Money laundering. Not even joking. Large denominations of cash is one of the more important ways of transferring value across borders for laundering purposes, which is why the largest number of bills in the most significant international currencies (USD and EUR, primarily) are in denominations mich larger than their day to day use value should suggest.

I’ve been thinking about some similar use cases recently and came to the conclusion that it’s ultimately about packaging. All the functionalities that are needed are fairly readily available (other replies here have aome good suggestions in Nextcloud and self-hosted Odoo), but the real challenge is to make it easily deployable into and accessible for the community.

My thinking was specifically for the idea of easily connecting and organising building tenants. I want to get to the point where one (or a few) tenants can get together, set up a single boxin a flat in the building, and distribute QR codes to the other tenants that will allow them to access some kind of virtual building community hub. If you’re reliant on a lot of technical know-how to set up or maintain this, that’s going to severely limit its usefulness.

Yeah. Though not really a fan of the use of ‘simpler’ here, as it has other connotations than simply ‘less syntactically complex’ which is really what we’re seeing. In many very real ways, the fragmented phrasing etc of less formalised forms of language are structurally more complex than regular written forms.

I’m surprised that what seems to me to be the most obvious hypothesis isn’t covered. Until very recently, historically speaking, written and spoken language have been very clearly separated forms of language use.

With the advent of the internet, instant messaging, social media etc, the distinction has been gradually blurring in the sense that written language is being used more and more frequently for what would previously have been considered ‘spoken uses’.

We know spoken language mostly consists of shorter fragmented phrases compared to the longer complete sentences of the written word. It should not be surprising that as writing is increasingly used for ‘written speech’, regular writing will be influenced to move in the direction of the shorter phrasing of spoken language while otherwise maintaining the syntax and grammar rules of written language forms.

If you had read Hannah Arendt’s work on totalitarian regimes (Origins of Totalitarianism) - focusing specifically on Nazi Germany and the USSR under Stalin - you would never think this. As she says, and I am paraphrasing here, the consequence of people always lying to you isn’t that you stop believing everything but rather that you end up capable of believing anything.

And I’m pretty sure that effect is on full display already.

Israel doesn’t give two shits about the hostages beyond their propaganda value. That much has been obvious since before day one to anyone willing to actually believe their eyes and ears.

Yeah one of my more… tech adventurous friends had the most insane series of security breaches (to out it mildly) potentially related to this and some other recent ridiculousness.

It’s arbitrary. The reasoning is based around avoiding inflationary effects, but that’s based on a stupidly simplistic and wrong-headed idea of how inflation works.

Thing about social democratic bureaucracy is that it tends to end up being extremely rigid with politicians who are particularly entrenched in this rigid system of rules. So in these states, things like ‘not hurting long term goals too much’ matters because going at cross purposes with legally stated aims in any way is more than good enough reason to not do it at all. You don’t get to interpret your way around the law in states like Norway.

Add to this that the same politicians also have entirely forgotten what social democracy is supposed to be - maintaining a capitalistic market economy while leveraging state power to counteract its negative social effects and ensure the social security of the people - in favour of some idea that it’s actually just a set of basic institutions that were invented one to two hundred years ago that don’t need any kind of updating outside of just the bare minimum of maintenance, and… well, you end up with states that run relatively well but increasingly keep creaking at the seams, everything increasingly underfunded, with politicians who seem convinced they can’t actually do anything apart from tinkering at the edges.

This breeds discontent and political distrust. And in such conditions, it doesn’t really matter if the vast majority would want us to support good causes abroad, people will still be angry about it because it feels like they are getting stepped on in favour of someone else. They couldn’t tell you exactly why they feel that way, so they grab on to the nearest idea - cognitively speaking - that they can spin an understandable narrative about. Immigrants is the obvious one. Political elites playing their games the obvious next one. Then comes the common misunderstandings about economics, especially where inflation is relevant.

Basically our politicians have put themselves in a corner they are unequipped to get themselves out of, and everything they do ends up producing backlash one way or another.

Yes, the rule is up to 4% of annual proceeds can go into the national budget for covering spending. That rule, however, is arbitrary nonsense and only serves to limit the size and scale of investments on the budget.

The actual limiting factor is that the law states that the purpose of the fund is to save for the benefit of future generations. That’s something they will have to navigate. Personally I would like for there to be a mechanism that basically requires a ‘business case’ outlining how any proposed investment/spending will align with that stated aim of the fund. Making such a case here should be pretty straightforward, as allowing one of our neighbouring countries to militarily invade and conquer their neighbours wouldn’t be good for said ‘future generations’.

I think one of the more important things you can get across to him is this:

Porn is fine, but it’s fiction. It’s no more real or realistic than the latest superhero blockbuster, and should be thought of that way. It’s entertainment, not education.

There are sex ed channels on Youtube. Good ones. Sexplanations is one, but there are also others. Seek those out.

I know this is going to be a very awkward conversation, but you have to understand this: he will be finding and watching porn, and most likely already is at 14. Don’t shame him for that. In any way. Let him know that you know, and that it’s normal, but that it’s important to think of it like it’s just the movies. Cos that’s what it is.

The neutrinos… they’re evolving!

https://youtu.be/bXdBzpRDR5I

SI just isn’t, or at least hasn’t been, set up to do this kind of step-change development. It’s been streamlined essentially since the split from the Championship Manager series to operate on an iterate-on-what-we-have basis with overlapping one-, two-, and three-year dev cycles geared toward developing annual refreshes of essentially the same game.

Everything from the dev cycle through AA, marketing, publishing, and even licensing is based on that fundamental structure. But that’s a model with an expiry date, and the kind of complete refresh they are currently attempting has been sorely needed for years already.

But they should have just announced a hiatus year at the start to get this done. They were never going to be able to do this within their regular annual cycle.

Nah we’re speedrunning the 20s currently, so it’ll probably be another ten, fifteen years or so.

I believe the signs have always pointed to it being a one-two punch of lingering inflammation and actual lasting physical damage to the blood vessels, including in the brain. The fatigue symptoms dissipated for me after about a year, but the inability to focus and the shite memory has not and likely will not go away. Also my muscles got fucked by the rhabdo and my EDS got much worse, but hey…

Every new piece of scholarly evidence is good to have.

If he gets caught (hope he doesn’t), I hope he gets prosecuted, pleads self defense, and wins.

Because let’s be honest, this is 100% a case of community self defense.

I may be wrong about the actual reason for this - as ‘double V’ is also quite common - and it may just end up being some kind of ‘well when the printing press came to England’ thing, but:

In the classical Latin alphabet, the letter ‘V’ was not actually representative of what we today recognise as the /u/ sound (or its variants). It was in fact the written form of the /u/ sound (and related variants). So when the W was introduced to the English alphabet, I guess it was indeed a ‘double /u/‘.

I’m from Vesterålen in Northern Norway and this is giving me huge home vibes.

So I’m guessing it’s a combination of dun/den/tun etc being a common suffix in a lot of historical languages, and ‘ei’ being an extremely common diphthong worldwide just… leading to a lot of similar-sounding names that also converge in spelling in modern English?

I’m sorry, but ‘crash when pressing Ctrl+C’ is a hilarious bug.