But it uses Roman letters which form the Latin alphabet.
Romanization here means that Japanese text gets transcribed into Roman characters. The fact that the transcription follows English phonetics is a different thing.
I live in Germany and I've recently booked a cheap car with Hertz for a weekend trip. At the rental office, they offered me to upgrade to a premium EV for no additional cost, because most people rent a car for medium to long distance trips like I did, and the range, charging speed and charger availability makes driving an EV into too much of a hassle. We've had about 200 kilometers one way and a charger at the destination, so we went for it.
This made me think about the viability of EVs in places like Europe where inner-city driving is discouraged and there is a lot of public transit options. Among the people I know, if someone is thinking of buying a car, they plan to use it for leisure trips - public transport outside of major population centers tends to be unreliable and insufficient, and if you have kids, then it's straight out impossible to travel without a car. That's why convenience is king when people choose a car here - having to stop every 300-400 kilometers for an hour to charge your car is not something people would gladly plan for.
I guess that Americans might have different priorities, as everyone has a car that is being used within the metropolitan area most of the time, so this means more shorter trips with breaks that could be used for charging.
There was an early Israeli car company where, rather than charging, they'd swap the battery. Faster than filling a tank of gas.
I don't think cars are worth owning unless you drive nearly every day. A car costs a couple of grand a year to own. That makes for a fair number of Uber / taxi trips and car rentals, with much less hassle. You can also get the right car for what you're doing; a 400km family trip usually wants more trunk and interior space than a trip to the Kwik-E-Mart.
If I lived in a city like you described, I wouldn't even consider owning a car. For those trips, I'd use the local car rental.
Coincidentally, my experience in the EU is the opposite: Long-distance rail is awesome, and a lot better than a 300km drive. The time I've seen people do that drive is waaay off the beaten path, where rail doesn't run anywhere close. So I guess it depends on what country you're in.
I was a participant in their research project, which was run somewhat like a BBS.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company) says ""Better Place filed for bankruptcy in Israel in May 2013. The company's financial difficulties were caused by mismanagement, wasteful efforts to establish toeholds and run pilots in too many countries, the high investment required to develop the charging and swapping infrastructure, and a market penetration far lower than originally predicted by Shai Agassi."
Indeed, that's not true that travelling long distance is too much of a hassle for most people, that's just fearmongging from the anti-EV crowd.
Sure, if you are the type with a superhuman bladder who can drive 1000 kilometers with no stop, then an EV will be slower.
But for most people, and especially if you are travelling with kids, the right EV (like the model 3 you suggest), will not make much of difference with a petrol cars. Sure you will be stopping between 20 to 30 minutes every 2 to 3 hours but you should probably do so regardless of the car engine type.
I did saw some unexpected drawbacks however:
- you have less options about where and when to stop
- Tesla chargers are often in malls and shopping centers, and I found those stops can actually become quite expensive when travelling with 2 shopping addicted teenage girls...
- stop often end up being longer than planned due to said teenagers not coming back in time once the car is ready...
In my own limited experience in Europe, yes, it indeed can happen occasionally, especially during the holiday rush if you are travelling a popular route. I haven't found it to be much an issue in practice. You can avoid the worse of it by planning ahead, shifting your departure time a bit and carefully choosing your route as the situation evolve in regard to charger capacity.
Still, even if that happen and each of your 3 stop adds extra half-hour wait, sure you waited an extra 1 and half hours but it's not like the ICE cars are as fast on those days either. There are traffic jams, 10 min queue at petrol station, 10 minutes queue for the restrooms, 20 minutes queue for your sandwich etc. Your stop in an ICE car will be longer too.
In the end, even on those high traffic days I found the experience of travelling with an EV more enjoyable than with an ICE car.
Can I just say, as an American who moved to Europe in 2022, the lines at gas stations are crazy to see! In the US, I had never had to wait for more than 1 or perhaps 2 cars to fill up, even right off the highway. Here, waiting seems to be common from what I've seen if you're traveling on a busy weekend. My experience driving has mostly been confined to the Benelux region, so perhaps it is different elsewhere on the continent.
I do like driving over the border to save 20% on fuel prices though!
It's really not as much of a problem as people make it out to be, at least on the US west coast where there is good supercharging infrastructure. A charging stop takes 15-20 minutes, which is the same as a gas/pee/snacks stop in a non electric car, and gets you ~200 miles of range. So you have to stop every 3-4 hours on average, which is again very normal.
In the UK and it is similar here if you live in a big city. A car is not worth the hassle, except when you have young kids (but people with kids tend to live in suburbs). I used to rent for trips.
I now live in a town, rather than a city of any size, and (apart from shopping) need a car mostly for trips between towns within the same county and a bit beyond which are fairly short but there is a lack of good public transport.
I think this is a situation that tends to get forgotten about by policy makers living in big cities - we cannot reduce car usage without either being unable to do a lot of things easily or without a huge improvement in public transport.
In Germany there's a good coverage of Ionity and Fastned, which have 300kW chargers. In Hyundai/Kia that supports these speeds recharging takes 20 minutes.
I've road tripped across Germany and France twice now, and it was easy.
I've had the exact same reasoning about Polish, and after I've moved to Germany I've noticed that quite often I'm able to just translate a phrase directly from Polish and it would be correct. I suppose that the verbs originate in the convoluted language of German bureaucracy in the parts of Poland under German rule.
As I see it, this is to point out that attempts to change sexual orientation are doomed to be unsuccessful - and these are, in most cases, either forced or caused by peer pressure. I personally haven't heard of any case of a person doing a full 180 degrees from gay to straight who would not be motivated by religion.
It is not uncommon in the transgender community when someone transitions they will do a "full 180 switch". And of course this is never motivated by religion.
This was actually one key point in helping me understand and figuring out the biology and genetics behind gender dysphoria and the rest of the LGBT.
Here is a presentation that I gave last summer. Slightly out of date with some details given what has been learned since, but the main aspects are all there. The presentation focus's primarily on explaining the gender dysphoria aspect the second half touches on the rest of the LGBT. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1PdGQlNfY39JX9iPowsBh... Overall it is complex with many possible variants.
Given the sensitive nature I am not rushing to publish, but working on getting it right. Once the key aspects were figured out there is a ton to investigate in this area.
Sorry, but this doesn't explain anything to me. You've traced genetic mutations that cause an array of ailments and conditions spread all over the body, and propose that taking vitamin B will cure them all?...
Sorry if you were looking for a single SNP or something simple. If that was the case this would have been found long ago. Same goes for a b vitamin. Giving vitamin b wont "cure them all". This is complex and happy to discuss over phone / email if you are serious about understanding it.
Attempts to guide sexual orientation, either forced or self-guided, are not as straightforward for bisexual people (pun intended), seeing that the literature in sexology describes some successes that would confuse some less wellread people.
I feel this inability to blend in is a thing in most of Europe. A non-white person will always be perceived as an other by a significant portion of the society. I've had two friends in Germany, born and raised here, one with an African parent and the other with an Asian parent. They told me it's an everyday occurrence that people will immediately switch to English with them and won't be convinced even after they reply in native German. There's a joke here that if you are born to Western immigrants then you are called bilingual, otherwise you have a migration background.
Other than that, my parents (arguably living in a small town in Poland) always need to comment on a person's race when they see someone non-white representing an European country in a competition they watch on the television. I imagine many Germans hold that sentiment too, it's just that it's less socially acceptable to say that out loud.
In Denmark the situation is a tad different. A lot of immigrants of Middle Eastern descent have rather poor English and their Danish is much better (they need to be somewhat fluent in Danish in order to stay). Their kids’ English is however on par with “native” Dane’s kids.
The inability to blend in, IMO, is primarily language based. I have a better hold of Danish than most of my international friends and I have also felt more welcome in Denmark than them. Folks that have been in Denmark for 5 years longer, are even more homey in Denmark IME (regardless of skin colour, mind you).
This is obviously anecdotal evidence, I am sure there are some older folks that aren’t as accepting (my friends are generally young, as I am). But still, a lot of them can be open minded.
I am reminded of this story a friend of mine has told me. She ran an org helping immigrants in Denmark and one of the activities she organised was connecting immigrants willing to learn the language with older folks in care homes who longed to speak to more people.
An older resident lady has told her once that while she is not keen on those immigrants from Middle East, Muhammad is a very nice person whom she enjoyed spending time with. So much about accepting other cultures and people is about exposure (probably why cities are more liberal than countryside)
I think English knowledge is a generational thing, irrelevant of background. People who migrated earlier had to learn the local language, because English knowledge was not prevalent back then. Their kids are just like all the others, and speak English because it's a must in a globalized world.
I think that a major issue for people who are not fluent in the local language is that it's always an effort for the group to switch to a foreign language. People's English skills differ, and some of them might have it harder to articulate themselves. I personally think that the burden is on you to learn the language and not on them to learn English - as a guest, you should honor the house rules, just like you are expected to respect local laws and customs. If you plan to stay, learning to speak the language is a must. I've seen many fellow expats try to skip this hurdle though, taking classes to reach some minimum required level (here it's B1 if you want to attain a German citizenship) and then going back to expecting everyone to accommodate for them. Some people I know have been living here for close to a decade and they still struggle to order food.
I have recognized at some point that I had something similar, but originating in my childhood. Most of the time I would be told to do something vague (e.g. clean your room), and no matter how much did I do, the feedback was usually negative (e.g. "You call this done?"), following with me getting grounded. Eventually, I've developed a mindset that told me that there's no point in trying, because it's impossible to do things properly. This has spread out into personal interests as well - I would give up quickly, because what's the point?
I'm renting an apartment in Germany in a building from around 1900 and I do have a clause requiring me to open my windows at least once a day for at least 5 minutes. Not sure that if it's legally enforceable, but if clauses about keeping some minimum temperature indoors are binding (judging from the fact that the government made them explicitly invalid at some point in 2022 when the country got left on thin ice after Russian gas got shut off), then I wouldn't be surprised if that one were binding as well.
Afair the rules about minimum temperatures that got loosened are all about requiring the landlord to provide sufficient heating that the home is livable (it must be possible to heat the home to 20°C during the day and 18°C at night with the provided heating). The tenant is only required to not damage the apartment by letting mold grow or pipes freeze.
I no longer live there, but when I visit now, I often see the name "Kresowe" having replaced "Ruskie", Kresy being the name of a historical region around the Polish/Ukrainian border.
Romanization here means that Japanese text gets transcribed into Roman characters. The fact that the transcription follows English phonetics is a different thing.