All messengers are bad in some way or another.

iMessage lacks platform universality. Telegram doesn’t believe in decency — any message can be deleted forever, for all sides. Signal is badly designed. WhatsApp doesn’t respect privacy.

Email, however, is universal, honest, unintrusive, simple, and as private as one wants it to be.

Light switches should always be inside the room that the lights are being switched in. Letting outsiders interfere in internal affairs is never a good idea.

The newspaper is the worst content format out there. It’s impossible to read without crumbling its paper and getting furious about its massive size and idiotic foldedness. Newspapers should not exist in the modern world.

I despise cancel-culture: responding to every mishap is a path to isolation.

Dialog between adversaries should never stop, as it is the only way to find a solution that works well for both sides.

Having a hand dryer and no paper towels in a restroom is a slap in the visitor’s face. There are hundreds of use cases for paper towels, the most basic being blowing your nose.

Oh, and in some cases a hand dryer physically can’t dry one’s hands:

As the UK is about to leave the EU, I have updated my European diagram to reflect the new situation. I also added the Council of Europe for good measure.

Oh, and there’s a version in French as well:

LoungeKey is a way to access airport lounges for free if you have a special bank card. It also happens to be the filthiest and sneakiest scam artist that I know. Staff from lounges participating in their program constantly lie and should be ashamed of themselves.

In London Luton Aspire Lounge, after staff swiped my card several times, I was told that it wasn’t accepted. Then LoungeKey tempted to charge £150 for a free service.

After visiting a lounge in Moscow Vnukovo airport, where staff were overenthusiastic about telling me that my visit is free, I was charged $96 from a location in an American forest five days later.

All of this happened despite me never confirming any transactions in any way.

Don’t use LoungeKey or any of the lounges affiliated with them.

We could all start working on a solution to make sure we never have to cut nails again. The brightest students would be creating new ways of genetically modifying ourselves, the industry would soar with competition, famous investors would buy stocks.

But no one is really tired of having to cut nails, so we just make a good nail clipper instead.

Humans solve pressing problems first, and once they’re solved, the new pressing problems are those that we considered non-problems the day before. The world improves one little bit at a time, and this is fantastic.

The nail problem will come back to haunt us in several hundred years.

When something seems like a solution to a problem, look beyond.

In the summer of 2019 many protesters in Moscow were sued by the city transport authorities and a restaurant for making them work harder (!). This seemed like complete nonsense until I understood the wider problem. Most Russians hadn’t yet ditched the bug of believing that the Tsar or the Party will fix their problems. Thus they believed that the only person that can solve the problem is someone from the government. The government, of course, became tired of this: solving every problem is impossible.

So the government took advantage of the popularity of opposition leaders and the protesters following them. These people were fined high sums for minor misdemeanors. Most people in Russia haven’t crowdfunded anything, so by engaging in a nationwide discourse, the state created a situation in which people would impulsively help them, by crowdfunding. People learned about crowdfunding and later used it for personal matters. Russians became richer and Russia became better. This is especially noteworthy because Russia established a new crowdfunding law on January 1, 2020.