That's what I thought of when I read this in George Orwell's "1984":
"Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration."
You can literally learn most of Esperanto grammar in the time it takes to learn the difference between "soy/estar" and "por/para" in Spanish.
Those are just two Spanish concepts that students spend days learning. Look at a table of contents in a Spanish textbook and count the concepts. Now review an Esperanto textbook. It was designed for fast acquisition. Things that you have to learn in any language - like numbers, verb forms, days of the week, time, spelling, etc - are designed to be as simple as possible.
Take a book like "501 Spanish verbs" and adapt it to Esperanto. The book will shrink down to one page, since all verbs are regular. That page will further shrink down because there are fewer conjugations. All conjugations that do exist are composable - each conjugation dimension can be applied separately. They are even consistent between parts of speech.
How many people, who are making a serious multi-year effrot in learning a foreign language, no how to say "flutter" in that language? It's not unlikely that Esperanto learners will know that word in the month or so (after they learn the word for "fly", and learn how to make diminutives). Through these mechanisms you only need to learn a fraction of vocabulary, since from a root word you can drive many others.
Planet Money had an episode about "revenue-neutral carbon tax", where all the money collected is returned back to the tax payers, to spend however they want.
The point of this tax is not to raise money, but to change behavior. This, a family that drives to work and school every day will pay more carbon tax, but this will be offset by the tax refund (or lower income tax). And a family that finds ways to reduce their carbon footprint will benefit from the tax refund and able to spend it on other things.
WA state had a carbon tax initiative but the revenues went to environmental efforts, and it failed. I think if it were made revenue-neutral, or heck, even made as an overall tax-cut to please the fiscal conservatives, I think it would pass (although it would face pushback from environmentally minded about not doing enough).
They are very active in progressive causes. Perhaps when they sold the company to Unilever they negotiated some deal that allows them to continue to use Ben and Jerry website for their activism?
You play it casually just like you read a fiction paperback casually.
In the annual interactive fiction contest, the judges get 2 hours to evaluate ba game. So many new games aim for that to be the playing time.
From what I remember some old Infocom games like Enchanter (which takes place in the Zork universe) don't take very long to finish (definitely less than a standard $60 video game console video game).
Thank you for posting this - I took this quiz a few years ago in a team exercise and all of my answers were off. Since then I wanted to find a copy of this test, but didn't know where to look.
I think out of 15 people nobody got more than 1 or 2 right, except for my manager, who somehow got about 8 right. I'm curious how the HN crowd does on this - care to post your scores?