nednobbins

tl;dr I was wrong.

I used to go to a restaurant that I was sure was a front.

Years ago I was walking home from the gym and I got peckish. I was in one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan so I didn’t think twice about just walking into the first place I saw.

The second I walked in I decided it was a big mistake. This place looked fancy. Nice place settings, real wood furniture, etc. I was dressed like a bum and probably smelled bad.

But the head waiter came out and treated me like royalty. Fresh baked bread, a sauteed flounder that he filleted right at the table and all around baller service at a very reasonable price. I was the only person there but it was early so I didn’t think much of it. I figured that if their food and service was this good when they thought I was a bum this is the place for me. I dropped a 100% tip and decided I’d go once a week and if I ever found a date I’d impress the hell out of her when we roll into a nice restaurant and the head waiter greets me by my first name and treats me like a big shot (aside: the first and only girl I brought there didn’t like their vegetarian options but ended up marrying me anyway).

Ever time we went the place was practically empty. This was one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan but they were still paying Manhattan rent. The food was always top notch and did I mention how awesome the service was? Mooci, the waiter once came back from vacation and insisted that I try some of the moonshine from his Sicilian Mother. Constant freebies too.

We decided there’s no way they could be turning a profit and assumed it was a mob front. Some older NYers may remember when the story broke that SPQR was a mob front, so it seemed pretty likely.

Well a few years ago we went back after moving out of state. The restaurant was under new management and everything sucked. Crappy place settings, shitty generic food and I didn’t recognize anyone there. It turns out they weren’t a mob front. They were just great cooks that sucked at running a business and ran out of money :(

Can you point me at some 5G technology that china might be interesting in stealing?

China has about 5 times as many 5G access points as the US.
Media reports on 5G are all concerned with how far ahead of the US China is in 5G technology and how the US can catch up. These are from places like the Brookings Institue, the WSJ, Reuters and the Rand Corporation. Hardly the kinds of places that would erroneously pump up a Chinese technology lead.

I’m a bit sad no one has paired it with “Nanu nanu” yet.

Cries old person tears.

I don’t. When it comes up I argue in favor of staying federated with hexbear. There are some good ideas there and we’re worse off for eliminating them.

Hexbear does have a lot of posts that consist mostly of smack talk, pictures and memes though. I just block all of those posters individually for myself but I can see why a lot of people just consider it immature and want to block the whole instance.

Do they ban other forms of religious expression? Crosses/crucifixes? Yarmulke/kippah?
Or is it just Islamic symbols?

I read up on it a bit more.

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

It seems like regulations on religious attire are selectively applied. Small crosses and stars of David, some variations of Sikh turbans, Fatima’s hands are acceptable and the final decision is left up to school headmasters.

It also sounds like the legislators who created it specifically intended to target Muslim headdress.

It’s one thing to keep religion out of education. It seems that they’re disproportionately concerned about suprsesssing Islam in their schools.

I want to be very careful around judging the intentions of people who live 5000 miles away and speak a language I don’t understand. There’s a lot of room to misunderstand people’s intentions.

But from what I can see, it’s looking like there’s an intentional bias.

They do it to make you spend more time browsing. Shoppers typically get the same stuff every time they get groceries. Over time people learn the layout of their local store and develop efficient patterns to move through it and get everything they want. When the store shuffles everything around they force shoppers to wander around the store and to look at all the shelves carefully for the stuff they actually want. Some percentage of them end up finding new things to buy and spend more money.

I’ve had a lot of success with a combination of Skritter and the Chairman’s Bao (TCB).

Skritter has been my favorite vocabulary building app. For a bunch of reasons:

1. Supports SRS. It makes study time very efficient by making you practice the stuff your bad at rather than stroking your ego by asking you questions you’re good at. The only downside is that it doesn’t stroke your ego for you you’ll need to do that yourself by noticing how fast your vocabulary is increasing.
2. Great writing practice. It recognizes strokes, in the proper order and corrects you when you’re wrong.
3. A rich set of company and user generated “decks” (curated vocabulary lists) and the ability to create custom decks.
4. Automatic deck creation. You can integrate with other apps (like the TCB) to reinforce your learning.
5. The developers are a small team but they’re fairly responsive.

The Chairman’s Bao is a graded news reader. They create a bunch of articles based on vocabulary from different HSK levels. They have a nice integrated dictionary that will tell you about specific words in the context of that text. They also let you export those words to your Skritter lists.