Yep that’s the one I saw there I think. Drone goes into a little kiosk and then you pick it up from the claim window thing.

I like Chinas drone delivery model, you can look up videos of it online.

I mean charging the vendor a processing fee, not the vendor charging the customer for the credit card fee. That’s actually illegal in the US, though businesses can offer a cash discount, they can’t charge fees for using cards if they accept them. When I ran my business our card handler charged 3. something percent on every transaction with card, higher for credit than debit.

Do Visa, Mastercard, etc, not charge transaction fees in Europe? The only place I’ve been where there’s no transaction fees paid by the vendor is China.

It’s not no matter what. It’s under the system we have they are not only not punished for doing so, they are heavily incentivized to do so. There are ways to punish bad actors that de-incentivize other potential bad actors, our politicians actively choose to prioritize these bad actors ability to do harm over the well being of the population.

This is rather old news, predating Neuralink entirely even. There used to be an unlisted YouTube video by Gray(Grey?) Newell that showed off what they were working on back a few years ago, too.

China is probably the one place that can lay claim to that particular tradition being ancient. They go hard for spring festival.

I definitely didn’t, and I’m still not sure I do, but it was compelling.

Exactly. Then you get this face 😑

I like to say, “that’s the year I was born” to the cashier at stores, no matter what my total is. It’s really funny when it’s like $19.35. Well, funny for me, they just give me that dead in the eyes look that I remember having when I worked retail.

I’ve literally not met a single person who owns an ironing board under the age of 40, and since most of the Gen X I know were punks, even there it’s a very rare thing. I’ve personally only ever used one in hotels, because might as well since it’s there.

Rocky Mountain oysters is what they call them in my neck of the woods.

We have to fight the armies of NIMBYs and developers to even get a suite of overpriced luxury condos or apartments built, and we’re still building gigantic McMansion suburbs like they’re going out of style, so I feel that in my bones. My nearest grocery store is more than 2 miles away, and there’s no way to get there without having to go down a 45mph road with no sidewalks. But we have pretty monoculture lawns! -_- thank god my family is willing to turn most of our lawn into pollinator gardens and food gardens… now if only we could convince our neighbors to do the same.

It is the single greatest place I have ever been in my life. The air pollution in the cities I went to, which included Beijing, was no worse than it is in my Colorado city. They’ve done a lot to combat it, and though there’s still bad days, we also have bad days. Hell, we were known for the “brown cloud” for decades, and still regularly have inversions that cause the cloud these days, thankfully much less often though. There’s also a lot more electric vehicles there than there are here, so less ground level pollution from exhaust. I felt so sick my first couple days back in the states and everything smelled so bad. I didn’t even realize how bad it was until my nose wasn’t accustomed to it anymore.

In China it’s easy to afford rent in most of the cities on a full time minimum wage job, and the cities are extremely walkable. My wife lives in a 18 story building, and immediately outside of her development are at least 6 supermarkets, 20 restaurants and countless bus stations and subway stations. Sounds like it’s more of a problem with the economic system than the city itself.

The concentration camp was never the normal condition for the average gentile German. Unless one were Jewish, or poor and unemployed, or of active leftist persuasion or otherwise openly anti-Nazi, Germany from 1933 until well into the war was not a nightmarish place. All the “good Germans” had to do was obey the law, pay their taxes, give their sons to the army, avoid any sign of political heterodoxy, and look the other way when unions were busted and troublesome people disappeared.

Since many “middle Americans” already obey the law, pay their taxes, give their sons to the army, are themselves distrustful of political heterodoxy, and applaud when unions are broken and troublesome people are disposed of, they probably could live without too much personal torment in a fascist state — some of them certainly seem eager to do so.

- Michael Parenti. (1996). Fascism in a Pinstriped Suit

It’s fascism in a pinstriped suit.

The pre-rendered backgrounds were awesome too, if low resolution.

Ones that don’t just run on Google software anyway and still support modern applications? I loved my Windows Phone, but man was it frustrating not having really any third party apps.