Been using searx a bit recently and it often is the 1 thing I’m looking for as the top result.

but no financial state benefits at all for said kids, probably, if it depends on those same conservatives that are anti-divorce.

After some decades they just become so incredibly gross no one without a hazmat suit would try cleaning it again, so they’re replaced.

That’s already the case. Facebook etc have been walled gardens (or prisons if you prefer) for decade and a half now.

So… just making sure I am understanding this properly: centralized service monopoly by one government backed provider…? Doesn’t that got quite a communist ring to it?

I don’t think you’re very sincere, but I’ll try to explain how this is not communism and how this works in many countries.

People still have to pay for using the service. Depending on how often they ride, how far they go, etc. A fair, yet subsidised price. What the government does is create a “scenario”, a map if you like, with dots and lines and wishes and logical connections on which likely many people travel often. They identify which cities, which services, etc they want connected, and basically write out a TENDER to which many PRIVATE COMPANIES can participate. Sometimes, it’s a 1 take it or leave it big package deal. Sometimes, it’s split into a “main network” which will be run by a state controlled company, and local and regional networks, for which tenders are created and for which different companies can participate. They usually “win” a tender for quite many years at once, because it costs a lot of effort and money to get services started. It is quite far away from communism. But is does force a private company to not only exploit the few very most profitable connections, and ignoring all the others. Which is exactly what Uber is aiming for: only the profitable lines, 0 others. In a point of view from a society as a whole standpoint: it is still valuable to have more people use the bus instead of their own car, for many reasons, even on lines that are not profitable but require subsidies, for example also because it is still a lot more economical. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper for 20% of people using the bus, than to build yet even more highways and lanes and force people to buy their own vehicles. On top of that, it is the governments’ job to deliver basic services to all people. That is what we pay taxes for. What good is a hospital, a library, a school, if the people who very much need it, for example people too impaired to drive a vehicle and too poor to pay uber, can’t reach these services? Busses make sense, subsidised busses often make sense (not always, some places overdo it running empty busses too often), Uber is for sure not in it for providing a service to society, they are in it for destroying the service system for all and only taking the profit from some and fuck other people.

Uber will only cherry pick profitable routes for profitable customers, stealing them from public transport which will become more expensive as a result. Public transport is a public service available to everyone for a fair price. Uber is not public transport. Uber starting busservice somehow signals they want to move into that space, but they will never be servicing the poorest towns. Parts of PT being privatised by uber probably is bad news for bus passengers on less popular routes.

rustbelting makes voters transition from democrat to republican. you could argue that they actually benefit from declining industry, so of course they’re going for it

You don’t have a tax for owning “abandoned” housing (inhabited by noone)? There should be.

google controls the portals through which many people search. Defaults will always be google when people are using android and or chrome. Yahoo, infoseek or altavista never had anywhere near a grip on people like google does today. It takes effort to change now, while in the olden days you just had to change your 1 start page on the browser, things are a lot more embedded and thus customers locked in. Thinking it will switch over to a better alternative like it did back then, purely because it is a lot better, is a bit naive I think, unfortunately.

chatGPT and in apps integrated AI search is stealing it.

On most rainy days you can get quite far with checking rain radar prediction. It often doesn’t really matter if i cycle somewhere at 16h30 or 17h00, you look at the radar and try to not get wet :'). Most rain is in short bursts, dry periods between, most cycle trips aren’t longer than 20-30 mins. And yeah, sometimes you do get wet. That is okay if you got good gear and if it didn’t take you by surprise.

I’ld donate.

The app promotions can be disabled in the Settings section of Windows 11, but it appears that Microsoft will enable these by default

This should just be outright illegal for any new feature which “adds” “content”. Guess it will be another one of those funnies like the joke birthday-candles you can’t ever really get: update, “oops” reset your preference. Fucking moneygrabbers, it’s just never enough is it.

I have to work with power automate often (doing that gives me money, don’t judge). They recently did a make-over of the interface where you can make and adjust the flows. They made it even shittier. Didn’t fix any of the obvious super annoying issues with connections and references and them randomly being broken and stuff. Added copilot tho. Why? Now you can type “i’ld like it to send an e-mail!” instead of selecting the “send an e-mail” action, while taking up a fifth of the screen. Jesus fucking christ wrong priorities.

it could all begin with a dualboot…

You get 20 different tickets if you go to 20 different supermarkets. Some regional public transport companies are like aldi or kaufland, cheap, abundant, accessible… Some are like edeka or rewe, expensive. They don’t all offer the same level of service and that’s one of the reasons prices differ… Another is general economic differences, wages differ too. It’s just not that easy to streamline it EU-wide if a Bulgarian average paycheck is 861 € and a German one is 2741 €. Too government supported and you get 100’s of empty busses driving noone to nowhere. Too much free market and there’s no service at all on non-profitable routes. Organising good public transport in a good, financially durable way, isn’t as easy as it seems. Tickets like the 49 € are awesome, but also risk off-balancing the public transport finances.

and maybe not everywhere, but in belgium, i recall an very large optimism about the introduction of euro… Finally, we could travel more than 1,5 hours without having to worry about exchanging currencies. People forgot fast what a mess it all was before the unified coin and the open borders, just to go on holiday to a neighbouring country 150 km away…

I’m sure it’s not the same in everyones memories, but I for example recall when I was a kid that some parents and teachers (the knowledge-hungry ones) were borderline crazy about the realisation that an entire encyclopedia of like 40+ big fat books could now fit on one tiny interactive CD-ROM and it being possible to search through it with key words… That’s even before it being constantly up to date and you fitting the entire wikipedia catalogue incl. pictures, maps offline on your pocket calculator if you wish so. The general idea was for sure that people would become so much smarter and more efficient with all knowledge in the world at their fingertips (a desktop-pc with a dial-up at best, mind you) and all that at barely any cost at all (while it cost super much to buy a pc compared to todays low end phones or laptops).

Turns out the majority of people spend the majority of their time with super-pocket-calculators playing clickbait wait-for-your-turn-and-watch-ads-or-pay-up-now games over learning new stuff, and fake news spreads a lot easier and faster than real facts. Badum-tish.

https://yt.artemislena.eu/watch?v=CtnoK68M3Zg

So in the same spirit, and because the wall fell and all that, the idea was for sure that people would come together in peace and understanding, because you could easily learn everything about everyone anywhere in the world.

If they are literally mimicking the German ticket: it isn’t, anyone can buy it, resident or not.

It’s already a money issue within Germany how to distribute finances… Some of the regional public transport companies are appareantly getting less money and more passengers. This ticket, EU-wide would have been nothing short of a '90s EU-optimism renaissance.