Doorbell prankster that tormented residents of apartments turns out to be a slug
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
What really happened is that the ringing happened multiple times, residents looked out of the window and out of the door but couldn't find anyone, and only then called the police. More trustworthy sources than the Bild do not mention any abandoned house over the road, just that they assumed it must be someone who does the ringing, which is a very sensible assumption.
I suspect that German media only picked up on it because they could end their articles with the pun that "the perpetrator has been turned into a slug", which is a direct translation of a proverb which means that the perpetrator has been dressed down.
"I thought it might be the kids from the abandoned house over the road,” Lisa, 30, a shop sales assistant told the tabloid Bild.
How do you know this?
but its nothing like pornography. were talking about "screen time" which is a vague generic idea, just the same as "social media" encompasses pretty much any major tech companies website/app instead of actual mediums for socializing like IRC, forums etc that were around for decades prior just never called that
The young people shouldn't have to squat and abandoned buildings shouldn't be allowed to just sit and rot.
The most famous Prague squat, Klinika in Žižkov, was full of blue-haired nepo babies whose parents were well connected politicians or businesspeople. That is also why it was tolerated for a fairly long time, and it was always able to summon a crowd of friendly journalists whenever someone tried to empty the building.
(Note that this is something that actual poor people rarely are able to - but lifestyle squatters who studied the same faculty before dropping out can do easily, as they still have the phone numbers of their graduated friends).
The common feature is freewheeling attitudes to drinking and drugs. Most homeless shelters or cheaper landlords won't tolerate too much consumption on the premises, or even have a dry policy. In a squat, anything goes.
Nobody would "rather" do this. They are incentivized to, typically as an Nth order consequence of public policy.
But there are some rules that allow teens above 16 to work in certain jobs and they may be considered adults depending on the circumstances depending on a judge interpretation. Below that age the police will bring the kids to their parents or to a foster home.
This is true for abandoned empty buildings. If the owners are not using a building and someone starts to live in there, they are allowed. The idea is that the right to housing is greater than the right to own empty buildings just for speculation.
In cities were housing offering is lacking this is seen as a measure to push speculators to sell or rent their properties.
But somehow people much prefer the “bohemian squatters sticking it to greedy capitalistic landlords who don’t use their property” narrative.
It took a year to remove the squatters without risk of government violence being applied to the owner.
There's a subtle difference.
In Germany squatting laws dictate you have to openly live at a place for 30 years and the property needs to be registered to your name in order for you to be able to claim ownership.So here it can hardly be a measure anyone can take to get a cheap place to live.
My ass would be offended if so wiped it with a BILD "news"paper.
Now designers and manufacturers have decided that everyone wants and needs touch sensors.
Sacrifice in the process -
Inadvertent triggers and lack of tactile feedback.
…have people whose job it is to clean everything every day anyway.
After a lengthy quarantine and investigation that turned up nothing, I decided to go see this machine myself for context. While I was standing there taking everything in, a fly landed on the dirty touchscreen on a smear and tripped an on-screen button as it rubbed its legs together.
Everything clicked - it was just a fly and eventually some digging revealed someone had carelessly left an admin user available: ID 2, no password, which the fly inadvertently tapped into the touchscreen login UI with two lucky clicks.
Teenage slugs causing havoc on a Saturday night after drinking beer in the park.
Why is this on hackernews in the first place...
Pre internet age I worked in a store where one "unlucky" guy out of reflex asked the king of Sweden for identification when buying with a credit card (fully aware of who was in front of him, it was a toy store and the king used to shop there once a year for Christmas). A colleague told the story at dinner, the colleagues father worked at an evening news paper and wrote a small blurb about it. The following two days news papers from (literally) around the world tried to get an interview with the guy.
Anything can become international news.
Regional media is dead, it's attention bandwidth has been taken up by spacially distributed, but otherwise super narrow opinion bubbles. And unfortunately I don't see any substitute for the kind of local information that we should have, like communal level politics. For a while it looked as if Facebook might survive filling that gap, but that's not really what happened.
Nacktschneckecus Klingelstreichus
Also mysterious... why did nobody just... walk downstairs to look? Use them peepers? At least we know no software engineers are to blame. Along with the slug, we are the one group most reluctant to walk.
> Together residents and police discovered the slug
they did?
It has to be said, that I probably have the habit of most people: skim the title, skip to the comments, skim the article, skip back to the comments, and maybe if I am intrigued enough (as I was this time) read the article.
Well, the more I skipped back and forth the funnier it became. Realized it wasn't the UK started trying to find that abandoned feral children apartment and what not. Then I decided to the read the whole article when a depressing thought mixed with indignation hit me.
The article reads like the following llm prompt: "translate this article from BILD to english make it short and funny" voilá. I still hold the Guardian in a little higher regard than other online media, but this ended up being a small gut punch. But I had fun, thanks chatgpt.
Does German sound funny to everybody or just the English speaking world?
But I'm talking about their regular everyday speaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghRKZRcxeI4
That's how it sounds in everyone's ears, in countries with more melodic languages like Spanish or French.
(It's not even the pronunciation overplayed in the video for comedic effect, many words are already threatening sounding by themselves, just the letters on page invoke either threat or bureaucracy).
Basically captures that part you said "I agree that German isn't the most pleasant language".
Sorry, Dutch and Turkish friends.
Turkish does have some harshness.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-hebben-een-serieus-problee...
English vs. German vs. Swiss-German Nut vs. Nuss vs. Nüssli Mess vs. Durcheinander vs. Chrüsimüsi Rascal vs. Lausbub vs. Glünggi Chicken vs. Huhn vs. Güggeli
Of course, before the radio, making fun of languages couldn't spread that quickly, so German was probably the first language to lose a war (or two) after globalization had started.
I've thought about this question a lot, and I think the answer comes from the history of English as a creole (or nearly so), consisting of a Germanic substrate being gradually displaced by a Romance prestige dialect, as the nobility all spoke dialects of Old French after the Norman Conquest. Moreover, even after that period, French was the language of diplomacy, while Latin was the language of academia and, until Henry VIII, the Church. Newton published Principia Mathematica in Latin, as was the well-established practice, and for generations studying at Harvard required learning Latin (and Greek) first. English's propensity for accepting loanwords rather than calquing them as is usual in Chinese and German has given us a large vocabulary of Latin words for use in formal contexts. New German loanwords, bu contrast, have largely come in through Yiddish, a language of desperately poor immigrants: schmuck, for example.
So it's common to have synonym pairs in which the Germanic term is informal or vulgar, while the Romance term is a formal term, sometimes an inkhorn word. Sour:acid, stuff:material, fuck:copulate, piss:urinate, cunt:vagina, cock:penis, prick:penis, shit:defecate, want:desire, fart:flatulence, balls:testicles, turd:excrement, everyday:quotidian, men:personnel, manly:virile, worldly:mundane, motherly:maternal, house:residence, big:grand, night:nocturnal, twilight:crepuscular, ass:posterior, better:ameliorate, schmuck:prepuce, water:aquatic, water:irrigate, king:monarch, armpit:axilla, cow:bovine, dog:canine, spit:saliva, rot:decay, whore:prostitute, tit:mammary, young:immature, worm:larva, enough:sufficient, grow:develop, sick:infirm, eye:ocular, think:cogitate, reckon:calculate, and so on. Pairs in the other direction are so rare I can't think of one, though I'm sure some must exist. There are cases in this list where a formal Germanic word exists, such as "breast" and "buttocks", but I can't think of a more informal Latinate synonym in those cases.
"Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits," which got Carlin arrested in Milwaukee, is Germanic from beginning to end, even "suck". So is Lenny Bruce's list, even though "ass" and "balls" have cognates in Romance languages.
All the most taboo words in English except "nigger" are Germanic, and the taboo on "nigger" is recent enough that it's shaped by quite different history—but note that English speakers, to convert the Spanish negro "naygro" into a deprecating term, assimilated it to a more typically Germanic phonetic structure, ending it in a syllabic coda that is common in German and prohibited in French, Spanish, and Italian.
(To be fair, "twat" is another possible exception; nobody knows where it comes from. Although a Latin origin is improbable—literacy in Classical Rome was sufficiently broad that we know the word "landīca"—there could easily be some unattested Occitan or Sicilian word from which we get "twat", even if it sounds Germanic phonologically.)
And there's an established idiomatic way to dismiss something by reduplicating a word, the second time replacing the onset of its first syllable with the characteristically Germanic onset cluster "schm-" as a form of ridicule: "Police, schmolice!"
As a result, to Anglophone ears, German (both phonetically and in its recognizable vocables) sounds like an over-the-top vulgar version of English with words that sound a lot like "schmuckrotfart". 'What do you mean, the word for "oxygen" is "sour stuff"?'
So I suspect that German sounding silly and foolish is particular to English speakers.
Also, this page is fantastic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Yid...
My wife, a native speaker of Spanish who doesn't speak German, reports that to her ears German sounds angry rather than silly.
In the middle ages, the Mainz-Worms-Speyer region was the center of Jewish life in Germany.
I think I even found a wrong explanation on that Wikipedia page, simply by knowing Pfälzisch: A "Schnook" is a housefly. It doesn't match the Yiddish meaning that well, but it's the exact same word.
... That's German humor for you
To be fair, the joke scans better in german, where "snail" is something you call someone who is being slow, and the Snail will often appear in jokes as the archetypal "slow" character, like the clever fox or the wise owl or the dumb blonde.
We've had that happen. It was annoying as hell. We didn't call the police, though. (Pretty funny that it was a slug and not a dying piece of electronics, I must say.)
Why is HN so uptight about literally everything?
"In a statement, a police spokesperson in Schwabach, Bavaria, said the animal had “been brought down to size, taught about its territory boundaries and placed on a nearby stretch of grass”."
I imagine that they, quite reasonably, expected that the prankster was some slimy character. And it looks like they were correct.