bier

Honestly, as a kid I loved fishing, I recently started again, but I actually felt kind of bad for the fish. Maybe if this trend continues I'll be a vegan in the next 20 years.

If possible I save the grease. My house is next to a river, so I made it a habbit to not just throw away food but feed it to the fish. Sometimes we have leftovers and it's been a little too long to eat, so I throw it in the river.

The Netherlands has 4.19

The Netherlands is close in size to Maryland, and close in the number of inhabitants as New York. Also half of the traffic is cars and half is bicycles. It's pretty insane how bad Mississippi is.

What does that mean? Where I live you borrow a certain amount of money and you pay it back plus interest (in my case 3.5%), and that percentage is fixed for 20 years. In 20 years I expect to have paid most of that entire amount back and my house should be mortgage free

I mean it more like if you would have borred 100K for a house in the 70s that was a lot of money, if you still live in that house you probably paid it back, but even if you didn't 100K today isn't that much money anymore

What do you mean with "inflation was added to your mortgage rate"? The prices of houses do go up but this is mostly a problem for first time buyers, after that your current house has gone up in price too, so that helps with the next house. But if you buy a house and don't move your mortgage is fixed for 20 or 30 years (unless you go without a fixed rate). So your monthly payment will stay the same, while hopefully your salary goes up.

Not necessarily, if you own a home AND your pay slowly goes up to compensate (both of these unfortunately aren't happening for a lot of people), relative to your income your mortgage goes down.

Or in more generic terms, inflation is good if you borrow money.

You just copy what other people are doing. When I got my first real job I was just looking at what coworkers where doing and doing the same. After a while you'll understand the why and improve things etc, after a while new people will look at you.

Is that even a thing anymore or did that also get demolished by DOGE? It seems like anything that benefits companies but screws consumers and citizens is being dismantled

Was Ukraine actually added to NATO? No

Do Ukrainians want to be Russians? No

In fact after the NATO summit of 2008 where Bush said Ukraine should be a NATO member, Putin who was at that NATO summit said he didn't want that (same for Georgia).

After that NATO didn't push membership further and Putin attacked and claimed parts of Georgia anyway.

About a month after Putin said he had no plan to attack Ukraine he took Crimea.

I know people from both Ukraine and Georgia and they always tell me that Russia has been an agressive neighbor forever and they really don't want to be Russians.

I'm not saying the west it perfect and we definitely did things wrong. But the invasion of Ukraine is 100% Putin, he did this, there was no war, nobody was threatening Russia. In fact the EU was slowly getting a better economic relationship with Russia.

But in the end all of this doesn't matter, it's not about NATO, or the west. If you listen to what Putin is actually saying, he thinks Ukraine and Georgia both are not counties. In his view they have always been part of Russia, so he would have invaded them at some point anyway.

This is like saying Germany losing WW2 is what allowed Israel to attack Iran.

The 5% is probably too much, but its realistically 3.5% the othet 1.5% can be spend on infrastructure (like make bridges strong enough so tanks can drive over them), on cyber defense and other things that are not weapons.

Also it's about deterrence, when we spend enough Russia can't attack unless they match the spending, this is part why the Soviet Union collapsed.