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Junior G-man posted:All cars suck and unless you absolutely need one try to live your life without it. Public transit is the worst even in the Netherlands, unless all you do is travel between Amsterdam and Utrecht or within those cities. I live in the eastern part of the country, and have to travel about 50km to my work. Using public transit it takes me 2 hours from door to door. By car its 40 minutes, 60 at most with terrible traffic. even calculating in the cost of purchasing a car and gas and insurance it's pretty much always cheaper to travel by car, even when traveling alone. Once you travel with 2 or more persons public transit is just hilariously expensive and ineffective.
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Jul 26, 2017 13:20
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AceOfFlames posted:I won't, and it's my loving hometown. Seriously, I don't understand why the hell Eurovision is a thing now. It always has been a horrendously sad and tacky affair but for some reason it became popular. Must be a hipster thing. 1) It's a safe and funny way of venting the millennial hatred and scorn all European nations feel towards all other European nations 2) They managed to brand it as an event for diversity and giving a voice to people of minority sexualities, the disabled, etc. 3) You have to be drunk for it, but some of the songs are hilarious every year, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not 4) Hipsters.
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Jul 26, 2017 15:42
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Rappaport posted:1) It's a safe and funny way of venting the millennial hatred and scorn all European nations feel towards all other European nations 2) They managed to brand it as an event for diversity and giving a voice to people of minority sexualities, the disabled, etc. 3) You have to be drunk for it, but some of the songs are hilarious every year, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not 4) Hipsters.
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Jul 26, 2017 17:22
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Cardiac posted:Or as my African co-worker put it, why make it so complicated? He referred to himself and his countrymen as black. I have heard from some of my French-speaking colleagues that many black francophones dislike being called 'noir' and instead prefer 'black' (pronounced blaque), bizarrely enough.
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Jul 26, 2017 17:33
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The best part of ESC is the handful of countries that still take it seriously (like Sweden) and everyone else just taking the piss. Eurovision is a Big Deal here and papers will write about it for weeks before and after. Especially if we don't win every article afterwards will be salty about it. 
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Jul 26, 2017 17:37
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Collateral Damage posted:The best part of ESC is the handful of countries that still take it seriously (like Sweden) and everyone else just taking the piss. Portugal takes it the most seriously out of anyone I mean look at Salvador's speech, what an asshat
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Jul 26, 2017 17:40
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orange sky posted:Portugal takes it the most seriously out of anyone Nobody takes Eurovision more seriously than Sweden.
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Jul 26, 2017 17:48
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Phlegmish posted:I have heard from some of my French-speaking colleagues that many black francophones dislike being called 'noir' and instead prefer 'black' (pronounced blaque), bizarrely enough. It definitely sounds more acceptable to call somebody "un(e) black" than "un(e) noir(e)" to a certain generation, presumably because the word doesn't carry the same immediate cultural context for us (evoking instead the perceived coolness of black American culture).
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Jul 26, 2017 17:50
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orange sky posted:Portugal takes it the most seriously out of anyone I take Eurovision very seriously and I'm still angry about Homens da Luta representing us in 2011. This was the year after Eurovision gained cultural relevance due to Epic Sax Guy, and here comes Portugal with it's joke band and satirical revolutionary music. Can't make memes out of this poo poo son.
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Jul 26, 2017 17:56
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Electronico6 posted:I take Eurovision very seriously and I'm still angry about Homens da Luta representing us in 2011. This was the year after Eurovision gained cultural relevance due to Epic Sax Guy, and here comes Portugal with it's joke band and satirical revolutionary music. Can't make memes out of this poo poo son. I loved it
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Jul 26, 2017 17:57
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Electronico6 posted:I take Eurovision very seriously and I'm still angry about Homens da Luta representing us in 2011. This was the year after Eurovision gained cultural relevance due to Epic Sax Guy, and here comes Portugal with it's joke band and satirical revolutionary music. Can't make memes out of this poo poo son. sal grosso
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Jul 26, 2017 18:09
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Re: car chat. Buy a Toyota.
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Jul 26, 2017 21:08
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Welp, Europe successfully defended: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/26/captain-crew-far-right-defend-europe-mediterranean-migrant-patrol/ Ship seized, Captain arrested for smuggling, crew claimed asylum, Nazis on twitter ranting about being victims of a conspiracy, Mission accomplished. That's how we do business in scam-town 
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Jul 27, 2017 09:52
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Collusion to fix prices doesn't mean that cars suddenly suck, just that the companies are trying to gently caress you over financially.
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Jul 27, 2017 10:00
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Raspberry Jam It In Me posted:Welp, Europe successfully defended: quote:Once there, however, several of the sailors reportedly requested asylum, triggering an immigration investigation. LOL
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Jul 27, 2017 10:02
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Raspberry Jam It In Me posted:Welp, Europe successfully defended: Embark with me on a ship I bought with a crew that's filled with racist thought It's the place to be in your Hugo Boss coat I'm talking about Naziboat. On Naziboat you sail the seas while sinking rafts full of refugees There's all these darkies trying to stay afloat We're going to stop them with Naziboat
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Jul 27, 2017 10:06
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Torrannor posted:Collusion to fix prices doesn't mean that cars suddenly suck, just that the companies are trying to gently caress you over financially. But we knew that the moment we knew they were German companies.
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Jul 27, 2017 10:07
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Even the naziboats need refugees to crew them, amazing
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Jul 27, 2017 10:08
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Raspberry Jam It In Me posted:Welp, Europe successfully defended:
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Jul 27, 2017 10:09
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mobby_6kl posted:Great news, but how do we know these nazis aren't operating u-boats in the sea and aren't responsible for the constant stream of smuggler ship sinking? Imported Mexican-made narco subs, you mean.
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Jul 27, 2017 10:15
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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There's a delicious irony in a ship with a stated purpose of stopping illegal immigrants being crewed by illegal immigrants.
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Jul 27, 2017 10:27
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Torrannor posted:Collusion to fix prices doesn't mean that cars suddenly suck, just that the companies are trying to gently caress you over financially. They are not accused of price fixing though. The german car manufacturers had and have industry wide working groups where they discuss and settle technical topics. Out of those come best common practices and/or lobbying strategies towards other involved parties like politics or the supply chains. All this is actually not illegal and common practice in other industries and although I don't know for sure most likely in other industry nations aswell. As long as it does not involve criminal behaviour like price fixing it is also usually good for the consumer because you get widely used common solutions for this and that function in your car. What led to the current situation is one or two manufacturers got cold feet and send note of that to the german government and the EU because the size of the Urea tanks ("AdBlue") in the cars (a catalyst for cleaning the diesel exhausts of Nitrogen compunds, first and foremost NOx) was also a topic that had been settled in one of those working groups and it turned out they were too small in general to deliver the promised uptime / effectiveness. The technology works though and for me its unclear what made some manufacturers decide to turn it off outside of tests. Also from what I know they sent note quite a while ago, if not years. So all of this has the smell of a campaign with ulterior motives.
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Jul 27, 2017 10:56
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Collateral Damage posted:There's a delicious irony in a ship with a stated purpose of stopping illegal immigrants being crewed by illegal immigrants.
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Jul 27, 2017 10:58
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dogboy posted:They are not accused of price fixing though. In other words, where they agreed not to compete based on their technical prowess, or in other ways. There's a reason these working groups were secret, and it's not because they were planning a surprise party to celebrate the consumers or the regulators. (this story says that they did fix prices for AdBlue though). dogboy posted:What led to the current situation is one or two manufacturers got cold feet and send note of that to the german government and the EU because the size of the Urea tanks ("AdBlue") in the cars (a catalyst for cleaning the diesel exhausts of Nitrogen compunds, first and foremost NOx) was also a topic that had been settled in one of those working groups and it turned out they were too small in general to deliver the promised uptime / effectiveness. The technology works though and for me its unclear what made some manufacturers decide to turn it off outside of tests. Apparently, it was because Volkswagen did not want the tanks to take space from the cars’ sound systems, according to a criminal complaint against an Audi engineer filed earlier this month in the United States. dogboy posted:Also from what I know they sent note quite a while ago, if not years. So all of this has the smell of a campaign with ulterior motives. The letter from Volkswagen trying to rat out its competitors before getting caught themselves was sent on July 4 apparently, so no. This is just German businesses showing that they are not in any way different from firms anywhere else. I feel I can drop Adam Smith in here: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
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Jul 27, 2017 11:47
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cebrail posted:None of this is illegal immigration. And I misread the telegraph article. The Sri Lankans applied for asylum, they weren't illegal. My bad.
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Jul 27, 2017 12:04
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Pluskut Tukker posted:In other words, where they agreed not to compete based on their technical prowess, or in other ways. There's a reason these working groups were secret, and it's not because they were planning a surprise party to celebrate the consumers or the regulators. (this story says that they did fix prices for AdBlue though). The working groups weren't secret, other news sites at least put quotations marks around the "secret" but it is Der Spiegels story so I guess it needed a bit pepper. Same with the other link you posted: it states the manufacturers admitted to have had an agreement over the size of the AdBlue tanks, and the rest is wrapped in "may have" and so on. "The automakers may have colluded to fix prices of a diesel emission treatment called AdBlue through these working groups ..." That beeing said how would you fix a price for stuff thats 1ct/liter? In Mercedes communities I checked people already gave each other tips how to get that stuff cheaply and where ... starting back in 2012. (In their models it gets used up reliably but you can fill that tank by yourself.) And I am not aware of some chipped tanks or poo poo like they do in ink printers or 3D printers. Pluskut Tukker posted:Apparently, it was because Volkswagen did not want the tanks to take space from the cars’ sound systems, according to a criminal complaint against an Audi engineer filed earlier this month in the United States. That makes perfect sense, as VW very clearly and knowingly cheated. I have 2 good talks about that from a CCC (Chaos Communication Congress) that I can find and link if you're interested. Besides of that it does not contradict anything I wrote. Pluskut Tukker posted:This is just German businesses showing that they are not in any way different from firms anywhere else. No they aren't, noone claimed that. That beeing said, price fixing and other criminal behaviour is still all allegations so far. The only known fact is that VW knowingly cheated and Audi most likely. (Beeing a 100% VW daughter company and building on their platform, this isn't that much of a surprise though.)
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Jul 27, 2017 12:52
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And to clarify, we are talking (amongst other things, but mainly) about this here: http://www.abgaszentrum.de/ which was founded 22 years ago. The antitrust authorities had a look at it, didn't like it too much, but gave it a pass. There are cooperations or industry wide organizations for all sorts of things, the CAN-bus for example is another result of those.
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Jul 27, 2017 13:03
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France will set up processing centres this summer in Libya for asylum seekers trying to reach Europe across the Mediterranean, President Emmanuel Macron announced Thursday.
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Jul 27, 2017 13:17
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dogboy posted:The working groups weren't secret, other news sites at least put quotations marks around the "secret" but it is Der Spiegels story so I guess it needed a bit pepper. Same with the other link you posted: it states the manufacturers admitted to have had an agreement over the size of the AdBlue tanks, and the rest is wrapped in "may have" and so on. "The automakers may have colluded to fix prices of a diesel emission treatment called AdBlue through these working groups ..." I was under the impression that Der Spiegel was largely respectable in its reporting (or, at the very least, that they would not invent a fact like these working groups being secret when really they weren't. Am I wrong?) Other than that, it's entirely normal for news sources to use the "may have" framing, since at this point the facts of the matter are still under investigation. The fact that both Volkswagen and Daimler alerted the competition authorities to a possible violation of cartel law is not under dispute though. dogboy posted:Besides of that it does not contradict anything I wrote. It was not my intention to argue with every single point of your posts; instead, I was drawing a conclusion here based on the dialectic of our argument  . But you posted dogboy posted:So all of this has the smell of a campaign with ulterior motives. which I thought was rather too trusting of the functioning of German industry (or even any industry at all) . Of course industries collaborate on setting standards; usually though they take care to do so very publicly because the line between cooperation and collusion is very thin indeed. And I also think competition authorities are much more interested in intervening now than they have been in the past; Deutschland A.G. would not be the only place where regulators would turn a blind eye to whatever nationally important businesses where doing. It used to be said of the Netherlands for instance that is was a club, not a country, and so we had cartels all over the place. So really my conclusion would be to be a bit more sceptical of all these corporate claims of innocence.
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Jul 27, 2017 13:23
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Pluskut Tukker posted:Deutschland A.G. would not be the only place where regulators would turn a blind eye to whatever nationally important businesses where doing. It used to be said of the Netherlands for instance that is was a club, not a country, and so we had cartels all over the place. So really my conclusion would be to be a bit more sceptical of all these corporate claims of innocence. Oh yeah Deutschland AG, not challenging that in any case. I sometimes jokingly say that we have no Mafia here because the whole country is the Mafia. (It was new to me that the Netherlands share a similar mood )It is important to keep an eye on things, and I say that as an industry guy rather close-ish to current events happening.
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Jul 27, 2017 13:48
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Kassad posted:France will set up processing centres this summer in Libya for asylum seekers trying to reach Europe across the Mediterranean, President Emmanuel Macron announced Thursday.
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Jul 27, 2017 14:09
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dogboy posted:. The technology works though and for me its unclear what made some manufacturers decide to turn it off outside of tests. The tanks in many VAG cars are tiny - 5 liters. Enough for 3000-7000km when it works correctly if the rather high diesel requirements German cars have. Which means once a week or month for people who drive a lot. And filling up your tank is annoying, even if it is easily reachable (mine is in the boot because my car is French, but has 17l so win some, lose some). To make it suck less for people they deactivated it, so you don't have to do the annoying process as often, because gently caress nature. Decius fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Jul 27, 2017 |
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Jul 27, 2017 14:51
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Decius posted:The tanks in VAG cars are tiny - 5 liters. Enough for 3000-7000km when it works correctly if the rather high diesel requirements German cars have. Which means once a week or month for people who drive a lot. And filling up your tank is annoying, even if it is easily reachable (mine is in the boot because my car is French, but has 17l so win some, lose some). To make it suck less for people they deactivated it, so you don't have to do the annoying process as often, because gently caress nature. Yeah poster Pluskut posted a link a few posts above that claimed the original motive was for them to have more space for the sound system. Well now it is biting them in the arse.
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Jul 27, 2017 15:00
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Der Spiegel has translated the full story on the carmakers' cartel into English, for anyone who's interested. One thing I have to correct about my earlier post is that Volkswagen alerted the authorities in July last year, not this year, so apparently the investigation has been going on for a while. Funnily enough though, they seem to have decided to run to the authorities after some of the evidence for their possible collusion was collected by the German Federal Cartel Office in the course of a separate investigation into a steel cartel (in Germany as in Europe, the firm participating in a cartel which informs the authorities first has a chance to escape punishment).
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Jul 27, 2017 15:47
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dogboy posted:
It is not unclear, the cars simply run better and use less fuel if you can partially or entirely disengage the systems, at the cost of significantly increased pollution. Even without things like VW wanting to shrink the tank to fit more sound system gear, there is still plenty of incentive for them to disengage that aspect of pollution controls if they expect to be able to get away with it, due to incompetent, sloppy, or colluding testing authorities. You get to brag much more about how fast your car goes, how well it accelerates, how responsive it is et cetera and as we saw no one with authority really bothered to check if it made sense that the cars could have that performance while also meeting the claimed emissions standards. This is basically about a fundamental compromise of using diesel versus in gasoline engines in small vehicles. There is fuel efficiency to be gained by using diesel, even still today, and quite a bit more decades back. But since the 80s, or even the 70s really, it's been clear that your fuel-efficent diesel designs will be far more polluting in many key ways when just running normally without additional pollution control systems, while gasoline engine designs have been capable of reducing most of their pollutants with next to 0 performance/efficiency impact in the same time period. The factor of performance impacts was additionally important because many of the companies involved have wanted to have their diesel vehicles catch on in the North American markets where diesels already have the reputation of being poky and polluting - and have the additional handicap that diesel fuel costs more than gasoline as both a means to attempt to have fuel taxes collect more from commercial vehicles which are largely diesel, and to a limited extent to punish the old blatantly polluting small diesel vehicles. If these manufacturers could get their small diesels to catch on in the US and Canada, they would make greater profit off their existing diesel engine production facilities and possibly being able to discontinue the gasoline engine variants of some cars altogether. So for the pollution aspect, a modern diesel even with the emissions control turned off at least doesn't dump out a ton of visible smoke and other such nastiness that the older diesels over here did. And an average person isn't going to test the exhaust of their new diesel to notice high nitrous oxide emissions and so on. So that comes to the performance - North American consumers expect massive horsepower and high performance in general from their gasoline cars. A diesel's got to stay at least competitive with that kind of stuff if it hopes to catch on in the market and break the "bad performance" stereotype. So that's even more incentive to disable performance-hurting emissions control whenever they can get away with it, and have the engine tuned around a high-performance terrble-pollution model, since their "test detection" will just switch over to the "poo poo performance, low pollution" when necessarily to be approved for sale.
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Jul 27, 2017 20:36
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fishmech posted:... good post ... I agree with most of it, although as far as I know the system that cleans NOx with watered down Urea solution has no performance impact. (It needs a warm motor to perform well itself though.)
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Jul 28, 2017 08:13
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Sea rescue or human trafficking on a massive scale, you decide  I piquant mediterranean flavour is added when it was found out the South Italian mafia is making huge profits with the operation. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jul 28, 2017 13:48
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Hey Ligur, advocating for mass muder on the Mediterrian Sea is GC's gimmick. Get your own.
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Jul 28, 2017 14:45
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MiddleOne posted:Hey Ligur, advocating for mass muder on the Mediterrian Sea is GC's gimmick. Get your own. GC is on probation and forum rules allow tagging in, htbh
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Jul 28, 2017 14:50
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MiddleOne posted:Hey Ligur, advocating for mass muder on the Mediterrian Sea is GC's gimmick. Get your own. How have I or anyone else here advocated mass murder on the Mediterranean, exactly?  ninjaedit: my new gimmicks is probably going to be laughing at animuguys, a subject I know nothing of so it must be easy
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Jul 28, 2017 15:01
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