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

Apparently there are some Cherry MX sets from 30 years ago that are still working today. So I guess part of it is longevity, part nostalgia.

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.

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.

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.

Roses are red

Violets are blue

Poetry is hard

Bacon.

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.

Batteries, energy, computer vision, deep learning, and crash safety. I’m most excited about better and better virtual human body models reflecting actual human sizes (male, female, adult, children, obese, average sized…) being released for testing, instead of the old default-male crash dummy.

Having said all that, I only use my car on holidays. I bike to work and prefer to take long distance trains for work related trips. So, yeah, fuck cars and fuck ever expanding roads. Streets are for humans, not for cars and parking.

My mother was a journalist, her heyday was in the 80s-early 00s, she covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as the wars in the former Yugoslavia. We had a long phone call last weekend where we ended up talking about Twitter, the online service that changed journalism. I explained to her that the current owner put a foot in his mouth and was forced to buy it at a higher price than the initial valuation while grumbling that it was not turning profit, she guffawed at this. She said, “When has the media ever made profit??”

The only difference between old media and new online media is that online media also sell user data to make more revenue (along with old time subscription models and selling ad spaces), and even with this they’re still not making profit.

Older companies are not stifling innovation the way you think they’re doing, in fact, I think there are fascinating research being done these days. As for the fact that their CEOs are not on Twitter, isn’t that a good thing? Would you want the CEO of a company to tweet something idiotic at 4 in the morning, wreaking havoc on stock prices and driving the company into firefighting mode, detracting energy from other parts of work?

I don’t disagree with you that old-world car companies have corrupt practices, but this is not why Tesla is so popular. Tesla is popular because they make luxury cars that feel fun and because Elon used to be so ebullient and good at PR.

As for Tesla being better, how? The company is just as corrupt and their R&D into self driving cars is a bit behind competitors