peterfirefly

You were definitely one of the exceptions.

He killed people for such crimes as wearing glasses, knowing French, and being able to read.

Probably not much worse.

Of course it was devasting for some families. That is never the same thing as saying that it affected China's birth rate much (which it didn't).

There were forced abortions (sometimes very late), there was forced contraception, forced sterilization (I think), and lots of punishments for people who broke the policy.

There were also others who got around it fairly easily by paying a bribe and by not registering their "surplus" child/children (especially if they were girls). That of course caused some problems down the road.

That still doesn't mean that it affected China's birth rate much. It was already low (and had fallen steadily) when the policy was instituted. It also had plenty of exceptions for rural China and ethnic minorities.

The official one child policy didn't actually have much of an impact. Birth rates had already fallen a lot, despite the official "lots-a-children" policy.

The one child policy is gone now but birth rates haven't really moved upwards.

And they are more about sounding good than about reality. They also affect a much smaller share of the economy than they used to -- which is very good! The original five year plans caused nothing but misery and starvation.

Mostly, yes. They didn't really apologize for the abuse they sent towards Muratori but they did essentially wind up with the architecture he proposed.

In other words, it's because of the greater lift.

Becoming French was an amazingly good reward for being pirates and slave traders.

Ireland is not part of Schengen because the UK never was (and they wanted to keep the Common Travel Area).

They mostly died from European diseases without ever meeting a European. It wasn't even planned or known by the European "visitors".

Germany also has a crazy Communist party that is more in the pocket of Russia than AfD is -- but somehow that is almost never mentioned, not even in German media. It's quite big and influential.

Did the Sami compensate the Indo-Europeans they displaced?

Something they might have is a lot of strain gauges around the rocket. They can tell if the rocket is bending and compressing (and how) -- but they are also essentially high-speed microphones. Valves make sounds (cause vibrations) and they are easy to spot if you have high-speed samples of your strain gauges. You can also triangulate distances if you have multiple strain gauges with synchronized high-speed samples.

It's good practice to dump data into several flash memories + transmit live. The live transmit is likely only a small summary of all the data that they capture -- distributed flash memory locations is a cheap way to increase the chances of getting useful data after a boom/crash (put them in orange water tight containers that can float + give them a beep-beep radio transmitter).

Norway is as close as you can get without formally being a member. It's not just the EEA, it's also a member of essentially all EU programs that aren't closed off for non-member states. That Norway is European is not a matter of perspective.

The Soviet Union was far worse at the time (both before and after the existence of Nazi Germany). It got a lot better after Stalin's death.

> Vietnam

The US was actually on the right side in that one (just like in Korea). The Communists were not exactly the good guys and their "agricultural and personnel reforms" lead to drastically reduced food production and starvation and death.

Blame the US for real things instead, such as supporting the wrong side in Afghanistan in the '80s or ensuring the survival of the Soviet Union in the '40s.

And do it with enough solder on the iron to get good thermal transfer. "Enough" really isn't a lot but it's also not a tip that's been wiped entirely dry. How you hold the tip relative to the via/component lead matters (because you want the liquid solder to help with the thermal transfer).

Germany does not look "solidly democratic" from the outside.

This was a scary one to read:

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/years-of-salt-and-metal-...

It baffles me that that airlines can run so well on check lists and procedures instead of thinking and understanding. This is a case where just a tiny bit of understanding on the part of the mechanics would have avoided a crash and two deaths.

It sometimes happened:

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

If your antisocial protagonist chooses to destroy something then he or she is not "giving the finger to the man" or anything like that. He or she is making life worse for other people, most likely normal people who have not done anything whatsoever to ruin the life of your poor widdle antisocial hero. Meanwhile, the billionaires will not be affected much.

> I wish we had capital punishment for corruption like in China.

The selective enforcement is insane. If it really applied to everybody then China would be a free country because the entire CCP would have been executed.

In practice, it's only for enemies of the powerful (which is mostly the coalition around Xi). Even then, most CCP members who are convicted get a much milder punishment

> post-2008 wave of poverty ruined it

but the US is not poor. The US has the richest "poor" people in the entire world. There is a massive social security net with massive redistribution. There was no "post-2008 wave of poverty".

Novopens have existed for a long, long time (40 years). Syringe disposal units are not for the diabetics and they never were. Where I live, they are commonly found in public toilets with awful yellowish lights that make it really difficult to see blood vessels.

> hey should be imprisoned for an appropriate period of time as a deterrent to crime, a punishment for their actions, and to facilitate rehabilitation (even though evidence shows this doesn't really happen).

And to prevent them from committing crime for some time. That might need to be a very, very long time. It is the most important reason to lock people up, sometimes.

Weren't both the Benin and Mali empires based on conquest, exploitation, and slavery?

> It can use very little memory (target <100mb for reasonable projects).

We live in a strange world.

I am very happy that the many glass shards and the inevitable cuts have been replaced by essentially zero plastic trash in streets/forests/seas in my country and all other civilized countries.

The problem is not Europe (outside of gypsy camps and illegal immigrant camps). It is mostly some parts of Asia (and it would likely also be some parts of Africa if they could afford as much plastic).

> It also shifted the onus from the producers of a wildly harmful material to the consumers. "It's those litterbugs!"

It mostly is those litterbugs in Asia.