grumpy-de-sre

I mean the obvious is that Switzerland is rich, and money is power.

But it's true that public infrastructure is more dependent on local rather than federal governments. I think the best example of weak local governments has to be the UK [1].

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0DKsMJl6Z8

I mean the public transport infrastructure here is great, and there's a lot to love about the place (it's why I'm still here after all).

But spot on about the mentality. A lot of that great infrastructure here was inherited, and the attitude around it's continued development has been super conservative. Not to mention the Berlin government is borderline insolvent.

Just look at the cluster fuck that was car free Friedrichstr.

Warsaw is great, need to visit Poland again, have a huge soft spot for pączki.

Warsaw really is booming, visiting from Berlin feels like stepping ten years into the future.

Lots of real (and not paper) economic growth.

But you cannot have good public infrastructure without a strong state (strength on its own isn't authoritarianism).

A lot of western governments are rather weak, I swear baumols cost disease and spiraling social/retirement/debt spending has crippled their ability to provide for the public.

Public transport is in a lot of ways an aggregate expression of state power. It takes a lot of state capabilities to be able to execute public transport well.

One of the very few places in London that I ever felt truly at peace.

I think the heavy maze like structure was incredibly effective at blocking out the sound of the city and the water features / conservatory made it an amazing place to chill out for a relaxing lunch.

Not quite cyberpunk, not quite solarpunk but somewhere in between and utterly unique.

Yeh the congestion on Beijing's ring roads is pretty awful. Orderly but awful, also less EVs than ideal.

Have a friend from Shanghai here in Germany that had a really hard time getting a drivers license due to her old driving habits. Aggressively cutting in front of people and horning isn't looked upon too highly here.

Was actually quite surprised by how "civilized" the driving was in our recent China trip. Don't think I heard a horn once in probably 20h or so as a passenger, did find the drivers up in Heliongjiang a bit bold with their lane weaving but in Beijing they drove great!

Clear rules, and consistent enforcement works.

Noticed something similar with littering, right now they have to employ an army of old folks to pick up cigarette butts. But I suspect once people come to expect clean surroundings that enforcement of littering fines can become a thing and the culture around respecting public spaces will slowly change. We even caught a young kid full on lecturing their grandparent for spitting on the street.

Big concern IMO with 10BASE-T1 and PoDL for long runs / in wall installations etc is the lack of galvanic isolation. Maybe I'm just paranoid but there's a ton of advantages to not having to worry about things like ground loops and common mode voltages etc.

What I wouldn't mind would be a beefier 100BASE-TX 2-pair cable spec, and some extended PoE profiles. You'd need high current magnetics or something but surely that's possible.

"Judge Flannery did not record a conviction against Lidden and ordered that he be subject to an 18-month bond and recognisance release order."

Thank god, after a couple years he should have a real chance of getting his life back in order.

Even worse is that if you google the poor blokes name they had the paparazzi out taking courthouse photos.

The gutter press in Australia have a field day at peoples expense.

Plenty of precedent of throwing high profile court cases too (hard to find unbiased jurors etc). Lately there's been a number of important cases being declared mistrials.

Pretty sure he won't be getting a license to drive a train anytime soon. Especially not with a recorded conviction.

In the meantime public sentiment toward cats in Australia is becoming really toxic (due to the consequences of a long-term ineffective feral control program). I swear one day when the chemical baits turn out to be worse than the cats themselves the pendulum will swing hard in favor of cats once again. They really are an indispensable tool and a big part of humanities agricultural success.

FWIW I'm in favor of dropping a few billion AUD into cat control programs and deploying technologies like felixer everywhere. Up until now it's just been an underfunded borderline volunteer affair.

I've joked that the nuclear wasteland will be populated by cockroaches, rats and ... cats. They are the ultimate survivor.

From what I understand SAC305 if not exposed to corrosive environments has a relatively low (but nonzero) risk of whisker formation. But in practice in a hobby environment it's not going to be a big issue.

Pure tin (or Sn99.3Cu0.7 alloy) is garbage, the silver helps a bunch.

For demanding applications there's apparently some even more performant alloys available today, eg. Innolot [1].

1. https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/55827

Damn right, there's absolutely no justifiable reason for using leaded solder for hobby projects today. Get a good iron, and a nice roll of SAC305 from a reputable vendor and you won't have any issues.

You're definitely not alone.

In my case it's somewhat of a learned behavior, a lot of my favorite video games make me violently motion sick so over time I just stopped playing them.

Most TV is pretty boring IMO. There's always exceptions but it's not something I find myself regularly being drawn to.

I'm always tinkering on something (a longtime favorite is gardening), and I'm pretty sure I'll always be tinkering until the day I die. Some of us are just wired differently.

Can be a little difficult to connect with the mainstream folks though. I pretty much live in a different world.

Visiting China earlier this year broke me, left the place dismayed about the situation back home.

I'm no communist, just someone who recognizes the social and economic benefits of abundant housing, cheap energy, and forward thinking transport policy.

I have no idea how we'll get back on the track of improving human development but it's not going to be easy.

The post 1970s financialization of everything [1] is probably behind most of Britains decline. The UK was just an early adopter [2].

Embracing that nonsense (including rampant neoliberalism) has really rotted the backbone out of our society.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization

2. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Evolution-of-the-GDP-sha...

Various state governments are already blocking solar projects.

I'm continually shilling Saul Griffith's work on here, I can't remember the particular piece but he calculated that by delaying the solar/wind transition, fossil fuel businesses would profit on the order of 100 trillion dollars.

My conspiracy theory is that Chinese development and proliferation of fossil fuel disrupting technologies is the root source of all of the current global instability. Only a matter of time until the petrodollar becomes obsolete.

The secret ingredient is millions of dollars from fossil fuel lobbyists, and the Murdoch media running a heavy propaganda/misinformation over the past year. Their only goal is to divert public funds away from solar/wind projects.

If voters choose to go down this path it'll be an absolute tragedy for the country and a huge missed opportunity.

I say this as an Australian realist living abroad who always was relatively pro-nuclear.

Propranolol is such an underrated drug, or at-least it was when I first started using it twenty years ago (initially for hand tremors but I found it did more than settle just my hands). Glad others have been discovering its usefulness over the years.

I think they've even recently found use in cancer therapy [1].

Sir James Black the pharmacologist who developed it is an absolute legend [2].

1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2162402X.2023.2...

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPe0sLghRBQ&list=PLVV0r6CmEs...

I mean are we talking about the USA here or Iran?

Definitely a great place to start!

Do you have any links to any material/info on this topic? I'm sure some folks have begun talking about protocols.

The great news is we can break the internet if needed. It will be torn down and chopped up into moderated walled gardens, it's inevitable. Algorithmic rage bait and echo chambers are incompatible with a functioning society.

We are all rapidly aging and pretty much no-one is bringing in anywhere near enough net contributing migrants to offset this.

What the immigration argument overlooks is domestic migration, particularly urbanization. It's zero sum for sure and rural communities will be hollowed out but I think there's a real possibility that they'll be able to soak up much of the excess capacity in the coming decade.

Urbanization massively increases productivity, reduces infrastructure costs etc. There's a real economic beauty to scale. Downside it suppresses fertility even further.

Elder care will be a real nightmare though, but the Chinese elders are willing to accept far more modest conditions and outcomes than their western counterparts. Confucian values for better or worse really help here.

It could go either way at this point.

All of the above is completely true.

But right now they are in the acute/fallout phase of a massive economic disruption (the deleveraging of a highly indebted real estate sector, no less severe than the GFC, they overbuilt to a massive degree). No matter what folks are going to be struggling bad atm.

The trillion dollar question is what does this look like in ten years? It could go either way. A Japan style lost decade, or they manage to find and exploit new growth opportunities. I guess we'll see whether having pretty much the cheapest energy on the planet and impressive logistics allows them to get through this.

Do not discount the tremendous potential of electrification, and cheap renewable energy.

I'm not sure how much acceleration we're seeing, do we have numbers on this? Or are voters just becoming disenfranchised?

Acceleration is great hope/source of optimism.

I vote, monetary policy, weapons of mass destruction [1]. At-least have a long term plan for deleveraging residential real estate. Sure that'll suppress construction even further for a while but I'm sure we can get to the other side.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_red_lines

On a purely numbers basis the older generation of homeowners far outnumber the young. It's going to take a good while before the balance of power can be shifted. Democracy has the longterm tools for sure, just not for another twenty years or so.

Hopefully over time yimby can take hold in some pockets and gradually expand out from those strongholds.