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Biking smarts in Berlin is a combo of having a grungy-looking bike and simply not going by bike to certain places such as busy squares and main stations.

Yes, that's what I meant. You can be either green or neo-Nazi, no middle ground.

People have different problems and priorities than you, and if you decide to annoy them on top of the hardships they've already been burdened with, this might be the straw that will cause them to eventually radicalize. Just look at the AfD banners of the day, and you will see that they use every opportunity like this to grab voters. I've seen posters that said "Klima-Kleber ins Knast", so this is a factor that may bend people down.

What I don't like about Germany is that left-leaning people love to shout out their virtue with demos, banners, stickers, banter and whatnot, but when they are confronted with an actual working-class crowd, they just brush them off as "Nazis", and we don't talk to "Nazis".

And the same people who celebrated shutting down nuclear now put the blame on cars and block streets preventing working class people from getting to work. And as such, the far-right party polls at a record high right now.

Looked it up in Google Images and it's funny how they made the label in German to mimic the feel of a luxury product. I guess German things must have been status symbols at the time.

Are debit cards really not accepted online? I thought that save for some very specific applications, all Visa or MasterCard branded cards should work online. Never got a Visa refused, and it's a Visa Debit. I know that some places like Germany informally refer to any Visa or Mastercard as a "credit card", in contrast to true(?) debit systems such as Maestro or V-Pay. So if a place says "No credit cards", it means that Visa and Mastercard cards of any kind are not accepted.

Sad to see that the people have failed Bitcoin again. I really hope that this perfect technology will give them an another chance.

I have an old email with my (common) first name and a low number. Every now and then I get registration emails from various children's online games.

City planners in Warsaw, Poland have apparently noticed that underground passages are actually an inconvenience to pedestrians and now I'm seeing a trend where such crossings are starting to get surface-level crosswalks as well, such as at Rondo Dmowskiego[0], a principal public transport hub. Such changes are a life quality improvement to people with disabilities - elevators are breaking left and right, cutting off people who rely on them. Right now I live in Berlin and the public transport notification page is always filled with reports of broken elevators all around the city.

[0] https://www.transport-publiczny.pl/img/20210430130147Dmowsk2...

The recurring accusation is that paper and fax is king. And as a Polish immigrant, I find this true. I can do most of the bureaucracy online for the Polish state and it's not the case in Germany. In turn, the lengthy path has its end; in my home country, you can be chased by the authorities in circles, because there's never a way to be 100% compliant with the law.

And the source that debunks the transgender suicide claim is literally named "The Transgender Trend". But I guess that a person who takes the NPC meme seriously deserves an another bullet point in author's bullet list - they are somehow all very similar.

I was looking through dozens of websites explaining this and it seems I might have fallen victim to SEO optimization. Thanks.

On the other side, while the compliance burden and tax regimen are huge, it is at least possible to _be_ compliant. This is in comparison to Poland, where taxes are vague on purpose and tax collection organs are allowed to just randomly go after you because they decided that the law actually meant something else all the time. And then you get retroactively fined for non-compliance.

Germany's employment laws are made for jobs in manufacturing. Germans love to boast their worker-centric legislation, but what's the use of it if most hard labor is just being outsourced to less worker-friendly countries? I'm an IT professional (shocking on HN) who's trying to get into a side gig because I enjoy doing my job and learning new stuff. If I were to follow the law to the letter, I could just forget about it, because it's illegal to do paid work for more than 40h/week in here, even if you're self-employed. If I get trouble for this, I may just consider moving out.

Common translation tools would benefit from the ability to input some domain information. Typing in an entire sentence is a sensible start, but oftentimes a lone sentence does not carry enough context. Example: in my language, the term "fresh water" translates to "fresh water" or "sweet water". "Sweet water" is the opposite of saltwater, while "fresh water" would only be used in a context like "water in a tank has been replaced". The translations in Cities: Skylines use the literal translation and this has always irked me; if the translator accepted "plumbing" as a context, it would have produced a correct translation.

Depends on the country. In Poland, most banks use a standardized interbank instant cheque system which is integrated with your phone number, and everyone would use that for settling small sums between each other. Sweden has a similar system that's even more flexible.

Meanwhile, German banks offer a similar solution (giropay), yet - in this privacy-obsessed society - everyone uses PayPal instead.

I can assure you that a great majority of practicing Catholics do not treat confessions seriously. Coming from a traditionally Catholic society, we don't have any better coping techniques than "simply man up".

I'm fascinated with Americans who discover Catholicism though. Suddenly the religious parts of Europe become what Japan is to anime enthusiasts - a mythical land of perfection.

As a Pole, I don't think I've heard the term "hypermarket" in like 10 years. There was a boom for all that exaggerated Western-style consumerism, but this kinda died down as medium-sized discount stores took over the majority of the market. Family trips to a shopping center might be a thing of the past - but also I'm not a kid anymore.

It's lore like any other, and it's fun to research, discuss and share with others. No need to go nuclear over people playing silly, harmless games with each other.

I understand, but the example was more about the way of getting your point across. These are two examples of radical stances where adherents are absolutist and tolerate no dissent.

The only acceptable outcome of a conversation with an "outsider" is that they will switch sides and give up their lifestyle to broaden my cause.

I come from a country infested by anti-choice/pro-life extremism and I like to reuse what I've seen and heard from them against radical vegans to give them a taste of their own medicine (regardless of my stance on any of those issues):

So, abortion causes deaths of millions upon millions of babies yearly, the victims are always innocent, there are numerous medical complications, and God's wrath on the world is imminent and inevitable if we don't stop doing this right now, everyone, no exceptions, not even thinking about it. If you disagree, you murder babies, you are a horrible person, and you are the direct reason for the destruction of humanity.

How does this compare in a perspective?

It amazes me how people are incapable of multi-dimensional thinking: you can pick a side without claiming that one of them is pure good and the other is pure evil. But we are also probably talking about the kind of people whose only cultural references are superhero movies and Harry Potter.

Another thing is the legal requirement to put your full name and home address on any website you own privately. Everyone I ask about this contradiction is like "Well it is like it is, so it probably has to be like that"

I think it's a uniquely German problem, because nowhere else in the EU did Google have to blur buildings. Having immigrated to Germany I can tell that Germans are pretty much privacy-obsessed, with strict regulations on CCTV (you will get in trouble if your camera points to the street) and hardly anyone having a social media account.

> I'll have you know that brazilians who speak english fluently are the elite

100% this. I've visited Brazil as a tourist and if I did not go with a Portuguese speaking friend, I would have been lost on day one. English is pretty much only spoken by people who can afford private education there.

Hard for potatoes to be ingrained in our vocabulary if they have only been widely known and used as food since the 18th century. And the association of vodka with potatoes is primarily a Western thing. If you don't specify further, vodka means rye spirit in Poland and brands that make it from potatoes specifically say it on the packaging.

Huh, TIL. Looked it up and they loosened up the regulations last year to permit growing poppies for personal use. It's bizzare given that poppy seeds are a very common ingredient in our cakes and pastries.

It's not too surprising in America, but I know a person who would refer to any Black person as African American in Europe. In most cases, neither party would have had set their foot in America in their lives.

Poland is unique here in the matter that it has banned Sunday shopping only recently to pander to the religious voter base. Germany has modified their labor laws to give the states freedom to regulate opening hours on 6 days of the week, but never extended this to Sundays (as Sunday is a constitutionally protected day of rest).

Looks like that ETF is just noise[0]. I've never followed Cramer, but this pretty much fits the narrative that he's just saying random things. If he's throwing around random opinions about given stock, then it's not difficult to cherry pick that one case when he was wrong at a right time.

[0] https://www.crameretfs.com/sjim

Also in heavily NIMBY countries like Germany, where it's difficult to place new transmitters and the existing ones are rarely upgraded. We have poor mobile service and higher prices compared to most of Europe here, but it's still pennies compared to the US.

An airport being outside of city limits has its historical reason (the Allies have agreed that the entire area of Berlin could only be served by airlines operated by one of the four occupational forces, so East Germany simply built an airport just beyond city limits so that they could serve Berlin with its domestic airline). But an airport being just outside of the "regular" fare zone is something that's unfortunately not unusual.