vinay427

The usual answer that will be thrown around to justify this is that London has the oldest underground metro system, whether that’s relevant or not. It doesn’t seem very relevant when even the deepest stations in Prague (which are newer but much deeper than most of London) have later added 5G throughout tunnels with download speeds of ~200 Mbps between stations.

I suspect the UK just doesn’t have modern standards for mobile internet service, as it isn’t limited to TfL services in London.

There isn’t even reliable mobile coverage on stretches of the West Coast Main Line rail corridor in England, which is outdoors and connects the UK’s most populous cities.

Much of London isn’t particularly reliable either on most mobile networks, in my experience. Meanwhile, in cities like Prague or Washington I can often get mobile download speeds outdoors of 400 Mbps - 1-2 Gbps.

States can opt-out of DST, as a few have done, but cannot choose permanent DST (assuming the relevant federal law would be deemed valid/constitutional).

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/nation-world/daylight-savin...

Is that not true for Portugal, or Finland in the other direction for example? I haven’t seen clear reasons for why a 1-hour offset would seriously affect economic relations particularly if it doesn’t affect when businesses are operating. Spain is already known (in stereotypes, so not sure if this holds up in reality) for later start/end times to the workday or other engagements than most western/central European countries, probably partly a figment of the time zone.

This is a well-established phrase in computer science and programming languages, and it’s likely that its use here is meant to be evocative of those principles rather than of an anthropomorphic sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-class_citizen

A modern Mazda MX-5 Miata can apparently get through that at 1230mm or so, although a taller driver with the top open may have to duck. It's the first car that came to my mind when trying to think of one, so there may be other modern examples. That said, it's relatively famous for the latest-generation maintaining about the same size as the first-generation NA Miata in the 90s.

https://www.carsguide.com.au/mazda/mx-5/car-dimensions/2024

IANAL so this specific case notwithstanding, that sounds like a gross overgeneralization of the Supremacy Clause, which at least in interpretation is largely constrained to the powers that the Constitution gives the federal government.

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

Zooming into a map, a picture, a webpage, or quite frankly most things would be rather awkward if you didn’t know where it would zoom in (or if it would always zoom into the center of the screen, for instance).

As another comment mentioned, it appears to use the cursor position as the pinch-gesture location.

On the off chance car culture in Kenya is anything like in India (which I would not assume by default), at least a decent few will have headrests covered by a seat cover and rear seat belts stuck behind the seat or otherwise unavailable.

There was maybe a more constructive way to phrase this, but I agree with the sentiment. I think people from the US should be included in the 7 billion, at this rate.

For instance, this is probably the worst part about being in the UK while being from the US. It seems rather difficult for people from places very closely tied to US politics (culturally, linguistically, politically, and diplomatically) to not redirect a conversation about any other country to the US especially if someone from the US is present.

It’s not clear at all that the vast majority of people in London commute by public transport. The sources linked below, one during the pandemic in 2020, and the other a series of estimates, suggest the figure is more like 25-35% but I wasn’t able to find something more conclusive. [1, 2]

More to your point, I agree that SF or at least the Bay Area has a higher dependence on cars, but it’s also more geographically constrained by the bay and resulting bridges/ferries, so it’s not obvious that there’s much more freedom in where to live in practice. For instance, I would guess a one hour commute in London would encompass a similar or greater number of housing units than in the Bay Area.

Somewhat unrelated, but London seems relatively low in public transport usage compared to virtually every large continental European city [3], which at least anecdotally tend to have much cheaper transport (particularly for monthly/annual subscriptions for commuters) and/or somewhat less car-friendly infrastructure. Riding a bus through Old Street, for instance, makes apparent one cost Londoners pay for not prioritising public transport.

[1] https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-do...

[2] https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-do...

[3] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Modal-shares-in-selected...

For those interested in playing with or doing research using model internals, the TransformerLens [1] project appears to be the leading open-source tooling in this area. It allows for loading dozens of different models, adding hooks, displaying activations in a format compatible with CircuitsVis, and other (mechanistic) interpretability work.

[1] https://github.com/neelnanda-io/TransformerLens

[2] https://github.com/alan-cooney/CircuitsVis

If you mean the one linked below, it seems very much on the iOS App Store (US).

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/exit-strategy-nyc-subway-map/i...

In particular, TfL Go also has a focus on upcoming nearby departures rather than directions which Google Maps and Apple Maps prioritise. For anyone with some public transport familiarity, it’s quite nice being about to see your approximate position on a schematic tube/rail map or easily view nearby bus stops.

However, a friend who was briefly visiting London found this quite confusing as it wasn’t focused on navigation. Separately, I find the UI far too information-sparse for my taste compared to some other official apps (Zurich, Prague, etc.) which makes it somewhat inefficient to use, but perhaps this works for some.

There are a variety of differences between having representatives vote with your interests and voting yourself, such as practicality, time expenditure and access to advising and expertise, etc. That’s perhaps why many direct democracy systems (California, Switzerland, etc.) combine the two with direct democracy used for relatively few decisions.

> something like an US driving license looks easier to forge than Thai biometric passport

I'm not sure this is the right comparison, in general, although I agree with your point (below). I suspect that one benefit of accepting domestic driving licences as ID, but not most foreign non-passport documents, is due to familiarity. That's probably as important a factor in spotting forgeries as the security features embedded in the document, which aren't very useful if the person checking isn't familiar with an authentic version of the document.

In practice, I tend to agree that someone is likely to not be familiar with many driving licences, such as (in the US/Canada) those from distant or low-population US/Canadian states, provinces, or territories, or (in much of Europe) a smaller European country's driving licence or national ID card, so a foreign passport is far from the main concern.

I’m not sure this addresses the parent comment specifically mentioning the first amendment. I don’t think anyone was saying that the US is unique in having free speech laws or that those laws are a free-for-all.

However, it seems to at least be a common belief that US free speech laws are often interpreted more broadly than free speech laws in several other countries. Moreover, compelled speech (as noted by the commenter) seems not unrelated here. For instance, see the somewhat recent Colorado web designer case [1].

[1] https://www.cpr.org/2023/06/30/supreme-court-303-creative-ca...

Not the person you replied to, but reading the line below in the GP comment, I assumed the founder was exclusively a patent attorney with no product-relevant background. The GP certainly didn’t argue that, as you said, and perhaps I was alone in my confusion but characterizing someone as a “patent attorney” while leaving out relevant academic qualifications seems unclear, at best.

> SawStop was started by patent attorney Steve Gass

It is at least valid in the meantime, and doesn’t affect travel rights like the immigration examples mentioned in various countries, but I agree that this is mildly annoying.

The bag tax is 10p [1]. California has had a similar one since 2016 with a 10 cent fee [2].

Anecdotally, the fee seems to work well in both places, or at least single-use plastic bag use seems relatively low as most people seem to bring a reusable bag or use a backpack or similar.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/carrier-bag-charges-retailers-re...

[2] https://calrecycle.ca.gov/plastics/carryoutbags/

Yes, Royal Mail tends to be far more expensive than USPS for letters and smaller parcels, including internationally (e.g. UK to US costs far more than US to UK), but they have relatively reasonable pricing on medium-sized parcels in my experience.

It definitely is apparent which is the private company based on their pricing schemes, even besides the more consumer-facing UK Post Office locations that are almost entirely franchised and often operate as a small convenience store, etc.

It does have TV in the name (Apple TV+), which the Oscars doesn’t cater for. Apple seems to be doing just fine (Ted Lasso, etc.) at the Emmys considering most of their originals are TV series AFAICT.

This is not universally true. All of the US cards I’ve used on non-US websites, probably multiple times a week in multiple European countries for years now, have worked either without a billing address (if the website doesn’t support it) or sometimes even with an incorrect billing address, such as a non-US address for US card. Most websites in western European countries seem to support it so this usually doesn’t come up but I’ve never had a problem at least with my current cards when it does.

The only time I did have a problem is when no foreign card was accepted by the payment processor, not due to verification issues.

For those who liked this, I frequently come back to this visual which displays the distribution within a city in an arguably more visually appealing format:

https://www.vox.com/2015/1/2/7480993/population-density-visu...

It helps explain the low-density feel that a city like London has compared to most large non-European cities.

The original source is the third panel here: https://issuu.com/lsecities/docs/hongkong2011newspaper/9

> And this notion of separation into "undesirables" in Gulf countries is also just plain false. The UAE just granted visa-free access to Indian nationals.

This isn’t exactly a convincing argument for the claim here, which to be fair I also wouldn’t phrase in that way, but it is telling that the citizenship/naturalization laws are deeply separate for foreign workers as opposed to locals in many Gulf countries.

One major difference is that most people, at some financial burden, can choose to change insurance providers whereas in many countries with universal systems (single-payer or otherwise) the government guidelines for what the national service or insurance providers must pay for or not tends to be more consistent across the board.

For instance, this is a struggle for people in many European countries who would benefit from access to specific psychiatric prescriptions which are either not prescribed except after trying various cheaper options or are not even approved because of the potential cost to the government, while the same drug is often available in the US (ranging from $10-hundreds a month, as is typical in the US). Public healthcare in at least California sounds more comparable to the universal single-payer systems I’ve seen in its relative inflexibility.

This is usually the case in the UK, at least at major pharmacy chains. It’s definitely convenient (similar to the US-style bottles) for traveling to easily indicate that any medicines you have are on prescription in your name.

> We wont even allow people to import drugs from canada.

This seems false based on countless anecdotal experiences and various sources online [1]. Individuals with a valid prescription can have that (once issued by a Canadian/provincial licensed professional) filed and bring it with them or have it shipped through online marketplaces that integrate most of these steps.

Suppliers importing from other countries seems to still be illegal although Florida seems to have recently passed a law and received FDA authorization to do this for some drugs [2].

[1]: https://www.singlecare.com/blog/ordering-medications-from-ca...

[2]: https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/what-to-know-about-the-fdas...

In my experience this seems to be much less of a problem now with contactless payments, in both directions. US cards that used to require swipe-and-signature or chip-and-signature instead of chip-and-PIN seem to just work in when tapping (at least in the 3-4 countries I’ve traveled in extensively, although contactless isn’t widely accepted in some countries) and cards from a few European countries seem to work with contactless which is finally increasingly widely adopted in the US.

I’ve driven in the US and the UK (among other countries) and haven’t paid before filling up in either. Is this a result of paying with cash or other non-card methods, as pumps in the US seem to require inserting the card first probably as an authorisation?

I also don’t drive that much these days so may be misremembering things. The only issue I had with payments was in a station in a small town in Italy which refused to accept most foreign cards (ant least based on other people around me also struggling) and was the automated no-human type of station so there wasn’t an easy solution.

Is that intended as a correction? It’s a different claim, as far as I can tell, and the data I could find points to ICA in fact being the largest supermarket chain in Sweden by turnover.

https://www.esmmagazine.com/retail/top-5-supermarket-retail-...