OT, but I just noted that https://www.preppylion.com/about-us/ looks strange in my webbrowser because the text has absolutely zero left/right margins...
Lots of modern appliances connect to the Internet, have multiple computers inside that need updates, maintenance, maybe subscription payments, and that need to phone home everything they see, hear and do.
Not buying them means usually having a good understanding what "smart" means, or why having an app as a requirement is silly. The mean consumer has no idea what any of that means, they sometimes even lack the technical vocabulary needed to put into words what annoys them.
You've apparently been off the web and out of stores for over a decade. Home Depot sells a bluetooth-connected shower head (just the head - it doesn't turn the water on). There are smart thermostats that are wifi connected so you can change the temperature of your house from anywhere in the world... for reasons...
You're right, I'm trying hard to practice digital detox as much as I can. Unfortunately, for job and family reasons I cannot give up an internet connection at home, but I have never owned a mobile phone in my life.
It often feels strange when I peak out my head into the real world as it exists today.
My biggest grief with wooden utensils replaceing plastic ones and cardboard(-ish) cup lids replacing plastic lids is the texture - I almost shudder everytime these environmentally friendly replacements touch my mouth, to the point that I eat in the most ridiculous way in order to avoid having to touch the wooden fork when I'm trying to get the food off of it.
And the reason is exactly the finish. Metal and plastic spoons, forks, lids, etc. are nice and smooth and don't get in your way. Cheaply made wood or cardboards ones are rough and tacky.
Of course you could argue that from an environmental standpoint, that's not a bug but a feature: now I'm using even less disposable stuff (first, no plastic because it's been replaced by other stuff; and second also the replacements because I hate using them).
Try bamboo chopsticks. They are smooth because they are made parallel to the grain. There is minimal end grain surface area, so you rarely have to interact with the rough bits. And they do almost everything you'd want a consumer-oriented utensil to do.
This is the hardest thing about selling wooden spoons and especially cups. Like you, most people think about the rough texture they felt when using cheap or disposable wooden utensils.
My spoons and cups feel more like warm textured ceramic. They are sanded to a high 600 grit, water popped multiple times to make sure the grain doesn't raise and the texture stays smooth, and finished with drying oils as you see in the article to keep the surface highly hydrophobic.
I really can't describe it in words, but everyone I know who tried eating with my wooden spoons and drank from my coffee cups, was pleasantly surprised of the feeling.
That's why most of my sales happen in person at local craft markets, because there, people can take the cup into their hand, they can feel the smoothness, and they can ask about the same things you are worried about.
All I can recommend is find a spoon carver in your area, or one that ships there, and try a hand carved eating spoon. I'm not saying it's better than metal, ceramic or plastic, it's just a different experience that some people enjoy.
My partial solution is to look a bit silly and shove the utensil in my mouth while I walk around setting up the meal (finding a seat, opening the package etc). Wetting the eating surface with your saliva for ~30-60 seconds helps a lot.
I don't know to what degree this is known to people outside Europe, but has been on the news over here for the last few months:
> drones aren’t just buzzing airports. They’re systematically surveilling military installations—often during sensitive operations
Now, if you live in the US or anywhere else outside Europe - please pause for a moment and see how it makes you feel to imagine having Russian drones hover over your military installations regularly, or other important places of your public infrastructure.
The political question here isn't why intelligence agencies aren't all over this but why politicians are deciding to not do anything about it.
A bunch of kids were able to figure out which ships were the source of these drones. Good work. I assume/hope this information wasn't new to intelligence agencies.
Relevant questions to ask here:
- were these ships not tracked and monitored 24/7 since they left Russian ports?
- in fact aren't all ships that leave those ports not tracked?
- isn't the journey of ships in the so-called shadow fleet documented in detail so that it is exactly known what's on board and who is buying it?
The answer to this is: of course that is all happening and known.
And the obvious one: why weren't these ships dragged to a port and completely dismantled to the last bolt?
Answer to that: that would be an escalation as these ships are in international waters and protected by maritime law. The obvious counter to that is that military aerial activity launched from foreign ships technically is an escalation in itself that could be considered a direct act of war.
I'm not going to speculate further on this. But it's obviously a highly political topic and not some kind of intelligence failure.
As someone who currently lives in Poland, I hope this will be a wakeup call for Western Europe, which has so far been living a medieval dream of "the aggressor is far away and there are countries between us and the aggressor, so we can carry on as usual". That used to be a valid assumption several hundred years ago, but now no longer holds.
I hope the lukewarm support for Ukraine will become at least a bit stronger. And I really hope the EU will stop funding the Russian military machine. Not everyone realizes this, but just in October 2025, the five largest EU importers of Russian fossil fuels paid Russia nearly 1 billion €. ONE BILLION EUR per month. Compare that to the military aid we are sending to Ukraine. (source: https://energyandcleanair.org/october-2025-monthly-analysis-...)
> so far been living a medieval dream of "the aggressor is far away
As a Western European, I want to give you a different perspective on this. For us, everything behind the iron curtain was Soviet. Then the curtain fell and we saw all these countries like yours, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Baltic states, etc, transition into democracies. While doing that, they lifted their welfare significantly. We had no reason to think Russia wouldn't do the same (why wouldn't they?).
Plus, our neighbor Germany was not the nicest kid on the block in the past, and we also saw them transition into a normal, peace loving nation. So in the end, we had no reason to believe why Russia would stick to something that actually hurts their own lives.
It was very naive, I agree. But only recently, we realized that Russia has no intention to follow the path that central and eastern Europe took.
And yes, I'm ashamed of how little support Europe is giving. I'm sending money out of my own pocket, because I hope every bit helps.
As I understand, if Europe stopped buying Russian natural gas, it would have to buy it at much higher prices elsewhere, which would raise things like electricity cost, logistics cost, which in turn might make voters unhappy and vote out the current government. That's the weakness of EU, it's made of many countries which put their interests first and have a democratic system.
Furthermore, there are suspicious things happening, like appointing former German chancellor for a Gazprom directors board [1]. Was he appointed for his exceptional skills and expertise, or for some other reason?
For comparison, Russia has no such problems; due to centralization and localization of economy, the prices and rouble value are kept under control; due to more authoritarian style of governing, nobody complains when utility bill raises every year, and sometimes twice a year. Russia also had tax increases for couple years straight, and again, nobody complained, unlike Europeans which tend to change the government every time they become unhappy with something. And obviously, West has no means to bribe or corrupt Russian leadership or finance any political movements.
It disheartens me to see how Polish opinion on the EU has been systematically dismantled, not sure if it's mostly Russian propaganda but EU skepticism is growing a lot over there, given that Poland is right at the footsteps of Russia it does not bode well it's starting to turn on the EU...
Guess who else is very much interested in that happening.....
"Leaked files ‘show US wants to persuade four nations to leave EU’
The countries seen as targets to follow Brexit are Austria, Hungary, Italy and Poland, according to leaked details of the US national security strategy"
https://www.thetimes.com/us/american-politics/article/us-meg...
Well, this was the case decades ago, too, just few people paid attention. The US made sure their interests are always put before Polish interests, and these were regularly reported by the US embassy in Warsaw. See e.g.:[0]
"Rozanski went on
to explain that Polish food products are viewed in the EU as
healthy and natural, and are competitive in their current
state. Use of GM seeds could threaten this perception, and
thus Poland's place in the market. When Spirnak and Embassy
Agricultural Counselor noted that such an approach would be
of great concern to the U.S. and would be contrary to EU as
well as WTO commitments, Rozanski backed off and said that
Poland must comply with EU and international commitments
(Note: Rozanski softened this message further at a subsequent
meeting that Agricultural Counselor attended)."
The bright point is, since it's more or less clear that the US basically stopped caring much about Europe militarily, the "great concern to the U.S." cited above is not that relevant. Trump basically destroyed most of the soft power the USA had over Europe.
>>I hope the lukewarm support for Ukraine will become at least a bit stronger
As a Pole, I think the nation as a whole doesn't recognize that we are already at war. By any estimate, Russia already uses thousands of people online to post false information about both the war and Ukrainians in Poland, trying to incite hatred towards them so that Polish support for them goes down, and so far it has been working. Just go to a comment section on any news article or(if you're brave) Facebook, it's dare I say infested with brand new accounts whose entire posting history is just "get those ukrainian vermins out of this country" or the variations of. The governments office that was meant to investigate and combat this had....2 employees until very recently. Our response to this is not just inadequate, we are literally being "attacked"(not in a physical sense) by another nation and we do very little about it. And it appears to be working too - outright xenophobia and actual physical violence against Ukrainians is up on the raise in Poland, and political stance of "you know maybe Putin isn't such a bad guy" is coming out of the fringes and entering public conversation too. For a country such as Poland which has suffered first hand at the hands of Russians, this is an insane position to take.
The Netherlands (population 18 million) has an annual budget of 350 billion.
Russia is in reality a poor country.
The strategy of the Netherlands is to just keep the war going by sending money. The reality is that we're actually WINNING but some people don't want that.
I definitely hope it will, but you know, the further remote from Russia the safer and less interested they can afford to be. Because the cyber war is here, there's lots of messages with "Russia is not my enemy" on the Romanian Facebook as well. This even when Putty's goon just said they're at war with Europe.
Here in the First Island Chain we've had Chinese drones buzzing our military installations since before COVID.
In Afghanistan, Yemen, or Somalia, the sound of drones buzzing overhead usually means an entire family is about to get murdered because ONE guy's pattern of behaviors pegged him as a "terrorist" in some computer system.
Europeans are just finally being shaken out of their false sense of security and don't know how to handle it.
>Now, if you live in the US or anywhere else outside Europe - please pause for a moment and see how it makes you feel to imagine having Russian drones hover over your military installations regularly, or other important places of your public infrastructure.
Something like that has happened in the US recently but Americans believed they were alien spacecraft as they tend to do and the whole thing got swallowed up in memes and Reddit threads.
Also apparently the US is ride or die with Putin now so Russia can't have done anything of the sort. Must have been aliens.
Are any of those drones being shot down? Is anything being done about it besides (AI-assisted) fear-mongering? That is the real question. If the drones are a problem, shoot/neutralize them and thank Russia for the free target-practice exercise.
It seems like the danger even bigger than Russia is government incompetence and the system of broken incentives where everyone does everything to appear busy but actually solving the problem.
If there's a drone there, and you don't want it there, the solution is obvious. It's obvious enough to any nutcase in the US with access to a shotgun (with various degrees of success, but at least they're got the right spirit). If nobody's taking out the proverbial shotgun then I have to assume the drones are not an actual problem and merely yet another excuse for busywork.
Edit: I am not saying to literally use a shotgun against them. But offensive solutions need to be developed and put to use; otherwise if we sit helpless now, what will we do when those drones evolve and start carrying offensive payloads? Fear-mongering and finding endless excuses about not doing anything is not going to help.
The drones here aren't your neighbor's kids' quadrotors. Some sightings over airports have been large (>2m) fixed wing aircraft travelling at 200 km/h. Even the quads are pretty fast. And they can appear out of nowhere, taking off from the ground near the target.
Shooting them down from the ground is next to impossible. They don't hover around waiting for someone to come by with a shotgun in their hand, catching them by land (ie. chasing them in a car) is not feasible.
Just to give an idea how hard it is to hit airborne targets from the ground with traditional guns: I once spent an afternoon shooting at a slow moving fixed wing target drone with tracer rounds from a 12.7mm anti-aircraft machine gun. There were about 50 of us taking turns, each with a few hundred rounds to shoot at the damn thing and the target aircraft didn't get a single hit.
My guess is that the drones are conducting signals intelligence, listening to radar signals and radio comms around sensitive installations (airports, military bases) and surveying the response time to a sighting.
>The initial pilot batch, consisting of up to 1,000 drones, will be built in the UK at state-owned facilities. The Octopus drone will become the first Ukrainian combat drone to be serially produced in a NATO country, with Ukraine retaining full intellectual property and technological control. https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/10/26/uk-to-build-pilot-bat...
If you watch some videos from Ukraine, you will see, that shotguns can hit them with much increased chances. So if possible without endangering civilians around the place where drones are sighted, I say get finally started, take the shotguns out and take out Russian resources. Just for the time of war make private drone flying without special permission and preflight registration illegal, then take down any drone that moves and is not registered to have a flight at the time. This also won't be giving away very critical military knowledge either.
One thing I don't know about shotguns is, how dangerous falling projectiles are. How much velocity they accumulate. That could be a real problem with this approach.
I've seen my fair share of frontline combat videos from Ukraine.
The hard part isn't shooting a drone when it is in shotgun range. It's getting the shooter close enough to the drone to have a chance of taking the shot in the first place.
For example the drones mentioned in the article can fly at 2.5km altitude at 140km/h.
I guess the only solution then is to already have people in places where it counts. I would suspect military bases have more than enough people. But then again the drones can just fly too high, at which point it becomes a cost/benefit tradeoff, or futuristic laser weapons.
It's actually not easy to shoot down a drone with a gun if it takes any measure to evade interception. It's not like shooting ducks taking off from a lake.
That said, last week the French navy did shoot at drones around the Île Longue nuclear submarine base, but as far as I understand just one drone came within close enough range to be targeted by radio jammers (which means maybe a few hundred meters at sea) and either it went away on its own or sunk but it apparently wasn't retrieved. It's very unlikely they could shoot it down with conventional firearms.
Also it's not like the US did any better when their airports and military bases had those massive drone sightings a little while back, except in that case it wasn't the Russians but "aliens" (lol).
The Dutch military fired on drones. However, they are all over Europe and generally not shot down for various reasons. First, shooting at them can be very dangerous. Debris and whatever is used to shoot at them (usually bullets) can hit civilians. Second, the laws tend to not allow military and police to shoot at drones that don't pose an immediate threat to life. A new police law has been passed in Germany to fix this issue, but it was only passed very recently. I suspect other countries have similar legal issues that first need to be fixed.
The solution is only obvious if you're naive and/or don't know what you're talking about. They can't reliably shut down drones in active war zones with complete disregard for any kind of safety and you think we could do this in populated areas ?
Do you realise some drones can fly hundreds of meter above the site, even a few kilometres ? Do you realise that what you send up must come down eventually ? Do you realise that you need to send massive amount of projectiles to take down an object that size ? Do you think you're smarter than everyone on the ground and in the command chain ? If shotguns were the solution you'd see much more videos of them being used on the front line, but they're only sporadically used, and from videos circulating online you can clearly see they're barely better than useless.
For short range, a shotgun with birdshot is pretty safe. The pellets aren't going to have much velocity on the way down to do any harm.
For longer range, there are a lot of options, but an interceptor drone is probably pretty good. You do have to worry about the drone pieces hitting something, most drones aren't that heavy but I would not want to be hit by one.
Still this is much safer than firing explosive shells.
The reality doesn't match all these armchair specialists takes on HN though. Neither Russia nor Ukraine can defend their critical infrastructure... and they're all in, at war, with 0 regards for safety and side effects.
What happens if you interceptors locks in on the plane behind the drone, of falls down on the school behind the naval base ? Planes are shot down all the time, even military planes by friendly fire. I even doubt European countries have legal ways to start shooting down aircrafts during peace time
I guess I'm talking about drone defense in more of a "Coast Guard" scenario than a "Navy" one. If there is some mass drone swarm coming at your cities you probably want to take a Navy approach and shoot them down by whatever means necessary.
In the case we're talking about though, the Russians are just able to fly their drones over European countries with impunity. Now these may not yet be armed, but you can't just let another country violate your sovereignty. If a drone is operating very close to a commercial aircraft, or there's a good chance of collateral damage, you may choose not to shoot it down, but you do need to demonstrate that you have some defense and that there's a good chance that they will be shot down.
I have seen videos of shotguns working on the frontline. Recently, there even circulated a video showing a super lucky one shot hit. However, what those videos have in common is, that they are targeting drones maybe 100m or at most 300m away. Obviously, the further away the drone, the more difficult it will be to align the barrel sufficiently precise to hit anything.
Shutting down a drone with a machine gun is difficult, there are lot of videos where you can see it. There is even video of a Russian-Iranian drone destroying a car with a machine gun which cannot even protect itself. What is efficient against drones, are Soviet ground-air missiles (which might be dangerous to use around airports), and interceptor drones (which Europe doesn't have). Jamming the radio/GPS probably won't help because drones have antennas on top which form a simple phased array, to ignore the signal from the ground. Drones might also use mobile networks, and there were reports that Russia used Starlink antennas on some drones.
Of course not. Because reasons. Because it's illegal to shot drones. Because let's not provoke putin. Because they pose no threat. Because the debris can hit civilians. russians will continue observing military installations with full impunity.
... and Russians will find new reasons not to shoot their drones, which they will happily share with EU residents via social networks. They are the masters of excuses.
So you have an invader trying their best (which is luckily not much) to grab a neighbor's land, just at your border, and you call that "murky and overblown"? Sorry this is not the Facebook grandmas knitting group giving likes to a carrot horse, we refuse to accept such bs.
The "Russian scare" in Europe is not about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that's just the premise, it is the narrative that the EU (and Western Europe at large) is next to be invaded and that we should be ready for WWIII against Russia.
Russia hasn't stopped invading their neighbors ever since the fall of the soviet union. To state they will stop doing so while Putin is in power is either naive or on purpose to propel some agenda.
That's both a logical fallacy and a strawman argument, not to mention an ad hominem attack. I did not claim that Russia would stop anything and even if Russia did attack several neighbours it is irrelevant. Reasoning and trying to see through the haze is not "having an agenda".
My claim is that Russia is not going to invade or start a war with the EU/NATO/Western Europe (and that, consequentially the "Russia scare" is mostly fearmongering). I don't think that they ever had a plan to, but in any case their campaign in Ukraine has shown that they don't have the capability.
> I did not claim that Russia would stop anything and even if Russia did attack several neighbours it is irrelevant. (...) My claim is that Russia is not going to invade or start a war with the EU/NATO/Western Europe (and that, consequentially the "Russia scare" is mostly fearmongering). I don't think that they ever had a plan to, but in any case their campaign in Ukraine has shown that they don't have the capability.
The only thing that matters is that they have invaded several neighbors over the last few decades. Failing to accomplish their goals hasn't stopped them. Just look at how divided Georgia is, or how the first Chechen war went.
Also, within the context of "fearmongering" you state, the fear is that they wouldn't stop in Ukraine. Yes, you are trying to say Russia will stop, that they won't invade anyone else. But history shows otherwise. That is why I did state above "The only thing that matters is that they have to invaded several neighbors... ".
> Reasoning and trying to see through the haze is not "having an agenda".
I applaud you trying to see through the fog, but I fear you are overcomplicating things and being naive at the same time. Not necessarily having an agenda.
Look, I'm talking from the point of view that Russia will continue to invade others within Europe unless they're stopped. Which is, from what I gathered until now, your fearmongering scenario. I think my responses will make a lot more sense like that.
Maybe the difficulty in conveying thoughts into text struck again. I don't know. I haven't been trying to be malicious or distort your take, really. As I see it we have just been talking past each-other. Perhaps my fault.
Were you saying all this time they won't stop in Ukraine itself? Agreed, if that's the case.
> Obviously that's not the only thing that matters...
Of course it's not all that matters, I have just exaggerated it in an attempt to convey how much their past actions paint that picture. That they will continue doing the same even if absurd. Again, not that clear.
Sometimes you have just to give up participating in internet arguments when you notice the other keeps trying to gaslight you. Yeah whether I'm a good debater or not, one fact is there's a cyber war now _declared_ against Europe, a real war against the Ukraine, and there's also a history of wars against every one of their neighbors, so the fear is totally justified even when pure logic might say correlation is not causality and other ivory tower nonsense. So thank you for your arguments, but I'm sure they fall on deaf ears - whether willingly so or not I don't really care.
Yeah, I do realize that after so many points being neglected over supposed fallacies. From the various comments I'm pretty sure they believe there'll be an end to these fantasies Putin has. But it's impossible trying to argue when the retort is either denial or listing fallacies out of thin air. Another problem they had was over the "naïveté or agenda" point I've made, which they took as an attack on themselves. And honestly if you take the latter personally it doesn't mean the former wasn't an option. And as you've said, we are at war, you have to assume some have an agenda. Not necessarily them.
Still, I do believe that some commenters are just being naive, others taken for a ride, and then there are bots. But I always assume there is a person on the other end if their account isn't new. Hence trying to reach an understanding.
Either way, leaving such posts unanswered always gives a false sense of a common view on a topic, and its good to just demonstrate not everybody agrees.
Of course the Russians will do this we helped Ukrainians attack the Russian nuclear fleet with drones they are most definitely organising some payback actions.
Be glad stuff isn't exploding yet, we are at war with Russia. Did people expect no damage would happen inside Europe?
One nice side effect of a dict that's immutable is that under the hood, you could employ perfect hashing so that the your dict uses a hash function that is collision-free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Nielsen_(usability_consu...
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