I don't pay taxes the way I pay for a cell phone carrier. The taxes have to get paid no matter what -- I can't withhold payment or switch to a different carrier because I'm getting bad service. I could, as a privileged American, uproot my whole life and move elsewhere, but I'd still owe taxes for the time I had awful service, and depending on the circumstances might still end up owing at least some taxes until I renounced citizenship.
Like them or not, want them or not: taxes are not voluntary payments, and we can't apply the same logic to them.
Google's estimation for my country is always less than what is achievable if you stick to the speed limit. I guess they calculate it based on other drivers.
10 minutes a day on a commute to work and back is significant and, if you drop down a couple mph, is low risk. That’s almost an extra hour a week without giving up any valuable activity.
I could only see the cost/benefit looking not worthwhile if you already have a lot of free time. An adult commuting 90 minutes a day might only have 2-4 hours of free time per day during the workweek.
Yes, this should also be considered although the rarity of a crash where the consequences will take longer to deal with means it isn’t meaningfully part of the time benefit calculation. Sorry to speak morbidly.
The effect also depends on the natural speed at which traffic flows and how the extra time is spent, as fatigue also increases crash risk.
There are exceptions to this though. If you're driving through Europe at night you can easily spend most of your trip on highways safely going 180kmh or faster, saving you many hours on longer trips.
You will most likely be partially liable for any accidents over 130kph because it is difficult for people to judge speeds over that amount.
This is why if you spend much time over that line, you will find that people will seemingly jump out from behind an LKW and cut you off. It's not because they're idiots or trying to intentionally crash, but rather they most likely completely misjudged your speed due to the innate human capacity for judging speed.
Therefore I've been told that while it's not against the StVO to drive over 130, doing so is a liability risk.
Just because you're driving fast doesn't mean you have to be driving dangerously, but of course there's going to be a significant correlation as idiots also like to drive fast.
I have no problem slowing down from 200 to 130 whenever I approach an entry ramp or pass a big truck, and I certainly aggressively avoid situations where I'd have to do so frequently.
Also, while going over 130 might strictly be a liability risk it does not mean that you're going to automatically be liable. See this case of a guy going 150, he didn't do anything wrong and wasn't held liable https://www.verkehrsrundschau.de/nachrichten/urteil-schnelle...
By Europe you are meaning Germany only, I believe, in most other European countries there is a speed limit of 130 km/h or 140 km/h, day or night doesn't matter:
Yep, but it doesn't change the "base" point, which is, you cannot legally drive faster than 120/130/140 kmh (depending on the country) and certainly NOT 180 kmh in any European country BUT in Germany (and only on some - many - strerches of the Autobahn, in some other there is anyway a speed limit of 120/130/140 kmh):
180kmh at night is definitely not safe on a highway. Even with perfect visibility during daytime, anything above 150-160kmh is pushing it for most of the highways I've traveled in Europe.
How come? The roads themselves certainly aren't the limiting factor, often you could go even faster.
> anything above 150-160kmh is pushing it for most of the highways I've traveled in Europe
Anything above 150-160kmh is certainly pushing it for most cars, the highways themselves tend to be fine for even faster speeds. There's a vast difference between speeding in a WV Polo and a BMW 7series, it's downright terrifying to go 160 in the Polo but the BMW won't start shaking like that even at 260.
I drive between Barcelona and Berlin pretty regularly, sometimes I go all the way to Bucharest. There are definitely stretches of road on those routes where you can't go fast in low traffic conditions, but they're in the minority.
For Austria at least, their car travel estimates are eerily accurate in my experience, including accounting for normal levels of traffic for that time of day/week. Traffic jams mess with it to some extent of course, as they appear and disperse relatively suddenly. And no, I don’t speed.
Their bike estimates are consistently wildly optimistic however. If it’s an easy route and I pedal flat out with no traffic and without hitting any red lights, I can get close to the estimated time.
OK, I don’t have a road racing bike or e-bike, and there are people who are more athletic than I am, but I’d say I’m fitter than the median. Their model seems to assume around 25km/h average speed, which isn’t really sustainable (Or safe) in everyday cycling with other road users about.
>> ... when someone is critizising USA with good reason:
and this:
>> ... but as a citizen and compared to the bad old commies it was mostly ...
I feel my comment is still pretty safe.
You see, there is often a reason I use all those weasel words; otherwise it would be hard to poknt out that something can be far from ideal and something else can still be really much worse.
My team uses task number and title as a commit message. We just can't fit all the description from task into one line of comment. So, when we look at git blame - we get a reference to a task in project management tool where we can find all the reasons behind a given change.
If there are more commits for the same task, all of them bare the same commit message. After each review, we add a comment to project management tool. That way we focus only on newer commits when performing another round of reviews.
Every other attempt to describe changes and intentions in one line seems doomed to me.
I was born in Romania, visited there less than two weeks ago, and now I am in the United States. This is simply not true at all. Tomatoes in Romania taste exactly the same as tomatoes in the United States (e.g. bland).
Even tomatoes bought from farmer's market are not much better because they don't use the tastiest varieties of tomatoes.
I don't have to ask anybody, I have lived in Romania for 21 years. Summer tomatoes that are not specially sourced are just as crappy in Romania, Austria, and United States. Slightly better at the farmer's market though. I have also lived in rural Romania for many months at a time, in the summer, for over a decade, and have grown tomatoes myself.
The only time I ever got good tomatoes was at some tomato faire, or some special organic farmer's market (in the summer, of course). And every time it was outside Romania.
The idea that food in Romania is somehow unaffected by global economic development is a myth that has to die.
I was in Serbia recently. The tomatoes and cucumbers blew my mind. In the city or in the country, all were great. Seemed like every dinner started with fresh bread and a bowl of tomatoes and cucumbers. I didn't need the main dish, until they put slow cooked lamb or pork in front of me.
That's only because more people have summer houses there (it's a tradition in most/all Eastern Europe) and grow vegetables themselves, so it's easier to come by naturally grown ones. Buy generic tomatoes from a supermarket, and the they'll taste bland as everywhere.
Introducing mandatory charges for tweeting will probably hurt their user base and they'll lose some value. But they could always make a combined approach, having first 5 to X tweets per month for free.
