European. Polite contrarian. History graduate. I never downvote reasoned opinions and I do not engage with people who downvote mine (which may be why you got no reply). Low-effort comments with vulgarity or snark will also be ignored.
A logical next step in Russia’s descent into the worst kind of police state. It will never quite be totalitarian, that era is over and anyway the Kremlin is too cynical and incompetent to actually control people’s thoughts. The model is obviously China. China has successfully locked down its internet and every dictator in the world has noticed.
Now that is some enthusiasm for the fediverse.
They really nailed it with the name.
Combien as-tu payé pour ce journalisme que tu décries ?
Sur le sujet, on est d’accord que c’est une contradiction.
In fairness to them, Greenland does constitute a nation with an aspiration to sovereignty. It’s also not in the EU.
“Access to source code reduces dependence on third-country providers, reduces vendor lock-in, keeps value and investment within Europe,” said center-right Finnish member of the European Parliament Aura Salla.
This. Open source is David’s weapon against Goliath. China is leveraging the advantage now in AI. Europe can too.
Of course the USA could “win” like it won in Baghdad. But what next? Nobody could ever subdue Afghanistan. Vietnam similar. Russia is now struggling against Ukraine.
A better example. The USSR, with its almost limitless tolerance for casualties, had to come to terms against tiny Finland - coincidentally also an Arctic nation few in number but that knew its environment.
Important not to underestimate the difficulty of asymmetric warfare against a determined foe combined with a limited tolerance for casualties.
The USA is (still) a democracy. If there were to be serious ongoing pushback in Greenland, that’s a story that would end just as badly for America as every other time in the last century. Against an accountable government, the motivation of the opponent matters a ton. Hence this news, which I found interesting.
Just as the term ‘constitution’ in 2005 diverted attention from the purpose of a treaty that was essentially codifying existing European legal texts, the term ‘federalism’ can unnecessarily inflame, divide, and polarize, when its ‘pragmatic’ nature should draw just as much attention.
It’s true. Those referendums were basically undone by this single word. Which is already much less scary than the F-word. After decades of peace and comfort Europeans have just become very conservative.
Asymmetric initiatives like he suggests are probably the only way forward at this point. As I understand it there’s already a mechanism in the EU treaty for it.
all high-speed trains are running on 100% renewable
Irrelevant to what I said: discounting energy source.
Trains obviously have much less rolling resistance, as you say (an advantage partly offset by their added weight). But wind resistance is the bigger factor, and trains are usually just faster.
A train travelling at 350kmh uses 40% more energy than one going at 300kmh. This is why the service speeds usually top out at 300 everywhere, Europe, japan and China.
Speed really is the decisive factor. The pyramid hints quite well at this.
That’s my fantasy too. And I understand it’s roughly the situation in Japan, where urban streets generally do not have parked cars (or sidewalks, alas). It’s because cars are understood to be just another form of private property, to be stored privately. After all, even in the West you don’t just leave your property in a public place, for some reasons it’s only cars. A mind-blowing framing of the problem.
Compared to everything.
Nice. I’ve looked into this question fairly deeply and this seems fairly accurate.
Two things that people find counter-intuitive (or in the second case prefer not to think about):
A private car typically sits empty and unused 95% of the time, with all its embodied energy and materials, blocking up 10 square meters of street that might otherwise contain sidewalk or trees.
Thought experiment. Imagine a city where all the car owners sold their cars and took taxis instead. I’m pretty sure this has been modeled and the result is always a massive improvement in terms of resources and space.
There seems to be a better name for what you are talking about. Fair point about Oceania though, that’s as uncontinental as Europe.
I agree with a number of the comments on the talk page. By Wikipedia’s own guidelines this article is catastrophically overweight and its title alone casts doubt on Wikipedia’s neutrality (the project’s most crucial asset)
As usual, nobody much here is clicking on let alone reading the article in question, they’re just upvoting the political sentiments carried by the title.
stopped after I finished my MSc in Geoscience
This snarky argument from authority is redundant given that the facts are extremely easy to understand and outlined in the Wikipedia article I cited.
The biggest gap between Africa and Eurasia (PS; we agree that Europe is not a continent) is the Mediterranean sea, and it is getting smaller. That does seem relevant.
geologically, an ocean is in the process of opening up in between
Hardly. Africa is converging with Europe and the Med is being crushed. It’s only moving away from Arabia.
OK but I tend to think that this kind of hopeless cynicism kinda risks being self-fulfilling. There are fundamental differences between Russia and the West, ordinary people (especially in Western countries) do have some agency, and nothing about the future is set in stone.