Asetru

Crepés

I don't think that's a German term.

Republican lawmakers in Arkansas have introduced a bill that would allow lawsuits against anyone who [...] use a student's chosen name that is different from their birth name

Did you just call him Bob? Robert, call the name police! Now!!

I have a friend that does that, too. Not sure where he gets the energy from, I couldn't do that. 😭

That's the photo from the article. Not much concrete on the floor in the picture on the left, but man, it's all over the place. Maybe it just really splashed around or something? If it wasn't deep but covered the whole tech, maybe trying to throw sugar at every surface covered in concrete would indeed be the best course of action?

https://theweek.com/uk-news/transport/57039/how-bags-sugar-saved-tube-tide-concrete

They... "sprinkled it on top"? Sounds weird. But still.

Just looked it up again... Pictures suggest that it wasn't that much volume:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/victoria-line-cement-flooding-fixed-workers-used-sugar-to-stop-spilled-concrete-from-setting-9082206.html

That reminds me of when they accidentally poured concrete into the server room that controlled, I think, the Victoria line. When they realised their mistake, workers bought all the sugar around the site to pour it in before the concrete would set to make the cleanup easier.

Et tu brute force

Same here. Just with three kids added to the mix so I don't even really have that "downtime that I'd like to use for hobbies but do use to rest" anymore.

Having achieved its £25,000 goal in just three hours

Yeah, that's not what it costs to create that game. They openly communicate that in the description, fair enough, but the headline not giving that context makes it sound like much more than it actually is.

I'm well aware that rail/wheel tech works well. However

It would be cheaper

is not true. High speed rail is precision engineering and what you gain from the reduced complexity of not having magnets on the rails is lost by the required precision to make trains as fast as you claim them to be. The cost for a Transrapid line was claimed to be pretty much on par with an ICE line, with trains carrying fewer people but on a higher frequency, so even that would have evened out. The advantage you claim, which is compatibility to existing rail networks, can be regarded as a disadvantage, too, as high speed trains suddenly compete for the same limited resource as all other trains in the network and are sometimes travelling quite slowly as they utilise the same, old rails because the pain of using the old network isn't big enough to make people build new high speed infrastructure. Add to that the issue of too many stops that are added for political reasons and high speed trains suddenly become less and less of a competitive player when it comes to international traffic. If there was another network that would simply be incompatible to existing ones, a lot of these issues wouldn't even arise. A Transrapid just wouldn't stop in Erkelenz, Züssow or Altenbeken and no overly confident mayor could even suggest it, simply because there wouldn't be the infrastructure. And that would be a good thing.

Also, the speed comparison is not that simple. You're comparing wheeled trains that took decades to evolve with the first generation of maglev trains and as far as I see, that's also the highest speed recorded, which isn't what they're allowed to do during regular operations. I highly doubt that there's no room for improvement to get faster for maglevs.

All that said, I'm well aware that "the train has passed". Europe uses wheels and I'm fine with that. I don't want to sound overly negative and I'm happy for every cm of rail that's built. It's just that high speed rail needs to up its game a bit if they want to compete with planes. Right now, they're still too slow. Next week I'll be in Italy for a conference... High speed trains would have taken 4 to 5 times as much time, so I ended up getting a plane ticket booked. That's a pity and had we built a maglev infrastructure 20 years ago, maybe it would have been better by now.

Guess what, I am a taxpayer and you can't tell me what I "really don't" want. Do you think i have come here from the stone age to not know that infrastructure and services cost money?