Friends of mine, having romantic dinner on their terrace, had bird shot land into their dinner plates. Bird shot is so small, it's no more deadly than raindrops when it falls back down, but it's a startling seasoning for a nice dish. The bird hunter who'd shot was in sight, they caught up with him, and he just didn't deem it to be a problem...
It's overall quite true. But I found that the smaller stores, that live in the shadows of a larger one, do still offer the actual bargains. For example, in Emmaüs Tarare, a smaller city 30 min away from Lyon, you still find solid furniture that can be up to 4 or 5 times cheaper than flimsier pieces in Emmaüs Lyon.
I don't quite know what the dynamics are, here.
This post reminds me of the book : Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness, by David A. Treleaven. It explains how incompetent meditation can awaken and reinforce trauma, while a competently handled meditation can be part of the toolbox to heal it.
Nothing unusual. Just an answer to the previous comment, that felt thrown over one's shoulder : a whole continent won't switch its energy sources in a couple of days.
I had a similar experience in spite of not needing any R, living and working in several English speaking countries. My name is Mathias, and the variety of ways English speakers called me was a proper issue, in the sense that I sometimes didn't even recognize that somebody was talking about me, or calling me across a workshop. When I started introducing myself as "Matt", all became easy. Never had this issue with pretty much any other culture I worked with :D (all kinds of Europeans and Arabs mainly)
If it's about Rs, I worked on an oil rig with a Mexican guy named Javier. The American OIM had such hard time telling "Javier" (with the two different gutturals) on the tannoy, Javier got called "George" for the rest of our stay.
This wasn't exactly a FPTP situation. First, the presidential election spans over two rounds. Second, about a month later, the legislative elections (two rounds also) were won too
with a proper tsunami (350 out of 577 seats, providing a governing majority).
When he won the presidential election, everybody thought it was no big deal, as he hadn't shown a single viable candidate to staff any of the 577 seats in the parliament, without which he couldn't wield any real structural power. But he used that weakness as a strength. He hired inexperienced people from all regular ways of life, young and shiny. To the voting public, the message was "you wanted neither left nor right ? Here you go, vote for the almost normal people I'm offering you." This turned into a huge strength, as once in office these inexperienced MP simply followed the group leader, who, you guessed it, was a seasoned politician from olden, and made the parliament a transparent corridor for the presidential power for quite some time.
The public pitch was along the "climb over the left/right stalemate and go forward". But the mechanics, besides good ties with the corporate world, were a masterpiece of perfect timing for every action along the campaign, and then for the legislative elections. In those days I was admiring Macron like you would admire a talented enemy general.
The top line, "Not Left. Not Right. Forward." kind of reminds me of Macron's "En Marche" ("Let's Go") that took over France in a storm, taking over the presidency AND the parliament only one year after its foundation, with very few previously known political figures in its ranks.
The whole thing looked like doing management rather than politics, and offered an alternative to fed-up voters who didn't dare turn to the usual far-right and far-left "protest votes".
Headed with a nimble tactical vision, the formula was extremely efficient... for one mandate.
Same here. After, like every little French boy, having been fed with Tintin and Asterix in my baby bottle, much of the more modern work made me feel like the author was not straight to the point enough, wasting my attention with his uncertain and meandering process of drawing. It took a lot of time to appreciate anything else and stop feeling like it's all amateurish sketching.
This map is impressively detailed and accurate. When you look at a small village-sized area that you know today, you can often recognize the features on the Cassini map (no always though ; many hills were drawn as they appeared from afar, many of the tiniest locations were marked upon hearing word of them by locals).
But it gets even more impressive when you know what the times were like when this map was made.
Neighbouring valleys hosted different languages that sometimes were not intelligible to each other.
In places, local people didn't have a name for the prominent mountain they grew up and spent their life under.
One of Cassini's young cartographers was notoriously killed by villagers who put an axe in his head, because pointing his mysterious brass and glass instruments at mountains and bell towers made them be sure he was a bad wizard.
Those were the times. And this is the map !
I work with several professional cartographers here in France. All of them have several large printed maps in their offices, just for the beauty of them. I don't know of one who does not have a Cassini map along, somewhere on an office wall.
That makes sense. Then there is still the problem of the cold tarmac, on which summer tyres are said to have poor grip, but that may not be as obvious to the average commuter as a road turned to thick white with two icy ruts to follow. And anyway I'm getting off topic regarding salt :)
Many mountainous regions across Europe too, like the French region where I live. Tyres are potentially part of any routine police check. The region is a rather poor one, and many roads are simply not salted at all. With proper winter tyres (and AWD helps too, but it's not as important as tyres), you get through, albeit sometimes with poor elegance.
The amount of snow we get is never anywhere close to those American phenomena I see sometimes in the news, where snow gets half way up your front doors nearly overnight. Seeing that, I'm surprised to read that most people don't use snow tyres in such places : it feels like going against common sense even on an purely individual level.
And if you talk about Germany, there's a whole museum dedicated to those in Bonn. The "Artihmeum". In the city center, by the university. It's huge, fascinating, and I believe I was the only person inside when I visited last year... They even let you use some of the originals.