sniff butt -> become cancer dog

Here come dat boi

On one level, it’s an epic cockup. On another, it’s a revelation of a deeper, more poetic truth.

They do, to an extent.

Some journeys it makes sense to do by air (spending a month or two on an ocean liner from, say, London to Sydney would not be an alternative to a <24-hour flight), though short-haul flights on routes connected by more sustainable alternatives (such as rail journeys of less than 8 hours) should be taxed extra, and revenue should be spent on building out high-speed rail, night trains and sea crossings where these can eliminate short-haul flights.

The current arrangement, put in place after WW2, does the opposite: jet fuel and air fares are tax-free, while land transport is taxed.

Singapore is effectively a one-party state, with a nominally democratic system expertly managed to prevent opposition parties from getting anywhere near power. If you ignore the question of Marxist-Leninist iconography, it’s more similar to China than a lot of people would admit (though is connected to the open internet).

William Gibson famously called it “Disneyland with the death penalty” in a WIRED article in the 90s.

Wait for someone to crack the bootloader and then someone to get a Linux/BSD working on it and/or code up a bare-metal web view/SDL/uxn/PICO-8 that runs on it. That way, when the App Store stops supporting OS versions that run on it, it can still be reused as generic hardware.

Of course. Why would they offer her Batman?

Singapore’s solution is similar to the Chinese one. There’s a limited number of car permits, and you can’t buy or import a car unless you have one. They change hands for more than the price of a car. One side effect, though, is that having a car in itself has become a status symbol.

Americans IRL: (Standing in the TSA queue at the airport) “Train? What’s that?”

Perhaps they can next bring back Maoist self-criticism, but make it a dating profile workshop

Except that you’re not entering code. You’re not even mapping out algorithms or data structures or reasoning about tradeoffs, as that’s for dirty-handed peasants. You’re constantly supervising and arguing with an army of industrious yet dim-witted sorcerers’ apprentices. Your voice is a lump hammer that you’re trying to hammer a large structure you’re above needing to understand into the shape it’s meant to be in, with each blow moving a lump randomly, and your mental capacity is fully occupied with forming and refining folk theories about how the mechanised idiots you command actually think.

I believe that’s a Byakhee.

It’s a honse.

They’ll need a public transport system. Not for anything as un-American as bringing the carless to Costco, but for the motorists who lucked out and had to park in the outer reaches of the car park.

They did, only it was a little later. By then it had emptied out and you could squat, set up a studio, throw raves and such in prime central locations for free.

You need to grustle up your clout if you want a chance to be picked by the algorithm for the handful of slots between the ads and influencer slop.

It was even worse at the start of the 20th century. There were no national standards, and different companies came up with their own plug/socket systems to save early adopters from having to wire everything in directly. If your house came with electrical sockets, their type often depended on what the builder could get cheaply. National standards arose when governments and standards bodies picked winners. (The US ended up choosing one American manufacturer’s flat-pinned system, though another one, with the pins rotated at a 45° angle, ended up being adopted in Australia, New Zealand and Argentina.)

Occasionally you see odd-looking sockets on old buildings, often with a distinctly early 20th century styling. Some places keep them for distinct uses (in railway stations in Britain you sometimes see sockets that look like the normal British ones only with the pins rotated, presumably reserved for cleaning equipment).

There have been moves to establish a unified international standard (which looks like a more compact version of the Swiss plug), though only Brazil has adopted it (and South Africa is transitioning gradually to it from the old British system it inherited).

Amen.

People who had formative experiences of listening to music on vinyl associated the crackle/distortion (“warmth”) and the ritual of putting a record on with positive feelings. Eventually, this evolved into the idea that vinyl is inherently authentic in itself (even for music that wasn’t released on vinyl the first time around, like 90s grunge), an idea close to that of vinyl records having souls which CDs and digital files lack.

The recording companies did their best to help this along: other than the margins being higher now that it has gone from being an outdated technology to a luxury format, you can’t pirate vinyl (well, you can, but you just get the lower quality without the magic of the whole package, as anyone who listened to tapes recorded off vinyl records knows). Given how they tried and failed to make copy-protected CDs that play in CD players but cannot be ripped (there’s no provision for DRM in the Red Book CD standard, so any attempts depend on breaking the standard and hoping that it affects the pirates and only them), the death of CDs, and their replacement by collectible vinyl and DRM-encrypted streaming services couldn’t come a day too soon.

Autism is anything expressing non-normative personality or interests.

“Cat/dog dad/mom” implies that the pet is forever a child, due to their species. rather than a fellow adult equal (species differences notwithstanding) in dignity. I prefer to think of them as chosen family, or possibly the weird housemate.