wobbleblob

If you've tried driving in the Netherlands, you know why so many people prefer to ride a bike instead. Well maintained, but narrow and extremely busy roads, densely packed with tiny vehicles. Wearing a helmet while cycling in the Dutch bike lanes is a bit like wearing a helmet while walking on the side walk. I used to only wear it while racing.

Since I had a bad crash after being hit in the eye by an insect, I wear a helmet and cycling glasses on my commute as well. This has a remarkable effect on how you are treated in traffic. Gone is the usual friendly coexistence between cyclists, pedestrians, drivers and even scooters. Without the helmet, I'm just one of the thousands riding their bike to work, but wearing it, apparently now I'm an asshole bike racer who needs to be taught a lesson, much the way cyclists in general seem to be treated in cycling-hostile countries. A helmet doesn't really make you feel safer if it changes the way you're treated by the rest of traffic.

If you want to take that approach, then why not compare Skåne to Staten Island, Zuid-Holland to Manhattan etc. These European countries aren't homogeneous blobs either.

You shouldn't feel competitive (pun intended) about this kind of lists anyway, it's just a score on criteria some organization called "WEF" values for reasons that are their own. You don't have to 'win' every ranking, if you "win" one, you're going to lose another that uses different criteria.

I once had a pascal compiler for a 6502 machine:

http://www.acornelectron.co.uk/info/electron/acornsoft/Spasc...

Glass? This is not the iPhone we're talking about, it's the Macbook Pro. The top layer of the screen is the polarizing filter, it's plastic and really not very scratch resistant.

If they didn't care, why would they bother with a survey? Asking 'do you use this feature?' is almost the opposite of saying 'Lol, I'm removing this feature, I don't care if you use it'

The gap between the surface of the screen and the bottom of the laptop is so tiny that when you close the lid, any dust particle, even so small you can barely see them, gets squashed against the screen. When you leave the laptop charging for a while, static seems to build up on the screen, and it attracts dust particles.

You can tell this is not an incidental thing if you examine the surface of a 2 year old screen. Even if you don't have visible scratches, you can see the contours of the trackpad on the screen, where the gap is a fraction of an inch wider, and the screen stays more pristine.

Yup mine too, one grain of sand is all it seems to take. You could follow the path the single grain must have taken during a single commute. When the macbook is charging, a bit of static charge seems to build up on the screen, which can attract and hold small particles.

Why did I get downvoted for this by the way?

Survey me about the damn screen. Make it less prone to scratching.

I like your comment about cubicles being a luxury. I don't know why they became a funny cliche of office horror. You don't have to be autistic to be driven mad by the constant interruptions enforced by office culture. When they tried to make pair programming mandatory, most of us decided to ignore it. Can't ignore the daily standup though. It just means I will not be able to concentrate until 10:30 every day. If that's the way they want it, so be it

There's another one of these loaded terms: 'heavy handed'.

In what way has the EU influenced your every day life, other than the freedom to travel? Where is this European oppression people are suffering under? Is the EU police beating people up? European army soldiers marching down the street?

The only answer people can come up with, if you really press them, is that they don't like all these foreigners. It's a vicious cycle. Headlines about foreigners doing bad things sell papers, so every bad thing foreigners are involved in makes it to the headlines. And with so many of thousands of Poles and Romanians in the country, there will be a drunk driver, a brawl, an accident, an incident every day.

People and media whipping each other up in a frenzy.

People like you are repeating that 'anti-democratic' mantra all the time, without really explaining what they mean.

When politicians hear people say 'not democratic enough!', they think you mean 'more power to the EU parliament' (elected directly) and less to the European Commission (one member per member state, chosen by your own elected government), but that's not what they want, is it? What they really mean is they want it to be less democratic, because democracy makes it look like a state. So when people call it anti-democratic, what they really mean is they want to do away with the democratic elements altogether.

The EU made it possible to drive from the Baltic to the Algarve without having to ask permission, without armed border guards searching your luggage... seven times! It made flying from Belgium to Italy as easy and pain free as flying from Atlanta to Pensacola.

Why people reject the freedom to travel is beyond me. I loved every minute of it, while it lasted...

It's not just open borders or free trade. It's about removing barriers and red tape hindering free travel and trade. It's about making sure that the car you bought in Estonia isn't stopped at he border in Spain because of different safety regulations, ending your trip to the Algarve in tears. It's about not getting in trouble because the food you bought in France on the way back doesn't meet the regulations in Austria.

I'm old enough to remember the difference. You, I assume, are not. The EU has brought a massive amount of freedom. Actual freedom and freedom from red tape, but all people want to talk about is burocracy. This burocracy is working to straighten out the differences between countries that caused tons and tons red tape in the past. That's a lot of work, there were a lot of differences.

People keep talking about a waste of money. The total budget of the EU was 143 billion euro in 2014, roughly comparable to the government budget of Finland (5 million people). To put that in perspective, the total federal budget of the US is something in the order of 4 trillion. It's really a budget price for something of such a massive scope.

To the people trying to take this away: thanks a lot. Why they hate freedom, I'll never understand.

> I would guess no small part of them will try to move to the remaining EU states.

Ironically, that might not be as easy as it sounds. Closing the borders works both ways.

Driving is nice there, but I think you've taken it too far. Why are there no sidewalks in the suburbs? People actively campaign their local government to stop them from building sidewalks along their street.

Sometimes we visit relatives in Atlanta. The mall is literally across the street from where they live. The only legal way to get there is by car. You couldn't even walk to the next crosswalk. It's a mile or two down, and then back up to the mall, but as there is no sidewalk, the police will stop you and ask you why you are walking. Crazy.

It would never occur to me to interpret it that way, rather than him moving the block closer to the trees. Wouldn't it take a human life time for a tree to grow that much?

I imagine a culture, 10,000 years down the road, that reads from bottom to top. Wow, awesome, let's excavate one of these disease absorbing blocks!

Why not stick the waste in an old Uranium mine? Maybe our future descendants will be able to make good use of our radio active waste?

I didn't say it wasn't well made, I didn't like the writing. There were so many nods to the old trilogy that my neck started to hurt.

Spoiler alert!

Young adventurer on a desert planet unaware of their Jedi powers?

Resourceful, commanding, brutally competent as well as sexy young princess?

Help from a reluctant rogue with his hairy side kick, on the run from crime lord that he tried to swindle?

A tall masked dark side antagonist, apprentice of a mysterious emperor type guy?

An evil empire vs a rebel alliance?

Secret plans hidden in robot?

Quest to find hermit Jedi master?

Quest to destroy a planet killing Death Star?

The most original part of the writing was merging the adventurer and the princess into one character and making the Vader part an annoying teenager.

> You were meant to relate to Han Solo

Funny coincidence: the other day my youngest stabbed me with her light saber

edit: spoiler alert. If you don't want to read spoilers, don't read the sentence above.

Not exactly the same story. It wasn't the plans for Death Star mk.III that were hidden in the cute robot this time.

To be fair, my wife liked it because the protagonist action hero was a girl, which is original in the genre I guess.

> One of the most common refrains among ex-Disney staffers was that Disney had a strong aversion to risk.

Now why does that not surprise me. Disney stopped making art somewhere in the 1940's (fantasia) and started shipping product. I didn't share people's relief that the force awakens at least didn't suck like the prequels. The writing was so derivative as to almost make it a remake. Instead of Jar Jar Binks, the comic relief was Emo-Vader, but the comic relief shouldn't be the best part of the movie, and I'm not even sure if he was meant to be funny.

Being able to fix your own sink is actually a useful skill.

> "with President Obama pushing for legislation to include computer science in every public-school curriculum."

Computer science or computer literacy? The latter would probably be quite useful.

This clearly illustrates what's wrong with the San Francisco tech culture: it is stuck in the 20th century, and assumes that 'tech' means white or Asian male in their 20's.

Actual cutting edge tech companies order foosball tables.

Maybe there's something different about the metabolism of people who manage to reach a weight of 450lbs in the first place. Without exercise and watching what you eat, almost everyone will gain weight, but most people never get anywhere close to the 300lbs+ range.

This article is about the Silicate-Carbonate cycle, a geologic process, not politics.

A little off topic, but what's cycling like there?

From what I've heard (never been there) Australia is about as close as it gets to the perfect society... except they hate cyclists like the plague?

It's not so much a comment on their situational awareness, it's that they're riding one vehicle with the style of another. It's behavior that would probably be harmless if they were going half the speed.

If you drive a car as though it is a motorcycle, you're also disrupting traffic and creating danger.

Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose? Why not ride a scooter?

Not aimed at you personally, but in my commute I'm not happy with all these motorized bicycles on the bike lane nowadays. They're usually ridden by people who don't race seriously, and are now riding 30+ km/h, but doing it as though they're still going 15 km/h: not looking behind them before passing or turning, immediately ringing their bell if you're in front of them, without first looking if maybe there's a reason why you're slowing down, not keeping distance. One slammed into me when I stopped to yield for traffic. Yield? Why would one yield?

Why do you need a cheater bike?

No reason except it being a $15,000 bike, personalized and tuned? Or over $50,000 if it's fitted with one of these engines, apparently.

They're not going to trust someone else to pick it up, even if it's a completely honest bike.

Tell that to the synapsids. Tell that to the trilobites! Tell them that straight to their faces, if you can find one.