Just power-hungry generals? Anything more to the story?

Und jetzt alle! “Ich hab ne Zwiebel aufm Kopp, ich bin ein Döner 🎺”

Oder vielleicht lieber doch nicht, wenn ich so drüber nachdenke.

176cm would be given as “eins-sechsundsiebzig” in German, literally translating to one six and seventy (yeah it’s backwards), which works exactly like currency.

It is known in Germany, “Eulen nach Athen tragen”. I’ve heard the explanation that the currency of Athens in antiquity had owl on one side.

This one https://www.reppa.de/images/BilderE/eulen2.GIF

That’s great news! Occasionally I browse the NA beers and last week I thought how great it would be to be able to drink a Guinness! Maybe it arrives here sometime.

Yeah that’s not the problem we’re talking about, it’s about still being presented with these 45 years later, with memories from a time when you were a stupid little kid.

Stupid brain.

That’s exactly how they get you, by telling you everybody is influenced (and stupid) but you and them, the smart people.

Yes exactly that! Our languages belong in the same category, west-germanic, so your feeling is justified.

Yeah obviously, don’t you guys have Mitternachtssuppe?

I’m also conflicted on that one, and to further compound yours, I can give you the destruction of the Egyptian museum of Berlin in ww2 as an example of a case where stuff would better have been left in the country of origin, or even in the sand.

I would in principle agree with you, however not about English, mainly because it is now a language of international discourse of any kind, and it thus no longer belongs to the local speakers.

It now has a role Latin had until just a few centuries ago, and extrapolating a bit into the future from that example, will remain quite stable while your dialect, American, Australian, Indian, Jamaican, will change until it becomes another language entirely, no longer mutually intelligible with the other dialects.

If you want to participate in the international dialog however, you will have to learn International, which is now English including the differentiation of the theiy’res, even if your native language is English. Your grand-grandchildren may have to learn English like an Italian in 1800 had to learn Latin if he wanted to join the international discourse.

It’s super interesting to watch this process unfold right now!

That’s actually one of the best ways to learn a language short of full immersion, we call it a tandem!

Allergies. Very popular fabric softeners contain one perfume that makes me asthmatic, every year someone in the office has watched a fabric softener commercial and thinks they are a good idea.

They are not.

Fix the stupid little things first.

Do you have a friend? Ask them if they would stick around for a few while you fix a bunch of stupid little problems you can’t find the motivation to do by yourself. You’ll need them only for structure, or maybe the occasional stimulus “OK, now write that email”, not to do any of it.

Most people can relate. Ask them directly, don’t beat around the bush.

Germany, born early seventies. Background, there was a strong “never again” sentiment after WW2 and to that end we were educated about the horrors of war from an early age. WW2 and the Third Reich was discussed in school and also very present in living memories of grandparents and their friends.

It was made very clear to us where the first nukes would drop (Germany) and who would drop them (Germans). Flexible response was explained to us, the Nato strategy of using nukes first, as well as MAD. We were given estimated times from sirens blaring to explosion. We visited a bunker, and we were imagining nuclear hellscapes and asking ourselves if one should even try to enter a bunker to try to survive. Pershing II were discussed and MIRV, which were new technologies at the time.

Sonic booms from military jets were common, we would respond to that with “Russians are coming”. Not fear, but fatalism was the usual response, and a large number of young men would reject draft and opt for civilian service, wanting to do something productive during service instead of training to get pulverized in the first wave.

Then came Gorbatschow, and Reagan would still pursue his star wars programme, which left us scratching our heads.

There are many factors at play.

Survivability is much higher. A lot of the deaths are attributable to secondary opportunistic infections that are now treatable with antibiotics, which did not exist at the time. We now have a plethora of treatments that did not exist at the time, for example many people were saved from death by covid by giving extra oxygen for just a few days. That would have helped h1n1 victims too.

Not 100% sure if you’ve understood, they should indeed do that, and it’s part of the “system” here. They should however also do that in solidarity with their less-exposed, more vulnerable coworkers, and not have a multitude of unions.

What annoys me is that there are two unions that would strike in turn and grind everything to a halt, the drivers and the service personnels union.

You two are argueing the semantics of ‘well-educated’, the one version meaning to have any higher education, the other to also have a well rounded, universal education. Both are valid definitions.

I share the same sentiment. Grabbed a laptop last week to be able to wfh somewhere else and entertain myself too, and to try if I couldn’t get gaming to work on Linux, and had that feeling of curiosity back about what is new and how everything works. The feeling was lost sometime after Windows 7, and replaced with a slight feeling of dread about where everything got misplaced in this newest shiniest iteration of Windows.

Couldn’t be happier with fiddling with distros!