Didn’t the housing crisis start with bad policies and market deregulations? I’m not sure which government undid which regulations though

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

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.

Here’s another “insider’s insight”: The car industry is a tough business. The profit margin is not like selling bottled water, especially when you consider overheads in R&D and the regulation compliant measures they have to adhere to, to sell in the German/EU market. Cars sold in the US are cheaper to produce because they go through much, much less vigorous testing, but then they are loaded with stupid add-ons (screens behind each seat, more luxurious user interface, better speaker+subwoofer combos, etc)

I saw someone starting this thought exercise just yesterday - imagine Al Gore became president, say for two terms. Then the boat swung back into two terms of McCain, followed by Obama. No Iraq war. No Benghazi. Possibly no 2006 Housing Crisis. Maybe Covid would still have happened. But anyway, wouldn’t that have been a much happier timeline?

Back to no Iraq War, maybe Saddam would have gotten toppled over locally. The Arab Spring would still have happened, but then also maybe no ISIS?

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

In Germany: Big car manufacturers do have round-table sessions where they share research informations with each other. However, they do not co-ordinate pricing.

When you feel like car manufacturers release models with similar specs within a short time frame, this could be why.

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.

Now they’re researching a time machine to try to create a conundrum where Musk simultaneously buys Twitter, runs it to the ground, but then in the past re-buys it from himself after he runs it to the ground.

Old fashioned as I am, in my head Facebook is still an online forum/social network/social gaming site like MySpace, Orkut, Friendster and that ilk. And Google is a search engine. But you’re right. Of course they’re new media.

Here’s my veeery slight pushback, Youtube doesn’t seem to be that profitable for Alphabet and Facebook is pushing the Metaverse because they think they might need a turn left and start selling hard products (like VR headsets) to keep engagement. Media is tough business.

I think you’re both on the same side of things but had a comm glitch on the word “fresh”. You think of fresh as being totally unprocessed, Wols think of fresh as being minimally processed (I believe they count whole grains, legumes, and dried vegetables as fresh)

But they’re dried grapes and mostly without added sugar. We shouldn’t need to live in a world where raisins are sold “now with less sugar”. Humans spent hundreds of years cultivating eating grapes to be as sweet as they are…