I meant around town and such, but yeah, wild yards are cool too. Easier to maintain flowers and clover and stuff.

You skipped kids 3 thru 14 there

All you can do is add to pollen I guess. Plant seeds of native plants that bees love. Indiscriminately in random places.

Maybe someone else has some better ideas.

I thought the books were for your shelf tbh. You put one for each language you claim proficiency in.

It’s cool to have niche older books though. My friend has a programming manual in Estonian from either the very late soviet era or very early 90s that has both some dialect of BASIC and some niche dialect of Pascal that I hadn’t even heard of.

Yes but the question is whether it’s imagined newly by a human, or it comes from an algorithm that only works because it’s combining other people’s existing works.

Tablets and software made things easier for humans, AI just… Makes artists obsolete and if you do create something new, it’ll be ingested too.

I agree with you in the core principle that less work for more productivity is good, but I feel creative work is the one notable exception. We remember a bunch of paintings from centuries ago not because they’re beautiful to look at even, but because these particular artists have found interesting new ways to convey their view of the world or their feelings. AI generating a new version of a Van Gogh painting isn’t as impressive.

Ghibli movies, similarly, have a distinctive art style that reminds you of how these movies have been lovingly made by dedicated artists who poured their souls into it. Using AI to shit out random content with the same style is just blatant disrespect for everything they’ve done. You can use AI to clone paw patrol or something if you want. That’s a merch seller, not art.

That one IS a controversial opinion unfortunately.

“Urknall” which I’m not sure how best to literally translate to English

Don’t worry, those of us who love German cars and Czech pilsner are already used to calling things ur-something :)

You can run quality modern oils for 20k in a car as robust as a Toyota if you change out the filter mid-interval.

Germans specify 12-15k nowadays and they run much tighter tolerances.

It has awesome reviews on Amazon so it’s worth it

It is the middle of the week if you consider the week to me the workweek, from Montag to Freitag.

Is that the driver or just the configuration interface in Javascript?

I would suspect that the actual driver is written in C.

There are neobanks for people who travel a lot. Both Revolut and Wise should let you either convert ahead of time or just convert as you withdraw (Revolut has a notice saying please don’t let the ATM do its own conversion as the ATMs are going to be higher fees). Currencies here. They apparently have a 2% withdrawal fee with a 1 EUR minimum. Revolut’s fee-free maximum depends on your plan. Metal gets you a metal card and 800 EUR per month fee free, Ultra or whatever gets you a platinum plated card and 2000 EUR per month fee free, but it’s also ridiculously expensive compared to their free, plus and premium plans. Metal itself is already a bit expensive, but it’s still way less than Ultra.

Wise has both a monthly allowance for proportional fee free withdrawals and a monthly limit of 2 completely feeless withdrawals. You get hit by fees once you hit either limit Basically: From the 3rd withdrawal of the month I pay 0.50 EUR for every withdrawal, and for any withdrawals above 200 EUR per month I pay 1.75%. If I make card payments or withdrawals in e.g the US, there’s a 0.47% conversion fee from EUR. In South Korea it’s 0.71%.

In both cases, the fees are predictable and low, just gotta familiarize yourself with the beforehand. There are other similar options out there as well, but these are the ones I use (Wise is great for giving you both a USD and EUR native account so you can receive USD and convert it to EUR instantly. Other currencies as well, but these are the ones that matter for me). You can register for either one without visiting a branch or anything, but you will have to do some KYC checks for both of them and for Wise at least once you hit a certain amount transferred or a certain transfer size, you’ll have to do an AML check. Not a lot of fun when you receive a large sum and you need a couple of grand out of your account the same day and get the AML check, but it doesn’t take a long time as long as you can prove the source of your income is legit. For me I had some trouble with it because I had proof but not the exact types of documents their app allowed to use, but I called their customer support and it was resolved quickly. Since then, no issues.

I imagine most people already know that KYC = Know Your Customer. AML means Anti-Money Laundering. The former is only about your identity, the latter is meant to check whether your funds are legit, or you’re receiving a bunch of money from terrorists or something.

I think Gen Z is about joining us millennials in being too old for that shit at this point, it’s α taking over now

Yup, it’s the sweat thing that makes us able to run indefinitely, as long as we’re in good shape. I hate the feeling of sweating, but it’s pretty much magic that with how much heat my body generates, my resting body temperature is actually pretty low, maybe 36.1C.

I’ve never owned a car that small and I’ll preface this with saying that of course the tiny car wins the fuel economy competition. My friend also has a tiny car with a 1.2 liter engine that absolutely beats anything I’ve ever owned in terms of fuel economy in the city. However, sustained highway mpg of 40 (just under 6l/100km) for a large luxury sedan with an ancient 4 speed auto box is pretty impressive if you consider that at the time, my other friend’s newer, significantly smaller, lighter and manual transmission equipped 1.6 liter Mazda 3 averaged 36 mpg or 6.5l/100km on the highway.

Of course the giant (by European standards) beast’s fuel economy dropped off if I gunned it from a red light in the city. Starting and driving in the city in -30C was also absolutely brutal for the fuel economy. But the fact that at least on the highway, for which it was truly made, it beat a smaller, lighter car with a smaller engine says a lot IMO. The beast ran around 1500-1600 rpm at 90 km/h, whereas the Mazda was more like 2000-2500 IIRC, in 5th/top gear. If you wanted to overtake anyone in the Mazda, you generally had to drop from 5th into 3rd gear as well, whereas my Chrysler didn’t really NEED to downshift from 4th to 3rd, but it certainly made the whole ordeal take a lot less time. Probably if the Mazda had had a slow revving 2 liter engine with decent low-end torque, it could’ve been geared entirely differently and would’ve used significantly less fuel. Underpowered engines don’t get the best fuel economy - appropriately sized engines for a car do. Keep in mind that my Chrysler was from 1999. It had a 4 speed transmission. My friend’s Mazda was a 2005 model. Modern cars tend to have turbos and 7-10 speed transmissions to help keep them in efficient RPM ranges for good torque-specific fuel consumption too.

Long term average for the Chrysler (300M) with a bunch of city driving included was 10 l/100km, or 23 mpg. Obviously no match for your ecobox, but still better than my current 2.5 liter Subaru Outback, which is 14 years newer, 21 CM shorter and 14 CM narrower than the 300M, and has similar gearing (it’s a CVT, but I get similar RPM ranges at similar speeds generally). The Outback of course does have the disadvantage of extra height in this case though.

So no, I never wanted to say that a bigger engine is always more economical. There are clear cases where there is no need for a big engine. Modern technology has also helped small engines deliver power in a much better fashion. The 3 cylinder 1.0 engine they put in some Škodas nowadays has about the same max power rating as my friend’s 1.6 liter Mazda did, but it has more torque AND at lower RPMs. The VAG 1.4 or 1.5 or whatever TSI with 110kW? It gets WAY more torque at MUCH lower RPMs compared to the 1.6. Hell, the 2.0 variants they put in the new Golf GTI, R, etc, are torque monsters that also blow my 300M’s N/A 3.5 liter out of the water. These engines can drive bigger cars without any issues. Of course this all comes with the cost of added complexity. Turbo, direct injection, etc.

So TL;DR: My claim that small engines are less economical pertains to underpowered naturally aspirated engines that lack the torque for the car they’re trying to move, versus adequately sized engines with adequate torque. Small car with small engine is of course still going to be more economical. Medium sized and big cars with gutless engines are where my point applies. Modern tech expands the torque range of small engines so you can’t compare it anymore anyway, you can now put smaller engines in cars without losing driveability and fuel economy.

They put the 2.2 ecotec in several Opel models and the 2.4 in a select few I believe.

A sluggish 2.4 engine isn’t a performance engine. If anything, it’s ideal for fuel economy in those bigger cars because you’re not tempted to rev it that much. It’s got some more low end torque, but it’s not fun to redline.

The best highway fuel economy I’ve gotten out of a gasoline engine was a 3.5 V6. You never needed to rev it over 2000 in regular usage and honestly 3000 rpm was plenty for overtaking. It had plenty of top end power too but you never needed it, so the pedal only got full usage when overtaking someone in a 3.0 diesel Audi or BMW and they couldn’t handle an old Chrysler passing them, but my young reckless ass also wasn’t going to back off obviously.

Wait till you hear about humans.

While most of us these days are obese, humans as a species are capable of running indefinitely. Because of that, we could hunt faster prey by simply tiring them out

I mean they used the ecotec engines in plenty of Opel, Saab, Vauxhall and Holden models too. Those are all non US market cars. Except maybe Saab which might have been sold in the US in addition to Europe.

What a privilege it is to be white tbh

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