I have a double-walled cafetiere and a double-walled mug that combine to make a very pleasant slow coffee experience

That’s fair enough. While I’ve seen a lot more of the insides of self checkouts than the average person, I definitely don’t know the ins and outs of every model out there, not even close

Oddly enough I’ve worked as both a cashier sometimes watching over self-checkouts and also as an engineer in a company that manufactures self-checkouts (although I worked in a different department and only occasionally helped out with the checkouts). They can log that stuff no trouble. They cancel it as far as the customer sees, but that doesn’t mean anything for what it keeps behind the scenes. At least on the ones I worked with, there was the option for cashiers to retrieve the most recent state and print it out as a receipt either for the customer or to scan it to transfer to another checkout

I was going to suggest “be awake” and then realised I had accidentally re-invented the term “woke”

I do not need any food whatsoever right now but I could still absolutely demolish a Moroccan feast

Where do you normally get your recipes? I have a small book of tagines but haven’t figured out a good reliable place to look otherwise

All of the self checkouts I’ve seen clear the transaction automatically if you don’t touch them for a couple of minutes. There’s a prompt asking if you want to continue, and if that times out it just resets

I’ve been a cashier before, and while it is a deeply dull job honestly the people screwing things up are not the problem. You help them, they leave, you forget about them. The ones that made me hate it there are the angry ones and the management

All this time we thought it was the Germans with no sense of humour. Turns out it was the Belarusians all along

“MLN” here clearly being an abbreviation for “May billions”

I don’t know, I’m afraid. As I understand it, the base ten positional numbering system we use in most of the world (as in, the value of each individual digit is multiplied by ten a number of times based on its position in the number) originated in northern India, but the writing of the people that developed it did not use a lot of punctuation. The modern comma comes from Europe and I’m fairly sure that the idea of a thousands separator comes from Europeans trying to write big numbers in Roman numerals. Based on that I would assume that the British colonial period introduced the idea of using a comma as a thousands separator to India. However, while Europeans were used to thinking in thousands and millions, Indians were habitually thinking in lakhs and crores, so I assume they adjusted the commas to suit that. Since the separators are literally only there to make it easier to read and do not affect any of the maths you can do with it, I don’t imagine Indians would have much reason to change their system

Just on the bus home from seeing a few friends for some drinks. Had a lovely evening. I’ve got little on this weekend save for meeting up with the old man on fathers’ day, but I’m hoping I can sit down and record a bit of music at some point

Oh shit, thanks for the reminder. I could do with something to watch in the background this weekend. I can never decide if I would actually enjoy going along to the race in person, but it’s always entertaining to follow along from afar

It’s groups of two except for that the three numbers left of the decimal point are in a group of three. So 1,00,00,000 rather than 10,000,000, for example. 1,00,00,000 is a crore, 1,00,000 is a lakh

Language doesn’t always follow logical rules though, it’s defined by how we actually use it. Like everyone understands that the word “homophobia” means prejudice against homosexual people, despite the “homo” part only meaning “same” when it is without the “-sexual” part. Nobody thinks it means fear of things that are the same

Right, but there’s basically nothing there. He took all that time to say “Iran outnegotiated us”. Brevity alone isn’t a mark of quality obviously, but the point the person above was making is that underneath the bluster there really is very little substance. You had said you don’t know whether it’s actually dumb or just not what you’re used to hearing, and we’re both saying that yes it really is dumb. It can be effective and popular while being dumb as well, unfortunately

To quote from the modlog:

Or because it’s a theocracy based on religion that literally says “God is telling us to kill everyone else”.

Making claims about what religion says means you’re either talking about the religion the country and missed an “a” before the word “religion”, or you’re talking about every religion. I think it’s probably the former, but either way Islam falls under it

“Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible.”

Actually trying to read a transcript of what he says is like pulling teeth. He’s absolutely all over the place and takes half a dozen tangents to get to a one-sentence point

There was an article during his first term written by a French translator who was lamenting how her job was completely impossible - if she translates the general gist of his speech then it’s like she’s misrepresenting the nonsense, but if she translates it directly then a lot of people think that she’s being either incompetent or malicious

They’ve had that government for a long time and were content to sign the JCPOA. You don’t have to like the Iranian government at all to recognise that it was not the party to break that deal

Also, Pakistan is a Muslim country which has had nukes for decades without using them on anyone. Being Muslim does not make you want to nuke the rest of the world

Playing combat on a grid is actually presented as an optional rule and not the default for 5E, despite its popularity

I don’t think I could come up with anything better than trash gryphons https://draconym.tumblr.com/post/181951747284