_Sunny--

Hi, I'm an American-born Chinese, and I often listen to my parents talk to their respective parents through Wechat pretty much every night. Since my mother is from 四川 and those grandparents live in 成都, and my father is from 山西 and those grandparents live in 大同, I often hear two different sort of local dialects being spoken every night, and it just got me thinking.

My question is, how much do you think local culture and language matter when considering how Chinese people treat those from other parts of the same country?

From what I know, I understand that a lot of people in HK don't quite like people from the mainland, and people from the mainland would rather not associate with people from HK, and then there's Taiwan, Mongolia, Tibet, and a bunch of other complicated matters. I also know that in the past, people farther up north and people farther down south never really got around to liking each other. I also know that the standard Mandarin was sort of forced onto all of China by the CCP to try to unify the nation, but that it was based on the local 北京 dialect, so you have some cities in the south that have Cantonese being pretty much a completely different language than what the rest of the country speaks.

I have a couple questions.

On your last AMA, you have a picture of yourself with a rifle, but why would anyone bother carrying a rifle on a submarine? The only reason I can think of is if it was borrowed from an onboard SEAL attachment or something.

Also, what is the spacing like inside a submarine? The vessels are already small, and I imagine the accessible inside area even smaller because of the thick pressure hull, ballast tanks, and machinery.

On the older submarines with periscopes and lacking photonics masts, the CIC is typically located right under the sail and on the uppermost deck to accommodate the periscope. What is the spacing like over there?

Why do we consider there to be four fundamental forces (gravity, EM, weak force, strong force) even though Steven Weinberg proved that the EM and weak force combined into the Electroweak force at certain energies because they come from the same symmetry?