Side note:

With lessons learnt, “the construction of future lines will be increasingly easier, faster, and more cost-efficient”, Hoang told AFP.

Hell, yes! Line 2 took ages and was embarrassingly late. (Slated for 2010 opening, it finally limped across the finish line in late 2012, IIRC, and had major teething problems, including one train catching fire, thankfully at a terminal station with almost nobody on it. The next five lines were up in a couple of years, and the remaining half dozen seemed to spring up out of nowhere, not to mention the constant extensions of existing lines. Twelve years, eleven new lines, plus countless extensions. It unfurls like magic once you have the techniques and challenges down.

Cool! It’s a life-changing thing to start getting good public transit in a city!

When Wuhan got its first metro (line 2: line 1 is a then-useless elevated light rail) it was actually possible to cross the Yangtze river in reasonable amounts of time, meaning that the two major halves of the city could finally interact properly without hours-long (note the plural) traffic jams.

Now with twelve lines built:

And with a bunch of extensions and new lines in the works, I haven’t had to use a private vehicle in ages to go almost anywhere in the city with only a short bus ride and/or short walk on each end.

Ho Chi Minh City: congratulations and enjoy your new life as it unfolds before you.

That’s what I was about to say, but quickly checked if someone else had already said it first.

P.S.

…there is a light at the end of the tunnelgangplank.

Fixed that for you.

(As a joke, not seriously.)

Albeit in many countries, Twitter never really had the same impact as in the US. Where I live, Telegram is the source for notifications, updates and news.

Twitter has always been an also-ran in social media circles.

Twitter purports to be a world-scope social media site. These are the numbers for October of 2023 (the most recent I have info for):

Twitter is behind three local-scope social media sites (WeChat, Douyin, and Kuaishou) and running neck-in-neck with a fourth (that is locally largely considered a failure).

Note that: a “global” site is not just behind, but FAR behind in one case, several locally-scoped sites. And it barely registers against other world-scoped sites.

And this is in late 2023 before Apartheid Manchild opened the doors to reveal his batshit insanity and stupidity even more.

Just like the Spinning Jenny back then, AI is as bad as it’s ever going to be today. It’s only going to get better and jobs will be made redundant, I’ll put my money on that. It’s a real fear that many people have, whether they’ll admit it or not.

It’s also as good as its ever going to be today (or the near future).

Degenerative AI has already dropped off in usage to the point that major stakeholders in it are terrified. It’s going to go into the same winter that every previous “no really this time we’ve got it right” AI crazes went.

I’m assessing whether your “guess” is wild SF-inspired imagination or grounded in anything, you know, actually factual.

You’ve answered.

Sportsmanlike behaviour in the modern age?

That IS weird! 🤣

How adorable.

Just the high-speed trains here carry just under 3 billion passengers per year. Divide it by respective populations (land area is roughly equivalent) and you’ve got the equivalent of the USA carrying 735 million passengers annually.

And that’s just high-speed trains.

If you factor in regular rail we can add about 730 million extra passengers (183 million extra passengers for US population adjustment).

The USA has a whole lot of work to do before it catches up even on regular rail, not to mention high-speed.

This is “Single-Bamboo Drifting” (独竹漂), a traditional sport of the Miao peoples in Guizhou.

You stand on a broad bamboo trunk and steer/propel with a thin bamboo stick. Often combining it with complicated dance. It requires a lot more balance than I could ever have managed at any point in my life.

Judging by later messages, this is a True Believer. Which when translated to English is “idiot”.

You seem both nice and very bright.

there are a bunch of orb-like UFOs exploring our sensitive areas

I think you will find that traditionally they do anal probes for this.

Seems like military drone tests in my opinion.

Have any actual expertise to back that opinion up?

(Hint: probably not.)

Things like the “C-Trains” in Calgary, despite being intended for mass transit (and ridden mainly by the poors) are also multi-compartment.

The reasons it’s so narrow is that Apartheid Manchild’s “Boring Company” has drills that are too small for the projects he envisions using them for.

deleted by creator

One of my absolute favourites of all time for street food is 肉夹馍. Had it this Tuesday on the way home from work. A very close second is 煎饼. Last time I had that, though, was over a month ago.

Yes. That’s exactly what I said.

🙄

I guess this is what happens when people grow up with video games instead of people.