> The minimum house temperature your home should be kept at to avoid damp, mould and condensation is 18°C, according to health and energy experts.
That article and the supposed experts are idiotic. Condensation is a function of relative temperatures and humidities. If your house is warmer than outdoors, then you're not going to get condensation from outdoor air.
The outdoor air isn't really relevant, the issue is human activity (breathing, showering, laundry, etc.) raising the indoor humidity when combined with low indoor temperatures causing surfaces to approach the dew point. Particularly external walls or windows that will be a lower temperature than the room as a whole.
At 70% RH and 15C air temperatures, the dew point is 10C - which could easily be achieved along the exterior walls of an older more poorly insulated house.
Spindly old grandmothers can crank the thermostat. Everybody else who cranks it then proceeds to whine about the cost and air quality is being an idiot. Put on a sweater.
> EU leadership are actively rooting for [a war] and waste no opportunity to stoke the tension
Yes, we should all just stop building our defenses and increasing our resilience and roll over. Let's roll out a red carpet for Russians all the way to Paris (or maybe Lisbon?). The same peaceful folks who talk about bombing our cities every week on their national TV.
> Let's roll out a red carpet for Russians all the way to Paris (or maybe Lisbon?)
This is the kind of platitudes I'm talking about.
Russia is struggling to advance in a couple of regions in Ukraine, how do you think they would fare with attacking Europe and reaching Paris or Lisbon? Seriously.
They'd fare much better. Ukraine had a large pool of conscripts, a professional cadre with combat experience from the Donbas, and deep Soviet stocks to draw from, while Western Europe abolished conscription and destroyed its Cold War stockpiles a long time ago. The current reintroduction of conscription and massive investment in defense are clear signs that European armies were (and for some time, will remain) inadequate.
Compared to Ukraine, Europe has enormous amounts of money and modern weaponry, including nuclear weapons, nuclear submarines, hundreds of f-16s, f-35s, and twelve times the population of Ukraine for twenty times the size. For God's sake.
There simply isn't an "enormous amount of modern weaponry", otherwise it would have been given to Ukraine a long time ago.
Russia’s war against Ukraine has underscored the importance of air defence, as Kyiv begs the west for additional systems and rockets to protect its cities, troops and energy grid against daily bombing raids. But according to people familiar with confidential defence plans drawn up last year, Nato states are able to provide less than 5 per cent of air defence capacities deemed necessary to protect its members in central and eastern Europe against a full-scale attack.
Are you saying that if we had them, we would have given all our weapons to Ukraine? Lol.
Europe's aid to Ukraine is also limited by the fact that it doesn't want to be seen as an active part in the conflict, so it provides only arms with a limited range and that can be used only defensively. All this of course would not apply if it were attacked directly.
> Are you saying that if we had them, we would have given all our weapons to Ukraine?
No - I am saying that this "enormous amount of modern weaponry" that you speak of doesn't exist anymore. The large Cold War era stockpiles were simply destroyed. Even basic weapons, like artillery shells, are now in short supply.
>The same applies to tanks, artillery, and pretty much everything else.
It literally does not.
US built 6700 Bradleys. US built 10,000 Abrams. Thousands of these machines are already stationed in Europe just waiting to shoot Russians.
Germany built 3600 Leopard 2 tanks. They built 2k Marder IFVs.
Saab built 300 Grippens.
The Brits alone built over 400 main battle tanks. France alone built 800 of theirs.
You should divide all these numbers by half or more to estimate ones with modernization upgrades, but Russia ran out of modernized equipment a while ago, and NATO 80s equipment has demonstrably outclassed Soviet leftovers.
The US is bad at producing Artillery shells because we utterly refuse to use State power to induce business nowadays, because of stupid "Capitalism good, gubermint bad" ideology, but Europe ramped up shell production. Manufacturers have openly said that all they need is a commitment, and they will build capacity.
The anti-air missile problem is because NATO always intended to rely on US air power (and our thousands of aircraft) to utterly own the skies and deny any air attack. Also the Shahed situation is somewhat novel. The US once produced 40,000 HAWK Anti-air missiles, which would be perfectly sufficient against something like Shahed.
Nobody wants to disarm themselves to give everything they have to Ukraine, but there is substantial arms that are just waiting for use, while Ukraine suffers. US alone could arm Ukraine twice over and not even feel the pain. Most of our equipment is considered not useful against China and is slated to be replaced, but we STILL refuse to sell it.
Germany might have built 3600 Leopard tanks since the 1970s, but as of 2025, it has only about 300 in service with the Bundeswehr, of which roughly 200 are combat-ready. France, the UK, and Italy each also have around 200 tanks in active service; Spain has fewer than 100.
Nor are there thousands of American tanks in Europe ready to fire at the Russians. The last permanently stationed US tanks were withdrawn from Europe in 2013. At any given time, about 100 to 200 US tanks in total are scattered across Europe on temporary rotations (exercises etc).
These figures pale in comparison with independently verified Ukrainian tank losses, which currently stand at 1267, with total losses estimated between 1500 and 1900. In early 2023, the Ukrainian high command requested 300-500 tanks from allies for the next counteroffensive. The US was unwilling to provide such support, and other countries could not supply anything comparable, even through a joint effort. Hence the stalemate.
If Europe had deep stockpiles to draw from without compromising its own military readiness, the picture would be completely different. During the Cold War, Europe maintained such stockpiles, but they were dismantled in the 1990s and early 2000s as a cost-cutting measure.
I think your view is a tad optimistic. Many people had difficult lives just because they didn’t want to be members of the party. Thier kids didn’t get to good schools, or got to the one 30 minutes by train, they lost jobs and were forced to dry laundry with engineering degrees.
There was even a joke about this:
⸻
In Poland, during the times of hard socialism, a math associate professor calculated that a shipyard worker earned three times more than he did. So he thought “screw this,” crossed out the titles before and after his name, and went to work in a factory.
Of course, he was doing well in the factory — he didn’t strain himself too much and earned three times more than at the school. Then the factory introduced an evening school for workers, with the promise that whoever attended would get a raise. So the associate professor signed up and started going.
On the very first lesson — bam — mathematics. The level was like the first year of high school, so the associate professor was just dozing off, not paying attention. The teacher noticed him, called him up to the board, and asked him to calculate the area of a circle.
The professor started writing, but for the life of him couldn’t remember the formula for the area of a circle. So he decided to derive it. He wrote the conversion to polar coordinates, then integrated it, and ended up with –πr². So he stood there, wondering where the minus sign had come from.
And from the back row, someone whispered:
“Reverse the integration interval.”
I live near a port and dock workers there make a quarter of a million dollars a year along with great benefits, meanwhile the majority of professors these days are adjuncts who aren't even university employees lol
1) maybe it was different in 50's, 60's, when I was around, plenty of profs at the university were non-communists in 1989. The communists as a percentage of working population was always low (<11%?), so what you suggest could not have been a generally applied rule, the math just does not work. I assume if you wanted to get to a leading position in a plant/office/university, you needed to be communist. If you refused, that typically meant no promotion. You must have really pissed off the local party boss if it came to your kids could not get to good school. Never a smart move. Probably not a smart move to piss off Irwings if you live in New Brunswick, Canada, either.
2) jokes are jokes, exxagerating a kernel of truth to the point of absurdity is what makes the joke. The truth is, the salary of prof was never anything special, but was marginally better than the salary of average worker. There were some highly (i.e. 2x, maybe even 3x?, salary scales overall were really flat) paid worker occupations, miners were one of them (maybe due to work hazard). The way to get the luxuries was not through money, but through connections (yes, mostly communistic ones).
3) shit happens (the accompanying text talks about a fire in the main/only paper-mill making toilet paper in Czechoslovakia), there were queues when the rumor spread 'there will be bananas in the local fruit&vegetables shop'. There were people panic buying toilet paper at the start of COVID also, maybe its a local specialty :-)
One anecdote I remember from my youth was people routinely taking their windshield wipers off when parking somewhere out (those were notoriously in short supply and easy to steal). So yes, there were supply problems, no rose glasses, but nothing extreme.
As with everything, there is too much polarization: some people remember only the bad stuff and it was a hell on earth for them, others remember only the good stuff and emphasize that. As always, the truth is in between.
>There were people panic buying toilet paper at the start of COVID also, maybe its a local specialty :-)
Not exactly. Australians did exactly the same thing. There were people who bought ridiculous amounts of toilet paper and stored stacks of it in their garage and other people missed out, causing massive demand vs. supply problems for a extreme future outcome that never occurred. It's the selfish-survivalist greed of individual humanity en-masse.
The same thing happens occasionally with petrol, unexpected demand for fear of missing our creates the supply problem. At extremes if it happens with banks, the run on banks mean the bank collapses because it's over-leveraged and can't give back everyone their savings because those savings have been lent but not repaid yet.
So a supposed long-term democratic capitalist society (Australia) behaved the same as the post-past-forced-dictated-communist society of former Czechoslovakia (now Czechia.
I think when humans get - it just occurs in different ways based on the local envioronment/scarcity/society and your version of brainwashing of your local upbringing. How many of us consider propoganda from the inside looking out (hard to identify) vs. taking an 'outside looking in' perspective? It's way easier to shit on North Korea than your local/national government. You have constantly shift your thinking in questioning your local news as much as non-local news.
Anecdotally, the recently voted #1 Australian song of all time music video was filmed there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIBv2GEnXlc, and one of my favourite footballers ever was Czech, so I may be biased. I really Prague when I visited, aside from the tacky tourist strip near the river on the non-castle side.
Too late to edit after a late post-proofread I got distracted by the ICFP2025.
>I really Prague
I really liked Prague... except for the tourist stretch on the non-castle side of the river which way tacky. We have our own tacky shops where I'm from, they're just not all together in a long continuous span.
yet, many people claim they were happier back then. At least in the country where I’m from. No options in life, no hard decisions or responsibility for their lives. Our current PM said he didn’t notice the fall of communism. shrug
You're giving a 10% chance to Denmark allying with Russia over a threat from US? Even right-wing parties in Dk aren't really pro-Russian, so I'd say the chance is closer to 0 than 10%.
