Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • 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.




  • You can discuss any war you like in any forum that will discuss this subject.

    The national media wherever you are will discuss certain conflicts and maybe strive others but the attention will really be elsewhere. As humans we have a limited attention span. Until last decade we had outsourced the sorting of importance to editors in newsrooms. With social media it’s been a hybrid of editors and algorithms. A lot of algorithms are fed by traditional, trusted news organisations so the biases persist. This is very generalized but I would describe the formula like this: far away, no oil, no business interests? No news.

    Also, people like having opinions. But there is also an ignorance level the majority of people will stay under. You’ll always have a-holes that just parrot stuff unreflected. They live these days mostly but not exclusively on Xwitter. I’m not talking about those guys. The more level headed will not want to discuss certain things for lack of knowledge.

    On Lemmy, you’ll find more level headed people that are influenced by biases that persist in the Anglosphere - we speak English after all. Also, people are not willing to walk into wood chippers. There is no comment on the internet that doesn’t have the potential to trigger a shit storm.

    Journalism is also about narrative. Aung San Suu Kyi’s journey from imprisoned freedom fighter to de facto head of government, to looking away from genocide - the hero journey was aborted and with it attention waned. Most white people don’t want to look too closely at Africa for fear of finding contemporary conflicts with their roots in the era of colonisation. Since our attention is limited, those are the conflicts we gladly let go of first. Also, we need to stay focused on whether or not an octogenarian shat himself in Washington.









  • but would an EU-style freedom of movement remove that by allowing citizens of both Canada and US cross freely…?

    Captain Obvious says yes.

    It should be noted that not all that glitters is gold. At various times, Schengen member countries have reinstated border checks. Not at every border crossing but randomly checking people. Often unfortunately in accordance with the Family Guy police stop meme Pantone skin color chart. Germany is doing it at great cost as an internal political maneuver. Italy is doing it to people coming from Spain post the run on Ceuta. At the height of the Syrian refugee crisis every EU country along the way did it. Free movement is the first victim of anti-immigration politics everywhere. There is an argument to be made that this lofty ideal inked on paper in the 90s was too lofty for its own good in a realpolitik kind of way.

    Given the current US administration and the crap they’re pulling on their friendly neighbours to the north there is no way this will happen. This century, if I had to put a time frame on it. This is what happens when the toddlers run diplomacy. Earning respect takes ages, losing it takes no time at all.