Foreign operators are mandated by the EU, they can't be banned. Spain has been one of the first countries to allow foreign high speed operators (unlike other European countries that did attempt to delay their entrance as much as possible
I have observed that it is a recurring pattern. I am most aware of the behind the scenes in public education, but I believe it is across the board.
Massive efforts are done to implement reforms to conform to EU standards, believing that that’s how the “superior” EU members do it (Germany, NL, Nordics…). But then I go there and I see that their system has nothing to do with the standards and they are not doing much to conform.
It’s fine, these reforms are often beneficial for Spain, and I do believe that generally being in the EU is a big win-win. Although sometimes it’s just a lot of unnecessary reshuffling at great cost.
A certain segment of the Spanish population really looks up to northern EU countries, or rather they feel a sense of inferiority. In practice there is not all that much to look up to and I believe Spain should be feel more confident. Many great things are prevented by the widespread belief that we are in a shitty country and that everyone is useless, but it is just not true.
> Massive efforts are done to implement reforms to conform to EU standards, believing that that’s how the “superior” EU members do it (Germany, NL, Nordics…).
I can't speak for Germany or the Nordics, but here in the Netherlands the government is doing just about anything in their power to keep foreign competition from our rail network. The only lines serviced by foreign operators are the ones that would cost the national operator more than they would bring in and (some of) the international train services.
Our "high speed" rail is a joke. The trains themselves are fine, but the bridges over them are too brittle for the train to actually achieve high speeds, so it's operating at less than half the speed Spanish high speed rail is operating at. If anything, the success of the Spanish rail operators is an argument in favour of actually bringing competition to Dutch rail operators.
That said, the Dutch railway network is very different from the Spanish railway network. We're a small, densely populated country with many stops along just about any track, barely giving most trains time to accelerate even between larger city centers. The network is complex, the rails are extremely busy all hours of the day, our trains run on an idiotically low voltage and two trains with a dozen minutes in delays can back up the national train grid in no time if they slow down in the wrong spot. There are only a few long-distance high-speed rail options that make sense, some of which already sort of exist (Eurostar to the south), some of which our neighbours plainly don't want (any Dutch rail project crossing into the German border), and some of which are hardly financially viable (trains from the big cities to remote parts of the country) in a country that doesn't want to spend money on public transport.
It would be nice to have a couple of routes between a few major cities with nonstop service, but there are are no bypasses around the interstitial cities so those would need to be built first.
Groningen -> Amsterdam
Maastricht -> Amsterdam
Eindhoven -> Amsterdam
Nijmegen -> Amsterdam
I can only speak for myself, but a trip from Maastricht to Amsterdam is almost 2.5 hours by train for a distance of a smidge over 200km. This is mainly due to all of the stops along the way to pick up riders in every major city between the two.
Currently, our trains never go faster than 160km/h if the onboard screens are to be trusted.
There are a few tracks that can go faster than 160km/h (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Baanvaks...) but also slower ones. The 80km/h tracks especially have a tendency to make a relatively short journey feel like it takes forever, especially if your train journey includes a trip over the 200km/h segment.
"Gut Ding will Weile haben." / "Haste makes waste."
I've got good memories waiting on the platform in Arnhem for my train back into Germany in the early morning, after a night in the coffeeshops there in the nineties.
Observing all the commuters holding on to their coffee to go, and balancing it in their hands, anticipating the jerky start of these things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Mat_%2764 :-)
Looked hilarious. All in sync. Like orchestrated.
Regarding the percieved slowness, and differences on both sides of the border(at the times?).
When doing the same route by car, your motorways felt supersmooth, even with all the strange markings and traffic signs :-)
Crossing back into Germany toward Oberhausen-> Ruhrpott came the Autobahn made of concrete slabs, and gaps between them. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump!.
Very annoying when still 'under the influence' of that grassy green stuff :-)
Taking a train to the nearest (usable) airport within the Netherlands takes between 2 and 2.5 hours depending on the available trains, amount of transfers, and "high-speed" (not actually) rail surcharge. Actually, because of a train hitting someone, I currently can't reach any airport by train because my city is right at the edge of the train network. Groningen-Schiphol is similar, and Maastricht-Schiphol is 2,5 hours at the very minimum. Meanwhile, Amsterdam-Brussels takes about 2 hours.
Our regular train speeds are 80kmh to 140kmh, with maybe a little bit of 160kmh on specific stretches.
I realize my country is incredibly well-connected by public transit and those 2 hours are already a massive luxury compared to probably most of the world's population, but I wouldn't mind a few high-speed lines from the center of the country (probably Utrecht) to major cities. With trains currently being more expensive than taking a car if you travel with two people or more, it'd make the high cost worth it.
and your country is 320 kilometers high and 250 wide. There may be a lot of problems with your rail network but insufficient train speed ain't one of them. With the current rail speeds you can cross it comfortably in two hours in any direction. Probably you need to optimize it, lay new train tracks, but there is no need to go for the expensive high speed.
The station density in NL simply doesn't allow for the same kind of high-speed rail that you see in Spain, France or Germany. The segments Groningen-Zwolle and Maastricht-Eindhoven are basically the only parts where train speeds over 200km/h make any difference. On all other trajectories, the limiting factor is not the maximum train speed but the interference from other rail traffic.
The major cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, Den Haag) typically have 4 trains/hour going between them. Higher-speed trains won't make any difference there, unless you first build out dedicated infrastructure (like the IC Direct line between Schiphol and Rotterdam, which cuts a whopping 20 mins from the regular IC travel time).
It's a common pattern far beyond the EU. One big driving force is that if you have an existing solution that achieves 80% you have much less incentive to change than if your current state only achieves 50%. So the "inferior" country modernizes to the new 100% solution while the "superior" one might stay on the 80% solution for far longer
Compared to road deaths that's practically nothing. Obviously 39 dead are 39 too many, and in terms of railway disasters it's a lot, but in the bigger picture it's a blip
France, for example, has been trying to delay allowing Renfe (Spanish operator) to operate through the country as much as possible, while their public operator SNCF (branded as Ouigo) has been able to operate here since 2021.
This EU free-rider behavior is unfortunately typical of French public sector policy.
European energy markets were famously liberalised in 1996, allowing French state-owned EDF to acquire the previously state-owned monopolist Electrabel in Belgium. All the while France negotiated an exemption for not privatising EDF because of its nuclear facilities. EU regulations should prevent this type of free-ridership: state-owned companies shouldn't be able to compete abroad if they don't face competition at home.
It's not. Regulation (EC) No 1370/2007[^1] states in the annex, related to compensation in cases where a public operator operates subsidised public services and commercial, for-profit activities, that:
>In order to increase transparency and avoid cross-subsidies, where a public service operator not only operates compensated services subject to public transport service obligations, but also engages in other activities, the accounts of the said public services must be separated so as to meet at least the following conditions: [...]
Another topic is: should France be allowed to keep the TGV monopoly in their country because they need it to finance the rest of their network, while they are allowed to operate abroad (like in Spain), taking away business from Renfe through the free market competition they try to impede on their country anyway?
Have you read the article? He didn't just ignore her. He combined periods where he ignored her with periods of caring only to hurt her in dark ways.
> Once, she says, as Jobs groped his wife and pretended to be having sex with her, he demanded that Brennan-Jobs stay in the room, calling it a "family moment." He repeatedly withheld money from her, told her that she would get "nothing" from his wealth — and even refused to install heat in her bedroom.
It's all very nuanced, but to put it overly bluntly: career-orientation is about power and control and self image. My understanding is that it's all mental illness related behavior.
Happy to be disagreed with, it's just my experience of the world.
I'm surprised that governments didn't take this problem more seriously. Obesity is a huge problem, people have been ignoring it only because improvements in medicine have been offsetting the general health decline. Without the medical improvements that save the life of obese people, life expectancy would have decreased. I don't expect the Trump administration to make the best decisions but at least they are taking it somewhat more seriosly.
I don't believe the creators of this propaganda take this problem seriously at all. Their actions speak far louder than their words, even words on a page that scrolls weird like it's 2015.
Republicans were actively angry at past attempts to fight obesity or limit sugar.
There is another side to the nutrition recommendations beyond pure nutrition and that's economics. Pro business Republicans were loathe to anger big food producers.
On the flip side, this new food guide is now advocating a diet that is far more expensive for average consumers at a time when food inflation is already hurting so many households.
There are certainly other use cases. git bisect was enormously useful when it was introduced in order to find Linux kernel regressions. In these cases you might not even be able to have tests (eg. a driver needs to be tested against real hardware - hardware that the developer that introduced the bug could not have), and as an user you don't have a clue about the code. Before git bisect, you had to report the bug and hope that some dev would help you via email, perhaps by providing some patch with print debug statements to gather information. With git bisect, all of sudden a normal user was able to bisect the kernel by himself and point to the concrete commit (and dev) that broke things. That, plus a fine-grained commit history, entirely changed how to find and fix bugs.
> With git bisect, all of sudden a normal user was able to bisect the kernel by himself and point to the concrete commit (and dev) that broke things.
Huh. Thanks for pointing that out. I definitely would never have thought about the use case of "Only the end user has specific hardware which can pinpoint the bug."
As someone who uses D and has been doing things like what you see in the post for a long time, I wonder why other languages would put attention to these tricks and steal them when they have been completely ignoring them forever when done in D. Perhaps Zig will make these features more popular, but I'm skeptic.
I was trying to implement this trick in D using basic enum, but couldn't find a solution that works at compile-time, like in Zig. Could you show how to do that?
import std.meta: AliasSeq;
enum E { a, b, c }
void handle(E e)
{
// Need label to break out of 'static foreach'
Lswitch: final switch (e)
{
static foreach (ab; AliasSeq!(E.a, E.b))
{
case ab:
handleAB();
// No comptime switch in D
static if (ab == E.a)
handleA();
else static if (ab == E.b)
handleB();
else
static assert(false, "unreachable");
break Lswitch;
}
case E.c:
handleC();
break;
}
}
Thanks! That indeed does the equivalent as the Zig code... but feels a bit pointless to do that in D, I think?
Could've done this and be as safe, but perhaps it loses the point of the article:
enum U { A, B, C }
void handle(U e)
{
with (U)
final switch (e) {
case A, B:
handleAB();
if (e == A) handleA(); else handleB();
break;
case C:
handleC();
break;
}
}
This makes me sad. AI is a product, these days being mentally healthy should imply having the emotional ability to be aware of that. If you become emotionally attached to a commercial product you should seek for help.
I would say that the lesson here is that cross-vendor replication is more important than intra-vendor replication. It is clear that technology can (largely) avoid data losses, but there will always be humans at charge
Yep, for me it confirms all the reasons why I think python is slow and not a good language for anything that goes beyond a script. I work with it everyday, and I have learned that I can't even trust tooling such as mypy because it's full of corner cases - turns out that not having a clear type design in a language is not something that can be fundamentally fixed by external tools. Tests are the only thing that can make me trust code written in this language
