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They stood around awkwardly a bit more, and then De Soto, the allegedly superior diplomat, noticed that Emperor Atahualpa seemed to be purposefully avoiding looking at their horses despite how mind-blowing they must have been. So De Soto decided to get his attention by making his horse rear back on its hind legs and stomp on the ground with a great snort. Amazingly, Atahualpa didn’t budge nor look at the horse, but a bunch of his royal bodyguards freaked out and ran away. Later that day, they would all be put to death by the Emperor for cowardice.
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Middle-aged man trading cards go viral in rural Japan town.
“We wanted to strengthen the connection between the children and the older generations in the community. There are so many amazing people here. I thought it was such a shame that no one knew about them,” […] “Since the card game went viral, so many kids are starting to look up to these men as heroic figures.”
Kids have started attending local events and volunteering for community activities — just for a chance to meet the ojisan from their cards. Participation in town events has reportedly doubled since the game launched.
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Fish switch frequencies to avoid signal jamming each other while navigating.
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This Russian tech bro helped steal $93 Million and landed in US prison. Then Putin called.
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Why America prefers a weak and peaceful Europe.
NATO has pushed member states (minus America) to specialize their militaries. The United Kingdom and France have even discussed sharing their aircraft carriers. The stated reasons, namely, budget constraints and “interoperability,” do not fully explain the need to specialize a military. Limited budgets only call for a country to specialize its military when the goal is to reduce capabilities that are duplicated between it and an ally. A specialized military is a force without all the features necessary for independent military action—or indeed military independence. The effect of NATO pushing its members to specialize is that they become more dependent not only on each other but also, ultimately, on the United States.
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A walk down Victoria Street.
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Cops in American cities make more than the CEOs of the biggest European companies.
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Age of Invention: How coal really won.
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Wang Yongli on U.S. dollar hegemony and digital RMB.
Although many still nostalgically call for the restoration of the Bretton Woods system or propose versions like Bretton Woods 2.0 or 3.0, the original system was essentially a partial revival of the gold standard. Given the limited supply of gold, it could never keep pace with the growing value of global tradable wealth, making its long-term sustainability impossible. The collapse of the Bretton Woods system was inevitable.
The Earth’s reserves of precious metals like gold and silver are limited. The amount that can be supplied as currency is even more restricted. However, in theory, the value of global tradable wealth is infinite: besides natural and physical goods, there are also many artworks and virtual assets like Bitcoin. If the currency supply cannot keep up, exchange and transactions will be severely restricted; the development of the economic society, especially globalisation, will stagnate; it will even exacerbate conflicts, causing greater shocks.
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Why markets crash faster than they rise.
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Youth and what happens when it’s gone.
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Men watch women’s sports more than women do.
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Electronic voting in Belgium.
In a 2003 Belgian election, the Communist candidate got 4096 extra votes; investigators suspect a cosmic ray flipped a bit in the voting machine.
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The right amount of randomness.
The better you get in any one domain, the more you have implicit mental models that guide the way you think about it. Especially in fields that change fast, these mental models drift away from reality, and suddenly they end up being actively misleading—a great deal of money was made in software by realizing that software was a product, not an add-on, and then by realizing that it didn’t have to come in the form of a CD and could be accessed by a browser, and then from realizing that a server did not have to be a specific box in a closet but instead could be an abstraction, at least from the user’s perspective. These shifts are hard to spot when you’ve only been through one cycle, but if you don’t develop the ability to spot them, it’s hard to thrive through multiple cycles.
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The colors of her coat.