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Did change trains in Geneva. So I was there for 14 minutes 🙂

Visited Geneva for a longer time in 2018.

I wanted to get into Italy but it didn’t quite work for our schedule. Hopefully next time

Just got back from a two week train trip across Europe. Overall, found it very easy and accessible to move around.

Here’s the general itinerary:

1. London to Brussels
2. Brussels to Prague (night train)
3. Prague to Vienna
4. Vienna to Zurich (night train)
5. Zurich to Bern
6. Bern to Lyon
7. Lyon to Nîmes
8. Nîmes to Barcelona

The only train problem on the trip was our night train to Prague. The carriage was 28-30° C and very uncomfortable. Especially for a 16 hour trip.

The inconsistency of scheduling, signage and trip information was a challenge. Especially when you add in the language barriers.

My ranking of the train systems:

1. Switzerland (obviously)
2. Austria
3. France
4. Spain
5. Czechia

https://www.summarize.tech/www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPOHf20slZg

https://archive.is/2024.03.31-110258/https://www.wsj.com/tech/discord-to-start-showing-ads-for-gamers-to-boost-revenue-bf5848b9

Rent seeking 🙂

Surprised no one has mentioned The Expanse series. A ton of world building in very different kinds of environments. Space stations, small ships, big ships, generation ships, asteroids, moons, planets.

The environments are well thought out in how the residents would need to adapt

There are a ton of style guides beyond APA. In addition to APA, I’ve used MLA, Chicago and Turabian through my academic career (BA, MS, MBA).

The likelihood of using any style guide outside of academia is low. However, in some non-academic research situations, you might use a style guide. Think about research done at a tech company where you need to document your work and distribute it for review, dissemination or presentation. Or maybe a policy institute or think tank who want to effect change at a state or federal level.

That said, teaching high school students about APA or MLA is more about helping them understand how research happens and is documented. You need to understand how to A) read what other people think about a topic and B) share your thoughts in a way that builds upon the extant literature.

This process of learning research methods also teaches you to be a critical thinker. Did the Author of Study A say something that you don’t agree with? Can you find Study B that refutes that point, or does the entire community agree with it?

Apply that concept to something like the news. You might hear a Fact like 5,000 immigrants cross the southern border every day. Is that a lot? Is that good or bad?

Now you can go read some analysis.

• A conservative author might say that all immigration is bad because they deprive jobs from citizens. We need to block all border crossings.
• A progressive author might say that immigrants create jobs or provide a net benefit to the economy. We need to permit more legal immigration.

Which opinion is correct? How would you gather more information to understand the situation? How would you build upon those two ideas to form your own opinion?

No man’s sky

Are you using services running on the OS, Docker or VMs?

With Docker you can set the Network and have some containers traffic egress on the vpn while others have no WAN or direct access. You can have a container join multiple networks to have the best of both worlds.

With VMs, you can set the network interface

With the OS, you might be able to set network interface for each service, but I don’t know how

Create a configuration file. https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp has the documentation

Columbus is a great little city in a not so great state. The local politics are quite progressive and the food and bar scene is quite nice. There was a decently sized queer community when I lived there a decade ago, and I’d expect it to continue to flourish as long as a major university is nearby.

Winters are cold. Summers are hot. The weather is what it is 🤷🏻‍♀️

1. Great photography
2. Great performances from Roberts and Ali
3. Great aesthetics
4. Okay story. Which tracks with the book

http://logicalincrements.com

Lana!

This Wikipedia article thoroughly covers their history.

1. Mitt Romney in 2012
2. Scott Walker
3. Not Trump in 2016, focused on Senate and House races

I wonder if you’d like Sleigh Bells. Twee pop vocals over grungy guitar. A lot of fun

You are correct that a fiat currency has no tangible backing. However, they do have backing from governments. The USD is backed by “the full faith and credit of the US government.”

Prior to WWI, the de facto global currency was the British Pound Sterling, backed by silver reserves.

Through the tumult of WWI, the Great Depression and WWII, precious metal reserves were consolidated in the US banks. Both through transactions (e.g. buying stuff from the US) and through deposits to secure the value from falling to foreign powers during wartime.

After WWII, the US economy was the only major power that had not been devastated, so the de facto global currency switched from GBP to USD.

As the global economy grew through the 40s, 50s and 60s, it became increasingly clear that there was not enough gold in the world to 1:1 back then USD needed to facilitate trade. There were many other factors that led to this, particularly macroeconomic decisions made in the US economy and the Vietnam War.

President Richard Nixon unilaterally ended the 1:1 backing of gold in 1971.

Since then, the USD has been backed by “the full faith and credit of the US government.”

Other currencies exchange rates are relative to the USD because the balance of international trade is denominated in USD. These rates either float (i.e. allow the market to decide the rate) or are pegged (i.e. a currency’s central bank says the official exchange rate is $1:x).

There have been discussion about shifting away from the USD as the global trade currency. Some contenders would be the Chinese renminbi or the Euro because a large proportion of international trade occurs between parties whose local economy uses one of those two currencies.

However, the decision for individual countries to switch is fraught and may cause more harm than good in the short term.

Gosh. I hadn’t thought about Indian in the cupboard in years

Not OP, but I almost exclusively read novels and non fiction via audiobooks. For context, I’m on pace for 70 books this year.

My main reason for audiobooks is I having a driving commute. Two hours a day round trip. Audiobooks keep me sane in a way that podcasts or music do not. I also do audiobooks when doing chores around the house.

Second, I struggle to focus on reading a book on my phone. Too many distractions and I think the reading experience is subpar. I do have an eInk reader, but I haven’t charged it in years because it’s easier to do audiobooks.

Physical books are rare in my home, but that’s a self-reinforcing cycle since I enjoy audiobooks so much.