As someone who has valued being able to live alone and recently went through a breakup after living with gf for a couple years -
Makes absolute sense.
First of all, in current always-up-never-down housing market (which has been like that since i bought my apartment over ten years ago) needing to move is always risky since you're basically always buying at worse value if time has passed.
Secondly, needing to buy a new place when you've been living with friends or partner or family for a while can be a lot of work. Once you're invested with loans and stuff you need a really good reasons to change that situation.
And then again in reference to the unhealthy market- if you sell higher than you bought you pay tax on the profit. If you're buying more expensive than you're selling as well, you're taking a hit.
I've basically just decided to keep my first apartment for ever, literally no benefit to ever selling it at this point. If i move in with a partner or something I'll just use it as an office or worst case rent it out or whatever.
Fun fact - if I'd sold my old apartment when I moved in with with ex I'm not certain i could have afforded to buy it today, likely I'd have to buy something smaller or further out of town.
Living together is increasingly becoming a very risky thing, whereas owning your own apartment sometimes feels like the only safety left in life.
It's not about transitioning to 100% renewable in this context, but about having a good enough supply of renewable energy to be more independent.
Are you talking about any specific part of Europe? In Sweden I think natural gas is supposedly something like 3% of totalt energy expenditure, although it is important for heating in some areas and dearth would affect that a lot i assume.
It's again one of those things where people tend to be overly extreme- I've had a few rational discussions with people but generally most people who have wanted a discussion have been of the "if you're worried you're racist" or "so you want our women to be raped by foreigners" style of discussion, which makes it real fucking tiring to try.
I've engaged in several conversations where someone starts out with statistics of crime and so on but wildly misrepresent those statistics, and when called out on and engaged in a discussion about the actual numbers in the studies they cite, the conversation has more than once ended on "So you want to let any trash into our school :) Allright if you ever have kids you'll understand :)))))" or something like that.
On the other side it tends to end with "If you talk about it you give a voice to racists so better to just not talk about it publicly?"
The reality either way is that if immigration is a problem, then we have a problem to solve. It's not going away, with how the world is looking right now, likely it will get worse. The impression I've been given growing up about why Scandinavia has succeeded has been that when there have been issues we dig our heels in and deal with them, find a way through. When the work put in goes down and the talking done goes up, nothing gets dealt with and the kind of people who get their power and following from "hate clicks" or "hate votes" flourish. The Internet is an unfortunate issue here as well- the media cycle is too fast to give justice to any sort of societal effort- before a decision can even be made about anything in politics there will be endless articles of how every conceivable outcome of the decision has already been failing before it has happened.
Covid is a good example, we have somehow already failed completely to contain it and succeded completely where others failed depending on who you ask and the verdicts started coming out just weeks into the pandemic from every corner of the world.
Honestly the theory I've been slowly growing over the last few years is that this is how society finally dies- media and everyone engaging in social media profiting increasingly on reporting failure until things simply cannot be allowed to succeed any more and our society just starts eating itself alive.
Summing up the article: Sweden took in a lot of immigrants and refugees which resulted in a backlash.
This gave a voice to an anti-immigration political party.
The other Scandinavian countries had a different experience, not surprisingly since they are very different in culture and policy.
All in all what the author describes is just unapologetical selfishness vs intentional virtue signalling.
Most people are able to internalise the facts that
a) taking in refugees will cause problems and those problems will need to be dealt with
And
b) taking in refugees will save lives and it's important to do so as much as possible
But of course some people just want to be as radically left or right as possible and yell about it.
The worst of us do not define the rest of us, but it seems to be simply irresistible to write article after article about the worst of us.
I find it likely that this is an example of someone using a macbook only for a long time, forming the opinion that the macbook touchpad is the standard and then finding everything flawed by comparison because its not quite the same.
I currently have a mb air m1 and an XPS 9570. If I had to say which is the best touch pad, it's the macbook; larger and more precise. But it beats the XPS by so little that I really don't care. However, I have a textured dbrand skin on the XPS touchpad which improves the surface so much so that I definitely prefer the XPS anyway- but the same would likely be true of the macbook if I had a skin on it.
Neither are as good as the touchpad I had on my first generation Thinkpad Yoga - now those pads have a kind of unsatisfactory tactile click, but on the first generation thinkpad yoga the entire touchpad itself clicked downwards. No dead zones or insensitive edges, literally the entire pad moved, haven't felt anything like it since. In the same manner as (I assume) OP I'm always gonna feel that any touchpad is just nowhere close to as refined as that one example. And likely I'll never see its like again since I assume Lenovo stopped using it for a reason (reliability must have been a concern when you have one massive button in the middle of a slim Chassi) That laptop also had the keyboard where the keys recede into the body and go rigid when you fold the screen to tablet mode, as well as being water sealed and having runoffs out of the keyboard. Truly something else. The keyboard also set my standard for laptop keyboards which means that no other laptop keyboard has come close since except for that of a barely functioning used XPS L321X I got for 50$ when I was "between" laptops.
So based on my very clear bias, most laptops on the market today including macbooks are steps back in keyboard and touch pad compared to my 2014 Thinkpad Yoga.
In the same way people compare macbook build quality to other laptops and always if the person has primarily used macbooks the outcome is given.
Meanwhile I kind of hate how careful I have to be with the screen of my macbook compared to thst of my XPS or the precision M7520 I have for work. But I'm used to laptops that can handle field use and of course the macbook is always going to be flawed by comparison to my ideal.
I would say if you were going to elevate anything after the 9000 it should be the Symbian devices- i had a 6600 and a friend had a 6630 and those will to me always be the first "Smartphones"
We played downloaded multiplayer games over Bluetooth in school, and though mine didn't have official mp3 functionality I downloaded the app used on later devices and used mine as an mp3 player. Even downloaded a bunch of roms for the ngage that ran just fine.
In the end though the peak for me was Windows mobile, everything up to 6.5 was literally just a pc in your pocket, after that they made the mistake (imo) of trying to compete with apple and android for user experience and failed miserably. For my part I never wanted the improved UX- a start menu style system with a stylus was great for me. Nokias N900 was great, but in the end too niche to compete with HTC and Apple when they were pumping out androids and iPhones. I handled purchases at my work for smartphones and gave the HTC hero as suggestion for my colleagues since it was simpler and got a N900 for myself, and though I liked it a lot android certainly went a lot further in the end.
I had an N900- for me one of the main downsides of it was the touchscreen, it was fine but with my colleagues all using the HTC hero it was frustrating to set their devices up for them and see how much nicer the experience was with multitouch.
Very solid device otherwise- i went from an Xperia X1 to the N900.
Makes absolute sense.
First of all, in current always-up-never-down housing market (which has been like that since i bought my apartment over ten years ago) needing to move is always risky since you're basically always buying at worse value if time has passed.
Secondly, needing to buy a new place when you've been living with friends or partner or family for a while can be a lot of work. Once you're invested with loans and stuff you need a really good reasons to change that situation.
And then again in reference to the unhealthy market- if you sell higher than you bought you pay tax on the profit. If you're buying more expensive than you're selling as well, you're taking a hit.
I've basically just decided to keep my first apartment for ever, literally no benefit to ever selling it at this point. If i move in with a partner or something I'll just use it as an office or worst case rent it out or whatever.
Fun fact - if I'd sold my old apartment when I moved in with with ex I'm not certain i could have afforded to buy it today, likely I'd have to buy something smaller or further out of town.
Living together is increasingly becoming a very risky thing, whereas owning your own apartment sometimes feels like the only safety left in life.