Presuming that’s an AI summary, but it only covers the bit that’s not blocked by the paywall. It’s one of those that has the first couple of paragraphs visible and then blocks the remainder, and that’s just summarised those first few paragraphs. The meat of it, where presumably it tells us about the shenanigans from the local councils and the details of the “policy failures and internal conflicts”, remains a mystery.

Paywalled, unfortunately…

That’s public transport for you. You pay for one ticket, you get one seat; you don’t get a whole row to yourself just because you don’t like other people.

Pay for first class if you want more space and a seat on your own.

For a brief moment I parsed that headline as saying that the woodland was illegally felled in order to make it a nature reserve.

What do they actually mean by “model identifier”? Serial number? IMEI?

Europe is less a place than it is a state of mind.

Arianespace has fallen behind, but they’re not out of the picture. They’re still by far the largest competitor to SpaceX, and they’re aiming for their 7th generation Ariane to be a reusable design.

Arianespace is an Airbus and Safran subsidiary, so it’s not like they don’t have the engineering oomph behind them.

Yeah, but it’s a dry heat.

Worth noting that these were changes implemented by the previous Tory government. The new Labour government was more or less happy to leave it to ride, but now it’s been successfully challenged in court they’re happy to let it fall by the wayside.

Sure, but that applies to the UK too. London has a higher cost of living than Los Angeles; averages being averages, this is weighed against lots of cheaper places to live (with massive unemployment and stagnated economics).

Cost of living in the UK is about 12% lower than the US, including housing costs. But the average salary is about half of the US salary. So you can see that that doesn’t really cover it.

Source: https://livingcost.org/cost/united-kingdom/united-states

Just looked on that link for the UK. The average is listed as £63k, which is $85k.

So you’re not exactly disproving the point that that type of high salary is a US thing.

Sure, but the specs aren’t directly comparable.

They also still manufacture the RPi 4, which starts at £33- which is £23 in 2012 money.

but they’re not cheap any more

People say this, but they really are still cheap.

The original Raspberry Pi Model B launched for £22 in 2012. The entry level Raspberry Pi 5 is £46, but adjusted for inflation that’s only £32 in 2012 money. So only £10 more expensive in real terms.

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is only £14.40, which is only £10 in 2012 money. Compare this to the original Raspberry Pi Model A, which launched for £16.

People look at the headline cost of the high end RPi 5s (£115 for the 16GB model, £76 for the 8GB), but fail to recognise that there was nothing comparable to these in the Raspberry Pi lineup before, and these are not the only models in the Raspberry Pi lineup now.

Ask a non-protesting friend or family member to take it with them about their daily routine?

I’m sure my mum would be happy to look after my phone for a day if it meant getting one over on the authorities. And if anyone asks, I’m just a good son who likes to hang out with his mum.

I was really impressed by how lightweight and gorgeous it is.

Maybe a controversial opinion here, but the one thing that everyone says about it is that it looks gorgeous, and I really don’t see it. Never have.

Even back when I first tried it out, maybe 15 years ago, I thought it looked strangely retro. Nowadays, compared to the eye candy that is completely standard in GNOME, KDE, MacOS, Windows etc., it looks incredibly dated.

It’s all hard edges, low res icons, ugly fonts, and eccentric design choices. Yeah, it can make window elements transparent, but you can’t dine out on that one trick for ever.

Same went for their rivals, Poundworld and 99p Stores, both of which have already long since bitten the dust.

Meanwhile their rivals that don’t bother with the fixed price gimmick (B&M, Home Bargains, Poundstretcher) seem to be doing better.

Poundland is never as cheap as you think it will be, anyway, even when they do stick to under £1. They just sell smaller packages of products than other shops; it’s not like they’re selling anything at a loss.

In theory it really shouldn’t matter. You choose your instance, and it’s up to the instance admins to make decisions about backend software choices. It’s possible that we’ll get to a place there it’s possible for admins to migrate a server from Lemmy to Piefed or back again without loss of content, in which case all the user would see about it would be a change of default interface.

I’m on Feddit.uk, which has several different web interfaces to choose from, and I mostly browse using a mobile app (Boost). It really makes basically no difference to me whether it’s running Lemmy or Piefed.

A social network needs enough users to actually function. In the early days, Lemmy/kbin/associates were too quiet to be appealing, so there was a constant push to bring in new users. As this is a Reddit clone social network, inevitably that means hoping that Reddit users will come across.

I would argue that Lemmy et al is already at a high enough number of active users that there’s a basic critical mass; that there’s enough activity here such that a new user would find plenty to keep them engaged. It could certainly stand to be much bigger still, but the pressure to grow is much less intense.

Exactly! Tunnel capacity is a hard upper limit, but in an ideal world you’d be using every minute of that capacity for either passengers or freight. Depot capacity issues are very solvable.

Station capacity is also an issue (particularly passport control issues at St Pancras, which limits how many passengers they can process even beyond platform capacity), but that’s relatively solvable too. One of the competing proposals (possibly the Gemini one?) wanted to make Stratford International its terminus rather than St Pancras to avoid station congestion. If HS1-HS2 link were back in play, that would open up other options for alternative termini too (such as Old Oak Common, or HS2 stations out of London).