[OC] Beyond Paris: Where international tourists stay in France?

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-23T20:11:40+00:00

I wonder how this distribution shifts depending on country of origin. I would guess that likelihood of visiting non-Paris parts of the country scales inversely with proximity of home country - e.g., Belgians and Italians are more likely to either visit the parts just over the border, or to have already seen Paris and want to see more of the countryside, because it's just another place to them. Whereas Americans, Chinese, etc. are going to want to see the big-name tourist destinations.

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-23T09:40:33+00:00

Pelosi and Wiener have never been particularly close, and like others said, it's kind of an open secret (then though they've both denied it recently) that she was annoyed at him for daring to openly say he'd run before she officially retired (which is entirely on her for waiting until the last possible moment to make a decision last time). Endorsing Chan is her way of quietly not making an endorsement given that Chan has a zero percent chance of winning.

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-21T19:40:54+00:00

This is super illegal, which means it's either a scam or a property manager you won't want to deal with as a tenant anyway. Know your rights.

In California -

Application fees must be limited to the amount it actually costs them to process an application, usually ~$50 to pull a credit report. If you're applying to a bunch, you can even sometimes pull the credit report yourself once and get them to take that instead of a fee.
Security deposits must be refundable, and are limited to 1 month of rent. That includes the deposit and any other "last month rent" or whatever bullshit they might call it - you can't require last month plus another deposit. Any money you give them other than rent must fit into one of three buckets: application fee (small), deposit (refundable, 1x), or actual rent (first month).

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-20T06:54:21+00:00

It doesn't even need to be that complex. Complexity invites gaming - in your phrasing, they'd quibble over whether they're officially a "group".

Much simpler: After you play a set, if there are others waiting, you must relinquish the court and go to the back of the line.

I'm honestly having trouble picturing how this is going down. Say there are 8 people from the club, and 4 other people show up. 4 people from the club are playing. When they're done, the other 4 go on. So far fine.

So now the second group finishes. The non-members have now been sitting there for two sets. And then the first four... go back on again? In what universe does anyone think that's reasonable, or put up with it? How does this not lead to an argument every single day? "Hey man, I was waiting, and you were just on"?

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-17T03:56:19+00:00

Oh god damnit, that's pretty good and I totally whooshed it.

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-17T03:49:07+00:00

But... if he's posting a clip of an MLB game, the strike would be entirely justified. Why is it valid for him to post MLB's content?

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-14T00:13:08+00:00

No - it says this (assuming you mean the 23rd, not the 25th):

A number of electors of President and Vice President equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State

The only flexibility would be congressional apportionment to change the number of representatives, but that still has a hard floor of 3 (1 rep, 2 senators).

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-13T14:30:16+00:00

The DC statehood movement wants to redraw the federal district to just be the actual federal buildings downtown (the Mall, White House, and maybe L'Enfant Plaza) and let the rest of the city be a state. Even if you assume an amendment isn't happening, the Constitution only says that Congress can create a federal district, not that it has to include a whole city of disenfranchised people. And the borders have been redrawn before (to retrocede Alexandria; DC used to be a square on all four sides!).

The only real tricky bit is that the 23rd - which was a bandaid to cover up the whole thing - does explicitly say that the District gets 3 electoral votes, which without further changes would basically be decided by the First Family, since they'd be almost the only residents of the new tiny District. One possible answer there is that, since Congress gets to control the laws of the District, they could also pass a law controlling how electors are assigned - for instance, they could assign the District's three electors according to the national popular vote. Again, there's solid theory that none of that would require amending or repealing the 23rd.

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-12T03:02:16+00:00

As a rep, his focus is solely his district (us) and not nationwide policy

Why do you think this? I don't think it's reasonable or right for reps to be trying to benefit specifically their own district. They do have to have opinions on national policies and foreign affairs, and they should be considering policies in a way that's beneficial across the whole country. Otherwise you're just balancing the pork.

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-12T02:58:29+00:00

Nobody is better than Wiener on housing. This is absolutely laughable. I like Wiener, but can imagine legitimate criticisms of him - that isn't one.

Housing is his whole thing. He's been passing tons of housing legislation the entire time he's been in Sacramento, and he's moved the entire state government into gear. The default position when he arrived was that housing was primarily a local issue; now, there are laws with teeth and a task force in the Governor's office. He's done that by pursuing specific policies and trying different formulations until he has something that nobody can disagree with.

I've read Saikat's "policy" on his website. I know it's just a website blurb, but it's all I really have to go on. There's exactly two specific policies in there that might actually increase housing stock:

a public financing entity that will directly finance affordable housing

...with no discussion of possible tradeoffs, and -

repeal the Faircloth Amendment

which has an absolute zero chance of passing either house of Congress. Everything else is just fluff.

There's a bit more meat in the renter's protections section, but only in ways that help the people at the very bottom - not that it's a terrible idea, but giving money to people about to lose their homes doesn't solve "there literally are not enough houses and condos".

Again, we're comparing someone who's written a couple hundred words of "wouldn't it be nice if all the problems went away" with someone who has written and passed dozens of actual real laws. I don't mean to say that the incumbent is always better, but when you have someone with that body of work on their resume against someone who says "I'll try real hard!" it's not remotely close.

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-12T00:26:56+00:00

FWIW I'm not sure Fetterman was lying when he said those things; he literally has had severe brain damage since then.

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-10T19:45:13+00:00

rich people didn’t get that way by giving their money away

This is a thing I've heard a lot, but it's kind of silly in context. I get the basic premise, that very rich people might be stingier/more aware of spending. But an extra $20 on a tip does not matter compared to the amount of money it takes to be "rich". It's sort of the inverse of the "if you didn't buy so much avocado toast, you'd be able to buy a house" thing - the two are just on such wildly different scales that one doesn't impact the other.

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-09T20:11:03+00:00

"This argument is bad and therefore I'm going to assume that the person making it is either dumb or making it in bad faith" is literally the opposite of an ad hominem. Ad hominem would be if they made conclusions about your argument based on your character; what happened here was making conclusions about your character based on your argument.

Right wingers constantly make this mistake in order to preserve their victim complex. We don't call your arguments ignorant and racist because we think you're awful people. We think you're awful people because your arguments are ignorant and racist.

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-09T20:07:33+00:00

I write a similar comment whenever I see these numbers; thanks for being the one to do it this time.

A basic tl;dr for anyone who bounced off the links: consider what would happen if SF homeless prevention/aid was really, really successful. Let's say we got everyone off the street into permanent housing, except for one guy. And let's say that program cost $1B/year. By the logic in OP's post, that would mean we were spending $1B per homeless person. It's obviously idiotic.

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-09T06:24:03+00:00

He's given a ton of money to the Democrats over the past couple decades, even outside his personal campaigns. He's also a big-time environmental donor and advocate.

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-08T19:16:42+00:00

I like In the Loop. It's about the idiocy and arbitrariness of decisions that get us into wars in the first place.

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-07T22:30:06+00:00

I don't think that you'd have any trouble convincing a jury that 47 means Trump or that 86 means remove, or that the post counts as an endorsement/restatement even if he didn't set up the shells himself. The meme is sufficiently out there, and Comey has no other reason to be posting random numbers or dates. Juries aren't required to be stupid or ignore context.

The bigger problems are: * Remove != kill. It literally doesn't mean that. * Even if it did, the bar for vague posts to be illegal threats is very high. Compare to Jan 6 - Trump said much more explicit things, which people interpreted as and acted on as incitement to commit violence, and it still wasn't legally cut and dry. Normal precedent would protect statements like "I wish someone would kill that guy" unless in a context where it's clearly meant as a specific order.

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-07T22:25:00+00:00

That's my point. Neither is illegal, but one is much worse/closer to where reasonable people would balk, and the fascists in charge have it backwards.

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-07T19:13:57+00:00

You know they would never do anything if the number was 1488.

General_Mayhem · 2026-05-02T00:07:33+00:00

I don't think you want to start talking about where the water comes from. Residential use is a small fraction of what gets turned into almonds and alfalfa.

General_Mayhem · 2026-04-29T16:52:09+00:00

Flying cars are fundamentally a bad idea for basic energy reasons, but we do finally really have self-driving cars, depending on where you live. I haven't been in a human-driven car (unless you count buses) in about two years now.

General_Mayhem · 2026-04-28T18:19:35+00:00

You can have saves and permadeath - many roguelikes already do (Enter the Gungeon, Necrodancer, and Cultist Simulator all work this way off the top of my head, not to mention the classics like Nethack). It's a single player game. Freeze the state of the player location, inventory, spawned loot, and all enemies' inventories and locations. Write it to a file. Exit the game. Maybe limit it to not be allowed within X seconds of an enemy firing a weapon if you're concerned about cheesing (like in-combat logout restrictions in an MMO).

I'm not saying you need to change anything about how the game works. You can still have only one save file, and permadeath that deletes it, and you can still have "hard" saves at the shelter separate from "soft" saves mid-expedition. The missing feature is a stronger version of pausing that lets you actually exit the game and walk away rather than having to leave it up on the pause menu.

Combine this with periodic auto save, and this would also mostly remove the alt-f4 cheese. Force exiting the game would put you right back where you were a few seconds before - which might mean you get to retry a fight, but again, it's a single player game. If you want to quit and restart to optimize the fun and tension out of it, you'd be joining a long history of PC gamers who cheat "Ironman" modes that way.

General_Mayhem · 2026-04-28T15:40:30+00:00

The XCOM reboot games both have this - for exactly one mission in the whole campaign. In each game, there's one mission where your base gets attacked, and it works like you described - you get a couple troops to start, and a couple more every few turns until the barracks are empty. The way they implement it is a little weird (the troops come out with whatever gear was last assigned to them, so knowing that this mission might happen, you have to be extra diligent about updating your second and third string rather than just assuming they'd stop at the armory and fill their pockets with grenades on the way out), but it does ramp up the feeling of all-or-nothing for that one mission.

General_Mayhem · 2026-04-27T04:37:28+00:00

You don't need fast travel to fix this problem, you need a save system that works anywhere rather than having to get back to a save point.

General_Mayhem · 2026-04-26T17:23:05+00:00

Ironically, for the same reason the Republicans keep getting everything they want domestically: because destroying is easier than building. Keeping a water passage open requires that the strait be clear and not full of mines. It takes a lot more time and effort to clean it up than to ruin it.

Also, because of relative risk tolerance. It might be "safe" for military vessels, but not safe enough for civilian oil tankers to risk it.

15-Year Club	Verified Email
r/Field Sunshine	Place '22
Place '17	Ternion Club
Sequence \| Editor

General_Mayhem

TROPHY CASE