holgerschurig

The thing is that a society does not always do only ONE thing. You mentioned that there are better ways to protect kids. But maybe they cost more (e.g. banning firearms is dead cheap, while setting up a structure with lots of psychologists specialized in teenager problems is really expensive).

Also you can do one and the other ... at the same time. E.g. suicides of kids/teenagers (<= 19) in Germany in 2025: 216. That is, compared to the population in this age group, 1.38 per 100'000. In the USA that ratio is 9.4 in the age-group 15-19 and 2.3 in the age group 10-14.

And keep in mind, the total deaths by firearms in Germany in 2024 was "just" 168 (we have 1/4th of the US population, in the US police forces alone killed more people ... the total number of 44'000 firearms deaths in USA/2024 is even more staggering). Even if I multiply the 168 by 4 for the population difference ... then 672 vs. 44'000 is still a point of shame for the USA.

So in Germany, we do BOTH better regarding firearms AND regarding health services on kids. And if the USA truly would try MAGA they'd actually copy good results from other countries. So a real-MAGA-person must be against liberal firearms distribution AND for better social health work with teenagers.

BTW, the USA ideology of "the population needs arms to fight a corrupt state" is laughable. When you had your armed religious sects clash with the state, then the state always won. They still have more and better weapons and armor. On the other side, if you look how east-europe shed off their socialist regimes 40 years ago, than nowhere was an armed general population involved. So one can conclude that private firearms may as well be highly regulated and diminshed.

I didn’t care to investigate further

and

my best guess

and

and presumably other things?)

and

maybe there’s a bunch of Python code running inside a transaction

Basically, this article has no substance. The author didn't bother to learn anything, didn't look things up. And is then wildly guessing, sometimes wrong.

This is BTW the reason why (as a Debian user) if I search something Linux related and a Ubuntu forum pops up, I don't even open that anymore. Sure, Ubuntu is similar to Debian, but the amount of wrong guessworks in these forums is hefty. I however usually open the Arch Wiki pages, despite Arch very != Debian. But the articles there are written by knowledgeable people.

Zigbee

Requires no technical understanding. At least not more than e.g. a WIFI router.

devices randomly disconnect for hours even when they are 2ft from the coordinator,

You present this like a fact. But it is at most an anecdote. I present you a different anecdote: I have ~30 zigbee devices, in two different houses (first a house with concrete floors and cellar and level 1..3) and now one old woodwork structure house with 2 floors. Nowhere did I had even half an hour of disconnection.

all around-horrible

... excellent experience even for my ex-spouse, which is/was non-techie.

However, that you present Zigbee here at all is weird. Zigbee doesn't have any way to transport a camera stream. It's mean for low-powered battery devices. My temperature sensors got a 1500mAh AAA chargeable batteries and they lasts now for over one year. Note that I have sensors from ~ 15 different brands. Mostly battery powered sensors and mains power switchable plugs.

I also enjoy that these Zigbee devices are by design completely disconnected from any IP traffic. This, and their (intentional) low data rate make them almost impossible to misuse. E.g. as denial-of-service originators or amplifiers.

It's like you present WIFI as long-range thingy but actually you'd want LORA for that. I'm not assuming that knowing for what kind of usage a tech was designed as "needing technical understanding". After all, no one would claim "you need technical understanding" to know that you better use a truck instead of a Porsche Cayman to transport 50 cubic meters of sand.

I think we should default to "information control is bad"

I actually don't. I live in a country that was twice wholly or partially under a dictatorship (Germany, once "3rd Reich", and once the socialist eastern part). Both governments tried to control political information ... and quite successfully so. So from that point of view I should be against what you call "information control".

However, I'm not really naive, because things can also go the other way. Both dictatorships also used heavily propaganda. Carefully fabricated lies, if you so will. In Germany, we now have a paragraph "§130 Volksverhetzung" -> instigation of people. So if someone comes around and say "They Jews poisoned the wells" (or modern variants of it) ... then you might say "Let them say this, we don't want information control!". But I say that there are enough dumb people that actually listen to such persons. And therefore I'm very well AGAINST a naively free flow of any "information". I think the core idea of anarchy is dumb, since people are power hungry and manipulators.

BTW, even countries that claim to be full of "freedom of speech" limit it. E.g. the USA, whose inhabitants arrogantly claim they are the epitome of freedom of the world ... they highly regulate sexual "information". Why is that? Partially because of religious prudism. But also partially because they think that this could harm weak people --- e.g. kids.

And here we're back to one of the core freedom idea of Germany: my freedom MUST have it's limits as it targets your freedom.

So, should I be allowed to tell lies about you in public forums, with full anonymity? Like "dTal is sleeping with kids"? Should I be able to start some slander campaign, the online form of bullying? Would you be happy to grant me this full freedom, this full flow of information control ... even if it harms you? Nope. We should protect weak people: people went into suicide because of such things.

I'd even say that things like 4chan, that don't regulate at all, are failing to reflect the interests of humans. Like e.g. the love of harmony and peace.

Na, it's just that people these days aren't that educated anymore.

A censor was a government employed entity where you had to present your text BEFORE you could publish it. Book, newspaper articles, things like. It was in heavy use in the European kingdoms and republics (e.g. during Napoleons reign).

You had no choice there: would you not censor and publish, then hefty fines would be one you. Sometimes even leading to death, e.g. look up "Der Hessische Landbote" from Georg Büchner, a tract against monarchy and feudalism.

So censorship has two keys: mandatory prior check, fines if you publish a text without that.

Moderation however is to keep your channel in a sane tone. It is something you do out of your own will, e.g. to cut down on flaming. And there is no government entity involved that checks the text in question. It is, after all, not identical to censorship.

My guess is that anarchist minded people, that (wrongly) believe that human groups develop organically in a nice way, have a problem with moderation. And then they seek some word with an extremely bad connotation and just use that instead. Just like some politicians use these days "terrorist" in plethora, even when "murder" would describe it better.

IMHO users of "censorship" term often want to manipulate us.

As if that would matter. Heck, what is even "israel friendly"? No one speaks about "french friendly" or "lithuania friendly".

In any case, you must first demonstrate that numbers from an organization you allege of being friendly to X (whatever X is) are automatically wrong.

That said: numbers on the deaths in the recent massacres are very wide ranging. The thing is that the government itself doesn't publish then. So they have to gathered by other entities. Or revealed by espionage.

In a german TV media https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/ausland/totenzahlen-iran-fak... they analyze "where do we get the 12000 dead people from" reported in January. First they list 4 human rights organizations (HRANA, HRANA, Hengaw, Amnesty International) that all reported considerably lower numbers. Keep in mind that most of these numbers aren't claimed to be correct, but to be lower bounds, e.g. HRANA said "at least 2615 civilians got killed and at least 153 security people".

Still, the article goes on and say "So where do we get the number of 12000 people". Then they tell about a Iranian TV station "Iran International". It's privately owned, sits in London. And they claim the have unpublished numbers of the Iranian Revolution/Oppression Guard (IRGC). They also say that therefore this number is difficult to verify.

Then they go on and analyze if 12000 dead people by January is unrealistic and based on dead people the see in videos they conclude that this isn't unrealistic at all.

In any case, if you don't acknowledge that even one dead person due to an oppressive criminal regime is too much because "someone is israel friendly" than I need to question your compassion.

BTW, as a German I have also other sources of quite high reported fatalities of the regime, e.g. from Red Cross or even the german government itself.

Oh, and Amnesty International also points out the cruelties the Israel government, the "settlers" and the Israel military conducts. Could be the case that there is more in the world as "100% friend" and "100% foe" ... and nothing of the cruelties of them make the cruelties of Hezbollah, Huthis or the Iranian mullah regime any better. You can't ink out one cruelty with another one.

The thing is: today (!) there is no such thing as a "german critique on Pennsylvania Dutch". Most germans aren't even aware that such a thing exists.

Also, this one citation is just anecdotal. You cannot conclude of any mainstream thinking about Pennsylvania Dutch. In the end, journalists often use items in their stories that create the highest emotions, not necessarily what reflects reality the most. So the writer of that citation might not have outright lied, but he might not reported about the general mindset about this.

Keep in mind that in 1780 germany itself was a mishmash, hundreds of counties, fiefdoms, kingdoms, self-governed city and what not. And even the language was much more a mishmash than today. Sure, Luther's work already started a bit a common way of writing. But we still didn't have some "high german" definition, e.g. no Duden. The Grimm Brothers, not only collectors of oral stories, were just 5 and 6 years old!

I guess during that time someone from Emden (very north-west) looked down at someone from Passau (very south-east) --- and the other way. Each one claiming that the other is uttering an unintelligible gibberish.

Oh, and EVEN today people from the center of Germany thing that speaking a strong german dialect (e.g. Bavarian, Swabian, Saxonian) correlates generally with low education / lower class. Because in THEIR region it is actually so. However, in Swabian it doesn't correlate. There was even the pun that in order to climb the carrier ranks at Mercedes or Porsche, one had to speak Swabian ...

Na, there aren't "~350,000,000 of us".

You are just assuming that the whole readership of Hacker News are US-citizens.

I, for example, are from an EU country. So "there are 450,000,000 of us" if I'd had a similar attitude.

It's really fun: I read so many propaganda on Lisp here that by now we should all be coding in it. Don't we get perhaps weekly posts like this?

But ... somehow almost everyone simply ignores this propaganda --- that's actually the way we ought to handle propaganda! Funny that it works with Lisp, but not with many political topics where it can be shown that propaganda really works.

My experience with Lisp is somewhat special-cornered. I only know Emacs-Lisp, and that not great. And for me, Lisp an out, outdated and confusing thing.

I don't know ANY other programming language that elected assembler mnemonics to be "high"-level expression: car and cdr.

While I love Emacs, they claim all the time that is has 100% discovery through build in doc. But that is only 70% true. It doesn't exist in Lisp like it does in other languages. For example, I have an association list. Now, what functions exist that uses them? I can't use the equivalent for (dir alist), alist.dir(), or use some LSP for that. I can't even look in the symbols, because operators are written like assoc or assq with not logic. And then there are either prefixes to them (rassoc) or postfixes (assoc-string).

That there is no namespace is soooo 1970. I mean, even Turbo-Pascal had namespaces.

Typechecking is nonexistant.

At least we have byte-compiling.

And note that I don't croak about the parenthesis. While I find it mildy weird that I as a human program in almost-AST, Emacs has superp support for the parenthesis. So people croaking about them just had never had a good editor IMHO.

Now, one can argue that Emacs Lisp != Common Lisp. But these propaganda articles don't tend to promote one specific Lisp, they only talk in generals. So I can apply this general principle and compare it to the tiny corner of these awful language family.

CoCom was terminated in 1994 and is entirely irrelevant by now (IANAL and all that)

What we have now is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassenaar_Arrangement

Fun fact 1: Switzerland (a major provider of GPS chips via u-blox) never signed or ratified CoCom. But they still followed it mostly, for fear of retaliation. They even had an allowance of "sell list 1 goods for up to 35 million Schweizer Franken" that they never reached, they only went up to 8 million Schweizer Franken. They however are a member of Wassenaar.

Fun fact 2: Russia is a member of Wassenaar. But I guess they now give a shit on it and give to North-Korea whatever NK wants, for all of these nice North Korean cannon fodder soldiers.

Yea, like the water in San Diego. Water tastes bad in plenty of USA. Not only due to clornination.

In in the fracking counties it isn't even drinkable.

Also note that I actually used the term "western europe" in my post. I was in UK, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Czech, Romania, Hungary, Poland ... and everywhere was tap water totally drinkable. In Mallorca (Spain) it didn't taste that nice, but it was drinkable. Germans travel a lot, and when you book a travel, you get some information about your host country. And never ever did I read "don't trink the tap water".

So of all places I've been, "tastes bad" only was once true. "Can't drink" was never true. Your "plenty if parts" is definitely hallucinated.

However, I've not been in many places in south-east and east europe, like not in Albania, Moldavia, Slowenia, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Herzegovina, the Baltics, Belarussia, Slowakia, Ukraina, Russia etc etc etc. So I have no idea on how their water is.

That is because EU is everything ... but not something homogenous entity. Living in Austria is very different to living in Spain, is different to living in Greece.

There are countries in EU where it is almost impossible to get out of public healthcare, for example. And then some like yours, where this seems to be quite common.

But I guess "rent is higher than minimum wage" isn't true for all of Spain. Spain is extremely centralized, everything is in Madrid. But if you somehow can get away with living in the middle of nowhere, then I don't expect rent to be higher than minimum wage.

These extremely expensive metropoles exist all over Europe (London, Prague, München, Madrid, Paris, ...) but also in the USA (New York, and probably 40 others).

That migth be true in some cases, but there are glaring cases there this isn't the case.

Look at the conflict on clorinated chickens between USA and EU. The USA insists on not-so-clean production environments and to get rid of the bacteria with clorine. While the EU insists on a clean-from-the-get-go approach, where clorination isn't necessary.

(Fun fact: "the customer is always rigth / drives the market" isn't applied here. The USA farmers want to export their chicken to the EU, but never ever did they consider to produce them according to what the EU standards are and what the european customers want: chicken without a clorine taste).

Or your eggs: you wash them for no real reason, That removes the protection against bacteria from the eggshell, and then you need to have a complete fridge chain towards the customer. Whereas in europe eggs aren't washed, keep their egg shell protection and don't really need to be put into the fridge. One could argue that here indeed the USA has "more strict controls" by requiring the washing phase. But this is faux security, as it worsens the product, mandating a more special handling of it.

However, things are really complex to compare. For some bacterias, e.g. Listeria monocytogenes, the US is indeed stricter (zero tolerance). Whereas the US has some "100 colony-forming units per gram". However, what is better? We know that the human body actually needs some amount of bacteria, lest our immune system isn't trained or turnes against ourselves. So it might be that a little exposition is actually tolerable --- and given that europeans have a higher live expectation than US-americans, that might actually be true.

Also the measurements is totally different. In the USA, they measure usually with a simple n=5 method, whereas europe has a n, c, m, M system based on ISO standards. That also takes in process hygiene.

"Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points" is mandatory in EU for all food, in the USA only for some (seafood, juice, meat, and poultry). So here the EU has a leg, albeit this isn't strictly bacteria related. However it relates to toxic metabolism products of bacteria and fungi.

And a fun fact: while many things in the USA differ from state to state, food hygiene in the USA doesn't. Their FDA and USDA work throughout the USA.

In the EU there is no central one for food. We have some FDA equivalent, but that is more for drugs & vaccines, not for food. And I'm not aware of something like the USDA at EU level. Instead it is usual that a EU regulation that the members agreed upon is then implemented in all member states ... and often slightly different. So any US legislation like the GPDR (and all others) have counterparts in national rights. And e.g. the german version might be slightly different to the estonian one. Thats for data protection as well as for food surveillance.

I give you the nature parks.

That being out of the way: drinkable water isn't really an achievement, we have it in all of western europe. Maybe even in all of europe. However, in the USA you have these places there the water is heavily poluted due to fracking. That is bad in itself. But even worse is that the political / judicial system in the USA is unable to fix this.

Being a country for 250 years is ... neither good nor bad in itself. And if you look at ancient egypt that had 4 digits here, then it is pathetic to bring this up. But also in the western world 250 years aren't that much.

Many wars ... yeah, the USA started and/or participated in many wars. More than european countries did during your lifetime. Out of my mind: Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Panama, Grenada, Bosnia+Herzegovina, Irak, Irak, Afghanistan, Iran, Libya. And don't forget undeclared wars like lots of "Wedding seeking hellfire missiles" in Yemen or Somalia.

Oh, and that was just a selection. Look up Wikipedia on the full list of US wars and incidents. You'll be mind-blown how militaristic / violent they are.

And then don't forget all the coups it did in south america, I think more than 20 incidents. Or the awful Nicaraguan Contra thingy, where the USA paid death squadrons to terrorize just normal people, not just communists.

Depending on how old are you, all of the above happened during your lifetime.

Ah, and did we forget in these 250 years not about their civil war, about the enslavement of millions of people? Or of the genocide on natives? Never heard of the trail of tears perhaps?

No way the USA has a even a tiny bit more of morality on their side as other countries.

You are both rigth and wrong.

First, the EU parliament isn't a "fake" parliament. You just claimed this, without any reasoning, so I'm free to just claim the opposite. The members of this parliament are freely elected and they can decide out on their own whim, without consulting the executive. So really they are one of the 3 legs, the legislative.

However, the "EU is a fake democracy" is maybe correct.

The thing is that one should never confuse the EU with some sovereign country, like the Unites States of America. Or with a federal state like the Federal Republic of Germany. The origins of the EU aren't based in some idea of nationality. They are based in trade: how to make trade easier, how to create a common market. It's much more similar to the "Hanse" than than to a modern national state.

And as such, comparing the EU with a national state is futile.

It's actually astounding that this trade club got so many democratic institutions, like the EU parliament or the EU court of justice. A lot of other trade agreements only have fully undemocratic arbitration tribunals.

Also, "the EU cares about" is silly. The EU is a body of many members. The member states think not in unions (just think of "Visegrad members"). This list here isn't even complete:

- Council of the European Union headed by Antonia Costa - EU Commission headed by Ursula von der Leyen - EU Parliament headed by Roberta Metsola - European Central Bank headed by Christine Lagarde - European Court of Auditors headed by Tony Murphy - Court of Justice headed by ... no idea

So one part can "care" about a thing, while another part does not. One must have lived under a rock to not know how e.g. the Commission often wanted some Orwell-1984 laws, again and again, and the EU parliament or the EU court of justice dismissed them. So no, the EU isn't a uniform body. And any claim in that direction is therefore inherently false.

Bell was not the inventor --- at least not for the telephone itself. Maybe for the telephone exchange.

Philipp Reis was the phone inventor. See my other post below for some details.

Well, it's a (usually believed for nationality reasons) myth that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.

In reality, it was the German "Philipp Reis" who invented it. In Friedrichsdorf he made the first prototype and also invented the special (coal based) contact microphone used in phones ~ 1990. He demoed the prototype in 1861 before the physical society in Frankfurt/Main.

Later on he sold phones in quite low quantity, usually to experimenters. Examples of the phones made it as far as to Russia or Scotland. Bell, who was too from Scotland, learned about Reis' telephone in Edinburgh in 1862.

Bell reverse-engineered it, improved it, and created a successful business around it. And that's not something shabby...

... but he definitely didn't invent it. Not even the name. "Telephon" was the name that Philipp Reis already used.

Oh, and another thing: that only 19.6% "already" have one isn't that much concerning. It is actually quite common that people do a job education (or 2nd job education) at an older age.

Examples: you learnt to a nurse (which isn't college here), but the stress is too much. So at age 30 you learn something else, e.g. carpentry or backoffice things.

So that someone that learned soccer learns something else, e.g. insurance agent, at age 30 would be totally normal and socially acceptable over here.

The most important factor however is that many EU countries don't have a US-style college system. E.g. in Germany we have a very different schooling system and a very different job education system. Even the university system is quite a bit different to the US-style.

Some jobs (e.g. bookkeeper) here are apprenticeships where in the US you'd go to some community college.

So there might be european soccer players around that don't have a "college" but still have learned a job from the basics.

That said: a german source says that only 19.6% of the soccer stars (Bundesliga) have learned a common job.

Nah, I'd say that common "americans" (really: US citizens) are perhaps a bit on the dumber site. Not only confuse they constantly a continent (America) with a country (USA), they also have no idea about history. Or logics. You wrote "ALL of tech" ... no lets check.

Cars - Germany (Gottlieb Daimler, but he didn't patent it), Germany (Carl Benz which made the first patent).

Motorbikes - Germany (Gottlieb Daimler)

Train - invented in Germany

Radio transmission - UK (James Clark Maxwell described them theoretically), Germany (Heinrich Hertz created/used them first in experiments)

X-Ray - Germany (Gustav Röntgen)

Telephone - Germany (Philipp Reis, your Bell bought examples and reverse engineered them)

Bookpress with movable letters - Germany (Johannes Gensfleisch a.k.a. Gutenberg)

Lightbulb - Germany (Heinrich Göbel)

Periodic system of elements - Russia (Dimitri Mendelejew) and Germany (Justus Lothar Meyer)

Dynamo / Generator - Germany (Werner von Siemens)

Vaccination - UK (Edward Jenner)

Gliding plane - Germany (Otto Lilienthal)

Pain killer - Germany (Felix Hoffmann, Aspirin)

Relativity theory, Quantum theory - Albert Einstein, Planck,

TV - Germany (Manfred von Ardenne)

Cathod ray tube in TVs - Germany (Conrad Röntgen experimentally, Ferdinand Braun with horizontal and vertical directivity of the ray)

Computer - France (Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace) for mechanical ones and Germany (Konrad Zuse) for electric ones

Atomic fissure, used in plants and bombs - Germany (Otto Hahn)

Chip cards - Germany (Jürgen Dethloff, Helmut Gröttrup)

MP3 music compression - Germany (Fraunhofer Institut)

Electricity - actually already in ancient greek they used electrostatic charging of amber. And one century before Christ they had actual batteries in Bagdad! But then a plethorary of european scientists brought the work forward: UK (William Gilbert, Francis Hauksbee, Joseph Priestley, Henry Cavendish, Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday), Germany (Otto von Guericke, Ewald Jürgen Georg von Kleist, Georg Simon Ohm, Carl Friedrich Gauß), Italy (Luigi Galvani, Allesandro Volta), France (Charles du Fay, Charles Augustin de Coulomb, André-Marie Ampère), Netherlands (Pieter van Musschenbroek), Denmark (Hans Christian Ørsted).

I actually terminate this electricity list here. I could go on and on.

Also note that physical units named after their discoverer indicate some kind of importance of the relevant invention. So we have e.g. Volt, Ampere, Coulomb, Farad, Gauss, Watt, Ørsted, Tesla, Weber as units. None of them is based on USA's academia.

If we look at unit names outside of electricity we also find outdated ones like Röntgen or Curie. And still used ones like Plack constant, Newton, Pascal, Kelvin, Becquerel, Gray, Sievert. So where are the USA american ones if "all" of technology is supposed to stem from their academia?

IF we want to trace the roots, then perhaps we need to go back to antique greek philisophers. Because western academia itself traces itself there. But then again ... something like that existed also in ancient India and maybe China.

BTW, you cannot compare a country ("USA") with a whole continent ("Europe"). The countries in europe aren't all in EU or EEC and are much, MUCH more different than US' states are.

"the environment in the U.S." ... and yet you have abysmal drinking water quality in some areas. A friend of mine from Florida was astonished that you can drink tap water in all of Germany. We can all see how bad USA is with it's environment if we link hydraulic fracking to tap water quality.

Many people over here think that a good amount of US americans are so dumb because of lead poisoning.

Air quality: currently https://waqi.info/de/#/c/5.69/7.058/2.8z doesn't indicate that the USA is vastly better. Yes, there are green areas ... but these are areas devoid of people. Europa has this in Scandinavia. In areas where population and industry density is high the USA isn't that good either.

"beautiful places" I grant you that, but that has every region on earth. You also have many, many more awful places to visit. The last two times I was in the USA locals warned me about "no go" areas. That doesn't exist in Germany, for example.

"people are friendly" no, they aren't. You have the highest crime rate in the developed world. People robbing or mugging me aren't friendly. That "no go" areas even exist is also not a sign of friendly. Your immigration officers are exceptional rude and unfriendly --- virtually the first experience a tourist travelling the USA has with their "friendlyness". And your ICE is even more rude: a swiss journalist from NZZ was e.g. detained for about 2 weeks. Instead of just denied entry and put into the next airplane heading to back Zürich. And the detainment was in one single room with about 30 other illegally-jailed inmates with zero privacy. Even the loo was visible for all. That's US friendlyness ...

Even not rutal... the last time I was in TX I heard on local radio that some whites put a colored man with chains on behind an oversized US car and drove him to dead. And if you are an outlier, e.g. you are from a minitory, or LGBTQ or whatever, then you have a hard time in the friendly rural-ness. Many people leave the ruralness towards towns to gain freedom.

If you have a collection of children tales from the Grimm brothers... then this is already watered down.

These brothers traveled in Towns and collected the tales that the adult told to each other, e.g. when spinning wool or whatever boring but necessary winter job they had. They called their first collection "Kinder- und Hausmärchen" (children and house tales). The children aimed ones where ... more or less ... okay. Being on the cruel site, of course. But the ones not aimed children could be quite explicit or sexy-hexy --- at least for the times. Small kids probably didn't get most things.

The german wikipedia e.g. writes "Die Texte wurden von Auflage zu Auflage weiter überarbeitet, teilweise „verniedlicht“ und mit christlicher Moral unterfüttert. " which I translate as: the texts were edited from edition to edition, belittled/diminished and bolstered with christian morality" --- the latter probably because most of the editorial work happened in Kassel, which at the time was hugenotic evangelical.

Since the Grimms played a remarkable role in the german language, there is LOTS of academic literate on then, their german words dictionary, their tales collection. So you dive as deep into it as you want.

In Germany it's often not IN cities, but around. Example for Frankfurt:

The's a metro ("S-Bahn") going north up to Friedberg/Hessen. Friedberg is the capital of the country. But there's no free "Park & Ride" there. Two stations towards Frankfurt you are in village called Wöllstadt. And there you have a free Park & Ride. More south some other village, no P&R. But then again in Bad Vilbel you have one.

Is however P&R + public tansport the fastest way to Frankfurt? That depends.

First, the Wöllstadt P&R isn't easily accessible from the Autobahn, or not even from the B3, which goes around Wöllstadt. And even when it went through it some years ago, it was several turn-left turn-rights through small streets.

And then the S6 only drives every 30 minutes to Frankfurt. It's supposed to change once they double the train tracks, but that will change. On top of it: metro lines don't have precedence, the quick trains like ICE have. So the S-Bahn more often than not waits until a faster train passes.

If it isn't between 7-9 in the morning, you're actually faster by car in Frankfurt than by public transport ... So the P&R is quite helpful for people living in the neighboring villages: they go by car to Wöllstadt, park there for free, commute to Frankfurt by metro. And that traffic jam free ... but not necessarily fast. And since parking in Frankfurt usually comes with a price tag, it's also a bit cheaper.

So it's nice to have this, but it's no all roses.

Yes, and they are higher due to 2 reasons. And both seem to work.

Number 1 reason is that power was quite highly taxed, since it is directly linked with pollution and CO2. All powers, but that also means electrical power. The effect is, that european cars are smaller and use less. And also european houses are better insulated. You can measure this, the typical german 4 person household uses less than 50% of the electric power of a 4 person US household. Before COVID I even saw a statistics that this less usage compansated the higher electricity prices, so both norm-households payed the same for electricity. Unsure if that is still true post-COVID.

The other reason is that also a good amount of money is directly invested into the grid, to make it more resilient. And you can also measure that. If you lookup the SAIDI (system average interuption duraction index) of e.g. USA and compare it to Germany, you immediately see why over there uninteruptible power supplies are hardly used except in data centers. SAIDI Germany 12.2 minutes per customer per year, USA 125.7 minutes per customer per year. That's a whopping 10x worse. Not just as number, but also for the industry.

And I heard that the SAIDI in Texas is even worse than the US average.

Well, some of the non-centralized social media is quite left-wing. If someone favours the SED or other parts of the ex-GDR regime (like FDGB etc) then it's IMHO already bordering on left extremisms. After all these guys enslaved a hughe population to make people do their biddings. If that is not extreme, I can't say.

That said, if you insisted that some "Germany's Independence Day" existed, then it's perhaps that what got you banned. Germany was never really a colony. Not of UK, not of Spain or Portugal, or not in newer times of Russia. Many countries that were a colony of them, or just annexxed, have an independence day. Germany doesn't --- the last time it was partially colonized, in roman times, there was no Germany.

Perhaps you mean the reunification day :-)

Spotted the US-american assuming their law system is used world-wide.

If over here a lady buys a hot coffee in a McDrive, drives away, spills the hot coffee on their legs and makes a car accident due to this ... she won't be able to sue the McDrive. There's no fine-print or "Coffee is hot, you dumb person" writing needed anywhere. She could be lucky if she doesn't get fined for endangering others by her stupid actions.

So, if we have a power outage here, the courts don't suddenly get busy. Because there simply no one is suing.

Fun fact: despite this bad power outage, the power grid systems in Europe are still better (even way better) than in the US. There is a comparable statistics measure called "SAIDI" --- system average interuption duration index. And duration wise, per custom and year, the US power grids are worse than over here than in most of West Europe: (US SAIDI 2020: 1.3 hours, German SAIDI 2020: 0.3 hours). That's a factor of more than 4 on the worse-iness of US power grid!

That could be an indicator that suing at the tiniest chance isn't helpful macro-ecnomical. Or that a general suing culture (with legalese trying to protect one from the economic risks) aren't actually helping improving things in the general sense, although they reduce the risk of getting bankrupt. But society-wise, a sue culture is most probably a negative: you spend energy/time/money on things that aren't necessary in saner law systems.

Wow, you brought many facts that escaped me so far. That why I still read HN these days.

Are 850000 millions muslim refugees are soooooo many more than over 5 million "Gastarbeiter".

I'm not saying those 850.000 millions are negligibe. They increase the scarce housing situation even more. They have antique idealisms (like that woman aren't equal, that woman showing their hairs are whores, that all jews must be bad). So they create a bit of trouble here, like antisemitism or even from time to time an "Ehrenmord".

But still... the millions of turkish Gastarbeiter actually changed german culture, think Döner Kebab. Which we can't say from the 850.000 recent refugees.

"Muslims are in Europe in large numbers because of wars that Europe and the West either started"

That's an interesting claim. The biggest muslim community in Germany is from Turkey. They came all here because of economic reason.

I'd even go so far that it's their religion that holds muslim states in a terrible economic situation. If you look down at 50% of your population (females), treat them unequal because of some ancient sharia feelings, sometimes even keep them away from good education ... then surely your car doesn't go fast, because the hand brake is still set!

The islamic culture was once renowned for education (e.g. look at Ibn Sina or why we today use "Algorithm" as word, or our numbers). But that's long gone. Even before islamists took over in Iran they seized the oil industry before they had the educated people to run it. In essence the country destabilized itself in the Mossadeqh time. But todays islam ... is more often than not demagocial instead of scientific. They dislike knowledge. The more islamic a country is, the more this is visible. Nothing of this creates good living condition to people, I'd say. And nothing here is in influence from "the west". Or Russia or China.

Now, the civil war in Syria ... I'm quite unsure if that has been instigated mainly because of the west. If anything, I'd say that the east (Russia) bolstered the syrian dictator. That most syrian people hated the torturing regime has IMHO nothing to do with "US and Israel spent years destabilizing Syria".

On your point that the US and USSR inventions only created destabilization with their wars... on this I agree. I can see the liberation of Kuwait from Saddam as a worthy war. But not the others.

"And noone stops US/israel" because no one has love the the Iranian regime, which kills its own people, allows Hamas to rain rockets on Israel (even when I don't like the israel government, the israel people don't deserve these attacks either!). It supports Yemenitic pirates. So it's an awful government, not righteous at all -- not even in a spiritual sense. There's a german saying: how you shout into the forest it will come back.

"and media totally ignore the suffering in Palesine"

That is a rather absolute state and easy to falsify. Just 2 days ago I heard a report in "Deutschlandfunk" about how israel settlers killed palestinians (basically: they let their cows go onto the fields the palestinians owned. Which come from their village to chase the cows away. And then a settler in a israel military uniform used his storm rifle to kill one, injure one heavily and one lightly).

We also seen the fields of rubble the israel armed forces produced in the Gaza strip.

What we however can see: the media coverage of the Hamas attack where they killed and abducted so many people was extensive (rightfully so, as it was an abhorrent act). However, the systematic destruction of lifing quarters into huge fields of rubble by the IDR was mostly only mentioned. It got coverage, but not really that extensive.

And yet, in "Tagesschau" and "Zeit" you could all the time hear about the issues the reporters had about actually reporting from there, since Israel controlled most information channels.

What also is a very german thing: any critic on the israel governments doing is sooner or later "conquered" with some "this is antisemitic" claim. However, few are actually antisemitic (yep, there are yew haters here, especially after we've got so many arab immigrants). But there are also many people that can separate between a religio, the very diverse people groups living in Israel and the current israel governement.