You may not know it, but Yasuke (in the late 16th century) predates the Sakoku period (starting 1630) by a few decades.

They don't. Houston has barely any snow storms or icy roads and not much rain. And still, it has 1100 injuries of pedestrians and 100 killed pedestrians in traffic accidents each year.

So you are telling me that there is a whole parasitic industry of additional confusion piggy-backing on this confusion, and you don't see this as a problem?

But what's the point to know those prices? You still have to pay the full price anyway. To you, it does not matter how much of the price you pay goes to the store, and how much to the entity setting the sales tax.

The price that is actually hitting your wallet is the price which should be displayed, and everything else is just additional information, which is nice to have, but of not too much of a consideration to your shopping decision.

Sorry to be not specific enough. I would not overestimate the role of E.U.'s End-of-ICE-mandate.

I would not overestimate this. To me, it looks more to be the recognition of the fact that BEVs are cheaper to operate, especially if you can charge at home, which makes them ideal daily drivers, and it relegates the SUV to the oh so important weekend, when you have to pull your boat trailer to a lake 300 miles away.

The problem with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory experiment is that while on paper, it was energy positive, the power positivity disappears already at the first stage, the laser cannons. Their efficiency is somewhere at 1%, and that means while the photons coming out of the laser might have carried less energy then the target created while fusing its contents, just at the laser level, we are at a factor of 60 times the energy put in compared to the energy output. We are really far away from any usable energy surplus.

The issue is that different languages have different rules for "case insensivity". In French for instance, the accent disappears when converting a lower case letter into an upper case letter. In Slavic languages, it does not. In German until recently, converting the Eszet to upper case required two letters, as the upper case version of ß was SS. But then the upper case ß was introduced, which made previous rules obsolete, and code had to behave differently.

Treating upper case and lower case letters the same is asking for trouble. Keep them separate things at all cost. Or don't allow characters other than ASCII characters in file names (which creates all sorts of additional problems).

Obligatory xcd.

Even older "In love and in war, everything is allowed." (sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte).

I am always amazed at people who think they know how others will find a spouse. As far as I can tell from anecdotal evidence, it just happens. (And yes, I am married, and my children are grown up, so I have some anecdotal evidence to work with.) Dating advice to me seems on the same level as astrology or the divining rod.

Found the one who does not know how dialing works, and thinks he knows the magic bullet.

A phone number does not correspond to a station. It never has, and it never will. A phone number is a route, which allows the phone switches to forward the call to a destination, which can take the call. That destination is but a trunk. What happens behind the trunk is up to the one operating the end of the trunk. Routes don't have to be symmetric. Just because the Network Provided Number you get gives you the number of the trunk the call had entered the phone switches of your provider does not mean that you can call a station behind this trunk. Corporations which operate several trunks, often some for dialing out and others for calling in, have to use User Provided Numbers to give you a number you can actually call back. And if someone wants his desk phone to be forwarded to his cell phone, you have to use User Provided Numbers to send the original caller id to the cell phone and not the corporate trunk number, which in the case of forwarding would be the Network Provided Number of the trunk the company routes the calls from desk phones to.

I would not take a bus to Costco (or any other bulk seller). If it really made sense, I would probably rent a bus to get there for that once-a-year occasion.

There is a reason why the likes of Costco are virtually non-existant here. People simply don't buy in bulk.

It works for my parents, so there is that.

Maybe one of the wrong ideas is that you have to buy in bulk and keep at least a two week supply of everything at home. No wonder U.S. fridges are so large. I also never understood why you have to buy a 12 or 20 can bundle of soda and are not allowed to take just one or two cans in the U.S..

I have five different supermarkets in walking distance (less than a mile), and I seldom buy more than I can carry in a single bag. The only things I have more than a week's supply at home are things like canned food, flour, sugar and noodles, which don't go bad for a longer period of time.

I know of a legislation where an additional fee for vanity plates was considered illegal because the DMV is a governmental service, and the service fee should be the same for the same administrative act.

Problem being: ZIP codes are optimized for letter delivery at the time when the ZIP codes are assigned. It does not optimize for goods delivery, and it is slow to adapt to changing demand.

What works well for USPS might not be as optimal for Walmart.