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Cake day: July 21st, 2024

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  • Counter examples exist. Willy Brandt was social-democratic German chancellor in a coalition with the liberals while the conservatives were the biggest party in parliament. The conservatives could only watch.

    Also recent state elections in Thuringia, the fascist AfD is the biggest party but nobody wants to work with them, so they don’t get a chance to form a government.

    What’s important in both cases: the majority of voters want it that way. They wanted a social-democratic+liberal government under Willy Brandt and there is a clear majority in Thuringia that don’t want the AfD to govern. In both cases it’s more democratic to not let the biggest party govern.





  • They are all enabling drug cartels, so no, none of them are good. We can’t go around and say companies if not by law are at least morally responsible for child labour and forced labour camps in their supply chain and at the same time ignore that every fucking dealer gets their shit from sources that do the very same thing. There might be exceptions for some drugs, I’m not that deep into it, but in general there is no moral way to sell illegal drugs.





  • There are definitely use cases for battery-electric trains:

    • We have these in Germany usually in areas with low traffic. E.g. if a train line is only serviced a couple of times a day, it’s more cost-effective to carry the batteries with you than to electrify the line.
    • Another use case are train ferries. They are the reason why Germany also had Diesel-powered high-speed trains for a while.
    • Another challenge in Europe is the lack of harmonization of power supplies of train lines between countries. In cross-border traffic, trains have to be adapted to work with different energy supplies. Battery-electric trains can add flexibility for these scenarios. E.g. Germany uses AC 15 kV 16.7Hz, the Netherlands DC 1.5 kV on low-speed and AC 25 kV 50Hz on high-speed lines. When a train goes from the Netherlands to Germany, it disconnects from the Dutch system and reconnects to the German system on the fly. For a moment in between, the train loses power. If the train lacks momentum or has to stop unexpectedly, the train is stranded and has to be pushed over the border by another train that is independent of the power supply.