An intuitive grasp of the size of the US eludes a lot of Americans, let alone a lot of Europeans.
When an American says, "that is a three-day drive", they don't mean it will take three days of six hours a day with breaks every hour or two. They mean it will take three days of driving 12+ hours a day with 10-minute breaks every three or four hours. NY to LA is around 41 hours of actual driving per Google. So three consecutive 14-hour days just in the car, not counting getting a hotel room along the way, eating, using the bathroom, showering...
It was said specifically while in this discussion, directed at me.
I travel world wide for work, 350 days a year. I know exactly how big the globe is.
That I would drive across a continent is ludicrous.
That many American cities are these monstrosities where car travel is the only way to navigate is because of poor design not out of necessity. The American car industry managed to halt the installation of public transport to a more effective degree than their European counterparts in the 50-60s.
This is not because Los Angeles is bigger than Zürich, or that it takes twice as long to cross the US compared to Europe by car.
In Zürich and Switzerland, they have highly effective trains. The US could do the same, but choose not to.
I think it's worth adding the fact, that not only the Deutsche Bahn has been privatized, but also the Deutsche Bundespost (mail service/telecommunication) has been privatized and split into Deutsche Post and Deutsche Telekom coming from the same policy.
As far as I know this all boils down to the fact, that the European Union (or better it's predecessor) wanted to get rid of state monopolies. It did work out for the "Deutsche Post" (more or less) and very good for "Deutsche Telekom".
But "Deutsche Bahn" was a failure coming from that policy.
It didn't work very well for Telekom's competitors, though.
I've switched apartments about once every two years in average and every.single.time I've had to wait more than a month without internet (after already waiting a month for the scheduled appointment) because Telekom is the owner of the DSL lines and they connect their competitors' customers only when they feel like it.
Isn't Deutche Telekom one of the main reasons why Germany's broadband and internet coverage is abysmal in comparison to even significantly poorer countries in Europe these days?
It actually happened to me once, when I was in London dining in a restaurant. I wanted to pay in cash that I withdrew in Scotland and the lady did decline the money I gave her.
Pretty wild for me as a German doing a little trip through the UK.
Very German thing to do, yet in the UK I have not had a need to pay in cash, just use your card (or phone/watch if you are into that). Dunno if it was the money type, or just not want to be dealing with cash per se.
> but you need to hunt down EMI sources, before you can properly use it.
Do you have any recommendations for doing this? I have some source that interferes every 11 seconds for a second or so. It causes packet loss with my wifi (2.5 and 5GHz), and makes my bluetooth game controllers really frustrating to use, since input are missed every time it does it. I assume it's in the microwave range.
I'm familiar with RF test equipment, and I've thought about renting a spectrum analyzer, but I assume there's maybe some cheaper way.
You can also use high-Q antennae, if you have a frequency of interest. For instance, on HF (shortwave) a tunable small loop antenna does a whole lot better than a wire antenna in a high-random noise environment. You may still end up chasing down various bogies, but a lot of them can be blocked with the directionality of the antenna or the filtering properties of the antenna (higher Q antennas are more narrowband).
The limited availability of KiwiSDR's have made it crazy high priced. I've been trying to get one for a year now but they're up to like $600 on aliexpress. KiwiSDR2 has been announced, but that's a ways off from being sold.
WebSDR on other hardware is a better alternative-ish.
I don't see the relevance of the account age as long as the person is engaging in a healthy discussion.
However, I have noticed that in other comment sections, such as those on „Der Spiegel“, some people attempt to dismiss the opinions of users with recently created accounts as well.
I once was assigned to a project at Volkswagen and had the opportunity to eat at their canteen.
First of all, the quality of the canteen at Volkswagen is top notch, every day you could a wide variety of meals, a lot of different vegetables and salads.
The only meal that was the same every day was the Currywurst made with the original Volkswagen sausage and fries.
They even sold them prepackaged at the canteen. With Volkswagen branding.
I don't know at which plant you worked at, but that sadly is not true anymore.
They are still being sold pre-packaged, there even was a vegan sausage once, I sadly did not buy it and since then I have never seen it again.
Texas alone is twice the size of Germany - which is really crazy.