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quote:The German government is phasing out nuclear power despite the energy crisis. https://uk.news.yahoo.com/germany-turns-back-nuclear-good-103253025.html A particularly terrible climate achievement from the German Greens this week. If the country had maintained its nuclear fleet it could be almost coal free in 2023, instead of it making up a third of electricity production now.
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Apr 11, 2023 13:18
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So, I just heard someone talking again about how in the US it is known that mail voters tend left and have for a long time. In Germany it is known that mail voters tend right, though that might change recently. I did find stats for 2021 and mail voter went more to Greens and CSU; less to the Afd and different trends depending on erst vs. zweitstimme with the other parties. Baffling, and almost certainly some rona influence there. Anybody know how those statistics go for other countries? And the rumours about the statistics, I am almost more interested in them. https://www.bundeswahlleiter.de/dam/jcr/8ad0ca1f-a037-48f8-b9f4-b599dd380f02/btw21_heft4.pdf  e: I did check the 2017 for comparison. And there are more votes for right of centre parties per mail and fewer for left. With the nazis and greens flipped around from the other parties and having the largest changes. Looks like (open) nazis hated mail voting even before the rona, surprising. VictualSquid fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Apr 13, 2023 |
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Apr 13, 2023 21:25
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Mail votes skew right in most countries that have it iirc, because they come heavily from older voters. Which in most countries are the most right-wing part of the electorate by quite a distance. If they tend left in the US I'd put it down to them just being a weird basket case as usual.
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Apr 13, 2023 22:15
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In the US it was regularly right-wingers who used mail votes until a recent cheese-brained reality TV host kept telling them that mail-in ballots are fraudulent, actually. It being a left-leaning thing is a post-2020 phenomenon.
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Apr 13, 2023 22:21
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GABA ghoul posted:Germany has had a 6000€ BEV subsidy for 3 years now, long before the US. Heat pump installation subsidies are several thousand € since the beginning of this year and energetic efficiency modernization have been subsidized through tax reduction schemes for decades now. That's exactly why you need to subsidize the construction of the assembly lines and not just the final purchase of goods in order to actually achieve goals relating to new tech. There was actually just a post in the US events thread about how the speed of rollout is faster than expected, and the international competition for similar projects more anemic than expected, leading to a increase in the projected spending on these programs relative to the estimates made at the time of passage - ultimately, the US may have been better off allocating less towards the start-up costs for companies, but it certainly is the most capitalist (and therefore in-character) way for the US to achieve green goals
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Apr 14, 2023 05:35
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May Day seems to be going nicely in France (CNN live feed) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qMYiDTcqEg
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May 1, 2023 16:39
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Protest! (And buy a hotdog from the stand.)
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May 4, 2023 13:35
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RBA-Wintrow posted:Protest! (And buy a hotdog from the stand.) https://youtu.be/wp84sRpM1Js
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May 7, 2023 00:01
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Great example of why I have mixed feelings about the EU, google translated article. https://svenska.yle.fi/a/7-10034664 quote:Passenger train traffic must be reorganized until 2031 in order to reach the goals agreed within the European Union. So basically EU rules forcing competition into what used to be a state monopoly.
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May 23, 2023 10:44
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yeah the "forced bidding" poo poo from eu is probably the thing i hate the most about it. usually it means the lowest-cost option with illegal labour and underpayment getting picked in my experience
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May 23, 2023 10:47
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His Divine Shadow posted:Great example of why I have mixed feelings about the EU, google translated article. Trenitalia had to split network from services due to similar anti-public ownership of logistic services rules, to be brutally blunt it has improved services quality after a few years of doom and gloom. Being private has forced them to drop weird custom tech and move to more standardized kit, making also easier to move to European standards. It's going to be a mess for a while and i wouldn't be surprised if part of that process will mean that gauge will get corrected to euro standards over time.
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May 23, 2023 11:14
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Also gonna be great fun when all municipal public services are put out to tender, as we in Italy passed such a law in reception of EU directives under the leadership of great helmsman draghi a couple years ago
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May 23, 2023 11:20
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Greece had elections last Sunday in which the ruling New Democracy party surpassed expectations and got 146/300 seats in parliament. Syriza did extremely badly and is stuck on 71. In theory there will now be a short period where ND gets to form a majority coalition, but they have already said they aren't going to. Syriza doesn't have any real way of forming a coalition either, which means that there will be a second round of elections in late June. In this round, the largest parties will receive bonus seats (taken from parties who gained less than 3% of the vote). With this bonus, ND is expected to gain a decent majority and govern by themselves.
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May 23, 2023 11:31
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The Navigators by Ken Loach is a movie that explores the tendering of services around British Rail. E: spelling Dawncloack fucked around with this message at 12:31 on May 23, 2023 |
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May 23, 2023 11:35
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SixFigureSandwich posted:Greece had elections last Sunday in which the ruling New Democracy party surpassed expectations and got 146/300 seats in parliament. Syriza did extremely badly and is stuck on 71. In theory there will now be a short period where ND gets to form a majority coalition, but they have already said they aren't going to. Syriza doesn't have any real way of forming a coalition either, which means that there will be a second round of elections in late June. In this round, the largest parties will receive bonus seats (taken from parties who gained less than 3% of the vote). With this bonus, ND is expected to gain a decent majority and govern by themselves. Would you say that Syriza has itself undergone PASOKification?
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May 23, 2023 12:04
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I really don't know enough about their policies and their stint in government to say.
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May 23, 2023 13:08
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Tesseraction posted:Would you say that Syriza has itself undergone PASOKification? There will be lots of historical analysis to write on this, but the way I see it SYRIZA has managed to induce voter fatigue extremely rapidly through its handling of its governmental term and by not really adjusting following the 2019 defeat. It is very hard to sustain the mid-crisis heightened, polemic rhetoric about the present state of affairs when a. things are no longer in freefall and b. you bear some responsibility for the present day of things. Mitsotakis has somehow managed to make a government term that includes one of the worst state performances against covid and a major wiretapping scandal feel like a return to normalcy. Add to that a handful of pre-election gaffes and the fact that SYRIZA's voterbase are political tourists - the long-term voters of PASOK and ND that make up the electorate didn't suddenly turn into radical leftists or forgot about the more stable years of those two parties trading power - and it isn't hard to see why SYRIZA's vote dispersed as radically as it did, even though no-one expected it. SYRIZA's primary mistake imo was the fact that Tsipras didn't step down as party leader after 2019. The U-turn on debt renegotiation did immeasurable damage to his trustworthiness and it pushed the rest of SYRIZA's high profile figures into the background. They could have used those 4 years putting the spotlight on other figures that were less tainted or more capable organisationally instead of putting their bets on the charismatic figure that had long burned his own reputation down.
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May 23, 2023 17:01
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Yeah, I think that even if Tsipras meant well when he U-turned, he should have fallen on the political sword and been the sin-eater. Instead he basically turned Syriza into a joke.
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May 23, 2023 17:11
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I personally think he meant well, in that he was unprepared to actually cause the kind of chaos that a default and a possible return to the drachma might involve. But in so doing he accepted a role as a steward of EU-imposed neoliberalism. And there's limitations once you're in that position. You cannot agitate against a corrupt system when you have accepted said system's premises. It is incoherent and arrogant.
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May 23, 2023 17:25
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp84sRpM1Js&t=280s There's Waldo!
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May 23, 2023 17:27
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The eu forced privatization of public companies is hosed up and generates a bunch of moneyed interests and corruption. It didn’t work in the ussr but what if we try it again???
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May 23, 2023 23:45
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I think you'll find the USSR failed because it was communist, and not due to any specific policy or action.
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May 24, 2023 00:05
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The rail policy is a mixed bag. Its bad in countries which already have well run, efficient, public systems where theres no need for reform. Its good in countries that have incompetent, badly run, public systems where reform is needed but unlikely to be done by the local government. So basically for once its the rich Northern states being screwed, which is probably a good thing karmically at least.
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May 24, 2023 10:22
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Pretty sure it's negative for everyone in the long run
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May 24, 2023 11:19
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Not for the But yeah this isn't really a surprise, the EU is working as intended, nation states must abide by the neo-liberal end of history - paradigm or cry and abide. 
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May 24, 2023 11:21
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His Divine Shadow posted:Pretty sure it's negative for everyone in the long run You've never lived in a country with properly broken public utilities so obviously. Theres an Italian poster on this very page saying it improved service there, and there are countries like Bulgaria where things are even worse. Don't get me wrong its absolutely terrible when its gutting actual properly run public utilities like in Northern Europe, capitalists leeching money out of the system for their own profit only subtract value there - the system already functions well. But there are plenty of poorer places in the EU where this will actually improve service quality, because the public utilities are so corrupt and badly run and politically difficult to reform.
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May 24, 2023 15:49
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Not discounting others' lived experience, but "free-market" solutions to completely corrupt and bloated state-run enterprises usually end up just as corrupt, no?
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May 24, 2023 17:40
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It depends on the corruption of the state anti-corruption bureau, ironically.
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May 24, 2023 18:29
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Pope Hilarius II posted:Not discounting others' lived experience, but "free-market" solutions to completely corrupt and bloated state-run enterprises usually end up just as corrupt, no? It depends on how much profit you can make it by running the service properly and if it's really that mission critical. Yes you could have the eu or the local governor prop your palace of dabauchery but if it's something that the populace can do without, public funding will dry up eventually. Rail services can make a profit, as long as you start dropping stations with minuscule populations from high speed services, so there is an incentive for venture capitalists to make cash with high speed while milking local governments to keep the low density station with bare-bones coverage.
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May 24, 2023 22:57
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one big issue with the rail stuff is that it makes it significantly more difficult to actually plan and do effective rail expansion because of all the public procurement rules stacked on top of each other and the weird fragmented structure imposed to achieve meaningful competition. norway recently tried to improve its railway infrastructure under the present rules and it went incredibly poorly because the bureaucrats were bundled into little subdivisions which didn't properly communicate and nobody synthesised all the moderate warning signs that were coming from an important european subcontractor before it all blew up in a very public and humiliating way. they'd won the tender according to the rules, and while everyone had *some* reservations on their own side the structure of a compliant railway is such that there's nobody really *in charge* of the whole project. granted, this could just be the norwegian implementation of those rules, but it's still a failure which imo can be reasonably laid at the feet of a structure designed to be compliant with EU regulations. the EU has very definite (in my opinion rather questionable, but this is controversial) ideas about efficienty, and has no problem prioritising those over effectiveness.
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May 24, 2023 23:15
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V. Illych L. posted:one big issue with the rail stuff is that it makes it significantly more difficult to actually plan and do effective rail expansion because of all the public procurement rules stacked on top of each other and the weird fragmented structure imposed to achieve meaningful competition. norway recently tried to improve its railway infrastructure under the present rules and it went incredibly poorly because the bureaucrats were bundled into little subdivisions which didn't properly communicate and nobody synthesised all the moderate warning signs that were coming from an important european subcontractor before it all blew up in a very public and humiliating way. they'd won the tender according to the rules, and while everyone had *some* reservations on their own side the structure of a compliant railway is such that there's nobody really *in charge* of the whole project. Something tells me a lot of big public infrastructure projects have got the same problem nowadays.
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May 25, 2023 06:18
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V. Illych L. posted:the EU has very definite (in my opinion rather questionable, but this is controversial) ideas about efficienty, and has no problem prioritising those over effectiveness. Can you elaborate further on this please?
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May 25, 2023 06:32
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I wonder how it will go in Poland, where we managed to solve the issue of one "public" rail by making every single bit of it a different company . The trains, the tracks, the wires, the power that goes through those wires - all of that are different companies. Very capitalistic in nature, as it allows to maximise the number of board members and directors who rake in tons of cash for fuckall other than "friend of current government". But technically between PKP, Intercity, Polregio and Przewozy Regionalne there isn't a per-se monopoly... Ah it's gonna be awkward.
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May 25, 2023 13:59
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And how efficient is your Randian nightmare of a rail service?
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May 25, 2023 14:06
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Well given that our rail infrastructure is very uneven thanks to Zabory, it's uneven  . It's fine between big cities and even between some smaller ones, but the eastern part of the country is basically a public transport exclusion zone. Like living in Bieszczady without a car, you might as well live on the moon. But for me, going from Gdańsk to Warsaw is a 4 hour trip for a reasonable price of 20€, and there are a lot of smaller stops on the way. Funny enough, Berlin is just 35€ for me Overall, we've spent a fuckton of money on rail over the last 10 years as we had a big grant from the EU to do so, and it would be a shame to see it all fall apart due to EU regulation.
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May 25, 2023 14:46
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Angry Lobster posted:Can you elaborate further on this please? the idea is, very roughly, that properly regulated markets drive a maximisation towards efficiencies in service provision more or less no matter the service. thus, the way to maximise value for public expenditure is to mandate streamlined regulations for markets which apply in all of europe, minimising the transaction costs, maximising market area (number of participants, participant reach etc - basically trying to avoid regional oligopolies) and counteracting political interference which causes inefficiency through corruption and unpredictability. it's almost algorithmic in its approach - in order to avoid waste, regulations and organisation is meant to provide a situation with minimal bureaucracy, harmonised rules and a good environment in which to do business. in practice, this is not always how it works out and the structures meant to promote this stuff often get in the way of actually planning and doing rail transport Kikas posted:I wonder how it will go in Poland, where we managed to solve the issue of one "public" rail by making every single bit of it a different company . The trains, the tracks, the wires, the power that goes through those wires - all of that are different companies. Very capitalistic in nature, as it allows to maximise the number of board members and directors who rake in tons of cash for fuckall other than "friend of current government". yes this is the way the EU's... first and third? i may be misremembering here - rail package sets up the guidelines to promote marketisation.
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May 25, 2023 19:31
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Kikas posted:Zabory Is this the term for the partitions of Poland over the years? As to the rest of your post, that makes sense. I wonder if the cheap link to Berlin is due to Warsaw-pact era train guages.
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May 26, 2023 00:11
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V. Illych L. posted:yes this is the way the EU's... first and third? i may be misremembering here - rail package sets up the guidelines to promote marketisation. Yes, it's very similar to how the French rail and electricity companies are split up now, infrastructure and maintenance under a different company than actual operations.
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May 26, 2023 08:17
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Tesseraction posted:Is this the term for the partitions of Poland over the years? Yes, „Zabory”, plural of „Zabór” - nominalization of „to take away”. Poland has the same gauge as Germany and most EU countries. The train line connecting Poznan to Berlin is also the main east/west trainline connecting to Warsaw and running towards Belarus/Russia. It’s a high capacity line with many trains connecting multiple cities, and the Berlin connection, where Polish trains terminate, is essentially almost an extension. The sad fact is the train line has not been updated for high speed trains so there is no Pendilino servcie. It take 6:30 hours from Warsaw to Berlin, which is an hour longer then I take by car on the A2 highway that runs on the same route. Mokotow fucked around with this message at 09:40 on May 26, 2023 |
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May 26, 2023 09:36
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e: nvm
Innadiar fucked around with this message at 14:26 on May 26, 2023 |
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May 26, 2023 12:29
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