In Germany you have something close to „drug stores in the US“ but minus the pharmacy. For example: dm, Müller, Rossmann. The bigger ones (especially dm) actually always have shopping carts. It‘s very common for people to buy large things in these stores, like toilet paper, baby diapers etc. which can easily fill a shopping cart.
Yup, actually dm is short for "Drogeriemarkt", which could be translated as "drug market". And yes, due to legislation in Germany, they can only sell things like vitamin supplements, "real" drugs (even non-prescription ones) can only be sold in pharmacies.
> "Drogeriemarkt", which could be translated as "drug market".
One has to distinguish between "[die] Drogerie" (more explizit term: "[das] Drogeriefachgeschäft") und "[der] Drogeriemarkt" (in particular in Austria and Switzerland this is strongly distinguished).
Drogerien are specialized shops with well-trained salespeople (Drogist: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drogist). Drogeriemärkte, on the other hand, are convenience stores that sell cleaning agents, cosmetics, nutritional supplements, ... Because in the latter, prizes are typically much cheaper, they replaced Drogerien in many cases.
My grandfather was a "Drogist" and his job was not to sell drugs, but anything pharmacy/chemistry related: "I got that oily dirt on my jacket" - "Say no more, I mix you the perfect soap for this". That feels quite the same as dm/Rossmann/.. from a customer point of view.
The modern word Droge/drug does not mean what it used to mean.
In Spain in a "droguería" you would find something quite similar to a DM: cleaning supplies, some chemicals, personal hygiene and cosmetic products and the like. A "drogaria" in Portugal probably would a bit more similar like a hardware store, but also in the theme...
Yeah, it's a very historical thing dating back from times of Marco Polo, the Silk Road, and the likes.
In France we have "pharmacie", "droguerie", "épicerie", and "quincaillerie".
- "pharmacie" is the regulated medical thing, historically it was "apothicaire" (apothecary)
- "quincaillerie" is where you get hardware ("quincaille") like screws, tubes, metal parts, and whatnot, and by extension, tools. By extension "quincaille" coloquially refers to small, cheap stuff in a derogatory way (akin to "lemon" but for small things).
- "droguerie" is where you get various general usage, non-medical stuff, from hygiene to ; it is part of "épicerie", where it used to be "all manners of drugs sold under the merchand guild, from dye pigments to perfume, hygiene products and cosmetics, as well as medicine". In the XVIII century the "drugs" term largely meant "things of small value that you can put on the market" and "mixes for which only artists and craftsmen hold the secret".
With this definition you can see how it grew from "épicerie" (=> "spicery", a shop for spice) from the economy market of bringing such goods from specific countries like North Africa, Middle East, India, China and whatnot. Pigments, spice, and medicine were obtained from foreign sources and highly sought after. Of course this could involve a deal of mysticism and exotic mystery, a perfect recipe for snake-oil medicine and once medical goods began to be regulated it is left with "alternative" medicinal things.
- "épicerie" used to cover all of the above, but today it's your corner-shop that has a bit of everything and is open most of the time to 24/7 (bordering on the illegal, or outright skirting opening hour laws) and saves you in a pinch. These businesses are often held by people of above areas ascendance, not really surprising given the history of it.
That would be more or less the same than in Spanish:
- "Farmacia" for the regulated drugs
- "Quincalla" is cheap hardware that you could find on a flea market or maybe a corner-shop. Old terms for places that would sell that kind of stuff would be "quincallería" or "chamarilería", but today you would probably go to a "bazar".
- And, as I anticipated, the "opens till late and has a bit of everything" store would be a "bazar", although sometimes is referred using the nationality or origin of the managers (usually from South Asia or China, at least on Spain)
There's also "parapharmacie" which sell things like lotions, shampoo, and other hygiene and beauty supplies. (Though not necessarily medicines, although some (most?) will also have that capacity.)
Even old American writings talk of “the chemist” which is clearly an early pharmacist who has various chemicals he can mix to make medicines or house cleaning supplies.
Interesting, I never made the connection. In my language "drogéria" is a store like dm - place to get cosmetics, perfumes, cleaning supplies and other similar chemicals. No relation to pharmacies ("lekáreň" => "liek" = drug).
I was a bit shocked reading all these comments, because many reflect exactly the issues I had with microwaves and I always thought I'm alone with that. When we moved in 2019 I had to buy a new one, living in Germany, you would usually go with BOSCH or SIEMENS, but at that time, all their models below 100 EUR looked almost identical! And of course had a loud beeping that you couldn't disable and generally looked low-quality. It took me quite a bit to find a decent microwave for around 100 EUR.
It's a Samsung! A brand that in Germany is not used for kitchen appliances at all. Just TVs/phones etc.
The exact model: Samsung MS23K3515AW/EG (not available on amazon.de anymore)
There is a bit of a hit: The beeping returns on power loss. And you have to press 2 buttons for 3sec to disable it again, took me a while to remember them, since we have power loss only like once a year. I guess you could do a small sticker with the instructions.
I count the "beeping off" not as a "great feature" - it's just common sense to me.
But there is a great feature: the "endless wheel dial" to precisely set the timer in 10sec intervals! That thing is awesome. It's very smooth to turn, but has small clicks for each 10sec interval AND you can use it WHILE the microwave is already running, for example when your wife tells you "but the food has been out of the fridge since 30min" - so you go 10-20sec less.
Pressing the START button immidiatly starts the microwave with a 30sec runtime. Press it again and you add 30sec or just use the "wheel dial".
Wanna heat up a cup of milk from the fridge? 70sec. Only half a cup? 40sec. Wife wants the milk extra hot? 80sec. Milk wasn't in the fridge? Minus 10-20sec - and so on. For families it's really useful.
It's 4 years old now and used 10 times a days, and runs still fine. It's a bit loud and the glass is very dark so you can't peek inside (probably the biggest disadvantage).
Contributing to the greenhouse effect, yes, but that's never been considered exactly "pollution". (Unless the darn kids have fucked up language again. Geroffmyfuckinglawn.)
You could also customize the notification sound for incoming messages in whatsapp and mute (or just use a short plop sound for) anyone else for grandma. Now grandma can focus on learning to use only one app for all her grand children and will find all the pictures from all her relatives in one place and will more likely be able to even forward pictures to other people on her whatsapp. Assuming Grandmas in their 80s.
But then grandma is using WhatsApp, which is what we're trying to avoid. The point is not that it's possible to make her use WhatsApp. The point is that it's possible to make her use a better alternative.
But how is it better for Grandma? Does she really care on her own or did you talk to her until she accepted that she cannot receive messages from you unless she uses Signal?
At its core, signal is still a messenger app. Its not hard to use. I dont think you realize how powerful are simple things like "good morning" and "i love you" to your family and loved ones. Give a little of it, and see the results.
In the global and indirect sense, it's for better for grandma in the same sense as it is better for the whole of society and the entire world. Privacy is something well worth preserving instead of selling to a large corporation and/or overreaching governments.
In the local and direct sense, it is no worse for grandma, and that is the point everyone is arguing. It will work for her use case while also being better in the global sense.
If you need to keep conversations across 2 messengers, that's at least less convenient. But noone seems to see that and everyone else around here is living in their idealistic bubble.
I'm also a privacy advocate, but there are downsides that you need to acknowledge.
Sure, I acknowledge this as a (small) downside, but it is at least no larger a downside than not having control over your conversations or being part of a dragnet to be spied upon by corporations and governments alike.
I would however have trouble with the implication that having this stance is the consequence of being in an idealistic bubble, though perhaps you did not mean that.
Signal is an E2EE messenger app with as little shared metadata as possible. Unless Grandma uses the "Status" feature, or wants to know at what time a message was received or read, it provides the same features as Whatsapp with an increase in privacy. It's fair to say that it's a better alternative in her case.
Is someone aware of how popular tools do video trimming (also JPEG cropping).
I have been looking for lossless (reencode-less) trimming of videos since the end of 90s and always just found huge video editing tools that never had these features. And then ypu were stuck with some CLI tools where you need to count the number of frames or milliseconds or something like that. Like if a WYSIWYG tool isn‘t what most people would want to use.
How does the native iOS photo editing tool handle video trimming? And photo cropping? iMovie?
And what about google android tools? Or popular Windows tools?
I used to crop my photos with XnView, which supports lossless cropping. And I‘m always puzzled this hasn‘t really take off in other popular tools.
Lossless crop of photos and lossless trim of videos should always be included as a feature.
Most video editing software (that I've ever used) supports making clips or setting in/out points in longer videos. This doesn't necessarily make new trimmed clips as files on disk because that's expensive (storage and computation) depending on the video's codecs. Editors also expect to export a wholly new output from source so they don't need to make those intermediate clips. It's like pass by reference instead of pass by value.
On iOS the trimming is done losslessly, when you trim a clip it basically does the same as what `ffmpeg` is doing here. It seeks to the new start time and copies all the GOPs (group of pictures) to the new end point. The camera records video with really short GOPs so the trimming can be pretty accurate. Only if you apply filters or crop the dimensions of the video will the trimmed clip be reencoded. Any iOS software using AVKit can do the same lossless trims, I imagine most editors on iOS do.
When doing rotation I know the Photos app just changes the JPEG rotation flag in the EXIF data. If you send the raw photo to something that ignores or doesn't understand EXIF rotation you'll see just the sensor's default orientation. I believe HEIF works the same way (the container has a rotation atom). When exporting an image (reencoding for sharing or after editing) it will bake in the rotation to the image data, actually performing the rotation to the image.
When you use ffmpeg with macOS, you can save a lot of reencoding time (a magnitude of time for H.264) by using videotoolbox, the Apple supplied harware acceleration backend.
Just de-boarded and re-boarded an aircraft going to Europe from NY because of this „small“ missing „detail“ in the initial announcement. 4h delay and the people who de-boarded the plane initially, are not re-boarding because they probably left the airport by now, not knowing they had wrong information. Ouch.
I expect the natural answer is EDT (Washington DC time) but it's an extremely legitimate question in a country as big as the US and it should have been stated more clearly by the Dyslexic In Chief.
Mea culpa. Makes sense when someone can't distinguish between themselves, their business and a country, so it would never be UTC. That would be too convenient for other people.
Midnight never refers to 11.59pm, which is one minute before midnight. I can say that for certain.
Normally I would take "midnight on Friday" as an instant to mean 2400, since if you're somewhere at 1am on Saturday morning you wouldn't consider it a problem to say "we were out partying on Friday night", but if you were there at 11pm on Friday night you would consider it a problem to say "we were out partying on Saturday night.
However in the particular case of something beginning, I would normally take take it to mean "the very start of Friday according to legal time".
Likewise, in the particular case of something ending, I would normally take it to mean "the very end of Friday according to legal time".
Dutch media reports "night from Friday to Saturday", so it's the latter. But that still leaves the open question in which timezone the 11:59 is in (and whether that's a static timezone, or based on local time at departure/arrival), and whether the 11:59 refers to actual or planned time of departure/arrival.
Yes, multiple news media reports the ban going into effect on 11:59 pm Friday. Some (e.g., "The Sun") report it as 12:00 am Friday. Unless they give an official answer from the White House, I would not consider either report from news as reliable. "Midnight Friday" can be interpreted both ways until they clarify.
4h delay and the people who de-boarded the plane initially, are not re-boarding because they probably left the airport by now, not knowing they had wrong information.
For those that live in the US and de-boarded because of this "missing detail", I wouldn't be surprised if in a week or two they don't feel like they dodged a massive bullet.
Correct; it's an incorrectly worded, flippant, emotional response to my view of my country's (the US) response to the crisis and not a statement that those that are/were travelling to Europe shouldn't.
This is known as “negative concord” and shows up often in colloquial English. While popularly associated with African American and Appalachian dialects, it actually occurs almost everywhere English is spoken. (E.g. Pink Floyd’s chorus, “We don’t need no education / We don’t need no thought control”.)
Even in formal writing, double negatives are common using “nor”. Consider the sentence, “He is not satisfied at all with the recommendations of Mr. Trump, nor with those of Mrs. Clinton.” If you change “nor” to “or”, the meaning remains identical. This shows the negative “nor” reiterates rather inverts the prior negation. Note the “nor” version is no less formal or professional in tone because of its double negative.
Negative concord even has precedent in Shakespeare: “I never was, nor never will be” from Richard III.
Most would suggest avoiding negative concord in a formal writing (excepting “nor”), but colloquially it’s been part of the language for hundreds of years. In a conversational context, the line you quoted is standard English with or without the “don’t”.
> This sounds like a misplaced and ideological canned response, since I’ve never heard negative concord in this context.
You have a misplaced trust in your instincts. The following examples of this exact double-negative construction (“...wouldn’t be surprised if ... didn’t...”) are quoted from newspapers and BBC specials:
> But the seeds have been sown and I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't try, once she's feeling more confident herself, to persuade him into the deep end.
> "I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't see there are a couple of days with some good news and very, very positive market news," Houge said, noting potential days of 10 percent spikes.
> "I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't lose $157,000 in taxes," Van Tuinen said.
> It was late, and I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't leave some of his audience back down the road somewhere impaled on point number 10 or 11.
Here’s a quote of John F. Kennedy using this construction in a recorded interview:
> President Kennedy: That's what I think. I would have been impeached. I think they would have moved to impeach. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't move to impeach right after this election, on the grounds that I said … and didn't do it … and let … I mean, I'd be …
I Googled these examples in five seconds. You could have too, but instead you chose to lob insults and embarrass yourself.
Imagine trying to perform TSA test procedures for terrorist activity (millions of people still removing their shoes in airports every day because one guy tried and failed to blow up his own shoes in 2001 WTF), while also trying not to spread COVID-19. Perhaps instead of pat downs they'll do interpretive dances.
I'm guessing we're going to get a lot of these sentiments over the next couple weeks (months?), about how these restrictions are interfering with the comforts of modern life.
Let it stand as a reminder of how good we have it, and how fragile things actually are. It's a pandemic. There's going to be some bumps.
The ridiculous part of this whole travel ban 3.0 is that it is totally unnecessary. If the U.S. had proper testing infrastructure, we could test every single person arriving from abroad and make them wait the 4 hours required to get a read. S. Korea has that type of testing infrastructure. We invented the darn technology. There are no excuses for the deplorable, laughable, incompetent, disgraceful (I could go on) roll out (actually lack thereof) of testing in the U.S. As best I can tell, we now (today) have capacity to test about a 1,000 samples a day? Unbelievable. Give me three water baths, any old microtiter plate fluorometer, and enough tubes and reagents and I can run 1,000 samples a day by hand.
Testing every single person arriving from abroad wouldn't work. The test is not reliable for people still in the incubation phase, and with exponential spread being what it is there are going to be a lot of those. I don't think there's any country on the planet taking that approach; they're all either banning travel from affected countries or forcing a 14-day quarantine period on travellers from them. The American media seems to have oversold people on how powerful testing is for domestic political reasons.
Also, 4 hour turnaround testing is really hard and I don't know of anywhere other than South Korea has managed it. They basically have to process the tests on site after collecting samples to achieve that, which is no easy feat as it requires not only specialised equipment and trained staff but also a carefully set up positive pressure room to prevent sample contamination. Plus, one of the key things that makes South Korea's approach so effective is that people drive up, get a sample taken, then immediately drive home to avoid spreading the disease to anyone else rather than waiting around for results.
I haven't even seen any examples of countries with substantial travel from Europe that routinely test people who've been there recently and developed mild potential symptoms. South Korea probably could but I haven't seen any confirmation that they do; they mostly seem to be focused on contact tracing and the large local outbreak. The UK and Europe don't. Maybe China does? Again, the American media has been running stories making it sound like the fact the US isn't testing everyone with a cough and a sniffle puts them massively behind the rest of the world and confusing people about what the rest of the world is actually doing.
They don't have a serological test yet. The test uses RNA extraction. So, the testing all over the world is time consuming and testing kits are expensive. I don't think this is just a US problem.
You are just wrong. RNA extraction is dead simple. The basic extraction technology dates to the 1980s. The extraction reagents are (or at least very much can be) very simple ad very cheap chemicals like trizol reagent.
Then, the first positive result that you get should mean that the whole plane is at risk, after all we are talking of people that have been jammed together on the plane for some 8 hours (on the same recirculating air) and then kept (possibly also jammed together) for another 5-6 hours at the airport to wait for the results, that is - from what I can understand of the way the virus is transmitted - the perfect environment to diffuse the virus.
The only meaningful way I can imagine (not doable in practice) is having travelers lodged at a departure airport hotel, and be tested before taking the flight.
This (the recirculation part) is likely less tragic than it seems.
Air recilculated on the airplane goes through a HEPA filter and the whole air is exchanged every 3 minutes. HEPA filters are able to catch the virus as far as I know.
I don't know it seems like it might be dumb to make an exception that would be hard to check and thus might be hard to apply and would mean that anyone who didn't want their comforts interfered with could say "I'm an immediate family member!"
But I guess the ethical will follow the rules and be uncomfortable, and the unethical won't, as per standard operating procedure.
It actually happens, in some hotels around the world, that they will demand a marriage certificate if they're sus. So an Indonesian marriage certificate is like a passport.
Depending on to which country they intended to travel exactly but all the western side of Europe is on the brink of COVID-19 explosion. Germany, France and Spain are just 7-10 days behind Italy based on number of corona virus infections. The rest are possibly around 2 weeks behind, I have not run the numbers for every country (disclosure: I am not a medical professional, my estimates are based on simple time series but at this stage of the infection these have been proven to be accurate enough).
Yay! I'm in Germany! The authorities here don't seem to care). I was trying to buy some food yesterday and there were massive queues hanging outside various apparently crowded social venues.
At least I work from home and my wife has been told they have to start wfh tomorrow.
Fellow German here. It's not that the authorities don't care. They're just putting "avoid panic" as their #1 priority above "contain the outbreak". Large events and gatherings are getting shut down, just not as vigorously as would be prudent.
