Money laundering. Not even joking. Large denominations of cash is one of the more important ways of transferring value across borders for laundering purposes, which is why the largest number of bills in the most significant international currencies (USD and EUR, primarily) are in denominations mich larger than their day to day use value should suggest.

Nah that’s just in the pictured configuration. The baskets and all the accessories just hook onto the rack frame so you can move things around to whatever config you want. Do the dish baskets on top of each other and leave the ‘flatter’ bits (like the knife block) for over the actual sink, much better config. Thirty second job even with the dishes on them.

I have one of these, too, and I’ve never been able to use it. Would if I could, it’s brilliant! But in my last flat it was too tall to fit under the cupboards, and in my current one it’s too wide to fir between them.

I have a dishwasher, but I use a dish dryer as a ‘pre-washer rack’ because my ADHD ass can never empty a clean dishwasher quick enough to avoid dirty dishes piling up. So the dryer rack keeps dishes from blocking the sink. Stupid problems sometimes require stupid solutions.

I’ve been thinking about some similar use cases recently and came to the conclusion that it’s ultimately about packaging. All the functionalities that are needed are fairly readily available (other replies here have aome good suggestions in Nextcloud and self-hosted Odoo), but the real challenge is to make it easily deployable into and accessible for the community.

My thinking was specifically for the idea of easily connecting and organising building tenants. I want to get to the point where one (or a few) tenants can get together, set up a single boxin a flat in the building, and distribute QR codes to the other tenants that will allow them to access some kind of virtual building community hub. If you’re reliant on a lot of technical know-how to set up or maintain this, that’s going to severely limit its usefulness.

The EU was designed from the start to be a liberal market for the US in Europe. The trim has changed over the years, but the foundation has not. For a country like Norway, joining the EU would be a terrible decision as it would put us in a similar position as France and Germany without any real control over domestic fiscal policy. Joining the Euro would see us lose control over monetary policy.

If this just meant our democratic voice being added to European democracy, that would be one thing. But that is not the case. The EU lacks democracy in the same way the moon lacks oxygen; it would be foolish to think it ought to be there to begin with. In the words of former German fonance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, ‘elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy’.

Yeah. Though not really a fan of the use of ‘simpler’ here, as it has other connotations than simply ‘less syntactically complex’ which is really what we’re seeing. In many very real ways, the fragmented phrasing etc of less formalised forms of language are structurally more complex than regular written forms.

I’m surprised that what seems to me to be the most obvious hypothesis isn’t covered. Until very recently, historically speaking, written and spoken language have been very clearly separated forms of language use.

With the advent of the internet, instant messaging, social media etc, the distinction has been gradually blurring in the sense that written language is being used more and more frequently for what would previously have been considered ‘spoken uses’.

We know spoken language mostly consists of shorter fragmented phrases compared to the longer complete sentences of the written word. It should not be surprising that as writing is increasingly used for ‘written speech’, regular writing will be influenced to move in the direction of the shorter phrasing of spoken language while otherwise maintaining the syntax and grammar rules of written language forms.

Always worth keeping in mind that the first rule of power is that it never surrenders itself willingly.

In this case, what that means is thatthe courts - supreme or not - will only go along with Trump’s power grab for as long as the belief that it furthers their own power prevails. And that belief is cracking.

It’s cracking way too late to stop the power grab from progressing further, but still.

Honestly, if we’re going to insist on this representative stuff that maintains a persistent hierarchy of power, it needs to be divorced from these kinds of influence channels. Becoming an MP should be an exclusive commitment. Once an MO, you should be barred from all other employment for a long time after leaving office.

We should all be more than happy to guarantee former MPs wages for that entire period, it would be a drop in the bucket of any national budget and would be a significant filter both to becoming an MP in the first place and to engaging in this kind of influence peddling as well.

If you had read Hannah Arendt’s work on totalitarian regimes (Origins of Totalitarianism) - focusing specifically on Nazi Germany and the USSR under Stalin - you would never think this. As she says, and I am paraphrasing here, the consequence of people always lying to you isn’t that you stop believing everything but rather that you end up capable of believing anything.

And I’m pretty sure that effect is on full display already.

Israel doesn’t give two shits about the hostages beyond their propaganda value. That much has been obvious since before day one to anyone willing to actually believe their eyes and ears.

Think these might be creationist penguins.

Windvane Lammy… if he’s leaning towards criticism now that suggests tensions are higher than I expected them to be.

Very high up on the list of worst persons in history.

Yeah one of my more… tech adventurous friends had the most insane series of security breaches (to out it mildly) potentially related to this and some other recent ridiculousness.

I really need people to understand that a) most people neither do or want to pay attention to politics, because they don’t have time or energy for it and because b) they are (rightly) convinced that politica just doesn’t work for them. So what will they do? They will tag on to anything that sounds oine it’s different to the same old bullshit.

Not because they don’t believe the new bullshit isn’t also bullshit, but at least it’s not the same bullshit that got us into our current mess.

Everyone in politics and the media lie to us all the time about everything. That’s not meant to be a true statement, but it is one that clearly feels true to most people. And Hannah Arendt once said something important about how people respond to such circumstances, and about what such a people can be brought to do. It’s not pretty.

Am currently reading the book, it’s a worthwhile read. And I already have a list of people I will recommend it to, because I think it will nudge them in the right direction politically.

It’s arbitrary. The reasoning is based around avoiding inflationary effects, but that’s based on a stupidly simplistic and wrong-headed idea of how inflation works.

Thing about social democratic bureaucracy is that it tends to end up being extremely rigid with politicians who are particularly entrenched in this rigid system of rules. So in these states, things like ‘not hurting long term goals too much’ matters because going at cross purposes with legally stated aims in any way is more than good enough reason to not do it at all. You don’t get to interpret your way around the law in states like Norway.

Add to this that the same politicians also have entirely forgotten what social democracy is supposed to be - maintaining a capitalistic market economy while leveraging state power to counteract its negative social effects and ensure the social security of the people - in favour of some idea that it’s actually just a set of basic institutions that were invented one to two hundred years ago that don’t need any kind of updating outside of just the bare minimum of maintenance, and… well, you end up with states that run relatively well but increasingly keep creaking at the seams, everything increasingly underfunded, with politicians who seem convinced they can’t actually do anything apart from tinkering at the edges.

This breeds discontent and political distrust. And in such conditions, it doesn’t really matter if the vast majority would want us to support good causes abroad, people will still be angry about it because it feels like they are getting stepped on in favour of someone else. They couldn’t tell you exactly why they feel that way, so they grab on to the nearest idea - cognitively speaking - that they can spin an understandable narrative about. Immigrants is the obvious one. Political elites playing their games the obvious next one. Then comes the common misunderstandings about economics, especially where inflation is relevant.

Basically our politicians have put themselves in a corner they are unequipped to get themselves out of, and everything they do ends up producing backlash one way or another.

Yes, the rule is up to 4% of annual proceeds can go into the national budget for covering spending. That rule, however, is arbitrary nonsense and only serves to limit the size and scale of investments on the budget.

The actual limiting factor is that the law states that the purpose of the fund is to save for the benefit of future generations. That’s something they will have to navigate. Personally I would like for there to be a mechanism that basically requires a ‘business case’ outlining how any proposed investment/spending will align with that stated aim of the fund. Making such a case here should be pretty straightforward, as allowing one of our neighbouring countries to militarily invade and conquer their neighbours wouldn’t be good for said ‘future generations’.