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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."
I don't see us being particularly enthusiastic about getting back to nature inside a large tin can. It lacks a certain crucial essence of naturism
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
. .
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.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
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