What I can confirm is that Tyr (Faroese Metal band) does more Scaldic rhythm fuckery than the rest of Scandinavia combined. That one is easy to explain: They’re still communally singing the sagas over there, they didn’t give up the oral tradition after the introduction of writing, after Christianisation. They’re growing up with the old poetic forms like the English are growing up with iambic pentameter.

Is Faroese culture the closest we currently have to what Norse people were like during the Iron Age? Definitely: Small, isolated island populations tend to be culturally conservative and the Faroese are no exception. Were they ever Vikings? Nope. The first settlers, arguably, were, but settling the Islands is about the greatest adventure the Faroese people ever had the rest of its history is being a rest stop. And I say that with love.

Also, I kind of want them to extend the tunnel system to Iceland and Scotland. And then you could drive from Iceland to the edge of China.

Well, that’d be quite a distance. Also you can’t drive through the channel tunnel you get loaded onto a train.

It’s not about not able but not willing. And not in the “we don’t want to help Ukraine” sense, but in the “we don’t want to switch to a war economy, not even in part” one.

Lessons should definitely be learned about capacity to scale up, though. E.g. in future peace times we might regularly order shell casings from 1000 machine shops, each doing a couple, to make sure that each of them has experience doing it. The penny-pinchers won’t like that, low-volume production is expensive, military logisticians will love it.

And we can definitely produce more tank/artillery barrels than Russia, btw. They only have two suitable rotary forges, both of them Austrian models. That company could, push come to shove and with some help from other companies delivering parts, probably build forges faster than the Russians can make barrels. And at that point you seriously have to worry about whether we still have enough steel production to justify making cutlery.

Plenty of villages with economies which right-out rely on tourism, and plenty of space around those villages. As said: Many of those conflicts could have been avoided by collecting feedback before deciding on a route.

Also: Would you rather pay more network fees or more for your electricity because insufficient interconnections cause price spikes on the local spot market? Burying a cable is a one-time investment, paying premium prices for electricity is a recurring cost.

All I’m saying is that “Oh those evil NIMBYs” is a cop-out, if you plan and execute things properly you get YIMBYs. A master carpenter doesn’t blame their tools, a master planner doesn’t blame the population.

NIMBYs and Powerlines

That’s like half-true. Plenty of NIMBYs who said “bury that shit we’re a vacation spot”, commence companies whining about cost and misrepresenting the position of opponents to deflect blame.

Germany’s planning law does seem to be designed specifically to piss off the maximum amount of people. You need to inform early, before you’ve even decided on e.g. the route, so that you’re aware about conflict points so you can plan around them. Also figures that telling people “we’ve considered these 10 alternatives and don’t see any way around this particular nasty point, sorry” gets you a different reaction than “we’ve considered nothing and are out of alternatives”.

Israel are occupiers, yes, but Hamas attacked territories which everyone agrees are solidly Israel, and not occupied Palestine. Which, on first glance, is a-ok until you recognise that the whole thing was 5% attacks on military targets and 95% war crimes.

Oh, side note: Russia drew up the battle plan and trained Hamas to execute it. As far as Ukraine is concerned Hamas is a friend of their enemy, no different from Iran or North Korea.

Also I really don’t vibe with you equating Palestinians and Hamas. Smells of hasbara.

Eastern Orthodox in particular. Plenty of other Orthodox churches have adopted the Revised Julian calendar so Christmas falls on the 24th. At least until the leap years desync.

…which is of course still a bit off the solstice (more like 21st or 22nd) but that has been the case for basically forever as people forgot which holiday it was they declared to be baby Jesus’ birthday.

It’s a Swiss-owned company originally founded by an Italian in… barely the US. Two years after California joined the union.

A kilo for forty bucks. Are you kidding me. That’s way too cheap to be good cocoa, actually good chocolate costs 150-200 per kg.

milk fat, vanilla extract, natural flavor, soy lecithin.

…it gets worse and worse. You want to see none of those in good chocolate. But at least Lindt checks out as an owner they upcharge you for the gold paint on the packaging and also use cheap cocoa.

Go to Aldi. Buy Moser-Roth. Same quality, priced sensibly. Or treat yourself and buy something from Domori.

Or, you know, you could have mechanisms in place to do it without currency manipulation. Some countries have done that since before the Euro – the Euro inherited its price stability mandate from the German Mark. Many countries adopting the Euro then said, “well, looks like we’re doing it the German way now”. And they did. Countries like Kosovo are doing it without even being an Eurozone member, Bosnia and Herzegovina is doing it, the Convertible Mark changed its peg from German Mark to Euro.

Tons of countries, large and small, strong and weak, all voluntarily choosing a stable currency over being able to inflate yourself out of nasty situations. Maybe, just maybe, it’s not actually necessary to have that capacity, there’s other ways to deal with things, and having a stable currency is overall beneficial.

And, seriously, fuck Greece. Also fuck the Troika which fucked up debt restructuring but there’s not a single thing about the Greek tragedy that wasn’t caused by the Greek government being absolutely irresponsible with money. Maybe, next time, don’t spend money on useless BS while you’re already neck-deep in debt.

And being able to deflate your currency wouldn’t really have helped because do you really think anyone would lend money to Greece in Drachme.

I know just about noting about nuclear fuel cycles, but yes, more plutonium sounds exactly like what the French want. They have an arsenal to feed.

had money not been saved

This just serves as a lesson to the “failsafe technology” crowd: That also involves failsafe humans. Those, to the best of my knowledge, have yet to be invented.

Oh and relatedly some German reactor ran for decades without a backup power generator. It was there, present, physically, that is, but noone bothered to check whether it actually worked. Merkel justified her flip-flop on the nuclear exit (shortly before Fukushima, she delayed the exit that SPD+Greens had decided on) by saying, more or less, “If the Japanese can’t do it we can’t do it either” but if she had been paying attention, it should’ve been clear that we couldn’t do it. That became clear when the first SPD+Green coalition moved responisibity for nuclear safety from the ministry for economy to that for the environment, run by a Green, and they made a breakfast out of all that shoddy work that the operators had done. Oh the containment vessel is riveted… figures they put the rivets in the wrong way. Shut it down, have fun re-doing every single one of them before starting it up again.

Thus, my conclusion: The only people you can trust to run nuclear reactors safely are people who don’t want nuclear reactors to exist in the first place.

France won’t shut down fission for the simple reason that they need plutonium for their bombs.

France doesn’t care about fuel cycles which don’t produce plutonium.

The thing with printing money in Iceland is that a) they proved that they think it grows on trees and b) there’s no trees in Iceland.

Fun fact: Germany recently re-introduced patronyms. Technically only applies to Frisians but at least in my state being Frisian is as simple (as far as the state is concerned) as claiming that you are so it’s a free for all. So there’s again going to be Knut Jansen, son of Jan Peters, son of Peter Larsen. To modernise the whole thing also matronyms are allowed.

You missed the industrial-scale torture part. There’s been some instances of torture, yes, but nothing even close to what happened in Syria in matters of both scale and systematics. The IDF, at large, has always been more interested in killing people than pure, unadulterated, sadism.

You’re rightfully enraged about the plight of the Palestinians, now don’t turn around and deny the plight of Syrians by drawing false equivalences. If you want to draw an equivalence for the Syrian situation try North Korea.

Have they been in a prison where they were regularly and systematically tortured, and that for decades, before they ended up in those bags?

Not even a fucking month has passed and people with .ml accounts are already trivialising Assad. Tankies gotta stick to their own, I guess.