Here, in Southern Finland, the last few Januaries have been way too warm, snowing/melting all the time. Now it’s a consistent -5°C - -10°C, which is, at least historically, totally adequate for this time of year.

There were some strong winds though.

How bad is it elsewhere?

I am of course not dismissing climate change, but the tragedy here seems to be that people have forgotten how to properly prepare for a normal winter. Not that that was ever a thing in, say, Germany, where I used to live.

recreate a limited deflationary monetary system like the gold standard

I don’t know enough about Bitcoin or the gold standard to concur, but I’d agree that the original idea of Bitcoin wasn’t bad, compared to where we are now.

I used to take part in a moneyless exchange system. One main idea was that your credits decreased in value if you just left them on your account, thus making capitalism impossible, and encouraging people to keep it all alive.

Considering a single tweet can raise or lower stock prices by multiple %, yes.

I would take it even further, though: the whole monetary system is becoming increasingly abstract and - in a way - meaningless.
Long gone are the days where the banknote you are holding represented an actual piece of something valuable in some vault.
Nowadays, the money you are using isn’t even backed by a banknote.
You cannot even pull a Count of Monte Cristo on a bank anymore, but they have secured themselves against such action anyhow.
Multiplying money is a fact that has its own rules and regulations.

And so on. This was bad even before digital currencies (let me point to a short story by Michael Ende: Die Bahnhofskathedrale) and has gotten orders of magnitude worse.

So yeah, stock market bad. And it’s as old as the whole financial system described above, and an almost indistinguishable part of it.

I’d be glad if we could roll back the clock on all this, but I fear that madness is here to stay. Until some sort of collapse. Hopefully only a financial one.

strong winds

Sure it wasn’t nasty socialist terrorists?

€15million! That’s not peanuts. And Germany has 16 “states”.

I wonder what fantasy problems the reactionaries will come up with that - in their minds - will also cost 15million.

edit: yep, the old, old, same, same argument:

Meanwhile, the opposition (…) says that there are still problems with the new software (…) “It may be that on paper 80 percent of the jobs have been converted,” says SPD member of the state parliament Kianusch Stender. “However, far fewer than 80 percent of employees can now work properly. Errors in the migration of jobs still exist.”

This is corporate-donations-driven bullshit as we have known since LiMux. Bit sad that the so-called social democrats engage in this.

BTW it’s only 80% because the planners know that some still depend on MS products (esp. Excel). But:

According to Schröder, these jobs will also be converted in the future. “We continue to consistently implement our open source strategy and strengthen the country’s digital sovereignty,” says Schrödter. “In this way, we reduce our technical and therefore economic dependence on individual manufacturers.”

I like the last sentence: switching to open source is more than just using free software.

You can imagine how that went.

They’re always so proud of upsetting other people, like it’s a major win in the struggle for political dominance.

“I shat in the mall. You can imagine how that went.”

Along the lines of “Healthcare is socialist! We should just collect some money that we can use to help someone who gets seriously sick!”

As I said, I was just editing POIs.

OSMAnd~ also has the option to edit.

I did it a few times, it really isn’t hard! Just adding or fixing POIs though; I wouldn’t know how to add or fix a wrongly placed house/path etc.

You are a glass half full sort of person!