Interestingly seeing, or smelling foods can cause insulin release[0]. Perhaps it's not surprising that tasting foods would.
But it does make me wonder. If evolution was so concerned about blood sugar control it led to insulin release even before you ate (and that in evolutionary terms foods were very low in sugar and simple carbs). What must a doughnut do to our physiology?
That article seems a bit misleading. While some sweetener packets, such as equal and splenda contain some sugar, I don't believe this is necessarily true when they are used in other products. A quick google implies that, for example, Diet Coke (my beloved) does not contain any real sugar, only aspartame. So it seems disingenuous to compare the metabolic impact of a sugar/aspartame blend to pure aspartame.
They have fractional charges because that is how we happen to measure charge. If our unit of charge had been set when we knew about quarks, we would have chosen those as fundamental, and the charge of the electron would instead be -3.
Now, the ratios between these charges appear to be fundamental. But the presence of fractions is arbitrary.
> If our unit of charge had been set when we knew about quarks, we would have chosen those as fundamental, and the charge of the electron would instead be -3.
Actually, I doubt it. Because of their color charge, quarks can never be found in an unbound state but instead in various kinds of hadrons. The ways that quarks combine cause all hadrons to end up with an integer charge, with the ⅔ and -⅓ charges on various quarks merely being ways to make them come out to resulting integer charges.
Isn’t charge quantized? Observable isolated charges are quantized in units of e. You can call it -3 and +3 but that just changes the relative value for the quanta. The interesting question is still why the positive and neutral particles are nonelementary particles made up of quarks with a fraction of e, the math made possible only by including negatively charged ones (and yet electrons are elementary particles).
Russia has been involved in covert sabotage operations in Europe for more than a decade [1][2]. You can learn more about this from investigative journalist Christo Grozev [3].
What are the chances that the high-speed rail crash that occurred in Spain a few weeks ago was also caused by them? [4]
Such groups are manipulated. Easy enough to do, especially if you provide money in exchange for doing things. Russia has been caught doing it in Ukraine, why in the world would you think it couldn't happen elsewhere? There are enough desperate suckers out there.
yeah, but no credible connection has been revealed or proven. there might well be a teapot orbiting the Moon, but without evidence it’s just random speculation
With social media encouraging and promoting divisive bullshit it’s really not hard for a hostile power to influence local groups to do their bidding.
Social media should be the main target of all these defense groups, but sadly politicians themselves derive their power from it so it’s unlikely anything tangible will be done.
The bad actors here are the social media platforms who host and promote divisive content since it generates more engagement thus ad revenue. Those are very much in reach of law enforcement and regulations can be passed to forbid such engagement-maximizing behavior. Simply moving back to chronological feeds of accounts the user explicitly chose to follow would be a big first step in curbing the spread of propaganda.
But this imposes an effectively impossible burden on them. You can't build a platform with anything resembling free expression without inherently creating a platform that can be used for evil.
I was coming out of Barcelona on a train to France on the 18th, and through the window spotted a blacked-out quadcopter just hovering quite high over the tracks. No incidents happened in that area of Spain though so I'm wondering why it was there, I suppose it could be civilian or police?
Anyone can fly a quadcopter though? You can buy one right now for a couple hundred bucks off Amazon (and strap explosives to it if you wanted to).
If anything, the fact we’re not seeing random drones carrying explosives and diving into groups of people on a daily basis shows the vast, vast (99.999%) majority of people is actually well-meaning and has no desire to kill or hurt anyone.
If you’re legitimately baffled by a random guy being able to fly a quadcopter around without any kind of government approval or oversight, I encourage you to buy one and play around (without explosives please!), just make sure to not fly it over places where people could be standing - terminal velocity is real and even a light one could cause serious injury if it were to lose control and fall on someone’s head.
Here in the USA quad-copter drones are used to inspect powerlines and other infrastructure; I see them a few times per year in my area. I don’t see why they wouldn’t use drones to visually inspect train tracks as well. Very cost effective and energy efficient alternative to manual inspection in a vehicle of some kind.
Russia is a candidate, but it's far from the only candidate, and it's not clear how this advances their interests. Why not China, for instance? Or a random terrorist group? Speculation is fun but it's important to actually make statements grounded in reality.
I don't believe that without evidence. Europe tacitly supports Israel even while some parts of it claim not to, and Spain is internationally irrelevant.
Exactly why they are singled out for chilling effect. They cannot retaliate substantially.
Evidence is not easy to find on these topics. It's espionage for christ's sake. You need to analyze material incentives and be familiar with the methods used. You cannot expect the media to hand you the answers, because that is not the purpose of the media especially on topics like this.
Israel responds to words with words. They respond to force with force. And they are busy enough dealing with the trouble that Iran keeps stirring up, they're not going to do anything to Spain. (Not to say that it would be out of the question for them to go after terrorists who were in Spain, but it would be very focused. Look at what happened after Munich--multiple European countries were incredibly inept about extraditing the attackers so Israel responded with assassination teams. Not strikes on anything they didn't believe had hurt them.)
(And there never was a genocide, but this isn't the thread for it.)
The majority of those "journalists" were propaganda people in the terrorist organizations. And that's just counting the ones where Israel was able to verify their status.
You're following the propaganda, not the reality. Just because Hamas calls them "press" doesn't make them so. And almost nobody will call Hamas on it because that would jeopardize future reporting. And unfortunately having something to report is far more important to "news" organizations than actually reporting the truth. We've even seen The Felon try to do that here--report only what I want if you want to be allowed into press conferences.
You seem to approve extrajudicial killing / assassination. Would be interesting if some countries decide to start assassinating Israeli terrorists in West Bank.
I'd suggest that radical left-wing elements indigenous to Italy, such as those behind the Turin protests that left 100 police officers wounded a few days ago, are a perfectly plausible candidate; not every attack comes from without. There was another protest against the Olympics in Milan itself last night by left-wing elements who believe the games are economically and socially unsustainable [0]
Unfortunately with stuff like this, nation states will use groups like that as proxies.
Lots of governments.
For example, there's some other news at the moment that the USA is financing pro-MAGA groups across Europe, which I mention more because of Jan 6 happened at all than due to any specific evidence that the US government has knowingly given state support for terrorists.
After 6 weeks in Taiwan, one thing became very evident, mainland China can take the island in 3 days without firing a single shot. The only thing that can stop mainland China taking from taking Taiwan is a US president like Bill Clinton who had the courage to put two United States aircraft carrier strike forces between the mainland and the island to defend democracy which gave us TMSC. I don't see the current snowflake leadership doing that. While I was there, mainland China told the people of Taiwan to shut their mouths and nobody said a word about China after.
The reason mainland China hasn't taken Taiwan is because they don't have to.
I do not like the government of China, however, they are building infrastructure around the world especially in Africa, Asia, and South America. They are not destroying things like Russia does every single day. Their approach to diplomacy now is building.
For the same reason, China isn't commit terrorist attacks on other countries. However, Russia is committing terrorist attacks on other countries so it easy to believe that they are responsible for terrorist attacks.
> After 6 weeks in Taiwan, one thing became very evident, mainland China can take the island in 3 days without firing a single shot
This does not reflect the opinions of any military person I know who has knowledgeably commented on the topic, all of whom have spent quite a bit longer than 6 weeks on Taiwan.
Their defense system is as big a joke as the architecture design in Hualien. Nobody living on the island will openly criticize the mainland for the same reason nobody will point a weapon at anyone from the mainland. They know if the mainland wants the island, they surround the island on day 1, take over the island on day 2, and install their own government on day 3. They know they do not want a record of opposing the mainland in words or violence because of the consquences.
I'm not saying this to be mean. I'm being honest and because the current United States administration is a bunch of snowflakes, it puts the democracy in Taiwan in great danger you need to honest about that too.
The only country I think that is prepared to defend against China is Vietnam.
> if the mainland wants the island, they surround the island on day 1, take over the island on day 2, and install their own government on day 3
Now add typhoon season, the artillery batteries in the mountains, China’s lack of blue-water naval operations (let alone combined arms) and, in terms of allies, the Philippines and Japan.
This will be much more like the Taliban recapturing Kabul. If the artillery batteries are like the infrastructure on the east coast, likely they don't work. Taking the train out there is very dangerous. Not 1 in every 100 people dying because the architecture is shit and the local governments are super corrupt dangerous, but incompetence and people just don't care about maintaining them dangerous. They have ~400 combat aircraft but the mainland won't allow them acquire f35s or patriot missiles and anything that would really be a threat.
The Taiwanese are not going to fight. China told them to be quiet and under threat that if they speak out they and their families will later face retribution, everyone went silent. They are surely not going to take arms against China. My dad had a friend, an scientist from China, in the 80s. She was a critic of the government. She had one child in China. They removed one of her young son's testicles and told her to shut up or they would remove the other. The Taiwanese know how it works.
I spent 3 weeks in the Philippines and 2 months in Japan. Neither can afford a war. The Philippines is too poor and Japan's debt is hovering around 235%–263% of its GDP. Japan doesn't even have official diplomatic relation with Taiwan let alone a defense treaty. Japan is a mess with or without a war.
The only thing that will stop China from attacking Taiwan, is a US president who isn't a whining snowflake. If you are US citizen I would recommend electing a US president with a backbone who isn't a pedophile -- for Taiwan's sake.
> If what you say is true, why ever would the US want to defend them?
Ho Chi Minh went to the Americans and asked for help because the French were raping the Vietnamese and other things. The Americans refused to help them. So the Vietnamese asked the Communists for help. It is strongly believed that the American-Vietnamese war would have been adverted and Vietnam would have had a similar economic trajectory as Japan and South Korea after WWII if the Americans had helped.
Bill Clinton who learned from history did the opposite as Harry Truman and put two aircraft carrier strike groups between the island and the mainland during Taiwan's democratic election defending both democracy and Taiwan self determination.
There were a few American presidents who promoted and defended democracy. Unfortunately the whiny snowflake administration in power now isn't one of them.
> Taiwanese are not going to fight. China told them to be quiet and under threat that if they speak out they and their families will later face retribution, everyone went silent
Sorry, this is nonsense. I'm not Taiwanese. But I have a lot of Taiwanese friends, none of them in politics, half of them in America. They all speak out. Forcefully. Exhibit A for this being B.S. is the electoral history of Taiwan, particularly since Xi started his wolf-warrior bullshit in the late 2010s.
> I spent 3 weeks in the Philippines and 2 months in Japan. Neither can afford a war. The Philippines is too poor and Japan's debt is hovering around 235%–263% of its GDP
You have to be joking. Both have prominent militaries they're building up.
> Japan doesn't even have official diplomatic relation with Taiwan let alone a defense treaty
This is your first valid point.
> Japan is a mess with or without a war
This is Zero Hedge nonsense. Japan is a financial mess. They're also an industrial power, scientific powerhouse and potent–and building–military force.
> If you are US citizen I would recommend electing a US president with a backbone who isn't a pedophile -- for Taiwan's sake
Americans don't vote on foreign policy unless there is a draft.
Japan has the highest proportion of elderly citizens globally. Moreover, there is extreme economic inequality between older and younger generations. This is a huge problem. Russian has lost 1,200,000 young men attempting to conquer Ukraine which is an expense Japan can't afford.
Japan can defend itself but it is not going to aid Taiwan if China creates a blockade around the island like it did 1 month ago takes over.
To be fair to a US president who doesn't deserve any kind of fairness, the US/China dynamic 30 years ago is very different from today's dynamic -- and this has a lot more to do with China's growth than anything the US has done (or not done).
The only thing that can stop China from taking Taiwan is a US president willing to put two aircraft carrier strike groups between the island the mainland. That is the same today as it was 30 years ago. However, today, unlike in the 90s the mainland can take the island in 3 days without firing a shot.
> this has a lot more to do with China's growth
That is my point. Because of China's growth they don't need to take the island by force or commit terrorist attacks against other countries especially in Europe. Today, countries like the Bahamas, Peru, Afghanistan, and Nigeria are welcoming China and their infrastructure money (not destroying infrastructure like Russia does) with open arms.
China most certainly can destroy Taiwan. What would be very hard is taking it intact. That needs lots of boots on the ground--and how do you get those boots on the ground when any ship that tries to get too close finds itself facing a variety of seeker weapons. China shoot them down when they are fired from a few miles out? Not likely. Even not near land, look at what happened to the Moskova--targeting a sea skimmer is hard.
And it's a sea battle--drones can pick their own targets and thus can't be jammed. What happens when the ship is met by a hundred drones with explosives? Doesn't take much of a processor to compare the image of a ship with the ocean.
One month ago the Chinese navy surrounded the island. [0] That is a siege. Nothing comes in and nothing goes out. The eastern side of the island's infrastructure is complete shit because corrupt local governments. They can't defend it. The Chinese can land and take the mountains and have the high ground easily. The west side can be completely obliterated with rockets from the mainland.
The citizens wouldn't challenged the mainland in 2024, they won't challenge the mainland today, and they won't challenge the mainland in the future.
Likely the reason the mainland hasn't taken the island yet IS because they can take it in 3 days if they wanted.
The sea still makes quite a barrier to invasion. The Russians had to abandon Kherson because there was a river in the way and have had to abandon most of the black sea because Ukraine sinks their boats with missiles and drones.
In this specific case, becuase China has historically had significant FDI within Italy's infrastructure sector.
China has significant issues with the EU and is aligned with Russia, but it isn't in China's incentive to conduct violent actions outside of the Chinese diaspora within Europe (which is a separate sticking point).
1. China's not particularly known to conduct this sort of activity this far from their mainland.
2. What would be their motive? China is actively trying to fill that "superpower" void being left in Europe by President Trump's unpredictable behavior.
> Or a random terrorist group?
Plausible.
> Speculation is fun but it's important to actually make statements grounded in reality.
I look at it from the standpoint of motive and history. See "GRU Unit 29155"[1]. Russia has both. Russia is on the brink of war with Europe.
This comment is correct, but puts undue agency on EU/NATO. Russia is already at war with EU/NATO, and EU/NATO will only tick the box that says there's a war.
Their argument is that NATO had agreed not to pursue membership with Ukraine, and broke that agreement. It is one point in a strategy of encirclement against them that hardly relented when the USSR fell.
But there was no formal or binding statement to that effect, only verbal statements during negotiations over East Germany in the 90s. Gorbachev corroborates this.
So you might see this as a bait and switch, depending on point of view. Given larger patterns in US/NATO, I do buy the encirclement argument.
And before someone makes childish allegations of me being a nefarious state actor propagandist, I don't support Putin or Russia. Ridiculous that I have to add this but no one seems capable of dispassionate discourse anymore.
Dialectical Materialism is a powerful explanatory and predictive framework that makes me rarely surprised by international developments. One needs not be a Marxist to use it. I am not one of those either, but I do have an anti-imperialist bias.
Your comment is a call to reason and doesn't make any susbtantive claims, yet it's downvoted into the grey. People are not debating this topic honestly.
Russia has its back against the wall and has little reason to invite retaliation. Israel has the means, motive, opportunity, and lack of restraint to punish its critics with these means, as well as the sway to cover their tracks with nonsensical disinformation. Media is pushing hard for the Russia Orc narrative and it says a lot about the people who are happy to buy it.
> Europe should stop tolerating these sabotages and go to war with Russia
Unnecessary. Just (a) pursue and seize its shadow fleet and (b) give Ukraine long-range weapons. (And radars so you can profile Russia's air defences.)
Russia is operating so comically outside its circle of competence, material constraints and international law that you don't even have to go kinetic to hurt it.
NATO could certainly rollover the Russian army in a conventional war, but that was just as true before the Ukrainian war. The idea that Russia is/was a serious threat is a convenient fiction: It helps maintain Russia's image as a superpower, and it provides a justification for the existence of NATO and the associated military industrial complex that supports it.
What is true however, is that Russia does possess a huge arsenal of nuclear and other weapons:
Despite Putin's posturing, Russia's never going to risk deploying them in a conflict with Ukraine. But in an actual war between NATO/Europe and Russia, with the regime facing an existential threat, then there's a very good chance they would. But even before it got to that point, the nature of the conflict itself would make nuclear escalation very likely. Both sides would be firing huge numbers of missiles, attempting to gain air superiority by wiping out the other's own missile launchers, radar bases, etc. With that many missiles flying, and stressed people and automated systems making split-second decisions, it's very likely that an error or miscalculation would result in an accidental nuclear strike, at which point it would be impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.
This of course assumes that you are not just delaying the inevitable and giving time for Russia to recover will just make the nuclear escalation worse when it happens (not if it happens)
Which is why we must never give Ukraine enough firepower to pose a threat to the Russian regime.
But that does not mean we can't arm them with long range stuff, just in fairly small quantities. A Tomahawk can't take down Russia. A Tomahawk a day raining down in areas away from the battle front--that can make Russia very much want to quit provoking them. Provide such weapons on the basis that the supply will be immediately cut off at status quo ante.
You know what, yeah, I will, in exchange for EU citizenship and it must be fully financed so we have available the best weaponry money can buy (and a written contract that has a big payout for my parents if I die in combat)
If you get EU citizenship in western EU countries and survive you’re signing up for having any kind of respectable wage taxed at over 50% with rent being over half of your post-tax earnings. Be careful what you wish for. You are better off settling in and/or fighting in Ukraine where my understanding is that at least taxes are much lower.
Only if you can’t fly to a neutral low-tax country and enjoy low tax and not being sent to war. But you do you, I do me.
(And of course, if they don’t have a problem with stealing over half of the fruits of your labor, do you really think they won’t send you to fight for them when the chips are down anyway?)
50% tax is absolutely not typical in the US as far as I know unless you can provide sources? I thought it was around 30% thanks to all the various schemes and deductions one can use?
I live in Bulgaria. My effective tax rate here is around 20%. Next destination is Dubai which is even lower, because again, if rich politican assholes’ kids are going there to live the good life, why not follow them in their grift?
(Would I recommend Bulgaria? Well the tech money you make is enough to live like a king and privately pay for all the services a government is supposed to provide… but then again it’s no different from the UK where I also had to pay for everything privately except I could barely afford it because I also had to burn 50% of my income on taxes with nothing in return, so from that perspective Bulgaria wins. Make of it what you will. Switzerland appears to be the only place with a functioning government and fair taxes, except the property Ponzi is reaching such breaking points that whatever you save on taxes is getting burnt immediately on rent, so you’re no better)
“Decent” in the form of hopefully not dying while you’re on the waiting list.
And bankruptcy is only a problem when you actually have significant assets, something not easy to acquire in western EU countries. If you’re the average under-30 western EU resident, bankruptcy won’t make a major difference in your lifestyle, it’ll be shit either way.
If you are spending an amount which rounds to zero on world-class healthcare, all of a sudden rent being even half your post-tax income (which would indicate you are living near the edge of your means, if not beyond) isn't so bad.
80k is 6.6k/month. That’s pre-tax, but for the benefit of the doubt let’s go with this figure instead of the post-tax.
Have you seen the prices of stuff nowadays? Whether energy, cars, technology or rent? 6.6k doesn’t go far at all anymore. Of course the post-tax is even lower.
> which would indicate you are living near the edge of your means
Real-estate being an investment means its price will adjust to extract maximum value. There’s an entire industry there that makes sure you can’t just work around this problem by adjusting your living standard or eating less Starbucks & avocado. Move to a farther away place? Well now you’re spending that rent reduction on transport instead. Move to a lower quality place? Well now you’re spending it on higher energy bills trying to keep the house warm. Willing to sacrifice all your social life and move in the middle of nowhere with ultra-cheap rent? Most roles are “hybrid” to prevent this very scenario, so can’t do that either.
>Have you seen the prices of stuff nowadays? Whether energy, cars, technology or rent? 6.6k doesn’t go far at all anymore. Of course the post-tax is even lower.
You said tax would be "over 50%". I disproved it. Stop moving the goalposts.
Anything that annihilates bed bugs is a net positive to the world. Drinking poison out of spite for those sons of the devil is well within reason. To hell with those infralings.
> It acts most strongly on glutamate-gated chloride channels, which vertebrates don't even have.
They are like little holes in the wall of the cell of worms that can be opened and closed, and ivermectin locks them in the open position. A much better and more technical explanation https://pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/191
If you can't explain why it did not work in the past, and can't explain how & why things will be different this time, you don't have a plan. History is a harsh mistress.
Communism worked in China, for some definition of "worked". Stalinism eventually failed in the USSR and elsewhere. An extensive literature explains these things, as well as explaining different forms and varieties of "communism", and things that people call "communism" but aren't.
Communism worked so well in China that as soon as they adopted something resembling free markets in some regions, thanks to Deng Xiaoping, their GDP per capita rose amazingly fast for 3~4 decades. Not exactly a stellar example.
China is still communist. Again communism has worked for some definition of "worked". This is an objective statement, not an endorsement of Chinese communism.
While these events are statistically very rare, it is worth remembering that there have been two separate events in the past twenty years in Spain where high-speed trains have derailed leading to multiple fatalities [1][2]. In contrast, the Japanese Shinkansen has a spotless record since its introduction in the 1960s [3]. Not a single fatality due to a crash or derailment. And that's in a country with a much larger population and much higher passenger count per year.
I am not sure what conclusion can we draw from, as you said, two very rare incidents over a long period of time.
Reminds me of when Malaysian airlines crashed two planes in a short period of time. It was a good time to get cheap flights from Europe to south east Asia as long as you can withstand relatives thinking you are literally going to die in their third crash.
Bit of an odd comparison, given that one of those flights (MH17) was shot down by a Russian Buk squad. That was not an issue attributable to the carrier in any way, and after the incident the likelihood of it happening again to Malaysia Airlines specifically was negligible.
It could be prevented by simply not flying over an active war zone, something airlines do all the times to prevent the exact same thing from happening.
Or Girkin not ordering the civilian plane full of people to be shot down. It was a civilian plane at 10km altitude with a transponder on.
Really doesn't look like a jet on a radar.
And up to that point Russia wasn't known to supply the separatists with an anti air system and the crew to run it.
But it did look like an F-14. There really was an F-14, just on the ground at an Iranian airbase. And the Vincennes was under armed attack at the time--Iran let a civilian jetliner overfly their own attack. Plenty of blame for them, also.
It absolutely did not. The RCS of an F-14 v/s an Airbus A300 is an order of magnitude different (probably 2 or 3 orders).
> There really was an F-14, just on the ground at an Iranian airbase
There was, but that’s a red herring for the root cause. Each ship’s radar independently and correctly identified and tracked the Airbus separate from the Mode 2 targets, but when communicating the track information between ships, the tracks were mixed up.
> There was a combat camera team aboard the Vincennes, and the footage depicts considerable confusion and even ill-discipline amongst the crew (cheering, shouting, football game atmosphere) that contributed to one of the most tragic events in U.S. Navy history
The point is this is a fog of war situation. Mixing up who is who in combat is a very real issue where we have gotten better over time but have never truly solved.
I put the primary blame on Iran because they cleared a civilian plane to overfly combat they initiated. They set the situation up, a mistake happened.
Fog of war isn't like in a video game where it's just whether you can see something--in the real world by far the biggest factor is identifying what you see rather than simply seeing it.
The URL you linked to results in a 503 error (Service unavailable) and the Wayback Machine returns "Error code: 403 Forbidden" with "Looks like there’s a problem with this site", for all timestamps I tried, in 2025 or 2024.
I'm outside the US so that's probably the cause. Is such information available elsewhere?
Don’t fly a commercial passenger jet over an active known war zone. Then you don’t even really have to think about whether the separatists below you know whether your signature looks like a fighter jet or not lol.
Never leave your safety to the vagaries of Russian incompetence or malice, surely.
Russia is active war zone. Russians are flying commercial passenger jets over active war zone and then shooting them. Embraer E190 was the latest victim of Russians. Russia is the problem.
I remember seeing video of the guys behind it seeing the wreckage and saying something like 'shit it was an airliner'. I think they shot thinking it was a military aircraft.
I'm not sure why Girkin would want to shot down an airliner?
It would seem the air defense systems used could not reliably determine what you imply they should [1][2]. I’m not sure where you’re coming from, or why it would matter what one country was known or not known to do.
14 June 2014: "A Ukrainian Air Force Ilyushin Il-76MD was shot down"
20 June 2014: "The insurgents [...] shot down a Su-25 bomber."
14 July 2014: "Ukrainian Air Force launched air strikes targeting insurgent positions across Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. The Ukrainian government said that 500 insurgents were killed"
17 July 2014: "DPR forces shot down a civilian passenger jet, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17"
That one doesn't reflect well on the airline IMO. There should be systems in place to help employees cope with mental health issues so that they don't end up hijacking their own plane.
Also odd considering the other crash (MH370) was almost certainly a pilot suicide. Take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I’m not sure what they could have possibly done to prevent it.
> [The] stretch of track that was renovated last May and inspected on January 7.
The track had been inspected very recently. Maybe the inspection standards are inadequate?
The linked article also shows figures that are quite meaningless without context.
> [The] vast majority [of Spain's high-speed rail budget] went to new infrastructure with only some 16% earmarked for maintenance, renewal and upgrades. That compares with between 34% to 39% spent by France, Germany and Italy,
They simply can't compare those numbers as-is. Of course Spain will be spending less in maintenance as a percentage of the total budget if it's still mainly building new tracks. It's not a useful figure.
> The track had been inspected very recently. Maybe the inspection standards are inadequate?
Spanish officials are very good at deflecting blame and playing politics. Nobody wants to be held accountable for a catastrophe. Also see the 2024 floods in Valencia; a partially preventable tragedy, followed by a whole lot of mud slinging, but zero accountability.
So while inspection standards might be inadequate, I would take anything a senior official says with a pound of salt.
But he is correct. If you have a large enough budget for new construction it can make any maintenance expenditure look tiny. The right figures to compare are normalized by length and age of track, not percentages of the total budget.
English is unusual in that we have both Germanic "weld" and Latinate "solder" and they've acquired different meanings. Spanish (and other Romance languages) use the term "solder" (soldado) for both.
As an aside: Chinese also uses the same term for both (焊接), and the standard English translation is "welding". This can lead to some confusion when Chinese manufacturers start talking about e.g. "surface-mount welding". :)
Interesting. In dutch we use 'solderen' vs 'lassen', in German they use 'schweizen' and 'loten'.
English has a third term like that as well called 'brazing', then there is silver solder (a high temperature version of soldering), in dutch we'd call that 'hardsolderen', whereas what the English call brazing we call oxy-acetyleen lassen (which is more of a process name by virtue of naming the ingredients).
Soldadura autogeno and Soldadura en el arco (sp?) are what I think the modifiers used in Spanish to indicate brazing and (arc) welding.
Ah yes, you are right! I was going by ear, rather than by the written version, in fact I can't recall seeing it written. German is a language that I will happily use but don't ask me to write a letter in it, you'll probably need exponential notation to represent the number of errors.
> Spain spent an average of about 1.5 billion euros ($1.76 billion) a year from 2018 to 2022 on its high-speed network, more than any other country. However, the vast majority went to new infrastructure with only some 16% earmarked for maintenance, renewal and upgrades. That compares with between 34% to 39% spent by France, Germany and Italy, whose networks are far less extensive, according to the Commission data.
Conflating the maintenance budget with the money invested in new infrastructure in this way is not very useful IMHO. How much inspection/maintenance money was spent per km of (high-speed and overall) railway track would be much more informative...
After reading Shogun, Cryptonomicon and watching plenty anime and documents about Japan (including Japanese rail system - still using the "pointing and naming" method I've learned from them) I would risk saying that Japanese do literally everything differently.
A list consisting entirely of fictional works (one by an American who has never lived in Japan even) is not a good basis for claiming to understand a culture.
Seriously, Cryptonomicon is a bizarre thing to put on this list. I like the it a lot, but none of that book takes place in Japan and the closest intersection is Japanese soldiers during World War II, with a brief participation of a single fictional Japanese company in the modern section of the book.
Well I have watched the show adaptation of Shogun, which features authentic Japanese language, and enjoy the occasional Omakase (in Brooklyn), so I’d say I’m pretty qualified to comment on Japanese rail over the past sixty years.
You seem to be ignoring the important point: "The Pointing and Naming System".
While this protocol is not oriented toward maintaining equipment like tracks and wheels -- it does seem to be a good indicator that the Japanese deal with these systems and the safety concerns around them differently.
And their track record (pun intended) shows the result of this focus.
> Railways in Japan use a safety system called “pointing and calling.” This method of physically pointing toward an item to be checked while vocalizing its name was invented in Japan about 100 years ago. The combination of looking, acting, speaking and hearing reduces errors by as much as about 85%.
Japanese people are just people. They have a unique culture... Like literally every other identifiable culture on earth.
I love Cryptonomicon but it engaged in that distinctly American brand of orientalism when it got into Japanese soldiers killing themselves and whatnot.
I don't watch anime or really follow anything specifically Japanese, but I read Shogun as a teenager and then decades later (lately) I read about the Mishima Incident which attempted to restore the Emperor to power in 1970. Quite frankly the way the article was written and the events that transpired were extremely reminiscent of Shogun. The latter was written in 1975 but I am skeptical how much non-Japanese information was available about it leading up to 1975 when Shogun was published, considering this Wikipedia article has an obviously rough translation. Just the way the people involved relate to each other is quite unexpected from a Western perspective.
My tentative conclusion is that there is something really unique about Japanese culture and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.
They are two very different accidents: The second was insufficient/poor maintenance: Supposedly the train that checks for this had passed 2 months before, and someone will have to wonder whether it's just not passing often enough, or if the inspections are just poor in general.
The first was purely a matter of not upgrading the signaling in a very low speed section: The crash could have happened with regional trains too. Every engineer knew that it was unsafe and one distraction was enough to get someone killed, but Spain is still well in the middle of track expansion, so it's all the horrors of politicking. Unless you have a crash, not upgrading those signals costs nothing, but, say, the very expensive connection to Asturias was worth a lot, so iffy tradeoffs were made.
Hopefully better engineering-driven tradeoffs are made regarding track maintenance, but hey, this is Spain, not a place where we are good at efficient, reliable safety processes: See the failures in Valencia for the DANA, where the chain between the meteorologists seeing a risk that led to recommending evacuation, and the actual order of evacuation was so slow, so we ended up with 229 deaths.
A component here is the highly unfortunate timing of two trains crossing one another as one of the trains derailed. Both trains look like rigid HSRs, and usually when these derails they stay very stable and rarely have fatalities.
Japanese rails are all built on commuter style architectures and the tracks are generally owned by its users. So train operators are strongly incentivized to keep them in good shape.
Also, Far East right now is also massively cash poor yet labor rich relative to the rest of the world. Everything is crazy undervalued and there are clear gaps between amounts of money changing hands vs work being done. Skilled-labor-intensive tasks are going to be much easier when cheap skilled labor is just perpetually available.
1) There are type 1/2/3 train operators that owns everything/borrows rails/owns just rails as Japanese laws classify them, but type 3 lines are mostly rural low-traffic branch lines. Most high-traffic lines are owned(+accesses leased to type 2s) by train operators. Some of regional Shinkansen lines are technically owned by government run JRTT agency and leased to local JR company, which are probably as unrelated as UK government and its Royal Mail are.
2) I mean, like, it's the place where the English loanword for "death by overwork" came from. Also, undervalued means things costing less than they are worth. Trash costing little isn't undervalued, that's more adequately valued.
Shinkansen is built like a giant subway. Fixed transponders everywhere, mission control monitoring and coordinating everything, stations right on the main line etc etc. They even use the same callouts as intra-city trains and they've long been at almost GoA 2 levels in train people terms?
I admit that I was a bit uninformed about specifics of Spanish train system in that, the rails were in fact laid by then-Spanish national rail and the operator was then-national company, but still, they don't seem like built and maintained like the BART or the NYC subway that happens to go 200mph in straight sections. That Shinkansen architecture is unique, and that is also guaranteed to be more labor intensive than how everything in most HSRs are.
My understanding is that Shinkansen that is high speed rail in Japan is grade separated system. That is tracks are only used by high speed rail. In Europe generally tracks are shared outside few specific links.
This means that Shinkansen tracks are designed and build to much higher standard.
In Spain the high speed network is separate from the traditional network too. There is some inter connectivity to allow for high speed trains to call at traditional stations, but the high speed network is for high speed trains only.
Yeah, the planned Czech high speed trains (VRT) have the same gauge but are expected to be used by the high speed trains almost exclusively, with a limited number of normal-speed passenger trains and AFAIK no cargo traffic at all.
Why would they do that though? Like if people start associating "support Ukraine" with "get randomly attacked" then perhaps carrying out attacks could get them to reduce their support. But if the public don't think it's related, then what is the benefit to Russia? Do the Spanish government secretly know and it's a pressure tactic on them?
The recent tactic is to spread distrust to own government by any means necessary - seemingly random failing infrastructure is hardly attributable to some foreign actor, yet it has implications on who gets in the government after next elections, especially europarliament. And as you can observe, most of the "anti-system" parties are pro-russian, openly or by agenda.
edit: I'm not saying this accident looks like sabotage. The spread of propaganda after it happened it's a different story.
You won't be the first or last asking why Russia does the thing it does.
Russia is world's Dog in the Manger, why wouldn't we give it a bit of credit, though?
Out of all the EU countries Russia would be likely to sabotage (Germany and the UK come immediately to mind), you think the Russians would do this in… Spain which, to my knowledge, doesn’t seem to have much of an opinion on anything and is only in the news when they have heat waves, flash floods, or some public transport mass casualty accident like this one.
Ok so, devils advocate view here. Russians could do this exactly because Spain is on the fence and they would rather they were more antagonistic. They actually want war with Europe, so they can do whatever they like and claim it is Europe's fault for being aggressive. Don't forget, they don't really believe that they are losing the war in Ukraine. They could also be hoping to get Europe embroiled in its own conflicts.
It sounds unreasonable sure, but tbh I am not convinced that the Russian government is reasonable.
The Russian government isn’t reasonable (nor is it particularly competent), but neither is blaming the Russians for every bad thing that happens in the world. Sometimes trains derail. A track buckling due to shit maintenance is the Occam’s Razor most likely answer here.
You can call out the Russians for being pieces of shit without making them the boogeyman for literally everything. Doing the latter just makes you seem like a conspiracy theorist.
If it was a sabotage, we could indeed think with such a perspective. But even then, it sounds hard to believe because I am unaware of any specific grievance or animosity that Russia has towards Spain. If it was Norway, Finland, Sweden, Germany, UK, Poland, some of the Baltics country etc. it would be easier to agree with you. (If it was indeed sabotaged). I am reminded of a politician's speech in my country - "They says that everything wrong in the state is my and my party's fault. Somewhere an accident happens in our state, they say we are to blame. When a natural tragedy happens, and people are hurt or die, they say it is because of us. When someone falls down, they say we are to blame. Brothers and sisters, tomorrow when one of their worker has a child unexpectedly, don't be surprised if they claim that we are responsible for that too!".
A large number of roads in my country developed potholes a few weeks ago. I bet it was the FSB sabotaging our infrastructure, and not the extreme frost and snow causing damage!
Russia is already doing enough damage and causing enough fear as it is. Let's not help them by baselessly give them credit for every single thing that ever happens.
The mention of FSB is downvoted is because it was near-immediately clear that this was not the cause. It's total amateurs doing wild speculation for who knows what reason - some stupid upvotes on a website or because it makes their life more exciting to feel like they're whistle-blowing some international conspiracy?
This is roughly on par with every celebrity death over the last 4-5 years being followed by idiots commenting "vaxxed?!"
They do seem to come out of the woodwork quickly. Tbf I remember even before the current war, HN had a lot of Russian users - I'm not entirely surprised they would naturally defend their country, even if they aren't oblivious to what is happening.
Which matters, because Doctor Yellow inspection trains can be put into the schedule with the regular trains. There's no need to shut down traffic while a slow inspection car chugs along.
BART recently got a full-speed inspection car.[1] They needed a specially built one because BART has a non-standard track gauge.
The Federal Railroad Administration has track inspection cars, but only six of them for the whole country. One was seen on CALTRAIN track.[2]
These events happening 4 times in 3 days are statistically nonexistent. Even less existent is them starting to happen right on the day before a major politician in Spain visits Israel to talk about buying Israeli security and monitoring systems.
The geographic aspect of russian agents being in vincinity of the traintracks. Week before supply trains in Germany also derailed, as they do once per month.
I'm not saying it couldn't have been the Russians, but it would be strange for them to target Spain, since it's the only NATO country that doesn't want to increase its defence spending.
Edit: someone down this thread pointed out the answer is likely written by AI. If you copy the whole post from GP into ChatGPT it will give you an answer very similar to the post I am replying to.
> Shinkansen lines are completely separate from conventional rail: no level crossings, no shared tracks, no freight, and no interaction with slower services.
> but they still tend to interact more with legacy rail networks and inherit more constraints.
Spanish high speed trains mostly run on their own tracks because of gauge differences. France and Germany are the ones who actually runs high speed trains on old tracks, a lot.
It is surprising how many upvotes you can get on the internet just by glazing the Japanese.
There are some lines that were originally built as regular narrow gauge railways and later converted to standard gauge supporting Shinkansen trainsets.
I tried asking ChatGPT if Japanese high speed rail has level crossings and it correctly identified the line I used as my counterexample (Yamagata Shinkansen). I think GP is just plainly misinformed in a more boring way.
If you paste the comment it replies to into ChatGPT, it generates almost exact same answer as that comment. Also, "Finally, ..." and "it's not A, it's B" is a good tell.
Damn, I tried doing what you did and got a similar response too, down to exact wordings like "short answer, long answer" and "conservative maintenance". I will admit i was too quick to dismiss the accusation in my previous reply.
> If you paste the comment it replies to into ChatGPT, it generates almost exact same answer as that comment.
But would it have generated almost the same comment 4 hours ago, when the comment was posted here?
A few months ago I posted a comment in a thread about some new law that would not have been needed if a law from many years early had not seemingly arbitrarily limited itself to some particular cases. I speculated on some reasons why the original law might have been written that way.
A couple hours later I asked an LLM about it (Perplexity) and it gave the same reasons I had guessed. I checked the links it provided to get a suitable reference if the topic ever came up again...and it turned out my comment was its source!
> Short answer: Japan treats high-speed rail as a tightly controlled system, not just fast trains on tracks.
Is exactly what a text bot would say. Eloquent, but when you think about it, is just nonsense. Which operator treats HSR as "fast trains on tracks" and which does not treat it is a "tightly controlled system"?
That's nitpicking, IMO. It's still 99% true. There are just two "Mini-Shinkansen" lines, they only run once or twice per hour, are shorter than non-Mini-Shinkansen, and only a relatively short part (distance-wise) of their journey is spent on the slow tracks. There are non-Shinkansen trains on the Mini-Shinkansen portion of their journey, but not very many. (Also the word "shinkansen" implies new tracks.)
> It added that three trains that had gone over the tracks at 17:21 on Sunday, 19:01 and then 19:09 had similar notches "with a compatible geometric pattern".
Then the crashed train passed at 19:45.
I don't see why an overnight inspection must have caught this, it could have happened just before the 17:21 train, or even have been caused by it.
We will need to wait for the investigation to continue, and I hope Japan's rail people will not be so arrogant as to assume they can't learn something from it.
Spanish high speed lines are mostly separate from the legacy network as they have different gauges, there are a few parts of the railway with dual gauge tracks but it is that.
The Santiago accident was on the conventional rail.
Just a small clarification, Spain has two distinct track stems for normal trains (Iberian gauge) and high speed rail (international gauge). High speed rail is completely separate from the iberian gauge network which is primarly used for city and regional trains. Only a few cargo trains use the high speed network.
Regarding the second point, 2013 accident was caused by higher than allowed speed and drivers had been complaining about the line not having the security system that automatically enforces speed limits. In this year's accident, the line has a much stricter securty system.
The main issue with spanish rails, high speed and specially traditional rail is the lack of maintenance.
I have lived in Spain for the last two years and observed the luck of maintenance in a lot of things.
For example, people typically pay for house/apartment insurance. But insurance companies never send a person to check for things like leaking pipes or whatever. Rather they simply wait until an accident happens and dispatch an emergency crew and cover a lot of damage that could be easily prevented. Then people tolerate non-trivial damage to homes/apartments like leaky roof not reporting it to insurance companies for weeks.
Then with cars people often do not follow the maintenance schedule and insurance companies do not ask for that. Typically people drive until damage happens due to a minor accident or maintenance are forced by state required technical inspection once in few years. The car companies even offer free maintenance checks as a part of guarantee but people skip even that.
Yet when someone spends efforts to complain, thinks do gets done. For example there a city service to remove graffiti on public areas. If one files a complain, they react and remove the graffiti. However sometimes one needs to send a complain twice.
I think you are describing how the entire world works. I have lived in 3 western European countries through my life, and they all work this way.
Never I had the pipes in my home inspected, even now that I live in areas where it freezes regularly.
Never has anyone (not even my insurance) forced me to follow any particular maintenance schedule (albeit I'm quite sure somewhere in the fine print it will read that if the accident is because of poor maintenance they'll just ignore the claim).
Here the city service to remove Graffiti is almost overnight, and works better than many other public services...
Minor correction: there are two Shinkansen lines in Japan that run trains partly on shared legacy track, namely the Akita and Yamagata "mini-Shinkansens". However, these sections operate at normal speed, not high speed.
> Of the roughly 700 passengers, 106 passengers and the driver were killed, and 562 others were injured
The Santiago de Compostela derailment (first link on the parent comment) happened in 2013 for the same reason.
All that said, I would not be surprised if the culprit for this particular case is lack of maintenance. However I would wait until the official investigation is over before drawing conclusions.
For context: the aforementioned crash in Japan was not on a high-speed / Shinkansen line but a normal commuter train. Both the 2013 accident in Spain and the recent one were high speed trains.
I’m not sure these are
comparable, high-speed rail needs much tighter tolerances as the risk is orders of magnitude higher. As the parent comment stated there have been zero major crashes on the japanese shinkansen lines.
The second train crashed on a non-high speed part of the network.
There is also no reason to treat speed limits on high speed and normal trains differently. There are plenty of speed related crashes on low speed lines. If anything the stakes are even higher on commuter trains because they tend to carry more people, many of which will be standing, and are more likely to crash into another structure as was the case in the Japanese incident mentioned.
Your comment is down thread of a comment containing a link to a Wikipedia page of a Japanese train crashed caused by speeding. I do not understand how can you think this is impossible in Japan.
> If a train exceeds its permitted speed for any reason, the system intervenes immediately.
Does the system automatically slow down the train, or does it notify the engineer? I would imagine that there are some scenarios where going over the speed limit is the correct choice.
In the movies terrorists place a bomb on board and the train crew has to maintain a minimum speed or the bomb explodes (this is where that american movie with a bus got the idea). And they have to manipulate the ATC or else it will stop the train when they enter sections of the track with lower minimum speed, or else ATC stops the train and the bomb explodes.
I'm curious what scenarios your imagining. Because I can't think of a single situation where a track limit should not be applied automatically, at least to trains with passengers on them.
I realize that this may not be an appropriate comparison, but I was thinking of cars; there are absolutely scenarios in which driving faster than the speed limit is the correct decision (i.e. trying to get someone to a hospital).
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