The japanese katsu curry was developed when British sailors brought curry powder over from India to Japan

It's also a lot easier to invest in compliance when you've already got product-market-fit in the regulation light US.

In Europe certainly, it’s very expensive to get anything close to what you’re describing in a hotel.

Just having a separate living room and bedroom in your hotel can be hundreds more per night.

Interconnecting rooms are rare, you can request it, and it’ll be subject to availability. So you can’t even guarantee you’ll have one.

This is the same everywhere I have been in the US.

A trick is to know which brands you need. Marriott's Residence Inn is a big reliable one (for multiple "rooms" and kitchen/laundry) that exists almost everywhere in the US. It's a part of the whole Marriott system and often in tourism lulls in various cities has deals that keep it comparatively well priced with other Marriotts in that city and will let you use Marriott points to further defray costs.

Hilton and IHG both have similar brands, but their exact names escape me at the moments. The search keywords are "extended stay" and "apartment hotels".

Comfort Suites by Choice Hotels as well.

Depends where you are. Maybe in expensive cities where space is at a premium. But suite hotels (with various levels of kitchenette/kitchen) in the US are not, in my experience, notably more expensive--though often have simpler facilities--than more conventional hotels. (Bedroom may not be actually a different room from living room area but is often at least somewhat separated. So may not help with kids. Stay in this type of hotel in the US a lot.)

Have you been anywhere besides NYC and Vegas?

Airbnb is always over 200 a night after fees

The charity you’re raising for sets up the infrastructure to do the activity. Charities, for example, have spots in marathons which are hard to get other wise.

So if you see a friend is trying to do some personal achievement, and you think the charity is a worthwhile one to donate to; why not combine the two and help your friend achieve their goal whilst also raising money for a good cause.

I expense all my work travel, and get to keep delay repay payments for myself.

My number one trick to getting the payments: get the tightest connection possible.

For the journey I take frequently, the train arrives into the main station at 8:52pm, my connection is at 9pm; picking up just 8 minutes of delays means I'll miss the connection. The next train is at 10pm, which triggers delay repay.

Maybe I've underestimating the amount of money we are talking about but I'd much rather be where I'm headed on time than travel for free, especially on a regular basis.

Depending on when you travel, it can be very expensive. If I want to travel at peak time (arriving into London before 10am, and out before 7pm), then we're looking at around £400

GP's comment sounds like hell for a few bucks. I'll avoid making any other observations.

I agree that it's a dire , expensive mess. But it doesn't seem like low hanging fruit at all...

Anything that will improve the situation will be expensive and/or take a long time to achieve.

And "short-term cost, long-term benefit" is kryptonite to the average politician. "We get the blame, the next guy takes the credit"

Which is why the mess of American healthcare won't be fixed anytime soon.

One of the reasons China gets things done.

Sure, "elections", that's why Xi has been president for how many years already? I lost count

When the key criteria for leadership selection is alignment with a specific ideology, and that ideology is defined by a specific person, it's almost tautological that said person will end up in charge for as long as they'd like to be.

Mao Zedong: 1943 - 1976 (various titles?). He was sidelined around 1959 and staged a successful coup, retaking actual power, in 1966.

Hua Guofeng: 1976 - 1981

Hu Yaobang: 1981 - 1987

Zhao Ziyang: 1987 - 1989. Removed from office for reasons related to the Tiananmen protests.

Jiang Zemin: 1989 - 2002

Hu Jintao: 2002 - 2012

Xi Jinping: 2012 - present

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leader_of_the_Chinese_Communis... )

So far he's in third place for length of service.

Any elections in the People's Republic of China occur under a one-party authoritarian political system controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

It's not the same, and as a consequence of being one-party; means (like the parent suggests) they can be more long term focused, which seems to be working.

There's still blame, but it is attached to people, not "the party" (at least not in terms of action taken to enforce blame).

prefer this to allowing conservatives to have any power. why should guys doing the heil hitler salute get a turn at the wheel

There is some low hanging fruit, like the ticketing system.

Might be possible to improve satisfaction without costly infrastructure upgrades by ensuring you have a seat for long trips and being more aggressive with discounts at quiet times.

Plenty of times I’ve been one of like 30 people on a 12 car train despite the ticket having cost £60. The train is going to run anyway, so may as well price more aggressively.

That's why we focus on the important stuff like spending several million to call lines suffragette and lionness.

> Anything that will improve the situation will be expensive and/or take a long time to achieve

Only if you do it properly.

I mean there’s pretty low hanging fruit mentioned in the article. If rail strikes are frequent enough to feature in the formula, end the strikes by paying the workers well.

Paying train workers what they are demanding is expensive

British train drivers are the best paid in Europe by a staggering amount.

https://www.euronews.com/travel/2022/12/23/train-strikes-the...

And the average UK citizen seems to have a huge problem with that, but seems to be completely happy with private train company executives getting paid obscene amounts and train companies paying out huge dividends when the services are so bad.

Why do people resent train drivers getting paid well?

Because the media tells them to.

When train workers demanded inflationary pay maintenance the highest train driver pay was splashed all over the media in an attempt to get workers to hate one another and ignore the execs and shareholders walking off with all the money.

There shouldn't be any money to walk off with whilst services are more expensive and less good than most other countries.

Creating a market for a natural monopoly like train travel should always include simulated competition against other remote geographies (ie. France), and financial penalties for losing that competition.

This is 2021 figures. Wondering how this would change for cost of living and especially rent/housing inflation.

Of course, train drivers aren't the only rail workers, and pay isn't the only reason for strikes.

You don't understand how this works, do you? By paying workers because of strikes, you are increasing the number of strikes.

Any evidence for that, or is this entirely opinion?

There was a social network called Path, that was this concept, you could only have 50 friends on the network.

It was a really nice app, but they just couldn't make it work.

I have an idea kicking round the back of my head... when I was a teenager I ran a php forum on a shared server. I shared it with my school friends, and we had about 30 regular members on it. It turned into a full blown social network, we'd have our own memes, we'd talk about who's going to the school disco, make jokes etc...

It was really nice, there was no monetization, no ads, the "feed" was chronological, no bots, or spammers.

I also used it to learn programming, reading and modifying the code to add our own features.

My idea is an open source social network. Completely customisable. It wouldn't be designed to scale up past a couple of hundred users. You'd host it yourself (on aws, heroku or similar), and would be completely in control of the instance.

You can do that already with many open source tools, disabling federation from those using activity pub and blocking new sign ups once the user number has reached you desired limit.

The reality is things do not work like that, even to maintain a small community forum you need a small but constant influx of new users as people regularly just disappear/leave as in any social group.

The real challenge is to let decent human people join without the trolls, bots and scammers.

It does seem like a confusing lineup, in terms of current gen models you've got, in ascending order of price

iPad ($349) iPad Mini ($499) iPad Air 11" ($599) iPad Air 13" ($799) iPad Pro 11" ($999) iPad Pro 13" ($1299)

So from a pricing perspective, it does kind of make sense. The naming is all over the place though.

The iPad Mini is more expensive and better specced than the iPad. And then the Air sounds like it should be a light version of the iPad, but is actually better specced than the iPad.

My guess is that non technical people don't care about things like names and spec, but buy iPads based on pricing. And if people are buying the entry level iPad, why drop it?

Awesome idea, some suggestions (to fit my use case)

My annual leave resets on April 1st, so being able to change the year would be handy.

I worked compressed hours (I have every Friday off)

I can carry over 5 unused days to the next year, and buy 5 more days. This might impact what days I take off.

Thanks! I made options to change the year and leave balance, but not to change the first day of the year. Let me know if it still works if you enter the right number of days

Surely the specific use case could be achieved in some privacy respecting way?

For example, you could send hashes of the user's contacts, they could be compared to each other, but not reverse engineered?

Hashes without salts are useless for preserving privacy.

Hashes with salts are also useless for preserving privacy, but at slightly higher than zero computational cost.