It’s a mob style government elected by a mob of angry, hateful people. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, the US was allowed to grow too big and now it’s being weilded against you.

America is owned and operated by rich people. They couldn’t make money running passenger trains so once we were ordered to invest in car-only infrastructure the trains were mostly disbanded and shut down. There’s a ghost of a system left with just a few corridors that could be considered bare minimum service in a developed nation.

How many kilometers of high speed rail does the US have? Zero. We have some that gets close, but not really.

My mid-sized city has two trains per day, one each direction, and they both leave between 1am and 2am. In Germany you would have 30+ trains per day in a city this size, likely a notable S-Bahn network, and also some trams and/or U-Bahns in the city to compliment busses. I’ve got busses in town, but they operated about every 30-45 minutes each, with evening service being every 60 minutes. Here’s the fun part: our busses are the most used public transit system for a mid-sized city in the US right now and it’s still pathetic when compared to even basic services in Europe.

DB needs to keep getting investment. Germany must get to a dedicated passenger rail network to separate out the freight trains. DB should also be re-nationalized and operated as a national service, not a for profit system that will inevitably fail as a commercial venture, leading to yet more terrible service. Here’s hoping the latest German Parliament follows through on investment money that they pushed through at the start of the year! Also, keep the Deutschland Karte! That’s such a great resource for everyone.

My city has two trains per day: one each way. They leave at 1am and 2am. The US train system is hilariously bad.

I know that DB in Germany is horrible compared to the rest of Europe, but at least it has trains that run during daylight hours!

Costco polish dog (from the freezer aisle, since they stopped selling the real ones at the counter). Mustard, catsup. That’ll do great. Oh, but make sure to grill it! Yeah, now I’m hungry.

Sample size: 1

That’ll do! Let’s hit the pub.

I had one of the 10" eeePC machines for years. That thing was a tank. It did everything I needed it to, especially weird networking configurations. The battery also lasted over 6 hours. I mostly ran Crunchbang #! Linux on it.

I don’t think I could live on a 10" screen anymore, but back in the day it was a dream machine.

Nice. Germany has some good visa programs for skilled workers. If you’ve got the credentials, the consulates will work with you on immigration and it’s not a very onerous system.

The hotel itself was nice, and the balcony had a great view. The problem was the mattress. It was so soft that it provided zero back support. No other options were available.

The net result was both my wife and I ended up with month long back muscle spasms. It taught us a lot about how to resolve back issues, but it’s not a lesson I wanted from a relatively expensive hotel in Leavenworth, Washington.

Very few of the pots in my city are city owned. They’re all private. They refuse to build anything else since using it as a parking lot has very low taxes so the profits are good, plus the land value goes up so just waiting makes them millions.

Tax them like crazy or all you get is downtown Houston in the 1980s.

Every city should be repurposing every above ground parking lot.

Housing, open plazas, parks, transit systems, 5+1 housing everywhere.

If you want a parking lot in a city it should be below ground and taxed out the ying-yang.

Show Toronto how Paris built 13 tram lines in the last 20 years. Make sure to do it in Parisian French too.

Of course my city is delaying the construction of a fucking BUS line to 2030 because the freeway build out (which is about 3 miles away from the someday bus line) is delayed. Why these two are connected, the public isn’t sure. Given my city’s ineptitude, at least Toronto is trying at all so I can’t throw any bricks.

Edit: but we did declare a downtown parking garage a historic building and put it on the historic register so we have that going for us.

I’m not convinced of the author’s details and models on fares vs taxes. The overall concept seems on track, but there’s differences between direct fees (bus fare) and general funding (taxes).

The US has a long history of not understanding just how valuable and efficient shared resources are, even with the overhead of government administration. In fact, government administration is usually much more efficient than private corporation administration of the same kinds of services so we get a lot more bang for our buck.

The author does leave out the libertarians of the world. They do want every bus ride (even school busses), even police, fire, and library service paid for via contracts with the person receiving the service. It’s completely infeasible and never works in practice, but they’re out there.

The vast majority of public transit systems that go to a fully (or nearly fully) non-fare based model do great. People use the busses, trains, and other resources. They make better transit choices and have more money to spend in the local economy. The author hints at this, though I’m not sure they really made it clear in their writing.

To sum up: make the transit paid for by the community at large because the community at large benefits from it, even if they’re not actually riding the bus. It gives us freedom as a community to have free public transit and our economies are healthier.

It’s also California: the weather is usually really good. Maybe this “Becker” should add an amendment that requires bike roads to be built instead of parking spots.

I assume he’s against being proactive in problem solving, though.

Yeah, the US has reached an incredibly low standard of literacy for what is supposed to be a developed nation. The numbers on reading level are scary. Also look at how much people read as adults. We just don’t learn how and then we don’t practice during our lives. It’s a nation of partial literacy being kept together my hyper nationalism and smart phones to distract us with 6 second videos.

And he needs money! He just can’t handle it so he needs more.

– Abbreviated George Carlin

Ah yes, yet another way to control and hurt women. The whole idea of medical care during birth is based on situations where you happen to need it. If things go well, they go well. Being at the hospital or having a midwife is about when things go off the rails. The vast majority of people want you and your child to survive childbirth, which is a dangerous and difficult process for many out there. Anyone who says “just don’t have help you might need, it’ll be fine” is either a liar or actively trying to harm you.

This is just another branch of “under the hood” religious nutjobiness like Tradwives which all boils down to active alt-right control over women.

You passed the one that matters: you’re interested in having a democracy.

According to one of our adjuncts: “Windows just works for dev, why are we teaching Linux at all?”

He didn’t last.

And who has been appointing, then bribing, the judges for the last 30 years…

I don’t know much about Poundland, but I know they’re no liars about their advertising. Everything, including the business itself, went for a pound.

I salute them for their consistency!