Alon

Alon, 10 months ago

@denisbloodnok @stonebear @danwentzel The problem is that other than Eurostar, there is precisely one international city pair in Europe that is fast the entire way: Paris-Brussels. It, too, underperforms, because the fares are insanely high by European standards (though no by American ones), due to business traveler-oriented pricing. Everywhere else, there are low-speed gaps through or near the border. For example, Paris-Frankfurt is almost 4 hours, where it should be 2:20 at TGV speed.

Alon, 10 months ago

@danwentzel What high-speed rail, as soon as you cross a border the average speed drops to Amtrak levels.

Alon, 10 months ago

@stonebear @danwentzel The security theater is why normally, a train that takes four hours outcompetes a plane that takes one. But on Eurostar, it doesn't, between very high fares (almost as high as the Northeast Corridor), its own security theater, passport control queue, boarding queue, and meh speed beyond Brussels. The issue of #CrossBorderRail in Europe is a serious problem and Americans shouldn't pretend like things work here, because they don't.

Alon, 10 months ago

@stonebear @danwentzel The average speed between Amsterdam and Brussels is rather low due to slowdowns in Belgium. It speeds up past Brussels, but then you lose 30 minutes to security theater whenever you ride Eurostar. Result: ridership underperforms any model trained on domestic high-speed rail travel.

Alon, 10 months ago

@ndhapple India is electrifying its entire rail network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Organisation_for_Railway_Electrification

The UK is electrifying a bunch of main lines and branches (at high costs, because of bad UK project management).

Italy is doing a large electrification project for the branches - the main lines are already wired - at low Italian costs; Marco has some timelines about what's being done.

Caltrain is insignificant by any European, let alone Asian, standard.

Alon, 10 months ago

@ndhapple See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proposed_railway_electrification_routes_in_Great_Britain, but these are not good UK examples but bad ones.

Alon, 10 months ago

@ndhapple Yeah, these are very well-documented with multiple British rail experts who will talk about them in detail.

Alon, 10 months ago

@futurebird At your school, do science classes still cling to the "Africans use slash-and-burn agriculture and that's unsustainable" meme? Because I was taught that at an IB school in 2001-2 and my cousin's private school-educated American children were in the mid-2010s.

Alon, 10 months ago

@futurebird I was taught it's a thing in Madagascar in 2001-2, at a school in the expat ghetto of Singapore, with all the usual NGO-style derision.

Alon, 10 months ago

@Colinvparker @tzimmer_history The difference is that American courts have a history of protecting civil rights. If you dig into it the history only lasted 20 years, but these 20 years were formative for American civil liberties as most understand them. German courts don't have that history, and during the formative period in German historiography, the 1920s and early 30s, they were a reactionary force. So Germany got its lèse-majesté mentality toward the courts from somewhere else.

Alon, 10 months ago

@Colinvparker @tzimmer_history Brown is not at all dead - the South has a lot less school segregation than it had in the 1950s. The North has never desegregated, but in the 1950s and early 60s the focus of civil rights was the South. Then there are the straight civil liberties rulings in criminal justice matters - before that era the prosecutor could put you on the stand to testify against yourself and you could plead the fifth but the jury would be allowed to make inferences from that.

Alon, 10 months ago

@Colinvparker @tzimmer_history Re Brown, the issue is that the locus of civil rights in the US shifted over the 1960s and 70s from the South to Northern cities. Thus, people say things like "school desegregation was never implemented" because it never happened in New York.

At any rate, my original point is that Germany lacks this tradition of judicial liberalism. The Spiegel affair was resolved through protest and coalition politics, not lawfare. And yet, there's judicial lèse-majesté here.

Alon, 10 months ago

@DiegoBeghin @tzimmer_history It's fine, the Grundgesetz is flexible and the judges are mostly just finding that EU law is magically always in conformity with it. Legal realism doesn't stop being correct just because the judges don't believe in it.

Alon, 10 months ago

@dynamic I should try it when I get harassed (which has yet to happen). On Twitter, the interface for reporting out of Germany specifically was terrible, requiring you to identify the specific section of German hate speech law that is being violated; unless I was traveling, I would have to ask mutuals abroad to report things for me instead.

Alon, 10 months ago

@adapalmer Ooh, where in Italy are you going to be? Firenze again?

Alon, 10 months ago

@randahl Because I live here and see how both AfD and Die Linke are Putinist and so are some elements within SPD and CDU in the East. The minister-president of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern kept complaining about why NordStream 2 was canceled, even after the war started. In Berlin, right-wing neighborhood activists routinely harass Ukrainians. The most pro-Ukraine party, the Greens, is being turned into public enemy #1 over heat pumps, with "Hang the Greens" signs at extreme right rallies.

Alon, 10 months ago

@randahl If they did this here, they'd have to depopulate most of East Germany, and most of the people in question would be ethnic Germans who just miss the Reich or the DDR, rather than Russians.

Alon, 10 months ago

@akshay Not just you - in primary school we were split on whether that was the line or not.

Alon, 10 months ago

@pony Multiple people have tried to evangelize Haskell to me. I noped out.

Alon, 10 months ago

@pony I listen to the OG Hell March while writing @ww3real sometimes.

Alon, 10 months ago

@partim @scunneen @jon Yes, a high-speed, high-frequency system would be the best. And this means that systems that have one but not the other should invest in what they have: Germany needs a network of NBSes connecting all major cities, France needs to run on an hourly Takt and be more comfortable with seat turnover. It's just really unseemly when German rail advocates turn SNCF into public enemy #1 and declare that there's no point in building intercity high-speed lines.

Alon, 10 months ago

@scunneen @jon @partim The issue is that most ridership is not within the three-hour gap; the gap suppresses ridership during that one gap, while the slowness of the ICE suppresses ridership throughout the entire day. This way, when I compare the scraps of O&D numbers I have for the ICE and TGV with my model based on trip times and metro populations, the frequency issue is invisible (cf. RENFE, where the ridership was a lot lower pre-competition and to some extent still is a bit lower).

Alon, 10 months ago

@BrentToderian I think my #76 is plausible? But King Charles ought to be in the top 10 for his (entirely negative) influence on the London skyline, the inventors of YIMBY should be on that list (hi, @Gurre), big city mayors other than Hidalgo (like Kejriwal and İmamoğlu) should be on the list, AMLO should be on the list (with entirely negative influence, again).

Alon, 10 months ago

@phillmv The sad thing is, people here do feel joy when eating. They just think bratwurst is joyful because they've never eaten real food made by non-AfD voters.

Alon, 10 months ago

@sfsworms @ww3real No? She's Finnish, she and Pekka just know a bunch of Polish kids their age.