In the Alps, there are already quite some ghost towns. Small towns either turned into touristic villages or disappeared over the last 50 years. Others were border towns that slowly went out of business. So many are hanging in by a thread, with increasingly old population.

I heard the problem was with yeast interacting poorly with their digestion. Please, power of the internet, tell me if I’m wrong!

I do this sooo often. Often times I just write intro stuff to cool ideas that might or might not be connected to what I should write about. I find honing a page much easier than writing it, so I try to write something and recursively make it into what I need.

Ohhh daaaaam!!

Absolutely! I just moved to a city that significantly sponsors third places, there are so many clubs and activities for free or almost (archery club fee at 45€/year, dojos go between 45€/semester to 100€, swimming pool at 2€/hour, film festivals for under 10€, knitting club and language club are free, additional discounts come with social security benefits). It makes such a difference! Meeting people becomes seamless when costs are not a constraint. It has been so much easier to build a social net.

Previously I was in a big business city. Everything costs so much, it was hard to justify. Free activities were few and far between. After years there, all my social contacts were through my work.

Wouldn’t there be other possible plants that would provide the same alkaloid compounds?

Wow, your wife and her brother rock! Congratulations!

A dude approached me letting me know he was the Blue Elf, he was dressed in a childish vibrant flat colors, but nothing too out of the ordinary. He told me he was an artist traveling for an exchange and that he was known for giving away blue puzzle pieces, of which he gave me one. Said goodbye a couple of stops later. He left me utterly confounded. Once home, I looked it up on the Internet and confirmed all his story…

We haven’t crossed the point of no return. We are accelerating because we keep press on the acceleration. If we stopped (as we did temporarily during Covid), stuff would get back on track. We have to act now

I don’t get it… I’m getting to the point that i dislike receiving most presents because i don’t have a use for them. Like: “ thanks for thinking about me and getting me this… plastic cheap Christmas decoration/little toy/picture book that I will never use”

On my side, I gift almost exclusively nice food. Doesn’t clutter in the long run.

I would particularly look at your cohort, a vague term indicating people you recognize yourself in. Your slightly older cousin, the neighbor, classmates and such definitely have a big influence.

Yeah, I’m a big public transport supporter, I never owned a car and so forth, but the transport options outside of city limits are always crap. I haven’t found a good solution yet, and definitely never saw one implemented.

I couldn’t get into it. I don’t know if it’s too dry, or too many characters, but I dropped off after some twenty episodes.

Like a mildly modified version of geisha? Wow!

Our society (with US at the forefront) is built on contradictions. On one hand, capitalism says you don’t deserve anything, you have to earn it. On the other hand, consumerism says you deserve every new gadget, luxury, treat.

I believe both are false: everyone deserves a reasonable standard of living (UBI?), nobody inherently deserves more than that but it should be possible to earn it. And we should acknowledge that earning something is not a matter of moral superiority, but a combination of some effort and some luck.

I think the key word was unaged. Cheese tends to become yellow when aged, starting very quickly. But stuff like cottage cheese and mozzarella are indeed milk colored

Some time ago, my colleague tried to pitch to our boss to turn the coffee room into a ball room. Unfortunately, cost and sanitation problems were impossible to fix :/

Ironically, I work a lot with Fourier Transform. Still feels like magic. I even taught it! I’m trying to develop more intuition about it (vs hard knowledge)

In the genre, it surrealism is your jam, Welcome to Nightvale.

Magic!