The car share can be replaced with self driving cars, however if you make self driving cars more attractive than cars now, you’ll shift the balance and are heading towards more car centric and therefore more hostile and less attractive places again.

It is a nice fairy tale hat self driving cars are more space efficient. Real service patterns have shown that they fill up road infrastructure more than regular cars as they will do either fill up trips or need to drive everything twice. Also, making use of these fancy advantages (higher speeds, shorter breaking distance, dynamic crissings without traffic lights) make roads much more pedstrian hostile, more highway like.

Fair point as well.

I remember that very well. Doesn’t change anything about the ID.Polo being a great car for a competitive price tag. Chinese cars in Europe aren’t much better priced.

That is not entirely true. The new VW ID.Polo is a very nice new compact EV for a reasonable price for example.

And self driving cars will do nothing to change anything. I you push for them, more than for cars currently, cities in the Netherlands will be much worse places and traffic will get much worse as well.

Cars are of course part of the mobility equation, especially in rural regions with small settlements. 1 hour connections can still be perfectly fine for commuting but it can only be a supporting service there. The story is completely different one as soon as you get anywhere close to any major city. In the Netherlands, most people live in such locations.

A city built for cars (no matter if “self driving” or not) has to be built much more spread out. Distances for everything multiply. At the same time that spread out infrastructure leads to heavily mono-directional traffic, making rush hour load much worse.

That is why people in car only cities aren’t any faster than cities well designed for public transit. Yes, heavy rail does not cut it alone, that is why there is also light rail, bus lines etc. With all of that, you can get anywhere you need to go, in places that are not primarily or exclusively built for the car.

That is the neat thing about language, it adapts. Euphemisms wear off and something like “smart device” increasingly sounds like “nasty anti-consumer surveillance home appliance” all by itself.

joke aside, the Hippodrome was your common low key football game, with betting and people going crazy. The Colloseum on the other side was a special occasion where you better looked your best and behaved, as a spectator. Hollywood never got the memo.

What a load of nonsense. Just coming from Finland. They basically have no night right now. No space mirrors required and people looked perfectly sane.

I thought it was pretty much general knowledge that Belgium was one of the most terrible colinial powers in europe?

I do see the lack of relevance of that for that football game though. It is like talking about the genocide(s) the US was built upon, just because of a football game.

Yes, that was not an exhaustive list. Both, Germany and Britain are on it too. Any developed country is.

That is not even correct anymore. China is nowadays in the lead on battery technology in specific and EVs in general anxx dc that lead is home made. The West simply did not care about battery technology that much, as it was considered a low return business. You can’t copy that much anymore if you are the technology leader yourself. China is also increasingly outresearching the rest in other fields.

I am not saying that China isn’t still copying elsewhere where it isn’t technology leader. The US and Japan have historically done the same.

PS: Regarding LLMs, no tears for thiefs being stolen from btw.

This has absolutely nothing to do with wind power in France. The US pays a French company a lot of money to not build wind power in the US. Not France’s or Europe’s strategic problem.

France has massively increased renewable sources and is also in good position regarding EV transition.

No matter how you turn it, there is no reason to make oneself dependent on gas or oil from an openly hostile dictatorship in Moscow.

You should readjust your irony detector.

Personal traffic is currently shifted to electricity, so is home heating via heat pump or to other sovereign sources via distributed heating (oil is being phased out in Austria for example, gas will follow sooner than later). Heavy road traffic is seeing currently the implementation of commercial vehicles that can cover everything up to mid range. China is already getting into transition in that market too. Europe would be irresponsible not to follow.

What is left is rather small in volume. Making oneself reliant on an openly hostile Russian dictatorship which won’t waste a second to use that dependency as a weapon against France or Europe, is not necessay than anymore.

That’s exactly Russian propaganda. France doesn’t need “cheap energy” ftom Russia. It needs a sovereign reliable energy supply, one that pnly renewable energy (and possibly nuclear under certain conditions) can enable. France is working on this.

“Cheap energy” from Russia is also a lie. Putin’s vassal Orban didn’t get cheap energy either. Hungary did have higher energy prices abd much higher inflation than other EU member states.

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His views go beyond dislike. He wants the EU functionally dismantled and that is why Putin doesn’t care if he or Le Pen make it to power.

Putin doesn’t really care if European countries are governed by leftists, fascists or whoever, as long as they are nationalists, working towards the balkanisation of Europe and the functional destruction of the EU because this is the precondition to enable the next stepd of Russian conquest and domination of Europe.

There are not only right Putinist parties in the EU. In Germany Wagenknecht is openly defending Russian positions and pretends to be left as well.

What’s wrong with having hobbies?