radpanda

> Can't it just be a semi-niche product that some people buy?

As a fan of smaller smartphones (the likes of which aren’t made anymore), I thought the answer to this was supposedly a resounding no.

I mean, Apple sold millions of iPhones mini but we were told that wasn’t a viable product.

Looking at the author’s Reddit post apparently things like exclaves were intentionally omitted for simplicity’s sake.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/gxwn5r/oc_the_topo...

Still doesn’t explain some things, like, why is Singapore (an island) shown on the map as having a border with Malaysia? Other countries connected by bridge or causeway (Denmark and Sweden, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain) aren’t shown as sharing a border.

Since the creation of that map Canada and Denmark have gained a border (Hans Island). That barely registers on any traditional map but would dramatically rearrange this.

EDIT: Or maybe it wouldn’t? I don’t see Russia’s border with Lithuania and Poland reflected (due to Kaliningrad) so maybe only the “main” part of a country is considered?

Yup. My parents bought a Jeep Cherokee back in the day as the family car rather than something like a Ford Taurus just so they could drive on the beach. That probably only happened a few days a year, but they were beloved outings and made the Jeep worthwhile to them. You could say that it would make more sense to drive a more economical car for most of the year and only rent a Jeep for the beach excursions, but how realistic is that? Most rental car places won’t guarantee much in terms of what sort of vehicle you’ll get. And most forbid offroad driving. It makes sense to a lot of people to buy vehicles for the 1% case if that 1% case is something they really value.

If you’re an American, I highly, highly recommend the book American Ramble by Neil King, Jr. The one-sentence summary is “a guy walks from Washington to New York” but he connects with history (and the present) at a walking pace along the way, experiencing much more than the typical Washington->NYC traveler.

I dunno, New Zealand getting a big chunk of Antarctica is a pretty big percentage gain too.

That reminds me of the story of the university librarian who lived frugally and left his savings to the university, which went ahead and spent a million of those dollars on a silly football scoreboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morin_(librarian)

> "nova" is not a Spanish word

Nova is Spainish for nova.

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova

Hotel branding might be worse. Marriott has 30+ brands, each supposedly with its own identity but I can’t really see how having that many makes sense. Should I stay at the Fairfield or the AC or the Four Points or the Aloft or the Moxy or the CitizenM … how about just the Marriott?

I don't really see that as the same thing as what the article was pointing out. Those are shibboleths that only an insider would know. You have to get the pronunciation of Cholmondeley or Couch "right" to pass for an insider.

The random misspellings, missing spaces, sloppy grammar, etc in the examples in the article seem different to me. Misspelling "en route" as "enriewu" doesn't show, "look, I know the secret country club spelling for en route". It simply shows that you don't have to care about your mistakes. You write something that approximates what you mean, and you're too important to spend time revising. The mistake could be "enrout" or "n route" or on any other word. But you're not going to be a try-hard who edits and frets over their messages, you're blessing someone with 10 seconds of your attention and they're lucky to receive your correspondence, typos and all.

I feel like I’ve seen essentially this same comment every time a Lego thread comes up but there doesn’t seem to be unanimous agreement on which brick toys are better. Sure, some people have good experiences with brand X but others will say they’ve had bad luck with the construction. Someone else will talk up Brand Y and someone else will point out how terrible the instructions are. Are there any brands that actually do consistently deliver a Lego-quality experience without the Lego price?

I haven't used Facebook in probably a decade or so. I've missed out on Facebook Marketplace apparently - at least 5 people in this thread mention using Facebook for that specifically, and I have heard numerous friends talk about snagging good stuff person-to-person like I used to do with Craigslist. OTOH, I haven't heard anything especially good about Facebook Marketplace's UI or features, just that "everyone is on Facebook", so it reaches a lot of people.

I wonder what will be next after Facebook Marketplace dwindles (assuming eventually "everyone" is no longer on Facebook). Going back to Craigslist? Something new?

I dunno, I’ve been doing some genealogy research and looking at a lot of newspapers from the 1800’s. It’s striking to me how much they are essentially Facebook. Sure, on the front page there’s the news of the day, but on the inside are jokes, riddles, local notes on who visited who and where. And the ads. Literal snake oil! As well as all sorts of other sketchy tonics for curing any sort of “ill constitution”.

I think those of us on this forum likely grew up in a golden age of ads being relatively harmless, but I’m not sure that’s the normal state.

If the ice cream cone won't lick itself, who will?

I’m an American living in a state with no roadworthyness inspections so I don’t have any first hand experience with this. But in previous threads, people have mentioned that the typical thing to do is, at the vehicle service (oil change or whatever) prior to the inspection, you mention “hey, my car needs to get the roadworthyness inspection soon, can you look it over for that while it’s in the shop?”. And if something is wrong, it’ll be brought to your attention and fixed before the official inspection. Then you show up for the official inspection and oftentimes, it goes smoothly. The pro-Tesla theory is that BEVs require less service so people don’t catch these things prior to official inspection.

Seems like if that’s true of BEVs generally one could find similar trends with Nissan Leafs, etc.

It seems to me that moving to lower cost-of-living cities did have a remote work boom, but it wasn’t evenly distributed. People from HCOL areas still wanted a high level of services (restaurant, airport, healthcare, recreation opportunities, etc) and probably a cool “vibe”. So the people fleeing SF and LA didn’t move to Dayton and Topeka and Duluth, but they did go to Boise and Bozeman and Asheville.

I’ve never been there but whenever I read something about it I get the vibe that they’re an HOA with a military.

To be pedantic I don’t think the 3-batter rule mentions relief pitchers. If a team wanted to use an opening pitcher to face only the first batter and then replace him, that would also be against the rules.

https://www.mlb.com/glossary/rules/three-batter-minimum

I think it’s about momentum. The perception is that the US is in some ways getting worse and Mexico is getting better.

Who is better off, the software engineer who lost her $250k job and had to settle for a new job that pays $150k, or the teacher who found a new job and got a raise from $50k to $70k? The software engineer might be better off while simultaneously less happy about their situation.

My understanding is that the Lucid Air Pure is more efficient than Tesla’s offerings, but yes, Teslas have tended to be more efficient than compliance BEVs and a lot of other efforts from legacy automakers.

> Ford makes plenty of sedans

Does it? Since they stopped building the Mondeo in Europe they don’t sell any sedans there or in most places I’m aware of. The only Ford sedan I’m aware of in production anywhere is the Chinese-market Ford Mondeo built in a joint venture with Changan.

I worked at a three-letter agency when the prefix “cyber-” became widely used, and widely disliked. I remember someone there distributed a similar browser extension that changed every instance of “cyber” to “computery”.

The DoD is legally mandated to pass an audit but consistently doesn’t: https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4992913-pentagon-fails-7t...

> There are, in fact, 88 approved Icelandic names with this exact pattern of declension, and they all end with “dur”, “tur” or “ður”.

…

> But that quickly breaks down. There are other names ending with “ður” or “dur” that follow a different pattern of declension

My “everything should be completely orderly” comp-sci brain is always triggered by these almost trivial problems that end up being much more interesting.

Is the suffix pattern based on the pronunciation of the syllable(s) before the suffix? If one wanted to improve upon your work for unknown names, rather than consider the letters used, would you have to do some NLP on the name to get a representation of the pronunciation and look that up (in a trie or otherwise)?

> even McDonalds is charging $15 for a 4 oz burger

Jeez, where is this? According to the famous McCheapest map the most expensive Big Mac in America is about 8 bucks. Have prices really shot up that much recently?

https://pantryandlarder.com/mccheapest

> Famously, while creating the model kit for the 1976 Porsche 934 Turbo RSR, Tamiya-san sent his designers to Porsche’s Zuffenhausen factory several times to get the measurements and details just right. However, despite repeated trips there were still doubts about the kit’s accuracy. So Tamiya bought a Porsche 911 and completely disassembled it to get every detail correct.

I don’t know anything about Japanese tax law but if an American did this I’d assume they were just trying to get a sweet tax deduction on a new Porsche. “Oh sure, that was 100% a business expense”.

> I bet it if the math was done based on vacation land area, Hawaii would come up near the top, given Lanai

I’d be shocked if the parcels that Larry Ellison owns on Lanai are classified in a way that would show up as a vacation home. Typically rich large landowners in Hawaii are “gentleman farmers” who (ab)use agricultural tax loopholes.

https://jacobin.com/2023/06/agriculture-property-tax-break-u...

As I understand it there was actually healthy demand for the Honda Fit and it sold profitably, but US-bound Fits were made in the same Mexico factory that made the more profitable Honda HR-V. The HR-V was successful enough that it displaced some Fit production and there were waiting lists at Honda dealers to get a Fit. Eventually the HR-V became popular enough that the Celaya factory switched to 100% HR-V production.

It wasn’t that Honda couldn’t sell Fits to Americans at a small profit, it’s that they found they could use their manufacturing capacity to sell more expensive, more profitable models to Americans instead.

Every HNer knows your startup needs to maintain a moat /s

I’ve always seen UBI as part of a post-scarcity sci-fi future. Once the robots run the farms and deliver the food and build the buildings and so on, and there just isn’t enough work to go around for humans, of course the fruits of this productivity should be shared with the wider population (both morally and to prevent uprisings). Sure, in this sci-fi future you can live in your basic pod and eat basic food for free or you can work a little or a lot to try to upgrade your situation.

But I don’t think we’re there yet. We do have a lot of industries that rely on shit jobs that people would rather not do. If we, IMHO prematurely, try to institute a UBI now we’d be in for a world of pain along the way as the prices of basic services skyrocket without robots being ready to step in.