ZygmuntZ

Fun Fact: The Amish population doubles every ~20 years. In 1920 there were only 5000 of them. Today they number around 400,000.

The European center of gravity has shifted to the East.

Al Pacino doing a British accent but all I hear is Tony Montana doing a shakespearean play

In Paris right now and wow this place is unreal. Every corner of the city feels alive at what seems to be all hours of the day. Genuinely hard to find a glaring flaw. Huge fan would be an understatement

NEW - Spain's PM Sanchez says the legalization of over 500,000 migrants will be approved today, calling it "an act of justice," comparing today's migrants to "our grandparents who emigrated to U.S. and Europe, in search for a better life," and "a necessity, Spain, like other European countries is ageing. Without new people working and contributing to the system, our prosperity slows."

‼️ ZELENSKYY: For the first time in the war, an enemy position was captured entirely by ground robotic systems and drones - without any infantry. A robot entered the most dangerous zones instead of a soldier and took the positions. «The future is here, on the battlefield, and Ukraine is creating it. These are our ground robotic systems. For the first time in this war's history, an enemy position was taken exclusively by unmanned GRS platforms and drones. The occupiers surrendered, and this operation was completed without infantry involvement and without losses on our side. Ratel, Termite, Ardal, Lynx, Zmiy, Protector, Volya and other GRS completed over 22 000 missions at the front in just 3 months. In other words, over 22 000 times lives were saved. A robot went into the most dangerous zones instead of a soldier» - Zelenskyy’s address to the workers of Ukraine’s defense-industrial complex. April 13th, 2026.

Your washing machine runs at 57°F. The CDC says bacteria die at 160°F. That's a 103-degree gap between what kills pathogens and what you're actually using on your underwear. And Procter & Gamble spent the last five years making sure you'd widen it. They enlisted Ice-T, Stone Cold Steve Austin, the NFL, Walmart, Samsung, NASA, and the World Wildlife Fund to convince America to wash in cold water. Cold water loads went from 48% in 2020 to 57% in 2023. Their Cold Callers campaign alone drove a 39% sales lift for Tide. The reason is carbon math. 90% of washing machine energy goes to heating water. P&G needs cold water adoption to hit net-zero by 2040. So they built campaigns around "$150 savings a year" and ran them during peak inflation. The sustainability math works. The microbiology doesn't. P&G's own internal data, published in a peer-reviewed microbiology journal, showed 44.7% of US households now wash over half their loads on cold. The same paper found that enteric bacteria require hot water, bleach, or both to reach acceptable risk levels. Cold water with regular detergent leaves viable pathogens on fabric. A University of Arizona study found 44% of home washing machines tested positive for fecal bacteria in the drum. Front-loaders are worse: a 2025 Frontiers in Microbiology study measured bacterial loads nearly 1,000x higher in front-loaders than top-loaders. 90% of bathroom towels carry coliform bacteria. One load of underwear can release 100 million E. coli into the wash water. And at 57°F, that bacteria doesn't die. It transfers to the next load. P&G solved their carbon problem by creating your hygiene problem. The $150 you save on energy is buying you a washing machine that functions as a bacterial trading floor.

Since China worships university education means it will develop many of the same ideological problems of "elite overproduction" that the West has. The bizarre derangement of first university professors, then media workers, then bureaucrats, then judges seems likely to develop.

The company I worked for consulted for them in 2019-2020 and they HATED HATED that most of their clients were now footballers and YouTubers instead of global royal families.

Isn’t that London is now a hellhole, actually it is very nice in many parts - is more that it is undergoing a process of (avoidable) ‘enshittification’ where quality of life on certain metrics gets slowly worse over time. So easy to tolerate but things are still worse than before