Luc

• 2 decades: Netherlands
• 2 years: Belgium
• 2 months: Finland
• 2 weeks: Iceland
• 2 days: United Kingdom
• 2 hours: Switzerland
• Somewhere between 2 minutes and 2 seconds: Netherlands, Germany, Belgium all at once

• 6 years: Germany
• 6 months: France
• 6 weeks… this is getting tricky, Luxembourg is probably closest but not close enough to claim this tier
• 6 days: Poland
• 6 hours: Sweden
• 6 minutes: I give up

I didn’t realise it was a life goal of mine to spend 6 minutes in a country until this post, but now I’m not sure I can unsee this list. Maybe the Vatican is a good candidate for that? Italy can go in the 2 days slot, bumping UK up to 6 weeks another time. Germany will exceed the 6 years slot soon though, maybe I’ll need to visit all sixers to get bingo on a row of sevens instead. And where are we going for 7 seconds? Another tripoint, does that count?

Before you buy the other plug standard for your place, please check legislation and insurance terms. It may affect liability if you install a nonstandard plug

Most devices I have are compatible with both, perhaps because Netherlands and Belgium are similar markets (because Flanders) and Belgium uses French plugs, so loads of products made for the Dutch-Belgian market will be compatible with both plug types. The only product I own that isn’t French-compatible is from Germany, not sure if that’s an exception or the norm there, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that it might also simply not matter which one you install since it’s easy and common to make universal plugs for these two socket types

The cross-section between high volume and easy to make

• Vegan replacement products? Easier to make than animals, but low volume so it’s more expensive than it needs to be (and often in a higher tax bracket, classified as candy or whatever)
• Eggs? Needs healthy animals
• Bananas are clones of each other. Might become an issue at some point, might not. Apples, too, but there’s many more variants
• Maize, tomatoes, potatoes? Grown by the bazillion, cheap, afaik needn’t be clones of each other to get (something close enough to) the desired product
• Rice? The pre-boiled stuff is afaik around the same price as the raw product, that’s how large the volumes are

Just as a small note just in case, since this data is quite irreplaceable: raid isn’t backup. Especially if the drives are of the same model, they’re fairly likely to fail at the same time. Speaking from experience sadly

I use restic for off-site backups, hosted with a friend

Eyeing the replies, does not one other person here get results constantly flooded with content farms? They’ve gotten significantly worse

But then, I don’t use Google so maybe this is still better than Google Search?

It started maybe three years ago, around the same time as LLMs became usable for this, but I’m pretty sure >50% are human-written still. Probably the LLM generates the structure (saves any time they’d have to spend coming up with plausible-sounding texts) and someone from a low-income country is contracted to make it look more legit

Of course, queries for topics that have a Wikipedia page get Wikipedia first, recipes get tons of big-name recipe sites, products get stores. But when there’s no obvious market around a topic, 3~4 out of 5 results are content farms pretending to have useful information to show unwary visitors ads

(As an alternative, I still have to try Kagi properly. It seemed on par with DDG when I did a few searches last year, but then their payment processor refused me trying to load my account, support was unhelpful, and I’ve gotten sidetracked since)

OpenStreetMap contributor here. What address format isn’t supported? Maybe I can help

Tried OpenStreetMap? Quality varies by country though

The fictional version of it is apparently named after soy and lent (the religious fasting thing, I guess), TIL. But the real-world version literally has meal replacement in the Wikipedia page title. Was looking for a reference from the creator stating their goal but Wikipedia said unreferenced (at the time that I wrote the Dutch translation in 2014) that it’s supposed to be nutritionally complete. The English page was shortened considerably since then, dunno why but this part is gone. That’s how it started and was marketed though, so that’s what makes it that by definition in my mind. If they’ve strayed from their raison d’être, idk what they are anymore

The definition of soylent is that it contains all nutrients you need. What’s the multivitamin pill for?

Well don’t leave us hanging