ximi

Data from the 2010 Census: 80.7%: Percent of the U.S. population is urban (living in Urbanized area or Urban Cluster).

Sounds like a majority to me.

Because it's only a matter of time before the virus will be in Berlin (if it's not already).

Nobody is suggesting people should quarantine themselves in Berlin, but avoiding crowded spaces, not touching your face and frequently washing your hands doesn't seem at all unreasonable.

Sweden already has a Value Added Tax (somewhat equivalent to Sales Tax) of 25%

It sounds like you mostly tried to compare the food in Japan with the food you have at home (obviously as you need a frame of reference), but I think the food the Japanese excel at really just doesn't have an equivalent in Romanian cuisine, so it's hard to compare.

Bread just isn't eaten that much in Japan, so obviously it's not as good as in Romania (which is once again far behind bread from Germany or France). Cheese is another product that just isn't quite as popular in Japan (in most of Asia for that matter, which is probably due to an overall much higher percentage of people with lactose intolerance) and doesn't have the same history and cultural significance cheese and other milk products have in Europe.

The sushi you get in Japan (and many other fish dishes for that matter) is far and beyond anything you could find in Romania for comparison, which is once again because fish just hasn't played the same important role in the history of Romanian food.

Yakitori is maybe something you can compare, because you find a lot of grilled goods at corner bistros in Romania as well and usually the quality in Japan is far beyond what you can get in Romania.

Ultimately what I'm getting at is that most countries probably excel at some foods and not at others. The further they are apart geographically and culturally the harder it gets to compare them I think.

Well, that's why the original commenter mentioned exposure. You don't invest all your money into just one market. The idea is once again for things to balance out at the end of the day/year/decade.

Invest into multiple emerging markets, chances are they won't all do bad at the same time, especially if they are in different parts of the globe (take India, Brazil and Indonesia for example), put some into an european index fund, etc.

You seem to be most comfortable with the US market, so the bulk of the assets you decided to invest in equities go there, say 70% and to make things easy put 15% into Europe and 15% into emerging markets. Now you have some diversification, but could still feel comfortable enough to not be worried about your money disappearing over night.

Doesn't make it any more or less legal though.

I'd look to Sony's compact series. They seem to go for small-ish displays without compromising on specs (see both the already released Z1 as well as the upcoming Z3)

I'm planning to move to Spain soon, so may I ask where it is that you lived?

I would say there are several reasons for that:

* While the median wage is a 1000 euro there are a lot of people that make a lot less than that ( < 500) and also quite a few that make a lot more.

* Expensive cars are the number one status symbol in Bucharest and Romania. People will often still live with their parents or in a run down apartment, as long as they can drive through the streets with an expensive car, so their budgeting priorities are a bit different from what you expect.

* There is a lot of unreported income and tax evasion in Romania as well as criminal activity, so on top of the high income inequality mentioned above, there are also a lot of people with high incomes that never figure into statistics and such but can afford luxurious cars.

I was thinking the same at first, but when you think about, the defining feature of a digital nomad is that he moves from place to place and doesn't permanently settle somewhere, so I can see how this isn't quite as important as cost of living.

After all, if you don't like it in a place (or you're not happy with the public services) you can just up and leave.

Having said that, it'd still be nice and make the data inherently more useful to have additional data such as the quality of/access to healthcare (though I'm not sure how easy it is to quantify that) or crime rates.

Out of curiosity: How many calories per day are you aiming for and how did you come up with that number?

I'm currently going for 1800 calories and after losing a decent amount of weight initially, I feel I'm making fairly little progress (to be expected). It seems to me that I actually lose more weight when I go a bit over the limit, which leads me to believe I might be eating so little that my metabolism slows down.

I think another problem is that a lot of the examples you are mentioning here are already prepared. I know not everybody has time to create home cooked every day, but it can make a big difference and even things like french fries can be prepared with comparatively few calories (in the oven, just lightly coated with oil).

I agree that 1500 calories are hard to stick to though, I did this for a while and lost a lot of weight in a short amount of time (19 pounds in 3 months). Once the initial, rapid weight loss was over, it felt like too much of a sacrifice for very little gain. Unfortunately that let me abandoning calorie counting altogether and putting some of the weight back on.

Now I'm on a 1800 calorie limit per day and find it perfectly manageable. I often even have 100-200 calories left at the end of a day for a snack. Around 500 calories for breakfast, 600-700 for lunch (which fell often like copious amounts of food. A bowl of pasta with marinara sauce and cheese or such) and another 400-500 for dinner, which leaves just enough room for snacks. I also make a point of eating dinner fairly early, about 12 hours before I'll have breakfast.

What I'm trying to get at is that if you eat the right food (and ideally prepare it yourself) 2000 calories (which should still lead to a significant weight loss) can go a long way without leaving you hungry at the end of the day.

I was confronted with this problem myself and decided to code up a jquery plugin that would let me add comments using firebase, so I wouldn't have to rely on a third party commenting system.

It's really basic right now, but I'm planning to extend it's functionality in the future significantly.

You can check it out here: https://github.com/ximi/jquery-firecomments

The first two episodes had their funny moments, but the sum of a few laughs and some "present day nostalgia" moments still didn't make for a great show. However the third episode that aired Sunday was pretty good, several laugh out loud moments (most of which weren't actually related to technology in any way, just good comedy).

I feel now that the basic premise of the show has been established (which may be pretty obvious to us, but probably not to the average Joe) and you have an idea of who the characters are Mike Judge's true strengths can start to shine.

I do agree that there are more than a few cringe moments if you have some knowledge of the tech and startup scene (the more you have, the worse it gets), but if you can see past that and they keep the momentum from the last episode I think we're in for a pretty nice show that is treating a topic that hasn't gotten all that much attention from main stream media so far and to be perfectly honest, could use a little bit of poking fun at.

Maybe I misunderstood the system (and with no way of checkin it out myself, having below 1000 karma myself), but I thought users with 1000+ karma would see all comments appear directly on each post and could then decide whether they are "worthy" or not to be shown to everyone.

Thinking about this again I realize that would kind of defeat the whole idea as established users would still see all the "bad" comments, maybe someone can elaborate on how exactly it's supposed to work.

We're doing the same thing at MakeLeaps[1]. The logo (which also says MakeLeaps Blog) links to the blog's homepage and to the right we have a prominent link saying "Back to makeleaps.com".

As the logo and link are the only things in the header this works pretty well for our visitors/users.

1: http://www.makeleaps.jp/blog/en/

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