This is genius. I've enjoyed Radio Garden on occasion for the musical novelty but never thought about putting a random station in Latin America on to practice listening to different Spanish accents.
It "was known" in the 60s that Japanese electronics and cars were inferior in design and quality. Chinese products are going through the same trajectory.
The first PC I built myself had an Athlon XP Barton 2500+ and 2x 256mb sticks of DDR2-400. It wasn't top of the line by any means but great bang-for-buck in 2003.
Then you should also question what flavor of censorship and bias US-made LLMs have.
Also, if someone says something that could threaten my safety (either directly or through inciting others) I would very much like them to get a visit from the police. This situation is so easily avoided by not being a dick to people.
But would you have thought to research how a specific car manufacturer's spicy anti-rodent tape tasted in the first place?
There's an element of discovery in this article, as well as being entertaining and informative. Her writing is—subjectively and objectively—uncommonly good.
Really. Especially taken with the "toy" statement that follows, this reads to me like "this isn't perfect but we had a good crack at it and are happy with how good it came out for our purposes".
The gameplay is focused on logistics, so those aspects have a lot more control. I particularly enjoy that in conjunction with the model railway aesthetics.
- You build roads and railways, and stations for passengers and cargo (road/rail/air/sea)
- You set up 'lines' to connect various stations, and you can specify what and how much gets loaded/unloaded at every station (or whether vehicles on that line stop there at all), and how long vehicles should wait for their cargo
- You buy each vehicle and assign it to a line, and in the case of trains you also buy each component e.g. locomotives, passenger cars, stake cars, hoppers depending on what your line needs to transport
The cities grow by themselves based on the passenger transport links with other cities and the level of goods supply. There's no zoning, building water pipes, schools, or anything like that. Just the minutiae of getting things from A to B via C to pick up some more things destined for Y and Z.
I think questioning the money is just as important. There is so much conflicted money pushing the "climate change isn't real" narrative that it should raise more suspicion in skeptics.
Although you are entirely correct in a technical sense, and it's common to serve hot brewed coffee cold, the opposite is so rarely desired that it will be considered 'weird' (in the sense of 'unusual') 9 out of 10 times.
Every extra process involved in making a coffee is going to add complexity and time to the workflow, which many cafes will elect to charge extra for.
There is some consternation in Australia about paying more for iced coffees compared to hot ones too: