thematrixturtle

The "third degree" of interrogation is actual torture. The less well known first degree was being shown the implements of torture, and the second degree was being made to watch somebody else get tortured.

The problem with many of these museums and even the medieval sources they're based on is that there's a strong incentive to make things as gruesome as possible, including just making shit up. For example, everybody's heard of the Iron Maiden, but all existing devices appear to be "replicas" and there's no properly documented case of such a device actually being used for execution.

Whiplash is also popular for insurance/disability fraud. There was an interesting story on HN a while back about how the prevalence of whiplash after accidents in the US is far higher than in Europe, for no other easily explainable reason, but I can't find the link now.

Magstripe is long dead throughout Asia as well. The US (as always) has been behind the curve on this, but contactless became pretty ubiquitous during COVID.

The vast majority of Australia has been inhospitable desert since before the Aboriginals showed up. Trees can only grown on a comparatively narrow stretch of temperate or tropical, mostly coastal land.

As a reference point for just how expensive, the Caltrain electrification project in SF is currently estimated at $2.44 billion dollars for 82 km of track, and still climbing. And this is for what's almost a best-case infrastructurally: flat land, few bridges or overpasses, etc. (But, admittedly, what just might the world's worst regulatory environment.)

Machine translation has put a lot of human translators out of work. The per-word rates for text translation are pathetic these days, even for language pairs that Google Translate struggles with.

Of course, there are still some jobs for high-quality/high-importance translation like legal work, simultaneous translation etc, but these are quite niche.

Citation needed for "most". Sure, there are wood stoves in summer cottage saunas and old rural houses, but this is not even close to possible for the average apartment dweller, and many of these apartments rely on district heating (kaukolämpö) to boot.

Wind power is nice, but the key is nuclear power, which covers 35% of Finland's needs already and that number is going to go up once they fully ramp up Olkiluoto 3.

Unfortunately it also took around 17 years to build the thing, so this playbook is not going to be particularly useful to anybody else who needs to wean themselves off Russian energy now.

I agree with your broad assessment that the glory days of Hollywood are over, but am not quite as optimistic on the future of Asian cinema.

Chinese media is crippled for the foreseeable future by heavy state censorship, including micromanagement of plotlines: can't do anything that lets the bad guys win or shows the state in a bad light.

I also note you don't include Japan, which is rich and has a population of 100M+, but with the arguable exception of anime has not produced any global blockbusters in decades.

> Orson Scott Card once said that Asimov was one of the few writers who kept improving in old age

I'd like to believe this was true, but much of Asimov's late works, particularly the final "Gaia" sequels to Foundation, were terrible.

The sheer breadth of his output (which went way beyond robot scifi) is impressive though.

Eh, just call it out, it's India and its subcontinental neighbours. And the reason is less culture and more there being a lot of first-time passengers going to menial jobs in the Gulf, who have been recruited from deep in the countryside and are entirely unfamiliar with things like non-squat toilets and how garbage collection works on planes.

I once flew DEL-AUH next to a gentleman who was clearly very puzzled with nearly every component of his in-flight meal. Not sharing any languages, I helped him out best I could with sign language, but I still remember his expression of surprised delight when he poured one packet's contents straight into his mouth, expecting gutka (powdered smokeless tobacco) but getting powdered coffee creamer instead.

This argument sounds very much like "the problem is not communism, all those countries just weren't doing real communism".

And I'm not even being quite as flippant as it sounds about communism here. Communist economic planning relies on accurate central planning, which we've learned the hard way is essentially impossible at the scale of a nation state. In the same way, UML assumes you can meaningfully model a complex computer program in advance, which tends to fall flat back in reality where requirements are poorly understood and evolve continuously.