Is that new this year - if so is (s)he not a bit early?
benjhm
joined 2 years ago
Jon is quite right, in many places they are not trying to significantly increase modal share, the problem is lack of trains to use the capacity of the network, plus some gaps/bottlenecks in that network.
Also the business model of SNCF is particularly bad (should be called SNCP - just designed for small elite living in Paris), while DB suffers from years of underfunding infrastructure. Situation is improving in some other corners of europe, but too slowly to pull enough traffic from air and road.
Compare with the expansion of chinese railways over the last decade.
[ By the way, is that photo the Meuse (Dinant-Givet) ? I'd like to use that line if it would reopen ]
I can relate to this, having developed a coupled socio-emissions-carbon-climate model, which evolved for 20 years in java, until recently converted to scala3. You can have a look here. The problem is that "coupling" in such models of complex systems is a 'good' thing, as there are feedbacks - for example atmospheric co2 drives climate warming but the latter also changes the carbon cycle, demography drives economic growth but the latter influences fertility and migration, etc.. (some feedbacks are solved by extrapolating from the previous timestep - the delay is anyway realistic). There are also policy feedbacks - between top-down climate-stabilisation goals, and bottom up trends and national policies, the choice affects the logical calculation order. All this has to work fast within the browser (now scala.js - originally java applet), responding interactively to parameter adjustments, only recalculating curves which changed - getting all these interactions right is hard.
If restarting in scala3 I'd structure it differently, but having a lot of legacy science code known to work, it’s hard to pull it apart. Wish I'd known such principles at the beginning, but as it grew gradually, one doesn't anticipate such complexity.
Thankyou for the tool, very useful, but hope they simplify this, so we can make trips across the country.
Vivaldi recently posted this -vivaldi-wont-allow-a-machine-to-lie-to-you.
See also vivaldi community
District heating makes sense from a purely technical point of view, however it's important to consider social incentives too.
Such systems were everywhere in former Soviet union, also in China.
They can work great when they are new, but underground pipes eventually develop leaks, need digging up and fixing, and this got neglected during the soviet stagnation era (from Brezhnev onwards). Consequently, most of the hot water disappeared underground (I heard this from Ukrainian engineering students), steam rose from the ground in city streets (I saw this) - often damaging nearby structures, and even in mid Siberia there were lines without snow, above the pipes (also saw this). The subsequent inefficiency was a major factor behind the flop of the post-soviet economies in the 1990s (Ukraine had highest emissions / GDP in the world at that time). Unfortunately fixing leaky old pipes is not sexy for political leaders who prefer big new power projects.
So - it can be done, but depends on the reliability of the social system.
It's good they exposed this network of websites - now what is going to be done to prevent them using it as intended (casual users on phones promoting soundbites to friends are not going to be checking the list in such articles...)?
Having said that, the anglosphere experienced this already in 2016 with Brexit and Trump, and such networks also promoted anti-french coups in Africa, so to 'uncover' this now seems rather behind the wave. A specific issue among francophone elite was their concept that to make french great again they had to focus on resisting "anglo-saxons", so were naïvely tempted by russian narratives about a "multi-polar world". Russia wants to divide europeans, we need to cooperate better.
Not all wetlands are methane-producing. I'd imagine that wetlands formed where ice has just retreated first have to sequester a substantial amount of carbon from the atmosphere, before they could release it back again.
Of course there are relatively small areas of greenland that have been green for a long time, so may have accumulated peat, but to imply the ex-ice-sheet will became a big methane source, just because this is an issue in other regions of the arctic (russia, canada) , seems to extrapolate too far.
We have one, it works reliably for many years, even in winter when there is sun - problem is sunny days are too rare here from Nov to Jan. If you get one, get a big tank, and optimise setup for winter (low sun angle), more than enough hot water in summer.
They are certainly not a 'de facto carbon price' because they are not related to the amount of carbon that any specific homeowner emits. Carbon price is meant to be an incentive to change behaviour or technology, to reduce emissions.
I suppose they might be considered a 'de-facto climate-change-denial price' for those who recently invested in such places by the sea (in the US case, there seems to be some correlation...), but that's still not fair for people who lived in vulnerable places for a long time, before some of these impacts became inevitable.
There was talk, back in 1990s (iirc?) of europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok. I think it’s a pity we missed that opportunity.
I've crossed the Russian-Chinese border on a few occasions, years ago, back then it felt culturally that was a european border. Now, the way it's going, seems more likely Siberia will end up attached to China.
(by the way, wrt OP, China has many many banks...)
We have ducks in the garden, neighbours have chickens, glad of our choice - ducks seem more fun.
Ducks help mow grass, eat slugs and bugs, don’t seem to damage vegetables. At any sound of digging they gather around - in the way - waiting for worms. Make mud near water, otherwise tidy. They are managing ok with buckets awaiting repair of pond. Our dog loves watching the ducks, stalks but doesn't touch them, useless at herding them home. Searching for eggs is a family game, but mostly just during the first half of the year.
p.s. fwiw, here's a lemmy community on ducks