The weirdest combination I’ve ever met was a set of female twins. One was named after their mother. The other had a different first name. Must have been really odd when growing up.

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but why change the current arrangement? It seems to work very well for all participants. Norway is already an EU member in all but name when it comes to applying the EU based regulatory standards. There’s also freedom of movement. Meanwhile Norway can keep its independence in a few key areas that are of importance to it, including fisheries and an independent currency. Unlike the UK or Switzerland this is a solid basis for long term cooperation between trusted neighbours. If Norway decides to join they should be welcome. But until then the current arrangement is perfectly fine already in my opinion.

In my opinion it’s not bad to have a diverse landscape with different options. I believe the best course of action for many institutions should be to use both of these options simultaneously. Any organisation with a social media, communications or other type of public relations team should be able to set up a crossposter easily enough.

This is really cool. I hope Playmobil can have a comeback and turn their slump around. I really think there’s a niche for their products.

OSM is a great project. It’s the basis for a lot of different tools and as such really needs to continue to be independent from American tech bros.

I’ve had Giesswein shoes for a while now and can’t recommend them highly enough. They manage to combine the comfort of sneakers and the warmth of boots (during winter months) while remaining light and airy (for the summer months).

Can confirm. I’ve lived in the Netherlands, France and Germany for basically all my life and I don’t recall ever actively saying thank you to a bus driver. I don’t even remember when last I exchanged any words with one thanks to modern fare systems.

On the contrary I say thank you to cashiers at the supermarket or staff at the bakery several times per week.

This is one of the reasons I would really like to have some degree of transparency, at least more than right now.

Modern supply chains are often complex and cross several countries and continents. Nonetheless I would really enjoy having some place to - at a glance - find out where the profit centre for a given product or service is, perhaps with additional information like manufacturers and suppliers, if this is public information.

As things stand I always have to manually look up all this information. Sometimes it’s even hard to find out who the owner and/or manufacturer of a specific brand really is. I’d like to have an alternative to this manual search that might even work for people like my mother in law.

I found myself looking for a new flash drive the other day and ended up buying hama instead of SanDisk. I must say it feels almost like a moot point, since both are manufactured in China, but I’d rather have the profit centre in Monheim (Baden-Württemberg) than Milpitas (California).