It's also important to consider the perceived needs of the different navies. The US wants global power projection, which requires ships capable of extended deployments overseas. This pushes towards larger capital ships with hefty logistical support, so an overseas mission can be sustained for a long duration.

China is more interested in regional power projection. This pushes them more towards a Jeune Ecole style fleet of larger numbers of smaller ships. This allows them a much greater degree of flexibility and concentration for deployments in their region, at the cost of greater difficulty in long distance sustainment of operations.

Because the two powers have different goals, their fleet compositions will differ. The US prefers fewer, larger ships that are very costly to maintain, while China prefers more, smaller ships that are individually less expensive. We can see this if we compare quantity of ships in each fleet vs the total tonnage of each fleet. This may all change at some point in the future, but it's where we sit now.

Yeah.

Not too long after the automobile started gaining popularity, they started releasing a sort of driving guide, basically cool road trip ideas to get people using their cars more. Part of this guide was rating restaurants. After a while the guide part fell off, but the restaurant ratings stuck around.

Until today when nobody remembers the guide but the restaurant ratings are the most prestigious awards in the entire industry.

Whatever. Yo momma so fat every step she takes gets picked up by LIGO.

lol Now I'm going to spend the rest of the day trying to think of a good general relativity based yo momma joke...

tbf, "manipulating time and space" is a pretty low bar to clear. You're manipulating time and space sitting in your chair, given that under general relativit,y spacetime warps around any mass present.

I've given myself mantras before. Just repeating a simple phrase over a long period of time can help influence your attitude.

I'm curious too. I would google her, but the number of Dr Lisa Andersons from Pennsylvania is probably fairly significant. It's not a small state or anything.

Sure I did. Not that it was particularly hard since you didn't support your point with anything. A single sentence of rando internet opinion isn't too tough to deal with.

Then I'd just go with the examples the other guys gave, it's good stuff, and they're probably more current than I am. Banter is fun, you're doing really well if you're both laughing. I liked that shoulder squeeze litmus test thing one guy mentioned, that's a good move. Anything you can back off from pretty easily like that without feeling like a dick is fine.

We're all being vague intentionally, though, nobody can give a script for it. Any script is a bad script, it all just varies too much. Back to what I originally said, this isn't really answerable in a forum discussion, not well anyway. Everything has to be either really vague, or risk being wrong for you. And I'm not some self help guru willing to take that risk of giving advice that very well might not work, just so I can sell a book or get youtube views or something.

I wouldn't sweat it too much. It's the sort of thing everyone needs to learn by practicing, that's how everybody who is any good at it got there.

If it worries you, maybe start with innocuous compliments, things like that whatever looks cute, you have a pretty voice, stuff like that. Don't have to press, you're not trying to get anywhere or anything, just build up some starter confidence in expressing yourself. Like the other guys said, if someone doesn't seem receptive, don't sweat it, just back off. Nothing wrong with a compliment.

It's a trial and error thing, though, and you'll develop your own style over time.

The other people in the thread provided some solid advice that included some loose examples. It's a tough thing to go into detail on without writing a book half full of caveats though. I don't want to try recommending a method or anything, because there kinda is no method to it. That I can think of anyway, that will be any sort of consistent.

Uh, no, not really, I don't think the reserve currency makes China subservient to us in any way, shape or form. It's not like the US can somehow remote control the dollars in distribution out in the world, or somehow control who gets them and who doesn't. Under our capitalist system, anyone can get their hands on some if they really want. There's also nothing really stopping them from buying a bunch of Euros too, and honestly, they probably have a bunch of those in savings as well. And some Japanese yen, Korean won, etc etc etc, alongside gold and everything else under the sun. That's just smart diversification of assets.

Being the global reserve of preference for everybody does confer a certain advantage in ease of trade, but it's really overblown. It's not like the Euro or Yuan is some worthless scrap of paper nobody wants. It definitely doesn't confer any sort of control.

Any other thoughts?

By that logic, China is currently subservient to the US. Is it?

This thread is really making me realize how many people just don't know what critical thinking is... :\

Problem solving is not the same as critical thinking. No puzzle or strategy game, that I can think of, has any significant critical thinking component to it.

Wait, just thought of one exception. Social deduction games, like Among Us, when played with live chat, will train critical thinking. Critical thinking is about figuring out if this information is lying to you (edit: or otherwise flawed in some way) or not, and if so, how.

Those are clearly whiskers. gtfo.

I've seen worse ideas I suppose.

The inevitable end result will be subservience to China.

citation needed

These folks like to throw around words like subservience, but I'm not sure how you get that without conquering someone militarily. People like to talk about NATO subservience to the US, for instance, but Trump doesn't seem to be waltzing into Greenland any time soon. Pretty weak subservience if you ask me, given how much smaller Denmark is than the US.

Ooh, Estonia could control access to the port of St Petersburg if they felt like it. I wonder if this indicates a broader ramping up of pressure, or is more of a one-off.

We often find a black hole because other things we can see are orbiting a patch of nothing. Based on the orbits we can calculate how heavy the thing they should be orbiting is.

A black hole that doesn't have anything visibly in orbit around it would be much harder to find, since it'd just appear to be a patch of nothing with nothing around it--which describes most of outer space to begin with. Though we could still spot one based on how it bends the light coming from things roughly behind it.