Something I keep bringing up but never see in these open letters is: why are politicians exempt? Are there no child predators in the ruling class? I think the Epstein files have shown that these people need to be under surveillance just as much if not more as the people. Otherwise this just means: become a politician and you get immunity to having auch material.

Of course the argument is national security, blah. But somehow that trumps protecting children. If there are exemptions, it is not about the children.

It is not transactional. Trying to weigh something good against the realities of everyday life is not helpful for enjoying the good thing. You have to go through all those everyday things anyway. Best enjoy the things that are simply ejoyable.

Love for me. Nothing better in life than having mutual love be it romantic or friendship.

Also stories of all kinds are pretty great.

Microsoft is such a horrid company.

This AR obsession is utterly baffling to me. There are so few real applications and the hardware requirements are insane so it’s not something that will get widely adapted anyway. Sure in a decade or so it might have matured enough to have shed all these issues, but AR/VR feels like a really out of touch thing to prusue, especially if you look at the garbage ideas they have on how to use it - virtual meetings??

I get movies and games on these, possibly even some recording and porn, but these are not their B2B wet dreams anyway.

The US and the USSR engaged in a race to have the most nukes. After the fall of the Sowjet Union international treaties were put in place to reduce the number of nukes in both east and west.

Don’t quote me, but if I remember correctly, at the height of the cold war, both sides had more than 12.000 nukes each.

Humanity had enough fire power to delete the entire globe roughly 40x over then. Why? Because bigger is better.

Anyone who might be surprised that Germany is so low here, Germans are always surprised people think it would be very high.

There is a simple reason, too: Auto-Lobby. Our car manufacturers are very powerful in politics and public infrastructure is heavily underfunded.

Funnily enough, highways and other roads are also crumbling, so good luck to the car makers when there is less and less road to drive those precious machines on.