horsestaple

True if you look at the cities, but it misses the bigger picture. There was also a trend of people moving into the surrounding suburbs and smaller towns, and commuting to the inner city. If you look at the metro area, both have actually grown.

https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/204296/berlin/population

https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/20107/vienna/population

The US is the largest country with english speakers, but it does not have the majority of speakers [1] (just India plus Pakistan have as many). So your assumption would be wrong, even based on statistics.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English...

WebClient predates pattern matching.

I've had many people try my VR headset and people experiencing motion sickness is pretty common. However you can easily train yourself to delay the onset substantially, or even completely cure it. The best thing to do is immediately take off the headset, and orient yourself in the real world until the feeling subsides. Wait at least 10-15 minutes, or even better a full day before trying again, repeat until satisfied with the amount of time you can spend in VR. I've had friends who felt like throwing up after 5 minutes be able to enjoy the experience for hours after a week of this technique. Trying to push through it just makes it worse, and you will develop a psychological barrier or fear which can be very hard to break.

Xiaomi also has working home assistant integration. I have mine set up to start vacuuming when everyone leaves the apartment.

Of course those suburbanites love their hard won individualism, the point is, that this kind of life is built on externalities that make it unsustainable for the majority of people to live this way.

Because it's not 10 000x harder to manage SpaceX than Joe's Plumbing. Sure the compensation should reflect in some way the effort and difficulty. But these earning ratios between the top and bottom or big and small are out of whack. Parent points out that they don't mesh with people's sense of 'right' either.

Yeah I don't think you need to spend so much when these second hand T-series get you 95% of the way there for less.

I couldn't finish the book, it just had too much unexplained fictional techno-jargon to be able to enjoy for me. I know thats the style of immersion he was going for, but it didn't click for me, even though I'm a big sci-fi reader.

He didn't do it to 'fix a disequilibrium', he ruthlessly exploited an opportunity for personal gain at the expense of an entire country. You can argue about the positive long term consequences, or the responsibility of the people that created the situation, but he is most definitely 'a' bad guy.

Yes, if you convinced a lot of people to transact in cans of beans, you would be undermining the control of the government. Just look at countries that don't have a (viable) currency. They are using dollars or euros and are subject to a foreign powers monetary policy.

Also no country defines sovereignty through voluntary consent. Laws applies to you whether you agree or not.

Would be pretty easy to do in this eastern EU country. We have laws that require stations to separate ads from content, so there is always a short animation announcing the start and end of ads.

All of it matters, as a lot of what you find enjoyable about music is learned. Today's music might sound dissonant to someone a few hundred ago. Eg. a particular interval the _tritone_, also known as the devil's tone was considered particularly unpleasant before, but is now ubiquitous. Even today you might find music with 12+ tones not enjoyable (try listening to Indian or Middle Eastern scales). To understand what the physical fundamentals are, think of a taught piece of string that produces a note when you pluck it. The length of it is arbitrary (frequency), what you call this note is arbitrary (letters, sharps, flats etc.). But if you start cutting the string and compare the note it makes to the original, that _ratio_ of strings (frequencies) is a fundamental property of sound and the basis of all music. The simpler the ratio, the more 'pleasant' it will sound when played together, eg. 1-2 is the octave, 2-3 is the fifth. As you can cut the string any number of times, the number of these ratios (the number of notes in a scale) is unlimited, but western music settled on 12 because that number has some nice properties.

*Note - 12 tone equal temperament, that allows for the kind of transformations in the article does not exactly match these fundamental ratios. If we were using pure ratios, the distance between any 2 notes in the scale would differ slightly. Meaning you would have to retune a piano if you wanted to play in a different scale.

You should watch this: https://youtu.be/BH-jVncTJbg Great explanation of how the modern set evolved from military marches up to the Beatles.