Meanwhile in my country you can serve alcohol all night, but you can only sell it (to go) between 10 AM and 10 PM

2 in the pinky 1 in the stinky

I’ve read somewhere that right winger (and by extension billionaires) could see themselves become one of the millionaires class, however they cannot imagine being one day someone in the intelligencia/artists class.

I'm not right wing and I'm completely broke mostly for reasons to do with a manipulative ex rather than a lack of income, but it's still far more likely that I'll one day be a millionaire than that I'll one day be an artist. And I suspect that's the same for a LOT of people.

You can luck into a well-paid job and good connections, you can't really luck into a skill you were never born with. They say hard work beats talent, but if you have zero talent, no amount of hard work will suddenly give you a sense of imagination worth a damn. 9 years worth of mandatory art class in school AKA mostly drawing or painting for 2 hours a week and my skills cap at... side view of a bus. An European one, not an American one.

So yes, it's a lot easier to fantasize about kicking off a successful business or just lucking into a high-end executive role at a job than it is to fantasize one day creating something that someone would actually find beautiful or meaningful.

And how much is it society having conditioned women into "oh I don't know anything about that" when it comes to anything technical, including home repairs and such so they don't even try to pay attention? Because I've encountered women of all ages who are impressed to hear a woman could do anything considered a man's job traditionally. It's a sort of learned helplessness to the point some think they need a man's help to put together IKEA furniture. Not because they're incapable of doing it but because they've been taught that they're incapable of doing it.

Can we be sure if anyone actually ate them? Articles were written, sure, but IIRC there were a ton of people posting about it sarcastically and that got reported as true

That doesn't get you inside info, that gives you a feed of posts as they come out instead of having to scrape or browse

Actual inside info is going to cost significantly more and probably require a referral.

Yeah their native client is a special case. It's actually an unreal engine application that runs chromium to display at least parts of the store.

Business friendly just means lower corporate income tax I'm pretty sure.

IMO, if you're a homeowner, DIY skills are non-negotiable. At least one person per household should know how to get things done so there's no need to involve contractors in any but the most extreme cases.

If you wear shorts and for some reason the slides have to be used to exit the plane, you risk being burned.

I'll take that risk over wearing jeans on an 8 hour flight.

Okay but do you want to do that hundreds or thousands of times?

Yes, Apple, a company founded in 1976, invented torx in 1967.

You may be thinking of Apple's Pentalobe screws, which are inferior to torx and have no real business existing.

The Rockstar of yore would absolutely throw in a reference, without using his actual name of course.

The Rockstar of the 2020s, I'm not so sure. Dan Houser is gone and he was the founder and head writer. No idea if his replacement will have a sense of humour.

They do pay tax in Finland, it's much harder to evade than somewhere like the US or UK. And the tax rates are pretty high.

It's easy to think that the government having more money can solve everything, but there's still a limited and shrinking pool of labour available. Money doesn't make young people materialize out of thin air.

If you look at the average age graph for Finland, you'll notice that 70 years ago it was very young (tons of children who don't work) and now it's pretty old (tons of retirees who don't work). In the middle there, it was a very strong economy with a strong workforce.

The only way around this is to start importing young people from 3rd world countries while they can still afford to allow their people to emigrate - as their own populations start aging, they may have to start restricting it. That's unpopular because it drives people's wages down, but if your labour pool is shrinking faster than the amount of people who need to be supported by the labour pool, you need to expand the labour pool somehow. Unless you want to start killing off old people or raise the retirement age to 75 eventually.

Does Germany actually use Linux and Libreoffice or is it still just one or two states that flip-flop when Microsoft shows key people a bag of money?

Well every single time an article is posted about Germany, it turns out it's a single state and that they reverted a few years later.

And here in Estonia, government departments are actually trying to get their private contractor companies to switch to Teams for "ease of communication". That's how bad it is. Yes, the official stance is "we'll see about using FOSS more", but that's not reality.

I suspect a good majority of European countries still use Microsoft on most of their government computers. France and Denmark are making the move, but not sure if anyone else is unfortunately.

Already explained this elsewhere in the thread, but that doesn't magically make young people appear out of thin air. Money can be used to motivate people to work, it doesn't make them appear out of thin air.

You'll have to start importing people from the third world to make up for your aging society while that's still an option (i.e while they still have enough young people to allow emigration).

I swear it seems that most people here seem to think money alone can solve every issue without humans being involved when it comes to these issues. If that were the case, why do we need people in the first place? Just have the money farm for food, build housing, etc.

If you're filling out the exact same data into forms for 8 hours a day for 50 years, maybe automate it?

That lane keep assist could actually be making your car more dangerous since it can make mistakes but it gives you a false sense of security and makes you less alert. That's different from something like automatic braking that doesn't change your perception because it isn't actively doing anything most of the time

I can. I know a company that runs dozens if not hundreds. They also use MySQL - not even MariaDB, actual MySQL, on all those servers in addition to their own software. I sometimes wonder if they pay the license fees on that. If I ever do end up starting a competing business, I could just tip off Oracle about that and they'd lose millions. Wouldn't even lose any sleep for it, they got bought out by private equity in a rather tragic story (founder didn't want to ever sell it).