Because the US generally doesn’t use passenger trains as transport in the first place, as people use cars or other road vehicles. Those provide some benefits that rail doesn’t: the road network is much more extensive than the rail network, so it can provide transport more-or-less directly to a door.

The US rail network is designed around freight transport rather than passenger transport, stuff where the time value of transporting the cargo is lower. Slow maximum speeds, supports heavy cars and axle weights, long maximum train lengths. FWIW, the US moves more freight per capita by rail than do Japan or China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usage#Tonne-kilometres_of_rail_transport_per_year

The measurement years vary a bit, but it should be about right. In absolute terms, for 2020, the US moved 2,105 billion metric ton-kilometers. China in 2025 moved 3,687 metric ton-kilometers. For 2014, Japan moved 21 billion metric ton-kilometers (I’d guess, without looking at Japan’s modal breakdown, that given that Japan is an archipelago, it’s probably like Europe, which is a bunch of peninsulas, and doesn’t use freight rail for as high a percentage of its freight traffic as the US, with a lot of the difference being made up by relying on ship with road freight covering the last bit).

So in per capita terms, grabbing the current population numbers, annual freight rail usage is about 6.17 gigatonne-km/million people for the US, 2.62 gigatonne-km/million people for China, and 0.17 gigatonne-km/million people for Japan.

For perspective, the EU is also listed there for 2014; it’ll move about 0.58 gigatonne-km/million people in freight rail.

And I still use social media the way many people originally imagined it: as a way to stay connected. My feeds have always been a mix of far-flung relatives, old friends, and high school band chums (because, let’s be honest, band buddies are the best buddies). Most days, I carve out a little time after work to catch up with the people who matter.

The last thing I’d want is for doing so to be…just more work. And yet, more than half of respondents agreed with the statement “Maintaining an online presence feels like work,” with about a third of those checking the “strongly agree” box. Only 16% disagreed, with the rest remaining neutral.

A full 60% of Gen Z respondents feel the pain of maintaining a social presence. Perhaps they have a niggling hope that they might still be discovered as an influencer?

I don’t really care about the following-people form of social media, the Twitter family. I’m more interested in the forum sort, the Reddit family. There, I don’t need to singlehandedly maintain a flow of content, because people aren’t coming to see @[email protected], but because they’re coming to see what’s going on in some community that I only incidentally participate in.

I mean, it’s still going to have the pants beaten off it by WebM or AVIF for anything originating from a video camera.

GIF was just never intended to be a video format. I have a hard time thinking of something where it’s really competitive. Maybe if you had a recorded lossless video of a small-palette video game, like, NES era or earlier, then GIF might be a solid choice. I’d still think that APNG or MNG would probably outperform it.

GIF animations really only got a boost because there was a period of time when it was all that a decent variety of Web browsers could display.

EDIT: Also, if one is using GIF…I dunno if ffmpeg does this by default, but most video formats have I-frames and then frames that depend on those. When seeking, a player will seek to the nearest prior I-frame and then decode from there.

I don’t believe that GIF 89a has a formal concept of I-frames, because the format was never intended for real video. But it is possible to create frames in a GIF 89a animation with transparent areas that don’t differ from the prior frame, and this achieves some of the efficiency benefits that a video format would get. I know that there have been GIF 89a conpressors that will do this. The downside is that it kills seekability, since after a seek in a player that just starts drawing from the current frame, you’ll see only some of an image until the next time that a pixel in a frame is non-transparent and gets redrawn. There may not be any frames wirhout transparent areas nearby, and the player has no way to know where to look for one. But for applications where you don’t care about seekability, that may help mitigate some of GIF’s limitations for animations.

In all honesty, though, the right answer for video is almost always “use a newer format than GIF”.

A lot of the wines are out of California. Both the state as a whole and the wine-producing regions in it tend to not be too keen on Trump.

searches

https://wineamerica.org/policy/by-the-numbers/

California makes 85% of all US wine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_Country

Wine Country is a region of California, in the northern San Francisco Bay Area, known worldwide as a premier wine-growing region.[1]

There are over 1,700 wineries in the North Bay, mostly located in the area’s valleys, including Napa Valley in Napa County, and the Sonoma Valley,

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2024/11/08/an-early-look-at-the-trumpharris-vote-in-sonoma-napa-and-other-bay-area-counties/

Sonoma County voters, with 52% of votes counted as of Friday morning, firmly supported Harris with 72% of the vote, compared to 25% for Trump.

In Napa County, which had counted 32% of votes, Harris had 64%, compared to Trump’s 33%.

Printers are a loss leader for selling ink cartridges.

Not quite — a loss leader is also sold at loss, so similar pricing concept, but that’s to get you in the store, where (statistically) people will buy more.

What (many) inkjet printers do is the razor-and-blades model.

The razor-and-blades business model[1] is a business model in which one article is sold at a low price or even given away in order to increase sales of a complementary good, such as consumable supplies. It is different from loss leader marketing and product sample marketing, which do not depend on complementary products or services. Common examples of the razor-and-blades model include inkjet printers whose ink cartridges are significantly marked up in price, coffee machines that use single-use coffee pods, electric toothbrushes, and video game consoles, which require additional purchases of accessories and software not included in the original package.[1]

Laser printers tend to be less prone to this. You can also get inkjet printers that aren’t using locked-down cartridges, will take tanks of ink and don’t try to keep out competing ink vendors — but keep in mind that while the ink will cost less, the base printer will also cost more than the razor-and-blades model printers. Canon’s “MegaTank” line is one such example.

Car: we were due for a new one, but we found a 2004 car in mint shape so we downgraded purposely. I wanted to be able to have easy repairs and no phone-home garbage of a new car, and never any SaaS nonsense.

If you’re in the US, there are some somewhat newer ones that only have 3G cell radios, so can’t talk to the cell network any more. That said, I have no idea what data they transfer when being serviced.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g39301678/3g-internet-sunset-cars/

In the US, I’d say that “bar” is probably the most common, but you can find “tavern” or “pub” (the latter especially if the thing is British-themed).

searches Google Maps for “bar in Chicago”

The ones that show up in the first listings and have a suffix:

• “… Bar”: 10
• “… Pub”: 4
• “… Tavern”: 4

Some of the “pubs” there were Irish-themed.

You can have programs that don’t show EXIF tags that they don’t recognize.

I responded to the parent comment with a command for exiftool that should list all tags.

$ exiftool -U -l image.jpg

But typing stuff like: /*********************************************************/ is pretty common for me and would be annoying without auto-repeat of the respective character…

If you’re coding, your code editor may have some way to input that.

Some people who frequently input something like that use a snippet system.

In emacs, hitting most keys (like “*”) runs self-insert-command. That takes a numeric parameter, so one can just do something like / M-5 M-6 * / (slash, hold Alt, type 56, hit asterisk, slash) to get a slash followed by 56 asterisks followed by a slash.

I’m not really a serious vim person, but I’m sure that vim has similar functionality.

searches

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5054128/repeating-characters-in-vim-insert-mode

Looks like, in insert mode, / Control-o 56 a * Esc a /. Probably not using correct vim terminology for the keystrokes, but you get my drift.

On US English keyboards, there isn’t a universal, standard way to do it at the keyboard level.

I use Linux, and bind my Menu key on my keyboard to Compose. With Compose, I can tap “Compose-backtick-e” and get “è”.

Emacs has its own input methods, as do other environments.

While I agree that AI is here to stay, he did say the bubble popping. I could believe that there could be a reduced level of investment for a while. In the past, we did have periods where we thought that various AI tasks would be easier to solve than they were, and investment fell back as we discovered that there were more hard problems to solve before we could accomplish a particular feat. Didn’t go away, but did see a decrease in work on it for a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

In the history of artificial intelligence (AI), an AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in AI research.[1] The field has experienced several hype cycles, followed by disappointment and criticism, followed by funding cuts, followed by renewed interest years or even decades later.

The term first appeared in 1984 as the topic of a public debate at the annual meeting of AAAI (then called the “American Association of Artificial Intelligence”).[2] Roger Schank and Marvin Minsky—two leading AI researchers who experienced the “winter” of the 1970s—warned the business community that enthusiasm for AI had spiraled out of control in the 1980s and that disappointment would certainly follow. They described a chain reaction, similar to a “nuclear winter”, that would begin with pessimism in the AI community, followed by pessimism in the press, followed by a severe cutback in funding, followed by the end of serious research.[2] Three years later the billion-dollar AI industry began to collapse.

There were two major “winters” approximately 1974–1980 and 1987–2000,[3] and several smaller episodes, including the following:

• 1966: failure of machine translation

• 1969: criticism of perceptrons (early, single-layer artificial neural networks)

• 1971–75: DARPA’s frustration with the Speech Understanding Research program at Carnegie Mellon University

• 1973: large decrease in AI research in the United Kingdom in response to the Lighthill report

• 1973–74: DARPA’s cutbacks to academic AI research in general

• 1987: collapse of the LISP machine market

• 1988: cancellation of new spending on AI by the Strategic Computing Initiative

• 1990s: many expert systems were abandoned

• 1990s: end of the Fifth Generation computer project’s original goals

Enthusiasm and optimism about AI has generally increased since its low point in the early 1990s. Beginning about 2012, interest in artificial intelligence (and especially the sub-field of machine learning) from the research and corporate communities led to a dramatic increase in funding and investment, leading to the current (as of 2026) AI boom.

Obviously, we did achieve a number of those — like, we have pretty solid machine translation of human language today. I remember, pre-Brexit, a senior EU translator for the UK talking about EU translation work. One thing he mentioned was that he did all of his first drafts via Google Translate and then just did manual cleanup by hand — and I’d call that a fairly prestigious translation position. But it took more time and research than we initially expected.

searches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_farm#In_China

Live snakes are supplied to specialty restaurants; dried or preserved in alcohol, they are sold to manufacturers of traditional Chinese medicines; snake-infused wine is made as well.[1][2]

Reducing emissions as swiftly as possible will be essential to prevent AMOC collapse and other catastrophic impacts of climate change.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/06/europe/russia-fuel-crisis-ukraine-drone-attacks-intl-vis

Almost every Russian region hit by fuel crisis, as Ukraine escalates drone attacks

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/07/middleeast/hormuz-tanker-iran-attack-intl-hnk

Iran strikes three vessels near Strait of Hormuz as Trump arrives at NATO summit

but I just can’t reach the soulsucker’s village because the goatfolk just keep killing me on my way.

Mamon Souldrinker can be, IMHO, a hard fight, the quest isn’t a prerequisite for anything, and the rewards aren’t anything fantastic. His fight is a quite significant bump in difficulty from regular goatfolk, I’d say. I’d probably back-burner it.

• At least for me — I normally play a melee character — and I assume most people, the biggest problem with the goatfolk is the goatfolk sowers, which have explosive missile weapons. You’re in a jungle. Use the trees to break line of sight with them so that you only engage them in melee. Don’t engage crowds if you aren’t up to it; you can lure lone enemies off onto an adjacent, cleared screen. If you’re a melee character, and can’t use trees to get as close as possible, Charge will let you close the last bit of distance quickly.

• Discretion is the better part of valor. If it looks risky, don’t take the fight.

• When you walk off the current screen to another, enemies who are close to you will follow shortly thereafter. However, if you leave that screen before they enter, you won’t be followed (e.g. leave near a a corner of the current screen, then exit off to another screen prior to the enemies following you to the second screen).

• You have a Sprint ability in your abilities tab. That’ll let you briefly move faster than enemies. “Sprint adds the ability to start sprinting, with a cooldown of 100. While sprinting, a character’s movement speed is doubled, and this effect lasts for 10 turns by default.” That’ll help break line-of-sight or get off the current screen.

• Especially if you’re a mutant, you may have some “escape key” abilities already — most roguelikes tend to favor having some kind of “escape key”. For physical mutations, something like Phasing, or the ability to emit line-of-sight blocking gas (Sleep Gas Generation, Corrosive Gas Generation) for physical mutations. I don’t play espers much, but for them, maybe something like Force Bubble.

…

Ukraine is literally using a heart crosshair on their anti-ship weaponry?

https://kotaku.com/overwatch-2-heart-crosshair-reticle-season-9-how-to-1851256441

How To Get The Heart Crosshair In Overwatch 2

Here’s how to make your shots a little more girlypop

Yes, but honestly, it won’t help you that much.

IMHO, the major challenge to reaching the exterior of Grit Gate is learning to handle goatfolk (especially goatfolk sowers, where you need to break line of sight until close up). It’s not that hard to get there.

I’d say that being able to handle Golgotha, which you need to beat to get the Barathrumites to open the city up, is the larger issue.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/08/clacton-byelection-likely-to-be-two-man-race-between-reform-leader-and-binface

Farage has sought to portray the byelection as a “people versus the establishment” contest, prompting Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, to describe Binface as the “people’s candidate”. The prime minister, Keir Starmer, even addressed his candidacy on the sidelines of the Nato summit. “I think it’s actually against Labour party rules to endorse another [candidate],” he said.

For the man himself, or rather the alien, it’s all come as a bit of a shock. The question of whether he might even win is one that he is reluctant to countenance. “It’s earliest days yet and there is a long old road to go, but if in the unlikely event that the humans of Clacton prefer me to old Nige, then I will do my very best to represent them,” he told the Guardian.

Farage is the favourite, but odds on Binface winning have been tumbling. Oddschecker, which provides betting odds from some of the UK’s most popular bookmakers, said odds on the underdog winning had been slashed from 5/1 into 7/2.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/nigel-farage-takes-fight-establishment-160348322.html

Nigel Farage takes his ‘fight with the establishment’ to the voters

Farage said his decision ‌to stand for re-election was part of a strategy of “sticking two fingers up at the establishment”…

It was at this point that Mr. Farage made the fatal decision that the best way to rally support from anti-establishment voters would be a one-on-one popularity contest with a man wearing a garbage bin on his head.

So far, we’ve had several times more domestic assassination attempts on Trump than we have Iranian.