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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2025

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  • You’ll find yourself explaining whats wrong with Trump more often than explaining that you don’t support America and Americans have exactly zero influence on its actions; when I was there last year, Vietnamese liked him because the only thing they knew about him was the tarriffs on China and the Chinese often thought MAGA just meant develop America, the way China developed itself.



  • Have you been to Korea or China?

    Japan may be better than Europe and way better than America, but the fact that their trains work at all is in spite of deregulation, privatization, and break up of JR and all the workarounds and laws passed they needed to get the “market solutions” to not just close non-profitable stations, fire half their work force, stop paying pensions, and raise rates to the point of unaffordability.


  • Which is why Shinkansen tickets are like 5x more expensive than in China. Also why every city has like 10 different transit companies with transfers that can mean “walk 2 blocks on the surface”. Under capitalism, the ideal railroad makes infinite money while running zero trains and owning zero infrastructure. You literally need to use legal means to get them to deviate from this.



  • Neoliberals: Correct. That’s why the only possible way to have HSR is if you give the railroads infinite land to develop and interest free loans. Then if you’re lucky, they’ll subsidize the unprofitable railroads by renting out the most expensive land in the city as exorbitant rates! Or maybe they’ll cut rail service and raise ticket prices anyway! Shame there’s no alternative.



  • The question isn’t do helmets reduce the risk of head injury, its “is that reduction worth the inconvenience given this situation”, for example for most people, walking around their own home has a low enough risk of head injury that a helmet isn’t worth it, while riding a motorcycle is, if you have anything to protect.

    The total number of accidents and population in those cities helps. The fact that Denmark doesn’t have a helmet law suggests to me that people are expected to have the judgement regarding the risk they’re actually taking.



  • Some bike models have a helmet that sits in the basket, and is supposed to unlock with the bike. But the lock never works, and I asked a worker about it and he was like “don’t worry about it”.

    I think it worked at one point, but nobody bothered to use the helmet because there’s dedicated, usually separated, bike lanes almost everywhere. And then there’s a giant sidewalk you can ride on if you want to go even slower.

    Either that, or there’s a separate option in the app to unlock the helmets that I wasn’t seeing.