I am a senior developer and consultant with more than 10 years of experience.
My expertise and pleasure is in crafting pleasurable user experience, be it for your customers or your team.
I am looking for part time freelance/consulting opportunities while I'm building indie products.
I hurt my right wrist on a bike fall, it's long term injury. I found that my left hand is much more compliant with touchpads than mice so I found an old Logitech T650 in second hands.
With solaar on Linux, the thing work flawlessly. On Windowsthe device is not supported by the official firmware so no gesture or click. It's a shame !
Well if your dependent on oil to make your car run, the people who have the power to block oil distribution have a huge leverage.
I don't get your argument, we have a huge dependency on the oil distribution infrastructure. A switch in transportation system is a switch in the type of infrastructure, not a freedom vs control thing.
The difference is incentives. The oil company wants my money whereas public transit is ran on hope and well wishes. Winds shift and policy can change at any time
Well not on hope and well wishes, more on planning and political will. As the oil, If your gas station is filled it's not only a thanks you the money you give the oil company but a large infrastructure work and political and geopolitical framework that make it happen.
There is an option to flip the screen upside down. I currently have a tendinitis on my right wrists so I use it a lot depending on the game and it work well.
My main take after practising Agile and Scrum for a few years is that there is more in Agile than Scrum. For Scrum to work you need to enrich it with other ideas.
There are less than 20 authors in the manifesto, go check what they were up to. Next to the management framework, there is a lot of engeneering techniques and ideas. A sibling comment talked about XP whose technics work well along scrum, but there is also clean code, refactoring, crystal methods, agile as a cooperative game, liberating structures, devops (no, not the job offer),...
They all had blogs (archive. org is your friend for some of them), wrote books and gave talks. I like to get lost on http://wiki.c2.com/ where I found lots of insight about how to make the thing work.
So yeah, I think it work pretty well when you learn how to use it.
Though note from Wikipedia (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligne_de_Lyon_à_Bordeaux) the projected journey time is 6h47, whereas going via Paris (and crossing by Metro) takes around 5h52, and there are a few connections via Massy TGV taking around 5h31.
That said, I think this exactly shows one of the benefits of liberialisation of the rail market: it allows other companies to serve routes that the nationalised operator does not want to.
> That said, I think this exactly shows one of the benefits of liberialisation of the rail market: it allows other companies to serve routes that the nationalised operator does not want to.
It really does not. Private companies won’t invest in the un-profitable routes that are the most important for half the country. Instead, they’ll eat into the margins of the established companies on high profit main lines, which are used to subsidise secondary lines at the moment. So either we’ll need more public subsidies and incentives, or these routes just won’t be served. It’s good if Railcoop can keep the route open (supported by local councils, so public money), but this won’t redeem the privatisation project overall. Doing this for all important secondary routes will be more expensive than a well-run public operator
Train service is a public service.
Is cross-subsidy really the best way to fund unprofitable routes, though? It makes sense if you view the state's rail budget as something that needs to be balanced in and of itself, but that's a matter of government accounting, moving where the revenue comes from, rather than a business in its own right.
Relying on cross-subsidy you're essentially overcharging those taking the profitable lines, versus raising the subsidy required through general taxation. At least in the majority of cases, I'd expect cross-subsidy to be a form of regressive tax, quite possibly skewed towards middle-income groups.
And it's not like those taking the profitable routes are getting disproportionate benefit from the unprofitable ones; the benefit from maintaining the unprofitable routes is derived from both the local economy and through benefiting the national economy, and as such it makes sense that it come from general taxation rather than fare-box revenue from profitable routes.
> Is cross-subsidy really the best way to fund unprofitable routes, though? It makes sense if you view the state's rail budget as something that needs to be balanced in and of itself, but that's a matter of government accounting, moving where the revenue comes from, rather than a business in its own right.
I think you’re right. It’s just that we’ve been brainwashed into seeing our state-owned companies as normal companies that need to turn a profit. From that point of view it makes sense for high-margin routes to subsidise unprofitable ones. But a state does not have to balance the books the same way.
Subsidising smaller routes directly from the State budget works as well, and results in lower fares overall, at the expense of a bit more in taxes.
Subsidising private companies operating these routes, however, is a recipe for disaster. These companies expect a profit and would cut any corner to pocket the subsidies instead of doing their job. This is how it (mostly) works in the U.K., and it is terrible and expensive.
> Subsidising private companies operating these routes, however, is a recipe for disaster. These companies expect a profit and would cut any corner to pocket the subsidies instead of doing their job. This is how it (mostly) works in the U.K., and it is terrible and expensive.
While I might defend the EU's push for rail liberalisation in general, I'm certainly not going to defend the historic GB model (Northern Ireland was never privatised, and the model of franchises carrying the revenue risk is gone from GB[1], killed slightly sooner than it would've been due to the pandemic).
That said, note a significant part of the reason why GB ends up with higher fares is much higher cross-subsidy and much lower reliance on the State budget than elsewhere in Western Europe. We've year-on-year had above inflation fare rises (and note that the rises have always been limited by Government; had there been a desire to set a lower (or no!) fare rise Government could have done so) combined with decreases in subsidy. This is highly unlikely to change even with the demise of franchises as we currently know them, as the Government desire to reduce subsidy is likely to continue.
So the GB model did achieve its stated goal: moving revenue risk to the private sector and decreasing subsidy.
The failings of prior franchises—and whether or not they're terrible—is a long and varied topic. Ultimately, they by and large delivered the service they were contracted to. There's ways in which this is an issue with the specification of the tender, and ways in which it's inherently a downside. Many of the complaints have some of their origins in Government intervention, it must be said: rolling stock acquisition was very tightly controlled from the 2000s onwards, inconsistent and often changing electrification plans, and infrastructure in many places running near capacity.
That's not to say the franchisees did nothing wrong, but often they had their hands tied in many, many ways: and often much tighter tied than British Rail ever did.
I'll argue to the end that the biggest mistake was selling off all of British Rail; elsewhere in the EU having the incumbent survive has almost certainly provided a more beneficial competitive environment.
[1]https://flus.fr/