So I entered #CrossBorderRail for the European Citizen's Prize 2023, but didn't make it to be a winning project 🤷♂️
There are undoubtedly some worthwhile things here in this list, but I was ultimately beaten by a songbook and a bland meeting of some regions in Ireland - and so the outcome is ultimately pretty disappointing
Your periodic reminder that VC-funded CEOs are in a situation that they have bet both their kidneys on being able to deliver a 100x return to the bone-saw wielding loan sharks who funded them.
Your “community” is worthless to them unless it delivers Kidney Money.
They cannot just “decide” to not enshittify the community you mistakenly believed was yours. No appeal to justice or fairness will work, unless accompanied by a donor kidney or two.
political rail views
@mjr @Peternimmo @jon I think it’s important to separate ownership of rail/stations from ownership of rail services/trains. The shared infrastructure of rail and stations is probably better off in public hands, as is normally done with roads, but train services should be a matter for the private sector
@JessTheUnstill @catvalente This seems really ignorant. The entire point of commercial social media is to first build a moat by attracting users with free service, then monetize the platform once it has gotten big enough that people don't want to leave. If you don't like it then stay away from commercial social media. It's like complaining about getting wet while showering.
@Peternimmo @jon Britain's rail is privatized and excessively regulated, which provides the worst of both worlds, imo. The strength of private actors is primarily that they can cancel unprofitable routes and therefore provide better service/cost on profitable ones. If this is not permitted then I'm not sure what the point of privatization is
For every ÖBB I can raise you SNCF or Renfe
For every Italo I can raise you Abellio or Connex or Railcoop or Midnight Trains
For SBB I can point you to their costs
For every sensibly opened railway (like Czechia) I can raise you Sweden (total chaos)
If you’ve travelled extensively ALL OVER EUROPE it's simply lazy to conclude “Public good, private bad" or vice versa. It's simply a denial of what you see if you take a comparative view
It is easy to get cynical about symbols like these. To see them as “virtue signaling,” “tribalism,” etc. I too am often skeptic and don’t appreciate shallow affiliations with symbols very much.
But this day and this month can remind us that it’s a luxury to think like that. Issues like gay rights or human rights in generally have been fought hard for and they are still in danger. Not everywhere, not always, but way too often.
The boundary between cringe and crucial is sometimes very narrow.
@jsbarretto looks like it’s DDoS protection from cloudflare that’s the problem
Dick pics available on request