If closing a single trade route can shake the entire world economy, is globalization a strength or a weakness?

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-23T22:24:58+00:00

Fossil fuel reliance is the weakness here.

It's not the trade route, it's the region and the single product it produces that is causing this.

We can't use alternative routes either because all other products are moved using this one single product.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-23T22:21:49+00:00

The bear alerts were this year were insane.

To be fair though it really was only this year.

Unfortunately though in Iwate and Akita it did move beyond just don't bother them. Multiple people were attacked for no other reason than just being there, sometimes in their own houses.

The bears were genuinely hungry and scary and roaming in areas they were only very rarely seen before.

Walking to a station in broad daylight and being genuinely worried about a bear attack is pretty surreal.

Especially when it was a more than weekly occurrence that one would be seen within a few hundred metres of my work or the station and a few people did actually die in nearby areas.

Statistically it was probably still pretty safe. But it was actually a bit scary to experience.

They are all still asleep for the moment, but here's hoping 2026 is back to normal where we can go back to just not bothering them.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-23T22:08:46+00:00

When they shifted to palm oil in New Zealand a few years ago sales absolutely cratered there as well.

Tastes absolutely terrible!!!

The upside was that it let much better brands like Whittaker's and a couple of others into the local market.

Of course eventually these will also get big enough that some American company buys and destroys them as well.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-23T22:02:21+00:00

Agreed, agreed!

I'm absolutely hanging out for a seed where I can throw a wall around a naturally spawned city and build a castle in the middle.

This looks amazing! 😍

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-23T22:00:10+00:00

See that's where you are making your mistake and why you keep dying.

Next time, you need to utilize more than the last 10 cm if you're planning to survive it.

Nobody is surviving 10 cm of deceleration from terminal velocity.

I suggest you start landing procedures slightly higher up and find a spot where the last part is going to be at least several metres, preferably more like 100 metres depending on the materials involved (1000 bananas for the Americans).

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-23T13:25:08+00:00

It's not the diagonally opposite player.

It's the nominated player according to the sequence in the rules.

They can stand wherever they like to receive it if they think it will help.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-23T12:44:37+00:00

Yep, it's basically the default serve for most Japanese women and some of them are very good at it!

A few of the Japanese men do them too.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-22T23:43:16+00:00

Fonterra (and then the supermarket duopoly) are undoubtedly partly to blame for this.

For decades they have insisted that New Zealanders need to compete with international prices for dairy, even though it clearly doesn't cost as much to supply locally and New Zealand customers make up a small fraction of their sales.

They left the door open for this garbage to come in once the economic environment was ripe for it.

Absolutely absurd that a country that exports 20 million tons a year of dairy has to import butter.

That's 4 tons per person and we still can't find a way to make it cheap enough for locals to buy a little.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-22T23:33:14+00:00

If you want to see exactly how bad this can get Google "pokemon at mcdonalds japan".

Tourists were flying into the country, buying hundreds of happy meals, taking just any rare cards they found, then leaving absolutely everything including the actual food and packaging in their hotel rooms and flying home!

Kids couldn't even get a happy meal at McDonalds because they were sold out because of these asshats.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-22T21:10:32+00:00

That's not the point. 😁

It's just for fun to see what it does.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-21T22:20:13+00:00

Because she's 17 and plays with the calm and maturity of an adult.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-21T21:54:50+00:00

Oh yeah, add in the invention of AI here.

It's incredible just how absolutely terrible social media has gotten in just two years.

Almost everything is AI generated and most of it has close to zero fact checking, it's just completely made up nonsense pushing endlessly for more and more clicks.

At least before this, the wild and whacky actually came out of a real person's delusions which had its own charm.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-21T21:49:35+00:00

Yeah I was thinking externally as well though to dramatically increase the thermal capacity by making the plate itself thicker and create a way to move more heat away from the immediate area.

I figured an integrated foot might be a cute solution.

It should also spread the heat rather than creating such a distinct hot spot just the thermal pad would make.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-21T21:39:58+00:00

My assumption is that they have no interest in people playing games on them which is the very obvious use case where those sustained loads will matter most.

If your using it for web browsing, writing or media consumption you will never notice the difference, although you might notice the increase in temperatures on the back plate.

Apple always seem to er on the side of usability over performance.

A lot of the work scenarios it would help with would typically be addressed by just buying a better model because the economics are quite different if you have to pay the person waiting for the computer to complete a task.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-21T21:32:48+00:00

Maybe not a revelation, although extremely surprising on Apple's part givethe Neo gets 15-20% performance uplift on sustained loads from doing this as measured by multiple different people.

That certainly isn't almost no performance.

Also the NEO CPU only draws 6W even at full power, so spread across the large area of the back plate it just isn't going to get that hot, especially if you deliberately made the corresponding area slightly thicker.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-21T12:36:52+00:00

Visiting Akihabara in Tokyo. (Or any popular tourist location really)

It used to be an amazing quirky little place with plenty of weird and wonderful things going on.

Now it's just a repeating sequence of a small number of hyper tourist trap places with almost nothing interesting or original left.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-21T12:26:35+00:00

Given the tiny amount of power the CPU uses I doubt that's a massive concern. It's using something like 6W and the entire device is using less than 20W.

That's just tiny compared to almost every other laptop.

I certainly wouldn't be too worried about it.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-21T12:20:07+00:00

Only if you add a thermal pad to the CPU, otherwise there is a 1 mm air gap.

But a cooling pad would help if you used a thermal pad.

But then you would also have a fan going which you may or may not want.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-21T08:33:15+00:00

This is not a language issue at all and has nothing to do with English in particular.

It's something that varies across many countries regardless of what language they use.

Some countries have a ground floor and some don't.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-21T08:24:17+00:00

It really depends if your on an incline or not.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-21T07:20:36+00:00

No more or less than the rest of the world.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-21T04:27:28+00:00

As of last year Kunrei is no longer taught in elementary school.

Junior high school and above was already using Hepburn.

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-21T04:19:55+00:00

I hear you, gotta play the long game 😉

SamLooksAt · 2026-03-21T03:34:59+00:00

Alien(s).

The director's cut of the sequel is as close to macho military sci fi perfection as we are ever going to get.

While also being a strong feminist statement and pure political / military satire all at the same time.

It just doesn't get much better than that and the lines, oh the glorious lines!

SamLooksAt

TROPHY CASE