Endemic everywhere I’ve used HSR. It’s a pity, really. (Though at least some of them will provide a luggage car that you can put larger or higher-count luggage in.)

That’s the case in any country with high speed rail: tracks are the devils of the details.

I mean in the end, especially with a country as small as France, there’s not a whole lot of difference between 320 and 350km/h. (I mean going one end of China to the other and that difference adds up, but not one end of France to the other.)

But … what’s stopping them from making the track changes needed?

320km/h? Welcome to one generation behind, France!

I just drink tea nowadays. Brewed tea at home, not bottled tea with ten tons of sugar per tenth of a serving. It took me about ten months to move from exclusively sugary carbonated drinks to tea, but now I don’t even enjoy the former anymore.

You are being a little bit pedantic. People talking about “AI” today are talking about “LLMs”, not the older tech that turned out not to actually be “AI”. (Rather like the current stuff isn’t actually “AI”.)

Ow. Fuck.

UNMARKED POLICE SURVEILLANCE VAN

Using it at all, really. Given the environmental costs, the social costs, and the fraud it entails, using it at all is pretty much unethical.

My favourite example, though, was the lazy lawyer who used ChatGPT to write a legal brief for him.

Yeah, shorting is not a good strategy if you don’t have very deep pockets.

Tesla stock was doing slightly better for a couple of days, yes, before starting another downward turn.

And yes, the Apartheid Manchild is leveraged to the hilt. He famously doesn’t take (much of) a salary from his companies, preferring, for tax reasons, to get money through loans with his company stock as collateral. While the specifics of these are, of course, private, the general rules such leveraging tends to follow are well-known so we can make a few educated guesses.

My own such guesses are that starting at about a price of 200 he may see the beginnings of margin calls where the holders of his debt force him to repay a portion of the debt immediately or to sell off stock until he can pay off that portion. By 175 it’s all but certain that margin calls have started (and quite possible they’ve been going for a while). By 150 the bulk of his loans are making margin calls and his stock tanks as he is forced to sell off ownership.

And of course when he starts getting forced to sell off stock, the stock falls possibly triggering more and more margin calls until TSLA is briefly in penny stock territory before it rebounds to roughly its actual real value. With the Manchild having no actual money to show for it.

There’s a reason he’s resurrected that whole “I deserve 56 billion dollars” case despite that being a massively inappropriate thing to claim when his stock is melting down. He’s going to need cash soon that’s not leveraged by his stock.

I can appreciate æsthetics independently of emotion.

But I need emotion to get “turned on”.

So I’m in this weird space where I can admire the looks of people (in about the same way that most people admire scenery) without wanting to fuck same (in about the same way that most people don’t want to fuck a forest … or a couch).

But logic isn’t innate. It’s a pattern. And human brains are basically very good at patterns.

But there are many, many, many patterns in life and logic is only one of them (and it isn’t even particularly useful if you don’t have some other patterns backing it up).

It was pretty common in the Zhou Dynastic period, being the official name and all that. That’s 789 years. I think we can consider it firmly established usage from that, no?

Because the name of the nation comes from the Iroquoian word “kanata” (for “village”) and mythology says that Jacques Cartier mistook that for the name of the land.

I cannot think of any language besides English in which an “f” can be written as “ph”.

French. Vietnamese (via the French influence) when transliterated. Italian (where in Greek-origin words you can see either being used). German (same as Italian, though over the years some words got formally modified from ph- to f-, but words like Philosophie is still spelled that way). Spanish and Portuguese too, though far more rarely than in Italian (where it is in turn far more rare than in French). Polish and Hungarian too, IIRC.

Uh… 中国(Zhongguo) was first used in the Western Zhou period, over 3000 years ago. Other words like 诸夏(Zhuxia), 诸华 (Zhuhua), 天下 (Tianxia), 华夏 (Huaxia), 神州 (Shenzhou), 九州 (Jiuzhou), and assorted combinations or variations of these were used off and on over the time as well. (None of which sound like “China” naturally.) 大清国 (Daqing Guo) was used the Qing before they were overthrown and the Republic, and later the People’s Republic, took the country over again.

And why “China” instead of “Zhongguo” or “Zhonghua” or any number of words, none of which sound like “China”.

I think that’s why it was “Min or Wu” there.

English is a trash fire. It’s a trash fire in pronunciation, in orthography, in grammar, in pretty much ever respect.

But my favourite thing remains ‘ough’: tough, trough, though, thought, through. All pronounced differently.

Keep in mind that the sixteen year old edgelord in this picture was 23 when it was taken.