Ou à peu près 5 fois moins cher de ce que ça coûterait de faire la même distance en TER, pourtant bien plus lent. Quelque chose ne tourne pas rond.

You can call him Nelson.

This rather thin article has been discussed elsewhere. The basic argument boils down to, “Natural landscapes need humans on hand to manage them”. I don’t question the good faith of the authors but personally I’m finding it hard to take that premise seriously. With time, nature will regenerate without our help. And yes, on a planet of 8 billion humans and still rising, less people is always going to be better, period.

I second your manifesto. It’s always been a mystery to me that so many people seem to enjoy wallowing in misery and anger and negativity and helplessness. It really seems to be the essence of much of social media. I’m guessing it’s something to do with catharsis, and release of frustration. But there must also be a certain personality type that is attracted to social media - and apparently we’re the odd ones out. Just downvoting is a mystery to me TBH (I see it as pure toxicity and obviously antithetical to civilized discussion) and I know from bitter experience that quite few people here agree with me on this. But there are a few who do and I take heart from that.

It just feels we’re squandering an opportunity if we just let this place turn into just another social media site

It can’t ever be that bad as long as there is no advertising. That’s my positive spin.

on Windows they keep waking up when nobody asks for it

Good to hear.

Par ailleurs, la fermeture du musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux jusqu’en 2027, pour une refonte complète, offre une occasion idéale

[…]

une manière idéale de commémorer le millénaire de la naissance de Guillaume le Conquérant, qui sera célébré en 2027

C’est bon, me voilà… conquis.

Just the fact that this beautifully written contribution got zero engagement for three whole hours is enough to bother me!

Many obvious cases of people responding from emotion from headlines and not actually reading articles. More infighting in comments. Less debate and dialog, just arguing.

So well put. People responding to headlines alone really is the bane of social media. Personally, I’ve begun to systematically add a quote from the source article, even when it doesn’t add much to my comment. As a way of subtly showing others that I actually read the article and that perhaps they should too.

But how are Chinese brands not eating their lunch? Chinese cities are literally filled with electric two-wheelers of all kinds, already. The country has the tech edge in EVs and batteries, hands down. How is this legacy Japanese brand gonna compete on cost? I mean, I want them to succeed, but how?

Could have written almost all of that myself, to the letter. Yep, now I remember your amusing description of the “responsible centrist” or whatever’s the term of mockery. Personally I am that odd type (possibly not so rare these days) who finds the left extremely annoying while never voting for anything else.

I was also banned from another community BTW (relax, there are only 2!) for objecting to the egregious community rule “No Zionism”, which IMO was very close to literal racism given that none of the other rules concerned specific countries or nations. The mods there would do well to read this piece just out today, by an Israeli pacifist, and consider again the value of open debate and speech, not to mention empathy (something they are always so keen to ask of others). Absolutely heart-rending.

PS: I’ll add a quote from the cited article because it’s so uncannily relevant to this whole thread:

So I ask myself: Where should I go, as an Israeli pacifist?

My own relatives question whether I belong in Israel, because I criticize the troops in Gaza for the killing and starvation of Palestinians. Abroad, a theater colleague once told me to “go back to where you came from”—that I don’t belong in the land where I was born but in the lands where my ancestors faced pogroms and the Holocaust. Nuance has no currency in a world addicted to absolutes.

Of course, there are far greater tragedies than mine. Palestinians are being killed in Gaza, and Israeli hostages are still in captivity. I carry the weight of those horrors daily. I’m not comparing my suffering with theirs. But I do believe that if we want a different future, we need space to speak from wherever we are—even from the uncomfortable middle.

I really empathize with your take BTW. Over the last year I have been unsubscribing from mainstream communities one by one for pretty much the exact reasons you cite: acute groupthink, dogpiling, purity testing, incitement, celebration of violence (the Luigi Mangioni cult was why I unsubscribed from “Uplifting News”, for example), vulgarity, basically all the things you find in a school playground.

So I get you totally. And yet the “ban 'em high” zero-tolerance strategy only goes so far. I was myself banned for the cardinal sin of racism after making a subtle (but entirely innocuous) point which happened to challenge the prevailing groupthink in an otherwise pretty decent community. That community now has one less moderate centrist.

The best possible solution is surely hands-on moderation in line with what happens at Hacker News (where the quality of discourse is incredibly high despite, as I understand it, very infrequent recourse to bans). But that community is full of literal-minded geeks and has a full-time paid moderator, yes.

Not OP but go peruse the links they posted in this thread. Everything is explained there, it’s well-written, we can’t ask them to lay it all out again here.

Some very perceptive observations in those comments. To others - click thru and have a read! This is clearly a mod of unusually high quality, if they’re really bowing out then we really owe it to them (and ourselves) to understand why.

Vivement le jour où on comparera le succès relatif des sociétés humaines par autre chose que leur PIB. Rien que le IDH est déjà dix fois plus pertinent comme indicateur.

Amazing. Was about to share this too.

Makes a nice change from the boring drumbeat of knee-jerk negativity usually found in this “community”. Thanks.

found only in New Zealand

And only just, given the massacre by rats and cats and possums. The few remaining kakapo are all confined to islands off the mainline and watched over individually. This species is above all a major conservation test case.

See the last 10 minutes of episode 1 of Attenborough’s Life of Birds (it’s been shared online) for a great introduction.

In the Disasters and Policy Stagnation scenario, a series of natural hazards affects all European countries, starting with heatwaves, droughts and wildfires in 2026, followed by a combination of floods and storms in 2027. The compounding effects of these hazards could lead to a decline in euro area annual GDP of up to 4.7% by 2030.

It reads like self-parody. We need to remember that economics is a pseudo-science.

Looks like a cross between a sparrow and a coal tit. What it is?

C’est dit dans l’accroche même : pour “relancer la compétitivité du secteur” et pour éviter que “trafic aérien stagne”.

La stupidité atteint vraiment des combles.

it looks purpose-built to capture diverse motorcycle-heavy markets like Indonesia, which counts over 120 million two-wheelers and is quickly transitioning to electric models

A transition that cannot come soon enough for that region’s eardrums and sanity.

As a teenager at the time, I remember finding it almost unbelievable that such a thing had just happened in the middle of Europe. Bosnia is right opposite Italy. Not in the 1940s but in the 90s! I still find it mind-boggling. The veneer of civilisation is very thin.