Do you need complex investment options in your bank? I’m sure some banks offer that here, but there are also dedicated services specifically for gambling on the stock market, which I think more people would be drawn to as they are focused on that specific niche. The bank investment options are more for long-term savings rather than proper investments.

Astronomers are expecting a “new star” to appear in the night sky anytime between now and September in a celestial event that has been years in the making, according to NASA.

I mean, no. It hasn’t been years in the making, it happened a very, very long time ago. We just don’t get to see it until now.

It’s more that we’ve been anticipating the event for years.

Fairy vagina??

I overall liked the first two seasons of Discovery but Michael and Klingonman’s relationship took too much space. It was too much melodrama and I felt like they could’ve done something more productive.

Tilly was probably my favourite character, but there’s a bunch of interesting ones they could’ve developed further. Did Tilly’s mushroom friend ever return?

I’m also hella disappointed they killed Hugh only to bring him back, like that plot line wasn’t interesting at all. I’m dead tired of burying the gays.

I love furries and their sexpositivity. This comment made my day.

Rumpelstiltskin.

Naomi Novik wrote a lovely book inspired by it called “Spinning Silver.”

Fittingly this comic kind of reminds me of Peanuts.

I don’t think we view this quite the same way. I don’t see a problem with something being a defining part of someone’s identity, because it’s not up to me to decide how other people ought identify. We all have identities so on some level everyone identifies with something. Just because say, you and I don’t get how diet can be an significant part of someone’s identity, doesn’t invalidate it being significant for someone else. It just means that we haven’t lived the same life and that’s fine.

In a way we do have to accept other people’s identities, because what else can we do? We can’t force change on others, all we can really do is acknowledge the situation and then choose whether or not we want to continue interacting with them.

It doesn’t really get problematic until you have someone that does try to force things on others. My mother was one of those militant vegans, and she lost a lot of friends for it. She’s the reason I am vegetarian, and the reason I was vegan for a long time. Back then I never had much choice in either regard.

Being vegan wasn’t even really a defining part of her identity. Her trying to force it on others was also less about trying to change others, and more about trying to place herself in some sort of morally superior position to them. She pretended to care about their health and the environment - hell on some level maybe she genuinely did care - but it really was more about making herself look and feel better about herself because she was (and is) a deeply insecure person pretending to be otherwise.

As a final aside; what I’ve written above is what I consciously believe, but I’m obviously not an infallible person. I’m an extremely cynical, nihilistic, and definitely a judgmental person. I try my best not to be, and to see things from the perspective of others, but some days I succeed better than others.

As a life-long vegetarian, this has been my experience as well.

Speaking as a life-long lacto-ovo vegetarian who did a ten year stint as a vegan (I’m 30), it’s because there is a subset of the vegan population that’s very gung-ho about their diet and wants to proselytize about it, and no one likes being told what they should eat. When you remark on people’s diets, people tend to get annoyed and defensive about it.

I grew up being told that my food looked yucky, how I can’t call something meatballs since it doesn’t contain meat, how since I don’t eat protein I’ll die, so on, so forth. It got annoying fast, so now I don’t generally discuss my diet unless it makes a contextual sense. e.g. when planning a restaurant outing with people - though to be frank I often just avoid social situations where food plays a role.

I think where the big clashes really happen is when someone has made veganism/eating meat a core part of their identity, having that criticised, however gently that might be, will cause friction and often cause people to double-down on it; even though they may know on some level that the criticism might even be valid. You can see this in the fat pride movement as well.

Why was Taylor Swift not in the Oval Office during 9/11? 🤔🤔🤔

Ooh. Is it like aggressive or playful? My dog gets a mix of playful and scared when the proper vacuum comes out and I suspect it’s because it “stands” in that front down back up playful position, and then howls like a banshee.

Keeping both of our boys away from mowers sounds like a good idea haha.

My dog is super fascinated by lawn mower robots. Every time we see one he has to stand and watch for a couple of minutes. I wonder how he’d react to one of this size. Interestingly, he doesn’t care much for our robot vacuum. For the most part he avoids it, sometimes he lays down in its way and freaks out when it bumps into him.

What the hell! I thought the previous example was miserable, this is even worse! Does he have a supervisor you can report him to? That’s not acceptable behavior for a person in his position.

He sounds like a miserable person to have to deal with.

I can believe that.

I was born in Stockholm to a single mother. Honestly not sure how we could afford to live in that 2½ roomer, I think the rent was about 5k when we moved away back in 2003? Right now I live in a small town and my rent is almost 11k for a 3-roomer. Stockholm isn’t even on the radar for me.

When I say Stockholm I also mean Stockholm, not the suburbs; we lived right by Zinken in Södermalm. Like, this is literally the same block and it’s 22k. I’m doing quite alright for myself, and my income is around 28k after taxes.

Another thing that really fucks me off is the fact that since a couple of years back we’ve been urged to not have too large salary increases because that’d contribute to the inflation. Meanwhile, landlords are making more money than they ever have, they’re circumventing the established system for negotiating rent increases, and increasing it many times more than done in the past 20 years!

This is a graph, taken from this article on Hem & Hyra, a news outlet operated by the tenants union.

When the bubble popped back in 2009 the rent increases were on average around 3%, there are cases where you only saw about a 1% increase and now we’ve gotten a 4-5% rent increase two years in a row. Last year my rent increase was on 6%! Sure there are places where it’s way worse; my sister’s boyfriend got slapped with a spontaneous rent increase of 150%, and she herself got her rent increased from $1200 to $3500 when her landlord sold the duplex; but we have a system in Sweden where this kind of thing shouldn’t happen.

The way I see it; if you can’t afford to keep the properties, sell them back to the government and let the public landlord deal with them instead.

Gods, and that’s Oslo too. I couldn’t imagine even renting there today.

Sweden. He’s about 80 now I believe, so if we assume he bought his house around his 30s that’d be around late 60s to early/mid 70s?

I’ve dropped all streaming services, well save for my YouTube Music/Premium subscription I got grandfathered into when Google Play Music was brutally murdered.

At this point, I’ll just find alternatives.

A couple of years ago, my boss’ father (who founded the company and still worked there on and off) and I had a chat over lunch. I’m not sure how the topic of house prices came up, but he mentioned that when he and his wife bought their house, a car cost more than a house, so you knew that someone was really well off if they had two cars in the driveway.

I think that’s the first time I’ve actually gotten my mind blown. The idea that a car could cost more than a house just didn’t compute, and it still doesn’t quite sit with me.

Here in Sweden we have publicly owned housing. Each municipality has its own company that acts as a landlord. The main issue is queue times, but that could honestly be solved quite easily if the government decided to prioritise housing. They don’t, however, and instead opt to try and privatise it, leading to private landlords that have driven up the prices and cost of living, while slowly eking out the life of the publicly owned housing.