Over here entrance to shelters is permitted only to the sober. Its more complicated than that.

Impractical stuff that looks nice gets some buyers. Especially in kitchen.

Looks like plastic to me. Or ceramic in style of wood.

It’s weird but not uncommon. There are lots of weird people out there. You’ll have company.

I think that it was just the last 30 years being an anomaly. In Europe you had lots of very interesting stuff happening pre WW2. Also pre WW1 was calm just briefly. After WW2 you had communist revolutions in the east which took a while, then in the west you had Basques, Northern Ireland, extremists in Italy and Germany doing interesting happenings. And decolonization struggle in the rest of the world. All very eventful. Real calm for Europe came after end of cold war up until 2014 Ukraine. And that is if you disregard the wars in ex Yugoslavia that was ongoing for 10 years! And included eventful things like a genocide and several ethnic expulsions. So maybe real calm was for all in all 14 years in the 21st century…not to say that Middle East was anything but calm in that period. And that Russia ended its civil war circa 2008 and invaded Georgia that same year. That leaves us with 6 whole consecutive years of calm on European continent.

There does exist a strong privacy movement that replicates 99% of tech products that mainstream tech companies provide. I think part of the momentum can definitely be attributed to Snowden’s revelations.

It’s as important what they don’t report on. Or the heading placements and wether the story gets burried after half a day. News organizations and politics are heavily connected. In my country it’s very common to go from journalist to member of parliment or PR staff.