joostjakob

If you want to really dig into the theme, you could use Know Your Meme

For this kind of query, consult the Urban Dictionary.

If I had a cafe or bar, I'd put a sign out "If you're the first customer, then it's always happy hour"

I had to check. I'm pretty sure it's this bridge in OpenStreetMap https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/28.02674/79.48926 And there it is also not closed off for routing

Having enjoyed the entire expanse series, I didn't really enjoy this book. I can't really put my finger on it. I think my biggest issue is that the characters remain pretty bland. Of the group you follow, many remained little more than a name for me.

It's a problem of the commons. It's not in the interest of an individual company to take on their responsibility (apart from some do-gooding greenwashing). The only answer is collective action, and that's really hard.

Even here in Europe where there are genuine left wing parties, where there's proportional representation, where we have mistly functional education, labour class people are voting for folks who blame poor people and immigrants for everything that goes wrong. I think part of the blame is with tabloid style media and social media magnifying formerly fringe opinion. Just saying that having a real alternative for the populist right, might not be enough.

One of the things I read about that, is that people tend to take an "average position" between all the opinions they hear. It used to be that the opinions you'd hear would be based on serious media, and your close circles. But much of the media has gone to shit, and social media amplify crazy people because it's good for engagement. So you end up hearing about the crazy position of lore as much as about the rational one. And that does influence a lot of people.

Glad you already learned this is probably nonsense. The wrong reasoning is very similar to much thought about overpopulation. The amount of people that makes for a place to be overpopulated is a function of how societies work and the technologies they have at hand. One extra issue there is that improvements in technology usually lead to population growth, so much progress gets cancelled out.

You know when we first started seeing growing populations and development of agriculture? When the climate started an exceptionally long stable period. Guess what's going put of the window now? Planting for draught because that's the "new normal" won't get you far if the next year happens to be the wettest on record. Let alone that stronger storms than ever seen before aren't exactly great for harvests either. And that's just agriculture. Climate related disasters can wipe out key infrastructure, with unexpected consequences down the line (e.g. no car production because of a certain specific part of almost all cars comes from that one specific place). And then there's the refugee problem on top of all that.

Yeah, the centre. But many places like this are half dead at the core, with car centered suburbs around it and shops in big malls along the roads. The difference with Spain is stark, where the old centres are usually still the actual heart of the village.