The reason is quite obvious if you know Spain's History.
Given that France invaded Spain in 1807, the military made it necessary to have a different gauge from France. Not only that, the train by the coast was also forbidden in some places as a naval bombardment could disrupt communications in case of war.
Spain has lots of mountains with a large plateau over 700 meters high and the coast is usually way lower so it makes sense to transport things by the coast.
>Once they have the cost estimates and effects on existing rail traffic studied, I bet construction will never start.
It is not that hard. Countries like Spain have already two different gauges and have the necessary technology in the trains to change between different systems.
One of the main goals of this is to not have the russian gauge available in case russians attack, so that logistics deeper into Finland cant happen easily with the same train, so backwards compatability is not desired.
It's not like this results in a categorical difference in difficulty. Gauge switching infrastructure is common at borders. Yeah stopping and switching is slower than driving right through but it's not the end of the world in the long tail of military logistics.
Russian military logistics _heavily_ depend on trains, everything that can go on a train, does so. Flight and vehicle stuff is mostly an afterthought.
Any hindrance we can put on the Finnish-Russian border to stop them just unloading 12 cars of fresh troops in the middle of the country is a good thing.
Another fun note about Russian logistics, they aren't palletized or mechanized. Thought being that cranes don't look good in parades. The train side seems smart or at least interesting, the pallets incredibly dumb.
Well yes but the US usually fights in faraway places to bring freedom (though the only thing they manage to 'liberate' is oil, see how Afghanistan and Iraq turned into hellholes as soon as they turned their backs)
Russia just likes to kill the shit out of their neighbours which is a lot easier logistically.
Why invest in forklifts, container infrastructure etc. if your military has a near-endless supply of uneducated conscripts you can order to shuffle around shells and other items?
(Of course a more thorough analysis would probably come to the conclusion that better logistics is worth it. There's still an opportunity cost for those conscripts who could do something else instead, like dying in zerg rushes on the Ukrainian front. And even though those conscripts are 'free' they still require chow and a place to sleep etc.)
Trent and a lot of Ukranian war commentators have a habit of saying $X is catastrophic for the Russians (this is the worst on YouTube). Then those catastrophic things don't come to pass.
Related, I have seen one guy, over and over say "Why isn't Ukraine hitting Russian electric train transformer stations". I don't have a good answer, most of Russia's rail network is electric, transformers blow up easily, there are many of them, and they would be very slow to replace. Ukraine clearly has deep strike capabilities, and Russia cant defend every transformer. I don't think it's a humanitarian issue, or at this point even an issue with the US telling Ukraine they can't hit those targets.
Yeah sure, but it doesn't take away from the fact that the Russians do not use pallets for logistics and therefore struggle with logistics as a result.
So I stand by my statement that his assessment is not wrong, even if it isn't as outcome changing as some may hope. It is however one of the many straws heaped upon the camel's back.
As for the transformer issue, I would imagine that these are somewhat related. Their train based logistics are inefficient, so Ukraine doesn't need to stop the trains running. If they did the russians may find a more efficient solution.
Transformers are not very hard to replace or make though. All they are is some copper wound around iron. It will just be some added frustration and annoyance for them but no gamechanger. If they start doing it a lot Russia will just build a bigger electrical workforce and more backstock. They have plenty of people and the authorianism to make them do whatever they want. It's just a pissing contest. Russia did lots of cyberattacks on the Ukrainian electrical network in the years before the invasion. Didn't do anything either but send a message.
I would compare it to the Natanz cyber attack which reportedly cost a fortune and caused lots of business losses around the world. It only set the Iranian uranium refinement back a few percent.
Then Obama comes and talks to them, strikes a deal. That solved the issue entirely and cost much less. Of course then Trump comes and messes it all up again but that's another story.
Gauge switching requires trains outfitted with specialized axles (increasing the cost to invade), requires trains to stop (increasing the train's vulnerability to attack), and requires switching stations which themselves are juicy targets and can't be repaired nearly as trivially as an ordinary length of rail.
And if you're Russia wanting to invade Europe, it's better to do the Gauge switching right near your own border rather than on the far side of Finland. So while this may make it harder to invade Finland, it makes it easier to invade Europe as a whole.
The far side of Finland? That’s the Baltic Sea. Sure, there’s a little bit of Sweden, but it’s so far north that there isn’t much rail infrastructure there - certainly little enough that it could quickly be destroyed at the beginning of a war.
The objective they try to achieve is not to slow down Russia's invasion into Europe, but to stop them at the border by being able to move assets throughout Europe relatively quickly. If they gain a proper foothold and full access to "euro gauge" rails, it's a different fight.
Of course, if it does go that far, tanks and trains can move rolling stock, rip up the tracks, blow up bridges and other infrastructure behind them if they're forced to retreat.
This. I am struggling to see how this is anything other than posturing by politicians. It’s hard to imagine this is strategy devised by military leaders.
It's less about what the Russians can do and more about how fast European and NATO countries can move assets to a potential invasion front line; as it stands, they're slowed down at the borders needing to switch to the different gauges.
The difference between Finnish and Russian gauge is 4mm
IIRC the diff to European standard is closer to 10cm, still doable but a hurdle compared to just driving a trainload of troops to the middle of Helsinki it's a bit harder
First sentence from the article:
The Finnish government has announced the conversion of its rail network from Russian gauge (1,524 mm) to European standard (1,435 mm).
> Train tracks are normally not precise to within 4mm anyway
Yes they are. Of course practical tolerances including allowances for wear and there are large enough that things can be made to work, but in terms of nominal construction tolerances for example, 4 mm can easily eat up all your construction tolerances or even exceed them.
I obviously don't have a in depth knowledge of Finnish rail, but have you ever looked at rail in the US? I can show you tracks with completely missing ties. Tracks that move vertically by a foot when the train goes over them. Tracks that visually snake all over the place. The difference is made by slowing down the train. Derailment at 3 mph rarely matters. The biggest risk is the conductor doesn't know it happened & continues to drag the car along the tracks
Where? Finland specifically, or elsewhere? Both my local tram system in Germany as well as DB as the national infrastructure operator in Germany have construction tolerances of only +/- 2 mm. Maintenance tolerances on the other hand can be quite a bit larger, at least in the plus direction (on the order of 15/20/25 mm).
But building such trains, at scale, takes a load of resources. Resources which could otherwise be used to build tanks, guns, missiles, and similar high-priority products.
> One of the main goals of this is to not have the russian gauge available in case russians attack
This doesn't seem like it can be a goal given
> maybe in 2032 we can start construction
I mean unless the plan is to assume Russia won't attack until e.g. 2040 when construction will be complete && Russia can't implement multi-gauge trains that Spain is already using now?
Even if Russia's conquest of Ukraine were to end tomorrow, they would take a few years to recover before mounting their next offensive. And Finland isn't first in line on their list of next invasion targets, that would be either Georgia, Moldova, or the Baltics.
And in any case, just as in computer security, a security posture does not need to be unassailable, it just needs to be expensive enough to deter the enemy. NATO countries (well, the ones that haven't already been compromised by Russia) will be happy to fund the gauge switch, as would the EU in general for the sake of greater economic integration. Meanwhile, it increases the costs on Russia and slows their advance. It's a win no matter what.
Given the disaster that is the Ukrainian invasion, this doesn't really hold true. As long as leadership is OK with a total logistical clusterfuck, you don't need to worry about "years to recover" for your next offensive. The next offensive starts today. You can figure out the details as you go.
>"Meanwhile, it increases the costs on Russia and slows their advance. It's a win no matter what."
Following logic it also increases your own costs and wastes money that could've been allocated to produce weapons and other more effective preventive measures.
Fortunately, a country can pursue many things simultaneously, which is often more generally effective than pursuing a single thing to the detriment of all others, thanks to diminishing returns.
Where did I say about single thing: "...weapons and other more effective preventive measures..."
Looking from the other angle - should Russia attack it'll trigger article 5. Russia can not win conventional war with NATO. It is just laughable. They're not that suicidal. And if they are it'll escalate to nuclear and then the railroad will be your last worry.
Russia can however win the US dithering, western Europe being scared of cruise missile strikes while their propagandists ask if it's worth dying for a few little towns.
Without the US Navy, NATO loses any war in the Baltic Sea. If Putin thinks the US won't respect Article 5, then he'll attack anyway. And if the US Navy is annihilated in a war against China, he'll attack anyway. Finland needs all the separation from Russia it can get.
Russia can't just attack anywhere it wants to. Putin is not Kim Il-sung, he can't count on any order to be blindly obeyed. It took years of propaganda, unfortunately armed with a couple of actually good points (mostly supplied by the neonazi nationalist wing in Ukraine, who wanted a war), before he could try actually invading. He had to walk a dangerous game with his own, in particular with his own neonazi supporter Prigozhin, who could easily have come up on top in their inevitable conflict.
He's absolutely not harmless, but neither should we allow ourselves to be distracted by phony countermeasures against the Russian threat, like this gauge shift thing clearly is in my opinion.
As you suggest, Russia's invasion of Ukraine was bolstered by Russian sympathizers in the east. Every country bordering Russia is incentivized to break free of any sort of alignment with Russia in order to reduce the threat of local insurgency which will aid Russia in its invasion. For example, the Baltic countries removing Russian from their list of official languages, in addition to decoupling from the Russian power grid. There are a lot of steps to be taken, and a lot of them will take decades. Fortunately, Russia's capacity to wage war measured against their number of potential targets means that it would take them decades to reconquer it all, assuming Europe steps up to fund the defense. Train gauge alignment is just one of many steps towards this end, and the sooner the better.
It was the case during the Soviet occupation and briefly during the transitional period, but otherwise - no, it wasn't. For example, in 1990, Latvia simply restored its 1922 constitution (still in effect today, although with some amendments) which enacted Latvian as the sole official language. This has also been the case with Lithuanian and Estonian constitutions, respectively.
The anti-Russian policies in the Baltics are dumb, they provide Putin with a good point to use in his propaganda, which is infinitely more useful to him than any railroad on foreign soil.
He's co-opting the red army's defeat of Nazi Germany for his own popularity purposes. Which is impressive, considering he's also disavowing communism. It would hardly have been possible, if it weren't for fringe (but not fringe enough) movements in Eastern Europe playing along with it. Not because they're pro-Russian, far from it, but because their old nationalist groups often were aligned with the nazis, and they want to rehabilitate them. Putin and these groups totally agree that the conflict should be framed as being between Russia and these groups.
> The anti-Russian policies in the Baltics are dumb, they provide Putin with a good point to use in his propaganda
This is dangerously naive. Propagandists like Putin don't need real grievances, they're happy to invent grievances and brainwash the population into believing them. In light of this fact, there's zero downside and nonzero upside to decouple from Russia (at least for any state which intends to remain independent) which makes it a no-brainer.
What you're really saying here, is that Russians are fundamentally different people than you, because they fall for any dumb propaganda, whereas you don't.
Or maybe you accept that you are human too, vulnerable to the same thing, and maybe you are the brainwashed one, but you don't care?
Going down either of these roads ends you up with the neonazis in the long run (and yes, Russia has a lot of them too).
So no, it's not naive to point out the good points that feed the propaganda. What's naive is to think that dictators can manufacture good propaganda out of thin air anyway so it doesn't matter what "our side" is guilty of.
Putin is a gangster, not a cult leader. He's in it for himself, the people around him are in it for themselves. No one thinks he's selfless, least of all regular Russian people. It takes effort to keep something like that together. Unfortunately, he gets help from his foreign enemies.
> What you're really saying here, is that Russians are fundamentally different people than you, because they fall for any dumb propaganda, whereas you don't.
No, I don't read that at all. There's plenty of Russian propaganda that Westerners have fallen for hook, line, and sinker, chief among them the idea that all Russian speakers are actually Russian and want to be a part of the Russia.
The point is that the propagandists don't need to base their propaganda on truth. A salient historical example here is actually World War II: the Germans tried to provoke Poland into overreacting and causing a major incident in Danzig to justify their invasion of Poland. The Poles refused to play ball, so when the appointed hour came, the Germans made up some atrocity and used it as the basis of the declaration of war, faking the evidence early in the invasion. Given that Russia has already used a similar pretext regarding Russian speakers in Ukraine, it's not a surprise that the Baltics are nervous about Russia doing the exact some thing with regards to Russian speakers in their territories.
I think this overstates the challenges, especially given the last 10+ years of despots doing things they shouldn't just be able to do. Waking up one day to find that the US has invaded Canada is now a non-negligible possibility.
I think they are up to the challenge of whipping up some BS casus belli and scaring would-be protesters into submission.
Like most such things, it's probably mostly symbolic, so politicians can say they're doing something in defiance of Russia (which is a very popular thing to do in Finland right now, or most of the west for that matter). I guess they'll back down on it when by 2032, everyone realizes it doesn't matter since wars will be fought with small autonomous drones and any railroad would be sabotaged in an instant.
What kind of ranges are you expecting from these small drones so logistics suddenly doesn’t matter? Even if something can hypothetically travel thousands of miles, designing disposable weapons with that kind of range has a real cost.
Sure, logistics matter. I'm sure Russian-gauge railroads in Finland would be mildly convenient for invading Sweden, provided you can first invade and utterly defeat Finland quickly enough that the railways survive.
But if Putin could do that (he can't), railway gauges would be the least of our worries.
As to railways surviving it’s relatively difficult to effectively destroy rail infrastructure. Making the call to cripple your internal infrastructure is tough especially in such a dire situation, it’s also a really large target. Taking out some strategic bridges is easier but most local issues can be quickly fixed when you talking million men armies.
Always loved going over the border from France as a kid and they would lift the whole train up and slide the old wheels out and put the new ones in and off you go!
To be fair, that is not a very valid argument, given that for any given King/Queen, they will be millions on the other side wanting this given person to die.
E.g when the Spanish Empire ruled the world, the British were not very happy about that. With the British Empire, the French and the Germans fought them with every opportunity.
I don't believe it, but it could also be the case that the God is wiser than everybody praying for their monarch to have an unnaturally long life, and knows that monarchs dying in a regular sort of way is best for the kingdom.
I'm an atheist, but many of the arguments put forth by atheists seem very lame to me.
That is what people seem to believe, coherent or not. I think you will find few Christians who believe their god is just some sort of mechanism to be commanded as they please.
If you want to persuade them to believe otherwise, then you have to come up with arguments which are actually persuasive from their perspective. This is a problem I see with a lot of smug atheist literature. It's also a problem I see with all the arguments from Christians about why I shouldn't be an atheist. I guess I seem approachable to them, I get a lot of well meant but totally fruitless conversion attempts. They are arguments which doubtlessly seem very sound to them, one who already believes, but totally fall flat to me, somebody who doesn't. Like telling me how many different people claimed to witness Jesus resurrection... that seems like compelling evidence if you already believe that the bible is reliable. Christians tell each other these arguments at Church, find it very convincing because they are already convinced and find it hard to imagine the frame of mind of somebody who doesn't believe, then with great earnestness present these arguments to nonbelievers and are puzzled when it doesn't work.
Well that's exactly what's going to happen when you confront most Christians with "Your god isn't real because he doesn't do as you command him to with your prayers." Prayer failing any empirical test of efficacy is convincing evidence to people who already don't believe but totally falls flat with people who do.
If you have issues with having proper material compensation for your work, you will have to work on those first before anything else.
Doing necessary work, even when you don't like is for me the definition of "work". You should also learn to manage it, if you work too much, you should take a break.
You don't need to get rich as "billionaire", but if you are good at your work it is reasonable that you will get "millionaire", because you gave society tens of times more value that what you got.
That is not something to be ashamed of. If you got the money gambling(taking it from someone else) you can feel ashamed, but not if you made money generating wealth with effort and work.
The concept of Liberal in the US is different from liberal in Europe. In Europe "liberal" means supporter of low taxes, small govertment. The concept in the US has to do with sexual liberation and sexual freedom more than economic marxism.
Francis was not sexually liberal. He was marxist. He believed in liberation theology.
As someone who knew personally the man from a spiritual exercises' house in Spain(obviously when he was not yet Pope), I never liked the guy.
He was the friend of dictators. Loved so much Raul Castro, and Maduro, never criticised them, but criticised the affluence of western democracies. His business was the poor and he loved poor makers.
His support for Putin and not denouncing the takeover of absolute power was jarring for someone in his position.
You can be a leftist religious leader, but you have to report abuses when you see them, specially if the abuses are made by your friends. Of course you will lose them if you do.
Francis was too weak in character to oppose them. But as a Pope, that is your job.
> The concept of Liberal in the US is different from liberal in Europe. In Europe "liberal" means supporter of low taxes, small govertment. The concept in the US has to do with sexual liberation and sexual freedom more than economic marxism.
It isn't a purely US vs Europe thing though – you will find some Americans who call themselves "classical liberals", by which they mean "liberal" in largely the same sense as many Europeans do. It is just that "classical liberal" is somewhat of an obscure term in the US–you are only likely to know it if you are interested in or have studied economics, politics, etc–but among those Americans who know it there are definitely some who identify with it.
"Progressive" avoids this to some extent, in being a term which is closer to meaning the same thing in the US and Europe – although in a US context, "progressive" often means something in the same direction as "liberal" but going further.
Some people like to talk about two dimensions, social vs economic – so a person can be socially conservative but economically progressive (not an uncommon position among some conservative Catholics, for example) – although that still has the limitation that "socially progressive/conservative" is a selection of issues with an assumption that people's positions across them are correlated, but there are people who break the assumption, e.g. self-described "consistent pro-lifers" who oppose both legal abortion and the death penalty (unlike many "pro-lifers" in the US who oppose legal abortion yet are pro-death penalty), or certain radical feminists who support LGB rights but oppose transgender rights ("gender critical" as they prefer to call themselves, with "TERF" being the pejorative label applied to them by their opponents)
Some of these linkages are country specific – e.g. in the US, most social conservatives support the death penalty and oppose gun control, in some other Western countries you may find most social conservatives opposing the death penalty and supporting gun control, even while they agree with US social conservatives on other issues.
As someone who has read thousands of books in his life, and always asks about the books on the shelves on the houses I visit, I would say that there is a so much people that do not read books with intrinsic and genuine interest.
They buy books as a status, intellectual symbol, but they couldn't care less about its content. It's an ornament, like a flowers' vase.
I like audiobooks too. It can only be cheating if you believe there is a proper way to experience a book. I enjoy specially some books narrated by their authors, because it adds the nuances of what they consider important, emphasis and information that is lost on paper.
I’ve never actually seen that in the wild. Plenty of houses with no books at all, which always makes me feel rather sad for the people who live there, but I’ve never seen one of these “status” bookcases.
What do they even fill it up with? How is it status when they don’t even know the contents?
All this simulations and experiments always have the same problem: They simulate giving people free money, but you are not simulating the other side of the coin: extracting the money from other people to pay for it(a.k.a stealing or "redistributing" euphemis)
The "surprising results" are so surprising to me because I talk to people in Germany and most people believe they pay too much taxes, specially young people. The difference is that middle class Germans are actually paying for the system. No free lunch there.
If robots take over human labor, you can always own robots(privately owning distributed means of production) instead of having a central planning system that never worked but interested people are hell bent designing so they benefit.
I'm not sure about which taxes you're talking about, but employees pay about 50% of the taxes for any of their workers' income. I think this is the same for Germany as a lot of other countries in the EU.
> but employees pay about 50% of the taxes for any of their workers' income
That is wrong. Employers pay a small fraction of taxes per each one of their employees.
I think that there is a big problem with education and the tax system. When people thinks that the "employer part of the salary tax" is 50% of the employee tax we are failing to provide education to our own citizens. And I think that HN readers are more informed that the average person.
But this is by design. Misinformed citizens have a more difficult time realizing how much money big corporations and the rich are stealing.
Sure, go ahead and insult me instead of providing any actual facts.
Now, I've searched for the actual contributions, and indeed the actual income tax is not covered by the employer at all. The only parts of the full levied amount that are shared 50% are: pension, unemployment, health and long-term care insurance, (plus some other things that the employee doesn't have to pay).
So in the end it's about 1/3 (or under that based on tax class) of the total levied amount that gets covered by the employer. (PS. All of this for Germany, cribbed from one of those tax calculator websites)
Well, money is just a coordination tool for tracking who is "owed" what. What people are actually consuming is labor and natural resources.
From that point of view, getting "free money" (which in effect may mean for example getting someone else to deliver food to you without you working) is not much different from all kinds of other rent-seeking behaviors.
This experiment, like all similar UBI proposals, is not serious because indeed they are impossible: it is not possible for the state to fund giving €1,200 a month to every adult "for free".
The scary bit is that this seems not to be immediately obvious to many people.
Central planning targets what is good, but inefficiently. Private enterprise targets what is profitable very efficiently. There's a combination of the two that is a happy medium.
For me as a European, adding fluoride to water for your teeth is as ridiculous as cutting the foreskin of babies' penis in name of (dubious) "hygienic reasons".
But people get used to it. Specially when they don't get to experience the alternative. Most people rationalise it is a good thing. Stockholm syndrome.
Which part of Europe are you in? Countries in Europe add fluoride to water, salt, milk, and Italy has naturally fluoridated water.
> The European Academy of Pediatric Dentistry
(EAPD) recently called water fluoridation "a core component of oral health policy" and adds that salt fluoridation "is suggested when water fluoridation cannot be implemented" due to
technical, logistical or political reasons.
I was thinking exactly the same thing, down to the circumcision thing. This whole discourse gives me the vibe of something the American society has randomly walked on and now is an "it has always been like this".
I have run barefoot and used minimal soles for more than 20 years, also using "normal" shoes from time to time, most of the time I use minimal, no heel soles. That is something I did when I started working from home long hours as heels were very harmful for me.
If you are thinking about doing it when you never did before, DON'T. You should be doing a progressive transition. It changes your knees, ankles and calves. It should take at least 6 months to a year.
If you don't do that, you will injury yourself. People running Marathons barefoot suddenly are risking a lot.
About 20 years ago I changed from running in basketball shoes to minimal shoes. At the time I was only running about 5K. It took me about 10 months to work up to 5k in the minimal shoes.
My general approach is to run less far but more often since you usually don't notice tendon injuries while you're exercising, but a day or two later.
I have a bad heel on my right foot, and I have had to "walk on my toes" basically, without putting much pressure on the heel. It was excruciating in the beginning, I hated it. Now I do it without thinking much about it.
My problem? I walk on my left heel normally... Duh. Resulting in very assymetric walk. I am trying to "fix" this. It will probably take another 6 months or year..
By the way, running on toes feels wonderful compared to walking on your toes, in my opinion.
Given that France invaded Spain in 1807, the military made it necessary to have a different gauge from France. Not only that, the train by the coast was also forbidden in some places as a naval bombardment could disrupt communications in case of war.
Spain has lots of mountains with a large plateau over 700 meters high and the coast is usually way lower so it makes sense to transport things by the coast.
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