This one is great: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffè_sospeso

First the taste got lost, now they turn into the nutritious equivalent of card board. The nutrition supplements industry: “Hell, yeah!” But you have to give it to them, every vegetable and every fruit looks perfect now and keeps that look for a long time. What can be better than that?

My neighbor has a balcony and has tomato plants on it every year, and they are the ugliest tomatoes I have ever seen and have the best taste of any I have ever eaten. I want a balcony or a garden so badly.

It is understand some class photographs were taken before the pupils with additional support needs were brought in.

How did that happen, when no one in the school was in with it? Where were the kids with complex needs at that time? As a parent I would have a closer look at the school, no matter what they say now. I mean it takes time to get the kids stand together, stop making funny faces etc. This was not done in five minutes or the pictures would be awful.

Now I see one second a panda butt and the next second a snoring panda and then the butt again… help.

In Germany there are only a few crimes that take away your voting rights and I am fine with these:

• preparation of a war of aggression and high treason against the Federation
• treason and disclosure of state secrets with intent to cause damage
• attacks against organs and representatives of foreign states
• disruption of election process and falsification of election documents
• bribing delegates
• sabotage against means of defence or intelligence activity endangering national security (provided that a sentence of imprisonment is imposed for at least one year in this case).

source

This is the way!

They allowed capitalists to win and they bought golf.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2023/jun/13/saudi-arabia-golf-pga-tour-public-investment-fund

That’s the capitalists:

The tragic paradox is that for the most part the people who care about sport do not own it and the people who own it do not seem to care for it at all. It is of no consequence to Saudi Arabia whether or not you like golf. Eventually, it will find the thing you do like and your views will not be of interest to them. No, they will not be taking questions. No, you will not be kept up to date on progress. As ever, you will find out what’s happening whenever it decides you need to know.

And if you think “I don’t care about golf, no loss” they already have bought all kinds of other tournaments including e-sport.

And yet the whole world is still feeling bad for MLK getting murdered so many years later, he will stay in every American’s mind forever, his death a stain on this country because people saw his humanity, his death made them feel ashamed. Even you needed to mention him. He was working within the system, he won. His words are still present and an inspiration. He changed more than burning cities did. Without his work and dedication the burning cities would just have been meaningless violence easily dismissed as Black people being bad by the racists. Even the people who ignored racism and pretended everything was fine understood through him that there was something wrong, that change had to happen. Violence and destruction alone will always only spread fear and change who is the next oppressor, good people can change the world into a place where we all hinder oppression to happen, where we don’t need oppressors anymore.

And it was the system who brought the housing rights act. Boring, peaceful lawyers who were there waiting for their chance to make something good happen inside the system. Witout them the fires would have burned out and everything had stayed the same until the next violence.

Tomato sauce and everything hot tomato, especially if you use canned tomatoes, needs a bit of sugar. It makes it 100% better. It does not make it sweet, but all the flavors of the tomato just pop while otherwise it is only sour and bland.

A lawyer who confronts the white people of the whole village with their racism. The way he makes them all see loud and clear that their choice is either to stand by their racism and let a child rapist who raped his own daughter (and does a lot of other bad things) go free because he has the same skin colour as them and drag themselves down to his level, or to admit that a white person could commit such a crime. On that day, no one in the courtroom could lie about what decision they made, that it was made solely out of racism, and what the price was. Tom paid the ultimate price, but everyone in the courtroom paid a price too. None of them got off scot-free.

Do you really think that hasn’t changed something? That doing the right thing is only worth something if it changes the world immediately? Atticus may not have saved Tom, but he made a difference, because everyone understood that Tom was innocent. If more people made that kind of difference, we would live in a different and better world. People who are racist need to be confronted with the damage they are doing, why they are doing it, and the damage they are willing to do to themselves and others.

And of course the children needed an explanation. They were hoping for immediate change, a happy ending, and they understood the explanation better than you, it seems.

It’s one thing to be angry at the system and feel helpless, it’s another to give up and just shrug your shoulders because “there’s nothing I can do about it” or to use what’s there and do the best you can and make the change you can. If Atticus had not used everything the system gave him and not defended Tom, the result would have been the same for Tom, but the people in the courtroom would have been able to pretend that everything was fine, that Tom was guilty and cheer for Tom to be convicted. He took that away from them, they left the courtroom with their eyes down, because they put a proofen innocent man into jail. He won. Believe it or not, the far from perfect court system, even in a village like this, allowed him to force them to look in the mirror.

In many ways it’s more restrictive than before, albeit better for the intended use case.

I had to scroll way too far down for someone to point that out.

There will be a lot of people facing problems like yours with actual family members living abroad, and others will face issues with sharing with friends abroad or friends that used to change often or paid sharing that changed often.

I am a cynic so I think it is mostly done to hinder paid sharing and sharing with friends and family abroad is collateral damage.

A second use is probably that child protection is now pushed away from Steam and more towards the parents. I think that was necessary because European countries and maybe others were putting Valve under pressure and they do not want to implement a real age verification (they should imho). Now they can just say: “Kids should not have free access to a PC to be able to make an account, parents need to do that for them and restrict access age appropriate, it is not our concern anymore!” I have my doubt that will be enough for the EU though, but might buy them time.

I think many people haven’t realized the downsides of this yet and only see where it benefits them. We will have complaints about the one year cooldown soon.

If you buy Backpack Battles you can get a copy of Slay the Spire for free … just sayin’. I mean I am totally not hoping for a lot of people to hop on Backpack Battles, so I will have a lot of people to play against forever. 😏 It has a demo, so no blind buying necessary. It is Early Access but worth every Cent in my eyes.

You admit that anything to do with gender dysphoria is more important than a minor transgression. You are right, it is more important than a tattoo, because the stakes are higher if you refuse help.

• Delaying puberty does not lead to lifelong regrets, it avoids them.
• Gender dysphoria is a life-threatening condition that can lead to lifelong mental health problems, self-hatred, self-harm, severe depression and suicide, and going through the wrong puberty makes it extremely worse.
• To even be considered for the medication you need:

a long-standing and intense pattern of gender nonconformity or gender dysphoria.
Gender dysphoria emerged or worsened with the onset of puberty.
Coexisting psychological, medical or social problems, if any, are stable enough to begin treatment.
The adolescent has given informed consent.

Many health professionals and, where possible, parents are involved in the process.

Delaying puberty does not mean that the child has to change gender, it means giving them more time to think about it until they are of age, giving them the time to live as their preferred gender and find out if it is the right one or if they want to stay with their birth gender. At any time the child can decide to stop taking the medication and will go through puberty like any other child, just a bit late (which happens naturally for some children).

It is exactly the opposite of what you say it is. It avoids the damage of a false puberty, gives time for decision making and time to “grasp the choice and consequences” and gives them time to grow up and make the permanent decision later. Everything you say is basically pro puberty blocker.

Permitting them to permanently mess with their physiology in such a critical phase of development seems wildly irresponsible to me.

And do you think all these scientists and doctors haven’t thought about all the problems and side effects and why it might still be necessary before they think about giving children a drug like this? Do you think it is not being closely monitored? We have many years of experience with this, not only with children with gender dysphoria.

All you see is “messing with their physiology at such a critical stage of development”, what you don’t see is the “mess” of watching a child go through the wrong kind of puberty and the damage it does for a lifetime, and you haven’t confronted yourself with that or the corpses of young people who have killed themselves because they just couldn’t take it any more.

This is something that requires knowledge, not emotion. I understand that you are uncomfortable with this process, nobody can take that away from you. Either do not think about it and leave it to the specialists, or get the knowledge to understand what you are talking about.

To take away a life-saving drug because some people who are not affected by it, do not want to face the damage and loss of life, or do not want to learn about the procedure, feel uncomfortable, is the stupidest and most evil thing I can think of. Guess who I think ist the irresponsible person here.

To be fair I am also concerned about children’s safety in Alabama, for a multitude of reasons and non has to to with transgender people.

I am too old to sail the seas. Either I get it legally and convenient or I just stop watching and read a book instead. Not saying others shouldn’t, I had my fair share of years out there, but it’s not for me anymore.

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-trade-tariffs-eu-colorful-cards-2018-7

Being able to and wanting to, being practised in reading and actually understanding what you read are probably very different things. Some people decided that colorful flash cards work best with him. The news articles about him not reading his briefing materials but looking at the pictures are also out there. I think he reads everything that comes in the size of a flash card or a tweet, much longer than that and I have my doubts.

Me: “I would like to uninstall Edge and use Firefox for everything!”
Netflix: “With Firefox I won’t give you best quality even if you pay for it! Use Edge!”
So Edge stays my video streaming browser for now, but only that.

Increasing water efficiency is likely to result in reduced demand for water, with less water therefore flowing through drains and sewers. Some parties have suggested that this could lead to blockages, drainage problems and homes flooding due to backed up sewerage systems.

In Germany our toilets usually have two buttons, one for the yellow which flushes but with a lower amount of water and the bigger button for the big brown business and maximum water flow.

Depending where you live and depending on drought being a thing in your place of the world, using less water can have unwanted side effects:

• backed sewerage systems
• not enough water can lead to environmental problems if the sewage isn’t watered down enough for your sewage treatment plant to deal with it or if it goes straight to a river it is worse than with more water (that one is always really bad but definitely extremely worse with less water)

In the past I had to upgrade my PC every 4 years (my first PC run on Windows 3.1), but my last one just works and even the GPU only fell out of minimum requirements of the newest and graphical shiny games end of last year (it even managed to run Starfield although it looked bad and lagged in cities terribly), but my backlog is huge, so I don’t care and if I care I can use Geforce Now or Game Pass for PC and stream that one game I can not play on my rig directly anymore.

Our planet is on fire and consuming less is the only actual solution to that. Everything got more expensive. I literally don’t want to spent a lot of money on a PC that I do not need, because the one I have plays the games I want to play just fine (currently Dave the Diver) and on top throw a perfectly fine machine away, add to CO2 production and need to cut back on other needs I have because everything is so expensive.

My machine is an i7-6700K 4GHz with a GTX 970 and 16 GB DDR 4. And the only reason this is not working with Windows 11 is the CPU and upgrading that would need a new board and at that point I need a new PC. Oh and I tested it at the beginning when Windows 11 came out, I can circumvent the restriction and install Windows 11 anyway, it’s just not guaranteed it will stay working and getting upgrades can be a hassle, but at least for the time I tried it I did get automated updates.

I do not hate Windows, I tried to get Windows 11, I just don’t want to accept that a security feature for businesses makes my consumer PC invalid for it. I am a gamer and I would like to stay with Windows, but I am not buying a new PC unless a vital part of my old one breaks. I rather stay with an unpatched system and do anything that needs security on my phone/tablet on android. And no, I am 58 y.o. and I am not learning Linux, maybe if I were interested in the Steam handheld it would make sense, but I am not.