Since January of this year, I have been waiting for a certain MCU (STM32F042K6T6) to be available but still no luck. I get the bigger picture now: there's a shortage at the source. I have to move fast and secure a stock of the rest of the ICs, otherwise this supply-chain issue can be disastrous to small hardware companies.
I'm convinced that, if in-person IEEE meetups were still a thing right now, you could drop a tray of ST Micro chips in the middle of the meeting and watch it devolve into a fistfight in seconds.
+1 for having to be sealed.
We have a handful of companies wanting to sell us needed chips but they are odds and ends, not always packaged. Were always suspect.
This is a (modern, mistaken) conjoining of two similar phrases
- drawing the short stick (where you hold five sticks / matches, in your hand one of which is cut short but no one can tell cos they are held in someone's hand)
- Grabbing the shitty end of the stick. Which seems fairly obvious if a stick was used for any clearing out style work.
(there seems to be no obvious "short end" of a stick)
No. It comes from choosing somebody at random from a whole group. Get thin sticks (branches from any tree), cut them all around 10 cm and one of them cut it shorter (like 5 cm for example). Now hold the entire bunch of sticks in your hand, carefully to have them same height at visible end (hiding in your hand which one is the short one) and let everybody except yourself draw a stick at random. Whoever gets the short one is the one that would do the task at hand. If everybody draws all long sticks you're the one with the short one at the end. Hence the phrasing.
Not as poor countries, but as poorer countries than the ones the parent comment mentioned. The GDP per capita of Saudi Arabia is around $23k - approximately half of that of Sweden, the Netherlands, or the UK.
Qatar is absurdly rich, but the wealth is inequitably distributed (unusually so). Although the GDP per capita is ~60k, the median household income (and the median per-capita income) are considerably lower than the countries the parent comment mentioned.
> The GDP per capita of Saudi Arabia is around $23k - approximately half of that of Sweden
Why are you mentioning nominal GDP, not PPP which is $55 grand according to CIA (which is more than Sweden's and UK's and just a bit less than US's)? If they raise their taxes to the level of Sweden they will have larger nominal GDP although without any increase in the purchasing power.
The obsession is not just with stations;everything is bigger over there. My first visit to the US, I was traveling from Japan. The difference in size of things in the two countries is uncanny. From people to cars to food;my impression was Americans like it bigger.
People living in Japan are used proper train boarding and exiting - they stand on the correct entry markers and the train doors will be on these markers once it stops. In the same manner no one blocks the exit markers and people stand in the queue behind the train door ready to disembark quickly.
Only this makes the 90 second Shinkansen stops possible as well as the 3 minute cadence between trains we saw in Hiroshima station possible. Not only is the platform used very efficiently, there is even a small Soba restaurant in the middle of the platform! :)
In comparison here in Europe (CZ) the trains are usually late and you migh only lern the platform couple minutes before the train arrives - and it might even change at the last minute! There are no door markers and trains stop preatty much at random somewhere at the platform. Most traincars still have stairs and people are not used to proper queueing, so they form a fan around every door that blocks people from quickly getting eiter in or out.
The trains are also slow (160 km/h max on parts of track and on a good day) and mostly not EMUs, so you have platform space used up by the locomotive. Oh well.
Please don't generalise all of Europe based on circumstances in a single country.
In the three European countries I'm most familiar with, at least some types of train stop in a consistent position, with platform markings and queuing.
Isn't that because of the obvious - Americans generally are bigger than Japanese people and America is bigger than Japan? I'm not sure it's a preference as much as an adjustment.
I suppose I'm destined to wander around my small(er than most other places in the world) Japanese flat, with fittings made for someone much shorter than I am even though I'm average height in my own country, and ponder on the existence of downvotes for a fairly innocuous musing.
Perhaps I should leave comments like "Japanese people just like things smaller because when I was there everything was so small" and not notice that they have a lack of space and are on average, smaller, hence the need for space saving measures and smaller fittings, or is that just one more, in my opinion, fairly innocuous musing that must not be stated… maybe it's just me? Maybe.[1][2]
This site is using videos pulled from Youtube. The lack of African cities most likely results from few available options. Certainly biases could play a role but a more charitable view is simply that those videos don't exist or are harder to find.
