Tim

Those of us in Eastern Europe long knew that Rutte was an odious piece of shit who blocked Schengen membership to Romania/Bulgaria for years to pander to the racists who elected him, so hopes that he’s suddenly turned into a good guy just pretending to lick Trump’s ring seem misplaced.

Pictures of pretty windmills and bike lanes do much to whitewash the fact that Dutch politics and politicians are as horrible as anywhere’s.

Tbf, since they moved to WearOS Galaxy Watch always chews through the battery for a day or two after an upgrade, and then returns to normal. I presume it’s doing a load of background app refreshes/optimisations after the update.

They’re labelled “oxygen removers”, so I rather assume that’s what they’re for. Dessicant is something else entirely.

I own a property & live part of the year in Thailand, and have worked in China for a decade - I don’t need grandma to teach me to suck ants. Amazingly, in all that time I’ve discovered that a single layer of plastic and a bag clip is, in fact, entirely adequate to keep both humidity and ants out of food.

If this helps Asia get off its addiction to wrapping absolutely everything in about 5 layers of plastic, there may be an upside here.

(For the uninitiated: if you buy a packet of biscuits in Europe, you’ll get a cardboard box, maybe one interior wrap of plastic, and the biscuits. The same packet of biscuits in China will see every two biscuits wrapped in its own sealed plastic bag. Each of those will have a small plastic bag of “oxygen remover” for God knows what reason. The bags will all then be carefully nestled into a thick plastic tray. The whole lot will then get another layer of plastic wrapped around it. Everything is like this there (and most of South East Asia in my experience) - it’s genuinely nuts.)