“Curious how the name of the person we’re calling for is the same as my name”

When it comes to finding oneself, the journey matters more than the destination…

Also lets not forget how the changes in press-ownership legislation during her time set the way for the growth of the Far-Right which has already delivered Brexit and will quite likely keep on regularly delivering problems to the UK.

I’m sure there were also wonderful moments later on when people had a chance to piss on her grave.

I’m in Portugal, and it’s definitely not.

I mean, people are clearly more selfish behind a wheel than they are in person (a lot of Portuguese “good manners” is really just social shame, which isn’t there when people feel anonymous, so many become a lot less polite when inside a car), but everybody just moves over when an ambulance comes and for example you’re more likely to be given way to turn off the road across the other lane, than not.

You do see some asshole shit (for example, cars trying to scare pedestrians into waiting for the car to pass before entering a zebra crossing), but generally it’s a minority (which the notable exception of people not using direction indicators to help others, only themselves, which is a majority) rather than the majority.

In my experience Spain is pretty similar.

From own experience in Latin America it wasn’t much worse, though I was only ever in Peru and I wasn’t long in Lima to get a good feeling for their big-city driving.

At about 10 seconds on the video you can actually see a guy getting out of the way of the ambulance to let it through, though he was not doing it preemptively and the guy ahead of him couldn’t care less.

As a non-native English speaker, ages ago I moved to The Netherlands (were they also use “ja” for “yes”) and once I learned Dutch and got used to speak it as much or more than English, I noticed a definite tendency on my English for my “yes” to come out quite “ja”-like (sorta like an “yeah” with a pretty much silent “e”), though granted not as strong as that guy.

Maybe this is some kind of broader linguistic tendency (non-native English speakers used to a “yes” in a different language that’s pretty close to one of the English words for “yes” - in this case “yeah” - just doing the lazy thing of using the other language word or a softened version of it because English-speakers get it) rather than a German-specific thing.

I would be curious to hear from Dutch people and people from Scandinavia (if I’m not mistaken most if not all of whose national languages use a “ja” for “yes”) if they tend to do that or not.

The country were I was living when I rented videos didn’t have Blockbuster, so 1.

Bullshit!

The tariffs on the tools required for the mandatory cock and ball torture would be set higher than for everything else imaginable.

For starters resistance changes with temperature.

Also even in a multi-turn potentiometer, getting a precision of 1 in 10^9 would require an equal level of precision in the angle you rotate that potentiometer to (for example, a 0.1 degree error in a 10 turn potentiometer - which I believe is more turns than anything that actually can be bought - translates into a 1 in 36,000 error in resistance, so about 3000 larger than 10^9) even if you had a perfect material whose resistance doesn’t change with temperature.

(PS: Just out of curiosity I went and dove down further and to translate a 1/3000 deg movement in a rotating potentiometer into a 1mm movement at the end of a bar attached to it, you would need a 176m long bar - i.e. the radius for 1/(360*3000) of a circumference to be equal to 1mm, is aproximatelly 176 m. This of course has serious mechanical problems even if you remove the bar at the end of the process as the removal process itself would shift the potentiometer by much more than 1/3000 degrees)

The joke here isn’t even specifically about resistances and electronics, it’s that the real world has all sorts of limitations that when you’re doing things wholly in the mathematical world you don’t have to account for, and that’s a hard realisation for Physicists (having gone to study Physics at uni and then half way in my degree changing to Electronics Engineering I can tell you that’s one of the shocks I had to deal with in the transition).

(In a way, it’s really a joke about Theoretical Physicists)

See also the “assuming this chicken is a spherical ovoid” kind of joke.

We had a saying in my country which goes roughly like this: “It’s not the dog that barks which bites”

I’d say it applies here, and I ain’t talking about the corgies.

Easy to measure (support manpower costs) vs hard to measure (business lost due to bad support).

Good engineering (and old fashioned business practices) would try to better measure the hard to measure stuff (for example using surveys).

Modern MBA business practices just uses the easy to measure stuff as guidelines and doesn’t even try to measure the rest, possibly because “if we don’t officially know it then I can’t be blamed for it”.

Mind you, maybe they’re right since most consumers get shafted and still keep on coming back for more.

Just thinking out loud, I’m wondering if there’s not a mix of two innovations - the big innovation such as whole new software or hardware to do something that wasn’t possible to do before or at least not in that way and small innovation, i.e. incremental improvements.

In Tech, companies usually start with one big innovation (consumer OS for Microsoft, web search with automated crawling for Google, universal discussion forum for Facebook and so on) and after that mostly do smaller innovations on it. Whilst they often have a couple more big innovations in them (for example Android OS for Google and Office for Microsoft) they seem to eventually run out of such innovations or maybe just become too much “play it safe” when it comes to them so don’t really do the break-through big innovations anymore.

I believe corporatisation destroys the environment in a company for big innovation (certainly it matches my own experience in working in all sizes of company) - it’s a lot easier, ntaural and safer for a big company with a large infrastructure, big costs and an internal preponderance of well-entrenched managers who have their own internal fiefs and spend their time on internal company politics, to keep on milking the existing cow than to try and come up with something completely different and the very mindset of the company changes from “try crazy ideas” of the small, poor and desperate startup to the relying on steady and safe income streams that more appeals to the bean counters that take over those companies when they get big enough.

Under a sales model, you need a steady stream of small innovation on the core product to keep the steady and safe income stream going - people need to be convinced to buy the latest and greatest version of the product so it general need to offer something more than the last one, and although marketting can be used to convince people to buy a new version which has little more than the last one (look at iPhones of late), as the product matures there is less and less small innovation on it that’s actually usefull so there is less and appeal for consumers to get the latest version and that income stream falls over time.

Both subscription models and paid-by-advertising upend that need for even small innovation - a company doesn’t need to regularly make a new and improved version of their original big innovation, they just need to keep on getting the steady stream of revenue from their existing product. I would say that this appeals even more to bean counters that the small innovation cycle since it’s even more predictable, hence you see big companies shifting to it even in things were it makes no sense for the product itself.

My experience living in The Netherlands (which has a similar system) as a non-native whose mothertongue is from the Romance branch is that you eventually get used to it. I think that’s because as your language skills improve you just stop interpreting the parts of the number individually and handle hearing and speaking those “nastier” blocks of two digits as if the whole block is a language expression.

Even better the apparently flip-flopping between one way of ordering digits and another one in longer numbers (for example: “two thousand, five hundred and two and ninety”) actually makes the strategy of “everything between 0 and 99 is processed as an expression” viable (i.e. “two thousand” + “five hundred” + “two and ninenty”), whilst I’m not so sure that would be possible if instead of just memorizing 100 numerical language expressions we had to do it with 1000 or more.

(If you’re not a French native speaker and you learn the language you might notice something similar when at some point your mind switches from interpreting “quatre-vingt” as “four twenty” to just taking it in whole block as an expression that translates to eighty)

A shitty take … that works!

This is also something I (luckily, I like to think) realized many years ago on my first trip abroad by myself (well, I went and met with a cousin of mine who is the same age as me) when I was 19 - when you’re focused on collecting pictures of everything (as he did to a level I jokingly refere to as “photographic diarrhea”), you’re not just living the moment.

Mind you, looking at any of the handful of pictures I made back then does bring me back to the memory of the whole thing (though the wierd details such as how the top floor of the WTC back then - pre 9/11 - was basically a large food court of fast food brands aren’t in the photos), but then again me thinking about it right now does the same.

Specifically in electronics there are actually milspec versions of some microchips, different from the consumer grade ones (they have a wider range of operating temperatures plus I also believe higher resistence to electromagnetic radiation and mechanical vibration, similar to microchips “for automobile automotive use”), but I suspect that when it comes to actual consumer electronics devices the words “military grade” are not a protected tag (as in, electronic devices said to be “military grade” are not forced by regulation to have certain characteristics) so those words are generally marketing bullshit.

Also now you have to buy a special cloth from Apple to clean the gold logo on the Offical Apple MacBook Cleaning Cloth Pro without scratching it.

(It’s cleaning cloths all the way down!)

I think at least some countries in Europe had a similar system as the US but moved to Restricted Birthright in the 80s because of freeloading - i.e. well off people with no connection to a country just flying over and having their kids there to give them citizenship in that country.

With Restricted Birthright the parents have to have been living in that country for a few years - so de facto being members of that society - to earn that right.

Personally I think it’s fair that those comitted to participating in a Society all deserve the same rights (including local nationality for their children) independently of themselves having or not the local nationality, whilst those who are not comitted to participating in that Society do not, and “being resident in that country for more than X years” seems to me a pretty neutral and reasonably fair way to determine “comitted to participating in that country’s Society”.

That’s what everybody will be saying in the Northern Hemisphere every time there is a break in the nuclear winter cloud cover, only with more feeling of joy (so, more exclamation marks!!!).