atomwaffel

My e-bike’s battery on the other hand is in Wh.

Having filed taxes in Germany, Switzerland and Norway, I can give you two developed countries where it’s not similar to Norway. Not as bad as what I hear from the US, but not simple either.

Good point! Still, I could swear I saw someone (@FakeUnicode?) do exactly this once, but of course I can’t find that tweet any more, partly because it turns out that search engines don’t handle ﷽ well at all, and I don’t feel like testing it on my own followers somehow.

Edit: it looks like it might count it as two characters, so that’s only 140 per tweet.

Yup, you can put 280 of it into a single tweet.

In Europe there’s CoopCycle[1], a “federation of bike delivery co-ops”: https://coopcycle.org/en/

Oh yeah, I doubt you’ll find business class tickets that are anywhere near as cheap as twice the price of the average Ryanair flight, but as someone who is in the lucky situation to be able to avoid airlines that I find actively unpleasant, the price hop from economy to business needn’t be that large. It depends on the airline, route and dates of course, but I’ve seen (and bought) short-haul business class tickets that were less than 150% the price of economy.

That’s true if you’re flying on budget airlines like Ryanair or Easyjet, but nearly all the legacy carriers offer a business class “cabin” where the seats are usually the same as in economy but middle seats are kept free. That’s a 33% reduction in density, not 50%, but it’s not far off.

Perhaps you could even pay a company to print the entire paper for you and have it delivered to your door every morning.

You’ll enjoy the rest of his videos then. He’s one of the few Youtubers whose videos I watch regularly. In addition to being interesting, I always find them well-researched, well-produced and exactly as long as they need to be without any fluff or clickbait.

I’ve recently moved away from Spotify and back to my own music library. I’m using beets[1] to manage my messy metadata and it does a pretty good job. You can probably tell it to leave your metadata alone and just sort things into folders for you.

[1] https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Since this tracks the combined size of the top 100 npm packages, my guess is that those spikes are caused by packages entering and leaving the list.

They’ll also be live-translated from German to English (and vice versa) by volunteers – and often into a third language too!

They did however take $200 million in VC funding in November: https://blog.1password.com/accel-partnership/

> If I'm in a hotel room, and something has dead alkalines, I'll toss the batteries, and try to make it very obvious the batteries were removed so they can be replaced for the next guest. That's not theft.

I agree it’s not theft, but the correct thing to do is probably to ask the front desk if they could replace the batteries, like you would for a light bulb. That way, the batteries can (hopefully) be disposed of properly and you get a working remote control.

> A lot of the time, it's actually difficult to find certain goods in stores here (or to know which store to go to).

Exactly this. I want to support small local businesses and I’m happy to pay a slight premium for that (as well as being able to look at/touch the physical object that I can then immediately take home with me), but I really can’t be bothered to spend an hour or two trying to track it down. I wish brick-and-mortar shops would get together and build a platform where I can search their inventories and find the places close to me that carry the item that I already know I want. Bonus points if I can compare prices too, but I can see why they might not want that.

Fastmail also lets you use wildcards and catchall addresses, giving you infinite email addresses whenever you need them, with no way to tell what “base address” they resolve to internally.

For example, my Twitter address might be twitter@mydomain.com, my Google address google@mydomain.com and so on. All of those go straight to my inbox unless I decide to set up individual filters for them.

The downside is that I can’t easily migrate to a service that doesn’t support this.

Yes, but think of all the meetings you can’t have if people aren’t at the office!

Eh, I work in Norway and while I can work remotely on request, my inquiry about doing so regularly one day a week was met with “what if shit hits the fan and we need you here urgently” from my manager (my house is a ten minute walk from the office) and “if we allow one person to work remotely, everyone will want to” from HR.

Yes, but around three out of four people will have left by 16:30, which is definitely not common in all European countries.

I’d say an average working day is 7 hours plus a 30-minute lunch break, usually taken before noon.

Nope, working in Norway, I can confirm that the office gets very empty very quickly after 16:00, and more than once have I been reminded not to stay all day when I was still at my desk around 17:00.

> the fact that you need to be a citizen to buy one

Small nitpick, but you need to be a Norwegian resident with an ID number (fødselsnummer) and a postal address in Norway, not necessarily a citizen.

Exactly, that’s why I’m wondering about the door-to-door times for a typical trip, and I don’t know enough about American cities to give a qualified answer myself.

My expectation would be that they’re more central and less time-consuming than most airports. Then again, my experience with bus stations so far has also been that they’re even less inviting places than most airports and not usually as well connected either.

I’m not sufficiently familiar with the geography of SF or LA – how does the door-to-door time and cost compare when you account for the fact that most trips don’t actually start and end at an airport? I’d much rather catch a sleeper bus/train in the city centre in the evening, sleep for 7–8 hours (something I’d be doing anyway) and wake up in another city centre the next morning with a full day ahead of me than deal with the hassle of travelling to an airport, going through security, killing time at the gate, and travelling back to the city centre at my destination.

> So allemannsretten is threatening to be extinguished because it's a concept that doesn't scale.

While I agree with your main point, I think it’s important to note that this is about a handful of hotspots like Trolltunga and Pulpit Rock. I can’t see any Scandinavian politician seriously suggesting to abolish allemannsretten as such, and Norway has thousands and thousands of square kilometres where it is working just fine.

> That's one of the great things about electric cars in Norway - you're actually going to get electricity from renewable sources.

This is true in a way, but only part of the picture. While virtually all the electricity that is produced in Norway does come from renewable sources, Norwegian energy producers sell a lot of their “guarantees of origin”[1] to energy companies in other European countries, who are then in turn allowed to market their energy as renewable. You can think of these as a kind of “virtual export”: Norway sells its energy to the rest of the continent and receives the “European Attribute Mix” in return. Since it would be pointless and inefficient to physically transfer this energy, virtual certificates are traded instead.

Because of this, the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate declares the energy consumed in Norway as being 58% fossil, 33% nuclear, and only 9% renewable[2], but Norwegian politicians and energy companies tend to forget this and prefer to emphasise the point that 98% of all energy produced in the country is renewable. Both claims are true, but somewhere someone is getting screwed over.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarantee_of_origin [2] https://www.nve.no/energiforsyning/varedeklarasjon/nasjonal-... (in Norwegian)

Oh, I agree that just about all apps use JavaScript to some degree, but the question is whether that’s for progressive enhancement or as a fundamental requirement. Wikipedia for example works fine without JS (including editing). Pinboard is one of my favourite apps and uses hardly any JS. That one’s perhaps a bit niche, but hell, even Gmail and Facebook still maintain basic “HTML versions” that deliver reasonable (some might say better) user experiences without JavaScript.

I build single-page web apps for a living, so I’m by no means opposed to JavaScript, but I think the web would be worse off if browsers imposed it as a requirement.

But as you say, that would require JavaScript to be available, making it impossible to build web apps that store user state without relying on JS (well, I guess there’s HTTP Basic Auth) and breaking a large part of the internet in the process. Not everything is a client-side single-page web app.

Yup, it baffles me how many people who earn their money writing code seem to either be content with crappy laptop keyboards or shy away from investing a few hours’ salary in a decent keyboard that they’ll be using for tens of thousands of hours.

They do offer three vegetarian burgers (apparently variations on the same patty), vegan nuggets, and a vegan salad.[1] It’s not as good as the vegan burger they have in Sweden, but it’s a start.

[1] https://www.mcdonalds.com/no/nb-no/meny/vegetar.html

Yes, as a European, I’m always amazed at how far south the northern US and even southern Canada really is.

With that said, those are latitudes, not longitudes.