wobbleblob

Compared to the Permian-Triassic extinction event, the black death barely qualifies as a mishap, let alone the greatest catastrophe ever !

You refer to it as ancient, but I just looked it up, and it seems it was last updated in 2014

How ancient can these laws be? The BRD is not that old.

How is it up to a politician to "allow" a prosecution? Shouldn't that be up to the court?

... which is in a country so small, google maps searches end up with the town in Michigan of that name ;)

More funny than infuriating. Unless there's an actual production issue, at weekend o' clock everyone goes home.

Being treated poorly? Ha. Demand for our expertise has, as far as I can tell, always outstripped supply. Compared to most sectors, we are treated like royalty.

Funny war stories though, of course I have some.

One of the owners of the company I'm working for used to put his agreements with customers and other 3rd party contacts for the week or the month in his agenda for the last day of said week or month.

Every week, every single week, on Friday afternoon at 4:55pm he'd call: "Ah, good thing you're still at the office. Hey, I promised <contact> that we'd have <complicated thing> done by the end of this week. Can you take care of it? You're awesome, thanks! Have a great week end"

(The company has grown quite a bit, and got more organized, so this no longer happens)

What, do they have to be identical to make the comparison? I could refer to Putin as the Russian Erdogan, but Putin was there first.

He is the Turkish Putin.

I find it worrying. Turkey seemed to be such a success until a few years ago. A booming, increasingly western economy, seeming stability. Somehow you expect dictatorship to come with a revolution, but it seems it can slowly creep up on you. All it seems to take is a strong, popular leader.

People think they like strong, popular leaders, but I find them a threat to democracy. They tend to think they're doing everyone, the country, a favor by latching on to power and never letting go again.

When you're young and relatively inexperienced, every day you have to figure something out you don't yet know how to solve. I believe this does the same thing as the deliberate practice of a musician. Five years of 40 hrs a week or ten years of 20 hrs a week comes down to about 10,000 hours.

Now that I'm a veteran, I find that at work I spend most of my time at work solving problems I already know how to solve. I spend some of my spare time on pet projects doing things that are new to me, but unless they find a cure for the need to sleep, I'll never have 20 hours a week to spare for this again.

> Consider every day driving. 100 hours should be enough.

100 hours should be enough for most people to pass a driving exam, not to become an expert driver.

> The guy isn't really a right-winger, he's a centrist nationalist as far as I can tell.

There's a word for that: populist. Policy by opinion poll.

As most European democracies have found out over the past decades, most voters aren't political idealists. Ideas from all over the political spectrum appeal to them. Many of them end up not voting because every major party comes with a package of political ideals that don't work for them.

From time to time, a politician appears who manages to tap that potential, and throws the traditional, ideals-oriented politics into disarray.

A Bosnian Serb once tried to explain to me that the Emperor's decision to have this parade on St. Vitus Day was a deliberate insult so great they had no choice but to respond with violence.

On that day, they commemorate the start of half a millennium of Turkish occupation.

It may also be a matter of getting used to it.

Oddly enough, after so many years, I don't like the taste of sugar any more, it seems 'off'. Aspartame is fine.

All natural, like arsenic, botulinum toxin, elephant seal blubber, corpse ichor and dying in child birth...

What is this current obsession with stevia? It has a very strong, pretty much unpalatable taste that even strong espresso can't mask.

Imagine trying to explain to an ancient Greek philosopher how Christianity is monotheistic.

So, you have one God, but also a demigod, who is his son. There's a god of the underworld you call satan, and a number of divine or demonic creatures called angels and demons. Ok, throw in some ancestor worship in the form of saints.

This monotheistic pantheon would have sounded reassuringly familiar your ancient Greek interlocutor.

Do you know how medievalists view the Accursed Kings series of Maurice Druon?

There's an internet subculture that might appeal to you: people who write elaborate, thoroughly scathing reviews on Amazon for widely admired masterpieces.

[1] http://www.salon.com/2010/04/03/mean_amazon_reviews_open2010...

Most would describe Eco's work as 'challenging' rather than accessible.

Naa, I was just not the intended audience, and maybe a few decades too young.

That book made me feel stupid and uneducated. There was hardly a paragraph without a word I had to look up or a reference I couldn't get. The translator utterly defeated me. I never finished it.

That reminds me of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, on thanksgiving:

Anya: I love a ritual sacrifice.

Buffy: Not really a one of those.

Anya: To commemorate a past event, you kill and eat an animal. It's a ritual sacrifice. With pie.

It's not medieval philosophy, with "years after that conversation was set", the poster you're replying to means 600 years. The book should not be seen as an historic work.

> And the reason they hold so many is not as some control play against the US -- its because it was the best way to devalue their currency enough to support exports.

Can you explain how that devalues a currency? Isn't a simpler explanation that the reason they hold so many is because US government bonds were and still are the safest way to invest your money?

P is the 15th letter of the alphabet, 15 is 0xf in hexadecimal, the ascii code of f is 102. 1 + 0 + 2 = 3 omg, Half-Life 3 confirmed!

The Germans will be ok, don't worry about them, but maybe they'll change their mind about collective guilt now.

I never saw the EU bailouts as handouts from the virtuous to the losers, nor do I see it as an altruistic gift to our friends in need. I see it more as an insurance. Do people whose house isn't on fire want to punish those whose house burned down? No. We all know it could happen to us.

I don't think Germany will need a bailout, but if some day they do, we should do it.

Put yourself in their shoes for a moment. For the past 8 years, day in day out you have to hear jokes about how dishonest and unreliable Greeks are, that they caused these problems for us with their cheating, how they should be strictly honest and reliable like Germans, how they shouldn't spend money they don't have and get their finances in order like Germans, and then the Volkswagen scandal happened, and now this. You know, it doesn't involve me at all, but I can imagine why he finds this amusing.

Maybe he can propose to sell some of the German islands to cover the bailout.

My colleague from Greece has been giddy as a schoolboy about this story all week. Not quite the roaring, thunderous fits of laughter as with the Volkswagen scandal, but this is still developing.

Man, the age difference is what, 30-ish years? Of course you won't get it, and they won't 'get' your world. If you can comfortably relate to someone 30 years younger or older than you, something has gone wrong in your development.

Don't worry about it. You don't need to get it. You will hate her music, you will find her friends stupid children, she will think you're boring and no longer with it, and when she's grown up, you will annoy her with unwanted advice on how best to get around in the world of 20 years ago. It's an inevitable, normal part of life, not a problem.