The EU election results are bad, but not as horrific as in France, Belgium, or hell, even Germany .. but here a fucking far right YouTuber organized a meme party and he has won THREE FUCKING SEATS.
People cheering for the release of 4 hostages achieved by killing 210 random people in a refugee camp is the perfect gist of the entire Palestinian recent history. Somehow those 4 hostages are fellow humans who serve a happy life (they are), but the 210 palestinians just disposable vermin that don't even get mentioned in the news.
Oh: and two reminders:
Israel keeps broadcasting their war crimes full of pride about them (soldiers entering combat zones disguised as non-combatants is EXPLICITLY forbidden by the Geneva convections)
Israel still kept about 2000 palestinian hostages themselves (people abducted without any formal accusation nor giving their loved ones any news of their demise) and no one ever talks about their release
Something that support MMullenweg going through a hit list now he is back at the throne is that tumblr/@charlottan has been banned for "targeted harassment" (no further explanation to whom). Which would be outrageous and absurd to you if you have ever seen her blog.
Unless "targeted harassment" means " you joked about the CEO being transphobic three months ago".
There is a reason I don't crosspost any of this to tumblr, you know.
And well, i have no idea of what's going on, but Matt had been known for holding grudges and being childishly petty way before (to the point of registering domains with the name of the project of someone who he had a flamewar with... years after such flamewar).
I wouldn't be surprised if he just have a death note of big accounts that were critical of him back in his February transphobic meltdown and now he is just going through it.
Also, there is a very gloomy vibe on Tumblr right now. In the last few days, a bunch of very popular trans accounts have been purged without being given any reason about it. Mind you, we are talking about accounts with thousands of followers and years of backlog, that never got into trouble with mods before... Suddenly banned without any explanation.
The automattic alumni slack server is experiencing a spike of new people joining these days.
The rumour mill says that the CEO, Matt Mullenweg, has set a hard goal of the headcount reduction this year and since he came back from sabbatical last month, things are getting ugly inside the company.
But you know, it's not another round of layoffs, it's just "performance management" (with an associated goal of how many people must be underperforming that must be reached, because MM is the kwisatz haderach of Wordpress and he can see the future and one know how many people will fail performance checks).
Also, quite a lot of "but public transport don't work in rural areas!"
Look, I grew up in a rural area. I could literally watch sheep grazing on a hill less than 50m from my parent's house kitchen window. My town was around 4k people.
Still, we had a bus going to the nearby (and similarly-sized) towns every 15 minutes. Two buses per hour to the provincial capital, and one to the other "big" (around 200k people) city of my province. A train to the capital and another to the 'big city' every hour. My town was in the bottom of a valley, and around it had maybe 20-30 hamlets (10-100 people each) between 2 and 10 km away from town, mostly in the surrounding mountains, and every day several buses go through them to pick the kids who live there and take them to school/high school in my town and back.
Hell, these are some of the stops in the train line that took me to the province capital, the one I used to take every day to go to college:
I don't think I've ever seen more than 1 or 2 people take or leave the train in any of those three stops. In the last one, you couldn't even see any houses around from the train. Most of the times, the train just stopped and left without taking or leaving anyone. Still, they were important for some people, who deserved to have a trustable public transport network.
Public transport in rural areas is perfectly possible. You just need to remember that it is a SERVICE and not a BUSINESS.
@javi Believe it or not, there are a number of places in America where people need a car to get their mail. Whether it's because they have to go all the way to the post office, or because their mailbox is at the end of their miles-long driveway, or because the mail is delivered to a shared multi-box at the end of the miles-long street at the end of the miles-long driveway.
And while I agree that the public transit network doesn't need to make a direct fiscal profit, it does still need to balance the books in overall cost vs good to society. Paying for services that are too sparse and inconvenient for anyone to actually use is a waste of everyone's money, and that's before you get to the massive infrastructure costs for more advanced things like trains.
We would all love to have universal public transit that works. But right now, the collective cost/benefit ratio just isn't good enough (nor as good as it is in Europe) for it to be an actionable priority in most places.
oh of course, there are places that it's just not feasible to get public transport to. In the US and everywhere else. But those are rare and covers only a small percentage of the population. Let's say that 90% of the population of a country could, or should, be covered by a decent public transit network. There's always going to be a small percentage of population that lives too far away from population centers to be covered. But again, that's a small minority and that doesn't mean that the other 90% of the country shouldn't have it.
I disagree that the cost/benefit ratio is any different. Here, we pay for it. It's a cost. It's not supposed to make money. Those nice high speed trains we have here? A money sink, massively subsidiced by the state, won't exist without those subsidies.
And they are a great money sink to have, if you ask me.
Reading a reddit thread about how many trains/buses/cars take to move 50k people and
Once again, I'm appalled at how much some USians think the rest of the world doesn't exist, is lying, or we are too stupid to understand we are making obvious (for them) bad choices