Space Alert is silly and fun and cooperative. Everyone also is forced to mention Galaxy Trucker as it’s also silly and fun, but the real time nature is quite isolated, and I prefer interactive games. Trading games like Chinatown and Sidereal Confluence often have real time phases for deal-making, of those two Sidereal is the better game by far but Chinatown is the one you’ll actually play. Finally no real time board game list is complete without Captain Sonar, a hyper-competitive 4v4 game of submarine warfare.
If you consider simultaneous turns as a restrained form of real time, then ‘tabletop moba’ Guards of Atlantis 2 is really quite good.
Retention and maintenance is easier than progress. If you get a skill to some level, then stop constructively practicing it, then you’ll allow your ability to slide back a bit but it’ll stay pretty good.
E.g. if you train to run 5k in 15 minutes (vvv hard, will consume much of your life for a long time), then return to a lower volume program, you won’t be able to run as fast but you’ll still be much, much faster than average.
So you prioritise. Pick something to do now, and say ‘I am doing this for June. In July I shall do this other thing.’ Maybe a SMART goal for the month. Stick to your schedule. Once it’s over, don’t forget the skill, but prioritise your new focus.
Having a back-catalog of skills is so much fun. They may only be 80% of what they were but that’s enough for 95% of cases.
Should add that with serious running training it is hard and painful, but more on aggregate. Even when I'm just base building, and maybe doing 1 or 2 'kinda hard but not all out' sessions a week, the accumulated load feels hard.
It's fun to watch numbers go up. No-one thinks that watching numbers go up makes them go up faster. (It probably makes them go up slower in the long run (lol), by encouraging short-term thinking and planning.)
German trains wishing to enter Switzerland need to wait at the border so the DB’s, err, _erratic_ scheduling doesn’t perturb the much more rigorous Swiss system.
My experience of German trains is one train arriving on time, to find my connection is delayed, but actually leaving earlier because the same train 1h before was 54 minutes late and I could get that instead.
> German trains wishing to enter Switzerland need to wait at the border so the DB’s, err, _erratic_ scheduling doesn’t perturb the much more rigorous Swiss system.
I'm rather skeptic of this take. Railway operators provide services by reserving track sections and train stations in specific time windows which take into account travel speed and scheduling. Rail track capacity is typically reserved for periods of over a year. If german trains run on time in Germany and swiss trains run on time in Switzerland, then it sounds like germany's trains being delayed when entering swiss lines is an impedance problem caused by the way the swiss infrastructure manager is handling german trains.
70% of German trains that arrive at their destination are “delayed” (30 min or more).
A train that never arrives is not counted as delayed. About 30% of German trains do not arrive at their destination.
In Switzerland, the stats are single low percentage digits.
After multiple ultimatums, Switzerland stopped allowing German trains into Switzerland. The most popular connection between Switzerland and Germany (Zurich-Munich) has been kept but is now operated by Switzerland even though most of the ride is in Germany.
This is shameful and a lose-lose for all parties, but necessary.
I doubt your stats, where'd you get them from? And there are multiple connections per day from Germany to central Switzerland. Take the Hamburg-Interlaken ICE for example.
From the article: “Mr. Daunt proved his book-selling bona fides as the founder of Daunt Books in London and, more recently, as the executive who rescued Waterstones, Britain’s largest bookstore chain. The hedge fund Elliott Advisors took a majority stake in Waterstones in 2018; the next year it bought Barnes & Noble for $683 million and installed Mr. Daunt, a Cambridge-educated Brit, as its leader. (He is still the managing director of Waterstones; the two chains operate separately.)”
This doesn’t surprise me at all. Waterstones have been pushing the “tat” further from the entrance and really are focused on being what bookstores were pre-Amazon.
My local Waterstones is the last surviving dedicated book store in the city and is really a destination as much as anything else. They run a lot of activities in their coffee shop too (book clubs and such).
I was certain covid would have been the final nail in the coffin but their renewed focus really is working - they’re thriving in a way they haven’t been in 20 years.
Exactly - In this case by tat I mean things like Harry Potter drinking flasks, Hunger Games calendars, and vaguely book-related trinkets that can be sold for under £5.
(The kind of high-margin items that you didn’t come to the shop for and most people won’t buy anyway.)
I don't have hard evidence but I suspect this is more common than you think, it's just we only read about the failures or the aggressive raiding stories (because they make juicier stories).
These funds make more money if the company they attempt to turnaround is a success, but the turnaround strategy tends to be high risk as they load the company with debt. So we mostly hear about the failures.
Further, I'd observe that most of the companies getting bought by funds for turnaround are.. in need of a turnaround. So many of them were on the path to failing if left to their own devices anyhow.
That said there are structural legal/tax issues that benefit "corporate raiders" in these these take-private deals.
In CoL, a few cycle lanes but mainly it's just very quite roads. It works in CoL because motor traffic is so heavily restricted the roads are fairly quiet.
Which is why it's pretty much the safest area to cycle because motorists are primed to expect cyclists on the roads but you only have to travel 2 minutes east and traffic becomes much heavier and more chaotic pretty quickly
