kawhah

How is it a 'blue dollar' rate?

Firstly the bars are being sold only a couple of percentage points above spot. This is a perfectly normal price for decent bars or coins in small sizes.

Secondly the 'blue dollar' concept refers to the fact that Argentines are restricted from buying more than a certain amount of US dollars. They pay much higher prices to buy dollars illegally. US citizens can buy as much gold as they like, and Costco is not an underground or illicit market.

Absolutely sure. The conductor of the train I ended up boarding explained the situation and showed me the updated timetable on his phone.

How is the freedom fund the one wasting public resources?

I went to catch a cross-country train in Berlin and was surprised to find out that it had unexpectedly left ~30 minutes earlier than planned, something I have never experienced in any mode of transport in any country, ever. I wasn't notified even though DB had my email address from my booking of a seat on that particular train. I had to get a later train and buy new tickets for my connecting Thalys trains at considerable expense.

Why do you say this? The fundamental nature of carrying smartphones with us seems to me to be that we genuinely are able to explore and enjoy culture, shared experiences and knowledge in a completely new and powerful way. Of course, there are aspects of exploitation, surveillance and manipulation. But are they really more essential to the experience of internet technology than the huge possibilities that they have opened up?

Is it possible that North Germans who would quite happily submit to angry, sarcastic and rude questioning from another North German as long as he had a badge and a peaked cap, feel that it's below their dignity to be treated in exactly the same way by someone of 'Mediterranean appearance'?

But they do it within, often, quite tight regulation on game mechanics. People compare loot boxes to slot machines, but often loot boxes are allowed to be much more manipulative than would be allowed for a casino slot machine in many jurisdictions. For example, slots can juice the number of near misses (two cherries, and the third reel has a cherry that's just offcenter), compared to what would arise naturally if the reels were independent. But they might not be allowed to vastly increase the likelihood of near misses just as the player gets to the last few spins before inserting more cash (each spin has to be essentially the same game). Mobile game monetization does stuff like this all the time.

Do you think that it should be legal, or illegal, for people to sell drugs to teenagers? Genuine question.

And the 260 shares could as far as we know have been bought by several different people, correct? It's just the total volume for the day, traded in several dozen clips.

And some languages where all the different varieties of father's brother's wife have their own distinguishing names, but then there's also a generic term which means 'older person of one gender who usually comes to the house on $HOLIDAY'.

English doesn't have any way of distinguishing between my wife's sister, my brother's wife, and my wife's brother's wife. They are all sisters-in-law. But these 3 relationships are very different for many people in practice. My wife's sister grew up with someone I'm very close to and unlike most other relatives I can't usually badmouth her to my wife. My brother's wife is someone who, like my wife, entered as an adult into a family which I and my brother have always been part of and so might feel threatened by our closeness. And my wife's brother's wife is someone who I can bond with over "we both married into this crazy family and are not really like the rest of them".

And then from my kid's point of view, not only are these all 'auntie' but so is my very own sister.

> this constant embeds two terms, exactly because this particular kinship term does not distinguish them

This isn't the case, any more than the English word 'aunt' embeds four terms (your father's sister, your mother's sister, your father's brother's wife, your mother's brother's wife). Plenty of languages distinguish between all four of these relationships. But the English term refers to what we see as a single concept - an aunt.

Most family words have translation difficulties like this. The concepts are usually more generic, more specific, or in some cases incomparable when moving between cultures. This also applies to many other words - even ones for very prosaic objects. The French have a single word which means "metallic object which has a particular shape in order to be able to turn something matching that shape", and they use additional qualifications to distinguish between a door-opening-shaped-metallic-turner and a bolt-undoing-shaped-metallic-turner.

The localization system seeks to avoid 2 things: that when an English speaker adds 'Mary (relationship: Aunt)' as a contact, they have to be asked "Is Mary actually your fathers-sister-aunt or your mothers-sister-aunt?" (Because that person would find it strange and unncessary.) Secondly that where possible, someone who has access to this information in another locale, doesn't see a low-quality translation, in particular one which makes no sense ("US English Kinship Relation �� Mary"), or which is misleading ("Mary is John's father's brother's wife? But I'm married to John's father's only brother!"). The right way to do this is to record a reasonable representation of the intended meaning in the source locale, and to translate into the destination locale. Since English also happens to be the language used for the code, the value "LabelContactRelationAunt" looks less complicated than this one, but it really isn't.

This can be seen by how it will be translated. In a locale where the English concepts encompasses two words, it might be rendered as "(Father-Aunt) or (Mother-Aunt)". In a locale where there are 4, 8 or more relationships which could be described in English as an aunt, they might use something intentionally less specific like "OlderFemaleRelativeNotAGrandmother" rather than a laundry list of possibilities. In others yet it might make sense to use the literal English word, or a contextualization like "Western 'Aunt'", if that's the easiest way to explain the relationship.

Nothing about this is unique to either English or Chinese.

It's unclear whether you're claiming 1. the vanilla ice cream is sometimes kept in a separate chiller must nearer the entrance and this obviously made-up story is perfectly true, 2. at least some stores exist where the vanilla ice cream (and only the vanilla) is kept in a separate chiller must nearer the entrance, or 3. the vanilla being kept by itself in a separate chiller has elements of plausibility, and can not be dismissed out of hand, even though it's possible that this specific set-up has never existed in any actual store in real life, ever. Which is it?

> then China's emissions and their emissions growth

sure, here you are: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#co2-emissions-by-re....

Turns out China emits around half the CO2 per capita that the US does, and the total hasn't grown in the last decade.

The total amount of power generated from coal in China also hasn't grown in more than 10 years. And the coal they do have has become cleaner, so the carbon emissions just due to that have gone down slightly.

'But China's growth is cancelling out all our potential cuts' was a technically true, but still venal and dangerously misguided excuse 15 years (and 0.25C) ago when it was first invented. Now it isn't even technically true.

No, the US is responsible for 15% of global CO2 emissions. China emit around twice as much (with around 4x the population), but their emissions aren't growing over the last 10 years. In fact, they have increased their energy consumption by a lot in that decade (commensurate with becoming much richer), partly with renewables and partly by replacing bad uses of fossil fuels with better ones. Neither is their population growing. India and Africa together emit less than the US for around 6x the pop. They have a lot of population growth ahead of them, and a fair amount of getting wealthier, before they start to eat up a 1/4 drop in US emissions.

A bit ridiculous to claim that global warming is caused by the dirt poor and the not yet born 'wanting to consume like Americans' when it's obvious that at least half of Americans are determined to continue consuming like Americans whatever the cost.

Your argument basically seems to boil down to "the most polluting country can't reduce use of its most polluting energy source because other countries exist and emit anything at all".

The hackers have taken down slots, cash registers and EPOS handhelds, controllers for doors and elevators, ATMs, kitchen ordering systems, display screens, etc.

Even if all their business data was 100% retrievable, they are losing money every day that customers are wandering around a casino full of darkened screens, and playing a working slot or getting a drink involves waiting 20 minutes for an employee with a pencil, notebook and a handful of cash.

Lots and lots of gambling addicts die through suicide. Is there some reason this is less attributable to gambling as a cause than lung cancer is to smoking or drunk driving accidents are to alcohol?

None of the images in the tweet show either premium of $22k or 5,500 option contracts (eg options on 550,000 shares). What am I missing?

The screenshots seem to show a total traded volume for yesterday of 260 contracts (26,000 shares), way smaller than what was suggested.

Furthermore, nothing makes it clear that these were all the same person. And the open interest went down that day so at least some of this volume was buying to cover.

...as opposed the alternative, a plan to turn the US into somewhere that has perpetual and disastrous wildfires and hurricanes.

So you think Vanilla Inc, the company that only makes vanilla flavor ice cream, is paying for a whole chiller that they fill with vanilla, since all the other flavors are not as popular?

Or perhaps, unbeknownst to everyone in the world who uses the word 'vanilla' to mean 'mundane', vanilla ice cream actually enjoys far higher profit margins than all other ice cream.

..nor would the featured product simply be one flavor of ice cream, as opposed to, say, all the Ben & Jerry's.

I don't really understand the relevance of Jimmy Savile here.

actually the story is detrimental to helping people understand how technical systems and troubleshooting work, because it's so poorly invented.

lots of people, both technical professionals, and non-engineers who are observant and have an appropriate level of belief in causality, troubleshoot transient failures like this all the time. a difference in the amount of time between shutting down the engine and starting it up is one of the first things that someone like this would test, or control for. it's beyond implausible that the second time the guy got vanilla (after riding along for 4 trips, two long and two short), the engineer didn't raise the question of how long he was in the store.

people troubleshoot things like this by being able to separate causes which are plausible, although unlikely and surprising, from things which aren't remotely plausible. the 500-mile email story and the stories above about sunlight interfering with sensors demonstrate this.

if you're the sort of person who believes that the type of ice cream you get might affecting your car's ignition - the type of person who buys ice cream often but never thinks about how long the errand takes, you simply never get the point of being able to make a pattern between those two things. the second time your car doesn't start, you blame it on the scratch-off lottery ticket you won $2 on which used up your supply of luck for the day. the third time, you conclude that the car ignition knew you were late and likes to choose its failures to cause maximum annoyance. and the fourth time, you realize that your mother-in-law gave your car the evil eye that morning.

the story as told, especially when presented as a real parable about engineering rather than an amusing myth, is frankly insulting to the other type of person. the untrained, not necessarily educated person who cares about machines and believes in material reality. the person who starts checking their watch each time they go to the store and a couple of weeks later is telling their mechanic friend "if it's more than 3 minutes or so, it's fine. but if you try and start it before 2 minutes, then you have to wait another 5 before it's ready to go".

There is a word for telling something as though it were factual but with a negligent disregard for its truth: bullshit.

Also ridiculously implausible is that the supermarket keeps vanilla ice cream in a completely different location in the store.

No it's not different, what you describe is exactly what fixed point is.

Let me guess, the last 10 times you had to move jobs it was because of a difference in opinion with your boss about the importance of correcting one-cent-errors in one invoice out of every ten thousand?

Quite right. Either this OP spends every day writing letters to banks, shops and credit card companies complaining about the fractional cents that they have been cheated out of, probably in green ink. OR they should be able to recognize that plenty of people have good-enough solutions for this.

Interesting, were the denominators always powers of 10? Or any positive integer?