Ah, rats. So much for that idea.

Thank you, Kindly.

Here’s a better use for all that money.

Start a non-profit organisation that harasses and annoys the hell out of people who take bribes. Stuff like putting laxatives in their coffee, banana peels on their path, water buckets on door, and so on. You get the idea. Also, they should video those pranks and post them online. Name and shame anyone who takes bribes.

It’s just a quick and dirty rule of thumb that works surprisingly often. If you meet a jedi from Tatooine, it’s a pretty safe to guess that they’re fed up with sand. Same sort of safe guess works with new accounts too.

I really hope so.

Don’t know much, but what I do know is that each symbol corresponds to a sound… for the most part.

If you hear a new word, you just listen to the sounds and convert them to a sequence of symbols. That way dictionaries are actually quite helpful and easy to use. Try that with English and you’ll see what I mean.

It works the other way too. If you read a new word somewhere, you can pronounce just like everyone else. Try that with English…

Oh that one. The Korean alphabet is pretty neat and sensible.

Countless reforms have already been attempted over the centuries, but here we are with this mess anyway. Yeah, that didn’t go as planned.

I think our best bet would be to switch to a more sensible language altogether. If USA loses its position in tech and entertainment, we’re probably going to switch to Chinese where writing is even more complicated.

I’m OK with the grammar, but the spelling is a total train wreck.

I wish we could just ignore that bit of history and start from scratch, because carrying a thousand years of historical baggage has gotten completely ridiculous at this point. There are also so many borrowed words from so many different languages that you can’t spell anything correctly without knowing the language of origin.

Just look at spelling bees, for example. English-speaking people seem to be okay with that, but people from other countries are like, “WTF are you doing? Just listen and write. What’s wrong with you?” Thanks to history, the sound has pretty much nothing to do with the letters. Forget about the rules. Just memorise each word individually.

That’s not OK. Someone needs to fix that mess, and many people have tried already. It looks unfixable to me. Maybe we should just abandon English and switch to any other language.

I wonder if Icelandic would be nicer.

Initially, you just need to survive. I can imagine that next you’ll start building small communities and fulfilling their needs.

If you can’t get water purification running, the small village won’t grow to a town. If you can’t make your own tools and shelters, it’s going to stay in the tribal stage.

That made me think about what it would actually take to start rebuilding after a zombie apocalypse or some other disaster like that.

First of all, you would need to restart various bits of infrastructure, like water and electricity. On top of that, you would also need to restart the factories that manufacture the spare parts for all the machiens. Those factories also require raw materials, like metals, so initially metal recycling might be the easiest way to do it. No need to start mining new metals until you’ve already used up all the broken cars and sky scrapers littering the landscape.

So, basically you need to get all sorts of heavy industry up and running again. Those data hoarders can help out with the necessary engineering literature, but having some tools is also required.

How about a pool of mercury or tetrabromoethane? Who said it has to be non-toxic. Besides, mercury comes with extra bling.

It’s not about having enough time. If you see the yellow light, and you are still far away from it, and you can stop the car by gently braking, you should stop. However, not that many people do, because they just don’t feel like it. If people don’t feel like stopping, they don’t.

If the intersection is very close when the light turns yellow, you would need to brake very hard. That’s when I just keep on going to prevent accidents. In that case, it’s not really about time either. You need to know how much distance it takes to stop your car. If you’re driving on bumpy ice, that distance will be greater than in good summer weather.

Like, how do you even discover you have such a superpower? It’s not every day that you even think of trying something like that.

So is it like planting the same seeds into different soils, and expecting to get different fruits?

Oh, thanks. It’s been many years since I’ve seen that movie. Had completely forgotten the name too.

There was a sci-fi movie where surrogate robot bodies were used for everything. Only very few people actually lived their lives using their real body. Was a pretty cool concept.

Washing the dishes. VR edition. While you’re playing the game, the maid bot does the household chores. Just try not to drop anything valuable in VR, because the bot might break something IRL.

In a mostly theoretical sense. America can’t fix its politics without making some radical changes to the voting system, but I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon.

The current system naturally gravitates towards a two-party system, which isn’t quite what I would consider a coalition government. If you have three or four parties actively negotiating about major decisions, that’s when you begin to see the benefits.

Have you considered forming a coalition government? That’s how much of Europe has been working for a while now. There’s usually a little bit of blue, red and green in the mix. Maybe some other colors too.