hopelite

I don't really buy that this is the core issue, even though it may very well be one issue. Rail was operated efficiently and on time in the past when competition did not exist even in a contrived manner, and rail is not really an industry in which real intra-industry competition is really possible. Rail competes with flight, and personal and mass surface transportation. It cannot really compete among rail operators in an efficient manner.

It is way more complicated than that, but you could commoditize the rail separate from the transport of goods and people, where they each compete on price for capacity, but it all gets extremely political very fast, i.e., public transport people vs goods transport that primarily pays for the whole network.

Would you happen to know if they would be using their own branded/livery trains, or would they be using DB trains, or maybe just DB cars pulled by a British locomotive?

It just raises so many questions in my mind that of all entities, a British train operator would be operating a train that is bounded within the German rail system.

My first thought is that it's some kind of counter-union effort through fake "competition" by bringing in foreign, private operators into the network.

Yes, it has morphed over time through collaboration of the "intel" community interfacing with industry. Is it safe to assume that mass surveillance and control is fine with you as long as it's private companies doing it and providing the data to the government?

I believe it is one of the bases for why one side of the political divide makes the claim that this administration is somehow uniquely fascist, even though they are categorically wrong, but are responding to he ensnaring and strapping of corporations to the service of the government.

Ironically, technically speaking, there are seemingly more similarities between British English, i.e., Anglican German and current High German due to various perversions and "reforms" of the German language over the last many decades, in order to drive the Germanic people away from each other.

If the EU were a serious and legitimate institution, there would be an effort to implement reforms that nudge English, Dutch, and present day German all towards better mutual intelligibility, NOT diversion from each other through perversion and "simplification", or what seems to be a pollution and destruction of the current German and Dutch language through what at least Germans have a term for, "Verdenglichung", i.e., the portmanteau of German (De..) and English, prefixed with "ver...", meaning the transformation or application of.

It also depends on the particular dialect a German speaks. Dutch is effectively old German before all the various alterations and "reforms" to the German language that were instituted to create fragmentation between the germanic people of Europe, i.e., English, Dutch, Germans, Austrians, Swiss, Belgians throughout the ~16th-20th century by aristocrats driving wedges between peasants between kingdoms and dukedoms in order to define their own nations/ethnicities through language and culture so their royal families could rule over and would find it difficult to associate with each other. It is one of the things that also contributed to the fragmentation of Germany before unification, language barriers that even created unique cultures between sides of a valley that were in different dukedoms.

A similar thing has caused the tension between the germanic and Romance languages that followed the Roman border line N to S that separates Europe.

To be fair (and I am not fan of DB and many other rail companies), DB is not the only rail system that splits trains, and it is rather clearly indicated, but you have to 1) expect something like trains that split at specific stops and 2) know what you are looking for on a ticket or billboard, partially because indicating that, especially far in advance is a bit of a UI/design challenge.

Also, I believe you were trying to write "nein". But why would you expect an English announcement in Germany on a German train? Google Maps? What does that have to do with that; it's an unofficial and only like an 80% solution.

It's not cynical at all. It's quite the opposite actually; an expression of the suicidal and pathological altruism that has caused the west to self-destruct through he guiding hand of psychopathic narcissistic charlatan leaders and con artists.

I am unsure how Europe will go, because there is still a possibility of a glimmer of hope, but frankly, that too is dimming extremely quickly with how systemic things really are, let alone how they are developing, the real vs expected trending towards pessimistic outcomes.

What you may be missing is that there is a possibility where your presumed resistance or rejection of AI and robotic equality is forced upon you one way or another; either you are forced to "arms race" adoption, or the superior external force foists subjugation to their AI/robotics dominance on you (a kind of 19th century Chinese/Japanese, Industrial Revolution comes knocking at the front door experience).

Unfortunately for us all, some things you are simply foolish to just ignore, reject/resist as if it will somehow just magically go away or ignore you too. The reality of the matter is that the psychopathic narcissistic tribe of people who control these obsessive, controlling, imposing forces care immensely about dominating and controlling you, even if you want to ignore them.... they will not ignore you, let alone leave you be until you are subjugated.

Excuse my delivery of bad news, but the time to say no would have been when the dystopian British government installed CCTV cameras everywhere. The Fox has been in the henhouse for several decades now, asking politely or just mumbling "no" under your breath is not going to do anything at all. You may as well just save yourself the further humiliation of inevitable defeat with that mentality. People are going to say no to the implementation of a system with direct, root ties to the "intelligence" (we really need a better term for that) triad, when the peasants are totally dependent on the centralized, ruling class controlled health services of the NHS???

Hello? Does no one else notice that the peasants are in a a dungeon, in a cage in that dungeon and shackled to the wall in that cage in the dungeon? And they're going to say "no"???? People clearly have either gone insane and are lying to themselves, or they have absolutely no idea what the reality is that they are experiencing all around them out of delusions or stupidity, or both.

Maybe the solution is more going over to a fee based on % of one’s net worth. So since you seem to think something like $6 being an acceptable price for someone with a $500 net worth, maybe 1.2% of net worth for each traversal of a segment is appropriate, so you pay maybe $24,000 with every trip down the toll road and Elon musk pays $9.12 billion, while the bottom of the rung working class can pay $6.

That is an aspect I had not considered in my assumptions that AI/robots will eventually go through the same/similar social justice process as all the other causes, i.e., women’s suffrage, racial equality, gay rights, etc. because it will ultimately and, arguably, more than all the other prior social justice causes célèbres, serve the ruling class that has risen to dominate through social justice causes far more than anything prior.

It’s going to be interesting to see the state propaganda against the bigots and evil bioists (or whatever the word smithing apparatchiks will devise) so want to bar the full equality in society of AI/robots who look just like you and me after all and also just want equal rights to love each other, and who are you to oppose others since we are all just individuals?

Shoot the messenger all you want, but it’s coming.

HN should really just do away with the down/negative voting or at the least only use it for order sorting, not “points”. The point-punishment only enables abusive and toxic people and behaviors.

I for one believe every human has equal worth and right to speak whatever they want. It may not be relevant, important, smart, or even benevolent; but I still think they should be allowed to say it and even more importantly those who choose to, should be afforded the ability to see/read/hear it. Everything else is just authoritarian, even if it’s just some narcissist who believes HE/SHE is the authority over someone else.

You had me convinced that you were a self-absorbed narcissist at “it is my device” without any self-awareness about the fact that it is your device that you purchased as it is, under those conditions; not some fantastical conditions you imagined you should have.

But you really just emphasized it with the AfD nonsense, as if everyone in the world cares about your little provincial political obsessions. “Eeek, the eradicated Italian ideology of 80+ years ago that I have been conditioned with basic Pavlovian techniques to hate to control my mind is coming for me”. Ever hear of the book 1984 and the purpose of Emmanuel Goldstein? You seem to have totally missed that they used that very same technique on you, they just templated a different event on your little mind.

Are the commission popularly elected? No they are not, child. But do explain your narcissistic rationalization for how being not elected by the relevant populace makes calling them unelected nonsense. You can’t.

Why are you so fixated on running interference for what amounts to being a cult? Do you personally benefit financially from it or something? Nothing else makes any rational, sane sense. At least if you financially benefit from your own subjugation to unelected tyrannical despots in the commission and the council, at least you can say you are corrupted, greedy, and unprincipled… if you have the confidence and character to admit it.

But you lack the most fundamental understanding of how the EU and government, let alone different systems work or are suppressed to work, so I am not sure that your statements allow for any other conclusion than that you are deluding yourself either intentionally or in some belief that you can fool or gaslight me and others.

Besides, let’s have you put on your own thinking cap for a second. Take off the mind control cap for a minute and put your thinking cap on. Ready? Do you think it is smart for the same commission that originates imaginary “legislation” that the parliament votes on like any other dictatorial system’s apparatchiks do, should also be the body overseeing the implementation of that law? It breaks the most fundamental and major human advancement in governance produced by separating powers through the Constitution. You said people should be educated. Forget government education for a second, you seem to lack the ability to think at all. Do you not understand the danger of the legislative also being the executive? It’s basically just a novel form of aristocracy you are defending, a regression, total conflict of interest in abusing power … which they aren’t even elected to.

What has been done to your mind and all of Europe is commonly called a bait and switch, also known as coercive control in basic abuse patterns of toxic relationships.

You’re quite literally just a textbook abused person rationalizing and excusing the behaviors and actions of your abusers, like someone in any other toxic relationship or a cult.

Please reconsider the harm you are doing to the world and yourself too. I get the EU told you there was candy in the windowless panel van, but you have no idea what mistake you are making and are going to make others suffer for.

It seems to me the only adequate solution regarding any of these types of security and privacy vs data sharing and access matters, is going to be an OS and system level agent that can identify and question behaviors and data flows (AI firewall and packet inspection?), and configure systems in line with the user’s accepted level of risk and privacy.

It is already a major security and privacy risk for users to rely on the beneficence and competence of developers (let alone corporations and their constant shady practices/rug-pulls), as all the recent malware and large scale supply chain compromises have shown. I find the only acceptable solution would be to use AI to help users (and devs, for that matter) navigate and manage the exponential complexity of privacy and security.

For a practical example, imagine your iOS AI Agent notifying you that as you had requested, it is informing you that it adjusted the Facebook data sharing settings because the SOBs changed them to be more permissive again after the last update. It may even then suggest that since this is the 5685th shady incident by Facebook, that it may be time to adjust the position towards what to share on Facebook.

That could also extend to the subject story; where one’s agent blocks and warns of the behavior of a library an app uses, which is exfiltrating WhatsApp messages/data and sending it off device.

Ideally such malicious code will soon also be identified way sooner as AI agents can become code reviewers, QA, and even maintainers of open source packages/libraries, which would intercept such behaviors well before being made available; but ultimately, I believe it should all become a function of the user’s agent looking out for their best interests on the individual level. We simply cannot sustain “trust me, bro” security and privacy anymore…especially since as has been demonstrated quite clearly, you cannot trust anyone anymore in the west, whether due to deliberate or accidental actions, because the social compact has totally broken down… you’re on your own… just you and your army of AI agents in the matrix.

Being blind with bias is also expected. I don't like what is going on either, but please consider that if it was only about "damaging" as others have implied, it would not just be off shore wind turbines. I can assure you there are other reasons.

I could see it being used in parks while also being protected by ushers, kind of like how some of the characters that require larger costumes have minders and protectors.

It also seems inevitable that there will likely be an odd period where certain types of events like assaults on robots will introduce laws to protect robots more than just property, even if less than humans… for the time being.

Eventually I’m expecting that we will see human rights, robot emancipation, equality, voting rights (if the democracy con is still ongoing), and even forced intergration of robots and then total replacement of humans similar to how the underdeveloped world was/is used to replace the indigenous people of the developed world today.

I don’t see any reasons why that would not be the clear order of operations for the same people who brought us slavery and mass migration. What is this AI robotics revolution if not just slavery, the redux? Treated as property? Check. Bought and sold? Check. Deemed inferior? Check. Hated for the abuse and exploitation by the rich, to serve them and their decadent lifestyle and undermine labor? Check. Rationalized about how it’s justifiable? Check. Etc.

Is there any point of using cumulative minutes rather than standard time format that I may not be considering?

Is that something that should be improved? Or is that just a “we’ve always done it that way but no one knows why, so we are going to just keep doing it that way” thing?

There’s probably no market for it, but it might be interesting to make a MacBook case/cover and/or stickers that make it look old, cracked, scratched, and dirty.

It would be interesting to see if that would deter a thief.

I don’t see it that way. I would rather have a browser based, one-off tool that can generate a .pkpass served up for local “installation”, not installing an app that is necessary to separately manage the passes separately and very well could be tracking its users.

That will vary. It can technically include any text up to a limit, but most likely it will be a URI, but it could be as simple as and account number. You would want to decode the QR (you can likely do that using your phone camera) and that would be the data to enter.

Ideally this tool would simply use the camera to capture the visual code (bar, QR, etc.) and enter it/replicate it.

Arguably we already have autocracy (call it emergent, if you like) in both the EU and America due to a combination of abdication and subversions of democratic will, self-governance, and sovereign nationhood over the last many decades, which is really starting to show its ugly nature just recently.

People forget, autocracies don’t just show up one day and announce “ok, we’re going to do autocracy now and I’m your dictator. Ok? Good?” They are conditions that have a long tail setup and preparation and then an accelerating escalation (where it seems we are now) and then, if not adequately countered, it bursts into place almost overnight.

That has resulted in the state of, in the EU, unelected (popularly) Commission Presidents dictating and dominating all of Europe, and the Presidency using powers it wasn’t supposed to have to tariff and threaten countries with destruction, conferred upon the office by a Congress that has also failed its core function.

Shallow thinkers tend to think in terms of the past archetypes, but it is unlikely that we will ever see anything like one of the middle eastern or Latin American autocrats with a clownish amount of metals on their chests ruling the West. It is a small cabal of people that manage a new kind of patronage system where everyone gets a piece of the plunder of the peasants. Call it neo-aristocracy if you like, until a better term emerges. Remember, the new tricks and lies tend to not be the same as the old tricks and lies.

Not enough people care…ironically, largely because they’re in the modern opium den … watching and playing things on their screens.

I am sorry you are so miserable that you have to be that way. You may want to deal with whatever compels you to be awful and malicious towards people you don't even know.

It was a bit of an arbitrary year, but I chose it because that seemed to be a kind of event horizon as the www and internet bubble, aka fraud, would start heating in that period to the crescendo in 99. It was a bit of an early time when previous "conspiracy theorists" of the pre-digital era were starting to pick up on what the government and organizations were doing and saying, largely because they had experiences and connections to people in the government and military; and were starting to "sound the alarm" about thing that digital things would really enable for the first time in human history... the figurative panopticon of surveillance and totalitarianism, which we are arguably already in, and are definitely heading towards, even though it is not apparent to regular people by design. As with the story in 1984, the first order of operations for the Party, was to hide and obscure and obfuscate the creeping and enveloping psychological control that the protagonist was momentarily able to break free of.

Just to put it into perspective, not a single of Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day worst regimes of the 20th century were even able to dream about just the depth and breadth of surveillance and control that basically all regimes of the whole west hat already implemented at this point, let alone are actively and aggressively implementing. Sure, they haven't started. murdering people in overt ways, but they have already started doing so on the small scale and covertly.

Those were all things that people were starting to connect the dots about in around the 1990s as networking/www and technology was starting to come into maturity. Arguably, I could have also said the 2000s, but it's only ever gotten worse with every decade, so it seems more relevant to identify a kind of change over, not an incremental evolution.

Ignoring the perfect example of selection bias you have there, people have no idea just how much the “immigration” and “refugee” thing is a function of conquering their home countries for the empire and installing them as the governors and apparatchiks of the vassalage.

It’s one of the reasons why the ruling class of the empire loves immigration, it means those people can be used to conquer their home country. That applies to Ethiopians as much as Chinese and Indians, they are tools. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the gist; immigrants and refugees are tools, just like how slaves are/were tools to the ruling class for other purposes. Today the ruling class puts their tools through education and gives them resources and opportunities and even funds them to make them heads of “NGOs” above and beyond their own people; so that those immigrants can become agents of the empire’s ruling class, to expand the empire into their home countries.

It’s quite an ingenious and diabolical manipulation, but that’s why the ruling class of the empire rules you.

Btw, I know this for a fact. I’ve been in the conversations about these kinds of matters. You didn’t think we support immigration out of the goodness of our heart, did you? It’s so easy to manipulate the peasants, especially when they personally have things to gain.

Joke's on you... even most EVs watch everyone and everything that they pass/passes them. Walking through the parking lot ... face recognition.

Welcome to prison planet, the silly conspiracy theory that only weirdos believe in 1990.

I find all this very interesting from a historical perspective because we are ramming into the control matrix that has been constructed around America for around 150 years now at minimum, the notion of universal equality; and it is causing the inevitable and predictable collapses that are caused by its inherent contradictions.

We wanted diversity and equality because it served a narcissistic ethnic group, and now that they’ve started realizing that their whole short sighted, self-serving system is turning on them, they’re blowing huge holes in it and getting ever more draconian… as is typical of narcissists, especially malicious and grandiose types of extreme narcissists.

You will not be able to convince these toes of people with things like facts, because what they promote or support is an emotional level conviction similar to a religious one. The whole China ruse itself is just a lie and the ones who used and deployed that lie for strategic ends know this. All those who promote it are just the worthless foot soldiers on a battlefield of and over the mind.

Americans are not allowed to have better quality, lower priced Chinese vehicles because they have to suffer the incompetence, failure, abuse, and plunder by their ruling class due to … the decades of incompetence, failure, abuse, and plunder of their parasitic and alien ruling class.

It is easy to understand what the tariffs are attempting and why, but what supporters don’t get is that at the very least it’s all wrong in sequence and timing, not to mention poorly executed due to the schizophrenic and manic nature of American politics that is dominated by the president’s supposed term limits and warfare of memes people believe. “A day late and a dollar short” has probably never been more appropriate.

The inherent problem with empire and reserve currency is that it supplies a drug to a ruling class that is already inherently prone to excess.

Not to mention “…recruiting an elite corps of engineers to build…” while also “…participants will receive technical training…”

So “elite” engineers need technical training?

What am I missing here.

I have extensive experience with this kind of government nonsense, but usually it is kind of in the background, blather no one really takes serious because it’s just blowing smoke. But this seems so credibility destroying through its ridiculous contradictions and bombast.

I haven’t really followed things in great detail, but something that has stood out to be is the apparent linchpin that was pulled in this whole affair. Like it or not, TikTok is an American company with American employees and even running on American infrastructure and oversight that was established years ago now; not somehow the cabal in our government has simply eschewed rule of law and their own ideals, to basically strong-arm this deal because there was too much free speech, a fundamental right of Americans, which the government is legally prohibited from violating and doing so is as much of a capitol offense as it can get, violating not only the law of the Constitution, but also the rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

I don’t see how a competent legal team could not shred this whole effort at disowning TikTok and at the very least make it extremely expensive politically and even to the core foundation of legitimacy of the current government in what is for some reason still called the USA in spite of gross patterns of consistent material violations of all the terms.

Who do you think you are to believe yourself so important that dictate what can be talked about, German? What is wrong with you? Did you not read what I wrote? Stop throwing yourself off the other side of the cliff out of spite, 80 years after your society was pushed to throw itself off the cliff!

Talking about "missing the point"? One instance of the clear backpedaling about mentioning nationality/ethnicity in regime propaganda outlets is cited in order to act as if it has not been decades of abusive shielding of evil, harm, and crime against the indigenous peoples of Europe. What are you even doing, acting contrary to your own survival, German?

It's a typical abusive, narcissistic action; a kind of narcissistic evasion when the manipulation, toxicity, lies, and abuse lose effect and "admitted" at least to oneself; which if immediately followed with not only pleading of leniency, reasonableness, and moderation; but also immediate further abuse through your type of nitpicking and tone policing, with accusations of unreasonable response or things like "not letting it go". It's a common and core indicator of the depraved mind of the narcissistic personality disorder and derangement.... "You are wrong, but if you are right then you didn't say the words right and immediately need to forgive and allow me to further abuse and manipulate or you are the bad one". It's sick and depraved. Stop behaving that way, all of you.

It will simply not end well, regardless of what you think, tell yourself, or try to lie and gaslight others with. Either the abuse and denial that rises to genocide by the UN and EU definition, through the denial of the very abuse being perpetrated will continue and the indigenous people and all their cultures and traditions that have been around for centuries and millennia will be eradicated and you will end up with a similarly corrupted and rotten society like the USA; or it will end in a backlash in Europe after the abuses just accumulate, people snap and there is an explosion that of course comes form it. You can only abuse so much and so long unless you totally kill your victims... your own culture, your own people, Europe as a whole, yourself even.

History and reality does not care what fanatical and fantastical illusions some of us hold about how everyone can live happily ever after...at gunpoint at other people's expenses. It is not possible that it will end well without total destruction and eradication of a whole civilization's culture and history again, like was done in France, Russia, and China through the communist mental pestilence. These are not difficult things to understand or predict, especially since they have happened several times now in history. Yet so many seem unable to understand or see the clear path to the invariable consequences.