In the karate kid film, the sensi has him waxing a car. He complains that it is useless make-work. A bit later on, he gets into a fight. The waz-on-wax-off motion was actually a block to a punch in the face. The constant practice trained muscle memory, and power, allowing him to implement it perfectly.

In short, it’s an apparently useless practice, that trains a useful skill better than direct practice.

It’s horrifying that RA2 is almost a 1/4 century old.

It’s also worth noting the implication of the full phrase. If you remove the bad apples quickly enough, then you can save the rest. If you can remove the corrupt elements, then you can protect the group overall. If you leave them to fester then you’ll have a lot more cutting required to clean up.

The problem is there is a race to the bottom.

E.g. in my field of work, there is a limited supply of skilled workers. If a company won’t pay my rates, I work for one that will, and the first is left short staffed. This creates a back pressure that helps keep wages reasonable.

In “unskilled” jobs. The pool is far larger. Even if a job is worth a living wage, there is the risk of being undercut. 3/4 of a living wage is still better than nothing. This leads to a race to the bottom, that larger companies exploit ruthlessly.

There are 2 viable solutions. You either manage a minimum (a “minimum wage”) , or you decouple survival from working by providing a baseline income (“universal basic income”). The first is simpler, but distorts the market in unhelpful ways. The second is harder, but let’s market forces actually work properly, and push wages up, where appropriate.

I can remember it fairly quickly. My spacial sense is particularly good. I can easily get a sense of negative space (hidden rooms etc) as well as good predictive skills. My personal problem is when maps get large or don’t overlap. It’s either mapped well, or not. It can take me a while to join up multiple smaller sub maps in my mind. (Think office or stadium sized spaces).

With a name like that, I’d be disappointed if they didn’t. I know enough people who would start one based there, even if the nearest water is 30+ miles away.

It’s spacially based. It makes more sense in 3D. It’s just as compatible with echolocation as visual data. (The soundscape of a room tells you a LOT about your surroundings). I believe it’s based within my visual system, just stripped of the superfluous visualisations. Interestingly, I can actually map mathematics into the same structures.

I’m doing a piss poor job of explaining it. Language lacks the nuance to describe it well, and I lack the skill to bend it into shape.

I also don’t get dog breeds, just amorphous and blurry blobs with rorsarch like colors slapped on them.

That’s akin to what I get. The core structure is there, but it’s almost a sense of what should be there. It’s akin to seeing things out of the corner of your eye, while overtired. Your brain tells you what it is, and you accept it, it doesn’t necessarily match what you are actually ‘seeing’.

I ‘know’ how dogs move, I ‘know’ their body structure. I can force that down to a single image, but it wants to be so much more. All the senses of ‘dogness’ compressed into a single entity.

Not op, but I have a very weak ability to visualise. The data is more abstracted. A map is a set of spacial connections that define an area. My brain has learnt to pull that from a map. What I can’t do is recall the map to figure out additional information. If my brain didn’t think it was relevant when I looked at it, the information is likely gone.

There are definitely pros and cons to it. I’m not limited to what I could visualise, when thinking. This lets me dig deeper into more complex ideas and patterns. It also makes other tasks a lot harder. I struggle a lot with faces and appearances.

As for the dogs, I have an abstracted “model” in my mind. The size and breed of the dogs is undefined. There are 2 dog entities in my mind. 1 brown, which is quite generic, the other has pink attached to it, that cross links it with poodles etc.

I can personally push it to a visualisation, but it takes significant mental effort, and the results are unstable.

I’ve got both pathways in my brain. Thinking without words is definitely faster. Verbal thought is better for communication and crystallisation of ideas. I.e. I think about something non-verbally, then internally verbalise the conclusions to help fix it in my memory and communicate it.

Charging from the top means you can easily keep the public away from the contacts. It’s also easier to keep things clean. It might also be a factor that you don’t have to dig up the road to add a new station/charger.

There was likely some cost/benefit analysis done that found it was cheaper/more reliable/less logistically complex.

A 3rd rail needs to be designed to play nicely with what’s around it, e.g. kids poking it with a metal pole. It also requires power to be delivered to it. It also requires a way to repower a section when roadworkers need to move the rails. It also turns a run of paving slabs into a full blown circuit, requiring more training to install.

If you’re intending it to only be at the stations, then you still need to deal with the curious kid issues, as well as dealing with weather related issues. E.g. what happens if the 3rd rail is in a 5cm deep puddle?

The other option would be inductive charging, from below. That has its own problems however, the biggest being efficiency.

A 3rd rail massively increases the complexity of the setup. The tracks are shallow and simple. This makes them cheap to install. Adding a 3rd rail hugely increases the complexity, as well as adding safety concerns. It would be cheaper and safer to add additional chargers, mid route.

It’s battery powered. Each end has a burst charger to top it up, followed by a full charge overnight. It seems like a good balance. You don’t need to lug a huge amount of battery along, and you only need power to a few places, not a continuous overhead line.

It’s main benefit is being lightweight and cheap to install. The rails don’t need support beyond the depth of the road. They are also designed to be removed easily for utility access.

I was at a festival, a couple of years ago. Someone sent a letter, with a name, a tent colour, and a GPS location. Royal Mail (uk) delivered it the next day.

I think the key difference is that it’s “easier” to apply a meta to a RTS game. In shooters, the meta often involves quick reflex decisions, where to hide, where to shoot etc. This is hard, and requires practice. It also means there is a significant number of players not applying it, or doing so sub-optimally.

With RTS games, the metas are easier to apply. This means that, in human Vs human games, the newer players often get flattened. It also means that far more complex metas can be developed and applied.

Shooters tend to back load the difficulty curve. It’s easy to get into them, and not do badly, but hard to do well. RTS games tend to front load the difficulty. You need to get over the initial hump to get “ok” with it. Once over the hump, the curve smooths off and you get good fairly rapidly.

One of the big differences between nerds and normals is that nerds enjoy punching through that wall. The difficulty is seen as a challenge, not an impediment. Most people want a faster feedback loop on the dopamine reward. FPS type games deliver that extremely well.

I’d definitely be the annoying shit on that one. I would insist on proper PPE for the environment. If the smokers in the team want to handle it without PPE, that’s entirely on them.

It’s also worth noting the smoking rooms are effectively empty, except for lights and some seats. Most staff can avoid it entirely.

It makes a lot more sense in the earlier versions of chess. The queen used to be the “Vizier”. The sultan made the decisions, the Vizier ran around and implemented them.

I’ve seen them done well in airports. They have additional extraction and filtering. They are also kept at a negative pressure, so the smoke doesn’t roll out whenever someone opens the door.

I’ve no issues with what people want to put into their bodies. I only take offence when others are forced to be exposed to it.

It’s a prisoner dilemma situation. It doesn’t matter how effective the ads are on an absolute scale, but a relative one. The aim is to get more facetime than your competition. Unfortunately, any company that opts out gets flattened.

Incidentally, this is why tobacco companies loved the ad ban (at least in the UK). It had long reached the point where they couldn’t encourage many people to smoke. They were advertising to cancel out the poaching of customers by other brands.