Good on this kid for going to such lengths to verify his hypothesis and show a serious weakness in railway infrastructure. I hope he goes on to become a serious railway enthusiast and advocate for safe, efficient rail.

However, there are way too many factors in the number of derailments and safety incidents in US rail operations to pin them down to this one issue. Once the major operators embarked on a journey to squeeze more and more money out of the business, a lot of things happened. Trains became longer - excessively so. Used to be that a train 1.4 miles long was considered massive. These days they are the norm. Can you imagine a train so long that, in hilly terrain, sections of it are being dragged uphill while other sections are pushing downhill?

Reductions in staff, motive power fleets and maintenance have led to trains being badly composed, with loads being distributed in a less than optimal way. An old railway man once told me that the only time he broke a train was when he, in a rush and under pressure, agreed to attach a rake of fully loaded freight cars to the end of a train of empties. Unequal load distribution played a role in a number major derailment incidents, among them a derailment in Hyndman, PA, which required the town to be evacuated for several days.

ProPublica have a series of articles regarding rail safety, and specifically one about the dangers of long trains. So while the worn out springs certainly don’t help, they are only one of many things that are impacting rail safety, and probably not even the lowest hanging fruit.

That’s nice, but how does that help people who, to this day, can’t get any ‘NBN’ other than satellite?

By that token, I would also recommend the one-season X-Files spin-off ‘The Lone Gunmen’. It can come across as a bit hokey for the first few episodes, but they found their pace and it became really enjoyable. I don’t think it was ever meant to be more than a single - and, by then-current standards, short - season but I really enjoyed it. The show blended the comic relief of the three geeks from the main series with some more serious storytelling and even had an episode with a plot that resembled a later real-life world-changing event.

Ich bin 2004 ausgewandert, und habe beide Stücke noch in Erinnerung als vor meiner Auswanderung geschehen.

Scheisse, ich werde alt…

Devil’s advocacy is supposed to be, ultimately, constructive to the discussion. If that’s what you’re doing, then good on you. A lot of people just do it to throw a spanner in the works.

The only thing worse than people misusing the term ‘enshittification’ are people who criticise that but can’t be bothered to get their facts straight.

No, it’s not a meaningless buzzword. And no, it was not made up by nostalgic millennials. It would have taken you a mere minute of online research to figure that out yourself.

‘Playing Devil’s advocate’.

Mostly because most people who use it do so in glaringly wrong ways.

I suggest you read up a bit on how and by whom the term was coined and what it actually means. It’s by no means ‘vague’ and it is also a bit more than just repackaging and selling something already known. I suspect many people using the term aren’t even fully aware of what it describes and, crucially, what is being proposed to reduce the effects it describes.

Lucky Number Slevin

Man On Fire

Syriana

Equilibrium

And for some solid Australian cinema: Mystery Road

Boss announces he will break the law.

Because he has no plan to address the causes of crime, only a plan for harsher punishments. So he has no realistic way of reducing victim numbers.

No surprises here.

Ja, ist schon ein bisschen eine ‘Wasser macht nass’ Meldung. Wenn die Politik nur endlich mal ernsthaft was dagegen unternähme, und zwar nicht nur Verbote, sondern auch richtige Hilfe für Suchtkranke. Wir wissen schließlich, dass diese Spiele aufs perfideste darauf zugeschnitten sind, Leute süchtig zu machen. Diese Branche sollte eigentlich nur in strengstens regulierter Form existieren.

Glücksspiel ist in Australien eine ernsthafte Krise, aber weder Staatsregierungen noch der Bund unternehmen bislang etwas ernsthaftes dagegen. In fast jedem Pub gibt es Spielmaschinen (im Prinzip elektronische einarmige Banditen - ‘Pokies’ genannt) sowie Keno, ein andauerndes Tippspiel. Überall wird man mit Werbung für Sportwetten zugeschüttet. Und ständig liest man in den Medien Berichte darüber, wie sich Leute immer wieder um ihre ganze Habe spielen und wetten, wie gefährlich die Spielsucht ist, und was da für Unmengen an Geld im Spiel sind.

wir achten aber auch unsere deutsche Sprache und wollen Abnormalitäten, so schlimm oder so schön sie auch sein können, in der Natur nicht zur Normalität erklären.

Aha. Frauen sind für die AfD also Abnormalitäten. Gut zu wissen.

It still means that fewer young people commit crimes than what used to be the case. It’s not like people stopped having children. And if the youths who used to commit crimes are now adults who commit crimes, they no longer class as youth crimes.

If the Libs win, I hope they go full Newman again and get kicked out after one term. I’m not exactly enamoured with QLD Labor but bloody hell anything is better than the toxic Libs in this state.

If only you could see the ‘newspapers’ in Queensland, every other front page has ‘young crims’ scaremongering and they make it sound like Townsville and such are hellholes where people are terrorised by young criminals day and night without reprieve.

Weird how the LNP’s only answer to this is ‘adult crime, adult time’. Like, literally, zero policies on how to prevent youth crime, how to help children with better education and more perspectives for their future. Nothing. Just harsher punishments.

If a woman seeks abortion at that stage, it is almost guaranteed to be due to a condition that would seriously endanger her, the baby, or both, if the pregnancy was carried to term. Nobody just decides after 27 weeks that they simply don’t want the baby. In these cases, inducing to deliver the baby will likely not help the baby and it could still seriously harm the mother.

What this guy proposes would be, in most cases, indistinguishable from an abortion, but way more harmful for everyone involved. It’s telling that it is usually men who try to push these kinds of law.

Thing is, I am actually Gen X. Early even. And I look at the Boomers and see the generation who kept pulling up the ladder. They got free education and privatised it to make it expensive for us. They got free healthcare and privatised it to make it expensive. They got into the housing market for cheap and started using it as an investment and speculation vehicle, making it harder for each subsequent generation to get into it. They were pretty much the last generation in which it was possible to raise a family on a single income. Climate change is front and center of mind in my generation, we’ve known for over 30 years what’s coming. When you look at those who most fervently oppose climate change action - all old fogeys, and I say that being very conscious of the fact that I am approaching ‘old fogey’ status from the perspective of Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

I can only imagine how todays teenagers and young adults feel…

Aber wird man als Anhänger abwegiger Theorien nicht so regelmäßig verarscht, dass man mit der Zeit Antennen für so etwas entwickelt?

Wenn sie in der Lage dazu wären, dann würden sie vermutlich gar nicht erst auf viele dieser abwegigen Theorien hereinfallen. Das ist doch genau die Zielgruppe vieler dieser Was-weiss-ich-Theorien - Leute, die einfältig genug sind, auf Unsinn hereinzufallen, den ein halbwegs rational denkender Mensch i.d.R. klar als Unsinn erkennt.