According to this article, John Major came so close to giving the UK a world-class railway system. A bit more deregulation and some light-handed tweaking of incentive structures would have done it.

The security is dubious, and Durov is not exactly an exile: he travels to Russia regularly, and Telegram have had (and might still have) development offices there, suggesting some kind of accommodation with the authorities there.

Do Substack next

And possibly are Jesus

JG Ballard was right

The people crushed in the martial-law crackdown that would opportunistically follow would probably mind

From what I remember, e/n sites were like personal blogs only with more of an incel vibe. They seemed to be by guys who referred to women with misogynistic slurs, while lamenting their lack of a girlfriend.

Capybaras, hands down.

So glad my TV is a dumb-as-shit model from the early 00s I bought secondhand for about $30

It sounds American and mid-20th-century. If that’s the vibe you’re going for, great.

Most of the time, yes. Sometimes visiting friends, sometimes going somewhere for an event (and staying in a hotel/hostel), and occasionally just going on a trip, visiting/exploring a few places.

If you’re in Europe, Interrail is your friend. Get a pass, catch some trains and explore.

“The Price of Freedom”

Which is great news if you’re a Mossad agent tasked with figuring out a target’s life patterns

He can just pivot to anti-wokeness grift.

There is the quality known in German as fingerspitzgefühl (literally “fingertip feeling”): the ability of an experienced worker to gauge the situation they’re dealing with from perception and past experience, in ways that one can’t codify into a ring binder of rules. It comes with experience and is a skill. And this applies to even the most menial labour: anything requiring effort has more and less efficient ways of doing it, as well as hazards.

The fact that fingerspitzgefühl cannot be codified into intellectual property and rented out to interchangeable low-paid day labourers must be burning up the owners, once again robbed of the dream of independence from those who actually do their work. Some argue that that’s what’s driving the vast amount of investment in AI: a push to deskill labour once and for all, eliminating human fingerspitzgefühl and replacing it with reverse centaurs following orders from their VR glasses.

Require printers to check digital signatures on STL files and have only approved slicers add those

Given the likely contents of the files, and the fact that CSAM possession is a strict liability offence, that’s probably not a good idea

Tim Cook thought he had saved Apple’s stock valuation by giving Trump his fake award, but, like the businessman who pays protection money, he merely marked Apple out as pliable. Now it’s the Apple News “radical left bias”. After Cook personally intervenes and gets the algorithm to deprioritise The Guardian and Mother Jones and boost Fox News and The Daily Stormer, Apple stock will shoot up for a week or two, only to be brought low by a complaint about Apple TV shows being “woke”. Then they’ll have to drop some non-white and LGBT characters, commission a Turner Diaries show and hastily rewrite the next Ted Lasso season to work in a Great Replacement storyline, which will work until the next complaint.

An unfortunate name in the German-speaking world.

The French post office used to have TGV sets dedicated to carrying mail. (Not sure if they were just a passive freight carrier or a mobile sorting office like the Night Mail in early-20th-century Britain.)