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Indoor Tropical Island
fons writes "The huge construction dome of the now bankrupt zeppelin maker CargoLifter, has been turned into an indoor tropical island. For about 20euro a day you can swim in the sea, take a walk in the rainforest or go to a beachparty. While it is snowing outside, it's a always a pleasant 25C on the island. And there are no tsunami's. It's bigger than Biosphere2 (it fits the Eiffeltower) but there's less sunlight. Would you spend your vacation in there? The Germans don't seem to be very eager."
It would be better if they had the whole ceiling lined with cloud pictures to simulate clouds instead of seeing steel.
Untill the nudist version? Surely this would be the simplest option and stop the retards going "I SAW SOME GUY NUDE ON THE BEACH PAST THAT SIGN SAYING NODISTS! I WILL SUED THE CITY FOR IT!".
It would be a safe (As in child molesters can't get in) and private (yet still free and among nature). It seems the perfect solution to a problem we don't even have (sort of..).
I like muppets.
Sooner or later, on Mars? With holodisplays imitating Earthian weather? On surface, or, to lessen radiation, underground?
. .
I think what really gets me is how flip people are feeling they can be about this in the West. Yes, Slashdot is global, yada yada, but it's readership is, for the most part, centered outside the affected area and in the United States in particular, so I blame us.
I live in New York, and what struck me was the global outpouring of sympathy after September 11, which killed 3,000 people, and it was months before anyone felt comfortable enough to to discuss anything but the horror.
But now, just a week after 118,000 parents and children and brothers and sisters have been drowned in a single moment, we start making fun little tsnumai references to set off an article on an indoor beach. That, and going to our climate-controlled indoor beaches are all part of our healing process, I suppose.
Sorry, I have a pretty high threshold, but that makes me ill.
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
Flights from Germany to Ibiza are about 100 Euro.
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I think if they catered to young kids who wanted to get piss ass drunk, they might succeed.
Seriously. Take a look at Cancun. It's not that less artificial.
I think of a beach full of middle aged German men all wearing their favorite Speedo swim wear.....I think I will pass.
"We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. " Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It's not that making life enjoyable is bad, on it's own.
It's when there are other things that *ought* to be getting done, but we're too busy using *the same technology* to make life enjoyable and *not* doing those things.
Case in point: Space Tourism
I'd *love* to be a space tourist. If it ever gets down into my price range while I'm healthy enough, I will. But if we get *so* preoccupied with space tourism that we don't think or prepare for comet/asteroid detection and deflection, that's bad. If tourism prevents exploration, that's bad. At the moment, I don't think this situation exists. In fact, I think space tourism will make people *more* conscious of the things we ought to be doing in space, and more supportive of them.
But preoccupation with entertainment at the expense of real goals is something to watch out for.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I agree with this, but in defense of the insensitive, I think many people (especially young people) have no way to fit a disaster of the scale of this tsunami into their frame of reference.
Humor has always been a way to deal with things you don't understand and can't grasp. In Africa, there are tribes in which the normal response to seeing something unimaginably horrifying - like a pile of dead, decaying human bodies - is to laugh. This is not amusement, it's a reaction to the incomprehensible, a way to deal with it. In the West, there's a veneer of cynicism over this response, but in the end joking about something like this is an acknowledgement that there's really not much else to be done about it (aside from actually donating or dropping everything to fly to the affected areas).
That said, people should be more aware that their offhand comments can seem incredibly insensitive to people who are more directly affected.
Could be actually be possible that after two generations of anti-Nazism and true democratic institutional framework that the Germans have actually changed? No more the violent, bloodlusting Huns screaming into the east to the pounding chords of Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song?
The Americans offered then the opportunity to join in the Iraqi invasion, kill anyone and everyone they want to, set up the most delicious camps, grab all the cheap oil that they want, letting Uncle Sam pick up the whole tab...and they turned it down?
Whatever happened to the good old Germany that we grew up with? Watching Combat on television and The Dirty Dozen at the movies?
Achtung!..you pussies
All nations with any smidgen of self respect has at one point or other partitioned Poland. It's a rite of passage.
Wow, between this and the tsunami comment, Slashot is hitting some new lows. How about them negroes! They sure are funny when they're scared! WTF. Get a life.
I would suggest looking for the beauty in the country you are living in, instead of comparing it to the desirable features of the one you left. Yes, it doesn't have the beaches and sun that Australia has (especially this time of year), I don't know of any place in the world offhand that compares. But try loving what they do have to offer. Take a drive or hike through the black forest, go skiing in the Alps and if the resorts in Germany aren't what you're looking for, Switzerland and Austria are right next door.
I'm Canadian, never been to Germany, never been to Australia (though I would love to visit both places), and have never been to any place that remotely resembles tropical weather. However I have travelled all over my own country and about half of the US, and everyplace you travel to will have something special to offer. You just have to find it, instead of lamenting what was left behind.
This is not a sig.