kara_jade

If I ask Siri on my iPhone "What time is it in London?" here in Germany, it replies with the time of London, England.

Well, I can tell the Netflix CEO why they have lost me as a subscriber:

- Their original content is not terribly appealing to me.

- They lack much of the content I want to watch (and in Germany the selection of content is much, much smaller to begin with).

- They have a horrendous user interface. Perhaps I’m in the minority, but I like lists. And even one big list with all the content Netflix offers would be far superior to their interface. I’m not interested in their recommendation algorithms or their peculiar categorization, I want to sift through their metadata on my own terms. Give me a big, filterable list. (That is something that bugs me about every streaming service: you are heavily restricted when it comes to searching and filtering.)

I have found that my local library has actually a very good selection of DVDs and Blu-rays. So they have become a reliable source of content. Other than that I occasionally buy used or new media cheaply. And for special interests (Anime) I have the net.

The first season of Fullmetal Panic was produced by Gonzo. While not bad, the (animation) quality noticeably increased after Kyoto Animation took over. Definitely a great show.

You can do this easily with the json_tree function from SQLite's JSON1 extension. It's given as an example in the documentation:

https://sqlite.org/json1.html#jtree

  SELECT big.rowid, fullkey, value
    FROM big, json_tree(big.json)
   WHERE json_tree.type NOT IN ('object','array');

The super-complicated LIFO example is, unfortunately, a contrived example:

“Ich stimme dem Maler, der die Meinung, dass Rot keine Farbe ist, vertritt, zu.”

This sentence can be rewritten in German just as in the English translation:

“Ich stimme dem Maler zu, der die Meinung vertritt, dass Rot keine Farbe ist.”

I guess that depends on your reasons. I took them to treat my depression after reading about patients being given psilocybin in a clinical setting. For me it was absolutely worth it. The first two times I also did prepare a tea which produced two nice trips, but the third time I just chewed the full dosage raw (15 grams of magic truffles of the sort ATLANTIS) which produced an out-of-the-world trip that unearthed things from my subconsciousness I otherwise would have never reached. Somewhere someone described the experience as getting your brain power-washed. That's an apt analogy.

So, hypothetically of course, if Microsoft subtly let the new Mayor Dieter Reiter know that they will only build their new headquarter in Munich if Windows was to replace LiMux, then what about this could not be considered as Microsoft killing LiMux? Sure, they didn't directly pull the plug, but that's semantics.

It's not clear-cut in the sense that Munich's IT landscape was and is fragmented which made and makes it very easy to blame IT problems on LiMux. But that doesn't make me believe even for one second that Microsoft didn't lobby their way back to Munich. Here's a little story from some years back about Microsoft's lobbying efforts to prevent usage of ODF as a standard in the UK:

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240234078/Government-op...

May be of further interest to German-speaking folks in Munich: there will be a discussion about LiMux on 11th June with former Munich mayor Christian Ude and others.

https://www.gruene-muenchen.de/terminliste/termin/freie-fahr...

> What I noticed in Germany though, is that many store clerks insist on taking your card...

That's a service. You'd be surprised how many people are unable to insert the card into the reader correctly.

FAZ, like many other German newspapers and magazines, uses ad-blocker blocking. Disable scripts for the site and it works.

> instead of just going to a shop, I now need to go to a bank, and then to a shop - I mean that's pretty obviously and undeniably less convenient for a start

On my way to work, before I get to the subway station, I pass no less than three banks with ATMs where I can withdraw money. You can even withdraw money in supermarkets without fees if you spend a certain amount of money.

> I have to carry a lot of little bits of valuable paper around with me - enough for an entire month of expenses in your opinion!

Possibly. I never said you have to carry around all of it at any given time. But I'd think that it's pretty much expected that you always have cash in your wallet in Germany.

> when I pay I have to wait for them to count the money, gather up the change, return the change, which I then have to count, compared to just tapping my card and going

That takes...a few seconds? How is that an issue?

> I get no protections such as insurance for my purchases

Protection from what exactly? Insurance for my groceries?

> I can't how understand how anyone can argue cash is more convenient!

In Germany it is. That's a simple fact.

> And how can you possibly argue cash is faster? Paying by card takes 0.5 seconds - I don't have to even look at what I'm doing I just wave my card and go.

Yes, contactless payment is also possible in Germany, depending on the stores and whether you have the right card. But the way it's implemented here doesn't make it that much faster in the end.

> Your articles talks about arcane things like inserting your card, paper printouts, signing with a pen - you haven't needed to do that with cards for a decade or more.

Oh, I guarantee you, it's not arcane at all in Germany, it's used every day.

Yes, you could think that old folks are one of the problems, but the extent seems vastly overrated if you look at the most recent study published by Germany's Federal Reserve Bank: "Payment Behaviour in Germany 2017" (only available in German) [1]. The relevant statistic is on page 52 and shows the forms of payment used grouped by age. The percentages for payment by cash are (2008 percentages in parentheses for comparison):

65+: 58 % (66 %)

55 to 64: 48 % (64 %)

45 to 54: 46 % (52 %)

35 to 44: 38 % (50 %)

25 to 34: 44 % (55 %)

18 to 24: 44 % (69 %)

[1] https://www.bundesbank.de/Redaktion/DE/Downloads/Veroeffentl...

That's not surprising. Transaction costs for credit card payments in Germany are higher (2 to 4 percent) than for electronic cash payments (0.3 to 0.95 percent). It's simply not feasible for many sellers to offer credit card payments, especially as everyone in Germany has an electronic cash card anyway.

How exactly is it inconvenient? I can't really think of anything. For example, proponents of cashless payments often like to claim that paying with cash takes more time than paying with a card, but the opposite is true. [1]

And if you have "the need to constantly visit the ATM", then perhaps it would be a good idea to withdraw more money to last you longer? My bank actually doesn't allow withdrawals of less than 50 Euros, but even before that was introduced I simply withdrew the money I needed for a month at the beginning of a month -- and that was it.

[1] http://www.faz.net/aktuell/finanzen/meine-finanzen/geld-ausg... (German)

Here’s a short video about the Tokyo Metro which shows in a nutshell why Japanese trains are pretty much always on time:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_rtxm30NULU

Usually HyperDia covers these cases with different companies using the same tracks. It never has misdirected me so far.

http://www.hyperdia.com/en