Oh, wait, no: Total temp occupied = occupied after + occupied before makes more sense. It’s liberated which is not included in any equation and no bar shows currently occupied. which should be temp occupied - liberated.

It isn’t, and has not been, illegal to carry knives out in the open in a public area. You don’t usually see people running around with 12cm Fahrtenmesser but it’s completely legal. That’s blade length, to be clear, not total length. This kind of thing. Or things like an Opinel, completely legal to EDC.

And mass gatherings aren’t the same thing as a random public place.

EDCing swords was outlawed in 2008 IIRC, now it’s aforementioned 12cm max, only a single edge etc.

Not in general I don’t think so. Probably depends on whether you’re talking about Frankfurt HBf or some forgotten platform at the arse end of the heath.

Courts are generally quite on top of making sure that those zones are very specific. All four of duration, time of day, space, and cause.

And, of course, over-regional train station are federal police jurisdiction. In SH that’s a downgrade when it comes to the quality of officers, in Bavaria an upgrade. Also in Hamburg which yes is still a police state. You get some, you lose some.

Nah it’s Occupied after = Total temporary occupied - liberated. At least approximately. Occupied before seems to be included in occupied after, that is, both numbers count Crimea and the “people’s republics”.

When’s that going to happen? Right after the green hydrogen revolution?

Already happening, on a small (but industrial) scale. You can buy that stuff off the shelf, but it’s still on the lower end of the sigmoid. Most new installations right now will be going to Canada and Namibia, we’ll be buying massive amounts of ammonia from both.

Sorry, I didn’t think someone would deny the existance of dunkelflautes. It’s currently happening in Germany.

Yes and elsewhere in Europe the wind is blowing. Differences in solar yields are seasonal (that’s what those three months storage are for, according to Fraunhofer’s initial plans), but reversed on the other side of the globe, and Germany would be better situated to tank differences in local wind production all by itself if e.g. Bavaria didn’t hinder wind projects in their state. The total energy the sun infuses into the earth does change a bit over time, but that’s negligible. In principle pretty much zero storage is needed as long as there’s good enough interconnectivity.

…meanwhile, we’ll probably have the first commercial fusion plant in just about the mean construction time of a fission plant.

The declaration of a weapons-free zone makes searches legal. If you don’t want to be searched, you’re free to not enter.

You must be confusing us with the UK or France. You can carry (concealed or otherwise) knives up to 12 cm or folder that are not designed to be openable with one hand. If you want to transport a Chef’s knife on the metro, do it in your backpack, that is, you’re not supposed to have it at hand. Some types of knives (e.g. butterflies) are right-out outlawed, you’re not allowed to have them even in your own home.

Mostly though these weapon-free zones are a way to allow police to do searches.

Wouldn’t it be better to go fossil free. Given, you know, climate change.

Gas can be synthesised and we’re going to have to do that anyway for chemical feedstock. Maintaining backup gas plant capacity is cheaper than you think, they don’t need much maintenance if they’re not actually running.

That’s physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.

Unless we use a different technology, that is not renewables + storage?

It’s not technology it’s physics. It is impossible for there to be no wind anywhere, at least as long as the sun doesn’t explode and the earth continues to rotate and an atmosphere exists. If any of those ever fail electricity production will be the least of our worries.

Technology comes into play when it comes to shovelling electricity from one end of the continent to the other and yes we need more interconnects and beefier interconnects but it’s not like we don’t know how to do that, or don’t already have a Europe-wide electricity grid. The issues are somewhere in between NIMBYism regarding pylons and “but we don’t want to pay for burying the cable earthworks are expensive”.

Tankies gonna tank.

Yeah, I saw where this was going. You have a thing against studying.

Not at all. Learning pointless stuff and producing pointless doctorates is not studying it’s wasting time and effort. Whatever happened to the virtue of laziness.

I don’t know what you mean with the second paragraph. I already don’t believe in that sort of voodoo.

The physiotherapy part isn’t voodoo it’s just off-brand.

They still hawk homeopathic mumbo jumbo at pharmacies

You could call it placebopathic and people would still go for it because wanting symbolic reinforcement of your wishes is a very human thing. Medicine shouldn’t be in the business of telling humanity how to be on a fundamental level, that’s a battle for philosophers, but in the business of providing health. The current situation around homeopathy is not ideal, especially those prices for sugar cubes are ludicrous, but this reductive “everyone’s an idiot and everything’s pointless” attitude isn’t making it any better, either. What would your way to kiss a boo-boo be?

The watthours is what gas is for. Germany’s pipeline network alone, that’s not including actual gas storage sites, can store three months of total energy usage.

…or at least that’s the original plan, devised some 20 years ago, Fraunhofer worked it all out back then. It might be the case that banks of sodium batteries or whatnot are cheaper, but yeah lithium is probably not going to be it. Lithium’s strength is energy density, both per volume and by weight, and neither is of concern for grid storage.

Imagine bridging even a short dunkelflaute of 2 days.

That’s physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.

up to and including a CDU/SDP left-right grand coalition.

Wasn’t the CDU talking about revising their “under no circumstance, ever” attitude towards Die Linke. Not terribly relevant right now with Die Linke’s numbers but it’s notable they’re even talking about it.

The current state coalitions are rather… diverse. In case Die Linke uses its new-found freedom from BSW types to turn itself around it could actually become relevant.

Article 3 (3) TEU:

The Union shall establish an internal market. It shall work for the sustainable development of Europe based on balanced economic growth and price stability, a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress, and a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment. It shall promote scientific and technological advance.

Emphasis mine. In a nutshell a social market economy is a Realpolitik compromise between capitalism and market socialism, where private ownership of the means of production is tolerated but said ownership doesn’t entail complete power over it, through e.g. co-determination laws.

To make this more concrete, and maybe blow some Yank’s mind: Volkswagen’s employees elect 50% - 1 seats on the board. Together with shares held by Lower Saxony (usually run by a socdem government) they run the place, no matter how many shares the Porsche/Piëch clan and the Saudis have. It’s why VW itself worked towards unionising its own plant in Chattanooga, to the bewilderment of many. Sadly can’t unionise the plants in China the CCP hates it when workers have a say.

GP without doctor is just a consequence of the vast majority of doctoral thesis in medicine, for ages, having been slop without academic value. You don’t need to be a good researcher to be a good healer, to know what you’re doing, and if you want to spend your career setting bones then there’s probably not much to research to be had in that area, anyway, so why force practitioners to come up with random stuff to investigate.

Did you know that you can become Heilpraktiker with Hauptschulabschluss, though? The only real requirement is the Gesundheitsamt judging you to not be an active hazard to patients and you can practice medicine. With or without scare quotes, from martial artists doing off-brand physiotherapy to complete but “studied” quacks like homeopaths.

You can also do work+university, best I can tell there’s actually no pure university option.

It’ll be a question whether you have 9/10 or 13 years of primary+secondary education: The latter qualifies you to study anything, while the former qualifies you for trade school, which then qualifies you to study anything remotely connected to the profession you learned.

If you want to bee-line for say a Doctor in physiotherapy starting with trade school might actually be faster, while with less hands-on medicine the route directly to university will likely take less time. On the trade school route university won’t really be teaching you the subject, any more, but focus on how you can turn your experience into novel research.

This “just a trade school” thing just doesn’t really make sense in the German context. You can study metallurgy and still not be able to weld for shit, or you can become a welder and then study metallurgy (skipping some courses) and be somewhat lost when interpreting Goethe because you didn’t spend three additional highschool years on a generalist skillset.

The step from single to multicellular life forms is a metasystem transition, and those don’t roll back, and are amplified by branching growth at the penultimate level¹.

Or, more concretely: A strain of cells learns to communicate with each other, to coordinate, giving all a fitness advantage in other words they create a control system to regulate the lot of them and apes together stronger than apes apart. The emergence of that (usually distributed) control system is a metasystem transition. Because that kind of cooperation has advantage over not cooperating like that, evolution never goes into the other direction (in that sense it has a direction, similar to how time doesn’t really exist in physical microstates, only in their relationship to macrostates: It’s not like genes can’t drift in the other direction, it’s that if they do they get culled at a much higher rate).

And because our critters now have an advantage, they have more resources to develop, to multiply both in absolute number, as well as to specialise into different functions. That’s the branching growth at the penultimate (that is, below the control system) level, and it makes them even more fit. Branching growth is one of those cybernetic laws that happen again and again and again and again and you’d think “surely this can’t always be the case” and yes you’ll find exceptions but by and large, yes, once there’s a metasystem transition you get that effect, again, because it’s very regularly beneficial to the whole.

If that got you consider the evolutionary step from soup of chemicals over the first feedback systems made out of simple molecules creating environments benefitting their own replication to actual cells. Which is explainable by chance alone, but once you take metasystem transitions into account suddenly it doesn’t take an eternity, any more, only aeons.

¹ I should, possibly, at this point warn about Principia Cybernetica just as people warn about tvtropes. It’s a rabbit hole.

Iran didn’t turn tribal and is still diverse AF. Don’t confuse the people and overall culture with the backwards government which isn’t exactly popular.

Iran only really fits half into the latter category because the people are vastly more liberal than their government.

And if you look at polls (can’t find them right now sorry) Iran is actually one of the least Muslim Muslim countries around when you drill down into dogma, e.g. belief in heaven, belief in angels, such things. The average Iranian is about as Muslim in their private faith as someone believing in reincarnation is Christian.

and questionable things regarding immigration laws

I mean… there have been some regrettable cases in Germany directly after the law declaring foreign sub-18 marriage to be invalid, like 16/18yold asylum seeker couples getting separated. There’s a difference between saying “we don’t recognise that, you’ll have to marry again under German law” and “we’re putting you in two different accommodations in two different states because you can’t possibly be a family unit and that’s how the dice fell”. You can’t just blindly assume they’re not heads over heels for each other, no matter how arranged and young the marriage was, you have to look at the individual case and if everything checks out treat them eg. analogous to siblings when it comes to accommodation.

The phase-out practically already started in the early 90s, latest when it became abundantly clear that building more reactors was not politically feasible.

The reason is distrust in anything being handled properly. See Asse (they just discovered irradiated water that they don’t have any idea how it came to be because it’s actually above the deposit), see plants running without functioning backup generators for decades, the list is endless.