Stupid commies never learn
Shot:
E-Bike Anti-Dumping and Anti-subsidy Measures Re-Shore Thousands of Jobs
“Re-shoring of e-bike (Electric Power Assisted Cycles, EPAC) production will immediately create up to 4,600 new jobs, if definitive anti-dumping and anti-subsidy measures are imposed on imports of EPACs from China,” according to the European Bicycle Manufacturers Association.
[…]
Since the imposition of the provisional dumping duties in July 2018, e-bike exports from China to the EU have dropped significantly. According to EBMA “There have been only approximately 10-15,000 units per month in August through October, while the Chinese e-bike exports peaked to an average of 100,000 units per month from January to May.”
Chaser:
It is with great regret, that FreeGo Electric Bikes Limited has ceased trading and will soon be going into liquidation
For any enquiries, please contact the administrator below
To recap, the EU noticed the Chinese were selling an awful lot of bikes in Europe. So, they put a stop to that. Result: almost five thousand new jobs magically transferred to the EU? Lol no. Local bike manufacturers and retailers forced out of business because who the hell did you think was selling those bikes?
FreeGo, which specialized in inexpensive electric bikes, used to make their stuff in Germany, until it because prohibitively expensive. Moving to Chinese factories was the only way they could stay afloat in the low-end market. And now they’re gone.
Yeah, my bike is a FreeGo. Stupid commies. I am pissed.
Have a good weekend, Capitalists!
January 4, 2019 — 7:42 pm
Comments: 17
Somebody ported Nethack to Steam!
I’ve posted about Nethack before. It’s one of the first dungeon slash-em-up games. It was the very first computer game I ever played and it ate a whole year of my life. Thirty four years later, it’s still the most fun game I’ve ever played.
Because even the very first PCs were capable of storing incredibly large and complex relationships between variables, which is “all” Nethack is.
Take the humble cockatrice. If you touch a dead cockatrice, you turn to stone. Fine, once you learn that, you never touch another dead cockatrice. You probably know better than to eat a tinned food ration that smells of cockatrice. Ah, but what if you fall into a pit on top of a cockatrice? Stone. What if you’ve been temporarily blinded and you’re feeling your way across the floor and suddenly, dead cockatrice? Stone.
But wait. But what if you have a pair of gloves? Can you run around poking monsters with a dead cockatrice and turn them into stone? Yes. Yes, you can. Just don’t trip and fall on it.
Under the hood, the formulae that create the dungeon and the monsters therein are incredibly complex. I could never work out some relationships from behavior alone. It wasn’t until I peeped at the source code that I began to understand how complicated a thing it really is.
Anyway, Steam reviewers are crying foul. Nethack is a giant cooperative labor of love and you’re not supposed to charge for it. There are plenty of places still to play it for free.
But I paid less than £4 for this version and, as far as I’m concerned, I’m not paying for Nethack. I’m paying for the dev’s effort putting it on Steam. It includes some light music and effects and a decent manual. And Steam achievements, if you care.
I paid for my very first version, too. It was technically to cover the cost of the floppy.
See? I play semantic games, too.
January 3, 2019 — 9:30 pm
Comments: 6
Boo…!
Eh. I tried to combine a picture of a weasel with a picture of a sulky toddler. It didn’t work out so good.
Reminds me of when I were just a lass and I had a new job as an illustrator for an engineering company. A boiler engineer asked me to draw a cartoon of a boiler with a stomach ache. I did my best.
His reaction was, “no, no…that’s a boiler with a headache.”
The worst part was, I knew exactly what he meant and he was right.
So anyway. First day back to work tomorrow. There’s nothing too onerous waiting for me, it’s just the idea of the thing.
I’m going to go take a long, hot soak in my expensive Christmas bath goo and ponder, for the umpty-umpth time, why I was not born to wealth.
January 2, 2019 — 9:44 pm
Comments: 7
Wounded warrior
No, we’re not starting 2019 off with an injury. Jack got hurt before Christmas and is very much on the mend now, thenkyewverymuch.
Something clamped down on his back leg a couple of days before Christmas. I won’t describe the wound; it was gross. The vet thought a cat or dog, but it seems an awfully big hole for a cat and there are no strange dogs in our neighborhood.
Anyway, they wanted to perform surgery on him on Christmas Eve, but I didn’t allow it. If something were to go wrong, there would be no-one to turn to for two days. Last time they put him under, he woke up trippin’.(I was going to say trippin’ balls, but that seems kind of a mean way to describe a neutering).
We took him in as soon as the office was back open, and they conceded that he was healing nicely and probably wouldn’t need the surgery after all. At any rate, I’ve spent an otherwise delightful Christmas poking antibiotics down the cat.
Happy new year, y’all. If you didn’t see London’s fireworks, they were particularly good this time. Despite attempts to politicize them by making the London Eye look like the EU flag.
Oh, you want your moment of schadenfreude? Before the fireworks, the announcer called it the “Coca Cola London Eye.”
Yup.
January 1, 2019 — 9:05 pm
Comments: 21