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Yeah some overnight trains can adjust their gauge on the France/Spain border.

On the China/Mongolia border on the other hand they disassemble the train, lift the train cars up one by one (with passengers inside), switch out the boogies and then reassemble. 3 hour process, you can fully sleep through it and not notice.


If it’s taking 3 hours on a passenger train, a 5-10 minute transfer seems vastly more efficient.

Yes, but most people can't sleep through a train transfer

On a night train such as the Transsib that takes several days to get from A to B anyway, being able to sleep through it and not needing to lug your stuff around is usually considered more important.

(Although in some cases you are woken up for border formalities.)


> (Although in some cases you are woken up for border formalities.)

Yeah although you can just stay in bed for this. I've been on the train. The Chinese officials just wake you up, stamp your passport, and off you go to sleep.

Then the Mongolian officials came on, asked me a couple questions to see whether I respected their country, why I was going there, grumbled something unintelligble, stamped my passport and moved on.

Much better than getting in line for 2 hours if you ask me (which is what happened at the Bulgaria/Turkey border and the Georgia/Armenia border when I crossed those)


For day trains as well, more often within Spain than on the border with France.

Not notice loud banging and violent shaking underneath you? You can sleep through that, with practice, but you will notice it.

Also for those that require a credit card for a free trial, I always use a virtual card and cancel it. It's super fun to watch them cry when they can't actually charge you.

They will usually refund you if you end up getting charged because you forgot to cancel. It isn't worth the headache of a chargeback.

Plus they have to pay a fee for chargebacks regardless of whether they think it's valid or not, so strong disincentive.


it's also not easy to just apply for a chargeback in some jurisdiction. they are betting you will just give up and chalk it up as an expensive lesson.

Funny, I got a fraud call recently because CrunchyRoll decided to try to renew a subscription I abandoned years ago and the card they have is expired.

I know it wasn't me because I gave up entirely on the service after they changed something about their login systems to reject my password and I could no longer get in. Support wanted me to jump through a lot of hoops and I just refused, choosing instead to just stop doing business there because I wasn't really watching anything at that point anyway.

This was around 2022, mind you, so they tried to renew me after several years with no explanation.


This happens with me every year with Barnes and Noble bookstore. I canceled their annual membership back in like 2018, Starting in 2021 this zombie account started charging me for a renewal. I reached out to support and they disavowed any knowledge of how this could happen, had no record of charging me, and no clue how it could have happened.

Since Amex is nice about allowing someone who charged you in the past - keep charging you even as your card has changed, they allow the charge.

Every year I do a chargeback, every year. Amex can't figure out how to not allow it and B&N has no idea why they charge it. Hmmm...


I have this exact same thing happening with B&N. Did you ever figure out how to get it to stop?

I have not unfortunately, and spent several hours trying to get it sorted out -- all unsuccessfully.

I do a chargeback every year. <sigh>


A letter from an attorney to B&N’s legal department might be required to get their attention. They are effectively committing wire fraud, so maybe talk to your local DA?

It's way easier to just not give them a way they can charge you. That way you don't have to deal with a support representative fakely asking you how your weekend was, and who doesn't actually care about your weekend.

> best library for simply loading images and video

But not for saving video. That fourcc pile of crap doesn't open up in QuickTime player, the default Ubuntu video player, or anything anybody actually uses. I've always had to add a os.system("ffmpeg [ask llm to generate the command for you]") afterwards to fix anything that OpenCV generates.


It is the 16-color VGA version of blue, not the version of blue you'd pick if you had a 24-bit color display.

This website reminds me of the early 90s internet because of the specific shade of blue they picked.


> Denmark doesn’t get a lot of sun to begin

First, that's only true for about 4 months of the year. Second, people cooped up in offices in China, India, and the US don't get a lot of light either. In fact I'd bet the better work-life balance in Denmark means people actually do get more light there because they spend more of their evenings and weekends outside instead of in the office. Office buildings in Denmark also tend to have much better sunlight by design.


>Office buildings in Denmark also tend to have much better sunlight by design.

Just on this note, you don't make vitamin D if you're indoors even if there's direct sun hitting your skin, because commercial glass filters out UVB.


I don't think it invalidates a study as long as you do things on relative terms and have a control group. Another study can see if the same delta effect is reproducible in an e.g. homogeneous Asian population and report on it.

It is probably a logistical nightmare to do a study of this sort in multiple countries and regulatory systems simultaneously.


It doesn't invalidate the study at all! On the contrary, if you're measuring vitamin d levels from blood tests, it is easy to adjust the dosage to match.

It's just an important factor - if you live much further south or spend a lot of time outdoors, your target dosage will be different than someone in _Denmark_.


The biggest hope at this point honestly is that fewer people are having kids and we're on track to halve the world population in another couple generations. Greenhouse emissions cut by half.

The per capita emissions of USA/Canada/Gulf countries have to be cut by a factor of 8-10 to reach sustainable levels. The per capita emissions of EU/China/SEA have to cut by 4 to reach sustainable levels. All within the next 25 years if we want to avoid crossing tipping points.

Halving the population in 50 years is not a realistic plan.


> Halving the population in 50 years is not a realistic plan.

Here are some projections to support that statement. Supposedly 2084 is peak population.

https://population.gov.au/sites/population.gov.au/files/2025...

I haven't read up on all the assumptions made for those projections. If something unassumed pops up that makes things substantially worse then the population peak would come earlier I guess. But that's a gamble.


Just block cookies, and it doesn't matter whether you consent or not.

Of course, paradoxically, these consent banners need to put a cookie to remember that you didn't consent to cookies, so you might need a plugin like uBlock to block the banner as well.


Wonder why they don't just grab a huge permanent Sharpie and write in huge letters "Do not insert pin here" on one hole and "Insert pin here" on the other hole.

I'm actually serious, it seems to me they resist these kind of short-term helpers that would save lots of injuries.


You’re likely a fan of this: https://i.sstatic.net/vaPH0.jpg

I think the report says they just put a little cover on the hole where the pin shouldn't go (but can).

Sure, but they probably took 3 years to have a design review, an executive review, some firings and layoffs, re-hire, orientation, a sprint planning meeting, a sprint retro, a post mortem, an OKR meeting, a KPI meeting, an all-hands, and then the cover probably got stuck in customs with tariffs, and then the tolerances probably weren't correct.

Meanwhile the sharpie would take 1 minute.


> Meanwhile the sharpie would take 1 minute.

And eventually be missed/ignored by a rushed ground tech and fail again.

Other than making it easier to blame someone, labeling is just a short term interim fix for such things. You design it to be physically impossible or as close to that as possible.

Been there, done that in much less high stakes environments. Upping the training, documentation, and labeling simply makes the mistakes happen less often for a physical process obviously prone to a common mistake.

Sure as an immediate airworthiness directive giant bright lettering is a great immediate “this month” fix. Certainly not a permanent one though.

If you make a hole multiple things can be fit into, eventually someone will try.


Or just directly on Slack. I want to try this but Slack's API has become impossibly difficult to use compared to 10 years ago when it was just simple POST requests here and there. Now you have to create an "app", install the "app", have "internal" and "public" apps, give "apps" permissions, all that garbage.

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