Diego

That's interesting, but I'm wondering if that applies to trains that run through to the legacy network?

Though the UK legacy network is fast already, you'll never have the amazing Paris-La Rochelle, split into ~300 km to Poitiers in ~1h15 then 140 km to La Rochelle in 2h.

Yeah, though for rolling stock it's usually a wash because the high speed one is more expensive. Hence the ICE4 and its lower max speed. Makes sense in the context of a German network where you can only run at 300 km/h between Köln and Frankfurt and some parts of Berlin-München.

Ah yes so high speed trains are "only" 2h faster :p

(Well they charge more because it's an international route and in that case publicly owned railways prefer jacking up fares to increasing capacity)

Didn't need to read much to see the immediate confusion of "low price" and "low cost". High speed trains aren't actually more expensive to operate, they charge more because people are willing to pay for the better service.

If HSL Zuid cut travel times by 1h I'm legit impressed!

Wait, when was this 4.5h Paris-Amsterdam train running? Paris-Brussels was close to 4h before the high speed line opened in the 90s.

It is nice to know that "A implies B" can be expressed as "not-A or B". When cleaning up data, for example

Desertions, AWOLs, manpower shortages, and recruitment struggles are often linked to the Ukrainian army. And rightly so - I’ve spoken about these issues at length. But the situation on the Russian side is also worsening. This issue deserves wider attention, so here’s a 🧵thread:

The European public also needs to be prepared but that won't really happen until our leaders stop signing ridiculous deals with Trump

"Richer and bigger": yes, but with military spending that's famously inefficient due to lack of coordination. For such coordination to emerge you needed most countries to be on the same page about its need and that only happened with Trump II

And Europe was led by lots of soft Putinists for a while. There's definitely been some change in the opposite direction

*coolly

And I won't lie, European leaders aren't cooling in charge of the situation. They're panickingly appeasing Trump to cling a bit longer to a world that's already falling apart.

But there's already *some* rhetorical ground laid for a post-US Europe. What's galling is the lack of urgency

This is silly. For deterrence purposes it's good to have such an overwhelming military advantage that Russia doesn't even think of attacking. The sudden US retreat from Europe throws everything into chaos.

It's an ongoing series where I read classics I bought a decade ago and had never bothered reading. And then I discover they are indeed good.

"Shell shock" was starting to be recognised as a mental illness but the book is very critical of doctors. Most incisively, the doctor who owed his success to being beloved by his patients' *families*.

(Virginia Woolf would of course know given her personal experience)

And of course there were the scars of the war and the recent pandemic.

1923 is a time with radical modern ideas already bubbling up: non-believers, feminism, growing awareness about mental illnesses. And butting up against a still extremely conservative society: the importance of good breeding, homophobia so pervasive it doesn't even have a name.

Disorienting the first time it happens between Mrs Dalloway and the florist, but it's most spectacular when the POV goes from onlookers to a plane flying overhead and back down to the ground on the other side of the city.

You experience this hot London day in this intense detailed way from the POV of a character, but seemlessly jumps from one character to the next and back to the first.

Mrs Dalloway: it's ironic how intensively the narration describes the present moment, shapes, coulours, sounds, sensations. And yet the characters' thoughts are stuck in the past: romantic disappointments from the 1890s, PTSD from WWI.

Legitimacy then starts deriving exclusively from winning elections except there's institutional chaos and the election rules may themselves be contested. You enter really dangerous territory.

Basically judges are supposed to uphold the institutions, the rules of the game. When they start instead undermining them, with a partisan agenda, it's really hard to fix. Basically forces the others to be counter-partisan

Judicial independence is such a tricky balance to get. Ideally judges represent a consensus of all the mainstream political forces in the country. They prevent governments from passing too wild changes without amending the Constitution. Make sure the executive doesn't bypass the legislature etc.

Absurd to talk of fundamental rights when it's about clinging on for as long as possible to the most powerful public offices in the country.

This nonsense is reminding me of the Nicaraguan courts arguing that it would violate Ortega's human rights to term limit his presidency.

How would you fix the final approach into the Hanoi main station?

Wow, "earned" is insane language indeed.

“Earned” is a very clear tell that the US is on the side of Russia, not just in the war but in a belief that Ukraine is a rogue province not a country.