I dunno, centre right national governments in recent years have been pretty car friendly. Driving can be cheaper for family outings. For two adults and two teens to go from Utrecht to Amsterdam and back (26 minutes each way) is €48 (with discount if you buy a flex pass monthly) or €80 without a discount. Suddenly driving is pretty competitive
That ignores the ongoing costs of car ownership: parking/storage, maintenance, and the purchase price itself. Driving costs a lot more than just fuel and tolls.
Oh I know, and that's part of why this family doesn't own a car, but 1) a lot of people are not great at calculating those costs and 2) some of the costs are sunk costs.
Even so, the sticker shock of some trips on Dutch trains is unsettling. Utrecht to Rotterdam is €27.60 round trip (if using undiscounted fare). It's ~112 km (again, round trip). So for the same family you're looking at over €100 to go on a pretty minor journey.
I just want the Dutch government to fund trains more and roads less. It's kinda bizarre how there's no motorway tolls here, at least that I've encountered.
Japanese rail companies are allowed to buy land, then build infrastructure, then enjoy the increased value of said land. American rail is hobbled by the extraction of increased land values by those who already own land by the stations. Of course, freeways are similar, but people don’t mind roads losing money.
I've been on a contract for a multinational European company that's in partnership with ESA for the past 18 months, and I've seen a lot of money and effort spent to move out of the US cloud to OVH. After the US decided to go rogue, this project became even more urgent.
My job is basically recreating a small part of the infrastructure that was designed for AWS, while patching some shortcomings of the OVH offerings which are not as featureful.
Are you just hanging around California startups? I work in big consulting and am inside hundreds of the largest companies in the US, everyone of which is fully Microsoft and only ever seen PowerPoint. I’m in dozens of teams meetings a week across as many organizations and have been in 2 Google meets meeting in the last decade, both of which were California fintech startups.
Yes, most people use MS where I live, too. But most of them only scratch the surface. To this thread's point, 99% of PowerPoint presentations I've seen are just walls of text on a bunch of slides, with the occasional illegible graph.
Now I'm not saying I actually know my way around PPT or that I'm some presentation whiz, but this can probably be done with the browser version. Just like the "new" Outlook is simply a new Edge skin.
I work for a company that has drunk the MS Kool-Aid and then went back for a refill, yet I've never had any issue using the web version of the suite ever since it came out. I don't even run Windows on my work laptop. Teams is the only app that seems marginally better in its heavy version (heh), since it supports separate windows for the calls.
I've been out of the powerpoint loop myself for almost 20 years too; does it actually have any valuable functionality that you can't get on the free alternatives?
I've worked in academia for years (in computer vision labs) and I can confidently say that PowerPoint is the best tool to prepare research presentations.
At least in my field, 90% of presentations are Beamer. PowerPoint is bad at equations just like Word. Besides easily integrating video/animations I can't think of why it would be better.
Could you go into details about why you think this?
I haven't used PowerPoint in years as I think my needs are pretty simple but I wonder what I'm missing.
I can see that the Microsoft ecosystem gives control on who can view files and provides collaboration and control. Both of which would be useful in the corporate world.
Is there's somethnig other than that or is it just ease of use?
For the most part I see people using MS Office tools because it's what they are familar with. They're familar with it because it's the only thing their IT department will allow them to use.
I'm actually constantly surprised by the diversity of experiences I'm seeing here. It's very much not a small bubble, at least not in comparison to any other social network/activity in my life.
Interestingly, clearcutting is part of it but another part is just grazing. If you let sheep graze in a forest they will eat all the saplings, so after a century of this, the old trees die out without new ones to replace them. I agree with your point but thought that could be of interest - Whittled Away, by Padraic Fogarty, is a good book discussing this (and why Ireland, which really should be all forest, is an ecological wasteland more generally)
I wouldn't, as China being the largest single market for motor vehicles and the cutthroat competition there is what caused all this.
Everyone is trying to cut costs so as to be able to compete there and Europeans are paying the cost of financing this.
Personally I'm going to wait until the average car age in China crosses the 10-year mark to get a new vehicle. Until that happens there will be no incentive to think about longevity.
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