thematrixturtle

7 ms·

1.
by thematrixturtle 4y ago
The "third degree" of interrogation is actual torture. The less well known first degree was being shown the implements of torture, and the second degree was being made to watch somebody else get tortured.
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by thematrixturtle 4y ago
The problem with many of these museums and even the medieval sources they're based on is that there's a strong incentive to make things as gruesome as possible, including just making shit up. For example, everybody's heard o
3.
by thematrixturtle 4y ago
Whiplash is also popular for insurance/disability fraud. There was an interesting story on HN a while back about how the prevalence of whiplash after accidents in the US is far higher than in Europe, for no other easily explainable r
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by thematrixturtle 4y ago
Magstripe is long dead throughout Asia as well. The US (as always) has been behind the curve on this, but contactless became pretty ubiquitous during COVID.
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The Central Subway will cripple MUNI for years to come(missionlocal.org)
2 points by thematrixturtle 4y ago|0 comments
6.
by thematrixturtle 4y ago
The vast majority of Australia has been inhospitable desert since before the Aboriginals showed up. Trees can only grown on a comparatively narrow stretch of temperate or tropical, mostly coastal land.
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by thematrixturtle 4y ago
As a reference point for just how expensive, the Caltrain electrification project in SF is currently estimated at $2.44 billion dollars for 82 km of track, and still climbing. And this is for what's almost a best-case infrastructurall
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by thematrixturtle 4y ago
Machine translation has put a lot of human translators out of work. The per-word rates for text translation are pathetic these days, even for language pairs that Google Translate struggles with. Of course, there are still some jobs for h
9.
by thematrixturtle 4y ago
Citation needed for "most". Sure, there are wood stoves in summer cottage saunas and old rural houses, but this is not even close to possible for the average apartment dweller, and many of these apartments rely on district heatin
10.
by thematrixturtle 4y ago
Wind power is nice, but the key is nuclear power, which covers 35% of Finland's needs already and that number is going to go up once they fully ramp up Olkiluoto 3. Unfortunately it also took around 17 years to build the thing, so this
11.
by thematrixturtle 4y ago
I agree with your broad assessment that the glory days of Hollywood are over, but am not quite as optimistic on the future of Asian cinema. Chinese media is crippled for the foreseeable future by heavy state censorship, including micromanag
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by thematrixturtle 4y ago
> Orson Scott Card once said that Asimov was one of the few writers who kept improving in old age I'd like to believe this was true, but much of Asimov's late works, particularly the final "Gaia" sequels to Foundation
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by thematrixturtle 4y ago
It's not going to be any better , but if you'd like to spend $20k on a phone, Vertu still seems to be around peddling crocodile skin phones encrusted with diamonds etc. https://www.vertu.com/collections/aster
14.
by thematrixturtle 4y ago
Eh, just call it out, it's India and its subcontinental neighbours. And the reason is less culture and more there being a lot of first-time passengers going to menial jobs in the Gulf, who have been recruited from deep in the countrys
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by thematrixturtle 4y ago
This argument sounds very much like "the problem is not communism, all those countries just weren't doing real communism". And I'm not even being quite as flippant as it sounds about communism here. Communist economic pl
16.
by thematrixturtle 4y ago
Ah yes, more lawsuits, that always works grrrrreat at speeding up bureaucracy.
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by thematrixturtle 4y ago
In Malaysia and particularly Indonesia, a great many sauces are to this day called kecap , pronounced "ketchup". The debate is mostly about whether the Indonesian kecap inspired the Chinese ke-tsiap that eventually became Wester
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by thematrixturtle 4y ago
Heinz is ambrosia compared to the sweet and runny house brand ketchups at your average supermarket.
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by thematrixturtle 4y ago
The GP's statement was completely factual: the title of "Queen of Australia" only came into existence in 1901 when the states of what is now Australia federated. Before that, the Queen was head of state individually over s
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by thematrixturtle 4y ago
That was New South Wales. The Commonwealth of Australia was founded on Jan 1st 1901.
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by thematrixturtle 4y ago
I'm continually amazed that Abe's assassin appears to have successfully turned the media spotlight exactly where he wanted it to be, and so successfully turned public sentiment against Abe that a vast majority of the population no
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by thematrixturtle 4y ago
Yes, they are. The LDP (Japan's ruling party) is quite openly in coalition with Komeito, the political wing of Soka Gakkai, a prominent Buddhist-ish cult.
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by thematrixturtle 4y ago
But appeasement worked so well last time in 1938, when we gave Germany the Sudetenland and satisfied their desire for Lebensraum once and for all! And I'm sure we could have avoided all that unpleasantness in the Pacific if the West
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by thematrixturtle 4y ago
Hong Kong makes this more obvious by letting banks issue paper currency: HSBC, Standard Chartered and Bank of China all issue their own banknotes, with radically different designs to boot. Northern Ireland and Scotland do this too, but ther
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by thematrixturtle 4y ago
They're common in Singapore because of the southern Chinese influence. You don't see them often in Malaysia or Indonesia tho (outside Chinese areas) because frog is not halal.
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World's Largest Cruise Ship to Be Scrapped Before First Voyage(jalopnik.com)
7 points by thematrixturtle 4y ago|0 comments
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by thematrixturtle 4y ago
That's pretty much the bullet point version of Kafka's The Trial, although Airbnb was kind enough to merely banish their protagonist instead of executing them.
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by thematrixturtle 4y ago
A classic on this topic: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
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by thematrixturtle 4y ago
Once upon a time, a Japanese megacorp was designing a new factory. The master plans for the factory were stored on a USB thumb drive owned by the Chief Engineer, who was the only person authorized to make changes to the master plan. The Ch
30.
by thematrixturtle 4y ago
No, they're both on the same continuum. The original Chinese characters were emoji, which literally means "picture characters" in Japanese, and emoji today are already evolving beyond their original pictorial meanings -- fo

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