The question is rather “how many people have a metro station within walking/biking distance” and “how many long-haul trips do you need to make”.

Over here we don’t set aside half a day (or more) to to drive to walmart to buy groceries for a fortnight, we pick stuff up as we need it when we’re out, anyway. Dropping into the supermarket to grab some things is like a five minute detour if you know what you need and where it is. You can spend the metro ride thinking about what to cook, buy what you need, then get going.

According to statistics commute times in Europe are actually slightly longer than in the US, but that doesn’t take into account that combining trips is much easier over here and that riding public transport gives you time to, whatnot, knit, biking or walking counts as exercise, while driving a car counts as, at best, nothing, at worst, the road rage will ruin your day.

I’m not saying that you, personally, can flip a switch and make it work for you, on the contrary: The reason that you’re not doing it organically is because the infrastructure where you live is right-out designed to not make it work for you. What I suggest is that instead of saying stuff like “It cannot be the case that Europeans are living better lives, they must be imagining things” you say, to your compatriots, “How are those bloody europoors better at this we are supposed to be the best let’s figure out how to beat them”. Or at least that’s how I imagine motivating Americans looks like.

but that’s just not feasible for real working class Americans in the economic system as it is currently

Nothing to do with economics, everything to do with city planning and resource allocation. Public transit and bikes are a bad option in the US because the transit is completely underfunded, “only poor people take the bus”, and bike paths, even pedestrian paths (if they even exist) are sent on detours around car infrastructure instead of cutting through everything.

And then you have to juggle picking up your child from childcare, etc with is ridiculous without a car.

My mum did just fine first coming by with the bike, putting me on the back seat, then swinging by the supermarket, groceries in the front basket, later on coming by with the bike, me riding along on my own, still swinging by the supermarket. We were driving on calm backstreets and through a park which was actually the most direct route, much more direct than with a car as you’d have to get onto the collector, first. Got more than one kid to wrangle? Put them in a trailer, or get a suitable cargo bike. They can even have seatbelts.

No, you don’t need a warehouse full of washing machines in every neighbourhood. People don’t shop for washing machines daily. People don’t need cars to shop for them, either, delivering bulky stuff makes a ton of sense. Groceries? Wherever you were that day, a supermarket should only be like a two or three minutes detour.

And it’s not like European cities didn’t go down the car-centric route, mind you. Difference being we realised it’s a stupid idea.

Just because you don’t know them doesn’t mean they’re obscure. They were even broadcasting over the air back when that was still relevant.

Let me wikipedia that for you.

“left-center” is likely to be US brainrot, though, everything left of Nixon is far-left to them.

Nothing wrong with being a peasant, in this context: History is full of peasant revolts. People in the European middle ages were perfectly aware of how the system was stacked against them. Arguably, more than they’re now.

centralised democracy

I think you mean democratic centralism.

“Centralised democracy” I think would make sense when contrasting parliamentarian vs. direct democracy. None of the ML parties ever implemented democratic centralism but bureaucratic centralism (ie. party leaders decide, base follows). It was never intended to be an organisation principle for a whole country, just a party, OTOH it’s a neat way to dress up autocracy as democracy so of course it’s been done plenty of times.

Lenin described the SPD as democratically centralist and well, yes, maybe back then. The structures are still in place but the whole party is paralysed when it comes to making decisions so in the end the Seeheimer rule, i.e. the neoliberal wing. It’s a rather perverse situation: An actually still lefty base, or at least union people, following a neoliberal vanguard with red paintjob.

As a lemm.ee user, you should be perfectly aware that if Ukraine is anyone’s proxy, then of Estonia: Ukraine is following Estonian doctrine on how to deal with Russia to a t.

Austrian. S&T bought Kontron and rebranded.

That’s not big guns this is the big gun. Cutting the US off from our goods, capital and service markets, banning them from state contracts, suspending their intellectual property rights, such stuff. Annex 1 has the juicy bits.

Application would of course be targeted, e.g. hitting all of Peter Thiel’s businesses at the same time.

And it’s always land, isn’t it. Inheriting some land, in this day and age, is worth much less than a good education.

Inheriting industries is much more problematic and can be solved, completely without reference to skin colour, by taxation. To fund the previously mentioned education.

We already can detect direction of infrared radiation, it’s called being warm on one side but not the other. Technically also possible by, say, lying half-way under a blanket and half-way not, but sensory integration takes care of the ambiguity.

More interestingly, did you know we can see the polarisation of light?

Nope. Or at least not necessarily.

The ranking that generally gets cited to that end judges universities by research output, which is generally not what you’re looking for when you’re looking for a good education – you want a university that’s good at teaching, not good at producing papers and citations. You want a professor that’s not busy producing papers, because they were hired to produce papers, you want one that actually teaches.

It’s also slanted heavily in favour of Anglo countries when it comes to looking at the “producing papers” metric alone: Pretty much all other countries produce the bulk of their papers at research institutes, which don’t show up in the list because they’re not universities. If they were included IIRC Max Planck would top the list. Granted, that’s also to a large degree because they’re absolutely massive, a large number of institutes under a common roof.

I was going to add a jab at the Brits but then thought “nah, they’re going to do that themselves, much more effective that way”.

Ryanair has no plans to introduce them. (sorry for the metro link).

Also Ireland kind of gets a pass they don’t have a rail link to anywhere. A Dublin-Holyhead tunnel would definitely be a good idea.

The lengths the US will go to to avoid building high-speed rail.

So, real talk: How far away is Israel from a civil war?

Meanwhile Germany “unwaveringly supports” this.

Meanwhile, the actual German position:

Israel has now fully blocked the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza for over fifty days. Essential supplies are either no longer available or quickly running out. Palestinian civilians - including one million children –face an acute risk of starvation, epidemic disease and death. This must end. We urge Israel to immediately re-start a rapid and unimpeded flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza in order to meet the needs of all civilians. During the last ceasefire, the UN and INGO system was able to deliver aid at scale. The Israeli decision to block aid from entering Gaza is intolerable. Minister Katz’s recent comments politicising humanitarian aid and Israeli plans to remain in Gaza after the war are unacceptable – they harm prospects for peace. Humanitarian aid must never be used as a political tool and Palestinian territory must not be reduced nor subjected to any demographic change. Israel is bound under international law to allow the unhindered passage of humanitarian aid.

Humanitarians must be able to deliver aid to those who need it most, independent of parties to the conflict and in accordance with their humanitarian principles. Israel must ensure unhindered access for the UN and humanitarian organisations to operate safely across Gaza. Hamas must not divert aid for their own financial gain or use civilian infrastructure for military purposes.

We reiterate our outrage at recent strikes by Israeli forces on humanitarian personnel, infrastructure, premises and healthcare facilities. Israel must do much more to protect the civilian population, infrastructure and humanitarian workers. This includes restoring deconfliction systems, allowing humanitarian workers free movement within Gaza. And Israel must prevent harm to medical personnel and premises in the course of their military operations. They must allow the urgent healthcare needs of the population to be met, while allowing the sick and wounded to temporarily leave the Gaza Strip to receive treatment.

Crucially, we urge all parties to return to a ceasefire. We continue to call on Hamas for the immediate release of all the remaining hostages, who are enduring terrible suffering. We must all work towards the implementation of a two-state solution, which is the only way to bring long-lasting peace and security to both Israelis and Palestinians and ensure long-term stability in the region.

On top of that SWIFT doesn’t even do payments. That is, it doesn’t transfer money, it provides a communication interface that banks use to talk about payments, the actual money transfer takes place separately via T2 (in Europe) or elsewhere via correspondent accounts.

If they tried to handle actual money they would not have the market share that they have. Iran is semi-sanctioned right now, that is, select banks are cut off. It’s illegal under EU law to comply with US sanctions against US or Cuba so you can be sure that the commission came up with the precise list of what to block and what not so they’d hit the revolutionary guard but not random carpet or saffron traders.

As a small aside “Open Source Free Trials?” If it’s open source, can’t they just disable the trial part?

Yes. There’s a number of projects which distribute binaries which aren’t as liberally licensed as the source they’re built from. E.g. Ardour is another one. There’s a demo version, subscriptions start as low as $1/month, $45 buys you the current major version and the next major version with all its updates, perpetual license. There’s also the implicit understanding that if you don’t pay up and want support, your bug reports better be developer-grade.

Basically it’s a way to get artists who are used to either freeware or commercial offerings to donate. Also as far as DAWs go it’s a fucking steal.

I’m not really acquainted with the details of how Spain does it but it’s common practice in Europe to need a license for short-term rentals, it’s usually municipal statute as an extension of zoning law. Details differ vastly depending on location because every municipality is different.

Before the days of AirBnB circumventing those municipal regulations was very hard as big hotels are kind of hard to hide, they’re rather obvious, and if you have small apartments where are you going to get your renters from. AirBnB made it possible to get renters for small properties that fall under the radar of authorities. So requiring AirBnB to, effectively, ensure that what they list is licensed is closing that loophole.

The “anti-tourist” thing only really comes into play when municipalities are actually limiting the number of licenses they give out: When licenses are abundant it doesn’t matter that you can skirt them with AirBnB. Cities like Barcelona do limit them, other places don’t, as such only places like Barcelona had an actual problem with AirBnB, as such cracking down on AirBnB is helping the anti-tourist “agenda” of places like Barcelona. With agenda I mean allow people to continue to live and work in their own city doing something else but wipe tourist asses.