For me the annoying thing is that everyone seems to assume using SvelteKit by default when looking something up about svelte. No, i don't want to use this folder based routing or server side rendering, i want to ise it to write a frontend for a backend.
It doesn't need to be that amount, just a significant amount, to be worth mentioning. Though even if that much were true, you would have unusually high electricity bills at home¹.
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[1] much like we do in the UK, but that is because our national grid is a privatised mess effectively run by external concerns (EDF have their fingers in the pie, for one example) charging us much more than they can get away with in their home markets.
> Albania, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Estonia, India, Kenya, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and Venezuela
Even if Estonia does have stated electricity distribution loss, it still looks so way out of place in this group of countries by so many criteria. I wonder why not pick Egypt or Libya given that they have the same distribution loss.
Edit: this could be the reason - when you click on "Map" above the graph, for some reason Estonia is one of the blue countries shown on the map. Argentina, Brazil, and Kenya are there too (but not others).
Interestingly, this page seems to contain data only until year 2014, but the graph next to Estonia in the grandparent link does show an increase on the right side. Maybe Estonia did indeed experience some changes in overall distribution loss in recent years?
Elering reports only their part, the very high voltage transmission losses. Then there are the distribution losses on the local level are they're about 4%.
The article also says Brazil's "problems look like Delhi’s 25 years ago", which is very incorrect from what they're describing. Almost none of what is described in the article happened in Brazil 20 years ago, let alone today. Energy theft, for instance, happens here but at a minuscule scale compared to what's on the article.
I also doubt Estonia has any of these issues whatsoever, like energy theft.
It really seems like a vibecoded article with numbers informing incorrect conclusions. Perhaps with a dash of nationalistic pride. Unfortunate from IEEE.
I did query ChatGPT and it seemingly wrong headedly suggested that Estonia had closed lots of Oil Shale power which it did have, I am not too up on this.
I did push back hard saying that that's not the same as what the article talked about at all.
The thing is if the World Bank is making statistics people are basing decisions on this is an issue.
Why should anyone use it over Java?
Ms is hostile towards its developers, it creates new versions of things, deprecates previous versions, uses confusing naming for newer versions.. etc.
Microsoft has come a long way since Satya Nadella took over in early 2014. The open-sourcing of .NET Core that same year was a huge step forward. Seeing a 'Microsoft Loves Linux' slide that year was something I did not have on my bingo card. VS Code and the GitHub acquisition demonstrated Microsoft's interest in fostering good relations with developers instead of alienating them. I do wish GitHub had stayed independent, though.
Microsoft is a business and will always put their business objectives first. In my opinion, they have a non-zero amount of evilness. I do not support them jamming Copilot into every available crevice. I still think they make dumb choices, like every imperfect organization. However, C# is a powerful and intuitive language, and for Microsoft shops that already run a lot of Windows and SQL Server it makes a lot of sense.
No shade to the JVM. I've mostly enjoyed my time in that space. I do believe the choice between Java and Kotlin, the wide variety of vendor JDK distributions and IDE fragmentation make the JVM stack a bit more difficult for newcomers to break into.
Because your employer is dick-deep in Microsoft psychosis.
I've been a .NET dev for a decade now. It's perfectly serviceable, but I wouldn't say I truly love the language anymore, but I would take it over Java any day. Entity Framework and LINQ are gifts from the Gods. I have never used an ORM that even comes remotely close.
Also, C# is big in the gaming world. I am working on a game right now, and I was not impressed with what many other languages had to offer. It seems like the kings are still C(++) and C#. Of course, Java can create games, but I would argue that is a "could vs. should" kind of decision.
Unity, Godot, Monogame, Raylib, XNA, FNA, etc. all can use or rely on C#. I have not seen Java be compatible with any of those -- except maybe Raylib? I do not know of anyone nor any games that use it though.
There are basically none, because the fees are low and card issuers are not allowed to rob retailers with insane fees. If you have a cafe or restaurant where margins are already low then it would be crazy to pay additional 2-3% tax on every payment.
You can check around all you want but it is not going to help if someone blindly decides to just step in front of you without looking anywhere. Pedestrians sometimes move totally randomly. This is a similar problem when riding a bicycle on a shared path. Sometimes they walk like they were alone on the path
I also agree. Doing university sudies in stem fiels is just.. doing the work, grinding until you get it. I was not very good at maths but i managed to pass the courses that I had. Most of my fellow students didnt.
It is what differentiates stem fields fron liberal arts, in my biased view. You are either talented at maths, physics, chemistry or you just grind, study with thr books snd exercises, until you know enough to pass the exams.
Coming from gymnasium/high schoolit is very different. There the teachers tell you what to do, at uni you have to figure out yourself how you need to study to get the results.
US universities have been known in Europe for being a childs play, if you were any good at all in stem fields
In Estonia this was solved by moving all the IT related people to organisations adjacent to the ministries and departments, so the lower paid civil servants wont have to be compared to the highly paid software developers and architects, etc. One colleague used to work as and architect of the justice ministry. He said the suit wearing civil servants with law degrees were pissed off at the homeless looking sweatshirt wearing software developers who were much higher paid. So the IT stuff was moved to another new department, but it still answers to the minister.
Similar stuff with other ministries. Interior ministry has their own it department, where they develop and maintain the population registry, criminal registries, and stuff that requires a security clearance
I’m not sure I buy that. That doesn’t explain what happens when the ministers budget gets slashed and as government policy there’s a push to outsource. It requires consistent commitment at a cultural level across governments. It works in Estonia because Estonia is a small enough country that there’s just no financial incentive for lobbying and it’s let to do its own thing.
For me i had a case and a screen protection film bit the phone dropped on stone pavement exactly so that a higher part of the stone hit the screen edge between the case and the panzer glass.
It certainly helps the buses move more efficiently, but it can't do much about things like bus stop placement, or just generally sense of place as you start or end your trip.
I see. I think you're talking about stop placement on a higher level? Removing street parking can free up room for lots of extra stops, which can help with bus bunching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching
I'm talking about what you physically see, or even step over, at the actual physical location where you're contemplating putting the bus stop; which is there because people were only thinking about cars when doing the zoning and construction.
car centric areas put their front door far from anyplace a but can easilly get. Either the but slows everyone else down because it is going in and out of all these parking lots and cul-de-sacs, or the walk from the but stop to where you are going is already your entire travel budget.
I think it gets confusing because we start out talking about cities but we'd also like to include other areas that are overrun with cars in the conversation. Buses in Ghent and Paris aren't going to be navigating parking lots and cul-de-sacs, no matter how much car infrastructure is removed. We can free up a lot of room for bus stops, though, which helps keep buses moving smoothly.
Suburbs are either cities in their own right, or part of the whole city. It deoesn't make sense in this discussion to think of them as not part af the city: they cover too much of the population.
Not really. Unless the restriction is to take a generic lane and dedicate it to buses. But if restriction is to take a generic lane and give it to bicycles, then both cars and buses sit in the same traffic jam.
So, first, it would be rare to bring in restrictions of this sort without doing something to buses. But even if you _don’t_, reduction in traffic helps buses (assuming you already have bus lanes, which any city doing this stuff generally would, the main problem for buses is intersections, which this helps with)
My city excels at this. We are at level where bus system is not enough at all. But the municipality is trying to avoid it since it’s seen as politically tricky. Nobody wants to start it, take the beating and then let opponents cut the tape a decade later. The bus system is struggling too. Old buses, incomplete bus lanes and so on. When one jackass got an idea to reduce car traffic and started with adding obstacles to cars without improving public transit… Traffic did not better. And buses get stuck with the rest. Thankfully remote/hybrid work is all the rage. In recent decade quite a few offices and other workplaces moved away from urban core. That helps the situation a bit.
Alternatives naturally become more viable over time as more and more people find car use impossible, but its kind of hard to tell in advance which lanes of public transport are most necessary to improve. So imo the best solution is just to do it, and then see what happens and adapt. It's too hard to plan out everything in advance, and if you try you get deadlocked politically and nothing ends up happening. So you just find the best lever you can to reduce traffic immediately, and just start pressing it. But you warn everyone that you're pressing it, and when you do so you do it slowly.
The reality is that a lot of traffic is simply unnecessary, and dissipates once you add some friction. The most extreme example of that is the rise of remote work during and after Covid. As it turns out, none of these people actually needed to go anywhere.
And more generally, cars induce their own demand simply by virtue of being the fastest and most comfortable option, and they shape the environment around them to depend on them. Small local shops get outcompeted by distant behemoths due it being more convenient to drive. People move to a large house in a distant suburb rather than a small apartment because they know it's just thirty minutes away from work by car anyways. The easier it is to drive, the more entrenched driving becomes. And any way you slice it, undoing that process will cause pain, so you might as well go ahead and start, because you're never going to find a way to prevent the consequences anyway.
No, it's worse than that. The city council very much implemented an anti-car (harassment) policy, to the point that car owners felt hounded by their own council's policies. It seriously wasn't a matter of "marginally less privileged".
Motorists are an easy scapegoat but without alternatives it's just political handwaving. And most people are motorists.
Take my city for example. I work in an office block around a 15 minute walk from the centre, which has free parking for employees. Monday this week the city announced that the land is now paid parking to the city effective immediately. When it was pointed out they they hadn't provided any of the necessary signage or machines for this, they decided it was illegal to park there at all, with fines and tow trucks for non compliance. An email from them suggested "cycling or using public transport as the weather is nicer".
I cannot stress this enough. No warning, no compromise, no other use for this land, just an immediate draconian announcement.
It's very easy to call another group entitled if you're not one of them
> the city announced that the land is now paid parking to the city
what a strange way to put it... why didn't they just say that they are not using any more taxpayer money to finance your parking space? Land in a city is not "for free".
> It's very easy to call another group entitled if you're not one of them
I'll be totally honest in that I don't know what the arrangement was before, but that free parking was previously enforced by permits so it's a reasonable assumption that it was not at the tax payers expense
Your job in any political office is not to leave everything as-is and to cement yourself into that position, but to make marginal improvements, even if doing so costs you the next elections or inconveniences people (hopefully only temporarily).
Most of those marginal improvements can only be seen as something positive in retrospective, not while they're being made. While they're being made, they'll always be unpopular, as the voter base is usually not keen on defending the people that are currently in charge. That doesn't mean they won't show up in the next elections, just that they are quieter in the meantime.
in the ideal world maybe - but we don't live in the ideal world: most are trying to get re-elected, or elected to a higher office now that they have experience.
and even in the ideal world a great leader can do more in the next term if they get relected.
I don’t know that it’s a helpful distinction. A lot of people do it all - drive, walk, bike, and take public transit. Only in this kind of discussion do I see people declaring it a team you have to choose.
The starting point is anti-anything-but-a-car, so it's understandable that in the process of getting to any sort of parity you'd feel like it's "harassment".
It's like claiming getting rid of slavery is "harassment", because your unfair privileges are being taken back.
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