seo-speedwagon

Most of my last trip to Japan was: 1) leave hotel, 2) take local train / bus in City A to the Shinkansen station, 3) Take Shinkansen to city B, 4) take local train / bus, 5) walk to hotel.

So there wasn’t a lot of taxi usage but a lot of (busy) street walking and (busy) public transit use. Plenty of people did successfully haul their stuff themselves, but luggage forwarding saved us a lot of headache. Felt very worth the price.

e: There wasn’t a lot of waiting either. We shipped our stuff 1 full day ahead of time (so if we were checking into our next hotel Wednesday we sent our bags Monday afternoon-ish). Maybe it can seem annoying to keep a day or two of clothes with you in a backpack, but cramming into a packed bus in Kyoto with two roller bags seemed like a far worse bargain to us.

$30k, hell even $300, is an absurd price when you can just go to the temple and have the priest help you figure it out.

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

Turns out the US does not think an international investigation (i.e. not done by us or Israel) would be “appropriate” at this time.

https://x.com/dimitrilascaris/status/1715137246431449451?s=2...

I’ve yet to hear a good explanation for how a fragment of a PIJ rocket could cause vastly, like an order of magnitude+, more damage than any that has ever landed in Israel.

But what I have seen is: Israel bomb UNRWA schools; issue evacuation orders for a bunch of hospitals, including this one in question; provide a number of inconsistent explanations and equivocations in the hours and days since; bomb the southern half of Gaza after demanding everyone evacuate the north. So I’m going with the most obvious explanation that Israel bombed this hospital, and it’s allies in the West plus a bunch of stooges like “the OSINT community” are muddying the waters and desperately trying to do damage control.

I appreciate your sincerity as well. And I agree, I think we understand each other.

As you said, regular people can only speak for ourselves, I’d never expect you to answer on behalf of your entire country. I hope you and yours stay safe and we both get to see a just peace someday, hopefully soon.

Since you’re being forthright about your biases, it’s only fair I do the same. My words were harsh because I feel that the original sentiment I objected to is precisely the kind of sentiment those who would continue perpetrating the genocide against Palestinians would like to engender among the public. The sentiment for those who are too busy or too distracted to look beyond a superficial level and just read headlines from the major media outlets: “it’s a complicated situation”; “oh, there’s more unrest in the Middle East”; “it’s all such a shame, I wish there could be peace”. For genocidaires, this kind of muddying the water is exactly what you would want for incidents that would polarize fence sitters or those not paying attention. It’s precisely the same kind of attribution-less passive voice headlines people object to when talking about other more familiar things.

I disagree with any assertions that it’s likely an accident, or that Israel would not want to bomb a hospital. Several high profile Israeli officials have stated over and over that they don’t consider Palestinians as human beings. Yoav Gallant has said “we are fighting human animals” and I’m not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt that he really only meant that to apply to Hamas when in the same statement he talked about cutting off all good, water and electricity to Gaza. And now there’s news that St Porphyrius Church was struck by a “blast”. Am I to also believe this was an accident? Another case where a Hamas rocket somehow caused an order of magnitude more damage than has ever been been recorded when striking Israel?

And here’s an analysis disputing many of those claims

https://www.channel4.com/news/who-was-behind-the-gaza-hospit...

> As soon as the story broke, it was clear to me that whoever did it, it was an accident. So in that sense, it doesn't really matter. It's an unfortunate casualty of war, in which innocent people suffer even when it's not intended.

What’s this based on? Vibes? People are upset about this because it, in fact, does matter. Intentionally destroying a hospital is an atrocity; in the context of a war, it’s a war crime.

This kind of false, lofty even-handedness doesn’t really work when the matter in dispute is human rights violations.

Your definition of “class” seems to be a kind of vague proxy for “income”. The original comment was using a more accurate definition aligning more with a capital vs labor distinction: are you paid in wages or are you paid in profits?

That’s right

Thanks for the explanation. I think that’s why the whole thing feels kind of … unserious? Like in Japanese a whole sentence like “I didn’t eat” could be one long “word” (食べませんでした) but who’s to say it’s more complex than English? If you wanted to play devil’s advocate you could make an argument that analytic languages have their own complexity, for example Yoda-ese (“eat I did not”) which is intelligible but distinctly unnatural to an English speaker

It’s not clear to me how good a measure of grammatical complexity “number of affixes” is. Like Japanese has a lot, English fewer, and the various Chinese dialects almost none. And if that’s one out of the two dimensions they’re using, it seems like a pretty incomplete representation.

I think a lot of other folks elsewhere throughout comments are right when they say more overt sex, rather than anodyne “sexiness”, just doesn’t have much of a place anymore in (western, at least) movies now. Everyone has a device in their pocket that can instantly deliver you whatever kind of sex you care to see.

It’s that, yeah. But also it was pretty overt too, people just forget because they’re oldies now

- “Hot for Teacher” Van Halen, 1983

- “Love in an Elevator” Aerosmith, 1989

- “Cherry Pie” Warrant, 1990

- “Shook Me All Night Long” AC/DC, 1980

- “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights” Meatloaf, 1978

- “I’ll Make Love to You” Boys II Men, 1994

- “Baby Got Back” Sir Mix-A-Lot, 1992

- “Black Dog” Led Zeppelin 1971

- “Brown Sugar”, The Rolling Stones, 1971. Off the album “Sticky Fingers” no less

Those are just the ones off the top of my head. But yeah IMO music hasn’t really changed much. People have and continue to love singing and listening to songs about bonin’.

I agree that movies are less horny in general, and that it’s not unreasonable to draw inferences since demographics also seem to show American society is less horny.

BUT let me propose a counter-hypothesis. If we widen our scope to not just movies but all media, and consider the same time period (80s vs now), the vibes are a bit different

- movies: less horny

- television: slightly more horny?

- books: roughly unchanged

- music: roughly unchanged

- video games: much, much hornier

So it’s possible we have a rough conservation of thirst across media.

So are you limiting your number of partners out of consideration for the future love of your life? I couldn’t tell based on your other posts.

I figured I’d take a minute to try and find the proposal itself, so I could see what the proponents considered the virtues of this to be.

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/852 https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...

I stopped reading after the explainer’s intro section. The first example is making it easier for websites to sell adds (lmao) and the other 3 are extremely questionable whether if the proposed remedy even helps. And it’s presented as a benevolent alternative to browser fingerprinting, as if we must choose between these two awful choices. It’s an absolute joke of a proposal.

Full name is Charles Entertainment Cheese

Yes, many people think that, and I’d argue many more maybe don’t but use it as convenient kayfabe to blame the poor for their lot / undermine attempts to address inequality.

If you want numbers, just look to the numbers of people who attend prosperity gospel churches. That’s just one very specific example of attributing individuals’ circumstances to their specific decisions (in this case, the individual’s piety)

> Existing code exerts a powerful influence. Its very presence argues that it is both correct and necessary.

I’ve probably paraphrased this line to every junior engineer I’ve mentored. It’s such a succinct and pithy insight.

It would be pretty funny if one of the groups’ business model was just drop shipping stuff from the other 5

The article mentions a number of systemic issues that would need to be overcome if the SK government wants to credibly claim they’re trying to do something about declining birth rates.

To poke at just one: South Korea already has an insanely long work week, and they tried to make it even longer (69 hours!). Honestly, where do you expect people to find the time and energy to produce and raise kids if they work a 5x12 +9 hours on the weekend (I don’t know how the actual work week is broken down tho)

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/south-korea-tried-...

> If you had the wit to think "hey, maybe I should be careful with $5 million" and bothered to put it in T-bills or an insured sweep, you're just a nerd who should know the Government will take care of such things.

It creates the precisely wrong incentives. If you run startup and spend any time, effort, or money to mitigate these risks, you're being irresponsible. The Fed will bail you out, stop wasting your precious runway on nonessential things.

I'm talking about the uninsured depositors. Who are first in line after the DINBoSC liquidates SVB's assets. And it doesn't matter what actually shakes out in the end; even if some miracle occurred and the FDIC convinced some other bank to buy out the rubble of SVB, or they managed to sell off SVB's assets without taking a loss (virtually impossible), that does not change whether or not this was a bailout.

Because before any of that was announced, the FDIC and Treasury said that no matter what, they will guarantee uninsured depositors will be made whole. That is not what the rules are, those depositors are getting special treatment not afforded to anyone else. They gambled (and most apparently didn't know it), lost, and the FDIC are going to make sure they don't take a haircut.

This is 100% a bailout and the wording that “no losses […] will be borne by the taxpayer” is a shameful misrepresentation. Just because a bunch of VCs and founders didn’t realize they were at risk of this happening if they kept all their money in one bank, they still bear the responsibility of their losses. Looking forward to this new future where uninsured deposits are actually 100% backed by the FDIC, so actually if your company spends any money to diversify or de-risk your banking posture based on how the rules are written, you’re a rube and potentially being irresponsible towards your shareholders

Making sure you don’t fail catastrophically if you get unlucky is the entire purpose of risk management, which SVB failed to do.

It’s funny to think about AWS doing hardball arm twisting stuff like “we moved all your S3 objects into Glacier Deep Storage, we’ll be happy to help you retrieve them once we straighten out this little problem with your bill”

But I think what you’re saying seems more likely

This is a good point. It makes it seem a lot more binary, actually. Either I think I can get my money with enough legal work, so I keep serving them, or I don’t think I’ll be made whole so they’re fired as a customer and their assets get liquidated (modulo anything that is paid up like reserved assets that are paid in full).

Again my enviable FICO score and decades of responsible borrowing mean I’m speculating quite a bit here

I’ve been curious how long you can get away with not paying your AWS bill before they start shutting your stuff off. Obviously it matters how big a customer you are, and I imagine AWS will put up with quite a bit in the hopes of having that contract honored before burning that bridge entirely.

What kinds of knobs does AWS have, I wonder? Not allowing new resources to get allocated? Eventually start draining existing resources? I imagine for stateful stuff like DB tables and EBS volumes they might keep them around but inaccessible to Twitter until they pay their bill.

I of course am a responsible individual with a flawless credit score so I have no experience with such things myself

A long time ago I was on a FAA certification test flight where we tested maximum braking. I wasn’t in the flight deck, so I don’t know if it was literally true, but it was described as “pilot standing on the brakes” and it sure felt that way. All our equipment was strapped down and when the pilot hit the brakes for our first test my glasses flew off my face. Those brakes are no joke