Years of competent and cooperative occupation? 5? Thats how long it took in Germany.

I'm having flashbacks to Iraq, or rather talking to Americans about the thing when they were all gung-ho about it. "It's going to be just like Germany!" is what you always say, completely ignoring that Germany had a democratic tradition, proper civil society, well-educated population able to re-industrialise in a couple of years, Universities that pre-date Columbus, and in many ways created those very values you claim you instilled. Do I have to remind you of the US's domestic Apartheid policies at that point in time gods fucking thanks you didn't instil shit.

Also the occupation of Germany lasted 45 years (1945-1990) but that's a technicality.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
  But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
  And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”—
       Merely this and nothing more.

In case anyone is curious, there's also Aramand Zorn, SPD (just like Diaby), Awet Tesfaiesus, Greens, and Harald Weyel, AfD, of all parties. Also happens to be the only native-born German.

Diaby is member of the SPD, their left wing on top of that which makes him a target for Nazis in the first place and his skin colour of course isn't helping. Neither is his constituency being in the east though do note that he didn't get into the Bundestag over the party list, he won a FPTP seat.

Do you currently spend your day celebrating revolting against even a fraction of the BS you're exposed to? Not willing to even protest against the various injustices in your country, but your right to be a mall ninja, that is where you draw the line?

Lay down your neckbeard, trenchcoat, fedora, and katana, good sir, and have some perspective. Like, arm the homeless or something.

Actually American stuff is illegal in the EU, preservatives, bleaches, dyes, whatnot. What's allowed to be called what will differ from country to country and you are not the biggest bread snobs, you're just the most vocally snobbish.

In Germany there's Toastbrot, actual bread though noone in their right mind would eat it without toasting first, then bigger and thicker and fluffier slices which are considered an "American-style" style of toast (again: don't eat them raw ewww) but as said not the real deal. Those latter ones may or may not be legally bread, it's usually hidden in the fine print while the big print is "sandwich slices" or something. Thing is the stuff needs to be made from 90% flour, sugar+fat together max 10%, and if you want something that's recognisable to Americans as bread you need to blow that limit.

Oh and all are bound to use a proper sourdough process, over-engineered as it may be in an industrial setting they're giving the dough enough time to actually pre-digest itself.

15cm is still 3cm more than what's allowed to carry without good reason. Replica or sharp doesn't matter in this context because the question isn't whether you could hurt someone but whether the public might worry you're going to hurt someone. You could reasonably argue that it has toy colours and therefore doesn't count as replica but looking at the image you're relying a lot on goodwill, there.

Also, a particularly stiff twig is a blunt weapon. You're not supposed to run around with broomsticks if you're not doing any actual sweeping, either. Or hang out in an dim underpass with baseball bats unless you're an actual baseball player and are waiting for the train to your game or something.

That's way longer. 20cm is the average blade length for chef's knives. Over here in Germany, with way more liberal knife laws: Legal to own (duh) but also very much not legal to carry much less wield in public unless you have a good reason -- like actually preparing food in public. You can transport that kind of thing without fanfare but transporting very much involves not having it at the ready.

Four months are still completely overkill, though. Impounding and maybe a week's worth of fine (one day of disposable income == one day in prison here) if he was being stupid and careless but non-aggressive. Four months go way beyond "let this be a lesson" territory and very much into "the state is nuts and doesn't make sense". If you're feeling poetic, how about some social hours in a charity store sorting donated fidget spinners.

I'm not sure how they're doing it but in Germany all those PET bottles go into a centrally-managed recycling stream (because 25ct deposit) and I bet they have some technical norms around that kind of stuff. The bottles are all crushed to save space, incl. the caps, which at least in the case of the water bottle next to me is HDPE. Judging by the haptics the label is PET, a flimsy banderole glued (fused?) on at the seam.

Either they're doing it chemically by breaking up the PET and then fishing out the rest from the soup (is that possible?) or what would also work I guess is shredding and mechanical sorting -- the label is flimsy, the bottle always transparent, the cap never transparent. Such stuff.

bamboo or metal straws

Silicone. Silicone is the perfect straw material. Bamboo I guess works for disposable ones but I've never used one. Definitely too short for 1.5l bottles though.

There was no infrastructure to find these kinds of opportunities unless you knew a guy who knew a guy. The likes of airbnb were what enabled the spread of couchsurfing in places you did not have a prior connection to in the first place. Then bread and breakfasts and smaller hotels started getting onto the platform as it was a way for them to get customers, not having the name recognition and own infrastructure that big hotel chains have. Then, years later, came the fucks buying up multiple apartments to turn them into short-term rentals.

I'll readily blame airbnb for not nipping that behaviour in the bud themselves but also that's just not how VC investment works, they had no chance at that point. I'm generally not a fan of how Silicon Valley companies act regarding regulations but unlike e.g. uber airbnb hasn't been trying to skirt them and find loopholes left and right, only thing they've been whinging about, particularly in Berlin, is that the administration doesn't have its IT shit together and is generally slow, and pointed to Hamburg of all places as something to imitate. Very smart of them: "You're worse than Hamburg" is one of the few viable ways to motivate Berliners to do anything. The other is to dangle VIP tickets to Berghain in front of their noses.

I think that's mostly UK and France. As in: I have an Opinel lying around here, perfectly legal to carry in any situation as long as it's not a protest or such, it's a French knife, lots of tradition behind it... and it's illegal in France.

Rules in Germany are quite simple: If the blade is longer than IIRC 14cm (palm of your hand), or it is a locking blade that's designed to be opened with one hand, you need a good reason to carry it. Like, walking on the street towards the forest with an axe over your shoulder is fine because you have a proper reason, into a mall, not so much. Butterflies and some other one-handed opening mechanisms popular with notorious people are outlawed. Fixed blades with certain features, say, guards or more than one edge, are rightly classed as bladed weapons which you generally need to keep at home. Everything else is a tool you can EDC, and the only thing you need to buy a sword is your ID to show that you're 18.

The whole thing is about bottle caps found on beaches. I assume people just lose track of them, you might put it down on your beach towel and then something moves and a second later it's in the sand getting buried.

Now I unscrew the cap with one hand, but I still have to hold the cap so it’s out of the way.

They latch so they're out of the way. If they don't then either they do and you didn't notice, or you came across one of the very early iterations which won't make the cut when it comes to regular use because everyone hates them.

Also be sure to engage basic common sense and turn the bottle to the side so you don't hit your nose.

I’m used to taking the cap off

And people were used to pull-tabs. Which btw are a hygienically cleaner solution as the tab doesn't end up getting dunked into the beverage.

All in all, I'm all in favour to enrich Euro-English with the idiom "To bump one's nose to spite Berlaymont".

And for the folks who are saying “wHy n0t rUst”, you can always show me the (rust) code.

https://github.com/servo/servo

I really wish they would publish flatpaks because I can't be arsed to either build the thing or get a non-standard precompiled binary to run on nixos.

Over here in Germany, they ran against a brick wall:

• Taxi apps already existed. Pioneers were taxi.eu, where a consortium of local dispatchers plain and simply introduced another way to access their services, and what's now called Free Now, circumventing the old dispatchers, directly connecting clients and individual, licensed, taxi drivers. Both predate uber's founding, and definitely uber's introduction into the market here.
• Regulations exist. Taxis are classed as public transport, prices are regulated, no congestion pricing, no not taking on a passenger to the outskirts because you wouldn't get a return fare, no nothing. On the flipside you need a license so that there's few enough taxis around for every driver to still be able to make a living. Uber didn't care a bit about that kind of stuff, bringing us to
• Regulations are enforced. Drivers taking uber fares without both taxi and passenger transport license were looking at court orders giving slaps on the wrist, but also threatening 1000 Euro fines for every subsequent passenger transported without proper licensing.

Oh:

• Public transport is a thing. Most trips are covered by buses, metros, etc, more rural areas by collect taxis. Needing to hail an individual one is very rare, I think most of their fares are from people with too much money on hand. Also if you need to hail that taxi chances are your health insurance is going to cover the cost they prefer you hauling your broken leg to the doctor with a taxi, transport ambulances are more expensive and it's not like you need medical supervision on the trip, or the thing would need to accommodate a wheelchair or such.

what even is ONE positive out of Airbnb?

It enables random Joes with an extra room or even couch or away for a while to actually find someone to take up their offer. Airbnb was one of the many couchsurfing platforms back in the days, one that managed to have global appeal and thus rushed ahead, and back in the days the offers were indeed of the bed and breakfast type at most. More commonly, "yeah we have a convertible couch and yep there's some cheerios if you want". Or even "hey we have a farm and there's hay in the barn to sleep on there's going to be potatoes, onions, eggs and ham for breakfast". That's good allocation of resources, and the likes of airbnb help using those resources more efficiently.

Investment sharks swooping in has been regrettable, but the only reason they were able to was because cities etc. had insufficient regulations. They didn't bother to before because the micro-hotel business was negligible and didn't have any noticeable market impact, now it does and thus they need to regulate.

And at least the Berlin regulations are furnished precisely to bring these kinds of platforms back to their original purpose: You can either yourself live in the apartment while the guest is there, or you can restrict your rental to a couple of weeks per year, if you don't, you need a hotel license. And there's no hotel licenses to be had for apartments in a residential zone in a housing crisis. If you're trying to skirt those regulations you'll soon find out that finance ministries in Germany have their own police forces. Especially in Berlin you have literally the whole population to deal with, a population which carried a referendum to socialise landlords owning more than 1000 apartments, they are going to rat you out.

The issue here isn't the idea of micro rentals, those have existed since time immemorial, the issue is capital capturing politics to avoid having proper regulation put into place so that they can exploit market failure.

Wait since when is mithril a thing in DF. Adamantine would certainly be a bad idea because crutches are bound to be blunt damage and adamantine (inspired by mithril) has about the density of cork. For blunt weapons you want gold or platinum, but you'd need to edit the game files or farm moods. Silver is the next best thing that can be done without cheesing. Adamantine is for armor and edge weapons.

The unreasonable effectiveness of crutches might be due to the same factor as the unreasonable effectiveness of pickaxes: Those use the mining skill for damage bonuses, crutches might use crutch-walker you'd have to test that. In any case wielding an axe one-handed is probably not a good idea, there's even dorfs that aren't tall enough to even wield them one-handed and the ones large enough to do so will still be way better at it with two hands.

Germany: just do what the rest of the west (and China) does and bribe the Canadian government to hand over raw resources to you.

Exactly what we're doing. Also Namibia, besides having (as Canada) excellent conditions for renewable energy, being (as Canada) a proper democracy, they're also an ex-colony so we're using the opportunity to help bootstrap their local energy infrastructure to industrialised levels (it's currently hit and miss), also, they'll have absolute energy independence. Also stuff like Africa's first hydrogen-based steel furnance. Which would make Namibia a more developed economy than Australia who somehow are still exporting raw ore.

In reality, Germany became entirely dependent on Russian gas, oil and coal.

For all that talk of dependency preciously little happened when Russia closed the valves. There's press reports about BASF going into gas saving mode but that's a bit misleading -- actual gas saving mode would be to change their processes on a fundamental level (they have plans and infrastructure for that), what they did do is to use the flexibility in their standard processes to not rely on gas as precursor where there's more readily available options -- as they've been doing for literal decades, depending on market prices they're using more of this, or more of that. They pulled a lever over to one side, they didn't build a whole new set of levers to pull.

Germany ended up having more gas reserves at the end of the winter than usual because people were quite mindful when heating their homes, mindful as in "it doesn't need to be t-shirt temperature in here, 20C suffices", not as in "let's heat our homes like English pensioners". Gas prices actually sunk, presumably due to lower demand companies invested in things like waste heat recycling.

The whole concept of Wandel durch Handel relied on the assumption that economical entanglement makes war ruinous, and thus states are heavily disincentivised to be belligerent. You can now interpret that in two ways: a) It didn't stop Russia, therefore, it failed or b) it succeeded in ruining Russia's economy because all their what ball bearing companies went belly-up during entanglement, German ball bearings being cheaper (not necessarily unit price, you also have to take lifetime, service costs etc. into account) and now they have severe shortages (that's simplifying quite a bit but that's the net effect).

In the end there's only one thing to take away: Policy can't influence non-rational actors. All you can ensure is that if an actor becomes irrational they're shooting themselves in the foot.

About 8% in 2022, under 30yold 12.6%, under 20yold 17.9%, over 60yold 2%.

There doesn't seem to be an official quota, at least I couldn't find anything concrete. Should be state law and that's generally easy to find. OTOH there's a literal fuckton of organisations involved running Kindergarten, many are independent associations, others are run by churches or municipalities, all of those may have their official or unofficial guidelines.

(For the Americans: Kindergarten is not part of the school system over here y'all are misusing the term. Kindergarten is where you develop motor skills (and other things) through play, school is where you then learn to write. Definitely no home-work. Generally not mandatory though some states have introduced mandatory developmental tests so that kids who lag behind in some areas can get that fixed by professionals (minimum 3 years education) before school starts so they don't start their school career at a disadvantage)

The push seems to come largely from academia and professional organisations. Here's a nice, long interview in a professional publication from 2013, I recommend reading the whole thing but this strikes me:

In our representative study [...] 40% of parents, 43% of daycare centre managers and 48% of intendants stated that they - more or less intensively - had thought about the risk of abuse by an educator.
Remarkably, however, these survey groups also showed a very high level of approval towards men in daycare centres. In our study, around 90% of parents, daycare centre managers and intendants consider it important that children are cared for by male professionals.

90% is rather significant, I'd be interested in numbers from other countries. It's more than enough so that you don't need advocacy to get things started because practically everyone already acknowledges that it's an issue that needs solving, all that was apparently necessary is for someone to sit down and develop ready-made strategies regarding getting men into the profession, allaying fears, making sure that organisational structures make it harder, not easier, for abusers, etc. That seems to be mostly "have them be democratic and not hierarchical", which is of course a good idea in general.