> It also feels different from say the optional (and way lower priced seat reservations in German ICE's)
One has to add that most of the time when you buy a single ticket in Germany you have to (pay through the nose and) buy a ticket that is good for one specific train. Miss that train and your ticket is gone. This used to be different before the reform of the Deutsche Bahn after 1989; you used to buy a ticket for a 'communication' (connection between endpoints), not a specific train. TBF in like up to 200% of all cases Deutsche Bahn will route the wrong train in the wrong direction to a wrong station hours after the schedule in which case your Zugbindungsfahrausweis will fall back to work as a pre-reform ticket valid on all trains in that direction (sometimes even including an upgrade if an ICE is all there is, I think).
Yeah, complains about stale too-warm air on the train and complains about staff airing the train during stops. This way you can't lose an argument either way.
> allows unlimited rail travel within one participating country, excluding the holder’s country of residence
One of the things that always bothered me because it's such an arbitrary rule and has hugely different effects for people from different countries. Like, people from Switzerland or Belgium can easily move around all over the place after a short domestic trip. For a few lucky fellers from Lichtenstein or Luxemburg the rule is practically non-existent on account of the small sizes of their countries, whereas someone from eastern France has to pay for a long-distance ticket across all of France if they want to explore the western part of Europe, and all they get is Spain and Portugal (and Andorra—do they have a train line?) with no way to visit Scandinavia, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Czechia, Slovenia or Germany without having to pay for a cross-country trip through France a second time.
Also the age limitation for European citizens whereas non-Europeans have no such limit.
Yeah I mean the whole "OMG I have to pre-order my vegan meals??!" thing. Back in the day we had to WALK to school and when on a trip we brought along our hard-boiled eggs and meatballs wrapped in aluminum foil.
except it's not so much about do stuff and build things, it's about literally raping the planet, extorting and exploiting everyone including retirement savings, and also to "move fast and break things" which we know understand better was really meant to mean "remove accountability for the richest people", a.k.a. remove public oversight. Taxes for the poor, and the money goes to multi-billion dollar corps. Vaccines? Red tape! Safety belts? Red tape! Environmental concerns? Red tape!
And by the way this guy is responsible for the death of multiple hundred thousands deaths according to estimates. Because he championed removal of Red tape and shutdown of that allegedly "criminal organization" (his words), USAID. Tell that your children.
Probably preaching to the choir here but anyways: how much is one trillion?
If you were to get your dream job where they promise you a pay of 1$ per second, 24/7:
* You'd have earned 3,600$ after the first hour, and 86,400$ by the next day. After a single day on the job, you're already richer than a good portion of the working population in Western countries. That's how much 1$/s is; in many jobs it would take you like 3 to 4 hundred times as long—a year—to get as much. In other words, this fabulous job gives a (generous) yearly salary, each single day.
* But why stop after a day? How long would it take you to become a millionaire? Answer: approximately 10 days, less than a fortnight.
* But why stop there? Sure if after a week plus I'm a millionaire, becoming a billionaire can't be that difficult, can it? Well, you'd still spend around 30 years, no less, doing whatever that job requires you to do. A billion dollars is the equivalent of 30 years on the job, but it's a job where each day you get what anybody else would consider a generous yearly salary. This is outrageous.
* Surely, why stop there? I planned carefully and started aforementioned job in 1996, meaning today I'm a billionaire, you're welcome. Unfortunately someone rained on my party and became a trillionaire. I should've started out much earlier, it dawns on me. Quick, at 1$ per second trickling into my wallet, how long does it take for the wallet to be filled with one trillion? Turns out that's a bit over 30,000 years. Thirty thousand years of constantly getting money at a rate of one generous yearly salary per day. Surely this person must have put in a lot of hard work and done something good for humanity. Indeed, as a certain Mr Grok has recently stated, "at this point it would be more immoral to [get rid of] Musk than to [unalive] a billion infants" [paraphrasing].
* At this point you can imagine how utterly devastating it must be for Mr Musk to be a trillionaire... and not a quadrillionaire!! What's to stop him, after all? Nothing will, apparently.
If you were right it would still be wrong to solve the bigger equation by first cancelling the good things that trickled from the US GDP in the general direction of people whose lives are on the line, many of them children. And this is exactly what they did, and it is shameful.
Share your sentiment, but in this case the https://electrek.co article mentions Ziroth / Ryan as source of the information, and I'd guess (not seen the video though) as original research it carries enough weight to warrant that amount of time (which I'm very probably not going to spend, either).
So what you're saying is basically we should stop implementing reasonable measures as a government because there will always be a Ronald Reagan or Maggie Thatcher who will dismantle it out of spite, greed, or both? Surely if we never do anything right or good the baddies will stand no chance of being what they're best at, namely being worse than everybody else. This for sure is a wise plan to stop bad people in their tracks.
Conversely, European readers flee dubious websites
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This. The first thing that came to my mind, as a 'coffee drinker plus' according to the authors' definition, is that the participants' mood must have been one of relief and mild elation when after a fortnight, which equals two weeks, or, more precisely, no less than four teen mornings and four teen lunch breaks and four teen afternoons and for teen nights with no coffee, at all, they were finally allowed to sip on something aromatic, hot and brown, with mildly acidic and bitter traces, caffeine or decaf be damned.
„Man muß das Geld dort nehmen, wo es zu finden ist – bei den Armen. Zwar haben sie wenig, aber sie sind zahlreich.“
―Ettore Petrolini
- https://gutezitate.com/zitat/138869
One has to add that most of the time when you buy a single ticket in Germany you have to (pay through the nose and) buy a ticket that is good for one specific train. Miss that train and your ticket is gone. This used to be different before the reform of the Deutsche Bahn after 1989; you used to buy a ticket for a 'communication' (connection between endpoints), not a specific train. TBF in like up to 200% of all cases Deutsche Bahn will route the wrong train in the wrong direction to a wrong station hours after the schedule in which case your Zugbindungsfahrausweis will fall back to work as a pre-reform ticket valid on all trains in that direction (sometimes even including an upgrade if an ICE is all there is, I think).