Notices by Lew Perin (wrenpile@mastodon.social), page 11

@bmt I thought I was kidding, but it turns out Unicode does have Ǝ, whose official name is LATIN CAPITAL LETTER REVERSED E.

@mattskala Ok, makes sense.

@mattskala Do you really want to use Wade-Giles for Chinese transliteration rather than Pinyin? W-G is dying out.

There’s a new little restaurant called “Der Pioneer” on a gentrifying stretch of Church Avenue in Brooklyn.

It’s hard to come up with a perfect name, and I don’t want to be the Language Police, but isn’t a pioneer someone who goes somewhere nobody lived before?

If you didn’t already know you were in a neighborhood inhabited by poor people, this sign in a takeout Chinese restaurant window on Church Avenue in Brooklyn would tell you.

@h @enkiv2 @vertigo @jjg You’d have to root it, right?

@esheep O.O., you mean.

@auntiekiki That’s a clean sink!😜

From now on, every time I hear the phrase “team-building exercise”, I’ll think of those Thai kids in that cave.

@KitRedgrave nature too cheap to meter

The Belgian flag is made up of a yellow card, a red card and — what’s a black card?

#worldcup

Isn’t #URU the world’s pioneer of cannabis legalization?

#worldcup

@auntiekiki @pamela As I often say to parents of toddlers, there’s no such thing as too cute.

@vfrmedia @slightlyflightyone @fluttergirly Not only that, Windows-based embedded systems tend not to get updated often, ir even at all.

@strypey @natecull @kensanata I think you mean 70 years, not 100.

I suspect people believe the state wouldn’t dare expropriate middle-class Beijingers et al.

See https://www.chinasmack.com/chinese-land-use-rights-what-happens-after-70-years

Compare that far-off danger to the worry about what a Chinese equity share is worth right now: http://www.businessinsider.com/lack-of-transparency-the-root-cause-of-china-stock-volatility-2011-6

@enkiv2 Which major news sources are we talking about?

And is all their content there, or just the part of their content that they publish through Medium?

@strypey @natecull @kensanata Yeah, well, I happen to have personal knowledge of the Puer tea industry, and I can assure you that in the mid-late aughts there was a bubble and a crash. I was actually in Menghai County in 2007.

If you’re really interested, I can dig up references from tea nerds that are way more detailed than the Times article.

@strypey @natecull @kensanata If you’re wondering what other commodities in China got similarly financialized, well, there’s also Puer tea: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2009/01/17/world/asia/17tea.html

@strypey @natecull @kensanata The Chinese housing bubble was indeed financially driven.

There were masses of people saving money who worried about their old age due to lack of a social safety net. All available financial instruments either paid pitiful returns or were opaque and untrustworthy.

So they invested in “real things” whose value, they were convinced, could only rise: chiefly—but not only—real estate.