On the bright side, if the AMOC shuts down, which early indications seem to say it might be, you’ll also have way colder winters in Europe to balance things out. I guess that should also get the eastern seaboard of the US hotter as well? So fun for everyone!

Spoken like an upper middle class person.

In fairness, it’s often false thrift to move to an area you need a car with the hopes of saving money on rent… that all ends up going into the car. I hear you as someone born into poverty in a car centric place that this often isn’t a choice, that’s fair, but all else being equal my experience that needing to maintain a car was a constant albatross around our neck as a family. Once I moved to an area with good transit and didn’t bother with a car, I could save way, way more money even considering higher rent…

Relax, amigo.

Look, I’m not sure if there’s a language barrier here, so I’ll try to rephrase this simply: if trains have fencing on either side, there are almost always man gates every so often so that a) the tracks can be accessed for maintenance and b) in case of an emergency ( like we’re discussing, ahem ) there is an exit to get people out and off of the tracks.

Is your expectation for emergency egress that sidewalks are required along the entire route in order to have emergency exits from a fenced area???

What you suggest is like letting people leave a plane and walk along the tarmac.

Buddy, this is exactly what sometimes happens. What do you think they do? Sometimes a plane just isn’t able to be fixed on the spot and you have to disembark on the spot. Shit happens.

What I want is to get from point A to point B safely.

Then why are you driving? That’s statistically way, way, way more likely to end in a fatality for you and it isn’t even very close.

Southern Europe cosplaying as western Europe for the purposes of feeling superior to eastern Europe is legitimately funny though, especially since I’m from a place where both would be considered barely functioning countries lol.

That being said, you seem to really be getting up in your feelings with this since we’re devolving to both unearned and mistargeted national pride, so I think now is probably a good time to block and move on :) . Been fun, amigo, but maybe get one of your countrymen to pass a J and loosen up a bit, eh?

Drive safe!

I generally agree, but there is a level of ignorance where you don’t even really know what questions to ask, and subjects complicated enough that you just aren’t equipped to understand an answer without needing a lot of background education first because they just aren’t intuitive at all by nature. At that point, is there really much value in asking the question?

Determining where that line is is hard sometimes, but I do think it’s there.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: this kind of “elitism” is literally just division of labor which is basically required for a modern society to function.

Walking through the woods is not what I would call “a better [train] experience”.

What are you actually wanting here? “They won’t let us off the train, we’re cooking in here” and then “Oh they let you off the train, what an awful experience”? Pick a lane here, guy. Being let off the train sounds a lot better to me than heat stroke… I’m still not sure what you really want in this scenario.

I’d still like to know when this actually happened? A breakdown, sure. But trying to keep people to stay on a clearly dangerous train? Hard to believe.

Do you not have mandatory gates every x km in Spain? We have plenty of sound barrier fencing, and all of them have gates a short distance apart exactly for safety reasons.

Glad to hear you had a good experience overall!

They will not open the door you dufus.

No need to be prickly :).

They will indeed do exactly this in my experience. We even had a sort of viral video of this happening here in Hungary… train broke down, they opened the doors and walked people through the nearby woods to the nearest village.

If Hungary is managing a better train experience than Spain… I would understand your frustration, the situation must be pretty damn dire there.

But again, I doubt this has happened at all… even aside from physical, can you cite a situation where conductors would not “let people off the train” when it was getting dangerously hot during a breakdown? It’s hard to believe that Hungary would handle this better…

You can get a fine for using emergency exit.

In a non emergency, of course.

they will not let you leave the train

?

Man, I’m surprised to hear that. International travel is infamously shit, that’s part of why so many Europeans fly. The trains themselves are fine, but there’s a mishmash of standards, electrical systems, booking systems, etc, and every country just wants to engage in protectionism and refuses to harmonize with others. Trying to book travel through multiple countries is usually seen as a bigger headache than it’s worth, not to mention more costly, than flying which is just backwards in terms of incentives.

Maybe if you’re getting one of the tourist Eurrail pass thingies it isn’t so bad, but for regular international use (aside from just going to one country over, so just one journey) Europe really needs to standardize its rail travel much, much more.

the AC stops working, the windows don’t open and it gets real hot real fast unless it’s some extreme situation they will not let you leave the train

That sounds to me like an extreme situation.

All trains have emergency releases on the door to allow manual opening. Practically, if it is actually getting hot to the point of danger, no conductor is going to physically stop you from leaving the train. More likely they’d be the ones to let people off.

I’d need to see a news story of this happening where they were trying to force people to stay on a dangerously hot train. This sounds like a made up scenario.

Eh, it depends. Faster bike traffic shouldn’t really be in such close proximity to pedestrians. On a lot of city streets, a fast bike is way closer to the speed of a car than to a pedestrian. City centers, especially non arterials, I’d say they should be in the street if there’s no path. I’m not particularly fast at just under 30kph and it’s rare for traffic to be much faster downtown here, especially non arterials I’m often passing them. I think that’s generally too fast to safely ride on a sidewalk, but a safe speed there would make cycling not very practical for me.

Which I can assure, unfortunately, no cycle paths is often the case in my part of eastern/central Europe

Once a society reaches a certain level of prosperity and people have some disposable income, it’s better to have a system that allows people to choose to do what they want with that income. Socialism fails at that point.

Just to be clear capitalism and markets aren’t equivocal. Market socialism is a thing.

Socialism is a really big umbrella term… similar to “democracy” there are a bunch of different ways to actually apply it. State socialism is only one scheme for it.

There, you see? The Catholic Church was simply about saving the children.

Agreed, there are definitely exceptions I could think of, just speaking generally.

I really wonder if there is any place outside of a concert venue that these folks find music on speakers acceptable? I kind of get it if they’re solo, just use headphones, but… hanging out in a group and listening to music together at the beach is about the most normal use of a beach trip I can think of.

Yeah, but Windows is no easier to install… most people just don’t experience it because it is the usual pre installed OS. I don’t think it’s really fair to count that against Linux… in terms of the installation process, I found them to be similar, which is to say a pain in the butt. I wouldn’t recommend a non tech person try to install WIndows either.

Aside from that, no, it did not need any further set up aside from installing Steam via the repository. Arguably easier than in WIndows, certainly not harder. I did also install VLC but probably wasn’t necessary, there was a pre installed media player I don’t remember the name of…

It’s funny you mention drivers as that’s what made me switch it over. A Windows update inexplicably borked some video card drivers. I didn’t need to install any drivers manually for the Linux setup, it all worked out of the box without any issues so far. Driver pains used to be a big issue years ago, but I think for 90% of PCs it’s a non issue today.

No, it was a very vanilla Windows setup. At least I can’t think of anything… what kind of workarounds did you have in mind?

We all pay for it anyway via the negative impacts. It should be the consumers buying the thing that pay for it. Why should society at large be paying for the negative impacts of a product not everyone is buying? Makes no sense. If your product is causing a big environmental impact, that needs to be paid for by the company making the product and the consumers buying it.

I dunno, I switched my 7 year olds laptop over specifically because Windows updates kept breaking things. Everything worked out of the box with Linux and hasn’t broken yet. He doesn’t care either way, he just wants to use his programs, and that’s been easier since switching. I say this as someone who very painfully had to use Linux for a few years about 10 years ago… the experience is just very different today. I don’t think a day to day user will notice any difference beyond better stability.

My experience is that once set up, the easy linux distros are way less likely to randomly stop working and need support. And by set up, I pretty much mean “install the OS and grab Steam”.

I think it’s more like people still hold onto a view of the difficulty that hasn’t been true for years now in the big ones (Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, etc). I agreed with this position 10 years ago, but not anymore. Users that aren’t super technical are likely just browsing, watching video, and playing games. All that works out of the box now with nearly no set up in my experience. My 7 year old has been using it with less problems than he was getting in Windows 11 (seriously).