The's a metro ("S-Bahn") going north up to Friedberg/Hessen. Friedberg is the capital of the country. But there's no free "Park & Ride" there. Two stations towards Frankfurt you are in village called Wöllstadt. And there you have a free Park & Ride. More south some other village, no P&R. But then again in Bad Vilbel you have one.

Is however P&R + public tansport the fastest way to Frankfurt? That depends.

First, the Wöllstadt P&R isn't easily accessible from the Autobahn, or not even from the B3, which goes around Wöllstadt. And even when it went through it some years ago, it was several turn-left turn-rights through small streets.

And then the S6 only drives every 30 minutes to Frankfurt. It's supposed to change once they double the train tracks, but that will change. On top of it: metro lines don't have precedence, the quick trains like ICE have. So the S-Bahn more often than not waits until a faster train passes.

If it isn't between 7-9 in the morning, you're actually faster by car in Frankfurt than by public transport ... So the P&R is quite helpful for people living in the neighboring villages: they go by car to Wöllstadt, park there for free, commute to Frankfurt by metro. And that traffic jam free ... but not necessarily fast. And since parking in Frankfurt usually comes with a price tag, it's also a bit cheaper.

So it's nice to have this, but it's no all roses.

Number 1 reason is that power was quite highly taxed, since it is directly linked with pollution and CO2. All powers, but that also means electrical power. The effect is, that european cars are smaller and use less. And also european houses are better insulated. You can measure this, the typical german 4 person household uses less than 50% of the electric power of a 4 person US household. Before COVID I even saw a statistics that this less usage compansated the higher electricity prices, so both norm-households payed the same for electricity. Unsure if that is still true post-COVID.

The other reason is that also a good amount of money is directly invested into the grid, to make it more resilient. And you can also measure that. If you lookup the SAIDI (system average interuption duraction index) of e.g. USA and compare it to Germany, you immediately see why over there uninteruptible power supplies are hardly used except in data centers. SAIDI Germany 12.2 minutes per customer per year, USA 125.7 minutes per customer per year. That's a whopping 10x worse. Not just as number, but also for the industry.

And I heard that the SAIDI in Texas is even worse than the US average.

That said, if you insisted that some "Germany's Independence Day" existed, then it's perhaps that what got you banned. Germany was never really a colony. Not of UK, not of Spain or Portugal, or not in newer times of Russia. Many countries that were a colony of them, or just annexxed, have an independence day. Germany doesn't --- the last time it was partially colonized, in roman times, there was no Germany.

Perhaps you mean the reunification day :-)

If over here a lady buys a hot coffee in a McDrive, drives away, spills the hot coffee on their legs and makes a car accident due to this ... she won't be able to sue the McDrive. There's no fine-print or "Coffee is hot, you dumb person" writing needed anywhere. She could be lucky if she doesn't get fined for endangering others by her stupid actions.

So, if we have a power outage here, the courts don't suddenly get busy. Because there simply no one is suing.

Fun fact: despite this bad power outage, the power grid systems in Europe are still better (even way better) than in the US. There is a comparable statistics measure called "SAIDI" --- system average interuption duration index. And duration wise, per custom and year, the US power grids are worse than over here than in most of West Europe: (US SAIDI 2020: 1.3 hours, German SAIDI 2020: 0.3 hours). That's a factor of more than 4 on the worse-iness of US power grid!

That could be an indicator that suing at the tiniest chance isn't helpful macro-ecnomical. Or that a general suing culture (with legalese trying to protect one from the economic risks) aren't actually helping improving things in the general sense, although they reduce the risk of getting bankrupt. But society-wise, a sue culture is most probably a negative: you spend energy/time/money on things that aren't necessary in saner law systems.

I'm not saying those 850.000 millions are negligibe. They increase the scarce housing situation even more. They have antique idealisms (like that woman aren't equal, that woman showing their hairs are whores, that all jews must be bad). So they create a bit of trouble here, like antisemitism or even from time to time an "Ehrenmord".

But still... the millions of turkish Gastarbeiter actually changed german culture, think Döner Kebab. Which we can't say from the 850.000 recent refugees.

That's an interesting claim. The biggest muslim community in Germany is from Turkey. They came all here because of economic reason.

I'd even go so far that it's their religion that holds muslim states in a terrible economic situation. If you look down at 50% of your population (females), treat them unequal because of some ancient sharia feelings, sometimes even keep them away from good education ... then surely your car doesn't go fast, because the hand brake is still set!

The islamic culture was once renowned for education (e.g. look at Ibn Sina or why we today use "Algorithm" as word, or our numbers). But that's long gone. Even before islamists took over in Iran they seized the oil industry before they had the educated people to run it. In essence the country destabilized itself in the Mossadeqh time. But todays islam ... is more often than not demagocial instead of scientific. They dislike knowledge. The more islamic a country is, the more this is visible. Nothing of this creates good living condition to people, I'd say. And nothing here is in influence from "the west". Or Russia or China.

Now, the civil war in Syria ... I'm quite unsure if that has been instigated mainly because of the west. If anything, I'd say that the east (Russia) bolstered the syrian dictator. That most syrian people hated the torturing regime has IMHO nothing to do with "US and Israel spent years destabilizing Syria".

On your point that the US and USSR inventions only created destabilization with their wars... on this I agree. I can see the liberation of Kuwait from Saddam as a worthy war. But not the others.

"And noone stops US/israel" because no one has love the the Iranian regime, which kills its own people, allows Hamas to rain rockets on Israel (even when I don't like the israel government, the israel people don't deserve these attacks either!). It supports Yemenitic pirates. So it's an awful government, not righteous at all -- not even in a spiritual sense. There's a german saying: how you shout into the forest it will come back.

That is a rather absolute state and easy to falsify. Just 2 days ago I heard a report in "Deutschlandfunk" about how israel settlers killed palestinians (basically: they let their cows go onto the fields the palestinians owned. Which come from their village to chase the cows away. And then a settler in a israel military uniform used his storm rifle to kill one, injure one heavily and one lightly).

We also seen the fields of rubble the israel armed forces produced in the Gaza strip.

What we however can see: the media coverage of the Hamas attack where they killed and abducted so many people was extensive (rightfully so, as it was an abhorrent act). However, the systematic destruction of lifing quarters into huge fields of rubble by the IDR was mostly only mentioned. It got coverage, but not really that extensive.

And yet, in "Tagesschau" and "Zeit" you could all the time hear about the issues the reporters had about actually reporting from there, since Israel controlled most information channels.

What also is a very german thing: any critic on the israel governments doing is sooner or later "conquered" with some "this is antisemitic" claim. However, few are actually antisemitic (yep, there are yew haters here, especially after we've got so many arab immigrants). But there are also many people that can separate between a religio, the very diverse people groups living in Israel and the current israel governement.

We now have 3 classes, I hold the "highest" class, A, but I'd still suck on the air, mostly because I'm almost never on the air.

We have the EU Parliament, the EU Council, the EU Commission. Often they have different views in itself (e.g. factions in EU Parliament, or commissars in the commission that are more end-user-friendly vs. ones that are move business-friendly). And the EU Council (the ring of head-of-member-states) is more often than not just of one opinion, e.g. thing at Poland when it was governed by PiS. Or of Hungary and to some smaller extend Slovakia.

"The EU wants ..." is therefore quite often wrong.

For decades, european countries like Netherlands or German had cheaper alternatives, e.g. in Germany the old "EC Card" and now "girocard". That costs a shop just a fixed amount of cent... and a very low amount.

(That is BTW one of THE reasons why US travellers won't see "Credit cards accepted" in every store ... our alternatives are just cheaper, so the market decided)

Also, Visa and Mastercard as US companies. So they are sniffing on all european transactions.

And it happened more than once that US companies tried to execute bullshit US laws in Europe. Example: there was once an german online shop that sold cuban cigars. Eventually the US website that hosted the shop said "Oh, that's not allowed" --- despite it perfectly legal by german law. And they didn't just delete this cuban cigars, they disabled the whole shop, with IIRC 20000 EUR positive balance. And the shop owner didn't even get his money, since their customer service sucked and was only automated response and untrained indian call center clerks.

So no, we cannot really depend on US services. They are expensive, they customer service sucks, they are sniffing either directly or let the NSA sniff everything.

And, bank-wise the USA seems to be some decades back (not online-bank-wise!). I mean, they still have pay cheques? Not direct bank transfers? Shudder. No wonder that, if they have no alternatives, they think everything must be Visa or Mastercard operated.

I find it puzzling how you (and all the other commenters here) accept this rule like sheeps. Normally, you US citizens cannot stop boasting how the USA is supposedly "the land of the free".

So don't take this personally, I'm replying to this as to all the others that appear like they find it totally normal that some security guy or hotel cleaning can enter a rented room. Every 24 hours, or at all. It's not normal. And IMHO not even needed / helpful.

No 24h check will ever hinder a mass-shooter. The criminal would just wait until room cleaning made their job, then go to his car and get the big suitcase with all the guns and ammunition one can buy entirely too easy in the US. And then he can shot from his room, minutes after this compulsory do-nothing 24h "security" check.

Here, were I am (Germany), things are completely different.

First, it's not so easy to get weapons. Not even at gun exhibitions. That in itself helps tremendously getting a less violent society.

Second, here we have the right, upheld by courts, that a hotel tenant can make the hotel not enter his room. A "do not disturb" sign is everything that is needed. If you want, you can look it up under "Frankfurter Landgerichts aus dem Jahr 2009 (AZ 2-19 O 153/08)".

Sure, there are other rulings that landlords (including hoteliers) have under some circumstances the right to enter a property they rented out. Like fire, or water pipe broken. Actual, imminent danger. Not hypothetical danger! But they even cannot get a general "you can always enter" term signed, that would be null and void over here.

As a rule of thumb: any physical unit derived from a real persons name is not written in lower case. In this case, the unit honors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Volta and so it's written "220 V" instead.

Applies to other units based on surnames, like Heinrich Hertz' "Hz", Lord Kelvin's "K", James Watt's "W", André-Marie_Ampère's "A" and so on.

It works only with JS enabled. And when I enable it, I'm pestered with pop-ups.

Generally, a lot more Zigbee devices are compatible with Zigbee2MQTT that to HA's own "ZHA" Zigbee implementation. But Zigbee2MQTT and HomeAssistant work EXTREMELY nice together, very well integrated.

And if you have your Zigbee devices in Z2MQTT, then you can also use Node Red or similar tools for some automations, if you prefer that over the somewhat weird YAML-based automations of HA.

(Tip: use a cheap x86 PC, install Proxmoxx, install Zigbee2MQTT, install HA.OS ... done!)

Use a cheap x86 PC, install Proxmoxx, install Zigbee2MQTT, install HA.OS ... done!

See my other post on "Heimweh" vs. "Fernweh" here.

* "Heimweh" (what the articles names as "Nostalgia") * "Fernweh"

The common part, "weh", means something like the english "hurt".

"Heim" means "home"

"Fern" means "abroad" or "distant".

Since Germans are VERY travel friendly (e.g. if we can pay for it, we do one holiday per year in a foreign country), we're people that have a high amount of "Fernweh". But ... "Fernweh" for us is mostly only some mild kind of yearning. If we cannot travel, e.g. due to finances or due to COVID-19, we won't die. The extreme form of "Heimweh" described in the article however is some kind of serious illness. Something that one will never attribute to "Fernweh".

Well, any country.

Did you know that Poland imported most of their fossil fuels from Russia also?

Or, that today, Bulgaria still imports all (that is, 100% !!!) oil from Russia?

People like to blame Germany, and they point to North Stream. Few people looked at a map of oil and gas pipelines of Europe ... noticing that MOST of them are in eastern- and southern europe. All of europe depended on cheap russian fossil energy, not just Germany.

Map of oil & gas pipelines, centered on central and western europe:

https://theodora.com/pipelines/europe_oil_gas_and_products_p...

Only gas pipelines, but showing eastern europe much better. Note that the amount of pipelines in Germany seems to be higher ... but also notice that a good part of them run from the northsea towards the industrial areas. The pipeline system was never designed to be run solely by Russian fossil fuel, unlike the ones in eastern europe countries.

http://www.mappery.com/maps/Europe-Proposed-Natural-Gas-Pipe...