I care how much taxes I pay for several reasons (Germany):

• Rich people are taxed less than working people
• Given that we have one of the highest tax rates in the world, a big part of my taxes go into corruption, incompetence or the pensions of civil servants (pensions for civil servants are way higher than for normal people, especially for some pencil pushing)
• It gets even more fun, when I think about how many big companies are getting subsidized by my taxes with billions (speaking about companies which are making billions for their stake holders)
• In our system, costs for health care system and workers pensions are also mandatory deducted from my income (they don’t call it tax)… Given, what an average worker pays, we get not enough out of it, neither from health care nor when thinking about the pensions
• A final tax, which is not called tax, is for public TV/state propaganda. There were more scandals about that money recently than anything else: The higher ups in that system earn more money than the president of Germany (no kidding), people get special pensions for the rest of their life which are obscenely high (after working like a few months, again, no kidding)

Don’t get me wrong: I would happily pay taxes if the biggest parts would go towards services, infrastructure, public transport, health care, people in need and smart/strategic investments of the economy.

As it is right now, my taxes are siphoned into the pockets of the so called elite instead , so I care.

If you don’t care about paying taxes, you are either mostly happy about were the money goes or have too much money to care.

Wanted (2008) - The comics are brilliant, sharp, funny and intelligent. By leaving out everything smart/interesting from the comics they managed to create a mediocre action movie.

Thank you, sir! :-)

• Teaching math is mostly done w/o context and history, IMHO a lot of math makes much more sense when the original problem is understood, before the level of abstraction is being raised.
• Math is a also a language and a notation. Unless one uses math regularly, there is simply not enough practice/repetition to read/speak this notation.
• Math is a tower of abstractions, depending on other abstractions. A lot of topics in math depends on people understanding a lot of basic parts, which means if a student just got by with a prior topic, it is near impossible to catch up/understand what is currently being taught. (Compare to other topics: For example, if a student is bad in their Greek history, they get a fresh start when the topic is industrialization in England w/o any penalty.)
• Math in the primary and secondary schools is mostly computation, ‘real math’ is only taught to people studying MINT.

tl;dr

• we need a better curriculum in the primary/secondary schools
• we need more exercises in reading/writing the mathematical notation (sorry, just understanding math is not enough, because understanding doesn’t make one fluent)
• at least in my school years, math was not repeated enough.
• reading/understanding math is really hard, at the higher levels, understanding 2-3 pages on a textbook per day is an acceptable pace. I guess all the entertainment nowadays makes it not easier to sit still in a room and get math into ones brain

For me the ‘breakthrough’ with math was, simply to accept that at the higher levels we are speaking about symbols (abstractions) that follow certain rules and everything else is derived by pure logic. Just accepting that one is manipulating symbols with rules to get to other symbols and learning the rules, made it click for me. Disclaimer: Was lucky with great math teachers in university, but even in my university there were people who simply could not accept the game of mathematics and were frustrated, because they wanted easy question/answer style formulas in the sense: When you see this, substitute PI with 3.14 and multiply r by r and write down the number that your calculator shows. They never made any effort to understand where PI comes from, where the radius comes from and why it makes sense.

What is insane, is how many people studied computer science but are totally unable to apply mathematics to the problems they try to solve. Supposedly most of them learned relational algebra and discrete mathematics during their studies (and formal languages/complexity theory)… it is like something is missing in their ability to transfer what they learned in the university to basically the same problems where the symbols have different names. That is something I would love to understand.

Who else can survive for years on eating their own foot-skin? :-P

Great pick!

So many quotes from Casablanca are part of our everyday culture… and AFAIK it is the first movie ever to feature a flashback in a flashback. Combined with the awesome cast of actors this is a masterpiece. :-)

One is not enough, and a lot of great movies where already named, still, some great movies are missing:

• Heat (Michael Mann) Every single time I see it, it is brilliant and I discover something new
• Jin Roh (The original animation movie), awesome atmosphere and only after the 2nd viewing one can really appreciate it
• Near Dark (1987) Why the hell did nobody ever produce something like this ever again?
• Miami Vice (Michael Mann), ‘Style over substance’, in a great way, although I have the shaky camera
• Seven Samurai
• Casablanca
• Strange Days
• Point Break
• XXX (Nobody understood that it was a parody back in the days :-P)
• What we do in the shadows
• Brazil
• Rocky
• Eternal Sunshine …
• The city of lost children
• Leon the professional
• Dolls
• The Killer (The original of course)
• The last unicorn
• Dark City
• The thing
• The Lost Boys
• Spirited Away
• Donnie Darko
• Rashomon
• Brother (2000)
• Parasite
• Hatsukoi (First Love)

… from the top of my mind. :-P

FreeCiv is a classic and still fun. rogue and nethack are good, too.

• Another vote for “Slay the Spire”, have bought it for all platforms and wasted too much of my time
• Horizon Chase Turbo is a very good arcade racer
• Danmaku Unlimited 2 and Danmaku Unlimited 3 for bullet hell shmups

Not arcade style, but Final Fantasy I-VI pixel remasters are IMHO great on phones.

Because we are men/gals of culture! :-P Hadouken! ;-)

Nice, I love Yakuza, really very special in the world of gaming! :-)

• Street Fighter 2 Turbo (Arcade)
• Chrono Trigger (SNES)
• Contra (NES)
• Dark Souls
• Warcrat 3 TFT (non remaster)
• OpenXCom with X-COM data
• XCom
• Slay the Spire
• OlliOlli
• Mark of the Ninja
• Yakuza0
• Horizon Chase Turbo

(No order, might be not exactly 10 :-P)

Digital, unless I really want the book and it is only analog.

The analog form factor of books is IMHO much nicer, and I understand everyone who doesn’t like digital books.

Stil, for me going digital beats analog:

• Having books always in my pocket, I never wonder what to do if I have to wait somewhere
• Going for work/leisure travel, always fully stocked with interesting reading material
• Learning from books and making notes? Digital makes it far easier
• I mostly read English books for learning and in my country one has to pay a heavy surcharge for English books

I also have to say, Amazon really earned all the critic it gets, but their Kindle apps and physical devices are awesome. It is easy to buy DRM free books and read/sync them with Amazon kindle infrastructure (send to device etc.).

Wait, so the summary states clearly, that a.) flossing is effective b.) mouth rinsing is more effective?!? It seems to good to be true, why does not every producer of mouth rinsing make advertisement with this? I also always ask my dentists about tips for dental hygiene, and none every recommend mouth rinsing. (Germany)

I also got the ‘brush after every contact with sugar’ thingy.

The common agreement nowadays seems to be twice a day and the points are very clear: before you go to bed and soon after getting up in the morning, to bring some fluid to the nasty bacteria, remove their food and plaque from your teeth.

Seriously, I have no idea how one could brush teeth in 2 minutes. I brush gently, use the simple swipe away from the gum technique and just work systematic chewing surfaces, inner surfaces, outer surfaces. Each part gets 2-3 swipes. I had a professional dental cleaner teach this technique to me, and she also told me that she couldn’t finish within 3 minutes. (Do not misunderstand me; I would happily get away with 2 minutes.) BTW flossing is another interesting topic, AFAIK there is no study which can show that flossing helps your teeth/gum. (I floss daily, but I just cannot understand why there is no study which supports this practice.)

Very nice! :-) Cheers to Eduardo!

Where would be the fun w/o a missed shot from your shotgun when standing right next to the alien? ;-)

Fair enough!

As I said, I would not host it myself.

My solution is much simpler and more redundant: A KeepassXC file backed up to different physical locations and 2 different cloud providers.

If I ever forget my password, I am totally screwed. :-P … but OTOH an event which would lead to the deletion of all of my backups at the same time would be extinction - level. ;-)

X-COM (from the 90’s, not the remake):

I totally sucked at playing X-COM and died a lot, until I learned about real world squad tactics.

In X-COM, the members of your team can get scared/lose it, and behave in random ways like throwing away their weapons/fleeing the fight or just going berserk and shooting around.

So, after I improved my game with my newly acquainted knowledge of real world squad tactics, I had a terror mission. Terror missions are missions, where the aliens attack and which are harder than the other missions.

I managed to survive the load out from the helicopter and kill nearly every alien on first contact, thanks to very careful and orchestrated movement of my squad.

There was one alien left, I tried to shoot it several times from a distance, and of course (this being X-COM after all), all of my shoots missed…

… THE ALIEN STRESSED OUT AND BERSERKED…

I didn’t even know that it was possible. After weeks of loosing and frustration, this one moment is the most satisfying moment of my entire gaming history (more than 30 years now).

Haven’t found any modern game, where this would be even possible!

Mandatory link to OpenXcom