Without going into too much detail, I once encountered an Experian identity verification question on behalf of someone else. This person was an Uber driver making ~$20,000 per year.
The question was: "According to our records, you purchased or leased one of the following vehicles in the previous year. Which vehicle do you currently own?"
A. Maserati Granturismo
B. Ferrari 458 Italia
C. Aston Martin Lagonda
D. Honda Accord
So... 2 Italian supercars, another supercar with only 200 ever produced, or a mass market sedan.
Bonus - of the 4 questions, you only needed to answer 1 correctly to pass the check.
I think you nailed it. If the question were posed as "Two envelopes with $A and $(A+1)" then there would be no talk of ratios and no "paradox" would ever emerge.
The helicopter is already outside its original mission parameters. It was only supposed to make 5 flights - probably the engineering team didn't want to invest money or weight or complexity in something they knew wouldn't be an issue during their originally scheduled timeframe.
I think that's just Andy Weir at this point. I enjoyed The Martian, but Artemis was horrible. Characters were indistinguishable from one another, they were all just Andy trying to emulate the success of the cocky sarcastic hero from The Martian. After reading that I don't think I need to read any more of his work.
> Andy trying to emulate the success of the cocky sarcastic hero from The Martian.
Yeah. And he went on and on about his dead crew mates, how sad and depressed he was for them, but he had barely any connection to them besides sharing a single space flight.
There's a song by one of my favorite artists, Peter Mulvey, which touches on this point. It's more of a spoken word poem, titled "Vlad the Astrophysicist". In the song, Peter asks Vlad if there are aliens, and if there are, why haven't they contacted us? Vlad answers basically that there almost certainly are aliens, but civilizations don't last for long enough compared to the size of the universe.
> "You see?" He said, "They never meet each other. Time is too long, space is too large.
I mean sure, maybe at one time, right next to each other at the same time, fss, fss -
Two civilizations sprang up and they had war, better yet they had peace,
They had arts exchanges, they had an intergalactic library... but they are all dead now, too.
In all likelihood, we are alone, and by the time the next civilization arises,
We'll have been gone for a long, long time."
I once worked at a tiny startup where we were trying to sell a dataset to GS. Before we could even send a sample, they sent over some boilerplate forms for us to sign. I remember two distinct stipulations - anything we sent them was immediately and forever their property, AND they had the right to drug test any of our employees. We ended up not signing so there was no deal. My boss said it was their way of getting rid of us.
Anecdotally I have a French acquaintance who dreads his trips back home because the food is so terrible. Paris might be famous for fine dining at the extreme top end, but that doesn't necessarily make for the best eating.
Eating great food in Paris is expensive on average. And the service is unfortunately known to be horrible. It’s not a rule though.
But other French cities are full of restaurants that serves really great food, with either gorgeous local specialities (hello Britain and Provence), or excellent « French » cuisine for really modest prices as low as 12-15€ for the « plat du jour » (which is made from what the restaurant bought in the morning) to 30-40€ for meals you’ll keep in your memory.
This is due to a law that enforces employers to pay for your mid-day meal. Most of them do this by giving you restaurants vouchers so a lot of people in France got to eat at restaurants on a budget every day. So as a restaurant owner, you’d better have nice food if you want to see your customers come back every week.
That's definitely not true. Source: my wife is French and from Paris, I lived in France etc. Paris is AMAZING to eat, in every single tier. And that doesn't mean you'll be eating French cuisine everywhere. Asian food is incredible in Paris, so is Moroccan for instance. It's a deep city though, if you do "shallow dining" you'll eat garbage, like in pretty much every single major western city.
