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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • The same holds true for roads as well: Build a massive highway somewhere in the mountains where nobody lives and it will cost a ton of money while having very little benefit. And highway bridges and tunnels are also very expensive to build.

    For comparison, I pulled some numbers from Germany. High speed train tracks cost €25mio/km (not counting bridges or tunnels). Highways cost €20mio/km (again not counting bridges or tunnels). So it’s not that far off.

    On the other hand, maintaining a high speed track is much cheaper, at around €70k/km pa., while maintaining a highway costs €390k/km pa plus another €180k/km pa. administrative cost.

    But the real kicker is capacity: A 2-lane highway has a capacity of 3000-5000 vehicles per hour. At an average occupancy of 1.2 people per car, that’s 3600-6000 people.

    An Austrian Railjet for example, can carry around 1700 people and you can run them at 3-minute intervals on a high speed track. That’s a total capacity of 34 000 people per hour. They are usually not run at that frequency, because that’s vastly more than what’s ever necessary, but you get the point. High speed rail has such a massive capacity, that it’s virtually unlimited, for a price that’s very comparable to a regular 2-lane highway.

    When it comes to cargo, low-speed rail is even much more efficient than trucks on roads, with the major downside being that you have to unload the cargo to trucks for local distribution.

    But my main point here is that roads aren’t some holy heal-it-all solution that’s never a waste of money while rail needs to be profitable on its own, like a lot of people seem to perceive it. A highway is not more of a basic human need than high-speed rail.





  • It’s almost as if infrastructure is there to facilitate growth and economy and not to turn a profit.

    Do the same math for roads: How many percent of the roads in your country (or any other country) turn a profit?

    Do the same with water works, sewage and so on. All these things have benefits far greater than immediate profit.

    You need roads so that people can get to work and to places where they can spend money and so that goods can be shipped. And all of these things generate taxes and economic benefit, which in turn finance, among other things, road building.

    It would be entirely stupid to think that every piece of infrastructure needs to finance itself and turn a profit, while completely forgetting the actual purpose and benefit of the infrastructure.



  • I have read the article, and I got your point before, and I still think that it’s totally moot and besides the point.

    If they had been two total randos, say Max the car repair man cheating with Mandy the receptionist, then nobody would have even tried to recognize them. Not with social media, not with facial recognition not with anything else.

    And even if Peter, the coworker of Max and Mandy would have recognized them, he’d maybe have told their partners, or he might have made fun of them at work, but that’s it. Because these people don’t matter.

    To get back to your example: Somebody took a picture of you. Ok. Now what? Did that picture go viral on social media? Did that picture make it into international news? No. Because you don’t matter.

    And you said it yourself:

    Shit, my workplace couldn’t even identify the people who walked in the front door and stole stuff and walked out. The police could see their faces clearly in the security footage, but they weren’t from around here and no one knew who they were.


  • A while ago, when the energy crisis was in full swing, I emailed a corporation that owns a large office building in town, that’s completely covered with a light display (basically tower-scale christmas lights) that they should please turn off that energy waster.

    Their response was like “Our lighting is eco-friendly, because once a month we turn it green to show our commitment to green energy, and that offsets all the energy consumption.”


  • We should bring back paying to read a newspaper, magazine, (pc-magazine :P)

    You are probably not wrong, and we should be paying for a lot more things, but the genie is out of the bottle for many things here and it’s difficult to roll that back.

    For example, newspaper reading habits have changed a lot. Before the internet, you’d usually stick with one newspaper and that’s it. Maybe two if you have too much money. You buy your newspaper and you read it front to back, probably even the topics you don’t particularly care about.

    Now it’s often the other way round. Most people read news from quite a few sources (or often just follow links on social media and don’t really even care for the publisher), but they don’t read their news from virtual cover to virtual cover. Instead, they stick to the topics they care for, or maybe even read about the same thing in multiple publications, comparing what they have to say about it.

    For this kind of newspaper reading, current forms of monetarisation don’t really work. Most newspapers only offer subscriptions to the whole newspaper, often in the range of €5-15 per month. So if I were to pay for the ~20 newspapers that I read news from at least semi-frequently, that’s €200-600 per month. No way I can or want to afford that.

    Some allow you to pay per article, but that is usually pretty expensive too (€1-3 per article) and also I need to register to every single newspaper. That’s not great either.

    What I’d really like to see would be a industry-wide subscription. For example, I pay €10 per month and that allows me to read 100 articles per month across all newspapers. That would be really nice.






  • There’s even worse stuff: Planting trees is sold as carbon offset. But where do you plant trees? Certainly not on valuable farmland. Instead they drain bogs to plant trees instead.

    The issue is that bogs can store about 10x as much CO² as a forest can, and by draining the bog, that CO² is released.

    And bog land isn’t exactly well-suited for growing trees, and also the carbon offset only pays for planting the trees, not for keeping them alive. So the trees die almost instantly, thus releasing their stored CO². But the upside to it is that on the now re-deforested land, more trees can be planted.

    It’s complete greenwashing with at best no effect and at worst terrible effects.

    The main issue with planting trees to remove CO² is that a forest doesn’t consume CO² but instead just stores it. Once a forest is fully-grown, no more CO² is sunk in there. A hectare of forest stores ~400t CO2. Germany creates about 650 million tons CO² per year. So to offset that, Germany would need to plant 1.6 million hectars of forest a year, which is about 4.5% of the surface area of Germany. 32% of Germany is already forest, so that leaves a theoretical maximum of 14.5 years of CO² emissions that Germany could offset by planting trees.

    But Germany has been creating CO² for much longer.