tschwimmer

Switzerland is probably the most densely interesting and scenic place in the entire world. Try telling this to someone in Iowa.

Mondragon gets glazed on HN frequently. Just search and you’ll find many examples.

Does anyone know how he is implementing country detection? I'm certain it's not GeoIP since my current IP address (and physical location) is different than the country it's showing me from.

>It also means penalties are limited to fines and can't impact your driving privilege or insurance.

If this is the case, what are the consequences of not paying the fine? I interpret your statement to mean that they can't prevent registration of your car. Can they tow you in SF for unpaid fines?

Unlike other commenters, I agree that there are some (arguably significant) things to complain about. The first one is price - tickets are quite expensive. I frequently travel Zurich HB -> Lugano. This is 200km and costs a whopping 120+ CHF round trip. Zurich -> Geneva, Zurich Bern are similarly expensive. However, it's a bit hard to fault them as Switzerland is an expensive country and perhaps the high prices keep the service good.

What I am less able to excuse them for is capacity issues, especially on weekend and Friday trains on popular routes in the Summer. That Zurich Lugano train is packed to the gills most weekends during the summer such that it's standing room only for most of the 2 hour ride. They need to add more trains or at least more cars.

Reliability is not something to complain about. The trains are punctual, that's for sure.

Tell me about it. Swiss air refuses to pay out 1800€ in EC261 compensation…

I was affected. Taking off now for a 5:30pm PT flight to Seattle. Aside from clearly not having an appropriate disaster readiness plan, communication was bad even though some information was readily available. For example, there was an inbound ground stop for KSEA for hours, but it was never announced to passengers. We were very lucky the crew was fresh, and there was no discussion of when they would time out. I happened to find out that the crew had lots of time left so I decided to stay but at least a dozen people gave up and left.

Air travel sucks. I wasted 8 hours today and I won’t even get a lousy T shirt. I’m sure next time I can take my business to a different airline who will also be happy to not do any better.

You think bandwidth is free?

-Sent from my 1T parameter LLM

I don't agree that a bad live demo is a 3/10. The recent demo showed me conclusively that the Meta Ray Bans are not at the quality level where I would buy them, especially not for $800. That's pretty much a 0/10 in my book. Since it was live usage, it's indicative of the real quality of the product.

Strongly disagree with most of the consensus here to start with Player of Games and that Consider Phlebas is boring. I found Player of Games to be the much weaker book, with lots of heavy handed social critique and a generally quite stock plot.

It's true that Consider Phlebas is set outside The Culture. I think that's for the best as The Culture is pretty alien and the Phlebas protagonist is more relatable. Banks does a great job of building the world such that when you get to the end of the book, you're like "I get it" in terms of understanding the Culture. Plus, Phlebas has a number of wonderfully evocative set pieces that are super cool. You can see how influential the series was on later sci-fi, especially stuff like Halo.

Car dealers are a scourge on Americans and a hidden tax imposed via poor legislation. They employ thousands and are generally very wealthy so regrettably they have become an embedded political entity.

I don't know what the answer to them is other than to remove the anti-DTC laws but that seems unlikely.

Thanks yeah, you’re right these are bad.

They're not going to build a 4 mile siding, which is the length that many freight operate at. At that point it's like building a second set of tracks.

Can you provide a reference translation or at least call out the issues you see with this passage? I see "far far away in the [time period]" which I should imagine should be "a long time ago" What are the other issues?