Trump: “what if I throw in the Baltic States as a bonus?”

What if you’re a US company wholly owned by a German company?

Daiso is the S-tier of these. I wish they had them in Europe.

Do the employees of their US subsidiaries have European-style working conditions? Other European companies have embraced US-style union-busting in their US operations.

We could do with fewer data centres and more dada centres, bringing avant-garde artistic provocation to every community to shake the people out of their complacency.

And their most famous rock bar was in New York

A “flying car” would be just an aircraft that can fit in a traffic lane. For good reasons, aircraft are regulated much more strictly than cars, requiring regular inspections which are checked, as well as having requirements for flight plans, pre-flight checks and more. Mass-market “flying cars”, if they gained adoption on the same scale as their earthbound precursors, would have to be deregulated much like cars, to the point where Joe Sixpack can drive/fly to the shops on a whim without going through the kinds of pre-flight procedures private-jet-owning multimillionaires pay good money to employ people to take care of for them. Which would mean skies full of poorly maintained rustbuckets piloted by people living paycheck to paycheck who need them to get to their job on time. From time to time, these would fall out of the sky and crush or incinerate people in their homes. If this came to pass, society would have to accept this as the price of progress, in the way it accepts road deaths and mass shootings.

In Europe, 200km is a long distance

In the US, 200 years is a long time

A better option is to regulate rental housing, as in Europe: cap the amount and frequency of rent increases, restrict evictions, and give tenants reasonable rights such as decorating and keeping pets. In such an environment, large corporate landlords, who have economies of scale and staff to handle obligations such as maintenance, can work better than many small landlords.

As a jazz musician once said, you’ve gotta know the rules to break them.

Oh no, not Mark “they trust me, the dumb fucks” Zuckerberg too

Ciechanowski is brilliant

I wonder if Rockbox can be ported to this.

Illustrators know this as the “hairy arm”: adding an undesirable minor detail to give the art director something with whose removal they can put their stamp on the project, without wrecking the rest of it or making too much work for the artist.

While Britain participated in the slave trade, they went out of their way to not do so in Britain; the slaveholders kept their slaves abroad and out of sight, in places where the laws of civilisation which rule such institutions to be obscene are waived. (Sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean were one such place.) And it was impolite to inquire too hard about the sources of fortunes that built stately homes.

The difference being that when the N-word was uttered in Britain, it was belittling and condescending in an exoticising way, like a colonial-era picture book of funny foreigners in their traditional costumes. In America, however, it had a more immediate edge of aggression and violence, implying an other that’s here rather than far away, and firmly below the speaker in the established racial hierarchy, and who must be kept there using tools including designating them as a (N-word).

The word carried somewhat less of a charge in the UK at the time, where black people were relatively uncommon until waves of labour migration from the Caribbean in the 1950s, than in the US, where it was freighted with the weight of slavery, the KKK, Jim Crow laws and such. Agatha Christie could call a book “10 Little N_s”, alluding to a children’s rhyme. This was an age in which the children who casually sang that rhyme probably had golliwog dolls.

“Here I will confess that I was anticipating the Schwebebahn to be a novelty, more of a gimmick than a real transit route, like Los Angeles’s Angels Flight funicular or San Francisco’s cable cars… I was immediately proven incorrect”

Tell me you’re American without saying you’re American.

That’ll only work until the Mormons retroactively baptise it to have been LDS all along.

Unless they’re using Chinese microprocessors like LoongArm, their CPUs were partly designed in Israel, and may well have backdoors for Mossad to use in the direst emergencies. Running a sovereign Linux (or OpenBSD or 9front or TempleOS for that matter) doesn’t mitigate these.

If they are running Chinese CPUs, replace “Mossad” with “PLA”.

Found the tankie