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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Probably because trains are limited in both weight and volume compared to ships and also less efficient. If you have this short route and know it’ll need this amount of cargo shipped it likely makes sense.

    This single ship can carry more containers than any train could be expected to pull, likely by at least one order of magnitude.

    All in all I’d guess the advantages are roughly:

    • Reduced staff
    • reduced energy use (land based shipping is less efficient almost by default)
    • no need for infrastructure except ports (if you assume there is no train line or this shipping would move existing lines over capacity building this ship is likely cheaper or at least in line with 300km of rail)
    • simpler logistics (loading / unloading)

    Disadvantages:

    • Speed (a train would likely move at 3-5x the speed)

    I would also not expect the risk for catastrophic fires to be all that high. This ship has the batteries be containers. So once you’ve designed a container that is a large battery, you’ve already spent so much that a proper BMS including proper battery fire suppression as well as proper breakers/contractors are things you’ve built into it without even thinking about cost. The separation provided by building containers as the battery is the next line of defence if one container fails spectacularly, it also allows the batteries to be maintained on land, much cheaper than if they were part of the ship.


  • Also some application of similar tech has worked itself into industrial machines and factories over the last 10 years or so, it’s downright ubiquitous for anything that’s expensive and requires maintenance/ upkeep. Also it’s well intertwined with the ML tech we see consumer facing nowadays, the image recognition of 4+ years ago was made to recognize issues with materials, unexpected growing patterns, anomalies, as well as recognition and counting etc… before we got just point your camera and it’ll tell you what you’re looking at.


  • Both are abused by criminals and narcos and dictators

    Everything is subsumed and used by those hungry for power, and with the means to solidify it. That doesn’t mean that the content of their claimed political thought doesn’t have meaning, or that we can never conclude anything about humanity or its ideologies from looking at history, understanding theory, analyzing culture, power …

    Maybe understand why people here seem ‘extreme’ left, instead of just writing nonsensical, and obviously bad faith or confused arguments.



  • Brother have you heard of both young people, and the concept of ‘having a future’, death might be inevitable, it’s still better to think about and implement things to quell the suffering, as well as to continue living with hope than to revel in the fact that we’re all dying.

    Hope isn’t at the bottom of the box of Pandora without reason, it’s both, condemning us to strive and suffer, and the only way to make anything of it.



  • I listened to the entire and it struck a chord with me, it might be because I’m similarly petite bourgeois as the authors or something. But if you couldn’t get through it I might suggest softly that you read chapter 4 first (or only).

    To me the order the book has it in makes sense, but it might be the wrong one for you. It explains the What for 3/4 and then carefully answers the Why with a short story in the last 1/4. It is essentially a manifesto with a reason to believe in it as the last part.

    For me the reason it worked is because the walk through philosophy and history sufficiently grounded the authors claims toward the necessity of economic planning and rewilding and in combination with my prior beliefs made the utopia real.

    The problem that unfortunately remains with this book is how we get there, but to me it seems reasonable to leave that part out for this book, not just because of the violence and messiness, but also because it seems like the much harder part to coherently write as well.

    Edit: I’ve played one round of the game and it’s fun, perhaps a bit easy after knowing the content of the book.





  • Your experience might be true, but to frame it as representative or real in any general way like you insinuate with;

    if you/they want people to switch up the way they do things, there needs to be an alternative that’s at least as good, but preferably better.

    is just disingenuous, you admit you live in a place with 4000 people, yet still you complain about transit. It fundamentally doesn’t matter because you are in the last couple of percent in terms of transit viability.

    That’s why it reads like propaganda because while the examples you give are likely true, the overall picture you paint is significantly worse than the lived experience of most people that use the system, because you consciously or accidentally collect examples that make it seem dysfunctional. It’s mismanaged and it could be much better but it isn’t dysfunctional.


  • I somewhat harshly disagree with this sentiment, sure most of the problems you mention are real, although I always feel like criminal danger in central/western Europe is just not really something anyone should let impact their live decisions, as it’s generally so rare –

    Punctuality is very much a mixed bag regional and S trains are usually pretty good here in Köln, there are delays of course but half of them seem to be idiots walking on the tracks which I don’t really attribute to DB.

    Long distance is a bit worse than that, you could definitely say delays are common and sometimes very long delays occur as well.

    And communication is usually pretty atrocious. Although this usually can be sidestepped somewhat by just reading the app carefully and at least occasionally reading the upcoming construction notices.

    But and this is the actually important thing that makes it all worth it, they run a ton of service, to a just insane number of stations. You can legitimately use it for all your travel if you just impose a time buffer about as long as the initial trip. From everywhere to everywhere in this country, usually for under 50€ if you just plan the slightest bit, or with the Deutschlandticket travel regio.

    The amount of stations we have in towns of under 50k people might be among the highest in the world. The amount of people within x km of a station with regular (usually at worst hourly) service is enormous. The amount of track per person both in the country as well as company is staggering.

    It’s nice and easy to call DB a joke but I think it’s far from it, public transit especially in urban areas, where as we all know most people live, is nearly world class in terms of coverage. You don’t need a car anywhere in Germany if you don’t want to and that’s a great thing, sure if you are impatient or get stressed when things outside of your control have impact on you, you might want a car but it’s very much not a requirement. Unless you almost pretty specifically have your home or work as far away from civilization as you can get.

    DB has much more potential and probably should be much better than it is but it’s far from bad even. Some of the arguments brought against it also in your comment will just read like old anti transit propaganda for the car companies, wether rehashed out of habit or ignorance. Please at least get your mostly valid criticism and don’t aim it at DB but the car lobby, and 20+ years of neolib transit policy that’s responsible for this situation.

    I knew 14 year old girls who would use the trains in the middle of the night and I have used them for all my transport that’s not on a bike for the last 6 years. And I like the system. Your comment reads like pure anti transit propaganda to me. Even though some of it I’d say myself as a jokey complaint.

    To end on a lighthearted note, at some point in time I borded a train (45mins delayed although for me it was essentially 15 mins early in a hourly schedule)heading for Aachen from Köln Deutz. After heading successfully through Hbf and Ehrenfeld we found ourselves on the track heading onto the südbrücke back to the eastern side of the rhine, with our train conductor being about as confused that we were now rolling through the same station i borded the train at, as everyone else on the train. All in all we ended up almost another hour behind.


  • In this same reality it’s also still more expensive, logistically difficult and just again inhumane. If the afd is getting close to taking charge entirely, I’ll take my bike to France to learn how to make the polices job a living hell. Just resigning to stupid outdated thinking doesn’t seem particularly appealing to me.

    Sure some might cheer when they start to push that hard against immigration. Others will riot and burn the streets even worse than they do already. Because for example we believe having such a thing as universal human rights is a good idea.

    Because completely counter to whatever you think about defending borders countries have for literal time immemorial tried and failed to gain advantage or prevent each other from doing so by military force. It’s been catastrophic every single time. Or are the Greeks Romans, Chinese kingdoms, Nazis, Soviets, still here with us today, did they have a graceful and good end to their reign.

    The choice you present is false both options will inevitably end in the decline of the West, one just might be faster than the other. But there is in theory at least better alternatives, they just require Europeans to stop being US lapdogs. And letting go of the thousands of years old doctrine of military and economic domination, that creates most of its own problems to begin with.


  • Yes it doesn’t work if you make it impossible or very hard for it to work. I’m obviously not perfectly sure but for the amount of refugees we have both in Germany and likely Denmark, especially now with Ukraine we spend way to little money on the process of integration, if there’s not enough (language) schools, shitty temporary housing and unhelpful and uncooperative Ausländerbehörden, we shouldn’t turn to blaming the people who come here for the problems we in the “West” largely created.

    Blaming and viliviying Somali and Syrian migrants just gets us increasingly deeper into this rabbit hole, until at the end of the day you have fundamentalist or ethnic riots, or firing squads at the outside borders. Both is completely unworkable, incredibly more expensive and frankly inhumane.

    The conservatives that think human rights are a good thing should get their head out of fantasy land, the crusty socdems should ask themselves how they let this shit happen, and yeah the afd isn’t gonna fix it but closing the borders as they demand is the most stupid non solution ever, just letting the thing heat up there on the outskirts until it blows up in all of our faces. Which it will continue to as long as no one takes it seriously enough to actually make a good solution. But relying on the publics generosity and frankly Kafkaesque government regulation and support isn’t gonna get you well integrated migrants in a generation, it takes 3 maybe 5 in that case. Which is what we’ve been doing.