Which is an important thing to check for, if you ever buy a used car. Some not-so-honest used car dealerships sell cars which have persistent ECU faults - which would result in a check engine light. To prevent the buyers from seeing these they just snip off the check engines LED from the instrument cluster board.

Here in Germany, there have been several fraud cases where car dealers don’t actually own the cars they’re selling. Instead, they’re selling them on consignment for someone else. That means when you buy the car, you don’t really know who the actual seller is, as the dealer just can say “ah, sorrybI didn’t know about that” . It’s a strange setup — and quite risky for the buyer, because it makes it hard to any legal rights if something goes wrong.

Btw these cars frequently are from salvage auctions in the us, then sent to eastern Europe to be fixed up so they look good from the outside and last being sold on small “used car” dealer lots as “pigs with lipstick”.

Anything else, sir?

Fortunately in English classes (I learned English at school) we read Macbeth. There’s a lot of layers to Shakespeare - for example a lot of allusions which you’ll only understand when you know about the time it was written in. And our English teacher dragged in a native speaker to help out with conversation, who was a student living in my town.

In German (my native language) however, we were presented a poem without not enough context about the author and had to answer “what’s the meaning of this”. Most of the German teachers I had were boring, lazy or both.

Your literature problem - I had that in German, Thomas Mann’s “Der Tod in Venedig”. Yeah, I as a teenager was so eager to read about the homoerotic thoughts of an older man traveling to Venice and lusting about a young boy. Yes, of course it’s symbolic but - fuuuuck me, really? Do I need to read that.

Mark Twain has written an essay about the “awful German Language” (I don’t agree). Amongst other things he complained about long sentences.

Ha! He know NOTHING! He had not seen the works of Thomas Mann. Thomas Mann must have been hugely intelligent. He managed to write a single sentence that is too long for a single fucking book page. With a random number of subclauses in between. Exploiting all the cleartext encryption mechanisms the German language allows! With the most boring content a teenager in the height of puberty can not relate to.

I still have a visceral hate for Thomas Mann. In my 40s I thought I’d give that book another chance. Nope. Still hate it.

Ah, soon I’m 40 years past school and I still get PTSD about it.

No no no.

In school in higher education we had to interpret poems.

I am definitely sure, that neither the author’s opinion or my opinion are relevant. It is only the teacher’s opinion that is relevant.

(Do I need the /s?)

Eating it cold is even faster and still better than microwaving it into a mush.

MICROWAVE?!?!!! Who puts Pizza in a microwave? That’s probably the worst way possible to heat it up. It’d rather eat it cold.

Put it in an oven (or yes, a pan).

Ah fuck I hate that, when people go to work sick and infect everyone else. (Yes I understand you need to, and it’s not your fault. So I hate your boss.)

The history is interesting, we got health insurance and paid leave in the 1880s from Bismarck. He was trying to appease workers so they won’t flock to the socialist or social democrat parties which were booming at that time. At the same time Bismarck outlawed left wing parties. (It was a stick and carrot approach).

In 1969 we had a bipartisan left - right government (“great coalition”) and they put up to 6 weeks of paid sick leave into. law.

My ex-wife and me divorced amicably, so we still talk.

One day, about two years after separtion she called me whether I still had my credit card.

(Typically we pay by payment cards called ec or giro card - but they don’t habe a credit card number, so not usable for ordering something from overseas)

So I said, yes, why. “Uhm, I want to buy something from the US” she answerf with skirting around the topic.

A certain assumption forms in my mind, as she speaks on I’m getting more sure every moment.

I answer: Look, <ex-wife>, don’t try to order the Hitachi Magic Wand from the US. It can’t be imported due to the no-lead-in-electric-devices law. And even if it arrived you 'd need a transformer for plugging it into our 230V system. Just buy one of the knockoffs available on Amazon in Europe

She : “Um (pause), OK”

Some years later my teenage kids found it when they were at her place. They asked her what it was and she said “a microphone”. I swear by my kids, the “it is a microphone” meme happened once in my family in real life. (And of course these teenagers knew what it was).

Over here in Germany there’s no sick pay when you’re self employed, but there is (by law) when you are an employee.

I had been self employed from my 20s to 50s and am an employee for 6 years now.

I was in hospital last week to get my back fixed and am on sick leave for 4-6 weeks now. It’s still fucking amazing to me, that I can heal up now and will still get my payment into my account end of the month.

Having things like that written into law is amazing.

You will get a lot of lasagna and only read unfunny boomer memes for a month.

Exactly, Just regular misinformation - not AI. As long as it is created by a human people will upvote any slop.

I do think software piracy also was a large success factor. When I was 13 there was one major spot in my city where consoles and computers were sold (within a department store!), and people where “swapping” games even before they bought the hardware. I remember at least one of the store clerks having a small side business providing access to disks and tapes you could copy - right on the machines that were shown in store.

And I learned how to copy the C64’s basic rom to ram and mod small things even before I had the machine myself.

All the kids were gathering round the computers, the consoles were less attractive.

When I got my own C64 in 1983, my first game was Fort Apocalypse. It was not an original. You needed a boom box with dual tape decks to copy these.

Yay, a 25 year old feature with a new UI design.

I’m using FF as my daily driver, but I feel my hatred for Mozilla soon reaches the level of my hatred for Google.

I do wonder (just in my head, there’s no hint to that in the public) if all that money Google pays to Mozilla somewhere has a no-competition clause which says FF must stay more shitty than Chrome.

I’m not consciously of one Innovation out of Mozilla that made FF a better browser, and a lot of interesting stuff has been canceled.

It’s still an OK browser, but it is like it was 15 years ago. While I watch colleagues using chrome reskins which have great tab management (amazing when you use Jira). Only now that we have LLMs people turn browsers into agents - why the fuck is there no cross - request scripting (go to google, search for this, click on 2nd result…). Yeah we have developer tools like puppeteer for that, but having - say python or js to do so would make people use it more frequently.

Browser history. Ah damn, a day ago I saw a page that explained how to do xx with yy while considering zz. How great some decent browse history would be. (And yes, FF, keep it all, but only when I’m at http://weirdkinkyporn.com/, please just store it for a few hours). A single keyword for history search IS NOT ENOUGH. I need to isolate things by adding a number of things, because if I knew the word I’m searching for, I’d just google it anyways.

Yeah, so much more things you could do (and the above ideas are just half - baked thoughts).

But Mozilla needa tha sweeet CEO payments. There’s no money for experimental stuff.

About a month ago, I ranted about that with a few friends, afterwards I rage-contributed to the Servo project.

I just wish Google would cut off that Mozilla money, I really believe that would improve competition.

That no-compete agreement is a product of my imagination, but things really feel like that.

Fuck Mozilla.

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’mangiate.

Something like that, I’m no Italian.

Because 12 and 60 are great numbers to divide. You can take a half of it, a third and a quarter and still get whole numbers.

Iirc the French did try decimal time at one time, it was not convenient.

Heh thanks for explaining it, I never knew if noon was 12am or 12pm. In German we say “11 in the morning”, “12 o Clock (noon*)” , and “1 o Clock (in the afternoon)”

But typically we don’t say whether it’s am or pm, it’s clear from context if “i need to be in the work meeting at 9”

Clocks, TV listings, my work timesheet read 24h times. We read 15:00 as “three” most of the time.

Btw some software tools (my timesheet for work) differnciate between 0:00 and 24:00. I can work (theoretically) from 0:00 to 8:00 (8h in the night to morning) and from 16:00 to 24:00 (8 hours from afternoon to midnight).

So 0:00 and 24:00 are the same moment but thought to belong to the next or previous say, respectively.

I love that thought.

Ok yes it’s not bad, for people here it’s just - normal. There’s quite a number of beer fests round the year in Bavaria. Of course it’s the biggest one.

In Munich we have at least Frühlingsfest, Starkbierzeit and Oktoberfest - so something where you can go is always close (time wise). And if not, you’ll just go to a beer garden.

Oktoberfest

I just got a flashback to an open air concert I was at. It was raining like mad. At some point my beer tasted only like rain water. Oh and the second thing is, after I returned home, not a single thing I carried along was dry. Clothes wet, underwear wet, even everything in my wallet was wet. Still, the beer was worst.

But it was an amazing concert.