donjoe

... throw universities and schools into the pool also and you might finally get something which 'just works'.

Difficult question: how do you make people in power agree on a solution? Not even universities managed so far to standardize their IT infra.

Germany is a country where one city orders would new trains which would eventually crash into the next city's platform due to different platform dimensions [0]...

[0] https://rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/duesseldorf/duesseldorfer-r...

I always rent through some sort of AAA (automobile club). Almost each country does have a similar organization.

I do mostly rent my cars through ADAC (German AAA) which usually comes with unlimited miles, no excess insurance(s), young driver benefits, free additional driver, ... and a hotline which just 'works':

Hertz once charged a pretty extra on a prepaid rental. One call to ADAC complaining about the extra charge and I had my money back a week later.

The car reminds me a lot of the Twike 5 [0] which - besides being all electric - can be pedaled, too.

[0]: https://twike.com/twike-5/twike-5/

Now take into account electricity costs. Where I live, running a Lenovo constantly @10w for a year would cost me $30. Then you avg the remaining lifetime of your laptop (5yrs) and the time you spent setting it up and you will find out, a $5 droplet is a cheaper option ;-)

Depends on what you call 'local'. Up until now, eating wild mushrooms and boars in the south of Germany is not considered healthy due to Caesium-137 emitted by the Chernobyl-accident decades ago [0].

Each shot wild boar needs to be tested before you are actually allowed to eat it.

[0] https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...

Firefox seems to be missing some features (such as RTX support) which makes it hard for jitsi devs to get it up and running. They seem to have gotten close though: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758#issuecomment...

I wonder how Oktoberfest will turn out this year. It's like 6 million people coming here each year to share all kinds of things for 16 days. It wouldn't surprise me if the city would at one point decide to cancel it for 2020.

Construction usually starts in the beginning of July. They'll have to get to a conclusion at one point in the near future.

It is all about trying to avoid having a broken/breaking wind turbine. A spinning wind turbine falling apart is no fun for bystanders involved [0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nSB1SdVHqQ

In Germany, a km of Autobahn costs ~10M € which is around 16M €/mile [0].

An Autobahn built in/towards a city tend to get way more expensive.

[0] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/bundesregierung-p...

Rainer Moormann's [0] recent statement concerning current nuclear costs Germany is facing in a single case:

" Here an info about #NuclearWaste. A particularly bad kind are the 900,000 HTR-balls from Hamm and Jülich. It is being considered to export them to the USA against the resistance of the ecosystem. Would cost about 1 billion €, including transportation. From the globes, 4.4 TWh, i.e. 0.15% of the German nuclear power was produced. If disposal would be generally so expensive, we would have 700 billion €, but even with LWR=factor 5 cheaper (more realistic) we would end up with 6 times what is available (24 billion €) Addendum: In the USA the graphite of the spheres is to be gasified and the CO2 is to be released into the atmosphere together with the radioactive C14. It's a military facility, they're allowed to do that. In the EU this would be excluded in the civilian sector. But it makes disposal cheaper. Here detailed information on the Jülich spherical castors radientelex.com/Stx_18_748-749... There are a total of 453 Castors with balls. The castors are however smaller than LWR castors (25 t instead of 120 t) One more addendum: The acquisition costs of the 455 castors alone were almost as high as the value of the electricity generated with the balls. And one more thing: The transport is to be carried out by an armed special ship, some dozens of trips would be necessary " [1]

(sorry, dirty twitter unroll & deepl translation)

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Moormann [1] https://twitter.com/MoormannRainer/status/120112832873803776...

Edit: Typo

My favourite German expression which doesn't exist in English is still "Ohrwurm". It refers to a catchy song/tune stuck in someone's mind [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm

Apparently, the avg cyclist in the city pedals at 50W to move forward. Now, imagine you'd have to power your USB charger at 20W at an 80% efficiency factor (which is what current high-end hub dynamos manage regarding efficiency):

Your avg city biker will only have left half of his pedal power to move his bike across town.

I recently came across a quite new rim dynamo [1] which seems to have bearings that last for ~15.000km which might be a real alternative to hub dynamos regarding efficiency. Never had the chance to try one so far since my hub dynamo is still going strong.

[1] http://www.velogical-engineering.com/velogical-felgendynamo-...

I think this car will seriously hurt the car insurance industry. Just imagine a car that cannot get scratches and/or mailbox dents which cost thousands of dollars in repair by simply... not colouring the car and making the surface more scratch-resistant. Awesome!

As a fellow bike-communter myself I had exactly the same thoughts regarding pedestrian safety though.

Germans pay rent on a per month basis. The prices mentioned are in €/sqm/month.

I hope you see your point of argument regarding weather conditions: just because you aren't able to deal with the circumstances doesn't mean that everyone else needs to be forced into car/climatized shadowy areas.

The article is about giving space to -all- participants. Currently we highly prioritize cars due to arguments like the weather. As pointed out, weather is not an issue for many folks out there.

Been in these temps. Not in Australia though so can't talk about UV protection. Sunscreen helped me in other environments though.

Doesn't 'Tour down under' happen during Australian summer months? Somehow they manage, too.

Yah... Bad weather isn't an argument though.

I'm faster with my bike no matter the weather. Especially when it's snowing outside. Gosh, snow slows cars down massively. I love this time of the year: no one tends to speed any more since drivers are afraid of crashing their cars.

Get yourself a Bullitt [1].

For your grandma you might consider a three-wheeled version of a bicycle.

My cousin's granddad stopped cycling in the city at the age of 94 since he had problems getting off the bike. He got himself a home trainer and is doing 10k/day at home now. He's turning 96 in a few days.

[1] http://www.larryvsharry.com/

Everytime I read about glasses I have to think about the Luxottica-Monopoly which kind of controls most of the market and prices of glasses/lenses.

https://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-glass...

Where do you store your car?

Assuming your car takes up 12sqm * 2m I assume you'd find plenty of space to store some panties replacing your wet ones ;)

Momondo.com does it, Cheaptickets.de as well.

Whenever I talk to my friends from the States I get the feeling no one compares flight prices. Most of them book with 'their' fav airline of choice without comparing different options.

I wouldn't say it's per se wrong. The tax is based on a per liter basis and not on a per distance/liter basis. If you'd want to tax CO2 emissions, Diesel would need a higher tax rate than gas since it'll emit more CO2 per burned liter.

... whereas less CO2 emissions caused by Diesel engines is a misconception, too.

Diesel comes with a higher energy density which means there are more CO2 emissions per burned liter of Diesel in comparison to gas.

Burning a liter of Diesel emits 2.6kg of CO2, gas 'only' emits 2.3kg of CO2 [1].

Plus, a Diesel engine is heavier compared to a gas engine with comparable specs.

[1] https://www1.wdr.de/wissen/technik/kohlenstoffdioxid-sprit-1...

Similar to this map?

https://ss2.climatecentral.org

Does your car parking cost as much as renting a flat/sqm? I bet it does not.

Where I live, parking space costs you about 15€/sqm/month on a single floor/no floor since it's 'public space'. A flat is avg. 22€/sqm/month and buildings in general come with 6 floors: we're closer to 6*22€/sqm/month for living space...

I bet he/she's talking about Houten:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFEfr7Amn6U

... until a service reaches a certain level of operation costs, a switch to other, more efficient technologies will be enforced by management.

Nicely put! ;)

The avg. speed in London for example is already down to 19km/h due to traffic jams. I don't see a problem with setting it to 20. You'll even reduce the chance of traffic jams by lowering speed limits. There's quite a pleasant traffic simulator to play with: http://traffic-simulation.de/

https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/37200/umfrage...

Traffic in cities should be remodeled.

Currently, approx. 7/8 of public space is used by cars. Most of the time they're stuck in traffic or 'dead capital' while in parking mode. Furthermore, where I live, the price to park a car is ~10 times cheaper than to rent (per sqm) and highly subsidized by tax payers.

I wonder why we do protect our workers but pedestrians and cyclists/scooters just don't matter. Have you ever seen a working environment where an object with 2-40tons is allowed to freely move next to a person at a speed of 50km/h and more? I'm glad we do have rules in working enviromnents. It would be great to see the same on roads as well.

I'm all for 'shared roads' with a speed limit reduced to 20km/h which makes it unnecessary for cars to overtake scooters/cyclists. We wouldn't have to build new infrastructure but could simply use the existing one. I could imagine we could even remove most of our traffic lights replaced by roundabouts.

In the long run I hope to see less cars overall and people switching to smaller means of transportation. Moving 2 tons to buy a 500g loaf of bread is just insane.

If you really want to start learning about systems, go for Incose's setup: https://www.incose.org/

You might find some of their handbooks online free of charge (maybe not the one most up-to-date).

There is a really good book written by Haberfellner called 'Systems Engineering' which to my knowledge is only available in German. The book is awesome though: https://www.amazon.de/Systems-Engineering-Grundlagen-Reinhar...

Oh, it seems like they finally managed to get it translated - apparently available in July this year: https://www.jpc.de/jpcng/books/detail/-/art/reinhard-haberfe...

I did my Master's degree in Systems Engineering based on both Haberfellner and Incose's handbook. It's been great learnings which have been useful ever since helping me to separate all kinds of problems as both a software developer and a systems architect.

So, enough said - separate and conquer ;)