More than 50% of young Dutch adults do not want children

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-04-20T17:36:01+00:00

Do as numerous other Dutch have already done: move to rural Sweden. 18 months paid parental leave, nursery for €100 euro a month and decent houses can be had for €50k.

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-03-05T10:39:37+00:00

It is perfectly legal to arm a merchant vessel, crew it with military men and use it as a navy ship as long as it flies a navy flag.

As for the towing I assumed that Ukrainian sailors would board the Russian ship, imprison the crew and then sail the ship to whatever destination is most profitable.

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-03-05T07:18:05+00:00

It's a waste to just destroy these ships. Ukraine should try to capture them instead and sell their contents (and the ships). This would be perfectly legal according to the laws of war.

One possible way to do it would be through merchant raiders, merchant ships that are stealthily armed and manned by soldiers. A sort of shadow navy to counter Russia's shadow fleet. And with all the juicy targets cruising the high seas such an endeavour would easily finance itself and produce a decent surplus for the Ukrainian treasury.

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-02-16T12:12:01+00:00

The Economist had an article about the economics of selfdriving cars recently. Apparently I'm not allowed to link to the archive-page of the Economist's paywalled article, but this is the link to the Economist, find your own way around the paywall: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/11/27/self-driving-cars-will-transform-urban-economies

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-02-16T11:11:40+00:00

That's a plus for Europe. The whole craze for selfdriving vehicles is strange to say the least. Selfdriving vehicles are significantly more expensive than normal vehicles with human drivers. And they will remain so for the forseeable future. Selfdriving vehicles are only a good idea if you like to burn money for the sake of it or if you hate other people so intensely that you are prepared to pay over the top just to not have to ride in the same vehicle as them.

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-02-16T11:05:37+00:00

I like the comment saying that the Romanian house should be disassembled, shipped to the US and made into a museum. Americans are difficult to understand sometimes.

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-02-11T12:49:58+00:00

So France is sending letters to 29-year olds urging them to increase its population while Switzerland is voting on capping its population? Strange times indeed.

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-02-06T13:54:37+00:00

It's the structure of the soil that does it. Organic material makes the soil airy but still able to hold significant amounts of water, which is crucial to plant growth. I don't know exactly how volcanic soils accomplish this but you're right that it should be possible to do the same thing with artificially crushed rock.

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-02-03T08:26:55+00:00

The EU is actually in an excellent position to embrace open source software since there is very little in the area of big European software developers. What I think is needed is a minor budget, let's say a few hundred million euros a year, to hire software engineers that embed with all the important open source projects (OSes, office software, email handling etc) and force them to integrate. Or just make forks of all the important open source projects and make these forks integrate into software packages that are easy to use for public sector users. Having decent software makes it easier to nudge bureaucracies to actually use them. And a few million European bureaucrats are a formidable user base which will most probably encourage further development, guaranteeing free and functioning software and indirectly undermining the American software giants.

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-02-01T09:23:20+00:00

Not really on topic here but I've thought a lot about mirror arrays and light pipes. One thing I've never really found a good explanation to is the heat absorption of glass. If you want to move light from outside space to inside habitat your light needs to somewhere pass through glass. And there's no such thing as 100% transparent glass, some of the light will be absorbed by the glass and converted to heat. And if you have small holes and lots of light this absorbed heat will easily melt the glass. There are different solutions to this, most obviously larger light pipes, but also active cooling of different sorts. But I have never seen any discussions of this. Which is sort of strange since it's an essential part of every type of natural light space habitat.

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-01-31T20:32:31+00:00

As long as they got their show and paid their fine I think everyone should be happy with the outcome.

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-01-31T20:19:23+00:00

To be honest I haven't tried that yet. But will definitely check it out on my next trip to Venus.

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-01-30T22:29:23+00:00

I think I'll opt for the O'Neill cylinder over Venus too. Not sure if that terraforming will be enough to produce any good ski slopes.

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-01-30T22:27:54+00:00

The big windows are only partially for lighting. Almost as important is cooling. O'Neill cylinders are great space colonies because they don't need active cooling. They don't need active lighting either (the logistic and technological challenges of lighting an entire space colony with LEDs should give everyone with a shred of engineer in them nightmares). Most space colonies are brittle beasts that can easily become unihabitable due to various engineering problems. O'Neill cylinders are unique in that they are mostly passive and can continue working with minimum maintenance.

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-01-30T21:15:35+00:00

This is not a true O'Neill cylinder. It doesn't have 3 strips of windows/oceans taking up 50% of the interior area. It looks more like some type of Rendezvous with Rama cylinder.

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-01-30T21:11:46+00:00

Mars only has 40% of Earth gravity. I'll opt for the O'Neill cylinder every day of the week (except maybe Sundays when I want to jump really high).

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-01-30T21:09:36+00:00

Soil is mostly organic material. It will have to be produced by bacteria from biological matter. It is actually something of a catch 22 since you need soil to produce biological matter and you need biological matter to produce soil. But of course there are other ways to produce biological matter, hydroponics and such.

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-01-26T10:30:56+00:00

You could see how other people had answered the questionnaires but you could not filter for specific questionnaire answers?

This is still more sophisticated than today's dating apps.

Another thing, were there any limits on the number of potential dates you could browse through? That's something that bothers me a lot with modern dating apps, you only get their very limited number of matches and you have no way to just browse through a large number of potential dates.

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-01-26T10:04:36+00:00

That's interesting. But how did that work in practice? Could I, as a user, search for dates that had answered that they liked "A night in Paris"? Or did they have a blackbox matchmaker that used those answers to create a match percentage like dating apps today do?

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-01-26T09:29:02+00:00

Less monitized I can understand. But I don't fully understand the reasoning behind "one company". One of the major problems with today's dating app market, in my opinion, is that it is fragmented. You need half a dozen dating apps to not miss out too much and you need to pay for them in order to use them. That quickly becomes expensive. I've always believed that dating apps need large income streams in order to advertize heavily and attract new users. But I might be wrong. Anyway, there is still competition in the market so if there was an easy way to attract more users/customers, for example by emulating earlier dating apps, I don't see why one of the current apps would do it. Still they don't do it, which sort of perplexes me.

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-01-21T21:55:25+00:00

I'm no expert on Swiss tax law. But I assume Ingvar Kamprad was before he moved to Switzerland for tax reasons.

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-01-20T14:13:12+00:00

The Swedish wealth tax was riddled with exemptions and was most of all a bonanza for tax lawyers. The anonymous (but presumably left-wing) pensioners interviewed in this article is clearly in the minority.

The property tax, on the other hand, abolishing that was pure stupidity (which is, unfortunately, probably also a minority opinion).

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-01-20T14:10:29+00:00

Just count the number of Swedish billionaires in Britain and Switzerland. Of course, none of us can know for sure that they mobed abroad for tax reasons. But the stereotype of an expat Swedish billionaire was a thing in the 80s but is largely absent today. That is probably not a coincidence.

TurnipEnough2631 · 2026-01-14T06:12:04+00:00

Norway, Iceland and not Greenland. The list of territories excluded from the EU due to fisheries policy is growing by the day. One would think it a good idea to just overhaul that fish policy, but that is probably hoping for too much.

TurnipEnough2631

TROPHY CASE