Wife and I did Dorf Romantik on a recent long train ride and we had a great time. It’s very cozy/calm which helps when you want to stay low energy and not bother your neighbors. And I fully agree with the battery pack idea - it gives me a ton of peace of mind when I’m traveling.

You would really like the Three Body Problem.

Great shot! LA Union Station?

Source? I want to believe this but the first page of my search results is all articles saying that WIC will shut down within days and SNAP is unlikely to last much more than a month.

The Surviving Mars OST is spectacular, though the gameplay is just good.

New construction sometimes doesn’t even help, when developers knocks down an old affordable 12 unit apartment building and build a luxury 36 unit building, you’ve created -12 units of affordable housing.

The argument I hear against this is that the 36 people who move into the luxury apartments moved from somewhere, and so 36 other apartments become available. The reduced demand for the vacated apartments then drives their prices down.

Of course, housing as a market is super distorted for a bunch of reasons so this effect is muddled. But I think it would be a net negative to fully disregard supply and demand in a market-based economy and preserve 12 affordable units in favor of 36 luxury ones.

Largely agree with all your other points though.

Three of the six currently operating maglevs are in communist china

Not a huge fan of the Israel situation but it does seem like they often stay out at the US’s request:

During the 1990–1991 Gulf War, Iraq carried out a missile campaign against Israel, in which it launched 42 modified Scud missiles (designated Al-Hussein) at Israeli cities with the strategic objective of provoking Israel into launching retaliatory attacks and potentially jeopardizing the multinational coalition formed by the United States against Iraq, which had full backing and extensive contributions from other Muslim-majority states; Israel did not respond to the Iraqi missile attacks due to American pressure, and Iraq failed to gather support for its occupation of Kuwait.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq–Israel_relations

DW news (dw.com) is pretty good and not too sensational. They’re like German PBS with a whole English side of the site.

I don’t intend to ever own bitcoin, but “the government called 1000 australians and asked whether they use a soon-to-be-taxed, questionably-illegal currency, and most people said no” is some pretty poor science. Why is this the top post in the “Science” community of the science-focused Lemmy instance?