Joined the Mayqueeze.

  • 1 Post
  • 271 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle












  • I don’t have an example for you. I see another left hook coming your way unexpectedly and that is from the term “genocide.” It’s fairly new. It was coined during WW2. And people still argue about the definition. We have killed each other for time immemorial but we didn’t have that label that stuck to slap onto the most egregious cases. So anything before the Holocaust is given the label after the fact. And that will have some historians at the ready contesting it. So most genocides are contested not because they don’t want to admit a lot of killing was going on. But because they cannot agree on what genocide means.

    They hold ten-year trials in The Hague to figure out if a Milosevic or similar asshole is guilty of it. There is wiggle room in the definition. Were enough people killed? Was it targeted enough? And other distasteful questions.

    We talk about genocide like it’s a fixed term and everybody knows what it means. But it’s more in that “I know it when I see it” category and the resulting wiggle room will make any argument you’re having harder. You can’t get to the slam dunk of your argument when your opponent withdraws from it on this technicality.


  • Registration is mandatory and registry may be checked on the street if they see you’re missing a wheel reflector etc. I’m not sure if that’s by local or national ordinance. Japan has a mountain problem, i.e. most of the country consists of them pushing most of the 100-something million people into the two major plains and a handful of other big cities. Where people live in shoe boxes and converge around train busy stations. Where space is doubly at a premium and most cities have no parking zones for bicycles on the streets. If they didn’t force people into paid parking arrangements, the streets or more specifically the often conically narrow sidewalks would become impassable with bicycles. I’ve seen bicycle “tow trucks” in action in Tokyo. It’s just a big open truck with an outfit of lock pickers/cutters that impound illegally parked bicycles. The registry helps reunite owners with their bikes and a nice fine. Theft is less of a problem here and depending on the area you’ll see bikes that are locked but not locked to anything immovable and people leaving helmets or other items in the basket because chances are nobody will take it.



  • If the dual passport holder is lucid and able to make decisions, they can choose which country’s evacuation effort they will take advantage of. Neither country is in any position to deny this, even if having the other nationality is in violation of the law in the first one. Rescue first, prosecute later.

    If the person is unable to make decisions for themselves, there are a number of situations that are possible. Maybe the first consular staff on the scene takes charge; nobody looks for a second passport of a person they don’t know when they located the first. If for whatever reason both consular outfits are involved, they figure out who will be in charge. Probably the one where the unconscious patient has spent the most time in living most recently. A lot of that will have to do with how well the countries get along.




  • I don’t remember lines in front of stores. I would split the decade roughly into two halves. The first half was one person buying a game that came on 15 floppy disks and a million people of friends and friends of friends and their friends would copy it. The second half was more about CD-ROMs but we figured out how to copy those two. In the background Nintendo was picking up steam and then PS. But for my money console gaming was still a bit of a niche business in the first half for sure. The geeks were excited but it wasn’t a mass phenomenon.

    People stood in line to buy Windows 95 though. Imagine that. People stood in line waiting to give their money voluntarily to Microsoft. I’m sure there were scalpers there as well. In my memory that was more impactful than any game release.