(and that vision is “happily pissed people with empty wallets”)

Plenty of propaganda, but Smoky was a real cat – was rescued from a bombed-out building after an air raid by the woman in the picture - Miss Ann Twynam of Paddington (a district of London). While I’m sure his saluting trick didn’t involve taxidermy, I’m sure it involved bribery. Cats basically owned the black market in tuna during the war when pretty much everything was strictly rationed.

“Babe, you’re looking Haplogroup I-M437 tonight. No. Not M-437. Damn, girl, you’re an M-438.”

Rather embarrassingly, Austria Post doesn’t do that but does have “crypto stamps” which are regular stamps only with a QR code linking to an NFT or something. To be fair to Austria Post, though, they are really good at extracting cash from the pockets of overexcitable stamp collectors with gimmickry like this. https://onlineshop.post.at/en-AT/page/crypto-stamp

“Food truck culture” is pretty much a hipsterism as far as I can tell. It’s a posh way of describing regular food of a sort that often gets sold from the back of a van everywhere except it’s made by and for white people and costs twice as much. Their original purpose of selling affordable food reasonably quickly to workers who want some hot food instead of bringing their own lunch to work but don’t have a long enough break to go anywhere to eat was gentrified away a while back.

One of the things I miss about living in Switzerland is that both of the major supermarket groups had lots of self-checkouts and they were the trusting sort, not the ones which weigh everything constantly and hate you. The advantage of an economy with low unemployment and where supermarket work pays a living wage, I guess.

An “Oops, racism!” incident is pretty much inevitable as well, of course.

Frickin’ laser beams or GTFO. A gunbot with a metal-projectile weapon taped to its arm is like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie where they’ve lost all the knowledge needed to build new tech.

Well, “Man who wrote some code mostly based on other people’s code a very long time ago and parlayed that into media darling status and a lucrative income” is a bit long-winded.

worst prog rock band ever

Claim to fame! Aleister Crowley was born a short walk from the house where I grew up, although then he was plain old Edward Crowley. My home town isn’t that keen to be associated with him, largely because of the above - at a superficial level he was a harmless crank, a rich kid who decided to start his own religion and dress up in robes, but once you dig down into the history he was a pretty unpleasant, exploitative man - a classic cult leader.

“sponsored content, but only very smol bean sponsored content, pls not be mad thx”

There was a new government elected last week on a platform which can be broadly summarised as “no more insane politics shit”. So far they’re showing dangerous signs of competence and rational thought. What a load of weirdos.

If you want more crazy, that political party is actually a limited company in which the leader is also the majority shareholder and the bylaws permit him to fire and appoint a majority of directors at will. I’m not sold on whether all those candidates were actually fake, but journalists from more credible outlets than Byline Times are no doubt working on physically tracking down every one off these candidates as we speak to verify their existence or otherwise.

I vaguely remember his original car crash on Wogan after he went loopy and it was barely veiled antisemitism even then - lizard people and the like

(without reading article) The answer presumably boils down to “the Tories”.

Well, they’re arguing that your claim is nonsense. Here’s the reason why different countries ended up with different standards for various railway things: interoperability simply wasn’t that big a deal at the time. These weren’t continent-spanning high speed train services, they chuffed along at a speed of 30-40mph and had frequent stops because the locomotives needed regular watering and coaling and the passengers needed regular watering and emptying as well (no on-board toilets or restaurant cars yet). Border crossings usually involved a lengthy stop while formalities were completed, and if a train was crossing the border they’d simply do what happens right up to the present day in many cases: change the locomotive for one belonging to the company that operated the railways in the country they were entering, staffed by drivers who knew the local rules, signalling and practices.

I know this doesn’t cover for breaks of gauge, but they were handled in a similar way – border stations were simply connected to both systems, so when crossing from (say) France into Spain passengers would alight, clear immigration, and board a new train on the opposite platform to take them onward into Spain. The French train would then usually (all going well) return into France taking the passengers who’d left the train from Spain (which falls mainly on the plain) when it arrived there. Freight was obviously harder to transship, which is why at least initially the railways were more interested in enabling through-running of goods wagons without having to offload and reload the whole shipment than they were in through-running of passenger carriages.

Definitely this. There are few more persistent myths out there than the origin of various track gauges – starting with the myth that standard gauge (1435mm) derives from the width of a horse’s arse. Military planners weren’t stupid enough to think that a break of gauge would present an insurmountable obstacle to an invading army (not least because they could just commandeer or seize rolling stock and march all their soldiers off one train and onto another), but instead relied on the obvious, reliable stuff like having plans to blow up bridges and tunnels to deny the enemy the use of the infrastructure. If a gauge is unusual like in Russia or Ireland the most likely cause is that it was a compromise between people who wanted broad gauge and people who wanted Stephenson gauge which resulted in the choice of some number inbetween the two. Russian gauge is a round 5’, Irish gauge is 5’3", both round numbers in archaic units.

There are loads of weird things which essentially boil down to “someone made an arbitrary decision” - for instance, a lot of railways in Western European countries have left-hand running for no reason other than it was what George Stephenson used when he built the Liverpool & Manchester Railway and British practice was highly influential on the early development of railways on the continent.

The CPH metro also has short trains - evacuation of a three-car train is substantially less difficult than the safe evacuation of, say, a Victoria Line train - 133m long, with a crush load of 1,200 people and no side walkways. You’re right that the benefit here isn’t so much in cost savings (most trains still have at least one staff member on board) as it is in being able to run short trains at low headways.

If what you took away from that is “EU trains are FUBAR because something something conflicts” then you weren’t paying attention. Automating trains isn’t that hard to do (London’s Victoria Line has been more or less self-driving since 1967) with some kind of transponders-and-in-cab-control arrangement, but they still to this day have to have a train operator (i.e., a driver) in the cab. This is not because the automation can’t make the train go and make it stop again at the right place, it’s because actually pushing a lever back and forth is only a tiny part of the job of driving a train. The rest is about knowing rules many of which are extremely safety-critical, evaluating rules, and applying knowledge and experience to make sure those rules are correctly applied. For instance, you can put a passenger train on a fenced-off track with no intermittent route changes and it can drive itself from A to B using existing technology. The problem, however, is what happens if something goes wrong? A wire connecting a trackside transponder fails – the train will stop because it doesn’t know what to do. A foreign body is detected on the track in front? The train will have to stop until someone moves it. And not only that train will be stopped, but all the trains behind it will be stopped until someone can get there in person… and let’s hope they don’t have to use the strech of track that’s blocked to get there.

So you still need a human on the train to resolve these problems - a signal failure means a two-way conversation with the signalbox to confirm what’s going on and get given manual permission to proceed, usually at a reduced speed. A foreign object can be examined on the spot, moved if the driver is able to do so, and the track checked over to make sure it hasn’t been damaged by the impact. And this is a very simple example. Driving a train is one of those jobs (a lot like being a pilot, and few people seem to be talking about getting rid of airline pilots) which is 99% routine but 1% exceptions, and the possible number of exceptions is nearly infinite. Automation in the cab is certainly a useful thing just as automation in your car is a useful thing and for the same reason - it frees up expensive human eyeballs and brains to worry less about the repetitive mechanics of the 99% routine so they can pay more attention to any potential 1% exceptions coming down the line. Automation simply can’t meet the safety requirements – there’s no “acceptable number” of accidents or fatalities in railway operations unless that number is zero.

There are, to be fair, some extremely niche operations where full automation can and does work – mostly on isolated metro systems where the infrastructure is expansive enough, there are no level crossings, and the line operates effectively in a vacuum. Even in that case, the Victoria Line can’t meet the safety requirements as the tunnels have no side walkways and passenger evacuation means walking people off through the middle of the cab onto what have to be assumed to be live electrical rails without going through complex safety procedures to be sure they’re safe.

Railway safety in Europe is nothing like what a lot of people think it is (i.e., akin to highway safety). It’s taken very, very seriously and no compromises are ever acceptable. Even many rules which seem hard to explain today exist because a massively improbable series of failures at some point in the past caused disaster or near-disaster and could still repeat themselves today if not for this rule. It’s complex, sure, but for a system that’s undergone 200 years of continuous evolution and development and still remains extremely safe it’s anything but FUBAR.