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I guess the parent commenter meant to say hydraulic limes are inferior in terms of breathability compared to hydrated lime. Which is entirely correct.
As always, it's a trade-off. Anecdotally, we did the base plaster layer on our straw bale house using hydrated lime for better breathability. We'll probably make the top coat slightly hydraulic using trass.
One book I like is "Building with straw bales" [0], by Barbara Jones. It's mostly very practical. Reassuring also when it comes to using a less usual building technique. A tad bit to the eco hippie side for my taste, but only in minor details. All the important bits are very much grounded in sound practice.
If you want to gather practical experience, come help me fiddle with our straw bale house next spring or summer :-)
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23281280-building-with-s...
Knowledge of "Roman cement" roughly speaking was never really lost.
How do you think the quay walls in medieval Dutch and Flemish harbours were built? The mortar was made with Trass [0], a natural puzzolanic from the Eifel, transported along the Rhine.
"Roman cement", also known as hydraulic lime [1] mortar, was in widespread active mainstream use in many places in Europe until the 1920's, and in some the 1930's. In Latvia for example, large scale Roman cement production only came to an end with the second world war flooding specific quarries.
The main problem with these hydraulic cements is they cure/set much more slowly. That's very much guaranteed to limit their use in speed focused modern construction.
There's still a market for hydraulic lime mortars. There's even a euro norm for it, EN-459. These products have excellent breathability and moisture resistance properties. The entire field is seeing a revival in monument restauration and ecological construction. Most straw bale construction in Europe for example is plastered using hydraulic lime plasters.
Some interesting products:
- natural hydraulic limes (NHL), like Saint-Astier from France
- formulated/artifical hydraulic limes (HL), often using blast furnace fly ash
- natural puzzolanic additives, like trass from the volcanic Eifel, has been used continuously since the Roman era!
This is getting fairly off topic, but since you ask... My impressions about people born in Latvia post-1991 are numerous, but obviously anecdotal:
- Most native Latvian language speakers born in Latvia post-1991 will have low or non-existent Russian language skills, especially in the west (Kurzeme) or north. Very few native Russian speakers there. The situation in and around Riga is a little bit different. Try getting a customer-facing job in the private sector around Riga if you don't speak any Russian...
My significant other is young and speaks Russian fluently by accident. Native Latvian language, but raised in a "Khrushchevka" (Soviet apartment block) full of native Russian speaking families. Playing with the other kids meant learning Russian...
- Very very large differences amongst native Russian speaking youths in Latvia's three largest cities. A significant number hardly speak any Latvian. I've asked kids for directions that had trouble finding the words for "left" or "right". Which is somewhat surprising, given that officially, they're taking a significant part of their school in Latvian. Another group speaks both languages fluently. I've had chats over lunch with people I could hardly detect their native Russian background.
- Surprisingly, _a lot_ of young people in both groups speak abysmally bad English too.
If language fluency would be the most important criterium - which it isn't-, the Dutch speaking 60% of Belgium are an even more logical choice. They're buried in that ranking below the less stellar English in the French speaking part of Belgium.
Flemish people might be an even more logical choice for the EU. Similar English, Dutch and basic German fluency, plus with most uni educated people there, pretty decent French.
And if you recruit me, you'll get fluent Latvian on top :-)
In case of the land locked EU micro states, a blockade would be an obvious way.
Rather surprisingly, I can't seem to find a lot of historical examples of, say, German trade unions completely blocking Liechtenstein, demanding a fairer taxation system.
This does hit home. My significant other got a 600€/month pre-tax raise. Her net raise? 120€. She could actually go work 80% and hardly lose anything at all.
I'd say that depends on whether he wants his party to have official public mandates. Those certainly help, but they're not always strictly necessary when one's goal is to influence the political discourse...
Reminds me of the remarkably little-known AlgoRythmics sorting dances [0].
Because making even two pebbles fight is their business model.
From the archived ramenporn reddit comment thread at [0]:
This must be incredibly stressful so for your sake I hope you sort it out quickly... but for the world's sake, I hope you fail and make the problem worse before jumping ship followed by every other engineer, leaving it to Zuckerberg to fix himself. But I still hope it's not too stressful for you!
The whistleblower said she wanted to fix Facebook.
Mission accomplished, I'd say. For now at least.
What about VAT then? Value added tax as levied in the EU is not a sales tax. It's also a very popular fraud mechanism...
There's a different thing for that: tabulatures.
Tabulatures come with their own limitations though. They're mostly a far less portable way to express western music. They also lose a lot of meaning. Is a note part of a particular chord or melody line? A lot of this is not visible in tabulatures.
Bare necessities inflation in energy and food. If this is anything more than a post-covid19 curve spike, be prepared for significant social unrest where many live hand to mouth.
First home? 3% real estate transaction tax, or 1% if renovating up to high energy savings specs.
Any other home? 12% real estate transaction tax.
That's roughly how it works in the Flanders region of Belgium from 2022.
Lots of factors could be at play indeed. I'm certainly not an expert, but if I read correctly, the man has disbanded parliament and ruled by decree since two months, publicly announcing his disregard for the constitution. To me, that does not count as democratic anymore.
Not anymore unfortunately [0].
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/tunisians-protest-again...
One of the only species of birds known to be capable of transatlantic flight, and also credibly thought to regularly making the crossing [0] is the magnificent frigate bird [1]. The bird has a super interesting capability of flying on a single half of the brain. Remarkably similar to single slower core operation of a computer... [2]
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274193260_Has_the_m...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificent_frigatebird
[2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2016.008...
I certainly and sincerely agree with you about demands for budget efficiency and transparency.
[...] you only need to make like $250k total. It's a good amount, sure, but if you compare cost of living... it's still hard to live on.
This reminds me of the famous "Let them eat cake" [0] by queen Marie-Antoinette.
A statistical point of comparison.
California median gross individual income is under $64k, or $78k [1] household income. "Easy to live on" scales superlinearly from there, so by significantly more than 3.2 or 3.9 times respectively.
Two anecdotal points of comparison.
I enjoy a comfortable life on 1/6 of that threshold amount pre-tax, albeit in a HCOL western European city. My marginal tax rate is... 53.5%, not including real estate ownership tax, and some other minor taxation.
And though it may surprise you, friends of mine living in the very LCOL eastern European countryside live on a 6k€ pretax income. 6k€ a year that is. With a family of four, soon five. They consider their living conditions comfortable and wouldn't want to change them for the world. Do mind this is 40 times less than the "hard to live on".
A recommendation
Please grow your awareness of the material situation of others. Being more anchored in reality will benefit you.
That sounds like something different where the answer is not so clear-cut.
I've tried to rephrase the wording of the ethical dilemma I came up with to make it more neutral:
Imagine there's two covid patients coming into hospital at the same time: one vaccinated, one not. Both are in need of the same care, with the same urgency. Only one hospital bed is available. Which, if any, of these patients should receive priority in treatment?
Let's word this more sharply.
Hospital capacity being limited, should ill vaccine refusers be getting priority as they are getting right now?
What if you get super unlucky, and you get contaminated and severely ill despite vaccination? Will they kick an unvaccinated covid patient from the one respirator?
wisible!
Sowwy, couldn't wesist!
First, in my mind the difference between reddit, FB, twitter, HN, forums, etc is really just configuration.
The big boys are dopamine reinforced network effects incorporated by means of software tech. So forget about aiming for Homer Simpson.
You'll have to be happy with a small, but productive minority. Enough valuable people would rather die than use FB for niche purpose X. Start by convincing them...
Therapy.
Also, one short term hack I haven't seen explicitly mentioned yet. Try to enjoy a healthier kind of buying: buy your house piece by piece. In other words, pay off your mortgage early. If you can direct some of your impulse buying towards early mortgage repayment like that, that would be a win!
Try to experience the process of increasing your ownership as close to your senses as possible:
- Can you make the repayments cash transactions instead of online?
- Make these early repayments as frequent as possible. If the bank allows monthly, quarterly or annually only, arrange for a trusted friend to collect weekly or even daily.
- Visualise your progress:
- Make a drawing/real life 3d model/photo/lego model of your house.
- Colour the bits of the drawing you now own.
- Move the lego bits over from "the bank" to "mine/ours".
- Mark individual stones or pieces of siding as your own versus the bank's.
- ...
To stay within the food sphere, how about "kapsalon"[0] in Poland? Popular fast food created in the Netherlands in 2003. "kapsalon" is Dutch for "hairdressing salon". Etymologically, it can be tracked to a man who always asked for "the usual for the hair dresser".
Polish workers took the name home and it's now not an uncommon sight in Poland [1], amongst other places.
P.S. Don't eat it. It is disgustingly fat and unhealthy...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapsalon [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=kapsalon+site%3A.pl