Every five years, up to 60,000 Estonians meet for Laulupidu to sing songs together.

The next iteration will take in July 2025 (https://2023.laulupidu.ee/en/registraton-to-song-celebration...)

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTdOiCa0-4o for a beautiful excerpt of the 2019 event.

And, just in case anyone wondered - 60,000 Estonians is just shy of 5% of the population.

(Assuming that Estonian-speaking Estonians are over-represented at this event, and given that almost a quarter of Estonia's population are ethnic Russians, this event probably gathers some 6-7% of the Estonian-speaking population!)

I think the 60k includes just the visitors, not the choirs and dancers, which is around another 30k.

The concept of qualia, which refers to the subjective experiences and qualities of consciousness, is usually discussed in the context of human perception, so I was just idly wondering: what would an artifical intelligence look like to which the concept of qualia made sense?

Your best case scenario is actually a worst case scenario.

From Düsseldorf to Frankfurt, using regional trains, you have to change once in Koblenz (RE 5 to RE 2). This is a connection which takes 3 hours and 50 minutes and runs every 2 hours (with numerous other options in between).

Also rather scenic if it takes the 'left side' between Cologne and Koblenz. Escpecially in the upper floor of the 'Dostos' (Double decked coaches). The Rhine, all the old castles, the wine grows on the steep hillsides, maybe some ships...

Technically, every tax payer does pay, irrespective of whether they are using the ticket or not: the EUR 49/month ticket is heavily subsidised, to the tune of EUR 3 billion/year, and this is covered by the tax payer.

The usage of physical currency in Germany has dropped over the last three years.

During the pandemic, paying by debit card was encouraged, and this has stuck around.

I have used cash in a single instance in the last month (at a restaurant where the card reader was out of order).

However, it turns out that most people still prefer cash, so I might be living in a bubble, see https://www.bundesbank.de/en/press/press-releases/payment-be...

This is from 2006 and should be marked as such in the title.

I was wondering why the summit dates were from the 90s. That makes sense

The 1996 season was catastrophic. It'd still be relevant in a discussion of the mountain today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Mount_Everest_disaster

Do you maybe mistake Österreich (Austria) for Ostdeutschland (Eastern Germany)?

And Germans have plenty of money (and vacation days) to travel across Europe, in fact you will encounter them pretty much everywhere.

The quality of care in German daycare centers is still not great despite recent improvements, I'll give you that.

From the article:

Example #5: In order to discourage drug diversion in a neonatal care unit, and in the days before computerized fingerprint recognition, our nurses were required to do the following when retrieving medications from the Pyxis medication cart: The nurse fetching the medication would enter their password on the computer, remove the medicine from the Pyxis drawer, draw the correct amount, and administer it to the patient. If any medicine remained in the vial—which happened frequently, because newborns often require smaller doses—the nurse was supposed to call a second nurse to the Pyxis, who would enter their password. The second entry was supposed to indicate that the second nurse observed the first nurse discarding the left-over medicine. However, because the nurses resented having to bother one another, especially when they were extremely busy with patient care measures, they simply shared their passwords with one another and entered them when they returned to the Pyxis. Not only was this an easy shortcut, but it compensated for the nurses’ taking offense that administration would think them to be drug diverters. Of course, it categorically defeated the purpose of the regulation.

Some useful advice!

Big fan of skip-level meetings: I schedule those in an ad-hoc fashion.

I let new joiners know to expect those occasional meetings, so they don't get worried if they're invited.

I use them for relationship building, showing appreciation, and also inviting colleagues to provide feedback on improvements to our organisation, tools, and processes, particularly if the skip-level was recently blocked by inefficiences outside of their immediate control.

Several good points, but mostly a rehash of Roubini's most well-known and pretty mainstream arguments.

We certainly live in times where many of his most pessimistic predictions seem to have a decent change of coming true, which is somewhat depressing.