@TheOne libranet.de/ I guess

And you can still count Reddit in to some extent (that one is unpopular here as well tho, haha)

@TheOne Unpopular for the average person or for whom?

@poVoq Nothing bus-rail seems to have taken off tbh. The idea usually seems great, but all previous attempts seem to have failed. Here’s one example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr4EZwZbxwQ

@admin Thanks!

@admin are they also planing to add XMPP?

@admin indeed!

@QuentinCallaghan These far-right extremists are so sick (usually the most deranged people are far-righters anyway, but I digress). How can you just threaten someone’s life over a political opinion…

Local news says the Google car had to give way to the other car. Only one person was wounded as a result of the crash, though.

@pingveno Glad the experience is better across the ocean. 😁

But yeah, my main complaint is really that big businesses were able to essentially subsidize rides initially, then take advantage of their position

On the flip side, if this competition makes a service better overall, it is welcome from my side, imo (especially when it comes to transport). Before that, taxi companies used to offer very poor service (to say the least) - and even now you have to pay attention to various shenanigans of them:

• Dirty vehicles, some vehicles even in bad shape
• They are allowed to smoke inside (they usually ask you right after they light the cigar if it’s okay with you)
• You have to pay attention to the meter
• You have to pay attention to the route they take (sometimes they will just take the longer route, so you can pay more) - otherwise you can get a premium trip where you can see dozens of train stations, tens of triumphal arches and two Palaces of Parliament
• Drivers can get rude (at best) or outright violent (at worst) if they disagree with you on the ride.
• Plus some of the bad habits mentioned before, but which are way more widespread among taxi drivers.

Yet they still complain how Uber is taking their passengers and what they can do to stop this.

(and yea, taxi companies don’t do shit about this behavior)

@pingveno Here, car sharing companies became the new taxi in some ways. Drivers are just taking rides then canceling them, some say they’ve arrived then just leave, so that you get charged, others just stop and wait for you to cancel (or run around the city pointlessly, just so you can get bored and cancel the ride). You can contact the support team, they just give your money back and that’s it. Not all drivers do that, so your experience might be a hit-or-miss, but enough people complain about this.

Many drivers are just former taxi drivers, so they bring along some of these bad habits, like starting to talk with you about the most insane conspiracy theories (i.e. anti-vax stuff etc.).

Not to mention, the prices are also ridiculously higher when and where there’s an increased demand (i.e. when there’s a big concert).

At least their cars are mostly in good shape.

@TheOne I still use Facebook - there’s no way to get in touch with some of my close friends. Chatting via SMS is ridiculous, and you cannot send any type of media. They do not seem to use any other chat app than WhatsApp, and getting them to switch to a different app simply failed. I Could not get anyone to switch to XMPP, so both my XMPP and Matrix accounts are pretty much just a backup contact method for anyone who for some reason would not be able to contact me on other networks such as Telegram (still not ideal, but I had more success in getting that platform useful for me).

Plus, I still use Instagram because lots of people I know are using it, although I rarely even get in there nowadays, let alone post something, haha.

@ajsadauskas It’s always cheaper to work on with what you have and improve upon it, rather than getting everything from 0. If you have some unused rails though, it’s better for you to use these instead, or in conjunction with the bus network (i.e. making the bus network serving areas where the line is not going).

My city has an extensive tram network and quite a lot of train lines serving former factories, now abandoned. The current mayor has plans for revitalizing these, electrifying them, and starting a metropolitan train service on it (sort of a RER or S-Bahn-like service), yet things are moving way too slow, and I’m afraid he’ll not finish the whole project until the next elections.

@jay91

@ajsadauskas interesting. Yea, the problem is that these suburbs are kinda parasitic - in the sense that you’ve got no schools, little to no hospitals, no recreational spaces, only a few big box supermarkets or other stores and small supermarkets at the ground floor of the buildings. And these are not your typical American-style single-family homes - not at all. They look something like this.

@ajsadauskas Bucharest, Romania - here:

Biking

• Its almost non existent; there is one decently made lane on Victoriei Avenue. Period. That’s it. That’s the only decent bike infrastructure you see in this entire city.

• There is another joke of a lane on the banks of Dâmbovița river (also known as Splaiul Independenței) which care use it as well. Is it illegal? Of course, it is. Does the police care enough? Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not. Drivers just take for granted the fact that there are no separators like on Victoriei (see before) and get in.

• Bicycle infrastructure created on the sidewalk - many mayors just draw a couple of lanes on the sidewalks and call it a day (example). Doesn’t matter if we, as bikers, need to get around pedestrians or if a kid just jumps in front of your bike. They just draw two lines on the sidewalk, and so they support mobility, right? Everything just not to upset the people in tin cans, or else, you’ll lose your votes. Thankfully, the road police is generally closing these, for these very reasons; but it still doesn’t help if at the end of the day the bike infrastructure is nonexistent (see the first point)

• There is no place to park your bike. There is an attempt in the 6th district, but it’s just too little. They look like this, generally:

  If you don’t have access to one of these, and you live in a higher level apartment building (as many people do here), then good luck getting 10-20 kg of iron with you upstairs/downstairs.

• You cannot take your bike inside public transit if it’s not foldable, except inside the metro - during weekends and early in the morning and late at night. If you have a flat tire, good luck with that.

Transit

I generally find it quite decent, by contrast, but there are some things that need improvement in my option, and some things that I hear people complain
Here’s what I do not like myself:

• buses get stuck in traffic. There are no bus lanes, so they have to share the road with drivers (drivers also tend to use other people’s space because f*ck them, why don’t they also get cars, are they poor? but still). This makes the buses move slow and not come on time.
• There are still, in this age and time, vehicles where you cannot use your bank card to pay directly with it. And this is driving me crazy. Your alternative is to either take your time to go to a booth, buy online, but for some reason wait for 60 mins for the ticket to activate on your travel card, pay by SMS (not really cutting it for me, as I use a prepay) or install an app called 24pay - which is both proprietary and uses space I do not have on my phone.
• Some tram lines use old rails that are yet to undergo changing for a long time already. They are in poor condition and pose a great risk for derailment. When traveling on them, trams usually swing sideways quite a lot, which makes it uncomfortable to ride them. They also have speed restrictions in these places, so they have to go reaaaaaaaaly slow to get to the destination.
• Transit is non-existent in the suburbs. There are some bus routes and that’s it. No trams, no trolleybuses, nothing else. You have to take the car to get in the city.
• The metro is the best way to get around. It’s clean, it comes on time generally, but the network is still not complete after all these years, it takes years just to build a few stations (see the M5 line, which took 9 years to complete only 1/3 of it) - so it’s generally crowded.
• Lack of air conditioning on most surface transit.

What other people complain about, and the reason they choose cars:

• Old vehicles
• Crowding
• People; some speak loud, some like to put various music, disturbing others etc.
• Dirty vehicles
• People destroying chairs and other internals, people that smell, drunk people etc.

@nutomic when you have more cannon fodder you gain advantage anyway. Ukraine is more wary of losing people, hence why they pull back earlier.

@yogthos Louis CK just lost his job and is now in rehab because of your funny jokes, please stop it!

@yogthos ChatGPT must have such a low bar if it is even speaking with someone like you

@gun 16,000 casualties? For which day, lmao? Last time I checked, there were 200,000 on Russian side, which is no wonder giving their poor equipment. And even if these figures are seriously exaggerated by ukrainian counts, I doubt ANY of the sides lost less than 100,000 in such a mechanized war where fields and frontlines look like Verdun

@yogthos@lemmy.ml wrote:

killing civilians

Lol, that’s not HIMARS, that’s just Russian artillery and missiles being fired on Kyiv, and other Ukrainian cities when Putler gets bored by the way the war turns for him.

HIMARS is used to strike surgically, and one such rocket costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars. You do not want to use this to carpet bomb cities the way Putler does in Bakhmut, Soledar etc. You clearly pretend you’re smart while not following any news about the war or only following stuff that you like.

And where did you pull that map from? What does it mean? Does it have a legend attached to it or sth? I cannot find it in any of the articles. To me it is just Putler’s wet dreams of keeping NATO at the 1997 borders plus a few dozen US rather permanent allies. While Russia can only rely on a few countries you can count one hand - the others would side with Russia but are really not that eager to leave the western markets for a country which only really has two cities that were economically reliable before the invasion - and not even those now.

@yogthos can’t have a crash if you’re already crashed, can you?

@nutomic it’s a war, you lose some, you gain some

@nutomic who said it does not?

@yogthos they are not producing that many shells, but the West topples Russia at smart weapons. You saw what 16 HIMARSes did last summer against all the artillery pieces, did you? And this was just with the shortest range projectiles.

Meanwhile, it’s the west that’s cut off from the rest of the world

I do not see the West cutting itself from the rest of the world, I rather see Russia being the one…

You live in an alternate reality

…just as yourself, in the alternate reality you live in without realizing.

@yogthos the expert seems to miss the fact that artillery caliber pieces and various types of ammunition is still being manufactured in ex-Warsaw pact countries such as Poland or Romania, as the same type of guns are still in use. And beyond this, an important chunk of the supply of military equipment is largely classified. Beyond what the West is supplying and announcing it publicly, there are countries like Romania who prefer keeping information about support classified, although various leaks appear with shells produced here or TABs (Transportor Amfibiu Blindat - Amphibious Armored Carrier - basically a locally produced BTR under license) being sent over. Bulgarian officials even classified information from other government members.

My point is - there is a lot of support coming from post-soviet NATO members, helping Ukraine lobby as well, while Russia is pretty much cut from the rest of the world, economically. The Eastern Europe countries know Russia better and are more aware about the damage it causes. For us, Romanians, it is vital to keep Russians at bay, both in terms of keeping the power balance in the Black Sea in check, as well as keeping Russia away from Moldova. For Poland and the Baltics, you might know already that they see Russia as an existential threat, so even if, hypothetically, US support for Ukraine reaches 20-30%, there will still be at least 50% support in the said countries.

As for the Russian resources, albeit vast, will deplete, as there are not enough stockpiles to sustain such consumption and, critically, there are not enough smart weapons that Russia can use - all while Ukraine will still receive all sorts of guided weapons until the end of the war. The West makes more smart weapons to begin with and many of the such weapons, particularly the HIMARS or the Javelin, were precisely developed with destroying soviet machinery in mind, so this is pretty much the perfect place to see those in action. 😀

@Zerush so strange things got so heated, after all he even got watered preventively

@yogthos Funny, apart from the last one: war already happened in just the last decade, so no one was either willing or having resources to start another war. The borders more/less settled in Europe at the beginning of the 1920s and the world was already financially ruined due to WWI (especially in Germany, where at some point, people were finding it cheaper to use the money itself as wood fire, rather than the wood itself). The former Entente allies also indebted themselves a lot during the war (just as the Central Powers did for that matter), hoping to pay back using war reparations from Germany (which, as I said, was already in debt completely). Germany either way demanded concessions to payments, which it eventually received - and the payment amount for war reparations kept dropping year-by-year until 1938.

Moreover, this new thing at the time called the League of Nations was in full swing, so countries were more wary of stepping over other countries’ territory - as well as the creation of local defensive alliances such as the Little Entente. These organizations and alliances only in the late 1930s began to crumble, due to the rise of Hitler to power and to events such as Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia - which undermined the former one, while misunderstandings between allies undermined the latter one.

@frippa Don’t know how did I evade the bans, don’t even care anymore if I get them.

What I was expecting from you, guys, was whatabaoutism. Because sure declaring NGOs that e.g. deal with environment protection is the same as having organizations linked to Moscow and denying statehood of various nations - or at least rolling Moscow propaganda of faux neutrality and false identities in the case of Moldova (see “Moldovan Language”)

@TheAnonymouseJoker What did I lie about? Am I Russia? Am I a narcissist leader in Kremlin that invades other countries just because they do not like him? I do not think so.

Did Biden and Zelensky not come to your house?

I go to their houses for these very purposes.

@Zerush When you see your destiny written on the door

@Hirom I see. I’ll post the direct links to their articles then.

@Hirom I also wanted to promote their Mastodon page, but thanks a lot!

@KelsonV I see. So this might actually be a good thing, as they are publicly allowing anyone to use such a server to their own benefit, haha 😁
@nutomic

@KelsonV That makes sense

@nutomic

@KelsonV So you’re saying that anything you post can be visible for any AP server, basically?
@nutomic

The WWF, the ministry claims, “under the guise of protecting nature and the environment […] tried to influence the decisions of the executive and legislative branches of the Russian Federation, and to hinder the completion of industrial and infrastructural projects.”

The WWF told Meduza that it will seek to challenges its inclusion on the registry in court, and that it will continue “to protect rare animal species and preserve Russia’s natural world.”

@nutomic so there are no other similar settings on either Mastodon or Lemmy?

@nutomic wouldn’t it help to turn your profile private?
For example, on Friendica you can check the option below and you cannot access any information of that profile besides the bio, your official website and your contact info (Matrix or XMPP):

I imagine that by having people interacting with your content from P29, your content gets sent over to them, so, in turn, Meta can sell that info to advertisers or allow them to target you otherwise.

Or, more likely, they could use info they receive from the Fediverse to further track their users on the platform (say A from P29 likes my image of a giraffe on my profile. Now Meta will have that information available to advertisers, and they can advertise X with cheap plane tickets to Africa or something).

Edit: Now that I think about it, they could also still be doing some sort of EEE-thingie that they did with XMPP

On one hand, this could actually be great, as it would allow me to follow actual Instagram accounts without maintaining a presence on Instagram. Or imagine just giving anyone your Mastodon/whatever Fediverse platform. Meta-owned platforms are really so large that it is really impossible to quit them without losing access to lots of people.

On the other hand…
…
…
…

THIS IS INSANE! THE AMOUNT OF DATA THAT ZUCC COLLECTS AND CORRELATES WITH EACH OTHER IS SIMPLY ABYSMAL. IS THERE ANY PIECE OF DATA ABOUT US LEFT OUT THERE THAT THIS BEHEMOTH CANNOT TAKE FROM US WHETHER DUE TO TECHNICAL OR WHATEVER OTHER TYPE OF LIMITATION??? HOW DATA HUNGRY CAN YOU, AS A COMPANY, BE AND WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’LL GONNA DO WITH THOSE GIGANTIC AMOUNTS OF DATA??? JUST GIVE US A BREAK, ZUCC!!!

@ada

@Ninmi unexpected /s