Most runners I know wear running shoes nearly the whole time.
They run in their new shoes, then switch them over to casual use as the cushioning starts to go.
And if you're a really keen runner, you'll have different shoes for each type of training (track, tempo, long and slow) and racing (track, XC, trail, mid distance, half to full marathon). So you end up with a constant flow of "worn but not worn out" shoes. Which you wear when not running...
I got the X4 just before my summer holiday and put "War and Peace" from Project Gutenberg on it as my only ebook.
Five weeks later, I'd finished it, all 360 chapters, 1400 pages.
Apart from finding War and Peace a totally engrossing read, one of my favourite books of all time, I give the credit to the X4... I'd never have finished it if reading the physical book (too large to carry around) nor if reading on my phone (too many distractions).
When we did a full renovation, we had the cabinet maker install an Ikea kitchen, with a custom non-Ikea worktop and a small amount of his expertise to adapt it for our non-Ikea dishwasher etc.
This was a massive cost saving on a fully custom kitchen, and let us shift the budget to custom built stairs/bedroom cupboards elsewhere.
For sunbathing in particular, do what Australia does:
- large scale public health campaigns on dangers of skin cancer. With a catchy song and slogan ("slip, slop, slap... Slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen, slap on a hat")
- schools make it compulsory for kids to have hats in summer
- regulate tanning salons, promote fake tans in preference to sunbeds
- doctors check people for skin cancers during regular checkups
And over just a few years, being very brown quickly gets associated with being reckless and unhealthy.
Excluding people from services because you can't be bothered to handle their perfectly correct and validated email address is actually a form of discrimination.
My pet hate is my bank refusing to email me bank statement notifications to mail@mydomain.com ("not a personal address"), yet their password validation and marketing emails get through quite OK. Somehow they seem incapable of acknowledging that one department of the bank has made a technical decision in conflict with other departments...
Is it discrimination if you decide to switch to custom power outlets in your house and then you complain that local hardware stores don't provide compatible parts?
> Excluding people from services because you can't be bothered to ...
Yes. But like most forms of discrimination, it's probably 100% legal. Same as Chuck's Pizza Parlor refusing to deliver outside an X mile radius, and 1st National Bank refusing to use the full legal name of anyone who's name exceeds the size of their DB's 'CustomerName' field.
True. Vote your wallet as you will. Beyond that - discretion is the better part of valor, the low-level employees you can easily complain to are very unlikely to have any say in the policy, and Chuck is free to ask you to drive 40-mile pizza deliveries for the same pay and mileage as he gives at his 10-mile limit.
> it is "spend considerable amount of time thinking about and planning your eating".
Nonsense. It doesn't take any more time. Just buy unprocessed, basic food, fruit and veg. When you open your cupboard, cook something tasty from what you have.
When you go to the supermarket, just don't walk into the aisles with snacks. Don't buy anything laden with sugar and fat.
Get into the habit of drinking black coffee instead of Starbucks' calorific drinks; it takes less than a week for your taste buds to adjust.
It's not rocket science. Just most people don't want to admit that every excess 100 calories they eat adds 11 grams of fat to their middle. Which adds up week by week, year by year.
How many kids do you have, do you have help or you need to take care of elderly parents while also taking care of kids. How much do you have to work, you work from home or do you have to commute? What is your level of stress?
Because for me it sounds like you might have awful lot of time to figure out your life.
In my previous and current post I am writing about an average person. I am pretty well off myself — what I was writing about I am far from dropping advice "just do X" on less fortunate. Because what is easy: "writing someone should do XYZ".
> Just buy unprocessed, basic food, fruit and veg.
I have the problem that I absolutely abhor most fruit and veg and would rather not eat anything (which you can do for a couple of days at most). It's hard to get full on onions and sundried tomatoes.
This. If I cook a meal with mostly veg and lean meat, I can't overeat. I'll feel full fairly quickly and, most importantly, not think about food 2 hours later.
But even with this kind of food, if I figure "sure, lemme have a sugary ice-cream", two hours later I'll be looking around the fridge and cupboards for some "quick bite".
Just don't buy this crap. I find it's much, much easier to have none at all than to hope to be "reasonable" and only eat a bit.
To your point 4, we have lots of good reasons why people are gaining weight: they eat more. It's not exactly rocket science.
Obvious reasons include:
a) food is very cheap, especially processed food
b) portion sizes are comically large in the US
c) ubiquity of snacking and eating on the go, which is mostly high calorie
d) few people smoke now, and cigarettes are potent appetite suppressants
e) less social disapproval of being fat. To fair degree, being overweight is contagious
I agree completely with your last paragraph, at a society level. At an individual level, though, it's all on us to exercise self control for ourselves. Just most people don't want to.
Re point a, cheap calories have been around in abundance for 5 decades. The trend has actually been toward more fresh food being available, not more junk (most candies, sodas, and white bread brands are ancient).
lol at point e.
This is so not true. For a while there was a tiny blip where a corner of the internet was fat friendly.
I know a black lesbian from the south who was obese and managed to lose fat by weightlifting. She said by far being obese was worse socially than either of the other things. As part of getting in shape she started jogging and people mocked her for being fat while exercising.
The number of people that agree with something does not inherently make it good or true. History has proven that.
Many people don't own guns, partially because violent crime in general has declined significantly over the past 200 years. The justifications for ownership still exist, though.
This Red Blob Games blog post would be accessible to a wider group of readers if it spent just a few sentences up front on motivation and terminology.
If you don't already know exactly what the heuristic function is and that L is something called a landmark marker, and anyway what is a landmark marker anyway, you need to read quite a long way through the blog post to make sense of it.
And when you do finally get to that point, you realise it is all very simple, so why not just say that at the start?
You’re asking for a different post. More like a science paper where they say the result up front.
This blog post is like a story. It doesn’t start with the ending.
I read your comment first, expecting to go to the article and see a bunch of undefined math terms, but that isn’t what happened at all.
Of course you need to know what a heuristic function is, so maybe you’re right in that sense. You absolutely do not need to know anything about landmarks to enjoy the post. I didn’t, and it was no trouble at all to follow.
Perhaps you found the “discovery” method of presentation not to your liking. Discovery means there’s a demo where you move the L around before its purpose is defined. Building an intuitive understanding before producing a rigorous definition is (now) considered a good teaching method.
Speaking as a European, current foreign policy is not "reducing trust in America as a reliable and stable partner". It has already reduced trust to rock bottom.
It's hard to see how much worse it could get, short of outright invasion or allying with Russia.
Just this week, amongst other news:
* America's useless adventures in Iran have used up so many Patriot missiles there aren't any left to defend Kyiv against Russian missiles, while Iran is still firmly in control of the Straits of Hormuz.
* Meddling in Greenland went up a notch with landing equipment to start oil drilling.
* State Department funding MAGA-oriented "free speech" disinformation campaigns in the UK.
* The revival of Trump's tariffs under the hypocritical guise of guarding against slave labour. Especially when the US prison system is such a large domestic source of slave labour.
Zero trust left here. Zero desire to visit the US ever again.
I feel it is hard to grasp for an American how much perception of US shifted in eu. This is just anedoctal of course, but a famous Italian singer famous for having written a song about American and sexual liberation decades ago, wrote an updated version. The former is "America", the latter is "America INC." You can guess which one depicts America in a bad light.
I wouldn't have expected a famous singer to make such a song, given that America was always portrayed in italian pop music with a positive image, and negative views were relegated to mostly political groups or singers with political themes
Simply put, I think Americans don't grasp it because even for us Europeans it is sometimes surprising how repentine and fast the shift has been in the regular Joe's brain - I'm not saying that Americans are stupid bla bla thing -, I'm saying that it is normal not be as up to date with some phenomena as people living where that phenomena happens.
Also, at least the Italian government is still dancing the tip tap regarding a position on America, not taking any definitive stance or doing anything significantly different than before, which is a big rift wrt what people want. Only exception for defense expenses
I don't think the first group understands how important Europe is to America's status as superpower, while the second group operates under the delusion that the world will go back to business as usual after the next presidential election.
Only the elderly who are blind to the decline and can’t even picture a world order outside other than Pax Americana believe we will go back to business as usual. The rest of us realize it will take decades of stability to gain a semblance of the trust we used to be granted. And in the mean time the rest of the world will forge ties that don’t include us. We will be weakened on the world stage compared to status quo prior to trump for the rest of my life I’m sure.
The US has been the foundation of European security since the beginning of NATO. Now Europe has good reason to think that American security guarantees are no longer reliable, and the US president keeps threatening to invade a European country, while Russia fights a war of aggression nearby. If I were European then I guess I'd find this rather more worrying than brown people moving in, or the struggles of car companies.
> In Europe it means Muslims and in North America is means South American. In China it means Indians.
Interesting. Thanks, I didn’t know that the Chinese used the phrase “brown people” to refer to Indians. Or that Mexicans (part of North America) use “brown people” to mean South Americans.
It seems such a weird phrase to use. Is it white people who use the phrase? Or also brown people themselves? What about sub-Saharan Africa? Do they have a group they label “brown people”?
I assumed that was what the commenter above was talking about, but perhaps I'm wrong. From the little I know about it, most of the immigrants that right-wing Europeans complain about are from places to the south.
In case my understatement made things unclear, it's not the sort of thing I worry about at all.
> > Will my kids be an ethnic minority in their own country in the next generation - and if so, what's that going to be like for them?
> What about this is an essential concern for you? Like, what are the potential harms?
European countries take great care in maintaining and strengthening their traditions and cultural heritage. That would be at risk. Now, whether or not that actually matters or not is debatable, but Europeans DO seem to care to keep their cultures and traditions alive.
This fear of "the others" that don't look like us or dare to have their own culture coming and "stealing" your cake has been used as a cheap distraction tactic for ages. It backfired for Germany, it's gonna backfire for the US.
I really like this metaphor:
A politician, a voter, and an immigrant are at a BBQ. There's 100 sausages on the grill.
The politician goes up, takes 99 sausages, turns to the voter and says "quick, that immigrant is gonna steal your sausage".
It's truly frustrating how effective it is to distract the general population by just inciting fear like that.
I lived all over the place after growing up in the Catholic German country side. I think the places most afraid from cultural dilution are the ones that needed it the most.
It's also so funny how folks in the US keep forgetting that they literally used to be immigrants of all sorts of origins and what made them so successful is leveraging the diverse perspectives. Most of this whole AI boom is based on work from people that came to the US from less privileged places all working together for something greater than them.
What do you think about all the money and energy that European countries spend on propping up their traditions and cultural heritage VS just letting it evolve "naturally" as demographics shift?
you can't fault people for being confused. just because some people in the US have latched on 'cultural integrity' as their new favorite racist dogwhistle doesn't mean that it makes sense at all to anyone else.
its really funny. some people are fighting a fictional war that the 'other side' isn't really engaged in, and they're losing.
the other funny thing is that if you asked someone what the largest threat to their cultural identity is, a lot of them wouldn't answer immigrants - they would be more concerned about the cancerous US style anodyne consumer culture and media as being the most corrosive
What are all these presently dominant cultures that are so fragile that the mere presence of others represents an existential threat? Sounds like an excuse for xenophobia more than a sincere concern.
I think there are very few countries that can claim to have a good setup for an ethnic minority. Singapore, US, Israel, western Europe. Most of the world - being an ethnic minority sucks. As western Europe changes the ethnic western Europeans may not enjoy their treatment.
> Will my kids be an ethnic minority in their own country in the next generation - and if so, what's that going to be like for them?
Are you sure they are not more concerned about 'Will my kids be able to get a good job, own a house and generally be at least as prosperous as me, if not more?'
You know what the best way is to ensure that your children don't become second-class citizens because they're an ethnic minority?
Treat the ethnic minorities well today.
Lay the foundation for an inclusive, multicultural society now, rather than falling for the same old bullshit about immigrants stealing yer jerbs and using that as an excuse for rampant racism that will reverberate down the line.
> Will my kids be an ethnic minority in their own country in the next generation - and if so, what's that going to be like for them?
It occurs to me that an effective solution to that problem might be to… Treat minorities well? You know, like people equal to you? Societies are made of the people in them; if minorities are treated positively, then you don’t have to fear being in one. Teach your kids to be nice.
If you are not a moronic racist, #1 is a non-issue.
As for #2, Volkswagen is far from going out of business. In any case, trade with China can be adjusted with adequate policy, EU as a trade block can handle it just fine.
As an European, I see the US as an actual existential threat to Europe. China is just a trade partner with some clashing trade interests.
These people never say "great replacement theory", because they know if they do then that firmly puts them in the "flat earther" aisle. So, we need to call it out when we see it. This is just not legitimate ideology, it's a form of white supremacy.
It didn't happen in Canada, unless you mean the part where we rounded up all the natives and put them on reserves. I'm a white Canadian born and raised in Canada and I am far from being a minority no matter where I go, from the prairies to the GTA. Conservatives keep talking about this like it's a thing, but they do so from their majority white communities. The only places you see large numbers of immigrants is in low paying service jobs and you can thank the exploitive hiring practices of major companies like Tim Hortons - the people there are slaves living under the constant threat of deportation if they disappoint their employer/owner.
It's also worth noting that those white people concerned about becoming ethnic minorities are themselves immigrants. British and French colonists; German, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Irish; Hutterite and Mennonite - all immigrants, many within just the last few generations. For as long as Canada has been a country, it has been made up of many groups of different ethnicities, all immigrants. "White" isn't an ethnicity.
People with other ideas are barely literate. Said someone who feels good about himself today but couldn't offer up actual facts and offered nothing to the conversation.
Debating is impossible when you don't have facts supporting you. Mockery is next followed by acceptance. Wish you well on your journey towards knowledge.
I hope you get what you want. Keep all the whites in your territory, and you get to have your land for your race, whatever you think it may be.
On this side of the pond, we can be welcoming all those pesky Indians, Asians, Muslim, Latin Americans, African, Slavic and so on. The more highly educated they are, the better.
Not sure why you were trying for a few days to be part of the conversation and being ignored by everyone and when you finally get a reply is all you have to offer.
I'm glad you are disappointed maybe you can set different goals in your life and find some level of happyness.
You are a minority in Toronto if you are white and less than 20% if you are British. Edmonton is 53% white and going down fast. Vancouver is down to 45%. GTA 43% white.
If you are in tech or government or banking or any large corp you are a minority.
It's not some chaps from Eastern Europe, Latin America, or Africa that threaten me. My neighbor is Nigerian, dude is chill. Loves football, takes his children to the local playground, etc.
What threatens me is imbeciles that believe in great replacement and 14 words about future for white children. Keep your racism across the pond and try not to breed with siblings.
I both don't believe that the white population is being replaced, and even if it was, I don't care. I am not a racist, my family tree does not resemble a circle.
Issues of migration and fertility rate are related to structural incentives and constraints, level of urbanization, economic development, etc.
I want my country to prosper. It won't prosper by closing itself off to migration. I hope it attracts more researches and highly educated people from around the world, especially now that the US is shunning them.
You are bundling a lot of ethnicities, many of those who historically had major grievances amongst themselves, in race bullshit very specific to the US.
A "white" label is very meaningless this side of the pond. I have little patience for this shit, the US truly is a sick place if your rhetoric is what it produces.
I understand white people not identifying with each other and supporting each other. Other racial groups stick together and that's why you are hearing people say wake up from across the pond.
In the end what you don't value will disappear including your nation.
You literally have no idea how ethnicities in Europe operate, but still insist on extremely wrong ideas with confidence.
In fact, you have no idea how ethnicities work in other countries as well. Places as old as China and India have a lot of baggage in terms of ethnicity, culture, and language within their own borders.
Not to mention Africa where those borders where drawn by Europeans that had no interest in how things were actually organized, sometimes lumping together tribes that fucking hated each other for generations in the same country.
I am not even bringing up religion, as it will open up another very messy can of worms.
Again, you are applying the logic of US racial schism to places where it is simply non-existent, and pretending the rest of the world operate in your very local, very foreign, racist logic.
one thing that largely undermines even the notion of US whiteness is that 50 years ago the definition of white was very different. Italians were swarthy and not properly white. Irish, while ostensibly white in color, were a degenerate race. Half of the 'white' people in the US are race traitors because they just don't believe in this crap in the first place, and apparently they are on the chopping block too.
Arbitrary bigotry always finds a way to claim that it represents a truth.
If we went to Croatia and Serbia both wouldn't concern themselves white or they wouldn't consider the other as white? What would they call themselves?
I think they would consider themselves white from a different nations. Many north american natives come from different tribes but they are still Indian. Same thing.
They'd consider themselves Croatian and Serbian. Whiteness is an American construct that is absolutely meaningless and smushes literal millenia of history into OBE category because your country's history is so short.
Please refrain from spreading nonsense you clearly know nothing about.
There is no such thing as race in Europe. You still do not understand the very fundamentals. The forms would not indicate white, they'd indicate Croat and Serbian. Here's the census from back when they shared a country: [0]. Note the absence of "white".
A Croat will never agree they are the same anything as a Serb.
Your limited understanding smushed millennia of history into the primitive categories your country developed in it's short existence. They have zero meaning here and your continued ignorance serves as example why it would be better for everyone if you stopped talking about things you know nothing about.
You lost the debate here. People classify themselves in a million ways. But we are talking race. Next you'll say there are no males or females just Croats or Serbs. No blonds or brown haired people just Serbs or Croats. Lol.
Again, you don't understand. Race is absolutely meaningless here. It is a concept developed in the US a few hundred years ago to justify slavery.
You insist it maps to our continent, which has had identities develop long before we came to invade your part of the world.
It does not, no matter how much you insist. You told me it's what people would pick on forms. I showed you the form. It wasn't even an option.
There is no debate. It is just you trying to map your racial animus to a set of societies that based on your continued confusion are much too complex for you to understand and me trying to educate you.
Croats and Serbs are just the most obvious example. We can also play the same game with Poles and Russians or any number of ethnicities.
The only one that sounds racist is you, espousing Great Replacement conspiracy theories.
But you know that and now that you've fully run out of talking points, there's nothing left but projection.
This has become thoroughly unproductive, you have demonstrated for everyone to see you're not interested in actually learning, just in spreading hate.
Theres no point engaging anymore, I believe your own comments have sufficiently demonstrated the inconsistency and vileness of the message you're trying to push.
It’s interesting how you zero in on skin color rather than culture. Many of the other dog whistles at least try to focus on culture and religion, but you went right ahead to equate skin color as being the issue. Bravo!
What if I told you the history of humanity is migration and mixing? That populations don't stay the same over time? That there were even other hominids sharing the planet with for a long time, some of which migrated to places before we did.
History of humanity is conqoring other tribes. Those other hominds don't exist anymore with some humans carrying a small percentage of their dna.
White majority countries will become another majority race because people like yourself don't see any value in people with white skin. Other races do and they will represent the future. China is still going to be Chinese so is Japan going to remain Japanese, so is India going to remain Indian. They see their value. White majority countries have been told they have no value and they will disappear.
There is a lot of that with the population but I don't see it at the leadership level yet. The top politicians are all still desperate to go back to the good old days of euro-atlanticism (and all the cushy positions it gets their friends & family), there's also the problem of all of their capital happily sitting and growing in fortune 500 companies.
> It's hard to see how much worse it could get, short of outright invasion or allying with Russia.
Why would the US ally with Russia, who is a Chinese and Iranian ally?
That's just uncritical thinking.
The United States is the single largest bilateral provider of direct military equipment, intelligence, and defense funding to Ukraine (a European country) against Russia.
> Why would the US ally with Russia, who is a Chinese and Iranian ally?
I don’t think the comment above you is suggesting that is a possibility, but rather saying “things are so bad that the only imaginable way to get worse would be <outlandish unimaginable scenario>”. In other words, it seems to be hyperbole.
Perhaps, though my reading between the lines is that they think trust is so low because the US won't help defend Europe and might invade Europe, even though, despite rhetoric, all actions point to the opposite happening.
It is, as the USA has a large population. We can be more nuanced.
By absolute dollars, single country: US > EU institutions > Germany > UK
By absolute dollars, bloc vs. bloc: EU/Europe combined (~$237bn+) now exceeds the US (~$130bn), especially after 2025
By per-capita/GDP burden: tiny front-line states (Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania, Norway) far outstrip both the US and the larger Western European economies — the US actually ranks closer to the bottom of the pack on a relative-effort basis, behind Germany, the UK, and virtually all Nordic/Baltic states
Between February 2022 and January 2025, average expenditure per European resident stood at $394; by April 2026 that figure had risen to $618, driven by the total spending by European NATO countries on Ukraine exceeding $237 billion, including $96 billion contributed just since January 2025.
Average European (across NATO's European members) $618 per person (2022-2026)
United States (my estimate: ~$130bn total ÷ ~340m population)≈ $384 per person
I admit I haven't followed the French protests as closely as I should have. Do they shoot protestors in the face with teargas canisters there too? Maybe they do. Do those protestors face the real possibility of medical bankruptcy if they need extensive care? Does France enforce laws that protect striking workers?
The problem with the US is not the regime, it's the people. We elected Trump a second time with ~50% of the vote after seeing four years of his complete buffoonery. His approval rating is still around 40%. If he were somehow to run again in 2028 (never mind it being unconstitutional), there's a pretty solid chance he'd win. His party still backs him 100%, and nobody has any idea whether they'll maintain control of Congress after the midterms, because they still have enough support to plausibly keep their majority.
It's not about being too meek to fix things. It's about half the country wanting what's happening.
They run in their new shoes, then switch them over to casual use as the cushioning starts to go.
And if you're a really keen runner, you'll have different shoes for each type of training (track, tempo, long and slow) and racing (track, XC, trail, mid distance, half to full marathon). So you end up with a constant flow of "worn but not worn out" shoes. Which you wear when not running...
reply