Mitt Romney's wife shared this lovely story of when they were in college, they didn't ask anything from their parents. They'd come visit and got them a nice dinner, that was it. Ann Romney had to order carpet samples and sew them together so they didn't have to walk on bare floors. Sometimes, they were so stripped of cash that they had to sell stock to get money. They had to sell stock. SELL. STOCK.
She probably thought it was an uplifting story.
Humans could be about to ruin whatever was supposed to survive on Mars in a couple million of years. We've disrupted our own planet, and are about to destroy another one. And honestly, we're not all that great as a species.
DB the company has a lot of foreign interests. It bought a British transport company in 2010. Why did they do this instead of reinvesting the money back into the Deutsche Bahn? Because it's a joint-stock company beholden to stake-holders. It should never have been managed like a private company. Now the damage is done and decades of unrepair is catching up to them.
Somehow I don't blame the politics for this disrepair. I blame the execs and upper management.
I also want to know. Same with Tony Blair. Alas, I'm not a legal scholar.
I think the naysayers don't live in Germany, or at least are not used to the idea of mixed use neighbourhoods.
Most restaurants that germans go to don't have a parking lot nearby. Most restaurants are in the city. Although maybe some enterprising country inn/restaurant owners already offer EV charging.
You're thinking cities with single use neighbourhoods like in the US, where residency and commercial areas are usually separated. That's not the case in Germany.
For a family trip? Toilet break, coffee, cakes for the kids, that's 15-20 minutes on a rest area. We do this on a weekend, so need a quick grocery run (our supermarkets are famously closed on Sunday), that's easily 30-40 minutes total.
Some gas stations are also highway rest areas with restaurants and whatnot. The ones that aren't close to rest areas are in mixed used neighbourhoods, so possibly close to the customers' homes. If you take your car to the cinema in Germany, you're doing it wrong.
I still wish it wouldn't go that far. I remember around 6-7 years ago my friends speculated about space tourism over a dinner party. That the contemporary space research wasn't about the environment, it was about rich people's tourism. I was genuinely disappointed that my friends' "silly" predictions turned out to be true.
boots
The Sam Vimes' Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness! Can we be friends? XD
Meta is evolving in interesting ways. The Oculus Rift line was huge for modelling artists and designers who worked with engineers (the ones I knew anyway). Now they revived Threads but interestingly it's marketed as "Threads by Instagram", because Facebook as a brands is somewhat tarnished, and Meta is a punchline, but Instagram is still popular and well-liked.
My prediction for the Metaverse is, and I'm just another idiot on the internet, that they're trying to make it into a play AND work platform, where people might do online meetings in VR, spend online money with Metacoin to buy real world stuff, then also spend leisure time playing in the Metaverse. The way Amazon have consumers who are also products (and sometimes also Amazon workers), the vision for Meta might be that one day people could live their whole lives on the Metaverse and be this worker/consumer/product in one fell swoop. I wouldn't want that, but I can see how this might be their line of thinking.
Where does this silly notion come from? Elon Musk also said something like anti-science, anti-merit, anti-human thing and he's not an original thinker. I've read some longtermism papers, but have yet to come across this exact wording. Where did you hear it? (Please don't say Elon, tell me you at least have the primary source...)