Mike

Im also annoyed at how much words are written about the Collins. Stop promoting these doofuses. (They have come up in sneerclub before)

Apologies. First time poster, all that stuff.

The corporal punishment thing is a weirdly Anglophone obsession – assaulting (sorry, “smacking”) your kids has been a crime here since 1977 and the kids seem to be alright as well as having the bonus of being less likely to have grown up surrounded by violence and the threat of violence. In 7 years here I’ve seen exactly one person hit a child in public (looked a lot like a visiting grandma from elsewhere) and it came as a real shock. The more the Collins types (and, of course, fundie types) try to justify this as “normal” the less normal it appears to everyone else.

I was a member of the ARRL for a year just to get QST, and found that so much of the American outlook on amateur radio is so different to that here in Europe with allthe stuff about patriotism (what? no.) and prepping and massive amplifiers and driving your pickup truck to the park (here in Austria we do SOTA, not POTA :) ) that it held no real interest for me. The tech reviews were great, though.

“Food truck culture” is pretty much a hipsterism as far as I can tell. It’s a posh way of describing regular food of a sort that often gets sold from the back of a van everywhere except it’s made by and for white people and costs twice as much. Their original purpose of selling affordable food reasonably quickly to workers who want some hot food instead of bringing their own lunch to work but don’t have a long enough break to go anywhere to eat was gentrified away a while back.

Put down the Ayn Rand bong, please. I don’t think any federated network in Internet history (and I’m including Usenet) ever had a need for some hypercomplex reputation/coinage/exchange… thing. You think this would be a great idea, fine, you do you. You could even fork the software if you wanted to see if you got anywhere. But I really don’t think there’s any traction whatever in this idea.

Plenty of propaganda, but Smoky was a real cat – was rescued from a bombed-out building after an air raid by the woman in the picture - Miss Ann Twynam of Paddington (a district of London). While I’m sure his saluting trick didn’t involve taxidermy, I’m sure it involved bribery. Cats basically owned the black market in tuna during the war when pretty much everything was strictly rationed.

The CPH metro also has short trains - evacuation of a three-car train is substantially less difficult than the safe evacuation of, say, a Victoria Line train - 133m long, with a crush load of 1,200 people and no side walkways. You’re right that the benefit here isn’t so much in cost savings (most trains still have at least one staff member on board) as it is in being able to run short trains at low headways.

That’s just weird. I love voids. I’ve already given notice that our next two cats (not for a while yet, as the current two are going strong and showing no signs of keeling over) will be a void and an orange one.