In a parallel universe, the word for paywall is “billgate”

That’s not really socialism, given that it is not universally distributed but depends on one’s social connections. A socialist system would have impersonal mechanisms for catching those who fall through the cracks due to not knowing enough people to ask for and repay favours. (And those people do exist: “everyone knows a guy with a truck” except perhaps for a socially isolated shut-in or someone who does not speak the language, or someone who does not fit in with the community in their truck catchment radius.)

At some point the meaning of the baseball cap worn backwards flipped from “streetwise hepcat who can probably breakdance and/or scratch and is handy with a spraycan” to “basic macho dude”

the top part has big milady-fedora energy

Corn Man / Corn Maiden ship

There are a lot of people in third-world shantytowns who’d be appalled at the sort of things the most frugal of us fritter our money away on while they struggle to get drinkable water

Unless they pay a king’s ransom to get fresh fish air-freighted in (which maybe would make sense if you’re the private chef of a potentate who’s very particular about fish but insists on living in Nebraska or the Swiss Alps or somewhere, but wouldn’t make economic sense otherwise), that’s how it always is anywhere far from fishing ports and fish markets.

Having said that, frozen fish isn’t terrible, just mediocre if you’re used to freshly caught fish. Though if you’re having sushi or sashimi, it’ll have been frozen if the place complies with health regulations: for fish, “sushi-grade” just means that it has spent enough time frozen to kill any potential parasites that would otherwise be killed by cooking.

That’s probably the best one of these

Didn’t even know he was in Angine de Poitrine

Oxygen is slowly killing you. It’s just better than the alternative.

And when a Black kid is shot dead by police, they do their best to find a photo of him looking like a back-alley mugger or at least a menacing-looking rapper. You know, so that the reader can imagine the cop fearing for his life.

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?”