Lemmilicious

I’ll express my last bit of disagreement with your reasoning and then I’ll probably leave this argumentation, but I will read if you choose to respond. This is not what cost means, you are basically saying that your gut tells you it should be cheaper without any supportive arguments. If e.g. the train requires more energy to run faster, that alone could make it more costly, even if it has a higher capacity. Since neither one of us seems to have idea of the actual costs of running trains, I don’t think we’ll get anywhere with this!

Is it really? Because that claim goes against my intuition so if it’s true I would be happy to get more details! But what you say doesn’t quite make sense to me, sorry if I seem pedantic: transporting people faster is not the same as transporting more people. You transport more people per unit time, but not necessarily in total. I also don’t see how faster trains need less staff. When you say it’s cheaper, do you also take into account investment cost, or do you neglect those and just mean operating costs?

I don’t disagree with you, I didn’t mean to say that there’s no way of HSR being good, just that maybe we’re not doing it quite right! Maybe just fixing pricing would be possible, I don’t know what. I also don’t know if they actually got rid of the old tracks or just of the train route. I just want both HSR and the old trains back haha!

That’s really a great article, thanks for the link!

Still, there’s plenty of criticism in the article I linked that is not touched on, I hardly think it becomes irrelevant by reading Jon Worth’s writing! Even with his proposals I’m really not sure if we would get back the cheap and still relatively fast connections that have been removed. To me there’s not a clear benefit to getting rid of the old “low-speed” rail even if we fix SNCF.

So the article is very long so let me TL;DR a little. It mentions that when high speed rail is build, existing low-speed rails are often removed. Those removes routes are a little slower but often MUCH cheaper. I would say, like the author, that more expensive trains that are a little faster doesn’t rhyme well with “let people go fast”. He also has examples of night trains being removed in favour of a high speed rail, which hardly is a time-save if you count sleeping at night! Great examples in the article.

High speed rail doesn’t have to hurt low-speed rail, it just has the way we’ve been doing it in Europe.

Haha I’m scared of sounding like I don’t like high speed rail, which I do! I love trains in general, I’m interrailing right now! Buuut I felt this was a relevant place to link this fascinating article (slightly click-baity headline) about how high speed rail in Europe is actually not constructed in a very good way, because it ends up eliminating many of the positive sides with the European railway network: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2013/12/high-speed-trains-are-killing-the-european-railway-network/

Edit: fixed typo

Complimenting the body is not meant to communicate neglected wits, but that doesn’t mean it never does. I had a friend who all their life received compliments for their body only, and not for anything about their personality. Even though I agree that their body was inherent part of who they were, it’s hard to blame them for feeling like their personality was bland and irrelevant, and that this feeling got reinforced by receiving more complements about their body.

I have a FP4 and I’m very happy with it! It’s a little chunkier than my last phone, but I think it works great. I haven’t needed to repair it yet, but just knowing that I can is awesome. I never was one for the absolute cutting edge of smartphones, so I can’t really tell you how it compares to those, but the camera is more than enough, and everything feels as new as it needs to be!

I had some issues with occasional ghost touches before, as someone else mentioned, but they seem to (finally) have patched them out just a couple of weeks ago :D

Very on-point critiques of Europe, if we don’t better ourselves it will not only be hard to get other parts of the world to take us seriously, but we will also allow a lot of nasty shit to happen.

Speed Racer (2008)! The Wachowski sisters directed it after the Matrix trilogy, and the silly and over-the-top aesthetics seem to have put of many, but I think it’s a genuinely fun movie with great themes and some awesome emotional moments.

My impression is that the hope is it will stop them from doing EEE on us

I started swaying towards defederating after reading this article, maybe you’d like to take a look and see what you think? It argues much better than I ever could.

I mean maybe, but I can’t help to feel a little like this is optimistic speculation, while I’ve read very well-written arguments for blocking threads.net that seem less (albeit still) speculative. I just don’t want to lose what we have, and if we really want to keep growing then we can do so without Meta.