Mlller's comments

“Eastern Europe has been parroting […] Germany stuck its fingers in its ears”

Or perhaps Germany couldnʼt hear them, because their actions spoke louder than their words – a majority of Eastern European countries had made themselves more dependent on Russian gas than Germany:

  - Hungary: 110.4 percent 
  - Latvia: 100.1 percent 
  - Finland: 92.4 percent 
  - Estonia: 86.5 percent 
  - Czechia: 86.0 percent 
  - Slovenia: 81.0 percent 
  - Slovakia: 75.2 percent 
  - Bulgaria: 72.8 percent 
  - Germany: 58.9 percent

“Some of the countries have a figure above 100 because they import more than required for domestic consumption and export other energy products.” per https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/326055...

A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher is electricity-free and the technology seems to have been invented in Iran some millennia ago. (But maybe itʼs not applicable everywhere and too costly for too many people.)

OTOH, why sad? I would have found the info sad if Romanians including the middle class could not afford enough heating and had to shiver in winter, whereas people in Germany lived in overheated apartments. According to what you say, many people are happy: Many Romanians are warm, many Germans save money / energy / CO₂ or so (I am happy to have done that myself by hardly ever heating this winter).

A related hypothesis[1] connects the Tambora eruption in 1815 with the colors of the sky in paintings made in the years thereafter, e.g. “Greifswald im Mondschein” ‘Greifswald in the moonlight’ by Caspar David Friedrich in 1817, see: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Caspar_David_Friedrich_0...

[1] https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/14/2987/2014/acp-14-2987...

“Follow-up question for German speakers: I was sometimes asked 'When were you born?' as 'Wann bist du geboren?' which would be a word-for-word translation of the English. Is 'Wann wurdest du geboren?' with the passive auxiliary the only really correct form?”

Both “bist geboren” and “wurdest geboren” are in wide-spread use, some German speakers prefer the one, some the other variant – e.g. https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewGeneraldiscussion.php?idThrea... – but not under all circumstances:

- “wurdest geboren”: the passive with an auxiliary form of “werden” is called “Vorgangspassiv” ≈ ‘passive expressing an event’.

- “bist geboren”: the passive with an auxiliary form of “sein” is called “Zustandspassiv” ≈ ‘passive expressing a state’.

A minimal pair:

- “Die Tür wird geöffnet” = ‘The door is opened’.

- “Die Tür ist geöffnet” ≈ ‘The door (has been opened and) is open’ (There is also “Die Tür ist offen” = ‘The door is open’).

So “wurdest geboren” and “bist geboren” offer two different perspectives (with a difference that often doesnʼt really matter):

- “Wann wurdest du geboren?” focuses on the past event of having been born at a certain time.

- “Wann bist du geboren?” focuses on the personʼs property to be now a person that was born at a certain time (a property, in the end, like age or weight maybe).

So the latter is rather not used for dead persons: “Kant wurde 1724 geboren” is much preferred over “Kant ist 1724 geboren”.

(If students of the German language donʼt want to memorize much here, they can, as often with German, happily apply the postmodern motto “anything goes”, plus there is probably some dialect anyway in which the form you use is the right one since the middle ages :-)

When Alcuin writes “Nec audiendi qui solent dicere” ‘And those people should not be listened to who keep saying’, he implies “sunt qui solent dicere” ‘there are those who keep saying’ and that the affirmative use of the proverb is older than his criticism. His letter, alas, seems to be the oldest still existing source of this formulation. Similar thoughts expressed earlier are quoted by Büchmann ²⁰1900 p. 353:

- Hesiod ‘Works and Days’ v. 763–764: “Φήμη δʼ οὔτις πάμπαν ἀπόλλυται, ἥντινα πολλοὶ | Λαοὶ φημίζουσι. θεός νύ τίς ἐστι καὶ αὐτή.” ‘No rumour will perish completely which is rumoured by so many people. A kind of god indeed is also this [= the rumour].’

- Seneca (the older) ‘Controversies’ I.1.10: “Crede mihi, sacra populi lingua est.” ‘Believe me, sacred is the language [≈ speech?] of the people.’

“[…] not so because they were sold on Bismar[c]k's theater.” Actually they were sold, and it wasnʼt just theater (‘this man means what he says’), but of course it was indeed the cold calculus of self-interest – that was one of the things Bismarck took into account in his complex calculus. And maybe we can even call it “theater”: in the sense a tightrope walk is, with which Bismarck compared the art of politics.

To be clear: I agree with your main point regarding the present war; I just think that specifically the “Einigungskriege” are not a good analogy, that they are quite unlike Putinʼs war, even before the question of defeat or victory comes into play.

You have shifted the focus to WW1, and I think your analysis of the power relations before WW1 is completely convincing (given the usual allowances due to brevity). (Nitpick: 1872 → 1871)

No, Bismarck didnʼt, because he didnʼt start them (esp. not No. 1 and 3), and he could win them – among other reasons – because he didnʼt start them (that was the point about allies and benevolent neutral parties). As I said, this is often misunderstood, tragically so by William II.

For the benefit of future authoritarian, empire-hungry leaders, letʼs correct the historical lesson Bismarck & Co. can provide:

- The first of the three wars was a reaction against Denmarkʼs attempt at annexing Schleswig. Prussia and Austria won the war on behalf of the so-called “Deutscher Bund” ‘German Federation’, a rather loose federation of states. It actually was a defensive war: against an on-going forced annexation.

- The second war was Prussia against Austria – not Germany against Austria; in fact, the majority of the German Federation was on Austriaʼs side, which lost the war.

- The third war was declared and started by the French emperor (after a public outcry in France over an alleged insult by the Prussian king, it was a ridiculous matter) with the objective to annex more of the German regions to the left of the Rhine. So it certainly was a defensive one.

This is often misunderstood because the wars were of use to Bismarckʼs policy. But he was not able to telepathically force the Danish king or the French emperor to their aggressive policies. He just had an uncanny ability to foresee peopleʼs actions, especially their stupid ones, and to align his policy with what he had foreseen. And of course it was necessary that the wars then were won, which was mainly Moltkeʼs work as far as the mere military matters were concerned. But the victories, especially in the first and third war, depended also on allies and benevolently neutral parties Bismarck won for his side.

So the lesson here would be: Donʼt start a war, you have to wait until you can credibly claim to be attacked; wage war from the position of the defender.

(Besides: “After these 3 wars, Germany was more than double in population” doesnʼt make sense: Before the war, the Germany that was after the war didnʼt exist in the first place; and the Germany after the war was rather “little–Germany”: the realization of the “kleindeutsche Lösung” ‘little-German solution’ because Austria was out.)

No, in the heatwave of this summer, some French nuclear plants had to be turned off because the rivers in which the cooling water had to be released had become too warm. (Further French nuclear plants had to be turned off due to technical problems.) So France had to import much energy to meet its demand. It was mainly Germany that helped out. The same problem affected – besides Belgium, Switzerland – Germany, too, though to a lesser degree (no pun intended) because Germany is less dependent on nuclear.

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bloomberg/news/2022-08-03-fra...

https://www.powermag.com/nuclear-power-production-curtailed-...

https://www.theenergymix.com/2022/08/07/failing-french-nucle...

https://www.grs.de/en/news/built-close-water-do-increasing-d...

https://www.thelocal.de/20090630/20301/ [Rhine, too, heated up by nuclear plants]

I do, too, for websites, although I try to avoid dependencies like a snowflake the fire. But doing nothing more than using gevent server and putting

  from gevent import monkey
  monkey.patch_all()

at the top of the main module was such a game changer.

Yes, I cannot agree more. I did the survey in the vain hope that I could leave a comment or even vote for “no nesting”, i.e. “equivalent CSS”. Most of the given examples are great evidence – some concerningly great evidence – for Tim Petersʼ “flat is better than nested”:

(1 and 2:)

  .foo {
    color: red;

    @nest .parent & {
      color: blue;
    }
  }

(3:)

  .foo {
    color: red;

    {
      .parent & {
        color: blue;
      }
    }
  }

(Without nesting:)

  .foo {
    color: red;
  }
  
  .parent .foo {
    color: blue;
  }

The nested variants, for my sense, foreshadow grave technical debt – in specs, docs, browser code and CSS files.

Taking it in a slightly different direction – because in my work chunking is nearly never necessary (too little text or too much memory) whereas Unicode characters and punctuation nearly always is – I would tend to something like:

  from collections import Counter
  from re import finditer

  word_counts = Counter()
  with open(PATH, encoding = 'utf-8') as file:
      doc = file.read()
  word_counts.update(match.group().lower() for match in finditer(r'\w+', doc))

In Python, this could be a fairly performant way of taking unicode into account, because it doesnʼt use Pythonʼs for-loop, and regular expressions are rather optimized compared with writing low-level-style Python. (Maybe it should use casefold instead of lower.)

> contrast that to the dueling German anthem in the film, which is a rather explicitly anti-French anthem

Yes, OTOH it seems to have a mere passive, defensive spirit: “a guardian of the river” – “the watch on the Rhine” – “protects the sacred border of the land” – “remain”,[1] written afraid of annexation:

“Repeated French efforts to annex the Left Bank of the Rhine began with the devastating wars of King Louis XIV. French forces carried out massive scorched earth campaigns in the German south-west. This policy was fully implemented during the Napoleonic Wars with the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine in 1806–1813. In the two centuries from the Thirty Years' War to the final defeat of Napoleon I, the German inhabitants of lands by the Rhine suffered from repeated French invasions.

The defeat and exile of Napoleon gave the Germans some respite, but during the Rhine Crisis of 1840, French prime minister Adolphe Thiers advanced the claim that the Upper and Middle Rhine River should serve as his country's "natural eastern border". The member states of the German Confederation feared that France was resuming her annexationist designs.”[2]

Maybe itʼs even meant as a signal of dishonesty that it is sung by soldiers whose army didnʼt watch at the Rhine but occupied France brutally? Anyway, I donʼt intend to praise the Wacht am Rhein, itʼs certainly not great poetry, rather a rattling and clattering from the dustbin of history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Wacht_am_Rhein#Lyrics [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Wacht_am_Rhein#Origin

(by Martin Niemöller, FWIW: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Niem%C3%B6ller – Ctrl-F “When the Nazis”.)

> Why didn't the German government massively subsidize Green energy?

But they did? (Sorry if Iʼve misunderstood you.)

“According to a 2016 study commissioned by a neoliberal think tank, €150 billion have been spent so far, and the bill is estimated to reach half a trillion euros by 2025.”[1]

That was started by the Schröder government (1998–2005) and rather half-heartedly continued by the Merkel government (2005–2021), decreasing the subsidies.

China has even benefitted from German subsidies.

“Germany long aimed to be a front runner in the solar energy industry, but waning subsidies and rising competition from China have clouded its outlook. To add insult to injury, the Chinese boom has been generously supported by German financial aid.” … “According to KfW officials, it was precisely the subsidy policy's goal to help Chinese solar producers achieve a breakthrough, in order to promote the environmentally friendly technology internationally.”[2]

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/german-issues-in-a-nutshell-energiewen... [2] https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-capital-error...

“europeans agreed to an open market and common currency that included Germany only if [Germany makes a certain concession]”

It was rather the other way round: Germany was made to agree to the euro project as a concession for reunification.[1]

All in all, this seems to have been beneficial for a majority of normal people in the countries getting a stronger currency and for a minority of people in Germany, who export: Consequently, Germany’s wealth distibution tends to be the most unequal in the euro zone,[2] and its median wealth is slightly below that of Slovenia and significantly below that of France, Italy and Spain.[3]

[1] https://voxeurop.eu/en/you-get-unification-we-get-the-euro/

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-wealth-idUSBREA1P...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...

Sanctions blocked specifically by Germany and Hungary (and noone else)? The oil ban, FWIW, was blocked or watered down by Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic (and supported by Germany):

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/05/09/hungary-slovak...

https://www.politico.eu/article/eus-russian-oil-ban-stalls-a...

What about Mommsenʼs History of Rome (itʼs actually only about the Roman Republic, he didnʼt finish planned further volumes):

- On the one hand, Mommsen was a professional historian and his work was (and is[1]) highly acclaimed. [2] cites: “Equally great as antiquary, jurist, political and social historian, Mommsen lived to see the time when among students of Roman history he had pupils, followers, critics, but no rivals. He combined the power of minute investigation with a singular faculty for bold generalization and the capacity for tracing out the effects of thought on political and social life.”

- On the other hand, his History of Rome got the nobel prize for literatur, so at least some people found it fun to read, too. Again from [2]: “Its sureness of touch, its many-sided knowledge, its throbbing vitality and the Venetian colouring of its portraits left an ineffaceable impression on every reader.” “It was a work of genius and passion, the creation of a young man, and is as fresh and vital to-day as when it was written.”

Itʼs freely available at Project Gutenberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Rome_(Mommsen)#Exte...

[1] “Still read and qualifiedly cited” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Rome_(Mommsen)#firs...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Rome_(Mommsen)#1902...

> The Germans committed atrocities against the Jews less than 100 years ago, but nobody is demanding reparations there?

As it seems, reparations were demanded (and payed) sometimes, cp. e.g. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/german-holocaust-repara...