Ι didn’t know that lower Saxony had seats in the board itself. Makes things even more complicated and interesting.
1 Like
They hold about 12% of the shares and 20% of the shares that allow voting. (Sorry if the terms are incorrect, business english isn’t my strength, really.)
4 Likes
I love the Ikigai in there!
1 Like
Interesting fact that few people know, from Wolfsburg - Wikipedia
Wolfsburg was founded on 1 July 1938 as […] a planned town centred around the village of Fallersleben, built to house workers of the Volkswagen factories erected to assemble what would be later known as the Volkswagen Beetle.
4 Likes
2024 going out on a high
7 Likes
Wait until the vicar finds out God doesn’t exist either… 
10 Likes
I wish for a society where we can tell children what we believe to be truthful without being frowned upon.
Edit: … as long as its appropriate … and I realise that I’m immediately contradicting myself 
9 Likes
It’s a great way to teach the lesson, actually.
If children come to understand that Santa is a lie that we tell to children to get them to behave, then they more readily understand that Satan is a lie that we tell to adults to get them to behave.
9 Likes
And finally we understand that moderators are a lie that is told to get go players to behave!
14 Likes
I never told my children to behave because of Santa. They were asked to behave, and they would get presents anyway. I let them figure out by themselves if Santa exists or not, and actually one of them told me they had a long and thoughtful debate at lunch on the subject with their classmates.
11 Likes
Not a coincidental anagram, considering the close function those two serve
So is the police. Our local analogy here is 20 police officers for 500 square kilometers and 20.000 people. 
1 Like
That’s more per capita than we have here in Hamburg.
3 Likes
Initially I thought that this probably made sense and I started to write that, since it is mostly empty hills and mountains where I live. The reason we even have 20 people and not even less, is to account for the craggy terrain. It would take you 1h and 48m to get from end to end of this municipality and that’s VERY generous, because google maps assumes that the road is in top condition (which it is not).
On the other hand Hamburg is 755 km2 and has almost 2 million people and it is mostly flat. You could get from end to end in 30 minutes (unlike our semi-destroyed roads, google maps is good in factoring in urban traffic), so a smaller force could be more nimble.
However, when I was going to write all than and about the “1 in a thousand” ratio I went and checked the numbers to make the actual comparison and it turns out that Hamburg is winning, by far, which also makes sense (you want a large urban city to be as safe as possible. Villages noone can find on a map are not really a priority):
There is says “Internal security in Hamburg is ensured by 9,401 police officers”, which would mean that (1847253/9401 = 196.5) there is a “1 police officer per 196.5 citizens” ratio , which is significantly higher than one in a thousand 
Still the main point remains. Security and social structure are being maintained by the illusion of safety and the fact that most people are inclined/trained to be law abiding citizens. I do not care with what equipment you could arm a police force of 9401, but they are not stopping 1847253 people if those people were inclined to break the laws.
2 Likes
Like density of pop in Switzerland which is low until you put away the mountains areas.
2 Likes
Must’ve skipped the pastoral care portion of seminary. Nothing says “Christmas spirit” like dropping a theological nuke on some sobbing schoolchildren.
6 Likes
It seems that 1 police officer per ~300 people is about average in Europa and the Netherlands. But in our small and somewhat rural village of 10,000 we have only 2 police officers (so 1 per 5000 inhabitants): 1 Belgian and 1 Dutch and they share 1 (Belgian) police car.
Though arrival time for a somewhat larger police force from nearby towns/cities is only about 30 minutes.
2 Likes
As we say in the U.S., when seconds count, the police are just minutes away.
6 Likes
Minutes if you’re lucky. More like hours if they show up at all.
2 Likes
You are right. I also checked the numbers and got similar ones to you. What I failed at is the simple division task! 
2 Likes
Well, it could have been worse. They could have been told that "also your parents will eventually grow old and DIE and you will be orphans (mhuahaha) or watch them wither away. And you’ll have to pay and get in debt to educate yourselves so that you can be useful to society and work till you grow old and decrepid and DIE too and your children will cry in your place, orphans themselves (mandatory lightning strike with a second of power lost followed by mad laughter and an Hammond organ in the background ). Laugh now little brats, while you can, at your precious little gifts and bells and whistles, for the future is COMING and even God can’t help you with that, even though I’ll sure profit from telling you otherwise! ahaHAHAhahaHAHAAAHAAAAAA (crows flying and cawing in the background)
The vicar has a lot to improve upon.
Jokes aside, I had gone to a service once in a monastery and the sermon’s message was “pray to God not for health and happiness, but for strife and illness, because only through God’s incessants tests and trials shall you achieve paradise”. For sure it made everyone’s day. Happy chap that preacher. God was probably amused too because next year everything around the monastery burned to the ground in a forest fire.
And then the floods came and the road is now like something out of an active warfield, so there are no longer many visitors and thus less revenue to the monastery. Ask and thou shalt receive. 
I’ve solved that problem by going to the police myself, in the few times they were needed (arguably for mild cases - e.g. my bicycle getting stolen). Not that they did anything, but at least I didn’t have to wait 
3 Likes