Deutsche Bahn has gone from not perfect to straight up disastrous and antisocial in the past years. They use scamming approaches more misleading than airline's and in cases straight up lie. It's rightfully headed for insolvency despite billions of wasteful and wrongful state funding. I hope that company goes under as soon as possible. Any other solution to the railway system management is better than DB. DB is not going to make it
Deutsche Bahn ist anything but wasteful, it's underfunded to the tune of tens of billions per year. Cleaning out trees more up to ten meters away from railways was seen as to expensive, now 6m tall trees fall in them all the time during storms. Having two railways next to each other was seen as unnecessary, now we have no backups when one fails.
Swiss railway is seen as the ideal DB should strive for, but fact is that Switzerland invests more than double per capita into its rail infrastructure. German stinginess now compounded over decades, and that's not the fault of management.
Underfunded and wasteful are not opposites. When there is not enough money to do things properly there is often a lot of duct tapping going on which waste available resources without fixing anything. There is scarcely anything more expensive in government than saving money.
> They use scamming approaches more misleading than airline's and in cases straight up lie.
Would you mind sharing some examples? My only complaints with DB are cancellations and delays. Well, the ticketing might be a bit confusing the first time you realize "ticket" and "seat reservation" are two completely independent entities. Similarly, rules for which train you're allowed to take might be a bit confusing. But I wouldn't call it scamming.
After privatization, the Deutsche Bahn became private enterprise and is now 100% owned by the German state. As such, insolvency isn't going to happen. Though it would be funny.
If a company fails this hard, the solution isn't to feed it more government money to prop it up. It's to let it fail and rebuild from scratch.
Blacklist everyone who was involved above a certain rank. Put together an entirely new structure. The only real way to get rid of this kind of rot is to make the consequences of dysfunction hit.
The DB is and always was fully owned by the government, this is not the usual case of "dumbass executives mess things up".
Unfortunately, the DB first got hit by Thatcherite neoliberalism in the early 90s that led to "unprofitable" things like switches, railyards or lesser-used routes to be torn down and the real estate sold off (to prepare for a privatization that THANK GOD never happened), and then we got 16 years of Conservative traffic/infrastructure ministers whose job priority was to funnel money to Bavarian highways [1], not towards railways.
Unfortunately, while the left wing loves to prune its ranks in purity tests (partially because its voters demand accountability), the Conservatives have a solid "better dead than red" voter base.
I use Apple Watch Ultra constantly, it’s extremely worth it to me. The charging is annoying, but otherwise, the watch is amazing.
It keeps me on track every day. I have recurring alarms for my daily and weekly meetings/calls, and for life things like when it is time to pack up and get the kids out time to close things down and go to bed. Each morning I also set alarms for critical events that day. Basically I outsource the “scheduling” part of my brain to the watch and just focus on whatever I’m doing.
I also use it for a stop watch, cooking times, etc. I use it for GPS while hiking and biking. My phone running AllTrails can’t track a 25-mile bike ride through the mountains without dying, but the watch doesn’t even break a sweat.
Beyond that, it’s a great backup phone for when I leave my phone on the table or in the other room, etc. I also bind the button on the side to the flashlight feature, which I use almost every day. It’s not as strong as a phone flashlight but it’s instantly available and more hands-free. It’s so helpful for dealing with crying kids in the middle of the night. It’s nice when I don’t have a hand to hold a phone flashlight, like when I take the trash cans to the curb at night, etc.
Overall I get tons of use out of my Apple Watch every day.
My suggestion would be to start with a refurbished or last-gen normal watch on sale. See if they like it. Upgrade to Ultra a few years later if they do.
It’s a hit or miss product category. My wife and I like ours and most of my friends like theirs, but I have a couple friends who got a smartwatch and then never liked it. Would be a shame to buy an expensive one for someone who doesn’t even like it.
For instance I never liked the default band, but the Milanese loop is great. My wife never wore her series 5 but I got her a series 11 which is a few grams lighter and thinner and she wears it all the time now.
I was on the fence about getting an ultra but for some reason never liked the size and shape (big rectangle with a huge crown bulge) since I have small wrists. I ended up getting a garmin epix pro at a big discount which is slightly smaller and round.
At the end of the day they are great if you want to collect data on yourself. Even though my wife didn’t like her series 5 the hypertension features were worth trying a newer one.
It is easy to suggest to fly less but it is going to be impossible to convince society where core values include agressive "extra" consumption, which in turn is the backbone of the world's current economy. Flying is one of top "extra" consumption types out there. I know many people are trying to convince people of that, but the society is moving in the opposite direction - bigger cars (both us and eu), more travel. Maybe arguments used currently are not convincing enough? I mean, sure, keep trying and you will obviously reach a certain 0.00x% of the population, but that's not really going to make any difference
Just tax everything the amount it costs to clean up the pollution it causes, then use that money to clean up the pollution, now everything will have the correct price including externalities
School was hell on earth for me. Openly racist kids (I'm mixed race wo I was more or less not as strongly affected, but we had one kid of certain heritage that was being harassed on an hourly base, think of south park Cartman multiplied by 10) with teachers never doing anything about it, borderline maniac kids that would attack anyone randomly, teachers not caring. Sure, nowadays it's different, but for me school has leas to me not exploring some of my personality traits and basically being afraid of people and disassociating with society on a way of 'them vs me'. Sure, I'm talking about 20% of "bad" characters, but when 20% does this and the rest kind of pretends it's normal, you get the idea of what "normal" is in the society. But, being honest. I have to admit that having that experience gave me the understanding that what society nowadays "tries to pretend it is" is just hiding it's true face, because only in school people are actually honest and sincere. So in this sense, I understand that going to school to get to know the true face of our society is definitely useful for individuals, but it causes overall harm to society as it contributes to it's separation
Is it just me or are the news lately really not nice? Less free internet, funding cuts for science (including NASA and this example), the economy is worse than it used to be (as far as I remember), general mental health of the population is tanking,almost every aspect of usual life is being exploited by apps for micropayments, wealth gap grows, I come gap, well, grows too, but everything is impossibly expensive for every class.. are we going into the "great recession" version of the dark ages? I mean, it's not it right?
But I have to agree, I do feel bad for the animals, but as someone who has participated in certain academic activities I am convinced that the scrutiny that the ethical committees have put the research through for this should ensure more than enough reasons for this research. Also. What happens with the monkeys? Do they send them to the zoo? I don't think so
Inevitable conclusion to conservative control in the US. But hey, at least you can call people n**r on Twitter without getting banned so all is right in the world for some people.
I do believe that you are writing the truth, but it is extremely unbelievable to me. To be honest, I've never been pulled over for traffic violations, but bribing officers with gift cards being "common" sounds like it could lead to some really bad place. It's a good thing it hasn't yet. Bribes have many drawbacks compared to traffic tickets.
Most of the released videos show speedboats without fishing equipment. For all intents and purposes, these speedboats might be medevac or just joyrides, but I would strongly count that they were fairly confidently related, to, uhm, the groups that were being referenced as being targeted officially. The sea allows for quite a bit more clearance regarding these things, mistakes can still happen, but are less likely than on densely populated areas on land.
Anyways these strikes don't change the big picture in terms of movement of the things that they move - the things that they move comes in on airplanes, trucks, containers, through tunnels, in pockets of people arriving, even in fishing/leisure boats. For all I know they could be easily moving it using homing pigeons. And you can pass the pigeons through the gaps in the wall. Sure, not as efficient as by speedboats,but the demand will make stuff move. The solution to this problem is complex, but solving it in the society is easier than trying to stop the flow... I mean, people would just start producing locally then. Either with the groups of people that are being targeted or without.
It seems as though part of the rationale may relate to ‘defunding’ the Venezuelan government (as the current administration seems to disfavor them), which appears to be deriving a significant amount of revenue (which may not be going to the treasury) from granting ‘license’ for these traffickers to operate from their coast.
The problem with data center water usage is that it is unnecessary from the PR point of view. Data centers can run on air cooling just as good, but more expensive. For all I know, we could also do just as good without data centers, like we did 20 years ago.
With agriculture, water usage is necessary as eating is not something optional and everyone needs to eat to survive. From the PR point of view, of course. We couldn't live without agriculture, as we had agriculture 20 years ago too.
Golf courses are unrelated as they don't use nearly as much water as agriculture or data centers.
PR is everything, the narrative is what makes the difference. There is a lot of hypocrisy in this field, which is why I try to avoid it, but there is also some truth in it - we really didn't need that many data centers 20 years ago.
Golf course water usage vastly dwarfs data center water usage. Google used something like 1 billion gallons a year for their DCs. Single golf courses in arid regions can use upwards of a hundred million gallons a year, and in those areas there can be dozens of courses. It's not even close in terms of water usage.
Golf courses in the USA used about 2.1 billion gallons of water per day circa 2004 [1]. In other words, the annual usage of Amazon's datacenters per the article, 7.7 billion gallons, is less than the amount of water used on just American golf courses in four days.
> Data centers can run on air cooling just as good, but more expensive
"More expensive" means spending more on air conditioning. Ergo more electricity used, higher electricity demand, more natural gas burned and carbon emissions, higher consumer power prices. So a different kind of PR disaster.
The difference in energy usage won't be noticeably higher for PR purposes. Of course, the difference comes at a price, cutting which is the main incentive for water usage.
It looks 3d-printed (edit: confirmed- there's footage of it being 3d printed on the FAQ page). I'd expect a process with a better finish for the final product, but who knows with products like this that are in beta.
Found this sort of funny too, from the FAQ:
> Is this production ready?
> No. The Roc Camera is currently in beta and we suggest you do not use it for anything important at the moment. We're open to feedback and suggestions. Please reach out to us at support@roc.camera.
My XP system was my best ever system. I had so many things in it. I still have my old XP laptop, it still works but I can connect it to the internet. Even when I do, usually browsers don't show anything properly anymore because the last xp supporting versions are from I think 2016-2018? Not sure about that one. But I love my XP computer. I wish there was a way to completely move the system to a virtual machine.
