Ah, #capitalism. Neoclasical (mainstream) economic theory tells us it ensures resources will be put to the best, most efficient use. However, ignores the obvious: wealth equals power, so that what is "best" for society is what the richest value.
Like chasing everlasting youth by getting weekly blood transfusions from your teenage son and $40,000 gym membership add-ons.
I am travelling by train from Brussels, in Belgium, to Messina, in Sicily. I am used to international rail travel, but this is my longest one-way trip yet at 2,500 km. Day one was Brussels - Paris - Geneva - Milan. Day two is today, Milan - Messina with an early start that should take me to Messina by dinner time. Beautiful early morning light! #rail
@mario hello Mario. I just took the 6.40 Italo from Milan to Villa San Giovanni, and then a Bluejet ferry to cross the strait.
If you travel from Brussels alternative is to enter Switzerland through Germany. Unfortunately Deutsche Bahn struggles with delays, so I recommend making sure you have no tight connections. 30 mins would be the minimum.
Belated update: the whole 2,500 km journey through four countries ran flawlessly, not one minute of delay. And day 2 was even a day of strike by Italian rail workers!
So that was great. Unfortunately it is always rather unusual. I love #rail travel, but delays and missed connections are a real problem, especially with international trips where you need to ride with several operators. A @EU_Commission passengers rights directive, like we have for air travel, would help.
@KarenStrickholm nice to meet you Karen. You are looking at a network with a specific structure: it consists of clusters of nodes that are densely connected with each other, and much more sparsely with nodes outside the cluster. This property is called modularity: the easier to identity dense clusters are, the higher the network's modularity. I believe this was a social network of some kind.
@KarenStrickholm when you induce a network you must define precisely what a link represents. For example, nodes could stand for families in a village, and links for whether any pair of families visited each other in the year 2015. Or nodes could be the chemical sector companies of Albania, and links represent purchases from one to another and so on.
@KarenStrickholm to make inference on the property or dynamics of the system being represented. Networks are good at "whole system" representation. Or just to make pretty pictures 😁
@ApaulD this is fixable. NASA has tech to monitor methane emissions with satellite imagery. We could use it get rid of states self-reporting emissions and entrust monitoring to the UN.
@EDPS you should reconsider. Having your own instance means we know these accounts are legit, and boost trust. If you crowdsource, I will even contribute. Cc @rysiek
@NatureMC@rysiek@EDPS of course money is not the problem. What we are doing here is participation, even collaboration with democratic European institutions. Which is the point of their social media presence. Hopefully someone in Comms at EDPS flags it to the higher ups. "People really appreciate us being here, just saying...". Will you do it, person running the account? It would be a way for the 100K citizens following @EU_Commission to feel closer to the EU institutions.