FriendOfDeSoto

The other ones I mentioned.

That’s ucked fup.

China’s biggest denomination is CNY 100 or about USD 15. India pulled its largest denomination bill from circulation maybe 5 years ago. The US stopped doing anything above USD 100 a while ago. Bigger denominations are a counterfeit and bribery risk.

Nobody cares about the Swiss Franc in cash outside of Switzerland. There are 10 million or thereabouts Swiss people. All the other currencies are used in much larger populations, three-figure millions at the lower end.

Because the earth doesn’t stop turning and somebody will always be asleep.

but would an EU-style freedom of movement remove that by allowing citizens of both Canada and US cross freely…?

Captain Obvious says yes.

It should be noted that not all that glitters is gold. At various times, Schengen member countries have reinstated border checks. Not at every border crossing but randomly checking people. Often unfortunately in accordance with the Family Guy police stop meme Pantone skin color chart. Germany is doing it at great cost as an internal political maneuver. Italy is doing it to people coming from Spain post the run on Ceuta. At the height of the Syrian refugee crisis every EU country along the way did it. Free movement is the first victim of anti-immigration politics everywhere. There is an argument to be made that this lofty ideal inked on paper in the 90s was too lofty for its own good in a realpolitik kind of way.

Given the current US administration and the crap they’re pulling on their friendly neighbours to the north there is no way this will happen. This century, if I had to put a time frame on it. This is what happens when the toddlers run diplomacy. Earning respect takes ages, losing it takes no time at all.

Which is it?

I may be white, sensitive, and full of bullshit. But I’m not American!

Sensitive? WTF do you mean sensitive? I’m not sensitive. Thank you for rage baiting with us today.

Seriously, I would stop doing that if I were you. Not for the esthetic or because there is inherently anything wrong with doing that. You’re going to become bycatch when people look to catch bots and sloppers in a wide net.

I would go for your favorite expletive. So when you see the mess he made and cuss he’ll come and look at you. Probably with disdain.

Any post formatted like that comes straight out of an LLM. No user, no matter how dedicated or how mad, would take the time to format headers and bullet points.

Reposting stuff from reddit and posting whatever the LLM spat out. As far as I’m concerned, you are a contributing factor to a stagnant user base here.

Asked and answered.

Sole custody? Not a big chance unless the other parent becomes criminal, sick to the point where they can no longer take care of the child, or worse.

Japan is embarking on a journey of allowing split custody. That concept is new though because we love a law with tradition that goes back to the Heian era. My layman guess would be they will somehow exclude foreign passport holders without PR, just on principle.

Forgive me for being this blunt: your friend is effed. They didn’t get their kid a passport. They are at the mercy of the Japanese courts. And even if they had the passport and could ‘go on vacation’ to the US, there is a very good chance the US courts would eventually send the kid back. There is international law at play to prevent child abductions, chief among it the Hague convention, to which the US and finally also Japan are signatories. Your friend’s best chance is a stable life in Japan, a good lawyer, and hopefully no marks on the record that diminishes their chances. Naiveté isn’t a defense. If the friend didn’t know that if the marriage went south this could be the outcome that’s regrettable but also the toughest of luck.

Also, we only get half the story on hearsay. The other parent’s story might paint a very different picture.

Personally, I look to the user side for lack of intelligence.

Funny enough it almost never means they care.

The further into the future you are trying to predict the weather, the more the reliability drops. The last time I heard a meteorologist talk about it, it was 5 days into the future for a specific location. Anything more than that was as reliable as reading tea leaves. You can say it’ll rain in Asia 10 days from now but you cannot say with any certainty it’ll rain in this village.

The climate which we ruined will provide us with punishment. Warmer oceans will give us stronger tropical storms. But they’ve gotten pretty good at detecting and outlining their likely paths. That sort of predicting is likely to improve with more storms and more data. Another suitable punishment is torrential train causing flash flooding. In the places with good satellite cover, they can see that and warn people with an hour’s lead time or thereabouts. The time span is short but the prediction accuracy is good.

We as consumers are not good judges of the weatherpeople. We look at our phones and form an opinion. But we don’t investigate where the data came from, which LLM may have added its hallucinations, and what other corners may have been cut to get us this information, which we don’t pay for. So we see it’s pissing down outside, the forecast was for blue skies, ergo the weatherpeople are getting worse at their job. When it is more likely the quality of the free data declined or somebody asked ChatGPT and Claude.

Language has an influence on how one thinks. But this shower thought smacks of too great a generalization to me.

There are few feces filled salvoes flung at Melon Usk that I would object to. This is not one of them. The question I have though is this: do we need a new Twitter? It had its time in the sun but most people look back at it through rose tinted glasses. Before the takeover by the son of South African emerald mine owners, Twitter was in deep trouble. It had cultural relevance but was a financial flop. It benefited from being the first service of its kind with sufficient reach. I don’t think Twitter would have survived without the Nazi saluting shithead either. Its decline would have been more graceful by comparison. It would have done it without the bullshit tsunami emanating from the top, it wouldn’t have had the money to digitally undress people or other adventures in so-called AI, but I believe it would have faded anyway. People have split up from the one consensus platform to many different ones and making people switch is hard. So coming back now with a new Twitter is like announcing we will electrocute another Topsy next week. That turned heads more than a century ago but we have moved on.

If a guillotine is not okay, how about a piece of cake? It has the French Revolution connection but looks cute and delicious.

The Marie Antoinette quote is probably apocryphal but wgaf.

And why is slop so sloppy slop slop? Consider this question asked and answered by yourself.