Paris is kicking ass on recovering their city from the damage done by car focused development. Lots of new rail lines, removing parking, raising costs of using cars in the core, and making the city more people oriented. Keep it up! Every car removed is a win for Parisians.

I had to scroll way too far down for this one, but it was the first one I thought of.

Another one would be Gary Indiana

They learned from our local high-profile crooks that if you can delay proceeding for a couple years, the process ends.

Just fucking wild man

Yeah, we US Americans know. We’re despairing that our justice system has finally failed after decades of active undermining be the right wing to install unqualified and ideological judges instead of people interested in a rule of law.

The delay delay delay tactics mostly work here if you have the money and connections for it.

I’m hopefully that Romania actually uses this case to prove their nation has a functional legal system when it counts, especially with such a high profile case. These brothers publicly derided, insulted, ignored, and put down Romania to their millions of followers. Go get them and make them pay for crimes and the insults. Show us all that Romania will enforce the law when it counts because the US barely is.

If you’re a professor with a doctorate in Germany, the official way to refer to you is Professor Doctor [last name]. If you hold two doctorates it’s Professor Doctor Doctor.

Professor is also a serious and registered title in Germany. You can’t just start a school and start handing out professorships without oversight and approval.

For a loose definition of “me” and more “my parents when I was young” was a mid-70’s Fiat. I have lots of memories where we waited in some parking lot or by the freeway for a tow truck or some other help to arrive.

Run as a right winger, especially an outright neo Nazi, in any EU or US country and they’ll ship a briefcase of cash to your door.

There’s tiny bits of real city around the US. It’s usually leftover fragments that managed to survive through the carpocalypse of the 30’ to today.

There are very few real city places larger than a 1/4 sq mile here.

According to Fox News, President Obama is still president and so is Traitor Trump. Everyone is president, depending upon who is watching at the moment to stir up one kind of hatred or another.

It was quite early for me. I shouldn’t post when delirious.

That doesn’t make them correct. The strength of the belief has no bearing on reality unless it’s combined with evidence to warrant that belief.

It wasn’t fun, that’s for sure.

The Amtrak system in the US shares rail, and is low priority, than freight trains. Basically, passenger rail has always been a side business for the train companies the US. It is subsidized and used as a bribe by the federal government to even try to keep a passenger rail service alive.

That means our trains are often kept as slow speeds to stay behind freight trains, and will be stopped to wait for freight trains if some is off schedule. The routes are also mostly only rated for 60mph speeds, so even at full speed you’re barely keeping up with cars on the highway, and then you add in stops at every podunk town that slows it down even more.

Until the US invests in a separate passenger rail network that can support consistent speed and schedules, it will remain on par with similarly under developed nations for rail service.

There’s also the very muddled announcement that to make it you’ll need to change trains at some small town.

Or, they just decide to not stop at your station, so you get to hop off past your station and ride a train back the way you came.

All that said, it’s still a miracle from God compared to the crap we have in the US.

With varying degrees of regret. Some cities named to keep the right of ways, so rebuilding is more reasonable, others gave/sold it off and now they’re double plus fucked.

Most of the pre-1950’s trams were private, and not city run. The cities that took them over and kept them running are looking really smart at this point.

My city is about as smart as a box of rocks.

It sounds like Twitter is hosting their services on several cloud platforms or replication services that weren’t blocked by Brazil. So, users in Brazil just hit the 3rd party platforms and kept going like usual.

Is that Twitter’s fault and/or on purpose? Don’t know yet, but services like Akamai need to make sure their hosting Twitter doesn’t get them banned in Brazil across the board.

International relations are often tough to build, especially when one side is quite rude and then wanting special benefits afterwards.

The UK cut the ties, so the EU has more say in how relations are rebuilt. The UK had a ton of special exemptions and their own national identity in the EU then many other members and the UK still freaked out about how oppressed they were.

The EU doesn’t really owe the UK anything that’s not in still existing agreements and if the UK wants a relationship they’ll have to come to the table bringing something, not just hurling demands.

I’m just really glad that the UK leaving the EU didn’t devolve into armed conflict. That’s a pretty normal arc for such a big relations change.

woke Marxist liberal critical race theory.

Any more smooth brain buzzwords we can throw in there?

Incel shit.

Every Olympics is a political catastrophe. I’ve now watched all too many of them. They’re huge events and all it takes is some controversy or a fuck up by some middle manager and the whole world freaks out.

Overall, this one East that bad on France’s, except probably the river pollution thing (which I hope pushes them to long term cleanup efforts). Most of the rest was all the USA (we’re #1 in being assholes to people) being assholes. Our pearl clutching about religious insensitivity, transphobic right wing hatred, and generally bring dicks was well over the top. So, that’s not on France, but the US and our own swimming in Christian nationalist right wing sewage that spilled over onto the rest of the Olympics.

I accidentally started a video way outside my usual feed. It was some right wing fascist starting to talk about replacement theory bullshit. I closed it fast, but it was like a starter gun for YT to race every kind of conspiracy theory, right wing, Nazi supporting, women hating, christofascist channel it could try out to me. I had to block channel after channel for weeks until it gave up.