Despite Międzyzdroje (zachodniopomorskie, Poland) lying directly at the seaside, the air quality in winter is so bad it literally irritates the throat and can even give you headaches or make you nauseous, and only directly on the beach can you still breathe fresh air.
The common argument is that people use bad furnaces or burn bad fuel or trash out of poverty, but far too often the actual cause is mentality and not financial issues.
Smog kills around 40,000 Polish people each year. [1] It was reported in 2025 to be 20 times more than in car accidents. [2]
On the bright side, industrial and post-apo art fans can wear breathing masks in Poland without even pretending.
AFAIR, I got refunded the whole tablet price in the end - I think half the price immediately, and the other half a few years later. It doesn't mean others were refunded too, of course. It was long time ago, though, so I may have mixed something up.
It's in a different league as it's a linux phone first and foremost, not degoogled/hardened android, you get full root access as a checkbox in settings that will install terminal app for you to hack to your heart's content, user having root access is not an attack vector for them
I was not asking about having terminal and root access. I was asking about security-wise parity, for example memory protection, full "disk" encryption, permission model, application sandboxing etc. This is the main selling point of GrapheneOS. This and Android application compatibility, but Sailfish OS has its Android compatibility layer too.
Same experience here, though from Sailfish OS run on their first Jolla phone.
Also permission model on Sailfish was much worse than on Android. I didn't use Android apps on Sailfish, though.
I really liked Silica UI, but available apps had much less functionality than their counterparts on Android and iOS. I think that open sourcing Sailfish and Silica would end up better for them.
Nevertheless, I kinda liked the phone, but ultimately went back to Android.
Yup, in Poland, a mobile phone number (pre-paid or not, it doesn't matter) is tied to a PESEL number [1] at the time of purchase. The official justification, as usual, was combating crime, but the end result is a tighter grip on citizens' privacy by the government while spammers and others continue their business as usual.
PSP S.A. is expanding abroad, so perhaps BLIK will be available in more countries in some time: "In September, the first BLIK transaction was made in Slovakia, and BLIK Romania S.A. received authorization from the National Bank of Romania to operate in the country. In November, the Polish Payments Standard transformed into a joint stock company, to support the execution of its strategic goals." [1] [2]
BLIK has one ugly caveat, though: it has no chargeback procedure.
At school (Polish class in Poland) we were always taught to prefer complex and compound sentences over simple ones, because it's more elegant and speaks well the speaker/writer.
It's not pretentious and there's nothing to see through here. This is the preferred style in Poland and it's widely used, especially by the educated people. Just because the sentences aren't simple, doesn't mean they're not informative.
Also, we were taught to prefer compound and complex sentences over simple ones where applicable, not at all costs. For instance, the quoted sentence from NTSB report is a bit too long in my opinion.
"a complex writing style preferred by educated people" - how is that not pretentious?
You started by saying complex sentences should always be preferred, but now you ended by saying "only where applicable" and the sentence under discussion was "too long".
> "a complex writing style preferred by educated people"
This is not a quote of me. Nor is it an honest summary of what I wrote. It also completely ignores the context: the "educated people" were supposed to "see through" - the same people who predominantly prefer the same style. I have also never claimed the style is not used by other people. Quite the opposite. Not to mention, that education until 18 years of age is mandatory in Poland anyway.
> how is that not pretentious?
The straw man you made up definitely is.
> You started by saying complex sentences should always be preferred
I wrote that we were always taught to prefer one over another (there were multiple teachers along the way), not that we were taught to always prefer one over another.
> but now you ended by saying "only where applicable"
There is no "but now".
> and the sentence under discussion was "too long".
Only if you're using technical writing in a situation where you shouldn't be.
Problem is the state of most English education doesn't even teach enough for people to recognize proper unambiguous technical writing, let alone appreciate it or attempt to compose it.
i imagine the language may change that though. With Polish having nominally 300k-400k words compared to English's >1m, i'd guess that it's a lot easier to misdirect and fluff up your writing in English.
It can if you count all the different forms of each word and proper nouns. But this way Polish may have even more words than english, given multitude of different forms. I've never checked that, though.
There's also the tendency in English to make new words out of existing ones to create new meanings, while in Polish we often use multiple separate existing words to create new meanings.
All in all, I believe English has more base forms than Polish.
This sentence isn't written for elegance but for meaning. The formal cause of the accident was the mechanical separation, but that happened for a reason, either mechanical failure (which means a failure in the engineering of the aircraft, which would have to be remedied by new engineering processes) or an assembly failure (which would have to be remedied by new assembly processes). In one sentence, the author drills down to exactly what went wrong that enabled the accident to happen. Identifying that is the first step to remedying it.
Could've been worse. In Korean schools they somehow find the worst, most meandering and pointless examples of English prose and shove them at poor students at exam time to test their "English comprehension" skills, when any reasonable native speaker would've said "Who the fuck writes like this?"
I remember an anecdote from my English teacher where a student went to London, and a taxi driver told her (the student) something along "What a lovely English! It's a shame nobody speaks like that anymore." ;)
What problem? To make sentences like the one from NTSB report quoted here? Well, personally I would've split it and I'm pretty sure my teacher would've asked me to do it too if I were the author. ;)
This is not about "writing to look smart". It's about using elegant style and using the language to it's full potential. There were multiple attempts to strip Polish people of their mother tongue and identity throughout the history, so we were taught to treasure both and use language's full richness. It's also simply nicer to listen to or read richer forms. These are the reasons for why we were told it speaks well of the speaker/writer. Also, elegance does not contradict communicating vital information. It's a false dilemma.
How come? A more fusional language is one where a single word can carry more forms of information where English would need more words (e.g. "my book"). This isn't directly related to how much information you should put in a sentence. OTOH, all languages are recursive which means you can construct arbitrarily long sentences - but you shouldn't, because human cognition has its limits.
In my experience as a speaker of a more fusional language, the sentences are shorter than in English, not longer.
reply