TomK32

Don't overdo with by adding "meticulously maintained, pristine city", I mean okay this might be a side-effect once people start walking more and have the time to look at their environment close up and maybe even thrown their single-use coffee cup into a bin instead of out the car window. European cities were in most of their cores built before the car or didn't allow highways to cut them up, followed by more demolishment for parking space. Add zoning laws that only allow single homes with no business in their center and you get suburbian where you can only escape with a car.

It is a long process, it was in the Netherlands (where it started with campaigns about the number of children killed by drivers (others might say cars, but there's a person driving the car) but will be faster for every other city. I envy Paris for the massive change in a quick time, here in Austria is a fight street after street with cars still cutting through the old town.

You probably wouldn't believe it: But we managed to raise our daughter without having a car. She's now a happy cyclist herself. And in regards to handicaps, a few years ago I broke my hip, nothing a few plates and screws couldn't fix but I wasn't allow to step on the right leg for months. But I was allowed to borrow a recumbent trike, moving the bad leg was fine. and I was able to ride it with just the good leg. Needless to say I didn't loose much musclemass in the bad leg as it was constantly in motion.

It's not about punishing cars for their existence: It's about the massive amount of space they take up. Did you actually watch the GCN video? Have a look again at the bit about the corners that allow cars to go faster but take away space from pedestrians.

GCN, a cycling channel, just released a video on the car-centric thinking that we all have been forced into over the past century https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_4GZnGl55c It took me years go get into a thinking that mobility should be the priority, not cars. Once you do this mental step you can think about who needs mobility but for whatever reason cannot use a car (too young, too old, drunk, etc) and how streets and cities need to be redesigned to slow down cars to make them safer for what many call an indicator for a good cycling infrastructure: women (with kids) on bicycles.

You will be very welcome as an engineer. We do have english speaking countries in the EU: Ireland and Malta have it as their official language but others like The Netherlands will give you not much problem and then there's plenty of cities to look at like Berlin, Vienna, ... Even in the rather small Austrian city of 200k pop where I live I know a South African woman who gets along just fine as English teacher. European cities are becoming the melting pots again they had been before the world wars. Just learn the local language and don't fall into English too often, the natives will do switch to English but I finally got into the habit of having bi-lingual conversations which is great fun.

Just like the markets in the West, the chinese market for EVs is saturated. That's why they have to ship their EVs to Europe before they have a buyer.

Xi the grab hag https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/grab_hag

I couldn't read whether those additional 16% last year (after a pandemic and the unexpected 3-day SMO by Ruzzia in 2022) are just a fluke or way above the e.g 2014-2019 average. Also, how much of those 16% are cheap Ruzzia oil? The drop this year could be explained with Ukraine's successful campaign on Ruzzia's refineries and export bans on some oil products that already have been extended beyond the harvest season. Are we sure China is intentionally building up stockpiles or it is accidentally because it's not able to shift imported raw materials into its stuttering economy?

Just picking one commodity here: Gas of which China now has 23 days worth of storage is ridiculously small compared to the whole year that Austria has in it's storage. Other players like the US have even more natural gas stored, in it's natural habitat below earth and not in facilities that are easy targets for modern missiles.

I understand the danger of mainland China attacking the Republic of China, but it would be much more suicidal for China than Ruzzia's attack on Taiwan. Argentina is mentioned in the article, they plan to drop their own currency for the US dollar, thus no action against the will of Washington will happen.

The Soviet Union was just the same old russian feudalism with a new name tag and leadership. In a sense even modern-day russians are still not emancipated citizens like we are in the West.

Yes, Austria has only a population of 9 million, with 1937 (as per 2015) unsecured railroad crossings with just a sign and no barriers or lights. The number of people being killed in car accidents was close to record lows at 178 last year with 42 of those not using a seat belt. Saving 15~20 lives by upgrading infrastructure is of course a gamble of prioritizing crossings but of course worth it as there's not just those 15~20 people but also their relatives being impacted. We have a lot of rural railroad, something better quarter-mile away is rarely an option.

Some people will even try to cross rails if the gates are down.

There's an Austria paper that looked into the accident cause "speeding" (nicht angepasste Geschwindigkeit) means across the german-speaking countries. The results boiled down to "it depends" on the officer typing in the data as there aren't any reviews or such. There's good data on other accident aspects like the seat-belt-usage you mentioned (and it's shocking how many people die because they are too lazy to use their seat-belt) but those aren't down to subjective judgement on the spot.

Good data is needed as a few accident causes do tend to be common in certain road/location conditions and those can be fixed. For example while the total number of accidents on train crossing is low (15~20 fatalities per year) in Austria, all of them are the driver's fault and almost all (except for massive idiot drivers) can be fixed by installing automatic gates on all crossings.

District heating is common in many northern European cities, even Italy (e.g 55% of households in Turino). The USA has 2500 (as of 2013) such heating and cooling networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating district cooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_cooling

It can be much worse if people have to use computers and of course trust them completely. Just this week I brought five crates of empty beer bottles back, the machine to feed them into didn't work so the cashier had to do it "manually" at the checkout and after a little learning experience and hitting a key 100 times (5*20 bottles) they wanted to give me 85 Euros in return which I refused as it should have been just 24 Euros...

I don't see the harm for start ups to think about their user's rights early on. Better it becomes part of their Startup DNA than having to learn it later and adopt their company.

Especially if they don't give you access to you data (impossible in the EU thanks to the GDPR). They have to be taken to court for this.

Much easier if the Supreme Court gives you at least carte blanche for all your misdeeds while in office.

Ask your parents, spouse, children, co-workers how they'd feel if you died simply because you were to lazy to do just one simple action before driving off into the sunset. I'm pretty sure they don't want you to join the Derek Kieper club https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/seat-belt-advocate-killed/

I can't think of any country that limits registration of older cars, can you?

Seat belts work. Use them. Those won't don't use decimate themselves over time. E.g in Austria of the 178 car occupants killed last year 42 didn't wear a seat belt[0]. Those 23% is far above the 8% that did not use a seat belt in observations[1]. Numbers for other countries are similar or worse.

[0] https://www.bmi.gv.at/202/Verkehrsangelegenheiten/unfallstat... [1] https://www.oeamtc.at/presse/oeamtc-erhebung-jeder-13-pkw-in...

You are almost right with your thinking expect those SUV owners are often also dad and thus the sons have access to far too powerful cars.

Your argument works fine until you remember that distraction, in the form of smartphone-usage during the drive, has risen to one of the top three causes of road accidents.

some exotic cars do, but I was thinking of cars popular with young men who cause senseless accidents by treating cities roads as race tracks. A BMW 3-series is popular with them and is about 5 seconds 0-100.

5 seconds is still too quick in my eyes, the current VW Golf can do this, the Mark 1 took 9 seconds. Why would you need this as a default? If it's an option that you have to toggle and it comes with a visible sign and the data tracker kicking in, that'd be okay.

Less reason for them to accelerate like they do. 0-100 km/h in 5 seconds will kill people in a city if you do it by accident, which already happens.

The speed limiter is enough, I'm sure that insurance companies will soon offer discounts if you submit those speed logs in case of accidents or in general with live-speed-tracking.

The problem though remains: Too much horse power and it's particularly sad with young men not being in full control of those cars causing accidents of all sort. Here's a recent interview with a public prosecutor in Germany: https://archive.is/20240703123415/https://www.sueddeutsche.d...

Even in something boring as programming software for the british Post Office, a scandal that is STILL ongoing, you can mess up not just the software but other people's life if you act like a coward who doesn't own up to the software they write or manage. Gareth Jenkins has just been grilled in the Inquiry and in my eyes insane that courts did allow him as expert testimony on the very software he was working on and responsible for. In a case where the subpostmistress Seema Misra was wrongly jailed WHILE pregant! Other's weren't that luck and at least four committed suicide. Adding to the stupidity of the scandal and continuous incompetence, just last month the Post Office accidentally published a document on its corporate website containing the names and addresses of 555 former sub-postmasters.

Courts have to level up quite a lot if they want to serve justice in cases where software is involved and those working on software need to be encourage to step back, let someone else assess the quality of the software and figure out bugs before courts can give a verdict.

There's plenty to be done mostly in research: Regular checks on every solider after they had a blast that potentially affected their brain. Training can certainly be adapted as well as the gear that protects their heads and brains. I bet there's something of a gradient in the brain damage and not just a single event that causes it to go bad, the ages of those mentioned in the article are all within a decade. Reassigning soldiers earlier in their career to tasks without risk for their brain will save them and their families lots of pain.

Swiss Air is owned by Lufthansa and part of the Star Alliance. Also, being from a small country almost all destinations are outside Switzerland and suffer from whatever care the local handler give to your baggage...

All that research, and a hundred years later it turns out that you need to be born from a very small gene pool to set long distance running records. Shows that your research is crap (or gets trapped in a local maximum) if you don't step back to get a complete picture.

Every modern day Parkrun is organized better by magnitudes. On the other, it's my watch that tells me how far or fast I have to run today.