Use your expensive/show-off devices everywhere, even if it’s extremely unpractical: drive the car/take the horse to go to a place next door. Have the most expensive, top-notch devices to do the easiest and most mundane tasks.

That reminds me of a former job I had. I had a male coworker who refused to make coffee. It was a small company with only 10 employees and we had this really cheap machine where you just put coffee in the upper part and then let the water run through. Don’t know what it’s called. Anyway, that coffee machine had ONE (1!) button: on/off. He’d always try to make me or the only other woman in the office make the coffee because “You women know better how to do those things. I never make coffee”. The best part: he was one of the engineers in charge of repairing the power tools that the company sells!

So, what happened if we refused or weren’t there? There just wasn’t any coffee! Those guys would rather not have their coffee than make it themselves!

A lot of brands have special barista oat milk, usually with pea protein I think or rapeseed oil to make the froth stable. Here in Germany they are often labeled “Barista oat milk”.

I have one always in my pocket, too, but I’d argue it’s not “unexpectedly useful”.

I’m learning a bit Dutch. We’re quite close to the dutch border and have been going there for vacation and shopping for a while now and would like to be able to at least order food/ask for the toilet etc.

I feel you. I worked in logistics in an office position for a long time. I’m very organized, so I liked it and was good at it. But wages have always been low and with the current cost of living you can hardly make ends meet with those logistics job. Managed to switch to IT, mostly project management, and thought I finally found something that I’m good at and that’s promising a decent wage. My contract for the last project is about to expire and jobs in IT are few and hard to get.

It’s really disheartening, you think you do everything right and fight your way into an in-demand field just to have the rug pulled from under you.

My husband and I went to Noord Holland in the Netherlands last year. We had a room in a private house. The owner was this nice old couple. They helped us rent bikes at a local bike shop and we just went everywhere on bike. Every day an hour or two just following the coastline, nothing but the sea, the shore and the sails of the boats in the distance.

We also went to a hat museum. It was a private museum - basically an old woman who’se been collecting and making hats her entire life. A whole room full of hats from all over the world and she could tell you all about them, how they are made, the cultural signifance etc. Her husband made us tea while we sat there and listened.

I’m going on holiday on wednesday for a week and the weather forecast looks great.

I love my husband and he makes me happy every single day. Every day we flirt with each other. He keeps making the same stupid jokes and over the top pick-up lines that he did 7 1/2 years ago on our first date and they still make me laugh every day.

Nope. I’ve been no contact for years, but when I still had contact, she just kept moving the goalpost. When I had good grades in school: They don’t mean anything, only the grades for Abitur (A-Levels) count. When I had good grades in Abitur: It means nothing, noone will ever ask for your Abitur grades again. Only the university degree counts. When I had my bachelors: Bachelor is worthless, only the master is a REAL degree. When I had my master degree: The master degree is worthless… And that’s the point where I cut contact with her.

Well, according to her, university degrees are all worthless nowadays and “a masters is at a level a high school degree used to be at”. She also told me my As were worthless because “everybody gets an A nowadays just for showing up to class”.

While writing my master thesis my professor suddenly left the university. Noone ever really knew why and there was no official statement other than a short sentence on the website that Prof. XYZ has left the department. My master thesis was on hold while I had to find a new professor. My mother, who has always accused me of being lazy and lying, insisted that it was all a lie. When I pointed out the news on the university website, she said: “I don’t know how you hacked the website and got it to display your lies, but I’m not falling for your deceit.” I am not a computer science major, I studied linguistics.

Is that so in France? I’ve only ever been there on holiday but I can’t imagine that “lots of places don’t allow children”. Museums were full of kids and you could see many in restaurants. As long as they are behaving I don’t think they are excluded much except for some hotels, spas or saunas. It’s ok to have some “adult-only spaces” just like there are kid-spaces like playgrounds, children’s museums etc. But I don’t have kids in France so I don’t know how many kid-free zones there are. I just noticed a lot of museums having tours or areas for kids.

I’d argue that the drop in conference and other professional visitors could be even steeper. There are still enough people who’ll privately take the risk or aren’t informed or think “I’ll be Ok if I comply with the laws”. Companies or universities however have HR departments and people in charge of travelling and compliance. They would risk a lot more money and possibly secrets if the devices are searched and employees are detained. I think they’ll be even more careful and restrict trips to the US. I could imagine a lot of conferences offering online participation and many opting for that rather than risking it.

And if enough international speakers can’t get in even more conferences will opt for moving the entire conference to a different country.

There are still too many people who are either uninformed or think this won’t happen to them. Surely the tourists that got detained did something wrong. As long as they follow all the rules it won’t happen to them. Etc. It’ll take a couple of more cases in the media for it to go down more.

So creating quiet places for relaxation is not allowed anymore? Because a child “shouts, laughs and moves” and that’s just how children are, no need to try and teach it to be quiet in certain spaces. But you are also not allowed to exclude them. These childfree places mostly exist because too many parents think children need to be loud and disruptiv everywhere they go and they can’t possibly teach them to be quiet for an hour or two.

I’m German and I worked in an office with managers and engineers who had a background in construction or related jobs. There is a very strong attitude of “We didn’t need that bullshit back when I was an apprentice.” There is a lot of scoffing at people who wear saftey gear and follow the rules. Corners are being cut and safety rules ignored because “we didn’t need all that bullshit back then and losing a finger or two is just part of the job”.

Some German news articles mention that the company in charge of the project had a bad track record when it comes to following safety regulations and the very same construction site had to be stopped before due to broken bolts in the bridge.

Adrian Paul in The Highlander TV Series.

The University where I studied switched from Linux to Windows because to many people complained that it was “too hard”. Even the computers in the library that were just for searching books aka 90% of the time just using the browser were switched from Linux to Windows because the students complained. I now work in a job where most of our customers are public institutions and you won’t even get our IT department to let go of decade old outdated software. Too many old people who will throw a hissy fit if anything suddenly looks different from what they’ve been used to for 30 years.

My contract also won’t be renewed. My bosses reason that he explicitly told me is: I don’t fit in because I ask too many questions like “Why don’t we use better alternatives for X software.” We do “project planning” with email-chains and Excel sheets. No, we can’t have any project planning tools, because this is what the 60-year old colleagues have been doing since their first day 43 years ago. If it was good enough for them back then it’s good enough for you now. That’s just how we do it here, since you can’t get used to it we’re letting you go. Etc pp, you get the idea. And the people in the IT department are the same! Never change a running system, it’s worked for 40 years now, no need to try something new.

There’s just no way you’ll get a public institution to switch to open source. Everybody over 50 will scream bloody murder about having to change how they work and it’ll be changed back in no time.

Just keep telling her she’s awesome. Don’t focus on the legs, just tell her all the things you love about her. And if she directly asks you about them, don’t make it a big deal. Just say “I don’t care, you’re beautiful.” For me the best thing my husband did was to counter the constant onslaught of beauty standards over media by telling me every day what he loves about me and how cool he thinks I am.