I'm not sure if your Chirp Club post is really about Vietnam, or even about peace. But I'm talking about Vietnam.
Tangent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War hyphen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_War the two recent wars use hyphens. The two wars fought in the 600s use en dashes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish–American_War en dash
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS:ENBETWEEN recommends en dash.
Sino-Vietnamese_War § Background, begins with this paragraph:
>Just as the First Indochina War—which emerged from the complex situation following World War II—and the Vietnam War arose from the indecisive aftermath of political relations, the Third Indochina War again followed the unresolved problems of the earlier wars.
I'm speculating.
>In February 1976, Vietnam implemented registration programs in the south. Ethnic Chinese in Vietnam were required to adopt Vietnamese citizenship or leave the country.
Was this like in Malaysia or maybe Indonesia? There, Chinese people were attacked, because Chinese people were seen as rich (the landlords). But China supported the government in Cambodia, which was killing rich people. But those rich people were probably not Chinese.
If the conflict was, at least in part, because of Chinese people having attitudes which lead to them becoming rich, then the last poll in the previous post seems relevant.
Is this what "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" is about? Is the difference that in Soviet-style socialism, and by inference in Vietnamese-style socialism, people are expected to act like they are being generous? While in Chinese-style socialism, the expectation is that everyone is being selfish in their business relationships?
Speculation: in Chinese history, people becoming powerful, which generally was the same as rich, was good for the country. Just the basic idea that the unification of China was good, because it meant less war. But for nations surrounding China, this was not necessarily true. War occurs around borders. Language divides people into nations, creating borders. And war means instability, which encourages rulers to act in a harsh way. This could make the common people view the ruler, and rich people in general, more negatively in a country like Vietnam which borders China.
Like, the fact that a large proportion of people in Vietnam have the same surname, because of all the wars in which the defeated faction wanted to hide their identity.
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Update 04 Jul 2026, 17:29
Polls are useful because they let people who expect that most people think the same way as they do see that they're wrong.
Soviet factories making the wrong types of goods, because it's more profitable for the factory even though it's worse for the nation: this is not being generous.
Poll: Would you choose to receive $1, or for another person chosen at random to receive $2?
Poll: Would you choose for yourself, all of your relatives, all of their friends, and everyone who lives in the same town as you to each receive $1, or for an equal number of people who live elsewhere to each receive $2?
Other effects, like individual farm plots being much more productive than the collective farm plots: this is probably more about 'following the rules'. When you suspect everyone of wanting to act differently than how you want them to act, you create lots of rules to ensure everyone acts a certain way, but these rules may not give a good result even if they are followed. That question, from like 2011 2010: "who is most aware of the importance of a task or able to understand the quality of its execution (not the same)". Example of a rule not being followed: "accurately report how much food has been produced in your area. You will be rewarded if the number is high, and punished if the number is low." (Holodomor.) Counterexample, of rules being followed: "Only give help to people who are so poor that they own almost nothing." (Irish famine.)
Edit: If the CEO of a large company were to hold a press conference and announce, "We are hereby insulting our customers. That is all", how many customers would they lose?
I won't say anything more about anything involving real-life money or economics until the amount of money I have increases by $0.01.
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Update 05 Jul 2026, 15:11
I don't know if this counts as doing nothing, and the intent might violate what I said above, but I thought of this open-ended question:
Is there any group of people, other than criminals, that it's widely considered acceptable to hate?
Vietnamese people who have talked to me in my life, so excluding Clara Dao since she hasn't talked to me: my male friend who was one grade lower in high school, whom I communicated with by email a bit afterwards and who might have become an engineer. Daphne Ngo, whom I met at the COSMOS program at the University of California, Irvine in the summer after my 10th grade of school. My landlady from whom I rented a room in her house after I finished my military training, and her daughter who had advertised the room (my emails regarding the topic of this weblog included her). And Hime, the friend that I met in World of Warcraft, who once sent me a photo of herself on vacation with her relatives, and to whom I sent a heart-shaped gold necklace while I wasn't talking to her when I was in Iraq, as well as the painting of a river by an Iraqi artist that Mei wouldn't accept.
The AoE2 player (and engineer) Hoang replied to at least one comment from me, if that also counts.
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Update 06 Jul 2026, 22:22
The following doesn't concern a prohibited topic.
I overheard a TV ad. At some company, "we believe everyone deserves" high-quality products or something. A company saying they are generous! And who wants to believe, or tell others, that the world is filled with people who are not generous?
A comment, probably spam from a bot, on this video (or dedicated page for video, which doesn't show some information like collaborators on videos with multiple creators):
我想看国际局势，地理知识，全国地理科技，人情世故懂得怎么和上级打交道，改变大势、财富管理零基础、未来科技风口，我想学能安身立命真正有用的生存知识，只想搞明白钱到底往哪里流动，财富底层逻辑是什么，我想学会人情世故，懂得怎么跟上下级打交道，稳步提升自己的情商和格局，学会看透人性，识别人心，懂得提防身边的恶意与算计一点点拉高自己的认知层次我还想搞懂AI，到底在替代哪些行业又在创造哪些机会知道怎样租房怎样入职懂得拟定婚前协议，好好保护自己的权益，这个好看，我喜欢。不要营销号，要有专业性 请推荐：中医药、针灸、心理学、健身、太极、练剑、六爻、道德经、王阳明、史记、资治通鉴、民法常识、商业思维、理财方法、经济周期、股市逻辑、地缘政治、科技趋势、识人术、读心术、心理学效应、人情世故、上下级沟通、提升认知格局情商财商的干货内容；少推鸡汤、娱乐、消费类、短剧类内容
At the end it says, "recommend less chicken soup, entertainment, consumption, short drama content".
I remembered that a few days after I first emailed Imane, around Dec 2023, she said on a stream that she had several people 'lined up', implying that they were interested in her and that she was not currently in a relationship at that time.
I was thinking about the drama, The Double. The foreign princess, who is being held 'captive' to prevent war — similarly to the main male character in Till the End of the Moon, or the main female character in The Princess's Gambit (桃花映江山, 2025), or the situation of the main male character in Lost You Forever when he first appears as an adult — becomes interested in an official who is already married. There is a scene where she first sees him, and thinks that he was waiting to greet her, but he was actually about to greet his wife and so the princess's sincere smile disappears. But the reason for her actions may involve a conspiracy that is not fully explained in the episodes available for free on YouTube.
What we do see is that she is fully or partly responsible for framing the wife of that official and forcing him to kill her. So I was thinking, maybe I'm like this? I could be interested in someone who was already in a relationship if they act in a way that shows that they completely reject that person and no longer care about them. Also, the princess did not complain when the official held her throat like he was about to strangle her to death. Of course, if he had, he would have been executed along with his mother and sister and all of his relatives, but it suggested that she was willing to act in a way that made others unhappy because she was unhappy as well, to the point that she didn't care about her own life.
I'm not trying to be ambiguous.
Based on the events in The Double, how could the official have avoided the sad outcome? By not looking in the direction of his wife when, by chance, he first encountered the princess. Letting her believe for a few moments longer that he was glad to have encountered her, a prisoner in a foreign land.
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Update 07 Jul 2206, 03:06
To be honest I don't know if you were responsible for the dance club videos that I linked in early 2013 being made private or deleted.
I've said this before but I'll say it again: I have never been to a dance club. Possibly the most recent, or maybe the only, time I was at the scene of random people dancing freestyle was after my middle school graduation, where (as I've said) I just sat and read a book, and didn't dance. And I felt it should have been obvious that even if I had been to a dance club before, I was not going to be doing that in 2013, so the dance music you were making around that time would never be heard by me in that setting.
There were some things I wanted to talk about that I can't because they involve money. It was going to be the topic of (again, really) what makes someone attractive, which is often helping other people. And gender-based differences in what this looks like. Specifically, females helping females, vs females helping males.
There was also a related topic: people getting offended when an attribute is estimated to be higher than it is, vs getting offended when it's estimated as lower than it is. The attribute can be intelligence (like knowing the meaning of a word), or it can be things like attractiveness. It's common for people to think that females are attractive based on appearance, which can be evaluated without talking, while males are often considered to be attractive based on other things. This requires talking, and here is the connection to money.
It is for this reason that I cannot say "I do not find hypothetical person X to be attractive". I am not using apophasis here.
So what I can say is that videos of dance groups in Taiwan cannot compete with short-form video content. The most popular groups now are probably significantly less popular than 15 years ago, and probably less popular even than one year ago. Covid probably interrupted it, and short-form content has probably significantly reduced interest. Example: filters that change body proportions cannot be used in real life, so if evaluation of 2D video content is similar to evaluation of a live performance (contrast a photo of clouds at sunset vs the actual thing), the live performance will look worse than an edited, short-form video.
This means that someone who wants to make other people care about these dance groups, whether ones that currently perform or ones featured in videos from 15 years ago, cannot do so.
I wish you hadn't wasted time.
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Update 08 Jul 2026, 15:43
This has nothing to do with Vietnam and I ought to make a new post. But I'm lazy, and this lets me blame you for saying something on Chirp Club.
Were you saying in your songs that people should be generous? I don't think so. But it may have been interpreted this way.
I tried using a modern browser for Douyin. It did actually have better performance. My usual browser, Firefox, can use around 40% of the maximum CPU just sitting on a video page, with nothing playing. I also wanted to see if I could use cookies from the modern browser with yt-dlp (I have been using Private Mode in Firefox for 13 years, and add-ons were disabled for old Firefox versions a year ago, so I can't use Firefox cookies). So I was playing random videos to seem like not a bot for the cookies, and ended up finding these videos:
(bookmark) 3231k likes https://v.douyin.com/8tTU60vtjbY 08 Jul 2026
(bookmark) 299k likes https://v.douyin.com/jdm4ssvR9qg
(bookmark) 2315k likes https://v.douyin.com/j8RPrAqF9XQ
(bookmark, dl) 112k likes https://v.douyin.com/2IhMJPOX8CY Gangnam Style
(bookmark) 941k likes https://v.douyin.com/HBh9FQJ_KqI AI gen disaster movie with random scenes
The song Gangnam Style is sort of about money.
"If people would just be happy, there wouldn't be war." Why do people try to get more points in video games? Why, in World of Warcraft, do they try to kill raid bosses before anyone else? Tangent as I link the last raid progression races I care about, from 15+ years ago:
H: The Lich King (10) Finnish guild, unlike the typical guild that used English and accepted diverse applicants. Players got a 5% buff to damage and health each week, as an alternative to scheduled nerfs to bosses, so two weeks later meant +10% health and damage.
H: The Lich King (25) Same boss, harder difficulty. Two-week lead over second place.
Alone in the Darkness (H) Chinese guild playing on Taiwanese servers, having a late start (including gear disadvantage) but still ending up first.
H: Madness of Deathwing Korean guild first, Chinese guild second. (But the progression race involved using alts to feed gear to mains using split raids. The website originally recorded the item level of players at the time of a kill, with higher item level meaning easier difficulty.)
It's difficult for someone who's extremely poor who has almost nothing to be happy. If I had gotten cancer eight years ago and died due to not having health care, would this have been a happy end to the story of my life, or a sad end?
So: people are always trying to challenge themselves. If a behavior seems harmful, there are two general solutions: stop the behavior, or change other things so that the behavior is not harmful. You could also, I guess, just ignore the harmful behavior. This may seem like a bad solution or not a solution, but if there are 20 bad behaviors, a person can only focus on a few of them at a time. I am saying that some behaviors cannot be stopped, but people don't agree with this so they still consider "stopping the behavior" as a solution and think that others may have a similar view.
Did I say something about money?
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