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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Pipoca@lemmy.worldtoA Boring Dystopia@lemmy.worldNot hiding it
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    1 year ago

    The fathers of 44% of Israel were born in Israel, as of 2015. I doubt they have dual citizenship, just as most Americans don’t have dual citizenship to their grandparents and great grandparents countries of origin.

    Also, most Mizrahim and Sephardim these days are living in Israel, similarly to how most Ashkenazim are in the US. Even if an Israeli somehow has e.g. Iraqi, Iranian or Yemeni citizenship, moving back probably isn’t a safe idea. Morocco is probably safer, though.

    After the fall of the USSR, there was also a huge wave of Russian emigration to Israel. Given conscription for the war in Ukraine, moving back now might not be the best idea.




  • Western Europe used to be much more of a dialect continuum. Every village had their own dialect, and you could understand everyone around you.

    But if you went from Castile to Paris, you’d go from hearing Spanish to hearing French. It’s just that between them, you had dozens of intermediate languages/dialects that transitioned very smoothly. It’s not like today where if you cross a border people go from speaking French to speaking Spanish.

    A large part of the nation-building project in Western Europe was to force everyone in the country to learn and use some standard dialect. So very few people now speak Occitan, Picard, Burgundian, etc., and instead speak standard French.









  • One poll this year found that almost one in three Americans say they may never retire. The majority of the nevers said they could not afford to give up a full-time job, especially when inflation was eating into an already measly Social Security cheque. But suppose you are one of the lucky ones who can choose to step aside. Should you do it? …

    But can anything truly replace the framework and buzz of being part of the action? You can have a packed diary devoid of deadlines, meetings and spreadsheets and flourish as a consumer of theatre matinees, art exhibitions and badminton lessons. Hobbies are all well and good for many. But for the extremely driven, they can feel pointless and even slightly embarrassing.

    That is because there is depth in being useful. And excitement, even in significantly lower doses than are typical earlier in a career, can act as an anti-ageing serum. Whenever Mr Armani is told to retire and enjoy the fruits of his labour, he replies “absolutely not”. Instead he is clearly energised by being involved in the running of the business day to day, signing off on every design, document and figure.

    Who exactly is this article being written for?

    Clearly, it’s not written towards anyone working the average job. It presupposes that your job must be the most fulfilling and useful thing you could do.

    It even calls out tech professionals as retiring early. But how many programmers can’t think of a more useful or fulfilling open source project to work on than what they do at their day job?




  • It’s not just car-centric Euclidean zoning and suburban sprawl.

    The US also builds really dangerous stroads that you don’t really see in most other countries.

    5+ lanes of 55mph traffic next to a sidewalk and tons of driveways for businesses is inherently unsafe.

    It’s also interesting to note that the biggest spike in fatalities was during the pandemic.

    The best explanation I’ve heard is that bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic essentially disappeared with the switch to WFH during the pandemic. Streets artificially looked safer pre-pandemic due to drivers getting stuck in traffic at peak periods. The pandemic just revealed how inherently unsafe American stroads are.



  • I mean, you also see that in the US with bike path design in general.

    Bike paths around me in the US mostly go along creeks and railroads. There’s one in the suburbs that’s an abandoned rail line out into farmland. They’re mostly designed as places for suburbanites to drive to for exercise. They’re more of a park than a piece of transportation infrastructure.

    Oulu, on the other hand, has bike paths that go through the center of town, out to the suburbs. There’s over 300 bike underpasses on the main bike paths. It’s designed for commuters, for people running errands, and for kindergarteners to bike to school. They’re a practical bit of transportation infrastructure.


  • Plenty of people in Oulu, Finland bike literally all year round. Fully 12% of all trips in winter are made by bike.

    Their secret? Just as the roads are plowed, so are the bike paths. If we didn’t plow and salt the roads up north, cars would also seem ridiculously impractical compared to a snowmobile or cross country skis.

    Oulu invests in making winter biking safe and practical, while American cities of comparable size and climate like Syracuse, NY don’t. The results are predictable.