Electronics fail for random reasons quite frequently, and the randomness is highly variable (something could last decades or be dead after a month). You can’t count on not ever dropping it either.
HDDs and even SDDs have a large enough failure rate that one should expect each to eventually fail and manage that risk accordingly (i.e., by having enough redundancy to handle some devices failing). Besides random hardware failures, software problems (bugs, viruses, ransomware, etc.) can also ruin all of the data on a device. There is also always the catastrophic risk of something like a house fire, which necessitates off-site backups for anything that you cannot tolerate losing (e.g., irreplaceable family photos, important legal documents).
On a somewhat cruder note there’s also “I don’t have a pot to piss in.” Admittedly a pot would signify a somewhat better economic status than a piece of cloth, so it wouldn’t have been the optimal choice here in any case.
My mother once received a chamber pot from an old friend as an anniversary gift. She recently passed it on to my youngest sister to mark her own twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Ain’t love grand?
I’ve heard a local idiom of Holo (Taiwanese Hokkien) - 窮到脫褲 - (someone is) so poor and need to drop/leave their pants. More of the meaning that couldn’t even afford to wear a pant.
I also have an idiom from Holo (Taiwanese Hokkien) I feel pretty hard to translate
有錢補冬，無錢補鼻孔 (冬 and 孔 rhymes in Holo) - “(When someone) have the money (they) can eat well in winter; (when someone) have no money (they) can only eat/smell with (their) noses”
There is a culture reference here - 補冬, a tradition that during the winter time, people should eat good food, like a stew with herbs, to keep healthy. And the action of making someone feel well about their well being is the verb - 補. Hence, the second sentence can use the verb to mean that felling good with just smelling from other people’s good food is a bit sad but also a self-deprivation act (and be happy to be poor? a Buddhism concept of a sort). Be content with what you have, even if it is nothing.
There is also a second layer of meaning behind it since it doesn’t specify which someone, so this idiom can also mean - “other people have money so they can have a good time; but I have no money so I can only pretend to have fun”, A critic of the unjust of the society, or imply this is a bad time (economically, socially) in the world.
No idea how layers of meanings can be translated easily. Do any other cultures have similar idioms?
That reminds me of a scene in the Norse saga Hárbarðsljóð, “The Lay of Hoarbeard”, in which Odin, who has disguised himself as a ferryman, mocks Thor by saying “I don’t think you even own those pants.”
I read on reddit that this comes from the historical fact that poor people were at the very least able to sell their urine to tanners and dyers, but really poor people couldn’t even do that without a pot.
Yes, it’s quite interesting. While the short squeeze dynamics are very real, and have ruined some over-exposed short-sellers, they can’t sustainably produce value out of nothing.
I think it could just be that maybe people see Cho Chikun’s peak performance being earlier. Wikipedia seems to think the 80’s.
So I guess just that that it’s 2003, and Cho Chikun is probably ~47 or so, that maybe he’s not as strong as when he was younger, but
‘He was still doing well in the tournaments, I think he won the Samsung Cup that year too, so he was doing well in international tournaments too’
I think it’s just giving context, that he’s still a strong player at this stage. Whether he’s still a number 1 say, probably not at this point. I remember watching this graphic that was putting him at number 1 in the 80s
These are the last times that Cho won each big domestic title:
Gosei, 1987
Tengen, 1988
Honinbo, 1998
Meijin, 1999
Kisei, 1999
Oza, 2001
Judan, 2007
And, as mentioned, he won the Samsung Cup in 2003.
I think Cho, in 2003, was probably still in the Japanese top five. The dominant players on the domestic scene appear to have been Yoda Norimoto and Cho U, with some emerging strength from Yamashita Keigo and Hane Naoki.
