No wonder Putin is taking a pass on attending. It would make his time and location line up publicly.

Please send your old Kindle to me. I just use them with a USB cable to transfer ebooks. I’ll gladly set them up with a few thousand public domain books and give them to kids or local schools.

These stupid vehicles and ones that are noisy for the sake of being noisy have one root element: attention. They’re designed to force you to pay attention to the owner. Admittedly it’s for negative attention, but still it’s a cry for help.

Too many people grow up where the only attention they can get is negative. Since humans crave any attention, they’ll seek it any way they know how. We’d rather get positive attention, but if you don’t have a source or tools to get it you’ll go negative in desperation.

I hate that these vehicles are designed to hurt people and they’re often on the road because the owner doesn’t know how to get attention any other way.

If he buys a longer truck, then maybe his dad will hug him just once.

Why does he keep coming back?

It’s actually making a serious (at least short term) shift on EV sales in Germany. They’re spiking hard right now.

Germany also legalized balcony based solar panels for grid connections. People are excited about lower energy bills, and even directly charging their own cars from their own solar panels.

All of the data shows that renewables are winning the economics in the market compared to carbon-based options. We just need to keep pushing so the rich people let us move faster.

A couple of years ago I got to see a guy shoehorn his person Ford F650 into a Starbucks parking lot. He was so proud of his massive waste of resources that he used daily for commuting and errands. It was utterly sickening with ow much he was excited to talk about how much he was wasting to “stick it to those horrible environmentalists”.

The Ford F650 is generally reported to get about 6.75 mpg. Gas prices up? Fuck that asshole. He deserves it.

Our family public health insurance in Germany is 12.5% of your income. There’s minimum rates for people who make very little income, but it does cover your household and dependents.

Checkups, illness visits, and initial consultations are free. I had a specialist visit with a cardiologist and it cost zero.

The dental only covers basics. The cost on extra dental is way less than it was in the US for basics.

In the US our good company insurance cost $1200/month, and even then we’d have $3k/year deductables. Oh, and every visit not in the annual checkup was a minimum of $170 out of pocket. Specialists would be $400 out of pocket per visit.

Seeing a non-emergency specialist in Germany can take months. Of course, it was the same in the US, so whatever. Both countries could be better, and should work to improve services available. I’d take Germany’s system any day over the commercialized mess that is the US commoditzing and charging people to live.

As the old joke goes: Emacs is great if you want to learn another OS.

I’m a barbarian vim user. Whenever I watch a real Emacs user operate a full dev environment inside of Emacs I’m always left stunned. It’s a whole universe of functionality, not just a refined line editor like vim.

That’s what I was taught at my first tech internship. It’s all they had on the UNIX system running the webserver in 1998.

I did write some web pages the pulled live data from the backend. I had the pleasure of writing them in C. I got the data binding to some kind of CORBA system using extern variables that were bound at compile time. All of the html (no js or css yet) was hand built and generated from the C code.

vi was the only editor on the system and there was no way to use arrow keys (the UNIX system didn’t have them on the keyboard at all).

I also had the displeasure of building a backup system on a floppy where I had to write a bat script that could manually load a token ring driver, bind a SMB share, load Ghost backup software and backup the local hard drive at under 2mb (yay coax thicknet). The tool used to query and write through the hostname for the backup? Copycon. Fucking copycon in DOS. That showed me how a terrible (but working) tool could be to work with.

Unless an editor can do reasonable vim emulation, I can’t take it seriously. You’re welcome to use it, but I won’t be able to get anything done in it quickly. The vi keys are too ground into my reflexes.

“The insider trading will continue until the Empire falls”.

Congress DGAF. Conservatives cheer for a monarch to empower their hate while establishment Democrats wring their center right hands over the fires of the workers’ lives they’re burning to get rich.

Until there’s a real left party and real economic justice it’s just a pantomime to keep people from taking inspiration from 1789 France.

Of course… too long and you only get a fraction of the cookie after gravity wins again.

You should pay half for streaming services.

Unfortunately, it’s then altered and likely not valid anymore. That said, maybe a little black smudge under his nose will not go amiss.

Weird. I guess I might have not noticed the possible route. I do heavily favor taking railed transit, so normally I would have found the tram if it was available.

It’s even worse than I thought. I was there in 2017 and the tram was definitely open to the airport May 31, 2014! What was I not seeing?!?

I guess I’ll have to come back and visit again to make up for it. I’ve been to Scotland & Edinburgh a few times and it’s always worth the visit. I live in Germany now, so I should be hopping over at some point for a quick trip when I can find the time.

Nice! The last time I was there was 2016 (I think)? I remember seeing just a bit of the tram on Princes, but had to bus out to the airport still.

That’s great to hear! Congratulations on having a city leading to a better future. Those investments take time and political willpower, but they’re very worth it.

Nice. Hasn’t Edinburgh been building trams? There’s one to the airport now, isn’t there? They need to get up to digging and make a local Tube network. The city has plenty of rock to bore through.

The Wien public transit network is stellar. I don’t know much about the rest of the country, other than ÖBB is inexpensive, on time, and clean (DB needs to take notes). Oh, and Salzburg needs some transit build out. The busses won’t scale forever there.

Woohoo! One of the great secrets for public transit is to keep building. If you stop, you lose the people and skills to do a good job building. When a city just keeps going, it builds internal skills and knowledge on running the projects so they get cheaper, faster, and hit fewer problems.