I never built up a CD collection but I now started a digital DRM free local collection. Yes, I am actually buying that stuff (call me stupid if you like) but only loss free.

One of the few disks I own is sadly too corruoted for error free ripping, luckuly I still have it as mp3. That album simply does not wxist online anymore, anywhere. Possibly not even in the darker corners of the net. I think that happens more often than many believe.

Bulldozing history is what revisionists actually want at least when it comes to the dark stains.

Funfact: If you build cities like it, walkable nice urban neighbourhoods, attractive for young families and others alike, can be perfectly affordable.

They played incredibly dirty, fouled nonstop, deserved even more red cards than they got, at the same time they played super lame football, debated with the referee nonstop, were disrespectful to the winning team afterwards and physically assaulted a Spanish player after the game without any provication from the other side.

Rarily has a team in the finals misbehaved more than that.

The car share can be replaced with self driving cars, however if you make self driving cars more attractive than cars now, you’ll shift the balance and are heading towards more car centric and therefore more hostile and less attractive places again.

It is a nice fairy tale hat self driving cars are more space efficient. Real service patterns have shown that they fill up road infrastructure more than regular cars as they will do either fill up trips or need to drive everything twice. Also, making use of these fancy advantages (higher speeds, shorter breaking distance, dynamic crissings without traffic lights) make roads much more pedstrian hostile, more highway like.

Fair point as well.

I remember that very well. Doesn’t change anything about the ID.Polo being a great car for a competitive price tag. Chinese cars in Europe aren’t much better priced.

That is not entirely true. The new VW ID.Polo is a very nice new compact EV for a reasonable price for example.

And self driving cars will do nothing to change anything. I you push for them, more than for cars currently, cities in the Netherlands will be much worse places and traffic will get much worse as well.

Cars are of course part of the mobility equation, especially in rural regions with small settlements. 1 hour connections can still be perfectly fine for commuting but it can only be a supporting service there. The story is completely different one as soon as you get anywhere close to any major city. In the Netherlands, most people live in such locations.

A city built for cars (no matter if “self driving” or not) has to be built much more spread out. Distances for everything multiply. At the same time that spread out infrastructure leads to heavily mono-directional traffic, making rush hour load much worse.

That is why people in car only cities aren’t any faster than cities well designed for public transit. Yes, heavy rail does not cut it alone, that is why there is also light rail, bus lines etc. With all of that, you can get anywhere you need to go, in places that are not primarily or exclusively built for the car.

That is the neat thing about language, it adapts. Euphemisms wear off and something like “smart device” increasingly sounds like “nasty anti-consumer surveillance home appliance” all by itself.

joke aside, the Hippodrome was your common low key football game, with betting and people going crazy. The Colloseum on the other side was a special occasion where you better looked your best and behaved, as a spectator. Hollywood never got the memo.

What a load of nonsense. Just coming from Finland. They basically have no night right now. No space mirrors required and people looked perfectly sane.

If your commuter rail in a major city comes only every two hours your system is simply bad. I commute a good distance and there is a fast train every 30 min, from early morning to late night, every day. Frequency gets only worse to places that are already outside of reasonable commuting distance and even then there is usually a train every 60 min.

I thought it was pretty much general knowledge that Belgium was one of the most terrible colinial powers in europe?

I do see the lack of relevance of that for that football game though. It is like talking about the genocide(s) the US was built upon, just because of a football game.

Yes, that was not an exhaustive list. Both, Germany and Britain are on it too. Any developed country is.

That is not even correct anymore. China is nowadays in the lead on battery technology in specific and EVs in general anxx dc that lead is home made. The West simply did not care about battery technology that much, as it was considered a low return business. You can’t copy that much anymore if you are the technology leader yourself. China is also increasingly outresearching the rest in other fields.

I am not saying that China isn’t still copying elsewhere where it isn’t technology leader. The US and Japan have historically done the same.

PS: Regarding LLMs, no tears for thiefs being stolen from btw.

This has absolutely nothing to do with wind power in France. The US pays a French company a lot of money to not build wind power in the US. Not France’s or Europe’s strategic problem.

France has massively increased renewable sources and is also in good position regarding EV transition.

No matter how you turn it, there is no reason to make oneself dependent on gas or oil from an openly hostile dictatorship in Moscow.

You should readjust your irony detector.

Personal traffic is currently shifted to electricity, so is home heating via heat pump or to other sovereign sources via distributed heating (oil is being phased out in Austria for example, gas will follow sooner than later). Heavy road traffic is seeing currently the implementation of commercial vehicles that can cover everything up to mid range. China is already getting into transition in that market too. Europe would be irresponsible not to follow.

What is left is rather small in volume. Making oneself reliant on an openly hostile Russian dictatorship which won’t waste a second to use that dependency as a weapon against France or Europe, is not necessay than anymore.