Ok, kid’s! It’s time for Uncle Ŝan’s Story Time!

So, it takes place in the spring in a little Italian town called Olmo in the Alps, not too far from the Austrian border. I’m living in Munich at the time, and am staying at a cabin the parents of my German friend own, with yet another friend who’s visiting from the US. We’re walking around on the paths through the villiage and meet this old guy (“old” – I was in my 20’s at the time, so he might have been 40 for all I know) who says something to us in Italian, which neither of us spoke, and I reply that, sorry, we don’t speak Italian. Undeterred, he starts rattling on to us in Italian. Now, although I was living in Germany, I’d just gotten through 3 years of French in college, so I’m picking out a word here or there, and we’re just barely sort of able to communicate by using latin roots.

So, we’re talking to this guy for, like 45 minutes in this sort of pidgin latin and a lot of gestures, when he picks up on the fact that I’m not actually an American tourist in Italy, but that I’m visiting from Germany, at which point he says in German: “oh, so you speak German?” And from there we have a regular conversation. I don’t know what he thought, but I thought it was the funniest thing, and that’s how I learned to do the “try every language, just in case” thing like in the comic.

That’s the end of the story, except a fun detail: I learned that this guy was on his way into the hills to count his sheep. Then he was going to go home, have lunch, and that was his work day. I’m sure keeping sheep throught the year is a lot harder than just that, but at the time I was terribly envious, because it sounded so idyllic.

Tune in next time, kids!

“Digital” dictatorship? The qualifier is unnecessary.

Huh. tar tf and unzip -l. I’m not sure I’d even bother to write a shell function to combine them, much less install software.

Zips just exploding to files is so common, if you just mkdir unzpd ; unzip -d unzpd file.zip it’s going to be right nearly all of the time. Same with tarballs always containing a directory; it’s just so common it’s barely worth checking.

You write the tools you need, don’t get me wrong. This seems like, at most, a 10-line bash function, and even that seems excessive.

function pear() {
case $1 in
  *.zip)
    unzip -l "$1"
    ;;
  *.tar.*)
    tar tf "$1"
    ;;
esac
}

Gini is wealth and income inequality, which is States in the page you linked. In developed nations, income inequality is strongly correlated to wealth inequality.

The Gini index for Russia was 0.88; the US was 0.85. There was more of a delta between US in 2008 and US 2021 than that. There’s more difference between the US and almost every other western developed country in 2021, than there was between Russia and the US in 2021. Russia is higher; it’s not much higher.

The US entered into it when you replied to the comment:

Average monthly salary in USD: $1256

the only possible reason was to put it in US context. Not just USD, but US salary, which is specifically a US thing. Your reply was that it was a huge deal in Russia because of wealth inequality, implying, via your response to a comment about US salaries, that it wouldn’t be a huge deal in the US. To which I suggested it was, because the US, too, has a wealth disparity similar to Russia’s.

What’s confusing about that?

Most owls are solitary, aren’t they? At what age do GHO stop being OK with being in an enclosure with other owls old this?

No, not on porpoise.

15mph is certainly reasonable, and not “as fast as a car.” A parked car, maybe, which in city traffic may feel the same.

But yeah, 15 is reasonable; humans can run that fast. Sharing a bike lane with a motorized bike going 25 is where it starts feeling dangerous, and where it starts to be in car range.

Thanks for pointing that out.

Well, once someone converted it to dollars and started comparing it to costs in the US, it kind of opened the topic, don’t you think?

Also, according to both the link you provided and the income inequality page by country, the US and Russia are on par; they both have Gini coefficients of 85-90, and PIP (poverty & inequality plaform) indexes in the 35-40 range.

Which metric did you see that says Russia’s wealth inequality is worse than the US’s?

They were absolutely having sporadic outages a few days ago, but they’ve been Ok recently.

No, this is a specific configuration Midwest.social has enabled. It actually modifies posts and replaces external image links with proxies through the Midwest.social server. It results in really slow image serving in posts, and frequently outright breaks images. The server is also not correctly configured for mime types, so SVGs aren’t served properly: even if the origin has the right mime-type, the forced proxy breaks the mime-type. So I can’t embed SVGs on this account.

I appreciate the service, but I’m really going to have to abandon this account. The comment modification and hijacking of image links doesn’t feel right.

I have no idea! It seems to be the human material. Have you ever heard of a solution? I can be aware of it and resist it, but what I hate is that instinctive, negative impulse, and I don’t think wishing it away is going to help.

I’d love to watch it once, but Imgur blocks VPNs.

There isn’t a massive disparity between the wealthiest and poorest in the US?

I’m lucky. I live in a place where stonecrop is native, and it grows like a weed. Except it doesn’t spread (quickly), and I love the look.

We had some landscaping done and they moved some stonecrop and forgot to move one back. it wasn’t even planted; it just grew right there where they’d left it!

Great plants.

Also, biological monsters would overheat very fast.

That’s why they tend to breath fire n stuff.

Old Godzilla movies got it right. He did look like he was walking on the moon. Not bouncing, but he probably had atrophied muscles from being in the water all the time.

Poor guy. Overheated and tired, no wonder he was grumpy!

Sometimes it do be like that

🖖

That’s brilliant. The thumbnail spoils it… at least, it shows me the punchline.

I don’t know why; it just popped into my head. Maybe because the float would just make snacking easier for the sharks?

Edit: because my home server insists on rewriting all image URLs to proxy requests through that server, and it often breaks things. I gotta re-home.

https://files.catbox.moe/6awpqm.gif

LOL. Op walks around town, leaking Razrs and building their own mesh network.

I know my limitations. One of them is patience.