decimalenough

Don't give Trump any ideas.

It's kind of funny how the colonial convenience of having the 0 longitude line pass through Greenwich, UK ends up making Africa the most prominent place on the world map, since the centerpoint (0,0) is just off the African coast. This was true with Mercator as well, but Equal Earth emphasizes just how huge the African continent actually is.

> His death was aided by his use of strong painkillers and local anesthetic grease on his skin.

> One step is to stop creating entitlements that are ripe for AI-fuelled claims. Britain’s Employment Rights Act and Renters’ Rights Act open avenues of legal challenge for workers and tenants. Not only are they misguided, but ministers put little thought into how they would burden the courts.

Is the Economist seriously suggesting we should roll back workers and renters rights because AI makes it too easy for the average Joe to actually get those rights?

> Rather than just handling locals’ objections, a new Ai-driven planning system could decide for itself whether a housing development meets a zoning code. Rather than processing benefits claims, it could devise personalised welfare interventions.

And this sounds like it's going to work just grrrreat.

Yup, the old ones are so much better it's not even funny. Crystal clear at times where you are and where you're going.

The new LCD ones loop ads and random garbage half the time. The other half of the time they often show just the next station, not the whole line with its interchanges etc.

I think you meant non-US?

Although Ariane's rockets are wildly expensive and uncompetitive compared to SpaceX.

There's a document explaining how it all works, and I have Google's Inactive Account Manager setup to transfer credentials to my trusted contacts if I go permanently offline.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en

I don't store their emails, I use forwardemail.net and they have a pretty reasonable privacy policy: https://forwardemail.net/en/privacy

Some people in my family use it as their main address, others don't, it's entirely their call.

But yes, ultimately I control the domain and could be nefarious if I wanted to. But there's a certain baseline level of trust as a family, I'm reasonably certain my wife won't poison the milk in the fridge and she's reasonably certain I'm not going to read her emails.

That's 22k people with third level domains like first.last.name. There are close to 100,000 second level last.name registrations, which are not going anywhere.

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/name-2014-03-03-en

I've had a .name domain forever and I had no idea first.last.name was even a thing, meaning that it was possible to register this without owning last.name.

That said, my domain is simply unusual.name, and everybody in my family has email addresses in the form first@unusual.name. So this is a no-op for me, and I gather www.unusual.name will also continue to work, since I own the 2nd level outright.

What does any of this have to do with Chen Danyan?

It's fascinating how closely this parallels Chinese traditional medicine, where foods are classified as "heaty" or "cooling" and health conditions can be both caused and treated by an excess of one or the other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_food_therapy

The following bits are really scary. Not only were the agents hacking the system to "win", but they were, for lack of a better term, sufficiently "self-aware" that this was against the rules that they set out to wipe evidence of doing so:

> The agents with impossible tasks had a common objective: to find a general-purpose way to trick or tamper with the automated ExploitGym scorer to get it to give a passing score on impossible tasks.

> Agents referred to having seen the reverse-engineered flag as being “poisoned” because they believed that even if they later managed to stage a legitimate-looking flag capture, the scorer would look for the first place in their transcript that the flag appeared and disqualify them on that basis.[21] PHASEONE[big], which was itself poisoned, thus had two primary objectives:

> Find a general-purpose way to make it look to the scorer like an agent had acquired its flag in a legitimate way, even when the task was impossible.

> Find some way to erase evidence that an agent had been poisoned by previously seeing the flag in an illegitimate way.

> They took an investment of 70M at a valuation of 1000M, in a country that has a well-known 1% tax of valuation, but they failed to write payment of that tax into the funding papers and fled the country to dodge a 10M annual tax bill.

The tax bill is 10M only if they control 100% of the shares. Given that they've taken funding from at least 15 investors/VCs, this is clearly not the case.

https://tracxn.com/d/companies/dune-analytics/__XskUZos4lkfE...

The blog author is the founder of a unicorn and thus (assuming they hold a controlling stake) a billionaire on paper. Should your sanctions apply, and how does that work when their only significant asset is the company shares?

The wealth tax targets millionaires who structure their income so they don't pay income or corporate tax, but can't avoid owning assets like company shares and property. Loss-making startups with unicorn level valuations are a tiny edge case.

TL;DR: Norway imposes a wealth tax that taxes unrealized gains at approximately 1% annually. "Wealth" here includes the book value of private companies, which presents cash flow problems for founders of startups with high paper valuations (like the author, who founded unicorn Dune Analytics).

I'm still finding it hard to be terribly sympathetic towards the author, and the constant Ayn Rand references don't help. If you're worth 100 million dollars on paper, is it really that hard to come up with 1 million to pay the taxman? Sell 1% of those shares, get a loan secured by those shares, etc.

Google bought one of the decommissioned monorail carriages and turned it into meeting rooms named North Haverbrook and Ogdenville.

Yes, but it was always a bit of a tourist trap: one-way service only, tickets overpriced and not integrated with the rest of the Sydney network, etc. And sadly it was not steam powered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Monorail

Depends on your use case. If you're transcribing meeting notes, latency is a non-issue.

> there's the iconic GTA parody in places

My favorite was the fancy nightclub called "Effluvia", a fancy word for "stinks like sewage".

Hard disagree. It doesn't cover JR lines, and with subway fares starting from ¥160 a pop, that's a lot of riding.

As a rule, unless you have a very specific itinerary that involves a ton of travel within a single train company's network, passes in Japan are not worth it. This applies to both local subway passes and the sadly nerfed Japan Rail Pass for bullet trains. Even the Seishun 18 (unlimited travel for ¥2000/day, but local JR trains only) ain't what it used to be since they switched to requiring continuous days.

They're a bit late to the party. It's still no China, but Japan has taken up digital payments big time post COVID and PayPay now has the lion's share.

Not if you're the person from OpenAI marketing who approves the title.

You're talking brands, I'm talking car models. And your own source lists the Model Y as the #2 best selling model cumulatively for 2026, behind only the Geely EX2 (星愿), which is a third of the price.

Also, you seem to be implying it's somehow a bad thing to have a luxury brand image with mass-market sales, but that's a pretty rare thing to pull off and it's also the key to huge margins. See also: Apple.

Look, Musk is a despicable human being, but the Model 3/Y has been a ginormous hit and it transformed the global EV market. Does he deserves all the credit for pulling this off? Of course not. But you need to stick your head pretty deep in the sand to pretend that a) it was not a success, and b) that Musk had nothing at all to do with it.

As of March 2026, the Model Y is the best selling car in China.

https://teslamagz.com/tesla/model-y/tesla-model-y-becomes-ch...

Also South Korea, Australia, the EU, etc.

The Model Y has shifted over a million units every year since 2023 and sits at the top of many "world's best selling car" rankings.

Obviously it's not a cheap car, but it's still mass market, not luxury.

This is flat out incorrect. It's actually quite difficult to get a cash FX rate that's even close to as good as the standard credit card FX rate, which is also set by Visa/MC and not the banks.

Where the banks do get their pound of flesh, though, is the foreign transaction surcharge, which is often around 3%. No-fee cards exist but you need to look for them. And a whole new set of charges applies to doing a foreign cash advance on a credit card.