jlangenauer

I'm similar to this - I like drinking, but I've cut it down quite a lot in the last few years. My main rule is that I only drink (with occasional exceptions) on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, ensuring that I have at least 4 alcohol-free days a week, though in practice I found I actually drink less even on the weekends.

The other thing I've done is focus on the quality of what I'm drinking, not the quantity. It's one thing to go and swill beer for a few hours in the pub (this is particularly an Australian and UK thing), but quite another to have a cocktail or two made by someone who actually cares about what they're doing.

A seriously incredible achievement, and I'm sure everyone at SpaceX is very happy with what they've done right now.

I was absolutely certain it wasn't going to make it when I saw chunks breaking off the flap.

It's a fair point, but the only way at all to land on a body that has no atmosphere is to use rocket engines that point down. The Apollo Lunar Module landed on its "tail", though it did at least have a separate ascent stage with its own engine, so might have had some chance of taking off again if the landing was damagingly hard.

And have significant externalities which democratic societies must bear, but allow for the tech monopoly shareholders to reap more profits.

This is not exactly the fault of VW/Renault etc. China has quite explicitly encouraged technology transfer as an important strategic imperative for their local firms, so if these companies wanted to play in the (obviously growing) Chinese market, technology transfer was the price to be paid.

(Another example of this is the high-speed trains in China - the first generation was built by JVs with Siemens/Hitachi/etc with an explicit policy of technology transfer, but the newest trains in China are now local, built on top of the technology that has been acquired.)

Or alternatively, "*technology will be used to extract profit, or preferably rent, from you and constrain your agency even further than it already is."

Oh that sucks. I recently rented a Model 3 from Sixt in Australia, and they said bring it back with any level of charge you want, which was great - I only had it for 3 days, and the initial charge was enough for that.

Both those brands are exactly that - brands - where a lot of the cost of the product is recycled right back into advertising to convince you that the brands are actually worth the prices they charge.

When buying clothing, it's worthwhile to spend a little bit of time learning what makes quality clothing and what doesn't. That's very helpful in avoiding over-branded garbage being sold for far more than it cost to make in a sweatshop.

I was born in Australia and live in Germany, and I think I see something of the same: in both countries, there is no sense of purpose, no raison d'etre. There is no national project beyond managing a series of externally-imposed and self-inflicted crises, and no obvious direction for the future to guide the decisions taken today.

So our politics (in both countries) becomes reactive and unanchored, solving whatever problem seems most pressing today, and ultimately devoid of meaning. What do individuals do in such an environment? They look after themselves, they partake in consumerism, they try to protect themselves against things the state can no longer be bothered to. It's all very nihilistic, and thus the deep anomie that seems to have infected most Western societies, and the younger generations most of all.

I have a Canon printer which I use with Windows, and I get exactly the same thing. I think your diagnosis is correct.

I see we're going from "UI changes, the cause or reason of which we don't know" to "geopolitics" without considering any of the obvious alternative explanations.

If China decides (and no-one is saying that it has) that it no longer recognizes Israel, then it will simply announce that, and not get a private company to make subtle UI changes to reflect a secret policy instead.

One of the other nice features of Swiss rental law is "imputed rent", which is rent the government assumes you have collected even if the property is empty, and upon which you are taxed. Discourages keeping properties empty.

It's not even a "crime problem". It's much more often people expecting their class prejudices to be embodied in the built environment, so that working class/poor/immigrant folks - which has nothing to do with crime, I hasten to add - are not defiling their beautiful suburb.

To be fair, this is how most "advanced" economies operate. It's identical in Australia (although there the consulting companies run the sweatshops directly so they can skim more cream off the top). Same in the UK.