In Germany, there was a trend of setting up public bookcases in town squares where passers-by could drop off or take books. But as things go, after a while, they slowly started to go out of fashion. Since then, kebab shops and barbershops have become a more common sight in the cityscape (Stadtbild).
I also regularly visit the 3-4 that are within 10 minutes walking distance from my place. It's fun to see that they have slowly become more "specialized"; for example, English books typically appear in only one of them.
They didn’t go out of fashion. It’s just that some people emptied them to sell the books on flea markets, sometimes drunk people used those for their “business”; and sometimes, kids set them on fire. And this was just in a rather small town.
Living in Germany, I can confirm that it’s part of the everyday scenery here (Stadtbild).
> and a rave
I can confirm that techno culture is a deeply rooted part of the urban landscape. However, the era of massive, free street parades effectively ended with the 2010 Love Parade tragedy in Duisburg, where a crowd crush claimed many lives. For years, such large-scale public raves vanished due to strict safety regulations. It’s only recently that we’ve seen a revival with 'Rave The Planet' in Berlin—an event led by the original Love Parade founders that attempts to bring techno back to the streets, though under much tighter organizational control.
At that time I used to visit Germany and take part to many Carneval open parties. I intended to even participate in a Love Parade. How did the accident affected other gatherings since then? Open street concerts, Saturday night club districts, Carneval?
Sloterdijk is a rare celebrity philosopher, popularized by his many TV spots. However, whether people actually know his philosophy as well as they know his face is a different story altogether.
Agreed. Even assuming that most people aren't deeply familiar with his philosophy, it's still nice for a culture to have something like a celebrity philosopher.
There are legitimate questions if physical constants are constant everywhere in the universe, and also whether they are constant over time. Just because we conceive something "should" be a certain way doesn't make it true. The zero and negative numbers were also weird yet valid. How is the structure of mathematics different from fundamental constants, which we also cannot prove are invariant.
Not OP but I think they are making a slightly different claim — that the universe sort of dictates or guides the mathematical structure we discover. Not whether they hold everywhere or not.
Or the media may be unwilling to report on potential corruption within parts of the Greenlandic government, because that would blur the clear-cut narrative: Greenland as the good side, Trump as the villain.
I lived for ten years in a German housing cooperative, which is a member-owned, non-profit organization that provides rental housing within a market economy alongside private landlords.
Tenants are also members, which offers long-term security and participation in governance, without the housing being state-owned or socialist in nature.
When I eventually moved out, I was required by my contract to remove all wallpaper from the apartment—even though I had lived there alone, the walls were plain white, and everything was in very good condition.
Scraping wallpaper off every room turned into a surprisingly tedious and nerve-racking process.
There is a scheme that is sometimes used by landlords in Germany in which an apartment is only rented out if the tenant agrees, before the rental contract is signed, to buy a fully fitted kitchen that is already installed — and usually at a price that is far from cheap. Otherwise, the prospective tenant does not get the lease. Given the current shortage of affordable housing in Germany, this puts the prospective tenant under considerable pressure to buy the kitchen from the landlord.
The landlord is fully aware that when the tenant eventually moves out, the landlord can require the tenant to take the kitchen with them — after all, it is the tenant’s property, not the landlord’s. The landlord can therefore demand that the outgoing tenant removes the kitchen. This again puts the tenant under pressure, because fully fitted kitchens very rarely fit into a new apartment.
At that point, the landlord can make an offer to buy the kitchen back from the departing tenant so that it can remain in place — but the purchase price is then only a fraction of what the tenant originally had to pay the landlord when moving in.
In this way, the landlord can indirectly force one tenant after another to buy the kitchen and later sell it back.
No, Apple has effectively promoted iCloud as the alternative to local storage as part of its product differentiation strategy in the lower price segment.
Apple will almost certainly introduce the same approach for the budget MacBook as well.
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