YouTube has been sending Opus for years. I **think** only older videos originally uploaded before the switch to Opus still offer Vorbis.

The original HSL between Paris and Lyon paid itself in about 10 years. It has since then paid itself nearly twice over.

Profits are down from what they used to be due to lowcost airlines (which are **heavily** subsidized). The whole TGV network (running the trains) is a for-profit operation, it is not subsidized. It pays for track access charges that cover infrastructure costs. Same thing for Eurostar and Thalys.

High speed rail is almost always a profitable business.

FTR: subsidized trains in France are suburban trains in and around Paris (Transilien and RER) and regional trains (TER).

Seriously, I still buy DVDs (which are essentially DRM-free at this point, except Disney's) even though I do have a blu-ray drive on my system

Now, get off my lawn!

Citroën is going in the complete opposite direction with its eletric Ami (a revival of an old model name).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

While everyone is sizing up (bigger, heavier, faster, etc) Citroën are going against the tide, I very much like that. I hope it sells well. (Even though I wish more people rode a bike or took transit, this type of car is a step towards "less")

The roundabout diagram in TFA is roughly what has been standard in Europe for the past 50 years (Nantes built the first "modern" roundabout in France in 1971, copying an earlier design from Britain. Can't remember how old the British design was). Now don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good things about roundabouts, namely car safety. They almost *eliminate* the risk of head-on collisions (the type you get on left turns). They transform massive crashes into fender-benders. That's a *massive* win.

On the down side, they take a lot of real estate. Shouldn't be an issue in North American suburbia though. And the freeflowing nature only works up to a certain point, they're not silver bullets.

The big downside is that the design in TFA is *terrible* for cyclists with lots of blind spots, and not enough traffic calming. Dutch designs favor pedestrians and cyclists (they have priority all over) by giving them enough room from car traffic to be visible. Other features *force* drivers to slow down more while still being freeflowing. Just google "dutch roundabouts", there are plenty of explanations and diagrams, videos on youtube, etc.

The bit about emissions seems backwards to me: people MUST drive less if you want any meaningful impact (pick any of: shorter trips, fewer trips, bike/walk/transit to work/school) No roundabout will ever fix the environmental hell hole that car-centric suburbia is.

In dense urban areas, buying groceries every few days is a common thing. No cars needed, just one or two bags worth. Or even a small shopping trolley/cart.

Shopping patterns are vastly different in car-dependent places. Once you have a car, you can go to big-box stores, buy lots of stuff, fill up the trunk, then fill up an oversized fridge and freezer, etc.

In large European cities (Paris, France in my case), a lot of people in city centers don't have cars. So online shopping replaces a *walk* to the supermarket with a delivery van. There's no way in hell this improves emissions. Same thing with Uber Eats, Deliveroo, etc. This has "induced demand" written all over it.

Now we even have online shops competing for 15-minute delivery inside Paris. This is insane! Both environmentally and from a health perspective! Not to mention, streets blocked by delivery vans, illegally parked on sidewalks. All of these services need to be reigned in somehow.

There are multiple problems that are now basically feeding off of one another. Yes it did *start* with Covid restrictions on longshoremen being able to do their jobs, but now it's hardly an issue. Instead there is:
- a shortage of actual containers that were not built in 2020 (mostly in China)
- a shortage of truck drivers in North America and the UK, also the EU to a lesser extent
- a shortage of storage capacity for empties in ports
- zoning laws preventing companies from storing empties on their land (eg no more than 2 high in certain areas)
- thus companies using parked truck trailers to "store" empties (to skirt around some of the above zoning laws)
- thus a shortage of truck trailers capable of hauling containers
- various reductions of capacity on rail roads (I'm looking at you, "precision scheduled railroading", which is forcing more and more rail customers to switch to trucking at the worst possible time)

And so on in the whole supply chain. I'm not in this industry, I'm just a casual observer. In my view, we're at a point where it's actually really hard to pinpoint a *single* root cause of all the current mess. There's no easy fix. And it's going to require cooperation from all the vested interest, whether public or private

Electrification is the best way forward. Overhead wires, not batteries.

Start with the west, across the continental divide. That's where diesel is struggling the most and where OHLE at (2×)25kV will shine. Trains will go faster across the mountains, regenerative braking will save *A LOT* of energy on busy lines, zero emissions en route and in rail yards.

As long as electrification is done on long-enough corridors (eg LA to Belen, NM on BNSF's southern transcon) where cars or containers are marshalled at both ends (meaning even diesel locos would be coupled/decoupled/refuelled/etc) then it'll pay for itself in a matter of years.

The main problem here is that, save for BNSF, all other freight railroads are owned and managed by Wall Street. These guys only "invest" money if they can make a profit within one or two quarters, not *years*. Long term for them is "next year", not "next decade". As long as these goons are in charge, it won't happen. Just take a look at "precision scheduled railroading" (sic) and see the damage it's done.

Having worked for/with a few customers over the years where spreadsheets were involved (my personal favorite: heat exchange simulation including varying weather data), all I can say is: bring it on!

Don't get me wrong, I hate Excel with a vengeance, VBA should be dragged in a back alley and shot at point blank range. Excel is the perfect tool for muggles to blow their feet with, and enjoy themselves while doing so (until it is much much too late, that is).

And that's where we, seasoned professionals, come in and offer to rewrite their sprawling spreadsheets and decaying macros in a proper language (doesn't matter which one really), with tests (unit, integration, functional, doesn't matter), versioning (git, but really any tool other than copy pasted renames will do) etc. And later on, new generations of muggles will do the exact same mistakes again and start yet another tool in an Excel spreadsheet. My previous employer got more than half of its business through this. At my current employer, it's much less but I'd wager a quarter of revenue ultimately comes from Excel spreadsheets that got out of hand.

I, for one, welcome our new Excel+JS overlords.

Maybe because anything Intel would make in UK factories would be subject to high tariffs when entering the EU? Maybe because attracting new employees (whether skilled or not) would be much more difficult than inside the UE (with a population of nearly 450M)?

But sure, blame it on "bad PR"

Got a reference for that? Or are you just pulling that out of thin air? Because the UK had (as in many instances) a special treatment with the rest of the EU: the rebate. So the UK never lost anything to the EU since 1985.

As for tax revenue itself, with nearly all UK industries reporting drops in sales due to the loss of access to the single market... I really can't see how tax revenue could ever go up.

As an EU citizen, it drives me nuts that NL and LU are doing stuff like this. We've known about it for more than a decade (LuxLeaks, probably even before that). I'm not at all surprised that UK is doing it, they're masters in corporate shenanigans. And they're out of the EU, so I don't care as much nowadays. But to see EU founding members keeping their *MASSIVE* tax loopholes (which still brings them a lot of tax revenue) and *THEN* lecturing other EU member states on fiscal austerity and welfare reform The hypocrisy is off the charts!

EU members states should stop competing with one another. EU-wide convergence on a much wider range of topics needs to happen now!

Low-cost airlines such as Ryanair and many others cannot make a profit without a metric fuckton of subsidies. That's why you'll see such companies operate in smaller regional airports (e.g. Beauvais in France, about 100 km/60 mi from Paris) where they manage to convince local governments and chambers of commerce (who usually run airports in France) to pay for operational expenses or at least a huge part of it. Employees, even the ones that never leave the airport, are paid with contracts from other EU countries with lower taxes/benefits/etc.

So yeah that's definitely a net benefit to society /s

TGVs have been a cash cow pretty much since their inception in 1981. They quite literally saved the company. Up until the 2010s, revenue from TGVs pretty much paid for the other loss-making services, freight included. Low cost airlines burst that stream of income. TGV service is still break-even but can no longer pay for other services, that's a main issue right now.

So get your facts straight.