10,082 karma · joined October 9, 2009
Like I said, it's a great exercise for teaching kids about interpersonal communication. And apparently a couple of adults as well.
Hyde Park Corner. Your turn!
Congratulations, you win! Let's play another round. I'll start.
Tottenham Court Road. Your turn.
(Also, thank you for illustrating why this is a good exercise that a lot of people - including you - would benefit greatly from!)
The base game is super simple. You go around taking turns, each player saying a London underground station - or pick a similar, familiar, enumerable set - and the first one who says Mornington Crescent wins the game. When someone does, you quickly announce the winner and immediately start a new round.
If you play it with children, see how long it takes them to realize that the fun lies in not saying the winning station. And how much fun you can have by anticipating what the others are going to say.
There was a lot more hidden perks for people who shelled out for suites.
Yes, this is how it worked.
Remember that the fastpass system was completely opaque, you put in your tickets in the fastpass machine, and it gave you a fastpass ticket and timeslot. Everyone with normal tickets were told they could only have one fastpass at a time, so if you put your ticket in again, or into another fastpass machine, you'd get denied.
But they knew the ticket numbers of people staying in the right rooms, so they could have the system work differently for them, and hand out as many fastpasses as they liked. And the people staying in those rooms generally didn't blab about all their perks.
And the general public was used to a small trickle of people passing them in the fastpass lane, the number of rooms that had more fastpasses than normal was limited, so regular visitors would pretty much never figure out that certain guests pretty much always used the fastpass lanes.
Currently, the only way to travel between the islands is by actual airplanes, through airports, with all the annoyances that comes with that, TSA, security, bag checks, prohibited items, and a gazillion other rules. That's what this thing will compete against, and it's pretty much a slam dunk.
Unless it will be lobbied to death like the predecessors.
They have a bunch of addresses for you to pick from, and it works the same way for any other similar service, so check around and see if one has addresses that you like. The keyword is "mail forwarding service".
For US addresses, there's a form you have to sign and get notarized to authorize them to handle your mail, because USPS does not fuck around with people illegally handling someone's mail.
Is there anything pg can't do?!?
I agree, that's the way to go. Charging an EV has to be just as easy as filling up a gas car. Pull up, tap you card, plug in. There's zero reason for having to fiddle with apps and memberships and qr codes and whatever else bullshit.
No, it's the other way around. Diesel-powered non-computer-controlled hydrofoils weren't good enough to overthrow regular diesel-powered boats. You saved some gas, but not enough for anyone to bother.
The pressure to go green and move to electric boats means that the energy savings from going hydrofoil is suddenly extremely interesting in order to make a boat that has enough speed and range if it's gonna carry batteries. Couple that with modern sensors and computing, and their hydrofoils can do a lot more on-the-fly adjustments to further improve stability and efficiency than the older ones. And these two factors combine to make something new, and you can't say "Well, hydrofoils failed in the past, so this will fail as well".
> In Vancouver
> (vulnerable to floating logs?)
That's a very local "you" problem. The various Swedish archipelagoes have completely different conditions than the Seattle-Vancouver bay area.
https://www.google.com/maps/@59.3284101,18.0369884,11.71z?au...
There are plenty of places where the water route is much, much, much faster than the land route, and there are plenty of islands that are only accessible by boat.
*wave of nostalgia*
Only Tesla thinks of this as a regular consumer product with a "launch".
In reality, the competition is already offering electric trucks of various sizes, today, not in beta, not pre-production, but actual products you can buy. And since their competition understands the trucking business, they already know exactly how to slot EV trucks into existing fleets, complete with logistics systems and maintenance contracts and a billion other things that Tesla has zero clue about. They're doing the usual Silicon Valley "winging it", thinking it'll work in this market as well.
Pepsi accepted the pilot program because of
1) Free publicity, although with Elon's recent public political statements, the value of that is quickly turning negative, and
2) Free trucks they're not paying for, California taxpayers are.
And yet a lot of people still believe Tesla is the market leader and that everyone is just waiting for Tesla to come and disrupt the trucking business.
https://www.freightliner.com/trucks/ecascadia/
https://www.mercedes-benz-trucks.com/en_GB/emobility/world/o...
Abolishing local solar-approximate time is an idiotic idea with multiple objective drawbacks, not to mention that it would be massively unpopular. IF you think it's a reasonable idea, you really haven't thought it through, and you absolutely do not understand how time has meaning to people, and how our entire societies are built on shared collective ideas of what different times of the day mean to us.
The level of stupidity of the idea is on par with "hurr durr, why don't we get rid of our nuclear waste by shooting it into the sun in a rocket?"
Well, I'm presume the timezone abolishionists are surprised...
They match huge humanity-encompassing patterns that have been true for millenia, for as long as we've kept time. We kinda like organizing our time in waking periods that we already call days.
Yes, timezones are a rough translation layer that gives you an idea of what's going on in a society on the other side of the earth, and yes, it's not a perfect solution to the problem of cross-timezone communication and coordination. It is an arbitrary system, and it could be replaced with a different system.
But the biggest problem with abolishing timezones is that you're destroying the ability to keep track of days of the week for some large chunk of humanity. If it's midnight at the same time everywhere, then the day of the week switches at the same time, everywhere. Things like "open on Wednesdays" will cease to have meaning, because for billions of people, they day of the week will now switch in the middle of the working day.
"9 to 5" will only be true in a single former timezone, some people will now work from 8pm to 4am. When does their weekend start? Is that the waking period that now covers Friday/Saturday, or the one that now covers Saturday/Sunday?
Every place of business, every school, every store, every restaurant will have to print new opening hours depending on where in the world they are, because the local time has now changed for everyone.
Everyone will now have to learn their local translation table so that they know what normal working hours in their location is now, when schools open, when lunch hour is, etc. You're throwing away all of our collective knowledge and intution about time, in order to make it "easier" to schedule cross-timezone meetings.
Abolishing timezones would piss off about 7 billion people for absolutely no gain.
Yes, when Alice in London schedules a meeting with Bob in Sydney they will now make no mistakes about which point in time the meeting is at, but Alice still needs a translation table to figure out what the meeting time means for Bob.
Timezones are that translation table, it imbues times with meaning.
I'm currently listening my way through The Rest Is History, the podcast he does with Dominic Sandbrook. Very entertaning, highly recommended!
If you're in the US, how can you not be? It's everywhere! The fledgling US was desperately in need of authority and gravitas, so they essentially cosplayed as the inheritors of the ideals of Rome, and put that shit everywhere.
Why does Washington DC look the way it does? Why are there pillars and obelisks and domes and white marble everywhere? Why is there Latin on the money? Why does every US courthouse look like a Roman temple, and why is there a Roman goddess on it?
The trend is popular because it's laughing at men for being "nerdy", but I think it's sad how ignorant a lot of people in the US are for not knowing about or recognizing the absolutely enormous amounts of references to Rome that exists in modern US.
But where English just has "great great grandmother", In Swedish you can specify exactly which one of the eight people you mean, was it your "mormors farmor" or your "farmors mormor" perhaps? Or I could say something like my "farfars farfars mormors mormors morfars morfars farfar" was a Walloon immigrant to Sweden in the early 1600's, unlike my "farfars farfars farfars farfars farfars far" who was a German immigrant to Sweden in the late 1600's.
However, in practice, it's very rare for people three generations back or more to be alive, so most people only have one or two of these, if any at all, and people usually prepend "gammel-" (lit. "old") in front. So if you have a "gammelfarmor", that's either your father's father's mother, or your father's mother's mother, or your mother's father's mother for example.
Learn to read between the lines. Remember how their director of AI, Karpathy, went on a sabbatical? That was also a lie.
The US has an absolutely enormous Not-Invented-Here field around pretty much any policy discussion. It is simply inconceivable for most Americans to look for solutions outside their own borders.
The solution is called modern trash incineration plants.
The environmental benefits are huge.
Some, yes, but not all.