Carrolade

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.

tbf that's often where they start. It goes something like: I like Rome-->I want to see that today-->How can someone build an empire in the modern world-->Oh yeah, a few guys did try that...

I think racism is more of an independent correlation than any causative element. The cause seems to be an oversimplification of the world into "natural laws" that are poorly understood, usually surrounding a shallow understanding of survival of the fittest and hierarchical structures in animal behavior. This root branches out into both racism and authoritarianism independently.

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.

This isn't really answerable in a forum discussion, as it all varies too much depending on circumstance.

I guess the basic idea is to make someone feel good and wanted without going overboard and coming across as any sort of creepy. This is a fairly fine line, though, and where it is fluctuates wildly depending on the person, situation and expectations of the moment. You're also juggling body language and tone in addition to your words, so really anything can be made flirty, or go overboard, all depending on recipient/mood, delivery and circumstance/timing.

The first thing I'd probably start thinking about is how to identify the times and individuals where any flirting will be welcomed, which is also going to vary quite a lot. Dates are a pretty safe place to start, for obvious reasons.