Indeed. My girlfriend lives there, last time I was over we went to the big demonstration against mass tourism. I felt a bit sick at the airport listening to all the north European pensioners talking about how they rent a place year round for 800€/month just to spend the odd week now and then there. While many locals working in tourism make minimum wage, around 1300€/month I believe.

I know the Finnish National Library acquires and files a copy of every newspaper or magazine issue released in Finland, and many Finnish language ones released outside Finland. Other countries probably have something similar.

I realize I’m very privileged. If I’m working on an issue for a whole day or a half day, everything I do during that day is part of the solution and will be billed to the customer (and I’ll be paid for by my employer too). If that includes taking a nap, so be it. Results are what matter, as it should be. If someone ever starts saying I’m taking too long to do something I may consider changing my ways.

You’re further proving that you missed the point.

I’m a reserve officer, trust me I have some idea. Also, you’re missing the point by quite a margin.

The military doesn’t attract the brightest minds.

Reminds me of a joke that did the rounds shortly after Finland joined Nato.

Finnish general: “You know, it’s difficult, we have mandatory military service, but around 15% are unfit for service”

Other Nato generals: “That 15% is where we have to recruit from”

Here in Finland, since their return in 2013, Burger King has sought to differentiate from other chains by having self serve drinks and unlimited refills.

Two screens and a laptop screen, could find use for more. I find myself shuffling things around depending on what I need, but most commonly I have the left screen split between notepad++ on one side for any notes keeping, and either documentation I’m reading, documentation I’m writing, a browser I’m using, or something such. Whenever I need to compare text files, notepad++ gets to take the whole screen.

On the middle screen I usually have the remote desktop or VM I’m working on at the time.

Right (laptop screen) is usually reserved for Outlook and Teams.

I think it was sarcasm.

This takes me back to the era when every other online store was selling DVD-gramophones.

I debated whether I should say NA or American, but I figured I don’t know what Canadians use, so there we go. Anyway, nice to see that debate is still alive and healthy. I gave up on it ~20 or so years ago. Writing unitedstatesman was exhausting after a while :)

Not a native English speaker, but my hunch is, soccer will almost certainly be understood. Also it will identify you as American.

Critical mass. When it has been the default way to message anyone and everyone for over a decade, it’s pretty difficult to start converting everyone and their literal grandmother to start adopting something else. I understand it doesn’t enjoy quite the same status in the US though.

I cannot remember when or where I heard or read about this, so take it with a grain of salt. But I recall hearing something about the people who had to remove the bodies from trucks where people had been gassed with CO2 finding the corpses so gruesome and agonising, as opposed to more peaceful looking bodies of people killed with other gases, that they stopped using it. Presumably the difference was because of how slow or quick the death was.

I doubt they would have cared the tiniest bit later on when it was other concentration camp victims who had to clear the bodies.

Very glad I saw this. I’ve been getting increasingly fed up with Google Maps. Their map in my area is full of annoying errors, such as routing you through roads that haven’t existed for a decade, or along private roads that are not open to the public. And no matter how many times I report them, nothing ever gets fixed. Going to give OSM a try and hopefully make the switch for good. Already saw that the map in my area is in much better shape than Google’s.

EA Origin, or possibly whatever they had before it, in Finnish used to have a button for “firewood outdoors”