Karto

It didn't freeze the Emacs of the guy writing it :-D 1 point for Emacs !

Friends of mine, having romantic dinner on their terrace, had bird shot land into their dinner plates. Bird shot is so small, it's no more deadly than raindrops when it falls back down, but it's a startling seasoning for a nice dish. The bird hunter who'd shot was in sight, they caught up with him, and he just didn't deem it to be a problem...

That's a beautiful excerpt, thank you. Barnum effect didn't wait for Barnum.

It's overall quite true. But I found that the smaller stores, that live in the shadows of a larger one, do still offer the actual bargains. For example, in Emmaüs Tarare, a smaller city 30 min away from Lyon, you still find solid furniture that can be up to 4 or 5 times cheaper than flimsier pieces in Emmaüs Lyon. I don't quite know what the dynamics are, here.

This post reminds me of the book : Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness, by David A. Treleaven. It explains how incompetent meditation can awaken and reinforce trauma, while a competently handled meditation can be part of the toolbox to heal it.

Nothing unusual. Just an answer to the previous comment, that felt thrown over one's shoulder : a whole continent won't switch its energy sources in a couple of days.

It's just about 22h00 here, and -6°C outside the window. Spring has not started...

My wrong, I meant the two different non-english-like consonants.

French guy here, thanking panick21_ for answering an irritating post with a cool head :D

I had a similar experience in spite of not needing any R, living and working in several English speaking countries. My name is Mathias, and the variety of ways English speakers called me was a proper issue, in the sense that I sometimes didn't even recognize that somebody was talking about me, or calling me across a workshop. When I started introducing myself as "Matt", all became easy. Never had this issue with pretty much any other culture I worked with :D (all kinds of Europeans and Arabs mainly)

If it's about Rs, I worked on an oil rig with a Mexican guy named Javier. The American OIM had such hard time telling "Javier" (with the two different gutturals) on the tannoy, Javier got called "George" for the rest of our stay.

This wasn't exactly a FPTP situation. First, the presidential election spans over two rounds. Second, about a month later, the legislative elections (two rounds also) were won too with a proper tsunami (350 out of 577 seats, providing a governing majority).

When he won the presidential election, everybody thought it was no big deal, as he hadn't shown a single viable candidate to staff any of the 577 seats in the parliament, without which he couldn't wield any real structural power. But he used that weakness as a strength. He hired inexperienced people from all regular ways of life, young and shiny. To the voting public, the message was "you wanted neither left nor right ? Here you go, vote for the almost normal people I'm offering you." This turned into a huge strength, as once in office these inexperienced MP simply followed the group leader, who, you guessed it, was a seasoned politician from olden, and made the parliament a transparent corridor for the presidential power for quite some time.

The public pitch was along the "climb over the left/right stalemate and go forward". But the mechanics, besides good ties with the corporate world, were a masterpiece of perfect timing for every action along the campaign, and then for the legislative elections. In those days I was admiring Macron like you would admire a talented enemy general.

The top line, "Not Left. Not Right. Forward." kind of reminds me of Macron's "En Marche" ("Let's Go") that took over France in a storm, taking over the presidency AND the parliament only one year after its foundation, with very few previously known political figures in its ranks.

The whole thing looked like doing management rather than politics, and offered an alternative to fed-up voters who didn't dare turn to the usual far-right and far-left "protest votes".

Headed with a nimble tactical vision, the formula was extremely efficient... for one mandate.

Same here. After, like every little French boy, having been fed with Tintin and Asterix in my baby bottle, much of the more modern work made me feel like the author was not straight to the point enough, wasting my attention with his uncertain and meandering process of drawing. It took a lot of time to appreciate anything else and stop feeling like it's all amateurish sketching.

Not an overlay, but side by side views are shown, when scrolling down enough, in the French article linked by @thinkingremote : https://www.inrap.fr/la-plus-ancienne-carte-d-europe-15574#

This map is impressively detailed and accurate. When you look at a small village-sized area that you know today, you can often recognize the features on the Cassini map (no always though ; many hills were drawn as they appeared from afar, many of the tiniest locations were marked upon hearing word of them by locals).

But it gets even more impressive when you know what the times were like when this map was made.

Neighbouring valleys hosted different languages that sometimes were not intelligible to each other.

In places, local people didn't have a name for the prominent mountain they grew up and spent their life under.

One of Cassini's young cartographers was notoriously killed by villagers who put an axe in his head, because pointing his mysterious brass and glass instruments at mountains and bell towers made them be sure he was a bad wizard.

Those were the times. And this is the map !

I work with several professional cartographers here in France. All of them have several large printed maps in their offices, just for the beauty of them. I don't know of one who does not have a Cassini map along, somewhere on an office wall.

That makes sense. Then there is still the problem of the cold tarmac, on which summer tyres are said to have poor grip, but that may not be as obvious to the average commuter as a road turned to thick white with two icy ruts to follow. And anyway I'm getting off topic regarding salt :)

Many mountainous regions across Europe too, like the French region where I live. Tyres are potentially part of any routine police check. The region is a rather poor one, and many roads are simply not salted at all. With proper winter tyres (and AWD helps too, but it's not as important as tyres), you get through, albeit sometimes with poor elegance.

The amount of snow we get is never anywhere close to those American phenomena I see sometimes in the news, where snow gets half way up your front doors nearly overnight. Seeing that, I'm surprised to read that most people don't use snow tyres in such places : it feels like going against common sense even on an purely individual level.

And if you talk about Germany, there's a whole museum dedicated to those in Bonn. The "Artihmeum". In the city center, by the university. It's huge, fascinating, and I believe I was the only person inside when I visited last year... They even let you use some of the originals.

https://www.arithmeum.uni-bonn.de/

Come to Europe, masons' ghosts are all over... I used to live cheaply in a simple downtown appartment in a mediterranean city. Year carved in stone : 1724.

Or more likely because very young dogs would grow some basic traits of character while influenced by the behavior that their parents exhibit in front of them.

Yes, one h is hidden inside m... Ending up with energy = something * h^2 actually makes the relationship show the same face as the one for capacitors, where energy = something * v^2.

If I think straight, the initial potential energy in a column of liquid would be the integration of mgh (actually integration of density * g * section * height), therefore mgh/2 at the beginning of the situation. Or said intuitively : the center of gravity of the column at half its height.

But obviously, even with this 1/2, your relation after dividing between two tanks still holds. :)

And that's what has been going on for a few days inside Europe now. Airlines flying empty or near empty planes to keep their slots. The European Commission was meant to make a move about that, I don't know if that's been done already or not.

Beside the discussable mortality rate among healthy adults, and beside surving with permanent lung damage, many people who are 30-40 have kids who are 0-10. Things take a whole new dimension there.

It might be a stunt, but stuff like that happens. Many years ago I used to work for a large European company that ran a booking system for several hundreds of airlines. The system was used as a back-end by more than one famous online booking site. Currency rates were updated automatically. Once, on a new year's eve, at midnight, a glitch slipped into the Canadian dollar conversion rate, setting 1 CAD to 0 EUR. All of a sudden, all Air Canada flights were for free for European customers, at what might be the worst time of the year : "- so, this year's resolution : we take time to travel. - hey look honey, Canada looks cheap. - deal done, book right away, and let's open one more bottle of champagne !" I don't know how many AC flights were booked before someone realized and an on-call guy fixed the conversion rate. However, I know that all those free bookings remained valid, and were offered by my company who payed all of it directly to Air Canada.

Ticks spread when there are host mammals, nearly regardless of vegetation height.

I'm with you on the dead ecosystem thing. Besides the vegetable patch, my garden is deliberately a happy self-regulated mess of grass and wild strawberries, trees and bushes, planted flowers and all sorts of plants and mushrooms. I only remove the thorns, and walk though with a scythe twice a year (one tough enough to cut the smaller saplings). It's quite rewarding to watch the birds, small mammals and amphibians that thrive there, and a delight for my young daughter. It is quite a surprise to hear that I'd have trouble doing that in the land of the free. Thank you for the insight !

I'm a bit out of the subject, but are you telling that in the US you're not free to grow vegetation on your yard however you like ?

The battle of Alesia took place several centuries before anyone heard about the Franks. The "us" the OP is referring to, is the Gauls.

I won't argue with the essence of your point though, although, for what I know, much of the nobility up to the 1800's was of Frankish descent, while Gallo-roman blood dominated among the commoners. So some heritage was there indeed.

Reduce a complex equation to only two variables ? But that's no the point : expecting fairness isn't practical anyway. :) I'd bet the practical response will be people stretching their car's lifespans way beyond reasonable, pushing them to new extremes of decrepitude and unsafety. There's also no police anyway to keep that in check.

6000 Euro tax for a 15000 euro car. I'd call it significant enough and ridiculous enough to be more than mere propaganda. But you're right, the figures I had in the mind were for the Jimny, not the Vitara. Over 10000 tax for a car that's less than 20000 euro.