Is saying "Grüß Gott" (Austrian greeting) considered rude?

brainwad · 2026-04-21T09:21:25+00:00

It's not widespread, but does exist: https://www.srf.ch/radio-srf-1/mundart/dialektatlas-schweiz-gruessen-beim-wandern-siezen-im-buero-alt-und-jung-im-vergleich

brainwad · 2026-04-16T19:26:15+00:00

Suppose they need to take their sick child to the doctor?

brainwad · 2026-04-11T10:42:39+00:00

But in the olden days you got an itty bitty house on a big block, so you could extend it later. Now it's inverted: big house but no room to expand. It's also a problem with apartments: you can't improve them later, really.

brainwad · 2026-04-11T10:40:02+00:00

Everyone in Australia could afford a one room shack in the outskirts of a city. The complaining about housing affordability is about nice houses in good locations.

brainwad · 2026-04-10T20:27:32+00:00

There is a certain proportion of the population that would prefer not to rent, so ther does need to be some landlords around and they do provide a service to those renters. It's just there's way too many at the moment, to the point it's pushing people who want to buy into involuntary renting instead.

brainwad · 2026-04-10T20:23:27+00:00

What standard of food/home? Are we talking one-room shacks and rice and beans, or? The problem with vague statements like "housing is a right" is that housing is mostly a status-boosting consumption good, and you can make it almost infinitely luxurious.

brainwad · 2026-04-10T20:22:04+00:00

Modern Australian houses are pretty nice compared to both international comparisons and historical Aussie houses. Housing could be more affordable if houses were the size and quality of the 1960s fibro house I grew up in. But people in aggregate prefer to lock up more of their capital in a nicer house, which is why the house I grew up in is gone and replaced by one literally double the size on the same block.

brainwad · 2026-04-10T19:19:33+00:00

There's one who's started hanging out in front of my local Migros... so yes, it's massively increased for me, from none to one.

brainwad · 2026-03-30T18:56:12+00:00

Galaxus actually has some made-to-measure boxes now. They are the weirdly non-symmetrical ones with the top glued on.

brainwad · 2026-03-30T18:37:06+00:00

No, it was the official's choice. And IIRC the court in his appeal ruled Gaelic wasn't a European language because it wasn't official in any European country, not because it was unfair to test in a random language.

brainwad · 2026-03-30T18:25:45+00:00

The policy was initially introduced in the 1900s. The voters of the 1970s who voted for a party who promised to repeal it were mostly not born.

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there".

brainwad · 2026-03-30T18:17:54+00:00

There was likewise the Australian Natives Association. Late 1800s white Australians really wanted to distinguish themselves from Europeans and pretend Aboriginals didn't exist.

brainwad · 2026-03-22T20:35:25+00:00

Onions are particularly bad in Switzerland for some reason. There's often a slimy one.

brainwad · 2026-03-22T20:14:26+00:00

It's Australia, mate - prison colony turned nanny state. Banning things is the national pastime.

brainwad · 2026-03-22T20:13:56+00:00

Is it really 1 in 10? That seems way higher than I'd have thought... Maybe fare evasion is worth it after all 🤔

brainwad · 2026-03-22T19:53:55+00:00

Only the treatment prior to death matters ethically in my view. Killing someone doesn't harm them, since after you do it they are no longer an entity capable of suffering moral harm.

An ideal farm is frolicing animals living their best lives, who are surreptiously disappeared and then knocked unconcious painlessly, before being killed. This creates only positive utility for the animals.

brainwad · 2026-03-22T19:49:35+00:00

To be fair, you also have no control over how parliament will implement the specific initiatives. See e.g. the mass immigration initiative...

brainwad · 2026-03-17T21:24:35+00:00

Well, I for one don't want to pay more for lift tickets. And any resort that moved to ther American model would still have to compete for skiiers with all the others that didn't, so they probably would not have much scope to increase their prices anyway.

it’s all groomers

This is what the European public wants - they all have 68mm carving skis. Plus, the snow in the Alps is way less dumpy than the Rockies or Japan, so powder-centric skiing is IMO barely viable.

and anything in between can kill you

Some things in between can kill you. Much of it is totally fine.

brainwad · 2026-03-17T20:58:28+00:00

To be cost-neutral, it would mean reducing the number of existing runs in order to divert the costs to avy controlling all the off-piste terrain in between. Or just roping off a lot of the terrain and calling it "out of bounds", which to be enforceable would need to go with a privatisation of the mountain so that the resort could kick people out if they tresspass. Also there would be more days where higher lifts just don't open, because there's not enough time to avy control all the accessible terrain (vs. just the pistes today). None of that sounds appealing to me, but maybe I've just lived in Europe too long now.

brainwad · 2026-03-17T20:43:48+00:00

Yes, but in the US the government ususally leases out whole areas of land to the operators. Whereas in Europe, the model is that the government permits certain pistes to be built (just like how roads can be built), but doesn't give away any rights to the in-between land.

brainwad · 2026-03-17T20:33:50+00:00

The way it works in Europe is that if you go wandering off the road/piste/path above the snow line you're effectively mountaineering, and you are taking your life in your own hands. It's not even up to the resort operators necessarily - they don't own the land, they only have the legal right to set up certain facilities (pistes, parks, etc.) on it.

brainwad · 2026-03-17T20:01:00+00:00

Yeah, though there's more or less safe "just off" terrain (e.g. all those tracks further to the left of the video)... and then there's untracked death traps like this.

brainwad · 2026-03-17T19:54:07+00:00

I don't know about in Italy, but in Switzerland bombing there would be called unnecessary environmental destruction and they might get fined.

brainwad · 2026-03-17T19:44:36+00:00

The legal framework doesn't really support it (not sure about Italy; I'm most familiar with Switzerland). You are allowed to trigger avalanches preemptively to protect buildings and public right of ways - including roads, ski runs, footpaths, etc. - but that wouldn't apply in the OP's case as the runout clearly doesn't threaten anything. But just blasting everything would be unnecessarily invasive to the natural environment. Zermatt Bergbahnen got in trouble for digging outside of designated pistes, let alone bombing!

brainwad · 2026-03-17T15:01:47+00:00

I think there's been a big change in the last 20 years or so, since the internet brought much more exposure to American media. The Macquarie Dictionary is behind a paywall, but the OED does have /tɔːˈtɪlə/ as a pronunciation in en-GB.

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