I'm not sure which station you saw this at, but none of the stations I've been to, and I've been to most of them along the Northeast Corridor mentioned in the article, as well as elsewhere around the country, have a difference in height between the train and the platform. What you experienced sounds very rare.

I agree with you, becoming more like the United States in every way would not make Europe better. There are many things I would not want to imitate, like strip malls, Applebee's, and completely privatized healthcare.

That said there are many things we could learn from the United States, especially around stimulating growth and innovation. Sweden since the 1990s is a great example how you can liberalize your markets, loosen regulations, spur innovation, and reduce tax burden all without completely blowing up your welfare state. Other countries could learn from how to make their economies more competitive without losing all the social benefits they hold dear.

Not all RBC-size particles are created the same. RBCs, for example, biodegrade in a few hours. Plastics don't biodegrade for hundreds of years.

The material here is SrAl2O4:Eu2+,Dy3+ (SA) coated with H3PO4 to prevent hydrolysis and biodegradation. So it's a metal compound, not a plastic. The core compound is well-studied and biologically inert, and the phosphorus is very common in cells. The core compound is inert, sort of like a fine dust.

By contrast, the concern with microplastics is that they can mimic various endocrine compounds (since plastics are organic) and cause endocrine disruption over the long term.

Both types of particles might cause low-level inflammation if they build up, because they're hard to naturally clear, but the metal compound will not interact with the body, whereas microplastics can interact with the body in various unpredictable ways.

Obviously we won't know any health effects until these are much better studied, but we also can't lump all micrometer-sized particles together - these clearly behave differently than microplastics.

We can ask them - far more Europeans migrate to the USA than Americans to Europe. I know, because I was one of them. Don't base your idea of living in Europe on your one-week vacation to Paris or Milan, or on what you read from people with an agenda. Some things back home are better, many things are worse.

Literally none of the things he mentioned in his post are accurate. I wrote a more detailed reply above, but - don't believe everything you read on the internet, folks!

Ironic that you criticize historians for bringing up inconvenient truths when you bring up all falsehoods:

1) The distance from Egypt to Canaan is ~250 miles. No human could walk that in 2 days. Yes, Exodus is not historical, but your take on it is even falser.
2) We have detailed records of the Continental Army. Almost all soldiers were small farmers, laborers, and tradesmen.
3) The colonists were deeply engaged. Although 20-30% were neutral or loyalist (some sources suggest 1/3 loyalist, 1/3 neutral, 1/3 patriot), there were widespread boycotts, riots, and local militias, especially in New England, and the war was hotly debated.
4) Volunteers turned out in huge numbers. Early battles such as Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill were fought almost entirely by volunteer militias who were almost completely unpaid, or only symbolically paid. As the war dragged on, recruitment waned and pay became more consistent but there were never any drafts until 1777.
5) The volunteer army was sometimes ineffective (such as at Camden), but they were effective from the start at guerilla warfare, and later in the war, especially Valley Forge, they became a highly effective force in formal engagements, winning victories such as Saratoga and Yorktown.
6) The Continental Army never employed paid mercenaries, only irregularly paid volunteers fighting for their ideological beliefs. Only the British side employed mercenaries, such as the Hessians.

Overall, you have no business talking about truth one way or the other given how completely you avoided it right now.

I vividly remember a CS homework assignment back in college where we had to get a word frequency table for a corpus to try to identify authorship. We had to do it in Java. I sanity-checked my work before I started by doing a tiny shell one-liner (something like tr '...some punctuation regex...' '\n' | sort | uniq -c). The Java program was maybe 50-100 lines and ran ten times slower. I learned a lesson all right, not necessarily the intended one, but one which was useful in my computing career.

As Heinlein said, "Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal."

Nothing but a truly massive fine will stop them picking and choosing which laws to obey. A billion is a drop in the bucket, the cost of doing business. A hundred billion, maybe they'll pay a bit more attention.

Facebook had an "AI" assistant like this maybe 10 years ago. They were hoping to collect training data to build actual models, but transformers weren't around yet and it fizzled out. But there the lag was obvious; any LLM today responds far faster than any human could. There's no man behind the curtain.

We can't cleave to the standards of previous decades. By the standards you are advocating, there are no left-leaning parties in the UK or Germany either - the consensus has shifted far to the right in the last 4 decades.

What *is* meaningful is the orientation of the parties relative to current society, and that's how everyone does and should interpret them. For example, the Democrats want to move the existing for-profit health system towards single-payer, which is leftist. In the UK, the Tories want to move the NHS toward more privatization, which is rightist. Everyone understands this, so this nitpicking relative to a standard frozen in time in 1970 is completely unhelpful and pure pedantry.

I agree with you that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, and not an apartheid state, but just as a factual correction, Iran has one Jewish member of parliament, as the Jewish community in Iran has one allocated MP by law.

Israel also has state land reserved for Jewish citizens, only conscripts Jewish citizens to the IDF, leading to unequal disbursement of benefits and opportunities reserved for veterans, and has housing policies akin to redlining in the US. Whether you think these rise to the level of an apartheid state - and I do not - they are certainly deep flaws in its implementation of democracy. And that is just within Israel proper, never mind the occupied territories.

Also, you make it sound like Hamas are just terrorizing the innocent civilian population of Gaza - but Hamas enjoys 70-85% support amongst the populace, even after the October 7th attacks, according to polls conducted by international organizations. Elections or no, terrorist organization though they are, sadly, this is what the people of Gaza want. Similar to how the war in Ukraine is supported by a majority of Russians living inside Russia.

Finally, bombing does not have to involve conventional bomber aircraft like the B-52. Most bombing is done by drones, close air support fighters, and fighter-bombers, plus of course people include rockets and artillery when they mean carpet-bombing. I happen to think that the response to October 7th is justified but let's not shy away from the nuance.

I am Hungarian and lived through the end of Communism. When the masses revolt, the dictator doesn't always fall - sometimes they send tanks and murder everyone revolting. It happened in my country in '56, in Czechoslovakia in '68, and in many places around the world at different times throughout history.

Heck most of them take screenshots by taking a photo of a laptop screen with their phone.

When I finally moved from a Comcast area to a Fios area, it was the best thing ever. I've paid a flat 39.99 per month for the last 4 years, with never a change in price, hidden fees, not even taxes on top, and I've never had an outage or a hiccup. Comcast made me want to scratch my eyes out, and Fios makes me forget I even have an ISP. It just works, and that's how it should be.