Personally I think that your plan would be counterproductive not to mention very wrong, so I will take “honestly” to mean “figuratively”. Otherwise agreed.

Haha that’s exactly it

The SUV parking-fee hike is almost comically punitive - the calculation is a bit complicated but it can reach €225 for six hours

PS: Why are people downvoting this? Are people here really so fragile and hypersensitive that they have to stamp on the slightest suspicion of dissidence from the One Approved Opinion? This was a completely neutral observation and FWIW I APPROVE of the fee. Jeez. Get a life, people

Adding back the word “eliminate” would make the quote more understandable.

IMO most of the suggestions here are small beer.

If you want to be very scientific about this, and to calculate cumulative sums of harm, with no discount for the future, then just look for some little-known hydrocarbons corp - it will top the list.

If you apply a future discount, but no discount (or a small one) for the suffering of non-human animals, then some meat company will probably top the list.

For humans, that’s true with caveats. For the natural world of which they are a part and on whose continued health they depend for their future wellbeing - it is not true in any way, shape or form.

The correct answer is usually the most boring one.

A decade out. Yeltsin chose him.

There are vanishingly few tourists in Xinjiang. Indeed they won’t even give you a visa if you say you’re going there.

Order. Conformity. Mystery. Impenetrable language. Impossible writing. Eating anything that moves. Mindless nationalism. People who don’t talk or even care about politics. Depressed single young people obsessed with shopping. Security cameras. Police. Airport-sized train stations. Electric scooters. Electric cars. Utopian-dystopian sci-fi.

Yes, I have been there multiple times.

PS: to be clear, I was very, very impressed by those trains and especially by the electrification of city transport. In Shenzhen the air is now cleaner than any big city in the West and with all the greenery and silence it really does have a utopian feel. The progress there is genuine, it’s amazing, it deserves lots and lots of credit.

I’m late to the party

26 years and 5 days late, to be precise!

But really more like 20 years, which was when it took off as the plumbing of the blogosphere (AKA the last form of social media that was arguably healthy for all concerned).

Or in fact you’re not late at all given that you probably listen to podcasts.

PS: to add a useful tool recommendation to this otherwise ruminative contribution: RSSBox

Yes, I know all that and I completely agree. It’s all but impossible to imagine that the USA will ever be an actually dictatorship, despite the ignorant shrieking around here. Because of its traditions of individual freedom and federalism.

But it’s obviously looking less and less like democracy.

You think? I don’t much care about downvotes. But I do end conversations if I suspect that that other party is doing it.

I just extrapolated. Their comment was posted at the same time as a downvote.

If they denied it I would apologize.

I don’t discuss with people who downvote my comments. You clearly don’t care what I have to say. Good night.

The USA is categorized by people who have studied this subject more closely than you (or me) as a flawed democracy. This is a dumb discussion. That’s all I have to say here.

That’s a balanced and fair-minded take. Unfortunately it won’t be appreciated here, because what people are looking for in this thread is catharsis and confirmation of their biases.

Firstly, the USA is obviously not a “dictatorship”. Come on, be serious. Words mean things.

Second, America’s two-party system also has internal factions and primaries, many of them completely open (you don’t even need to declare allegiance to the party). The primaries are effectively the first round in a two-round electoral system (of which there are plenty in the world). The whole point is to create a binary choice in the final round. For some reason this always gets missed by otherwise informed observers. “There are only two parties” is just not a valid argument in this debate.

Of course, none of these facts will be popular here, since the real point of this thread is to allow participants to performatively dump on the shared hate-object. Classic social media, I get it.

The catastrophic typo has completely undermined your three paragraphs of beautiful typo-free blurb. Re-read your copy before posting, people.

On a road without dedicated bus lanes, then buses and cars are essentially fungible. Who wants to be stuck in a traffic jam inside a packed bus with standing room only?

If the bus has its own lane then it becomes effectively a different mode of transport with higher capacity and lower point-to-point time. At that point it will begin to induce its own demand. Similarly, new bike lanes and metro lines are always empty at first, then they fill up. And the resulting world is much nicer than the one where everyone was in a car.