One of the links terminated in a seeming boathouse at Andøya in Norway.

It was a landmark. As in, if you were going fishing with a colleague and asked him which boathouse we'd embark from, he was as likely as not to say 'Three boathouses down from the hush one!'

(Reading Joseph Pearson's book on the Berlin airlift, in which he features prominently, do your last name stood out...)

Say, I have a Range Rover Classic (1972, 3.5l V8) I mostly use for fun and games during weekends in the summer months. Its A-pillars look like strands of spaghetti, making for excellent situational awareness from the driver's seat. It is effectively like driving around in a moving greenhouse. (Doubly so in summer, seeing as the A/C is of dubious efficacy, to put it mildly.)

If I ever roll the thing, I'll be done for, though.

Ranging from the understandable, but unacceptable (Say, CBDR/Constant bearing, decreasing range, which makes a lot of drivers misidentify an object as stationary even as it is moving towards them on a collision course) to the flat out unbelievable - I've been almost run over in a lit pedestrian crossing. While wearing hi-vis clothing. Pushing a baby stroller, also hi-vis. AFTER having made eye contact with the driver and even gotten a nod from her. After the car slowed down. Sigh.

In the latter case, it turned out she had assumed that us making eye contact meant that I had seen the car and would wait until it had safely passed the crossing. At least that was what she claimed when I asked why, oh why she'd approached the crossing, slowed down, made eye contact with the pedestrian - and yet proceeded to drive through...

Oh, and don't even get me started on the proliferation of touch screens forcing the driver to take his or her attention off the road to interact with the car. This was a solved problem, using physical buttons you soon learned the exact location of so you could reach for them while still keeping your attention on what was in front of you.

Looking at the statistics here in my native Norway, children killed in traffic is down a couple of orders of magnitude since the sixties - while traffic, at the same time, has increased by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Same goes for drowning - drastically reduced rates compared to the sixties.

Of course, I guess one can argue that maybe it has become too safe - in the sense that kids aren't exposed to enough risk to learn how to evaluate it, leading to major crashes with reality later on.

Then again, as a parent, I kind of like the idea that there's never been a safer time to be a child.

That doesn't stop me from urging them to ditch the screen time in favour of heading out into the boonies to find something to do, though.

I rely on Siemens automation products at work. They give me end-of-life warnings a couple of years ahead - and maintain a spares inventory for a decade and change after EoL.

That basically ensures I am never caught out, and makes me more than happy to (grudgingly) accept all their ideosyncracies...

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/05/gears...

I got VERY good at quickly rewinding a film roll and slipping it in the hands of a nearby friend in case security spotted me and wanted to nick my film. Always had a handful of empty film rolls to give up (seemingly reluctantly)

Worst scare I had was when taping Ray Charles at a jazz festival in Norway c.2000, methinks. Well into the show, he exclaims that some ass is taping his show, and he's not too happy about it. Starts explaining he's not going to play on until he's got that tape in his hands!

I glance around, rather nervously, but noone is heading for me - so I just keep recording, hoping that someone else is on the hook. Lo and behold, moments later a stage hand comes on stage with what appeared to be a broadcast video tape, giving it to a triumphant Ray Charles who sits down and starts playing again. Phew!

Which, incidentally, is itself considered an international crime.

So, these children would be alive and as well as one can be inside the theocracy that is Iran unless the US and Israel committed the international crime of a war of aggression?

Gabba gabba hey!

IANAL, and I have only heard about a couple of cases where people have been taxed under this statute - typically carpenters having built or renovated their own homes or cottages.

(Their obvious disadvantage being, of course, that the result of their labour is very tangible - and that whenever you do any significant building work, you'll need permits and documentation afterwards, making it difficult to discreetly renovate something off the books...)

The obligation to pay tax only kicks in (as far as I can tell, IANAL) if the work is substantial and of a nature which requires professional skills.

Here's a recent link, though in Norwegian, I'm afraid:

https://www.fvn.no/abito/i/GM86x4/skatt-ved-arbeid-paa-egen-...

If a Norwegian tradesman works on his own home, he's supposed to pay VAT on the value of the work he's done - not only on the materials used.

I suspect such work is being under-reported, though.

A Soviet engineer needs some plumbing done in his apartment, and calls for a plumber. The plumber arrives, does his thing, and hands over the bill. The engineer is shocked. -'What, this is like a quarter of what I make in a month - for half an hour's work???'

Plumber shrugs. -'Well, why don't you come join us? Easy work, well paid, no responsibility - just remember to keep mum about your degree, as we're not supposed to hire academics.'

Our engineer contemplates this for a while, applies for a job as a plumber - and gets it.

All is well, good money, no responsibilites - until management requires that they take evening school classes to gain new skills and thus better build socialism. So, grudgingly, our engineer enrolls in a math class and, upon arriving, finds that the teacher wants to establish what the plumbers already know.

-'You over there - could you please come to the blackboard and show us the formula for the area of a circle?' he asks our engineer.

Standing at the blackboard, he suddenly realizes he can't for the life of him remember the formula; while a bit rusty, he soon figures out how to reason it out - furiously writing out integrals on the blackboard, only to find the area of a circle is -(pi)*r^2.

Minus? How did a negative enter into it, he thinks, going over his calculations once again. No, still gets the same result. Sweat building, he turns away from the blackboard for a moment, turning to the other plumbers watching.

As in one voice, they all whisper -'Comrade, you must switch the limits to the integral!'

The sum owed I had calculated at the end of 2025 was less than 2% off from the sum our IRS equivalent came up with.

Their sum was the most favorable to me, though - they had adjusted a deduction I qualified for last year which I had missed.

This level of accuracy is down to our IRS knowing just about all there is to know about our income, assets, debts &c of course - oh, and on there being fewer loopholes in our tax code...