If countries only buy oil in dollars they need to get dollar from somewhere. They need to sell something else and get paid in dollars.

This is and advantage if you have dollars.

Furthermore since the price of both dollars and oils goes up and down all the time, you don't wan to exchange your own currency or sell stuff for dollars at a bad time.

You wan to get dollars while they are cheap and use them later when you can buy oil with those dollars cheaply.

This requires you to keep a certain amount of dollars in reserve.

Dollars that you don't actually use to do anything with them but keep nonetheless available to you if you need it.

This all adds up to people need dollars much more than they would otherwise.

Supply and demand happens and since so many people have a demand for dollars you can add more supply without making it worth less.

It is all much more complicated than that, but it all adds up to a huge advantage for the US and the people in the US who have money.

Arrest them all....

Oh wait, I see the problem with that.

Timezones are artificial constructs that people have made up, that is why they are just a line you cross.

If you move from one country to the next you suddenly are subject to all sorts of different man made laws and sometimes even manmade ideas of what time it is.

Because that is all timezones are a government declaring what time it is inside their borders.

Timezones are artificial but they are based on a natural things that is more real.

You know how the sun rises in the east and sets in the west?

If you move westwards you experience dawn and noon and sunset slightly earlier than someone east of you. (Like seeing a cars headlights sooner if you are further in the direction it is coming from.)

when we first came up with ways to tell the time we were pretty simple about it we had dawn and dusk when the sun rises and sets and we had midnight in the middle of the night halfway between sunset and dawn and noon halfway between dawn and dusk.

You didn't need a clock to tell the time just your eyes.

Dawn was at a slightly different time everywhere, but people would have to travel quite a bit to notice the difference and they traveled so slow that nobody really felt the difference.

Later people separated the time when the sun was up into 12 equal part called hours and the time when in wasn't into another 12 hours.

This mean that how long an hour was differed from day to day and location to location , but it was just a convenient way to split up the time between dawn and noon into 6 parts and so on.

Later the whole day night cycle was split into 24 equal parts this meant that dawn did always happen at the same hour but all hours were the same length.

than at some point when timekepeing got good enough we split the hour into 60 minute parts and got minutes and later still split those into 60 second minute part and got seconds.

At that point we basically had the time we have today.

The difference being that each place had its own time.

Noon was always halfway between dawn and dusk when the sun was highest in the sky.

Each town with it own church tower clock had its own local time based on the sun.

If you were rich enough to have an accurate clock or watch and set it based on the official time in one town and then traveled east or west to another town your clock would be off.

Of course clocks weren't very accurate or and travel was slow for most people.

The invention of a very accurate clock that could be compared to the time as seen from the sun was actually what enabled sailors to tell how far west or east they had travailed and thus tell where they were.

This all was very well until railroads came along.

Steam engines can move people very fast over great distances, fast enough that the time difference between towns mattered.

Keeping an accurate schedule is very hard when each town you stop has its own timezone.

Railroad companies made things easier by creating a unified time for their company.

At first this made things more complicated because each company decided on a different time, so you essentially could move between timezones by going from one platform to the next.

Eventually this shook out to the system we have today though were each country or in large countries each state within the country chooses a timezone based roughly on what the time would be based on the sun somewhere nearby. These timezones are mostly offset from each other by a full hour with a few exception being 30 or 15 minutes of.

These timezones are mostly the same north and south of where you are and different if you go far enough east or west.

In a few place you can go to a different timezone by going north or south though.

Noon and midnight will always happen simultaneously in a single line north to south from pole to pole (ignoring midnight sun phenomena etc) The line of when dawn and dusk happens is not quite north south but somewhat angled at times. So it can happen sooner or later north and south of you.

The legal time however isn't bound by that natural time. it follow the lines drawn by man

La of California has the same timezone, but if you go from Baja California to Baja California South in Mexico you move between timezone even if the dividing line between the two states is east to west.

Oh the sky would be blue, and you guys'll be there too
When I finally do what frozen things do in summerrrrrrr

One way to achieve that is syncretism. The practice of putting parts of the existing religion into the new one.

The people kept celebrating their old festivals the way they used to but they had to put some new labels on some things.

Some deities and stories were identified with figures and deities from the new religion. So nothing much changed.

This is a feature of religions in general and happens naturally especially if there is no central authority that says what is and isn't true. It can also happen on purpose.

Another factor is that in most places most of the time religion was not just a thing that stood by itself. It was part of politics and daily life.

The government and the religious leadership were not really separate things, but so deeply entwined that they were almost the same.

Keeping the old faith was the same as keeping to the old rulers. If the ruler themselves converted publicly this became even less a thing people would do.

Freedom of religion was usually not a thing. People were whatever religion they ruler said they were and going against that was like rebelling against the ruler. It was rebelling against the laws and customs that held society together itself.

Rulers were not keen on that sort of thing and neither were most of the people themselves. Finding someone in their midst who went against their rules and customs like that would not even always require the intervention of some far away tyrant to resolve but would be done away with locally by the community.

"Home Taping Is Killing Music"

• 1980s anti-cassette tape slogan by the music industry

"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."
-Jack Valenti said this in 1982 in testimony to the House of Representatives on why the VCR should be illegal.

Also see floppy discs, writable CDs, bittorrents and basically anything that made media easier to distribute.

Any time a new way to share media has come along it has made the rights industry more money not less.

The have continued to chip away at the rights of the public and extended copyright from a few years to basically forever.

Greed is killing their industry not lending out more digital copies of books.

That is mentioned in the Tom Scott video too. I guess Staufen is either the worst hit or the most photogenic example of that particular group. Certainly a nearly 5 century old city hall slowly being torn apart makes it more of an attention getter than the other ones.

Tom Scott did a video on that a few years back:

The German town that's literally cracking apart

This would affect Epic Games a lot more if their financials weren't insane anyway.

They have what appears at first glance a license to print money, but actually aren't a profitable company. They make hundreds of millions in revenue every year, but still aren't profitable.

I have no idea how that is working for them and if this will affect their bottom line and if their bottom line matters in any case.

They are so old that back when they were founded it wasn't a Finnish company but a Russian one, because Finland had not yet become its own country, just a Grand Duchy that was part of the Tsarist Russian Empire.

They managed to a lot better for themselves once they became their own country.

To be fair people can act in ways that makes no sense immediately after a crash. The adrenaline and shock makes you act stupid and some people default to "normal" behavior when they don't know what else to do.

However the husband who came to pick up the car was not in a crash and doesn't get a pass.

Also the most important component the age of the driver appears to be missing from the article.

No, this time research is only available in Mexico or places close enough to Mexico that they could be mistaken for Mexico.

I am not in Mexico and didn't get the quest.

It is supposed to be centered around the Pokemon Hawlucha, which is new to Pokemon go and supposed to be a region exclusive for Mexico.

They probably live close enough to the border that the game mistakenly thought they were in Mexico and gave them a Mexico exclusive research.

Solar panels don't really collect enough energy compared to what a normal car consumes to keep going.

In addition to that the panels will add cost and weight to he car. Under bad circumstances solar panel may actually decrease the range of a car rather thane extend it, because the car consumes more extra energy to carry the weight of the panels around than the panels give it.

There are some extreme cases like specially built racing cars that are ultra light and race through Australia with the power of the sun.

For normal cars that have things like safety features and amenities and drive though places that are not desert it would not work.

This is not an engineering problem that can be overcome with better technology, there simply isn't very much solar energy that hits a patch of earth the size of a car. and the minimal amount of energy to move something the car even with the most efficient engine is also fixed. Those are hard limits.

It makes much more sense to put some solar panel on the roof of your garage and charge the car while it is in there (potentially overnight with the help of a battery).

Another way to look at this is to look at nature.

Plants are solar powered and animals are powered by eating plant or each other.

Why doesn't a cow simply start doing photosynthesis so it has to eat less grass. Mostly because evolution does not work that way, but also because the amount of solar energy you can collect from the area of a cow hide is so much smaller than what you ca collect in a meadow full of grass.

There are some animals like sea slugs who do some photosynthesis but they don't need much energy because they don't move around much. A sea slug floating in the water needs less energy than a cow that keeps running around.

So you can totally power a car with solar energy alone, provided you either collect the solar energy outside the car and let it harvest it like a cow eating grass by plugging it in, or you can put the solar panels on the car but than you have to build it ultralight and only drive it in the desert, or you can build it like a normal car and put solar panels on it but simply not move it much at all.

It is not something we figured out is ti something we decided.

We needed to find a way to write down something like first add two and three and then multiply that result by five. and we decided that (2 + 3) x 5 would be the best way to write that down.

We could have decided on another system but that one is useful in many ways with how numbers work.

The important part is that we all agree that what we write means the same thing.

The details are far less important than that we are all on the same page.

The prefix isn't "a" it is "ab". aboriginal comes from "ab-origine". it is from Latin.

It means "from the origin". The idea is that those are native people who have been here from the start and not immigrated later.

It is similar to the idea of "first people" or indigenous (born inside).

Of course if you go far enough back all people everywhere outside of Africa migrated there from somewhere else, but that touches on some problematic religious ideas and in any case the people who first applied those terms didn't know that.

I am German too and while I admit that some parts of government especially on the local level can sometimes be not nearly as bad as we all love to say, at other times things are really, really bad.

Anything to do with health care makes it even worse. Having had to work with public and private organization during the height of Corona has shown me just how bad things can be.

But you are right, fax-machines are slowly losing their importance. Nowadays it is often something as high tech as a PDF of a document that was written on a computer, printed out, signed and scanned back into a computer and then forwarded by mail.

It probably doesn't help that the German government and major German institutions still see the Internet as newly discovered uncharted land and that Fax machines are often still considered the height of communication technology.

At least Parker Brothers were two brothers named Parker.

Relevant paragraph from Wikipedia:

>Bradley's ventures into the production of board games began with a large failure in his lithograph business. When he printed and sold an image of the little-known Republican presidential nominee Abraham Lincoln, Bradley initially met with great success. But a customer demanded his money back because the picture was not an accurate representation—Lincoln had decided to grow his distinctive beard after Bradley's print was published. Suddenly, the prints were worthless, and Bradley burned those remaining in his possession. Looking for a lucrative alternate project, Bradley found inspiration from an imported board game a friend gave him, concluding that he could produce and market a similar game to American consumers. In the winter of 1860, Bradley released The Checkered Game of Life.

Ryan Air flights don't have fatal crashes, but if you are on one for long enough you might start to wish they did.

The CPU is the brain of your computer. It can do everything.

The GPU is a specialized idiot savant. It can only do one type of thing but it can do it really good.

The GPU is good at a certain type of math problem that is needed to create 3D images.

The CPU can do that sort of math too, but since it isn't specialized for it, it isn't as good at it. The CPU isn't as fast at that sort of thing.

The type of math the GPU does well is sometimes useful for other things too, like mining Crypto or certain types of simulations.

Road are straight where possible, however they tend to go around obstacles like hills and mountains and swamps and rivers.

They also have to actually go where people want to go. They need to connect town and cities that people travel between and unless those were built in the very recent past, they are not on a straight line.

In some parts of the world current roads can follow roads that were laid down centuries or millennia ago.

Those roads were also built as straight as possible because people 2000 years ago also anted to get to their destination as fast as possible, but technology has changed since then quite a bit.

Roads always try to be as efficient as possible, but the balance of what is most efficient changes over the generations as building bridges and tunnels and moving large amounts of earth around gets easier and people travel faster on roads.

If engineers could build roads completely straight they would, the landscape just gets in the way.

You burn a lot of calories simply by being alive.

The more active you are the more you burn.

You can think of it like fuels consumption for a car.

You engine burns fuel even if you are just idling, fuel consumption goes up with driving faster or making the engine work harder in other ways.

You goal is to pump less extra "fuel" into your mouth than you burn each day.

Exercising and making you body work harder in other ways helps with that.

To add to that, in most circumstances pressing four on the keyboard will not result in 00000100 binary being stores, but instead 00110100.

The keystrokes get normally stored as characters not numbers and this character just happens to be a digit.

The value of the characters for 0 to 9 are not the values of the numbers 0 to 9, but 48 (00110000) added to them.

To actually treat what you enter as a number rather than a string of characters the computer needs to internally convert them.