Viewing profile — thematrixturtle

The "third degree" of interrogation is actual torture. The less well known first degree was being shown the implements of torture, and the second degree was being made to watch som…

The problem with many of these museums and even the medieval sources they're based on is that there's a strong incentive to make things as gruesome as possible, including just maki…

Whiplash is also popular for insurance/disability fraud. There was an interesting story on HN a while back about how the prevalence of whiplash after accidents in the US is far hig…

Magstripe is long dead throughout Asia as well. The US (as always) has been behind the curve on this, but contactless became pretty ubiquitous during COVID.

The vast majority of Australia has been inhospitable desert since before the Aboriginals showed up. Trees can only grown on a comparatively narrow stretch of temperate or tropical,…

As a reference point for just how expensive, the Caltrain electrification project in SF is currently estimated at $2.44 billion dollars for 82 km of track, and still climbing. And …

Machine translation has put a lot of human translators out of work. The per-word rates for text translation are pathetic these days, even for language pairs that Google Translate s…

Citation needed for "most". Sure, there are wood stoves in summer cottage saunas and old rural houses, but this is not even close to possible for the average apartment dweller, and…

Wind power is nice, but the key is nuclear power, which covers 35% of Finland's needs already and that number is going to go up once they fully ramp up Olkiluoto 3. Unfortunately i…

I agree with your broad assessment that the glory days of Hollywood are over, but am not quite as optimistic on the future of Asian cinema. Chinese media is crippled for the forese…

> Orson Scott Card once said that Asimov was one of the few writers who kept improving in old age I'd like to believe this was true, but much of Asimov's late works, particularly t…

It's not going to be any better , but if you'd like to spend $20k on a phone, Vertu still seems to be around peddling crocodile skin phones encrusted with diamonds etc. https://www…

Eh, just call it out, it's India and its subcontinental neighbours. And the reason is less culture and more there being a lot of first-time passengers going to menial jobs in the G…

This argument sounds very much like "the problem is not communism, all those countries just weren't doing real communism". And I'm not even being quite as flippant as it sounds abo…

Ah yes, more lawsuits, that always works grrrrreat at speeding up bureaucracy.

In Malaysia and particularly Indonesia, a great many sauces are to this day called kecap , pronounced "ketchup". The debate is mostly about whether the Indonesian kecap inspired th…

Heinz is ambrosia compared to the sweet and runny house brand ketchups at your average supermarket.

The GP's statement was completely factual: the title of "Queen of Australia" only came into existence in 1901 when the states of what is now Australia federated. Before that, the Q…

That was New South Wales. The Commonwealth of Australia was founded on Jan 1st 1901.

I'm continually amazed that Abe's assassin appears to have successfully turned the media spotlight exactly where he wanted it to be, and so successfully turned public sentiment aga…

Yes, they are. The LDP (Japan's ruling party) is quite openly in coalition with Komeito, the political wing of Soka Gakkai, a prominent Buddhist-ish cult.

But appeasement worked so well last time in 1938, when we gave Germany the Sudetenland and satisfied their desire for Lebensraum once and for all! And I'm sure we could have avoide…

Hong Kong makes this more obvious by letting banks issue paper currency: HSBC, Standard Chartered and Bank of China all issue their own banknotes, with radically different designs …

They're common in Singapore because of the southern Chinese influence. You don't see them often in Malaysia or Indonesia tho (outside Chinese areas) because frog is not halal.