You probably don’t understand German (well, even if you do, possibly won’t help you either). A pity, this song is a perfect fit of exactly that kind of person your comment describes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDeFYKmgePQ
As it happens, Austrians do know quite a bit about this kind of people. You may or may not guess why.
You think that PT is awful. We heard that already. You are also refusing to communicate clearly, even after it being pointed out to you. Keep trolling. I am out.
It is really not about Europe or US. Even the US has cities and neighbourhoods that are like that. In most places however, it is illegal to build such places new and their supply is so ridiculously low that most people could not possibly afford to live in such a place, or those places, or those places are so poor and dangerous that they aren’t good places to live for other reasons.
The problem is car centric urban design. Most people don’t get it that they do not only have to drive by car because everything is so far away but everything is so far away because everyone is expected to drive by car. You can change that but it takes a lot of time and the political will to do so.
You get the mobility you build your cities for. Cites were not built for cars (most of them at least), they were transformed into car cities (which took decades). Thing is, cities can also be transformed back into transit oriented cities. Both takes time and commitment though.
The Dutch were on the same “train” to total car dependency in the 1960s. But during the oil crises in the 70s they put a hard stop to that and reversed course. Now half a century later, most of the country is designed to be attractive for multiple modes of mobility, among others cycling but also transit and yes even driving by car. The latter does not dominate everything however.
But you are assuming the downvote is due to people wanting everyone to have the same opinion, not because you generally called PT as awful, no qualification of any kind. Maybe next time communicate in a clearer fashion.
That is a bit rich from someone who did not start the comment by saying, “I find public transport awful” but as a general truth “Its awful to go on public transport.”
Same goes for your line about how people spend a fortune, just to avoid PT, when in fact, many don’t spend a fortune on cars when they happen to live in places where PT is decent and useful. Almost as if not so much the inherent general awfulness of PT makes people choose going by car but when PT is in that specific place just not good, people do so.
I guess that must be why living in Vienna gives you such a terribly low quality of life, as more trips are done by PT than by car and around half the households don’t even own a car (most of them could easily afford one), compared to for example Fake London in Canada.
Travelling in a city designed for PT doesn’t take any longer than travelling by car in a city designed for cars. How? Because what cars are faster, they need more space, increasing necessary distances, and at the end leading to no improvement in travel times.
Brave New World is sinister but it is more of a “hell is paved with good intentions” story, while 1984 is straight hell with no good good intentions anywhere, the only aim is to secure a regime, from which no one is even really benefitting a lot. I mean the elite does have a materialistically better life but hardly a lavish one while being actually the least free. It is not clear but I always liked to think that there is no real “big brother”, no real, guy at the top. The system is just kept up by some double thinkers at the top. Fully exchangeable, with as little freedom as anyone else.
The thing in Brave New World is, that those rejecting the regime are actually free to go. I always found that the world outside was portrayed in a pretty exaggerated way, but one can also believe that this was possible mainly propaganda by the regime itself. Either way, people could leave if they wanted forsake the comfy life and experience struggle and freedom. Even then, when choosing that, their lives would have been materially probably still better than those in 1984.
Like I said, I believe we are heading towards a combination of Brave New World and 1984. The latter was too harsh, there is a benefit in letting people enjoy some things, give them something they can use to forget things. The Third Reich for example figured out along the way. That indoctrination movies were counter productive and rejected by the population. However, harmless entertainment movies, with no or maybe only a mild propagandistic twist helped them much more. People rejected the former but welcomed the latter, so that they don’t have to think about the unpleasant stuff. In our modern world, 1984 type surveillance and the death of democracy will be sold by Brave New World style convenience.
We are heading towards a future that will see marks of both dystopias but we would wish to be in a pure Brave New World instead.
The EU does complicate Gleichschaltung of the kind we see in the US indeed. This could be observed in Poland and Hungary, that the EU is at least an obstacle to some extend. However, like I said. Even that can only take so and so much erosion of institutions, especially once the populist authoritarians, energised by Russian support take over a majority in the EP and the Council (with the help of voters of course).
No democratic entity can survive voters persistingly voting for the end of democracy. No matter how it is set up.
On reddit I would respond with r/woosh
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To be fair, I always considered Brave New World a much less dire dystopy than 1984. I mean you have a really hard time arguing otherwise. People are not free in either but if you could choose, don’t tell me you’d choose 1984.
But this debate is moot anyway, what we are heading towards is a combination of the worst of 1984 and Brave New World combined.
No, they aren’t. But you did not attack one of those, you attacked someone who was saying he was fine with going to the office by bike.
It is owned by the ad company System1 though.
Duckduckgo does not only source from Bing.They use sources from everyone but Google and they have their own web crawlers and an index of their own. Their results feel considerably more relevant to me than whatever Bing is doing. ’
Have a look here for more infos: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/news-rankings
In some cases I still feel like Google has an edge but those cases become less frequent.
Duckduckgo should not have any such issues. If you need that prefix you should not even need any cookies. Going there has all those no AI settings on by default. Regarding Ecosia, could it be that you deleted some related cookies accidentialy? Or did they really push in a very sleazy way for AI?
As long as Brussels has not fallen to the same forces, yes. But it is dangerous to believe that Brussels can lastingly secure democracy when a majority of local voters persistently push for dictatorship.
In Austria ATMs do not only have 100 EUR bills, if you are not careful it will also hand out anytime it can.
Peculiar indeed.