I see no point in wasting words seeing how differing viewpoints are received here. Somebody has even bothered to go over my comment history and downvote everything.
I think you'd see it in a very different light if you were living here. I am honestly very worried for my friends and relatives who drive, most of whom do it very, very carefully, and still they have yearly encounters with adults who behave like feeble-minded children.
BTW, didn't I say I don't have a driver's license?
For a pedestrian it doesn't matter whether you have "right of way", because you can be right a hundred times over and still go to a mortician. That's all I am trying to say. If you are crossing the road, please wait for the cars to stop, or make absolutely sure there aren't any nearby. Cars are multiple-ton steel monsters, it takes a lot of energy and space to slow them down.
Just bringing some perspective from a country with a lot of idiots (that's what they are -- idiots) needlessly risking their lives.
It's not always the drivers' fault, some pedestrians are just asking to be put in a coffin.
Where I live, most people jump on the road, jack-in-the-box-style. They don't wait for the cars to stop, they don't even bother to look around. They walk slowly, sometimes crossing the road at an angle (which takes a lot more time, obviously), even if it's a single physically fit individual blocking a busy 4-lane road. I'd say about 80-90% of pedestrians behave this way.
So, despite it not being a particularly big city, running over pedestrians is a daily occurrence.
I am a pedestrian myself, mind you. I don't even have a driver's license.
Impossible if you have any skin conditions. I suffer from eczema (fortunately mild now, but in the past I was seriously considering suicide), and one of the things that reliably trigger a flare-up are unwashed clothes covered in dust mite excrement. Neither sun nor cold will help with that, only good old washing.
An old friend of mine has recently finished his term in the Russian military. According to his words explaining his own experience, and things he heard during military exercises from guys from other parts of the country, most soldiers are being trained not to defend their country, but to do three things: paint walls, wash their clothes, and clean up the premises.
It's no wonder you can mistake a passenger airplane for a military aircraft after such a stimulating experience.
>Can you use the dollar to buy food at a foodstand in Germany
I don't know about Germany, but most places you can easily convert it to local currency right around the corner. Not many currencies can boast of something like that.
I am confused. I live in a country with "banking services", but almost nobody here uses them. We get paid on debit cards, and then we immediately withdraw the sum in cash. We pay for everything in cash, why would we ever switch to something different? I can only see the negative consequences: the usual privacy implications (some guy can see what I spend my money on); the danger of not being able to spend money at all if they decide so (like the famous Visa/MasterCard WikiLeaks fiasco); fees (2-3% on every purchase? No, thank you.)
Ah yes, Arch certainly is much better. I've had enough to do with Arch when they totally borked my workflow three times in a row in a couple of months. One of the issues was rebuilding all of the Qt5 libraries without testing any of their dependents. All Qt5 applications simply stopped working.
I don't blame them though, one of the maintainers was supporting like, 3000 packages? I don't recall the exact number, but it was an impossible amount of work for a single individual. This strongly implies there was zero QA for these packages (an he really was doing it himself, it was not a front for an organization.)
They could implement something like Fedora modules: you have a stable base system, and then you have separate module streams for some software packages, which are updated separately, with multiple versions supported concurrently. For example, you can install the latest Fedora, and then pull the postgresql-9.6 module (or 10, or 11, or all three in parallel), despite 11 being the "official" version.
I think you'd see it in a very different light if you were living here. I am honestly very worried for my friends and relatives who drive, most of whom do it very, very carefully, and still they have yearly encounters with adults who behave like feeble-minded children.
BTW, didn't I say I don't have a driver's license?