arc

The point I’m making, which I think is obvious and demonstrable, is extreme left aren’t just do-gooders while the extreme right are evil. It’s hard to think of any communist / marxist-leninist / whatever revolutions that weren’t followed by purges, gulags, education camps, progroms or what have you. In some cases, the body count was in the millions, e.g. Pol Pot.

So in my mind extremism is bad either way you go and it is not something that anyone should brush off and say “these left wing extremists are fine” because reality never works out that way. Extremism is monstrous either way.

This is something you really can’t say one way or the other.

I could cite examples of sick, failing government owned companies that did better under privatization, or simply shouldn’t have been governments owned in the first place. On the other hand, I could cite disastrous privatization efforts that should never have happened because they were vital services, or in the national interest. I lived through most of it in the UK when they were privatising stuff left right and centre - some succeeded, others didn’t.

And if they stay under the control of government then they need incentivization and means for measuring success. Success doesn’t just mean profit but it does mean value and quality of service. And in some ways that would require operating similar to if it were a private company.

Hardly the same comparison. People buy houses when there isn’t demand and sell when there is.

I live in Europe where trucks are fairly rare but you still see large SUVs, 4x4s and vans around. My own feeling is that certain classes of vehicles should be considered commercial for the purposes of insurance, taxation, VAT, inspection, tolls, permitted usage and everything else. The legislation already exists for commercial vehicles so extend it to these kind of vehicles.

So is someone must have a stupidly oversized vehicle purely for personal reasons they can enjoy all the bullshit and restrictions that goes with it. Doesn’t stop them complying but making it more onerous to do it will take demand for these vehicles off the market entirely.

There is a difference between a rant and a tantrum. If you read the post, you could see very clearly he makes a point very forcefully.

Hydrogen probably has some niche uses but there are some things that proponents like to gloss over.

1. It’s not green since most of it is produced from fossil fuels. It’s also disgustingly expensive even compared to fossil fuels. I’d note that the company Orlen Koltrans which is funding this train is a subsidiary of an oil company PKN Orlen so yeah.
2. Even if it were green (e.g. water electrolysis from renewables) it takes something like 3-4x the energy to produce, store, transport, and convert back to energy as just charging a battery.
3. Regardless of how it’s made hydrogen also contributes to global warming - if any hydrogen leaks or escapes during fueling or venting, it promotes the methane production in the atmosphere.
4. It can and does go kaboom. e.g. this hydrogen powered bus has seen better days.

All said and done, I think it’s crazy to even bother with the tech unless its so niche it cannot be done some other way. Japanese automakers & oil companies looking to do a bit of greenwashing have been the major proponents of hydrogen and that should say something. Also the fact that hydrogen has been a miserable failure in areas where it has been piloted.

In the case of trains it seems more sensible to manufacture biodiesel or synthetic fuels than this. It’s certainly safer to transport and store. Perhaps existing trains can be converted relatively easily. Or electrify the train line or stretches of it. Batteries would be an option too - a train might simply hook up to a fresh battery tender and off it goes. Or some kind of hybrid solution that can source power from overhead lines and/or diesel and/or battery. Or even put solar on carriages to reduce fuel consumption during daylight operations. All these things seem more viable than hydrogen.

Personally I think that the following car functions should be mandatory physical controls - wipers, indicators, hazards, side/headlights, door locks, defogger / defroster, electronic parking brake. forward/reverse/neutral/park. And they should be controls that have fixed position in the car (i.e. not on the wheel) with positive and negative feedback.

And fuck Tesla or any other manufacturer that wants to cheap out on a couple of bucks by removing them. Removing physical controls has obvious safety implications to drivers who are distracted trying to find icons on a tablet.

LIDL is selling a bunch of “smart” crap this week including a “smart” kettle. According to the blurb “Can be linked to the Lidl Smart Home System using your WiFi connection”. And I’m thinking yeah and what possible reason ever would I have for needing that? And the same is true for most smart products.

It really depends if these systems (that appear to control arrival boards) are on a network or not. If they’re not, then there is minimal risk to leave them the way they are. Somebody would need physical access to the devices to do harm. If they are on a network then that’s a pretty big deal, but some attacks could be mitigated against by tunnelling and/or additional packet filtering to ensure the integrity of messages.

Continuing on a railway theme you should be FAR more worried all the devices that run up and down the side of railway lines - PLCs that talk with each other and operations centres to control things like lights, junctions, crossings etc. If they’re more than 5 years old then chances are then all that traffic is in the clear, and because these things live in boxes by the railway line, it wouldn’t take much to break into a network and potentially kill people by running two trains into each other.

Breivik is the sort of murderer, where there is absolutely zero doubt about his guilt, where the crimes themselves are heinous, and where he should never see the outside of a jail cell ever. If Norway had voted to throw him down a mineshaft, or imprison him in a windowless cell where he was fed slops for the rest of his life I couldn’t care less.

But Norway isn’t like that and he is being treated exceptionally well by any standard for his category of offence. His pathetic narcissistic legal whining to the courts will go nowhere and he’ll stew in prison for as long as they can legally hold him. I think authorities would be relieved if he made good on his threats since it spares them the concern of what happens if he is eventually released.