@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

Alon

@Alon@mastodon.social

I write about public transport and do research for NYU's Marron Institute. I've previously lived in Tel Aviv, Singapore, the Riviera, New York, Providence, Vancouver, Stockholm, Paris.

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Alon, to random
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Paul Lewis on construction costs in the US vs. Germany. The principles shouldn't be too surprising to people who've read my posts or our Transit Costs Project reports, but the example of how in Germany contracts are broken into pieces sized about 100-200 million euros instead of much bigger ones as is the emerging Anglo norm is interesting. https://railway-news.com/how-to-get-more-tracks-for-your-greenbacks/

gavi, to random

is a polycule with a bunch of catgirls considered a meowycule

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@gavi I think it's just called a polycule; if it doesn't have catgirls, does it even count as a polycule?

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

What does it say about the Netherlands that in the polls, the extreme right coalition has a majority? Sweden is racist as fuck but at least there, as soon as the coalition was announced, the public was shocked and the coalition lost its majority in the polls.

thisisskaly, to random
@thisisskaly@mastodon.social avatar

Had a terrible experience in the Berlin airport and the staff and airline literally made me miss the flight, as well as loads of other Israeli passengers missed this flight because of it.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@thisisskaly Oh shit, what did they do? :(

Alon, (edited ) to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

What's the worst thing to see on public transportation? StarCraft references edition.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@StephenRees That sounds like a firebat stimming :(.

DiegoBeghin, to random
@DiegoBeghin@mastodon.social avatar

Today was the first time I seriously planned traveling by night train, and it became clear that they can't seriously compete against high speed rail or planes.

Prague is about as far away from Brussels as Marseille. The Eurostar to Marseille (when it runs) is 5h, the night train to Prague is... 15h, with a more unreliable schedule. Even giving an 8h sleeping discount to the night train, it's quite a bit longer.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@DiegoBeghin Yeah, that's why I take day trains and break the trip with an overnight in an intermediate city. There's a reason my vignette of 2048 solarpunk involved me getting back on the train home from Moscow in 7 hours, rather than taking a night train.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@DiegoBeghin @pony They are, but all the money for it got spent on the second S-Bahn trunk.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@DiegoBeghin @Colinvparker Fun fact: in Judaism, it's not permitted to travel on Saturdays, but there's an exception for long-distance journeys (e.g. by ship) provided one gets on and off the ship on weekdays. Rabbis considered making a similar ruling for trains but decided not to permit it, on the grounds that unlike boats, trains don't offer any serenity for respecting the holiness of the Sabbath.

(In conclusion, lol at Orthodox Judaism.)

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@DiegoBeghin @25kV @jon @seatsixtyone Yeah, this. The intercity trains here are more or less a state monopoly, and they're also making a profit more than the usual rate of return on capital, and the combination of these two things breaks the brains of a lot of mostly American anti-government types.

dustcircle, to Israel
@dustcircle@masto.ai avatar

The ‘’ Has Officially Jumped The Shark

https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/the-antisemitism-moral-panic-has-officially-jumped-the-shark-4f09ee9ea4fc

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@dustcircle I stopped reading at the invocation of Antiwar.com, which is full of right-wing conspiracy theories, prints extremists like Pat Buchanan, and currently supports Putin and opposes Ukraine. Yes, of course that site thinks there's too much concern over anti-Semitism. @NoraGottlieb

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@NoraGottlieb @dustcircle Bibi's actions are not why people draw caricatures of him with a hooked nose or of Israel as puppeteering the United States; there are other democratic backsliders in the world, including some who do a lot of foreign policy violence, and they're not portrayed that way. I'm sure there are some people who write for FAZ and Die Welt who say anti-Turkish racism in Germany is the fault of Erdoğan, but reasonable people dismiss those writers as racists looking for excuses.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Wynter @NoraGottlieb @dustcircle Nobody claims criticism of Turkish military action is racist, because the amount of public criticism of such action in the West is small, and nobody escalates to ideas like boycotting all Turkish people - to the contrary, there's extensive engagement with domestic Kurdish and ethnic-Turkish dissidents. Nor do protesters use Remove Kebab-type slogans.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Wynter @NoraGottlieb @dustcircle Note also that non-Western countries constantly accuse their critics of all manners of things - racism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, what have you. Lee Kuan Yew and Mahatir Mohamed said shit like "human rights imperialism"; the global human rights community lols at them but doesn't react by boycotting Singaporeans and Malaysians or invoking racist stereotypes of Southeast Asia.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Wynter @NoraGottlieb @dustcircle In Germany none of this is mainstream, but protesters openly talk about ethnically cleansing ~all Jews from Israel. In the UK, there has been a huge upsurge in anti-Semitism from the moment the war started - it wasn't timed to anything Israel did but rather began right after 7.10. In Canada, there are protests in front of synagogues and hospitals named Mount Sinai. The LRB has long printed pieces complaining the Jews make the Holocaust too much about the Jews.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Wynter @NoraGottlieb @dustcircle A few months ago, PACBI announced a boycott of Standing Together, the group that's protesting the war and successfully escorting aid trucks to Gaza.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Wynter @NoraGottlieb @dustcircle "Far too late" for what? The complaints are of famine (which is being alleviated with aid trucks as we speak). And no, it's not the right tactic if the goal is some kind of coexistence; it is the right tactic if, like the majority of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, one believes there are far fewer Israeli Jews than there actually are and the South African solution of majority rule without any concern for what white people think (since they're 13% there) works.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Wynter @NoraGottlieb @dustcircle Yeah, 36,000 is not Dresden (it's slightly more but on four times the population, and also Dresden was a single night's bombing, and also everyone overrates how many people died at Dresden due to Nazi propaganda).

And the point is that if you say "I support two states" to a Palestine protest organizer, you'll be yelled at as a liberal Zionist. Occasionally they even have been protest chants clarifying "we don't want no two states."

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Wynter @NoraGottlieb @dustcircle Vonnegut was repeating a figure from Nazi propaganda as if it was fact. And no, the Gaza Strip death rate is not close to one-day Dresden levels (it's 1.6% of prewar population vs. 4%).

And support for two states has also gone up in Gaza; Hamas is not representative either, but protesters routinely wear Hamas emblems (this is especially bad in Canada, but the splinter group in Germany that Greta protested with did the same).

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Wynter @NoraGottlieb @dustcircle He specifically mentioned the 100,000+ death figure pushed by Goebbels, I believe. The actual was 25,000, so 4% (not 2%); Gaza is 36,000/2.2 million, so 1.6% (the missing are not all dead; the Gaza MoH methodology aims at a middle count, not a confirmed minimum).

Support for Hamas is low in the general public, and yet anti-Israel protesters happily sign petitions saying 7.10 was an act of resistance against Israeli colonialism.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Wynter @NoraGottlieb The IRA certainly knows terrorism - it was (weakly) supportive of the Irgun, which copied its tactics. Ireland can always be counted on to support the worst terrorists.

That said, the IRA never had any irredentist claim on Britain, whereas Hamas has irredentist claims on Israel (the Palestinian Authority does not, but if you say "I like Abbas" you're probably a liberal Zionist and not a Palestinian flag waver and certainly not a red triangle flag waver).

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Wynter @NoraGottlieb @dustcircle The alternative should look like how Western engagement with Turkey is to end its democratic backsliding, which means hugging the domestic opposition. The EIB lends to opposition-controlled cities at lower rates than are available to the Turkish state, which gives their mayors the ability to challenge AKP without fear of domestic economic isolation. Notably, there's no mass protest movement in the West calling for support for the PKK.

Alon,
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@Wynter @NoraGottlieb @dustcircle With negotiations? Remember, Olmert made an offer that Abbas would have accepted if Olmert hadn't been a lame duck by then. The "how should Israel be forced?" line is entirely people in Western countries wanting to establish a dominance hierarchy on the Jews; nobody talks about how the Netherlands or Sweden or Finland or (for years) Austria should be forced not to have an extreme right government.

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

For all of the nationalist and populist desire to decentralize cities, today, for military defense purposes, it's best to keep investing in your large cities for both insurgents and counterinsurgents. An insurgent wants their cities to be like Gaza - defensible in urban warfare, allowing terrorists to blend into the civilian population. A counterinsurgent likewise wants dense cities in the metropole, because those can be defended from cheap rockets by Iron Dome-type systems more easily.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Colinvparker Reshoring and radically changing what is built. The casualness with which I describe a construction program for 500 carriers in @ww3real follows from what happens when military spending rises to total war levels.

ww3real, to random
@ww3real@mastodon.social avatar

Hernandez reveals to Cagney that there's an inside agent that will help them. Cagney: “Chink?” Hernandez: “You're not cleared to know.” Cagney looks at her and repeats the slur, this time not as a question.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@timbray @ww3real He is, but as his reaction suggests, he already had a hunch this was happening. The real soft target there is Draper, on the theory that if she's compromised, everything else is compromised so Ma isn't safe either way.

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