Foreigner…? Reading this as a non-Chinese and non-US American is quite baffling. Are these the only two countries in your world?

Humans have had a taste for the macabre at least for as long as we have written history. Public executions used to be a past time activity (even Jesus’ crucifixion is told like it was a public show), the morgue of Paris was a tourist attraction, even the sanitised (and controversial) Body Worlds exhibition has no trouble finding an audience. Maybe what’s weird is our relationship with death and putrefaction. It happens to everyone yet it’s somehow in bad taste to talk about it.

Or we can go Ursula Le Guin and say “waiving shifgrethor”

Do you live in Swabia? You sound like you live in Swabia.

Apparently there are some Cherry MX sets from 30 years ago that are still working today. So I guess part of it is longevity, part nostalgia.

Humans could be about to ruin whatever was supposed to survive on Mars in a couple million of years. We’ve disrupted our own planet, and are about to destroy another one. And honestly, we’re not all that great as a species.

JUST ONE MORE TURN…!!!

You used Tiktok as an example for something that is more interesting than learning. (Of course it’s more interesting than learning, it’s digital crack cocaine.)

DB the company has a lot of foreign interests. It bought a British transport company in 2010. Why did they do this instead of reinvesting the money back into the Deutsche Bahn? Because it’s a joint-stock company beholden to stake-holders. It should never have been managed like a private company. Now the damage is done and decades of unrepair is catching up to them.

Somehow I don’t blame the politics for this disrepair. I blame the execs and upper management.

Send them a head of white cabbage every week (can use an online grocery service.

If you have access to their dwelling, put all their bedroom furnitures in the living room

I don’t know about you, but my school did the best it could. Some adults might even say what you said about society in general - infinite resources to harm and burden, etc. People usually try their best, your teachers too. Maybe you’ll grow up to be a teacher and you’ll be better at it than the ones you had. Good luck!

Please don’t learn about how Hitler died through Tiktok. Befriend your librarian and read it in a book.

I also want to know. Same with Tony Blair. Alas, I’m not a legal scholar.

I think the naysayers don’t live in Germany, or at least are not used to the idea of mixed use neighbourhoods.

Most restaurants that germans go to don’t have a parking lot nearby. Most restaurants are in the city. Although maybe some enterprising country inn/restaurant owners already offer EV charging.

You’re thinking cities with single use neighbourhoods like in the US, where residency and commercial areas are usually separated. That’s not the case in Germany.

For a family trip? Toilet break, coffee, cakes for the kids, that’s 15-20 minutes on a rest area. We do this on a weekend, so need a quick grocery run (our supermarkets are famously closed on Sunday), that’s easily 30-40 minutes total.

Some gas stations are also highway rest areas with restaurants and whatnot. The ones that aren’t close to rest areas are in mixed used neighbourhoods, so possibly close to the customers’ homes. If you take your car to the cinema in Germany, you’re doing it wrong.

I still wish it wouldn’t go that far. I remember around 6-7 years ago my friends speculated about space tourism over a dinner party. That the contemporary space research wasn’t about the environment, it was about rich people’s tourism. I was genuinely disappointed that my friends’ “silly” predictions turned out to be true.

boots

The Sam Vimes’ Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness! Can we be friends? XD

Meta is evolving in interesting ways. The Oculus Rift line was huge for modelling artists and designers who worked with engineers (the ones I knew anyway). Now they revived Threads but interestingly it’s marketed as “Threads by Instagram”, because Facebook as a brands is somewhat tarnished, and Meta is a punchline, but Instagram is still popular and well-liked.

My prediction for the Metaverse is, and I’m just another idiot on the internet, that they’re trying to make it into a play AND work platform, where people might do online meetings in VR, spend online money with Metacoin to buy real world stuff, then also spend leisure time playing in the Metaverse. The way Amazon have consumers who are also products (and sometimes also Amazon workers), the vision for Meta might be that one day people could live their whole lives on the Metaverse and be this worker/consumer/product in one fell swoop. I wouldn’t want that, but I can see how this might be their line of thinking.