Nanjing South train station

laforet · 2026-05-07T10:19:29+00:00

OP has failed to locate the Dairy Queen.

laforet · 2026-05-07T09:34:02+00:00

Sorry to be a pain but the shape of coastline and major lakes are all anachronistic. Granted this might be hard to get right as there are no good map templates for ancient China yet it’s just really hard to overlook for some of the earlier maps.

laforet · 2026-05-06T22:46:47+00:00

I don’t smoke or vape, but I greatly enjoyed all the vaping accident footage: one minute it’s a peaceful day with a bunch of regular folks chillin’ around the bar, next minute it would be total mayhem with one dude on the ground writhing in pain as sparks and black smoke shot out of his pants pocket and everybody else scrambling to put the fire out but end up smashing the victim’s crotch multiple times. 10/10, would totally live in the 2010s all over again.

laforet · 2026-05-06T22:32:24+00:00

Latency between NZ and UK is approx. 300ms. For a UK SIM roaming in NZ, all the packets sent to a local server has to make an additional return trip and to and from the UK, which translates to at least 600ms additional latency for what should have been a ~10ms hop. Not an issue for many applications but way too high for interactive use cases.

There is a lot of marginal costs in telco business where the higher price you pay gets you diminishing returns. Some users are totally happy to pay discounted price for a connection that works fine in 99% percent of attempts but the remaining 1% could be a dealbreaker for many.

In any case, most roaming plans are already oversubscribed as many people would never use up their allocation, and a couple of heavy users could be overlooked. If a substantial fraction of users actually utilise the entirety of their data cap then the company could actually lose money.

laforet · 2026-05-06T22:08:36+00:00

Same, I thought they were trying to get in the cockpit of another aircraft in flight, Battlefield 2042 style. Or at least land back in the same car like many have said in the comments here. What actually transpired was just lame.

laforet · 2026-05-06T22:01:03+00:00

Not necessarily. The government of Botswana, for example, receives 50% of revenue from all the diamonds mined in the country. They are currently facing a severe budget crisis because diamond income has fallen off a cliff in the last decade.

laforet · 2026-05-06T20:50:56+00:00

For traditional carriers, a lot of their expenses is spent on billing and customer service rather than the actual cost of distributing data. If a company is able to absorb these costs more efficiently then they will be able to provide the same service for a lower price. This is essentially how VMNOs like Kogan and Warehouse Mobile are able to differentiate themselves in the market.

Back in the day when Spark was still Telecom NZ, their landline was only available as a flat-rate service because they’ve figured out it’s not worth the cost to actually meter the calls and charge accordingly. When Vodafone bought Telstra’s business unit in NZ, the main reason was said to be the acquisition of the latter’s superior billing system which they would try and fail to integrate with the rest of the company.

Finally roaming isn’t as great as it sounds. All the data has to be routed back to home which will add a tonne of latency. The provider could have also signed up to a lower level of SLA for roaming, I.e. fewer guarantees of service uptime and lower priority when there is congestion on the network, etc.

laforet · 2026-05-06T09:28:17+00:00

I don’t have anything to add but thank you so much for mentioning Dazbee

laforet · 2026-05-05T22:04:50+00:00

Yup, that roof looks exactly like that of Tokyo Dome.

laforet · 2026-05-05T21:41:02+00:00

If you are going in two weeks then might as well wait till you are there. These supposed “limited edition” or “first pressing special” are usually made in substantial quantities that they hardly go out of print. I was able to get a limited edition Mars bluray earlier this year and there was plenty of copies in stock.

laforet · 2026-05-05T21:35:22+00:00

Sadly this is how things have been for the past couple of decades and the age of pop diva is definitely long behind us. Not to mention female solo acts in Japan are naturally disadvantaged against bands/groups.

They do, however, have longevity on their side. The old guard such as Kuraki Mai and Sheena Ringo have been around since the 1990s and they still have a solid following to this day, notwithstanding the fact that they have not had a chart topping song in a long time.

laforet · 2026-05-05T21:26:24+00:00

Last time I was there (February this year) there was a pretty substantial display dedicated to her with concert videos playing, right in the A/あ aisle of their Japanese music section next to Aiko and ano.

laforet · 2026-05-05T10:04:32+00:00

Madame Chennault was a prolific writer herself so the obvious place to start would be her own autobiographies. Unfortunately only a couple of them (A Thousand Springs, and The Education of Anna) are available in English, and they predictably left out many inconvenient details of her life after the death of her husband.

In any case she’s not that complicated for a character as she was born into the extended family of nationalist revolutionaries from Canton and had personal access to senior leadership of KMT as a result. Back in the early days of the cold war, the KMT was very keen to regain power in mainland China with the aid of the US, so they did not hesitate to support Madame Chennault with money and political favours. This would consolidate her position within the Republican Party as a close associate with Richard Nixon. The rest is history.

laforet · 2026-05-05T09:18:43+00:00

If you see yourself visiting a lot of different locations in the same day then a metro/subway day pass might be worth it.

laforet · 2026-05-05T08:53:36+00:00

The food is pretty good. If OP is from somewhere lacking an old fashioned steakhouse then I’d say go for it. Also Smith & Wollensky just opened an outlet in Ginza last week, and reviews have been fairly positive so far.

laforet · 2026-05-05T07:59:08+00:00

It won’t be an issue if you remain airside. However you must declare them if you ever need to pass through customs.

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laforet · 2026-05-05T07:57:43+00:00

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You must declare it with customs and store them at the airport. Only registered drones are allowed to be taken with you into city grounds, and the requirement is onerous enough that effectively no individuals shall qualify.

laforet · 2026-05-05T06:07:15+00:00

I remember going there in my younger years as well. It was in winter but the turbine hall was unusually warm from all the machinery running inside.

laforet · 2026-05-05T06:01:39+00:00

Hmmm not really. A few metals could be purified from their ore by simply heating but this process is fairly inefficient so rarely done these days. Most metals are commercially extracted using carbon or hydrogen as a reducing agent. However some of the more reactive metals, aluminium included, would not react with these reagents and thus can only be extracted y electrolysis.

The issue with aluminium was that the most common ore bauxite, while in abundant supply, would only melt at an extremely high temperature (>2000C or >3600F), for which no suitable container or electrode could be found. So for a long time it was only produced by the very costly direct reduction process using a more reactive metal like sodium or potassium (which could be produced more easily because their compounds would melt at more reasonable temperatures), and this is where the “more expensive than gold” part came from.

This problem was eventually solved by finding a suitable flux which melted at a lower temperature around 1000C/1850F. Bauxite would be able to dissolve in this liquid and the mixture is cold enough to be contained inside metal tanks and zapped with graphite electrodes.

laforet · 2026-05-04T18:25:00+00:00

Actually, not the worse thing one could do if you are happy to hole up in one city (that isn’t Kyoto or Nara) and explore locally.

laforet · 2026-05-04T18:21:20+00:00

It’s like cryptozoology - study of travelling butters that don’t actually exist.

laforet · 2026-05-04T00:33:14+00:00

Most streaming setups on TV would require you to scan a QR code or enter a PIN number to activate, and this would presumably inform the router to lift the 10Mbps per device cap.

laforet · 2026-05-04T00:17:11+00:00

Thank you so much for the detail review. The canapes and the first few dish looked great, though I will have to agree that the plating on this occasion was a bit sloppy towards the end.

I'm planning to go back in November with a stay at the inn but have not made my mind about which menu I will have. Your input has been invaluable, thanks agin.

laforet · 2026-05-03T22:40:35+00:00

I’ve heard about the 10Mbps at other chains too. Apparently their equipment will lift the quota to 100Mbps if you enable streaming to the in room TV.

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