Eh, kinda. You can buy table salt with or without fluoride, so I wouldn’t say it’s that comparable to adding it to everyone’s tap water.

A VPN is essential to access most of the Western/English-speaking internet (in Mainland China, less so in Hong Kong). The VPN might also be blocked though, so research ahead of time to find one that currently works in China.

I’m in Germany so fluoride is not a thing in our water. I don’t think it’s necessarily unethical to add it though.

For those living in countries that do this, does it have any effect on taste or limit how the water can be used, e.g. for watering plants, cooking etc?

I have to say I don’t really mind that the series is finished. Played and tried to like both Outer Worlds games, but found their world, characters and general writing completely uninteresting. The satire was too much and too on-the-nose for me as well.

People protesting agains the arms industry will generally focus on the bigger problem, which is all the people being killed.

“Stop murdering people” is probably a more powerful message than “Stop wasting resources on murdering people”.

Having a healthier sleep schedule.

We’ve had that in Germany for many years but for the last few years, many supermarkets in my region have stopped using the tokens. Looks like the “training” worked though, as I still never see any unreturned shopping carts on parking lots.

I think I’d survive. Never had a broken bone or any serious injuries really. I’d just have surface-level wounds everywhere, none with a lot of blood loss, and 2 rolled ankles. It would be unpleasant as hell, but I don’t think my life would be in danger.

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Train driver as a young child, then later game developer. I’m a software developer now, not making games, but pretty close as I mainly work with game engines. Due to various reasons I’m now considering quitting IT altogether at some point though.

Basically all porn I consume is fictional, so I don’t have that issue.

They’re design-focused first and foremost. You get a Nothing phone if you want fancy LED-lighting on the backside.

They used to be about having a “minimalist”, bloatware-free Android OS as well, but since last year some of their phones come preloaded with Facebook, Tiktok etc and they even put ads on the lock screen for a while (until backlash made them revert that).

This is no longer in the app, to be clear. It was removed in may 2025.

I’d say I’m at a very fluent level when it comes to understanding and writing. Most of my media consumption is in English and I can understand it just as well as German. I even think in English sometimes.

Speaking is a slightly different story though. I can still communicate just fine, but my English becomes much less eloquent compared to my writing. I just don’t get to practice it very often and even when I do, it’s usually talking to other non-native speakers, so we’ll both be talking at a relatively basic level.

No, and I don’t think any country really is nowadays. I expect it’ll still be a better place to be than where the bombs are getting dropped though. Unfortunately Europe quite often had the misfortune of being that place.

If you do decide to go (and I can certainly see why you would), you definitely shouldn’t try to apply for asylum, but get a proper work visa for your country of choice. No country currently accepts asylum applications from Americans as far as I’m aware, certainly nowhere in Europe. And even if you somehow managed to do that, coming here as a refugee is no pleasant experience. You’d spend at least a couple months living in poor, very crammed conditions among people from countries where homophobia is much more widespread than in the US.

If I ever decide to leave Europe, my plan was always to go to New Zealand. Seems like a good place to escape global geopolitics and/or a possible WW3.

I’m not a fan of paid mods personally and would probably never buy them, but I also think these copyright claims are crappy and seem baseless to me. What he sold was his own original code. He should be free to sell it and let people decide if they want to spend money on it. That may break the ToS of these companies, but ToS are not laws.

He probably would have tried to do even crazier things than Trump, but I doubt he would have had a similar cult of personality around him, nor the loyalty of the republican party that Trump has. So I imagine he would have been impeached very quickly and things might have ended up slightly better.

2020s, by far. 2010s were the best, but after 2020, the world order I knew pretty much became undone and everything seems to just be getting worse. I was pretty hopeful and excited for the future before, but now we seem to be on an unrelenting march towards dystopia. Much of the societal progress we’ve made in prior decades is being reverted. Also not great when it came to personal events for me, as my dad died in 2021. I guess the decade still has a few years left to redeem itself, but that seems highly unlikely right now.

Probably Minecraft. Can’t say how many hours, as it doesn’t get tracked but I started playing in 2009, when it was still a free browser-based game. Had a server with all my friends on it and played it pretty much daily for a few years.