* size (>=32", preferably ultrawide, currently using 38" UW)
* resolution (I am fine with >=1440p)
* USB-C or Thunderbolt with sufficient power to charge notebooks, so you only need to connect one cable to your notebook
* at least 4 USB ports (so keyboard, mouse, camera, speakerphone can be connected to monitor and it acts as a switch when using more than one notebooks)
* viewing angle / display type (image should look the same no matter which angle - but shouldn't be a problem in the price range of monitors that fulfill the previous points)
That would definitely not been unusual in Germany in the 80s. Actually many rural German roads didn't even have that small shoulder, you really had to walk either on the street or on the grass. Kids learned how to handle this. There are even popular children's songs from that decade about how to do this, which is to walk on the left side of the road (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La129TFxCGE).
When I started at my first job, at a small startup, I was definitely excited to work 7days a week. For me there was nothing better than doing what I loved every day. It lasted for about 6 months until I learned that it's not really healthy to do it, but I was enjoying it while it lasted.
I agree completely about the founders doing less work. That's also what I experienced. For them, it's less like a job. They are free to come and leave whenever they want, play hoops or whatever... it's less stressful than having a specific task that needs to be finished by some deadline.
1. At least daily with the whole team, and whenever you have something to discuss with someone individually. Be available on Slack (/Teams...). Announce relevant things on group chat (like a new API function becoming available, release dates...).
2. As often as the manager wants to. If you don't need anything from them, most are happy to be left alone as long as you deliver.
3. Daily, standup-like. Keep it short if there isn't a topic that affects everyone.
4. I am not a huge fan of extensive documentation, because most people don't read it anyway and it gets out of date quickly. Just cover how to get started, and the overall structure so people can navigate. Keeping it short makes it more likely that someone actually reads it. But how much documentation you need depends on the organisation and project.
It doesn't really matter whether you write it yourself or someone in the team. If you're lucky, someone in your team enjoys doing it. Just use some wiki-like system to make it easy to contribute. Or keep it in the repository as Markdown, if it's only for devs.
5. Depends on the project and team. But I have often tried to minimize the number of tasks I do myself, because as you suggested, it's hard to work on something when you're constantly being interrupted. In some teams I haven't worked on any tasks myself.
6. Talk to people and review their code. It's super-important to review as soon as the code is available, to minimize downtime and reduce context switching for the team members. Prioritize team members' code over your tasks!
(Some people also suggested pair programming. If it works for you, great, but I am terrible at it. Hard to explain, but coding and speaking are two very different things for my brain. I can't write good code while talking about it, and the whole thing is very stressful for me. I prefer to discuss code asynchronously or on Slack).
> 3. Daily, standup-like. Keep it short if there isn't a topic that affects everyone.
Be fucking ruthless about this. If someone starts digging down into details that only affects them or one other person, postpone that discussion - otherwise, your standups will balloon into hour-long semi-pairing sessions while the rest of your team's attention wanders.
And ensure that the rest of your team is empowered to call that out, too - "Can we do a sync about <Topic X> after standup?"
> (Some people also suggested pair programming. If it works for you, great, but I am terrible at it. Hard to explain, but coding and speaking are two very different things for my brain. I can't write good code while talking about it, and the whole thing is very stressful for me. I prefer to discuss code asynchronously or on Slack).
I find myself having trouble here, too, but one thing that helps is not feeling the pressure to be talking and/or typing and/or reading all at once, for a long time. Allow yourself and your pairing partner to just sit quietly and think during pairing.
I also "cheat" - before pairing with someone to support them on a problem they're having, I look at the code myself, first, and start diagnosing things. This prevents the issue of sitting there and staring blankly at code, hemming and hawing while you're trying to explain your thought process at the same time you're having the thoughts.
It's frightening how easy it is for an foreign actor to knock out a country's railway system. Something similar happened in Germany 2 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2022_German_railway_at...). I assume that it's a kind of warning by Russia or some other country. They don't even need weapons to attack countries that rely on public transport. If they'd systematically attack the railway system for a longer time, they could probably disable it for many months or even years.
We can be glad we have cars, trucks and roads that are a bit more resistant to attacks.
I don't think it's this simple: someone could do significant damage to the US's economy by sabotaging a small number of bridges that transit or cross I-95. Meanwhile, Ukraine appears to be operating military railways with relative success, given that it's currently engaged in the largest European land war in 80 years.
And let's not forget the premise is all wrong as well.
It's frightening how easy it is for an foreign actor to knock out a country's railway system
The attack on SNCF was not "easy". This was a methodical, large scale, coordinated attack. They knew what to take down. How to take it down with least collateral damage. And when each should be taken down. (Order likely counts here. You're trying to plug up tracks.) Point being, these attacks are not "easy". In a place with as much unrest and discontent as France has bubbling beneath the surface, the trains would go down twice weekly, every week, if it was "easy" to do so.
A similar methodical, large scale, coordinated attack on our bridges would shut the system down as well. I won't even mention some other infrastructural assets that, if targeted, easily will shut us down for months because I think they are just that soft as targets. I honestly believe it would be irresponsible to even put the idea out into the ether.
The takeaway here is that if you're dealing with large organizations, with even a modest amount of resources, and a grievance, you're likely dealing with orgs that have a lot of young people they can send to successfully carry out such attacks. Thankfully, these attacks still require a level of technical knowledge that seems to elude such groups. So it's just matter of keeping that information as secure as possible on the one hand. While working towards security and resilience of those assets on the other.
I'd say that it's "easy" with regard of the resources on the spot. No hundreds of brain-washed fanatics. No tons of explosives. No extensive concealed digging or something similar. No desperate suicide attacks or hot chases or anything else highly visible. Apparently no bucketloads of cash.
It looks more like an elaborately prepared barbecue party: careful planning, getting all the details figured out ahead of time, coordination and, well, relatively calm execution.
You are seriously understimating how easy it is to burn an electrical substation. It is actually a frequent occurrence in France (as seen on TV these days..) and everywhere else. Almost as frequent as copper thefts. Close to where I live they famously left a silicon foundry powerless for a day (with the consequent astronomical bill to restart it) by setting fire to one specific bridge.
The only novel thing here is coordination, but it doesn't seem like a huge stretch of the imagination to target the 4th most frequent high speed rail crossroads, which is exactly what they did.
I think it’s easy in the sense that it was only a single day attack of probably not more than a few people. What would happen if 50 foreign agents would do this every day over the course of months or years?
This required a lot more than 50. There was a lot of planning and execution on this.
Maybe foreign agents could do it with 50? If they were supported by satellites and other tools to which these attackers likely did not have access. But foreign agents are operating in relatively large teams even for simple missions. I don't think with this level of coordination, and this number of targets, spread over this large a geographic area, any intelligence agency is going to send one guy/gal per target. It only works like that in Bourne and 007 movies.
Um, sabotaging any city's water tunnels would make the city uninhabitable for years.
Most frightening experience I ever had as engineer in my life:
I was intern. At a place in a midwestern city where a city's water infrastructure can be monitored. Long story short, I heard "PING". Then three more "PING"s. Then another "PING". Then 2 more. Even as an idiot intern, I knew what the implications were with respect to tensioned concrete. I was thinking in my head, "8 feet diameter. 96 inches." But I couldn't remember the PSI because I probably had already soiled myself. Thankfully there was a grey beard there who coolly looked over at me and said, "Probably want to start shutting that down son."
2 things I learned. Calm is contagious. And our infrastructure is way more frail than should be the case.
But NYC has a rather high level of vulnerability with a small number of choke points (there are currently only two water tunnels for the entire NYC metro area), but yes, the water infrastructure for a lot of major cities could be disrupted disturbingly easily.
> there are currently only two water tunnels for the entire NYC metro area
How are you counting this? If you mean Hudson River crossings between NJ and Manhattan, there are five: two road tunnel groups (Holland and Lincoln) and three rail grops (Upper/Lower Hudson and North River). When Gateway is complete (2030s), there will be four rail groups.
But if you mean the entire NYC metro area, there are significantly more: Manhattan <-> Brooklyn alone has the Hugh L. Carey for road traffic, and then six active subway tunnel groups. Manhattan <-> Queens has a similar number.
Thanks, I misread that. Although technically there are three operational water tunnels for NYC :-) — tunnel #3 is operational despite being under construction.
You could bring the entirely of NYC to a standstill by simply abandoning a large bus or truck in a single artery of manhattan or one of the bridges. Literally just drive into a tunnel, then get out and walk off. The amount of chaos this would cause would take ages to get any towing services in to clear it.
While many bridges and tunnels have tow trucks and operators stationed at both ends for normal vehicles, they probably do not have heavy-duty towing available quickly. These specialized trucks can tow other semi-tractor-trailers, dump trucks (both garbage and material haul trucks), etc.
Extra points for putting the large bus or truck on it's side, requiring a crane or much more work to get it on its wheels.
And you don't have to walk off, you can unload your electric scooter and zip away to start your new life as a fugitive.
It doesn't take ages, they have dedicated teams for this as it happens pretty frequently in the lincoln tunnel that buses and trucks break down. There's a weird little specialized towtruck they have that can remove vehicles quickly and cameras are everywhere. Some details on it: https://www.nj.com/traffic/2018/08/how_do_they_unclog_the_li...
That’s a nuisance but not economically threatening. Disabling railway permanently is a serious threat. Especially in countries dependent on railways for logistics.
A stopped vehicle is a few minutes to tow clear. But add fire.... At least twice in recent times, a gasoline tank truck crash has destroyed a bridge that took weeks to replace.
If you ever want to turn your hair grey prematurely consider an attacker that infiltrates Tesla's Full Self Driving development and adds a "crash into the nearest X at maximum acceleration" hidden subroutine that can be triggered via an over-the-air signal. Millions of Teslas suddenly deciding to point at the nearest power pole or transformer and flooring the accelerator in the hopes of crashing hard enough to start a battery fire.
A mere decade ago this was pure science fiction, but over the past few years it has become a possibility.
This has been a concern for well over a decade, and self driving cars only changes it a little bit. You can google "remote car hacking 2010" or earlier to find great examples and reports of this going back pretty far. It's been awhile since this was science fiction.
Basically every modern car can have software that says "slam the gas pedal as far as possible". Combine that with cars that are heavily integrated into their infotainment system or even include built in wifi and you've got the "over the air signal" covered.
Telling the car to aim and steer at a specific type of object is something that has only recently become possible. Computer vision has come a long way in the past few years, especially computer vision built into automobiles.
I also believe that drive by wire systems are going to become even more commonplace in the future and eliminate the possibility of a driver attempting to muscle the car back into control.
The attacker just needs to make appropriate modifications to some open source library or framework that Tesla FSD software uses. Of course, these modifications would be made by people who have been contributing to the project for many years and have built up impeccable reputations for writing safe, reliable and secure code.
We have no way of knowing whether sun h an implant already exists, wait inf to be turned on at the moment of maximum damage. Luckily I have no hair to turn gray.
Having a railroad functional enough for military purposes is easy enough: get the rails hooked up. Put soldiers at switches to flip them, use radio for coordination. For high speed high frequency passenger travel it's more complicated: you need automation flipping switches at the right times, automatic block signaling to ensure that trains are where they're supposed to be and won't crash into each other, etc.
That's why they were able to get some of the trains back to operation: they can't run them as close together as before, but can still use the tracks.
This is a bit ironic given the fact that Russia makes a conscious choice to rely on railways for military logistics. Why? Because they are more resilient and easier to repair than roads - Russia has railroad engineering units in their military and can repair just about anything you could do to a railroad in a couple of hours, and in fact they do as Ukrainian partisans (rightly) go after railways.
Meanwhile if someone throws spike strips on a busy highway/tunnel/bridge between two chokepoints, you're effectively screwed. If this is done in a concerted manner it will probably take at least a day to fix.
If you have more resources (say a state actor attacking a nation that isn't on a wartime footing), you can also exploit the fact that asphalt is a petroleum fraction and therefore soluble : spill a lot of diesel or hydraulic oil, for example (and optionally set it on fire) and you will unrecoverably ruin that section of asphalt, which could take weeks to fix: this is why gas stations are paved with concrete.
So while it's not as easy to do this as it is to derail a train or screw around a signaling system, it's far more difficult to repair professional roadway sabotage than railway sabotage, and in the end the railways are probably more resilient.
> We can be glad we have cars, trucks and roads that are a bit more resistant to attacks.
Now that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has occurred, and cheap armed quad-copters are a publicly known thing, I can say this openly:
Are you kidding me? Because we are still petro-centric, we are extremely fragile. For example, the West Coast has a handful of oil refineries. To shut down the West Coast's road traffic it would take one guy, and less than $10,000 in equipment. This could all be accomplished in 3 days, and there are no deployed defenses for this attack vector.
I have been trying to argue that the transition to EVs is a natsec issue for 10+ years. However, I am just some forum schmuck, and it has not been going well. Any help with moving this thinking up the chain would be greaty appreciated.
A possible analogy: The Internet was designed to be a multi-path, decentralized, and distributed communications system to withstand attack. That's what EVs are for transportation.
Meanwhile, FERC found that knocking out just nine strategically located substations, of 55,000 at the time they did the assessment in 2014, would plunge our country into darkness.
There is no way that I can be off-grid with oil. Meanwhile, 6 months after the apocalypse all oil products have degraded, and my solar panels and LiFePo batteries still have years left.
Also, post-attack, there is a huge difference in supply chain lag between setting up some solar panels vs a refinery.
Ha; no. In such a situation, you'll be lucky to be alive and not have succumbed to the $5 wrench attack. Those solar panels will be a bright red target; and in such a scenario, the police aren't driving to save you.
If we lose 1/3 of our refineries, we lose about ~1/3 of our gasoline. The prices shoot up to ludicrous highs, but it's still there. We might have to make an expensive deal with Saudi Arabia to fill the void, but at least that's an option.
If we lose, according to FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission)... nine... of our 55,000 substations; the entire nation could lose power in almost all areas. Maybe our situation has improved since 2014, I definitely hope so, but think about this:
33% causing ~33% damage, or 0.016% causing ~90% damage. Which one is preferable?
Here's a genius idea if you're Russia. Maybe things have improved and are 10x better. In that case, knocking out 0.16% of our substations, 90 in total, in strategic locations should do the trick. Combine that with rail sabotage so the parts to fix them don't arrive, and then you've done it. Just smuggle about 500 soldiers among the 2.2 million illegal border crossings every year, and that'd be enough to assign a team of 5 to each task.
That'd make a great movie. Race against time to stop the Russian terrorists blowing up the substations, having to figure out what ones they're going for. I'd like it to come down to the last second, and then they actually manage to blow them all, and themselves, up, and then an engineer voice over explains that in 2018 they partially upgraded the system to account for transmission shifts due to renewables and they had enough redundancy near the three most important substations that reduced local blackouts to 4 hours.
What I didn't include in my original argument is distributed, off-grid capture of electrons. I would still argue that a national security priority should be increasing the share of EVs and distributed PV generation. If every person, and Amazon distribution center for example, could go off-grid and continue at least partial capacity.. that would be a good thing, wouldn't it?
A "microgrid," as you are describing, could be fantastic as long as businesses or individuals aren't unreasonably constrained by their microgrid's production capability (or misguided attempts to restrict capacity in the name of climate change / equity / misguided policy here). But in theory, if all power was locally sourced and physically separate, the resiliency would be incredible.
> We can be glad we have cars, trucks and roads that are a bit more resistant to attacks.
Cars with so much electronics on board are just vulnerable as the worst cellphone out there; always connected may seem a cool buzzword, but in reality means always ready to be exploited.
The reason they're not commonly exploited is that usually who is motivated to do that would rather look for bigger targets that give back more media coverage or potential ransom money.
Well Bob, they bought them anyway, did they not? And thus made that market a success.
Edit: myself, I have seen an overwhelming majority of users that just shrug. (Plus, a number of shocked users that could not believe the situation when told - but that does not mean they will not conform when pressed by the lack of options.)
Now: there are documented proofs of people in pornographic delight handling cars through smartphones; the facts are reachable of gadgets in contemporary premium cars that would be refused by a seventies' pimp; there are definite anecdotes of large amounts people not having the slightest idea of the security and privacy faults of contemporary cars (etc.).
To discuss how «hopeless» a population is we should probably assess and throw numbers in: "uninformed | unaware | drooling | flabbergasted, etc.". Even if the number of the «cool buzzword» enthusiasts were smaller than thought by some, the elements are there for concern and societal action.
I mean market choice was totally taken away almost immediately. You basically need to buy a used car to be totally taken away from touchscreen world.
It's similar to how consumer-grade dumb TVs do not really exist. And most consumers are not about to start a low-margin, multi-million dollar capex business and start building their own cars and tvs.
> start a low-margin, multi-million dollar capex business and start building their own cars and tvs
(Sorry, I missed that part.)
That is what we need. That is not something «most consumers are not about to start»: it should be a drive to have a few serving the rest.
An easier and (on an important side, fail-safe resilience aside) better solution would be a society that would not have let the situation happen in the first place.
Yes Bob. I also continually monitor that market. Europe here: the powers-that-be are restricting the use of old cars, and the new ones are unacceptable - as law and makers mandate. The scissor of usability is closing the gap between the blades. But that is the situation.
But this would not have happened if, wallets being holders of votes, people told the powers-that-be and the car makers to **** off.
We could make our railway more resilient to such attacks, but in general why bother ? It is probably cheaper to pay the cost whenever the disruption happens.
At least in times of peace.
There are two issues here though. The first is that the Olympics is a special event and it is more likely for somebody to try to cause the disruptions, and as such more control is probably warranted.
The second is that somebody else (Russia) is not acting like they are at peace with us so we should act accordingly
The railways get hit fairly often in Russia and nearby but while they are easy to knock out they are also easy to repair and are usually back running in a day or two. Large bridges would be an exception.
Cars are vulnerable to attacks on fuel stations, attacks on bridges, dumping a load of nails on the road during rush hour, etc. I’m not sure I’d automatically assume disrupting thousands of car passengers is necessarily harder than disrupting thousands of train passengers.
>It's frightening how easy it is for an foreign actor to knock out a country's railway system.
I get phishing mail with very pertinent information only JR West would know any time I make train or rental car reservations with JR West.
Yes, I am willing to bet hard money that they've been backdoored and/or compromised at the human level. Standard fare for Japanese IT, honestly; see Kadokawa.
Damaging highways isn't exactly hard, even if they don't contain any roads or bridges. And if you take out the highways the rest of the roads don't have nearly enough capacity.
> We can be glad we have cars, trucks and roads that are a bit more resistant to attacks.
Cars/trucks/roads are so much more dangerous than train travel that it actually seems worth the tradeoff to me even if these sorts of attacks were a regular occurrence. Putin (or whoever did this) sucks but they have not killed 1,105 Americans in a single year. That's just the number of cyclists killed by cars in 2022. Deaths of pedestrians and drivers/passengers are significantly higher.
Why do you assume that it's a "foreign" actor? I think it is utterly idiotic to hold an event of such scale in a country which has seen several consecutive years of mass protests. I mean sure, you can cordon off parts of Paris with fences and razor wire, but you can't do that with all of France.
Because it's the only logical conclusion and multiple Russians have already been arrested in France for plotting to disrupt the Olympics, including one who set himself on fire with chemicals in his hotel room. Oh and Russians have been doing this sort of thing all over Europe for the past few years.
If this were an internal political entity they would have already claimed responsibility and put out a manifesto.
> Because it's the only logical conclusion and multiple Russians have already been arrested in France for plotting to disrupt the Olympics
In Belgium they arrested seven muslim terrorists who were planning a terror attack during the Olympics, they were from Chechnya (so, technically, russian but it sounded like the usual islamic terror attacks that was planned and not some "russia vs the west" thing).
Still, why not a disgruntled ex-employee or a crafty IT-security student? Finding out how GSM-R works, where the towers are and what cables you have to cut is not exactly rocket-science
If the past has shown anything, then that both politics and infrastructure providers greatly overestimate the skill required for disrupting/hacking such systems and networks...
> Still, why not a disgruntled ex-employee or a crafty IT-security student?
“Simultaneous operations by 4 teams in different parts of the country” does not work well with “a disgruntled ex-employee or a crafty IT-security student” as a hypothesis.
You don’t need a “team” to do what was done there by the looks of it. You need like 4 dudes, with pry bars and half a can of fuel. I’m actually surprised this does not happen more often. Not only is this infra not protected, it seems entirely infeasible to protect it, and the result to effort ratio is staggering
A bit late for this thread now, but the deafening silence since the sabotage is interesting in itself. We’d expect militants to make some noise at some point, after all these sort of things are mostly about communication. And yet I don’t really see this being in the interest of any state actor (if disrupting the country is the point, there are easier and more effective ways of doing it).
I look forward to getting more detail a couple of years from now, when information will slowly filter out.
Who needs foreign actors when you have `climate protestors` who traditionally face way too little consequence for their actions and annoy their fellow citizens so persistency they do their entire movement a disservice?
> We can be glad we have cars, trucks and roads that are a bit more resistant to attacks.
Hack traffic light controls and set them to all-green (assuming the safety interlock is done in software), all-red, or just off. Dumbass drivers will do the rest for free.
Alternatively, disrupt Google Maps and Waze. Barely anyone has a dedicated offline navigation system any more - take these two out or "suggest" fake traffic jams to overload side streets [1] will also cause a lot of chaos.
> assuming the safety interlock is done in software
It's not. There's a conflict monitor unit that is completely separate from the signal controller.
It has direct inputs from all green or other permissive lights, and a diode matrix that determines which combinations are allowed.[1] If it detects a conflict, all signals go to flashing yellow.
"This monitor uses a standardized programming card for channel compatibility (permissives), minimum flash time, per channel Minimum Yellow Change Disable, CVM latch, and 24 volt monitor latch. Programming of this card is accomplished through the use of soldered wire jumpers. The programming card plugs into the monitor through a slot in the front panel."
All 4-way intersections use the same interlocking pattern, so there's a standard card that covers most cases. Only unusual intersections need a custom programming card soldered up.
>Hack traffic light controls and set them to all-green (assuming the safety interlock is done in software), all-red, or just off. Dumbass drivers will do the rest for free.
Have you never driven during a blackout? People get a little awkward figuring out four way stop priority, but it's not pure chaos.
> Have you never driven during a blackout? People get a little awkward figuring out four way stop priority, but it's not pure chaos.
Maybe I'm biased but I've seen incredibly dumb shit happening in urban areas (Munich in winter to be precise). People forget how to drive when lights go out and street markings are covered by snow.
Rural drivers in contrast have zero problems because they're used to driving without constant guidance.
Frankly no one wants to hire an engineer who highlights technical debt or a lack of tests without being asked for it. This kind of negative people is annoying and IMHO is indeed a reason why employers hesitate to employ older employees. Many are a pain in the... (and I say that as someone who's turning grey as well)
Most employers want to hire someone who actively improves things, someone who solves issues, and not someone who just complaints about them and makes demands.
Seeing and raising red flags as and when they arise--or even better, even before they arise--is the hallmark of a good employee. If you don't want to hire one such, good luck. That said, there's a difference between flagging and nagging. Again, a good one will know the difference.
You do. It's about 15% of the first 5775 EUR of your monthly salary. Officially it's split between employer and employee, so on your payslip you see only 8% if you are not self-employed.
Co-payments are very low though. Dental is partially included. Kids are included, wife/husband also if they are not employed.
Also worth mentioning that not heaving healthcare almost doesn't exist as a concept here. You have to be an illegal immigrant or something to not have healthcare.
The thing that most of tourism protestors don't see is that tourists are what makes their city attractive. They want an attractive city without all the crowds, but that won't work since without the tourists all the money is gone. The bars and stores, and the museums and other attractions are mostly financed by tourists. Without the tourists, it will be just another city with empty storefronts because all the locals shop online.
I've lived in a number of hotspots. Locals rarely use the same businesses as tourists. Any "attraction" that is not the historic buildings / culture / scenery etc. are likely trash. Tourist infrastructure is dead space for a local, not an asset. Any claim that e.g. transport is an asset, is typically only solving a problem tourism has created.
When people say they "bring money in", worth seeing where the money goes. Tourists spend in the most scammy cynical price gouging businesses and in multinationals. The profit margins of these businesses is not local wealth - the financial impact locals see is property price inflation. In most tourist cities, you don't need to walk far from the main attraction to see desperate poverty.
There is opportunity cost. When a political administration leans into the "tourist industry" they are not growing other industry and enterprise that creates high value jobs for locals. The jobs tourism creates are entry level service workers that will likely served by immigrants also attracted by the same dynamics as tourists and more easily exploited by a loathsome industry.
I also live in a city, Duesseldorf, that's a semi-hotspot. Very crowded during trade fairs, Christmas markets and events like the Euro Cup; not so much in between. Visitors are definitely the reason why there are a thousand bars and stores still open. City centers of comparable cities nearby are dieing. The difference between a thriving city and a mostly dead city are 5.4 million overnight stays.
(Admittedly, Barcelona seems to have about 20 million overnight stays plus cruise ships, but it also has almost three times the population of Duesseldorf)
Not sure about other regions, but in the EU, low tech cars are not allowed.
Required safety systems include emergency breaking, emergency lane-keeping, intelligent speed assistance (car must use cameras or GPS to determine current speed limit), driver attention warning systems and many more.
That fancy screen is really not a cost factor. These days you can buy after-market screens with Car Play and Android auto support for 100 EURs or less. But all the safety systems needs lots of sensors, and also the ability to auto-brake and auto-steer in emergency situations.
It's a good start, but a grander vision would be to reduce or eliminate the need for cars altogether. You can build and sustain a mighty civilization without automobiles at all.
Here in the UK, almost 17% (about nine million people) live outside towns and villages. A trip to the local shop can be several miles on roads that don't have pavements and public transport is of the "one bus a day" type if you are lucky. There are a few people who cycle but they're dedicated and for most it is not an option. Cars are an essential.
As I understand it, that’s not _strictly_ true. 17% live in “rural” areas, but this includes towns and villages in rural areas. It’s 8% for “rural village and fringe” [0], or much less for actually outside of towns and villages. Unless you have other stats to share?
I have lived in several towns and cities in the UK.
The problem is that even in reasonable sized towns not having a car is very limiting. The solution is much better public transport - more frequent is the big thing. That is the difference
On the other hand I did not have a car in London (which has very frequent public transport until quite late in the night), nor in Manchester (not as good, but OK) until I had a child. It was no problem. paying for the occasional taxi and hiring cars for trips when needed was a lot cheaper than running a car and more convenient too.
There is no way to provide a public transport service from the village 9 miles away with 4,000 people to my village of 150 at 2145 on a Friday night. It would have to literally be a taxi going out and back to transport one person.
Europe has generally done a very good job with urban transit. The real problem is that long-distance train trips cost a fortune, typically several times more than a budget airline. And ticketing systems between countries (within the EU) are poorly integrated.
Despite many years of hand-wringing about environmental impacts of air travel, almost nothing has been done to address this.
Agreed. Electric cars are frankly a pretty poor solution to the issue of carbon emissions. A far better, more long term solution already exists - high density, walkable neighbourhoods and high frequency, well run public transport systems.
> These days you can buy after-market screens with Car Play and Android auto support for 100 EURs or less.
Wish this was true. I wanted to buy one for myself, but even the most expensive aftermarket CarPlay units are absolutely terrible. Laggy & unresponsive touch screens, underpowered internals, gaudy designs etc.
I wonder why it’s still such a challenge to make something that feels as good as a first gen iPad from 2010.
> I wonder why it’s still such a challenge to make something that feels as good as a first gen iPad from 2010.
Cars have a unique set of operating requirements. During the course of a year, my car could be -40F or 160F inside, depending on if it’s winter or summer. Electronics that operate reliably in that temp range are expensive.
I believe the Zoe's successor is the Renault 5 e (the A290 seems to be a performance version of the 5e). The Renault 5 has advanced ADAS, since it's required for all new cars, and is, according to Renault, "packed with electrical and digital technology": https://media.renault.com/renault-5-e-tech-electric-the-elec...
* resolution (I am fine with >=1440p)
* USB-C or Thunderbolt with sufficient power to charge notebooks, so you only need to connect one cable to your notebook
* at least 4 USB ports (so keyboard, mouse, camera, speakerphone can be connected to monitor and it acts as a switch when using more than one notebooks)
* viewing angle / display type (image should look the same no matter which angle - but shouldn't be a problem in the price range of monitors that fulfill the previous points)
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