As someone living outside the US, your whole comment and the surrounding ones are absolutely wild.

Here in Germany, work without a contract is absolutely unthinkable. If anyone offered me a job without a contract, I would have to immediately report them to the authorities on the suspicion of tax fraud.

Also, even without a single word about it in my contract, they would have needed to notify me way in advance if they wanted to let me go. The exact duration varies by how long you’ve been there but the minimum is four weeks. For me it would have been four months because I had been there for over ten years. Also, the requirement for an employee to quit can never be stricter than for them to be fired. If you’re interested in the details, I recommend you find a translation of § 622 BGB.

And yes, these rules do get enforced reliably. The mere mention of the word “lawyer” usually gets even the most stubborn boss to comply in these cases because they know that every judge would rule against them within minutes.

I once did an even more extreme version of this. I showed up with a contract for a new job that would give me a 30% raise and an opportunity to work from home as much as I want. I told my boss to match that offer or I would sign it.

He took a few days to decide and made me an offer that was significantly worse, so now I have a new job, more money and haven’t seen the inside of a corporate office in months. My old team has been completely dissolved because the old crew left faster than they could train replacements.

A lot more specific though. I don’t know (or remember) one of the kanji but it seems to be along the lines of “Thanks for using the toilet cleanly”

My webserver had some spare capacity so I started my own instance.

General rule of thumb that aligns well with what you do in English: “Sie” goes with last names, “du” goes with first names.

There are very rare exceptions, for example sports reporters tend to address some athletes with “Sie” and first name for reasons that nobody can explain. Those are not very relevant in everyday conversation, especially not if German is not your first language.

Is it a big deal to start using the informal?

It used to be a cliché that you would call coworkers by their last name and “Sie” until that one fateful office Christmas party where your boss gets drunk and asks you to call him Fritz and “du”.

These days, things are a lot more relaxed. Many companies are adopting a rule that all employees should address each other as “du”, including upper management.

Also: you chose the way it’s presented. I’ve always been into history (mainly ancient Egypt and medieval Europe) since I was old enough to hold a picture book but I absolutely hated most history classes in school because the presentation wasn’t right for me. They made us memorize dates, names and what specific event caused a certain war but in the end, those don’t really matter that much.

The important thing to take away from history is the big picture and ironically, the best way for me to get that is by listening to a bunch of individual, personal stories and figure out how they fit together. These days, I listen to a weekly history podcast (shout out to “Geschichten aus der Geschichte” for those who speak German). For most episodes, I still won’t remember individual names or dates but pretty much every episode there are a few moments where I go “oh yeah, they mentioned that aspect in an earlier episode” even if they don’t point it out explicitly. I’ll never remember what year the second defenestration of Prague was or which Emperor it was directed against but after listening to a couple of episodes that roughly relate to that, I will forever remember the broad strokes about what caused the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century which superficially was about conflicts between Catholics and Protestants but on a deeper level centered around the question who would rule Bohemia and the Empire as a whole.

I was a fan of Miranda IM because that’s what I used for everything else (ICQ, MSN, XMPP, AIM, occasionally Skype though that plugin didn’t work that well). If I remember correctly, joining multiple servers was a bit more cumbersome than with other clients but having everything in one application was amazing.

Bah, the young ones joining IRC through a web interface. Back in my day, we used telnet, typed the IRC commands by hand and hoped we were quick enough to reply to PING to not get kicked from the server.

Well, not really but I did it occasionally to better understand how the protocol works.

The best chat platform is the one where the people you want to chat with are.

If you don’t have anyone specific you want to talk to and just want to join a community that shares your interests, maybe look into Matrix, which is an open and distributed protocol with many servers.

It’s absolutely essential. Otherwise every single defendant would claim “I’m sorry, your honor. I didn’t know that murder/rape/stealing is illegal”. It’s almost impossible to prove or disprove general knowledge so we must assume - at least from a legal perspective - that everybody knows the law if we want to apply that law at all. Of course that doesn’t mean that any random person on the street needs to be familiar with every single law that applies to forestry but that they are required to read up on those laws before they pick up a chainsaw and head into the forest. There may be a few obscure laws that could apply to you without your knowledge but those are mostly so low stakes that we can give people a warning for the first offense and then reasonably assume they will know and follow that law in the future.

Now, that all applies to ignorance of the law. On the other hand, there is ignorance of your own actions which indeed can get you out of a conviction because it indicates a lack of intent. A simple example: if you visit someone and on the way out, you grab their jacket because of your own because they look similar, it’s very likely that you haven’t done anything illegal, it was just a mistake. Same if you’re not aware that something you’re doing might endanger others. Those might still get you in trouble for negligence but one could reasonably construct a case where you do something that looks perfectly safe to you but out of pure coincidence ends up killing someone. In those cases, you’re clearly not guilty of a crime.

Well, not necessarily. I’ve had my phone for almost five years now. The battery is at 78% of it’s original capacity and still gets me through the day without problems, even on heavy use. The only times I need to charge during the day is when I’m on a long distance train and listen to podcasts or audio books for hours.

Chances are that something else will fail long before the battery. And even if not, the local phone repair shop offers a battery replacement for about 50€ which is more than reasonable for something that will get me another couple of years.

Then you don’t need to worry. Battery degradation isn’t much of a problem for those.

That’s why modern phone operating systems will charge your battery to 80-90% at the beginning of the night and then charge the last bit just in time to be done when you wake up, based either on when your alarm is set or on past usage statistics.

May I ask how much that cost you? You say things are cheap there so if it’s in the range of what you would have otherwise paid for a hotel or for your general cost of living at home, it sounds more like a mutually beneficial situation. You get to extend your vacation for relatively cheap and they get to keep what you’ve bought when you leave.

Just make sure to keep an eye on the situation. People can get used to your generosity and you don’t know how their disappointment will manifest when you eventually decide to leave. They might just be grateful for what you gave them, but they might also ask you to stay for longer than you’re comfortable with, they might ask you to buy them more stuff before you leave or they might ask you to take the girl home with you. Not even out of greed or any bad feelings but just because what you gave them feels nice and wanting more of that is just natural.

As long as you set limits for yourself (important edit: and communicate those limits) and are prepared to leave within the hour if they don’t respect those, I see no harm. Best case, you have made new friends that you stay in contact with and can visit some time in the future. Worst case you have to leave in the middle of the night and never see them again.

I’m German. Back in my day, we had 9 years of English classes in school and from what I’ve heard it’s even more now. I was lucky to have a teacher who had spent a couple of years in the UK so he had much less of a German accent than most other teachers at our school and was also able to give us a lot of insight into how people actually speak, compared to the rather formal and stilted examples in our textbooks.

Between social media, movies, shows and a job in software engineering, I would say that on most days I read and listen to more English than German.

Don’t give them ideas…

Okay, no idea if that was a brainfart or autocorrect but I‘m glad it gave you that opportunity.

If your sword shirt is edgy, you might have used too much starch.

For anyone wondering: openDesk, the solution they’re using, wasn’t developed from the ground up. It contains standard open source tools like Nextcloud, Matrix and Collabora.

Oh yeah, exactly what the PlayStation needs: more soulless shooter sequels from Microsoft. What ever would we have done without Halo? Played CoD?