Holy shit, I pay the highest possible payment for public health insurance in Germany (which would also cover any kids till age 25) and this is only roughly 10.000€ per year and way cheaper for people who earn less than me.

My wife and I were staying in Bologna for 2 nights, and there was a big free open-air cinema on the largest public square that showed Italian film classics with English subtitles. We watched "La Dolce Vita" by Fellini on the first night and a satirical comedy called "Divorce Italian type" the second night. La dolce vita is great but not an easy watch since it deals with typical topics of early modernity in the 50s. It's kinda like the books from that time about existence and hedonism and the complexity of life. The other movie is about a guy who wants to murder his Wife so he can date his 16-year old cousin and is way funnier than the premise would suggest.

Strangely, the oldest thing I have left is a web hosting account by Strato that I opened around 1999. My dad still uses an e-mail adress he got with his first T-Online account when the internet became available for normal households in Germany in the mid-90s.

There are tons of statistical methods to get reasonable conclusions without an RCT. Some things can not be detected with an RCT, because the experiment is just impossible to run, so sometimes you need methods to do causal identification with observable data. Here you do not even need causal identification methods for observational data. You just need to do some descriptive statistics for a large group of people well to find interesting patterns. Whether this aging pattern in the mid-40s is causal it coincidental is not important at first. The pattern itself is interesting.

If you make it from coal it is vegan because coal is just plants. If it's made from petroleum it is not vegan because it is made from dinosaurs.

I did not expect the sheer amount of posts from Americans about mentally ill people or drug users. I taught this would get more vibes, like people moving weird furniture in trams, or people in weird costumes, or stuff like that.

Never seen someone piss in a tram/subway in Stuttgart and we have an annual beer festival (the Stuttgarter Wasen) Here.

Damn nature, you scary!

I was on a holiday in the Cinque Terre in Italy with my wife a few years ago. Because of a rainy day we decided to take a train to Genua and visit some museums. At the maritime museum I randomly met an Italian coworker/coauthor from my research institute in Germany, who was visiting his family in his hometown with his wife.

Lots of great recommendations here and a good saddle/setup is probably the most important. I have only one thing to add: Padded bicycle underwear also helps quite a bit.