I have observed that it is a recurring pattern. I am most aware of the behind the scenes in public education, but I believe it is across the board.
Massive efforts are done to implement reforms to conform to EU standards, believing that that’s how the “superior” EU members do it (Germany, NL, Nordics…). But then I go there and I see that their system has nothing to do with the standards and they are not doing much to conform.
It’s fine, these reforms are often beneficial for Spain, and I do believe that generally being in the EU is a big win-win. Although sometimes it’s just a lot of unnecessary reshuffling at great cost.
A certain segment of the Spanish population really looks up to northern EU countries, or rather they feel a sense of inferiority. In practice there is not all that much to look up to and I believe Spain should be feel more confident. Many great things are prevented by the widespread belief that we are in a shitty country and that everyone is useless, but it is just not true.
> Massive efforts are done to implement reforms to conform to EU standards, believing that that’s how the “superior” EU members do it (Germany, NL, Nordics…).
I can't speak for Germany or the Nordics, but here in the Netherlands the government is doing just about anything in their power to keep foreign competition from our rail network. The only lines serviced by foreign operators are the ones that would cost the national operator more than they would bring in and (some of) the international train services.
Our "high speed" rail is a joke. The trains themselves are fine, but the bridges over them are too brittle for the train to actually achieve high speeds, so it's operating at less than half the speed Spanish high speed rail is operating at. If anything, the success of the Spanish rail operators is an argument in favour of actually bringing competition to Dutch rail operators.
That said, the Dutch railway network is very different from the Spanish railway network. We're a small, densely populated country with many stops along just about any track, barely giving most trains time to accelerate even between larger city centers. The network is complex, the rails are extremely busy all hours of the day, our trains run on an idiotically low voltage and two trains with a dozen minutes in delays can back up the national train grid in no time if they slow down in the wrong spot. There are only a few long-distance high-speed rail options that make sense, some of which already sort of exist (Eurostar to the south), some of which our neighbours plainly don't want (any Dutch rail project crossing into the German border), and some of which are hardly financially viable (trains from the big cities to remote parts of the country) in a country that doesn't want to spend money on public transport.
It would be nice to have a couple of routes between a few major cities with nonstop service, but there are are no bypasses around the interstitial cities so those would need to be built first.
Groningen -> Amsterdam
Maastricht -> Amsterdam
Eindhoven -> Amsterdam
Nijmegen -> Amsterdam
I can only speak for myself, but a trip from Maastricht to Amsterdam is almost 2.5 hours by train for a distance of a smidge over 200km. This is mainly due to all of the stops along the way to pick up riders in every major city between the two.
Currently, our trains never go faster than 160km/h if the onboard screens are to be trusted.
There are a few tracks that can go faster than 160km/h (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Baanvaks...) but also slower ones. The 80km/h tracks especially have a tendency to make a relatively short journey feel like it takes forever, especially if your train journey includes a trip over the 200km/h segment.
"Gut Ding will Weile haben." / "Haste makes waste."
I've got good memories waiting on the platform in Arnhem for my train back into Germany in the early morning, after a night in the coffeeshops there in the nineties.
Observing all the commuters holding on to their coffee to go, and balancing it in their hands, anticipating the jerky start of these things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Mat_%2764 :-)
Looked hilarious. All in sync. Like orchestrated.
Regarding the percieved slowness, and differences on both sides of the border(at the times?).
When doing the same route by car, your motorways felt supersmooth, even with all the strange markings and traffic signs :-)
Crossing back into Germany toward Oberhausen-> Ruhrpott came the Autobahn made of concrete slabs, and gaps between them. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump!.
Very annoying when still 'under the influence' of that grassy green stuff :-)
Taking a train to the nearest (usable) airport within the Netherlands takes between 2 and 2.5 hours depending on the available trains, amount of transfers, and "high-speed" (not actually) rail surcharge. Actually, because of a train hitting someone, I currently can't reach any airport by train because my city is right at the edge of the train network. Groningen-Schiphol is similar, and Maastricht-Schiphol is 2,5 hours at the very minimum. Meanwhile, Amsterdam-Brussels takes about 2 hours.
Our regular train speeds are 80kmh to 140kmh, with maybe a little bit of 160kmh on specific stretches.
I realize my country is incredibly well-connected by public transit and those 2 hours are already a massive luxury compared to probably most of the world's population, but I wouldn't mind a few high-speed lines from the center of the country (probably Utrecht) to major cities. With trains currently being more expensive than taking a car if you travel with two people or more, it'd make the high cost worth it.
The station density in NL simply doesn't allow for the same kind of high-speed rail that you see in Spain, France or Germany. The segments Groningen-Zwolle and Maastricht-Eindhoven are basically the only parts where train speeds over 200km/h make any difference. On all other trajectories, the limiting factor is not the maximum train speed but the interference from other rail traffic.
The major cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, Den Haag) typically have 4 trains/hour going between them. Higher-speed trains won't make any difference there, unless you first build out dedicated infrastructure (like the IC Direct line between Schiphol and Rotterdam, which cuts a whopping 20 mins from the regular IC travel time).
and your country is 320 kilometers high and 250 wide. There may be a lot of problems with your rail network but insufficient train speed ain't one of them. With the current rail speeds you can cross it comfortably in two hours in any direction. Probably you need to optimize it, lay new train tracks, but there is no need to go for the expensive high speed.
It's a common pattern far beyond the EU. One big driving force is that if you have an existing solution that achieves 80% you have much less incentive to change than if your current state only achieves 50%. So the "inferior" country modernizes to the new 100% solution while the "superior" one might stay on the 80% solution for far longer
Compared to road deaths that's practically nothing. Obviously 39 dead are 39 too many, and in terms of railway disasters it's a lot, but in the bigger picture it's a blip
I do agree with the general spirit, but do keep in mind that certain kinds of change are hard by design to ensure a degree of stability. Normalising the modification of electoral processes can backfire badly, certain groups will definitely try to bend the system to their advantage, and it is not unlikely that, the way the winds are blowing right now, it might lead to a collapse of the underlying democratic system that enables it. It goes both ways.
Looks great, it was actually just playing around yesterday with `code canvas app` which is similar, and also Charkoal.dev and Haystack Editor (before code-review pivot) which are related. Yours looks better than any of them already!
I wish it was available in Cursor as well though. Not sure how exactly they manage their marketplace, most VSCode extensions seem to be there but now and then I encounter one that is missing for no apparent reason.
Great! I tried it on a standard Django project but it's not displaying any edges. It is able to detect imports at least, because "Add Connected Files" works, but no edges at all.
hey! one of the co-founders of nogic here. sorry for the late response!! feel free to report your bug here on the nogic discord: https://discord.gg/pE9sadAm. there are a couple of issues regarding edges not showing in some cases, and we are hoping to address all of these issues by the end of the week.
> The environment, too, is unusually protected. The cave is hard to reach and is filled with foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide gas, in concentrations too great for most animals to live there.
You can draw a line between your location and the north pole, they talk about three variants:
- Magnetic North: Shortest surface line to the magnetic north pole (simply in the direction of the compass at your location).
- True North: Shortest surface line from where you are to the geographic north pole (based on the rotation axis?).
- Grid North: A line to the same geographic north pole, but aligned to the longitude lines (EDIT: for a local UK grid standard, slightly different from the global one). I didn't fully understand the subtleties of why it's different from True North, something about the projection. Not sure if it's exactly to the same north pole, the rotation axis might also change slightly and I assume that the grid north point is fixed by convention?
They are saying that there's a particular point where all three lines point in the same direction, and that point is moving.
It's a transverse mercator projection rather than a mercator as you might often see because it minimises distortion over the UK as a whole which means that the distortion is as you move away from the meridian, rather than as you move away from the equator (with a regular mercator I think all points have the grid aligned with true North)
This grid is setup such that it's origin is not on the prime meridian (at Greenwich), but 2deg west so only points on the line 2deg west are aligned with true north.
One of the advantages of doing this seemingly weird projection is that you can treat "local" maps (for some definition of local) as flat rectangular grids without introducing a lot of errors: drawing straight lines between two points, measuring the distance / angle between them, etc., just by dealing with a flat piece of paper. VERY convenient, but the farther you are from the center of the projection, the higher the errors that are introduced.
If your planet is tiny, it's very easy to figure out that it's a ball, a child can see it with their bare eyes. The planets in "Outer Wilds" are like that.
Because this planet is larger, smart people trying to figure out how it works used simple tools and measurements to conclude that it's a ball, we know that Greeks and Romans figured this out, I'm sure other civilisations did too.
Greg Egan's "Incandescence" has people who live somewhere where you can discover, in this same way, General Relativity. There's a small but noticeable difference between the simple linear results we'd see for Newtonian physics in rudimentary experiments and what they can observe and they figure out why. Since they have no context for what it means to observe this and have (to their memory) always lived somewhere this happens, they aren't terrified by this discovery any more than we were terrified to discover how our Sun must work - so much hydrogen in one place that it undergoes spontaneous nuclear fusion which releases so much energy that we can easily see by it even after it is no longer directly visible, OK cool, I still need groceries.
It’s easy to see that the surface of the earth is a ball - or at least a curved surface - simply by going to the seaside and watching ships dip below the horizon before they fully disappear.
The ancient Greeks proved it was a ball and measured the dimensions of it using mathematics, but the concept of a curved earth was known to seafarers long before that.
> Magnetic North: Shortest surface line to the magnetic north pole (simply in the direction of the compass at your location).
Magnetic North is the local horizontal direction of the magnetic field. But that doesn't generally coincide with the shortest surface line (geodesic) to the magnetic north pole (however you define that - there's several).
If you followed your compass you could end up in a loop without reaching the magnetic north pole.
Langton Matravers is about 2km north of the coast. The 3 norths will have met land at a place called Dancing Ledge, at about SZ 00000 76833 (50.59121, -2.00000).
Town names in England are full of historical quirks that don’t sound like modern English - try browsing a map, it’s fun. Some of its place names are thousands of years old.
Even names that seem very English now, like “York”, only seem that way because of their long historical presence. The town of that name started out around 70 CE as the Roman fortress Eboracum, which was a Latinized version of a Celtic name.
Later, around 600 CE, the Anglo-Saxons reinterpreted the name as Eoforwic, because “eofor” meant “boar” in Old English, although the earlier name had nothing to do with boars, other than sounding similar.
Then the Vikings came along in the 860s and called it Jórvík, an Old Norse adaptation of Eoforwic.
Around 1000 CE, after the Norman conquest, the name was shortened to York. That has no meaning in English, other than the place name and its derivatives. Fundamentally, it’s no more or less English than Matravers.
I've just bought a house in Alderwasley in Derbyshire, the nearest town is Wirksworth [1]. I assumed that, because this area was the heart of the industrial revolution [2], the town was an eponymously named workers town built for mill workers (there are actually entire towns in the area that were built for mill workers).
Then I read the history on wikipedia:
The name was recorded as Werchesworde in the Domesday Book of 1086 A.D. Outlying farms (berewicks) were Cromford, Middleton, Hopton, Wellesdene [sic], Carsington, Kirk Ireton and Callow. It gave its name to the earlier Wirksworth wapentake or hundred. The Survey of English Place-Names records Wyrcesuuyrthe in 835, Werchesworde in 1086, and Wirksworth(e) in 1536.
The toponym might be "Weorc's enclosure", or "fortified enclosure".
I just love how place names in the UK have evolved.
I agree, it's fascinating. I've lived in four countries, including England and the US, but I haven't seen anything quite like the UK names elsewhere. You do see a lot of indigenous names in the US, but they haven't evolved in the same way, probably largely because it's all so much more recent, but also because there was only one really one actual invasion, not waves of them coming from all different directions - Beakers, Celts, Roman, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Norman.
> I've just bought a house in Alderwasley in Derbyshire
Congratulations! A quick check of the map shows you're right near Whatstandwell, Nether Heague, Shottle, Hognaston, and of course Knockerdown. It all makes Tolkien and Pratchett seem a bit unimaginative!
There are a lot of French influence in England's place names (and the language in general) from the couple of centuries after 1066 when the Normans ruled the roost.
I don't think India had a democracy before the Brits, either.
Not that it gives anyone else the right to come in and declare themselves Raj. But Vicky wasn't the first to come to India and declare themselves in charge.
Massive efforts are done to implement reforms to conform to EU standards, believing that that’s how the “superior” EU members do it (Germany, NL, Nordics…). But then I go there and I see that their system has nothing to do with the standards and they are not doing much to conform.
It’s fine, these reforms are often beneficial for Spain, and I do believe that generally being in the EU is a big win-win. Although sometimes it’s just a lot of unnecessary reshuffling at great cost.
A certain segment of the Spanish population really looks up to northern EU countries, or rather they feel a sense of inferiority. In practice there is not all that much to look up to and I believe Spain should be feel more confident. Many great things are prevented by the widespread belief that we are in a shitty country and that everyone is useless, but it is just not true.
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