**It's a Sunday**
*The Legacy of WW2*
The year is 2025, 80 years after World War 2 ended. About 7.000 people of my hometown will spend today Sunday being evacuated from their home, waiting in a school, gym or elsewhere and coming back in the afternoon.
As already several time this year, a dud bomb from WW2 is the reason. As a submarine harbor, the town was bombed quite extensively. In 90 attacks about 44.000 explosive bombs, 900 block busters and half a million incendiary bombs were dropped. About 10% of those were duds.
The obvious ones were deposed immediately after, but thousands buried themselves deep into the ground. You can find unexploded bombs up to 10m deep into the ground.
Even after decades of intense searching, there are still many left. Nobody knows exactly how many are still to be found. A rough estimate is, that there are still about 100 in my hometown alone.
Whenever you want to build something here, you have to ask for an analysis for unexploded ordnance first. This is a major delay and in complicated areas can take weeks or months.
If areal photography hints on possible duds, an exploratory digging starts. If they find something, the disposal team comes on a Sunday.
Why on a Sunday? To keep the economic impact low, they do it on a non-business day. They need to clear a lot of area. And it is good they do, because not always a disposal is possible and the bomb has to be blown up.
And sometimes the disposal team never comes home ever again.
Whenever you read: "The war has ended" **that is a lie.** The killing may stop but the dying and suffering doesn't.
That part of the war will drag on for at least some decades.
Some areas from World War One (110 years past) are still unsafe.
**War is hell...**
How do I notice that I get old?
I am annoyed that most tutorials come as videos and not a document with screenshots 😏.
**dot.com Flashback**
The current AI financing environment gives me some serious dot.com flashbacks.
In 1999 another company wanted to discuss buying my company. We were both selling Internet access, building web pages and online shops, and doing what was then considered “cutting edge” technology.
We already had some commercial ties with them, and they had just been bought by a large investor. After that, they approached us to see whether we would be willing to join the club. Because of those existing ties, we sent two of the five owners to the meeting. I was one of them.
That meeting turned out to be one of the most surreal experiences of my life. They wanted to buy us to **increase** their cash burn rate, since, as they explained, “the valuation of a company is higher if it burns more cash.” My comment that we were actually earning money was met with: “I guess you can fix that.”
When I asked about their concept for integrating our company, their reply was (and I am not exaggerating): “Here you see our current org chart and as you notice, we have two free slots there and there.” That was the entire plan. They only had positions for the two people sitting in the room. We were not a big shop, just twenty-something employees, but this was utterly absurd.
The meeting went on like this for another hour. Afterwards we decided not to pursue the talks any further. We rated the chances of ever seeing the money they promised as pretty slim. They wanted to pay in stock with a two-year mandatory holding period.
It did not surprise us that they folded less than twelve months later. Their CEO, who didn't attend that meeting because we were too small a fish, eventually ended up in prison for an impressive list of crimes.
I notice in a lot of discussions that I need to write down how I proceed when something new or revolutionary is announced in the press or the internet. So here it comes....
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