The icons being tiny pictures of the actual trains is cute, but makes the map quite confusing to look at!
Edit: I just noticed that the marker style changes if I choose something other than "Equipment" from the map style dropdown, selecting "driving/stationary" certainly makes it a lot more readable.
Train movements between stations are simulated based on the expected speed between two points and not based on GPS tracks, sadly, so it's not very useful if you want to check whether your train is stuck (say, due to traffic or signal failures). Notice that the circles representing trains occasionally move at unnaturally high speeds -- this presumably happens when a train enters a station and its location is corrected. It would certainly be useful to be able to see the actual real-time location of a train and not just the approximate location (and I'd assume that at least some of the maps from other countries are indeed based on real-time GPS data!) -- this exists for buses in Oslo (only available in the public transport company's app, unfortunately) and it's nice to know for sure whether you'll have to run to catch your bus or not.
(Several years ago when looking into the possibility of creating a real-time train map, I read that certain train operators and/or the national government considers publishing the exact locations of trains to be a security risk, so unless opinions on this have changed I don't have high hopes that we're getting it soon.)
Another possible factor is specialist availability. As I assume is the case in all public healthcare systems (and in some way or another, e.g. through price differences, in private healthcare), some specialties have a glut of physicians while others have a real scarcity. I've personally experienced having to wait many times longer for a neurologist than a gastroenterologist, even though the issues my GP referred me to those specialists for were about equally serious, simply because there are so many more gastroenterologists available (relative to the demand) compared to neurologists (be it because too few neurologists were trained 5-40 years ago, because neurological issues have gotten more common, because GPs refer patients to neurologists more often than they used to, because neurologists may be more likely to go into private practice than gastroenterologists...).
With medical imagery, you don't just need to get to get the MRI, CT or whatever done, there often needs to be a specialist available who can decide how (or if) to treat you based on the results (the exceptions being very routine stuff that a GP can often handle the treatment of, e.g. common bone fractures; or screenings where a negative result is expected in 95%+ of cases, such as if you present with a headache and your GP wants to make sure you don't have brain cancer).
In the public healthcare system we have where I live, if my GP thinks I have a problem that's serious/non-obvious enough that an MRI would be useful (and it's not a highly routine issue as previously mentioned), the waiting time for that MRI will depend almost completely on when a specialist in the relevant field (or subfield) of medicine is available – otherwise, the MRI won't be up-to-date, etc. The MRI scans themselves tend to be done by private labs that are subcontracted by the public healthcare service anyway, and (as you'll learn if you ever book a private appointment with one such lab) these labs have lots of capacity. MRIs in themselves are cheap enough (it would surprise me if the public healthcare service paid these labs more than $500 per MRI on average, a pittance compared to the cost of a physician*) that there is no point for the public health service to queue up MRI appointments for months if they manage to book you an appointment with one of their own specialists.
The details vary between countries, of course, but if a public healthcare system in a rich country has so few MRI machines (and doesn't subcontract out outpatient MRIs to private labs) and/or are so penny-pinching that they find a speedy $500-$1000 MRI to be too expensive, then I would say those problems seem to be relatively easy to fix without changing anything fundamental about how the country's healthcare works.
*) Although this may not be the case if the physicians in your country earn less than, say, $30,000 USD on average – the cost of technical equipment matters less the richer a country is.
Unlike seemingly everyone else who has commented here so far, I actually took some time to read through the results. There are some interesting findings, like whites being the racial grouping least likely to own a cellphone at 97% ownership, compared to black and hispanic people at 99% and 100%, respectively. Assuming this isn't just a statistical artifact from a low sample size (the sample sizes are not stated, unfortunately), could this be at least in part due to luddite conservative Christian (and nearly exclusively white) groups like the Amish or Mennonites? In total, groups like these seem to have millions of members, but I'm not sure how many of them actually live without modern technology.
The likely confounding variable is just age: the oldest segments of the US population are the most caucasian, and these are the populations least like to use smartphones. So the correlation may be spurious.
To me those look more likely to be sampling artifacts.
Amish people are about 0.1-0.2% of White US adults, Mennonies about 0.2-0.3%. Things I would expect to move the numbers are that 0.5% of White and 2.3% of Black Americans are incarcerated, and that about 0.7% of adults are in nursing homes (with no apparent difference between racial groups).
I know at least two (maybe more, but i didn't ask for cellphones) who are just old back-to-lander hippies who bought some land in WV in the 80s. They use public library for emails and spend their time playing music, farming, drinking their own beer and smoking their own weed and tobacco.
They are super pro-union, they all have sticker "protect the water/Save the Elk River", most of them go to the farmer's market and one of them (one of the young lesbian) was documenting the opioid epidemic in WV with the help of a local journalist (who was present because he played bass pretty well i think?).
They do have some MAGA friends, "Try supporting Manchin, honestly i don't blame them", and honestly it was really enlightening.
What a stupid study. Happened to miss huge chunks of Native Americans who have neither cell phones nor land lines.
Have you also considered that white people are the only ones likely to have a landline but no cell phone? Due to the terrible design of the study, it excludes people who didn’t respond (which has many of the racial groups you incorrectly attributed as 100% having mobile phones).
Could you elaborate a bit? My parents live in a not-very-well insulated wooden house from around 1900, and use a heat pump as their primary means of heating the house. This is Scandinavia, so it might be that this house (despite not even coming close to modern insulation standards) still has better insulation than most British houses, but it would surprise me (older British houses are generally built in brick, which should provide a better base level of insulation than a wooden house, and I'd think Britain isn't warm enough that nobody would build a house without any insulation whatsoever).
Maybe I don't understand what you mean by the word "feasible" – they don't have a goal of getting their living room above 23 C at most in winter, and I guess heat pumps are insufficient in such a house if you desire ambient temperatures above that. However, while other means of heating could plausibly bring the temperatures higher, that would end up being very expensive also because of the poor insulation – it's just harder in general to heat a drafty house and keep the temperature up, and I don't see how heat pumps are a uniquely bad choice for homes like that.
Edit: This is coastal Norway, so the climate in winter is quite similar to somewhere like Edinburgh, with temperatures usually above 0 C in January. The heat pumps would probably be insufficient somewhere the temperatures regularly reach -10 or -20 C, but that's a very infrequent event both here and in the UK.
British houses generally have terrible levels of insulation and if built before roughly 1930 are likely solid walled, so have no wall cavity to insulate. There is also the issue that a lot of people live in terraces and semis and there may simply be no suitable place to install a heat pump. When I looked into it for my house a couple of years ago the fitters basically said they couldn't do it because of lack of space.
There isn't that much to elaborate on. Commercial heat pumps just aren't good for the average UK house. They would be "alright" if the costs weren't prohibitive.
I don't know the specifics of your parents. A "wooden house" with a heat pump acting as the primary heating system in a country like Norway sounds fairly bad on the surface. But I don't know the insulation specifics, nor do I know what other heating element might come at play when the heating pump fails to keep up with the heat loss. Also, what heating pump are we talking about?
Heat pumps work extremely well in the Nordic countries and are therefore very popular. That's because due to the cold winters houses are already well insulated, though very old houses less so. Which means the houses are in general reasonably energy efficient to start with, so a heat pump providing 3.5-6kW of heat is generally sufficient. That would be to the main area of the house, so yes the heat pump is the primary heating system (for those who use them) in the sense that it's the heater used for the main parts of the house - think living room, kitchen area. There may well be normal electric heaters in other rooms, if deemed necessary, but other rooms (food storage, bedrooms etc) don't usually need much, if any, heating).
Of course in the Nordic countries you also have areas very far from the ocean, and there it can get very cold. Down to -50C in some cases, and regularly -30C or colder. I imagine heat pumps aren't used much there. But elsewhere (i.e. most places) they are great. In those places you see them absolutely everywhere now.
The difference between the quality of the infrastructure (esp. roads and rail) in the Netherlands and Belgium must surely be the most convincing testament to what a country loses from even relatively mild (from a worldwide point-of-view) levels of interethnic squabbling!
It's not just that, it's also a conceptual difference. Belgium is a tax haven compared to the Netherlands and there are whole towns made up of rich Dutch tax evaders just across the border. Less taxes, less money for infrastructure.
Funnily enough the Netherlands is also a tax haven but it's only for large megacorporations, not people. They wouldn't be based there at all if it wasn't for the tax benefits so they don't lose out by offering it, they just screw the rest of Europe over by allowing companies to evade taxes in the whole EU.
Eixample is alright, and supposedly a decent place to live, but the main touristy part of Barcelona is the old town, Barri Gòtic, which is a typical chaotic maze of streets. Eixample receives a lot of visitors too, of course, but not so much, I think, because it's very charming in itself, but because it makes up a large part of the inner city and thus contains a lot of tourist attractions (including Sagrada Familia and other buildings by Gaudí) and shopping streets.
Also, once you go beyond Eixample (except to the east) the city's not a regular grid anymore. In the end, Eixample and other, newer neighbourhoods built on a grid probably represent a (substantial, of course) minority of the city.
Sounds like a process similar to how you would debug a difficult bug in a big and/or complicated codebase – through trying to isolate the code causing the bug, comparing the buggy code with code that's known to work, replacing other parts of the code with dummy code/mocks etc. And sometimes a bug seems impossible to solve regardless of how much developer time you throw at it, and you just have to ship the product with the bug (seems to be especially common in the game dev business).
>Moviegoers don't really like "squeaky" in lead male actors.
Unless you mean something different by "squeaky" than what I think you do, then Joseph Gordon-Levitt is an example of a successful actor who fits that description, don't you agree?
Can someone explain the logic behind this excerpt? I don't understand the connection between rising inflation and interest rates and online-only banks being outcompeted.
> "Rising inflation and interest rates this year have made it harder for online-only banks, called neobanks in Australia, to compete with established lenders, making fundraising much more difficult."
The first online-only bank in Norway was founded all the way back in 2000, and has overall been very successful. (Unfortunately, in my opinion, they were bought out by the largest local bank this year.) I understand how regulations and local habits/expectations can mean that an online-only back won't work in certain countries. For example, I can't imagine it'd work very well somewhere like Germany which is very conservative when it comes to tech in finance – cash and faxed contracts still being very much a thing and so on (correct me if I'm wrong, though). However, Australia doesn't strike me as being as conservative as Germany in this sense, so I'd be interested in hearing more about why online-only banking doesn't seem to be doing well there.
hikes in interest rates, if you have negative cash flows (need funding), the cost of the capital incises needing even more capital to pay your old debt, this affect less more establish banks who use they own cash flow.
inflation cause price of the product to go out but also the cost of the production, if you don't have a profitable product this make it even more negative cash flow.
also people are less likely to take debt if their fear how to pay back.
i don't know Australia but most bank offer solid smartphones and web base service( in south-america) meaning that maybe isn't that much of deal breaker anymore, you can do similar things whit the competition and have a full physical service to fall back if it something go wrong.
The article does not do a good job of explaining the situation, but (from memory) digital banks in Australia can not give out their own loans. They're on special, limited (but supposedly easier to get) licenses from the Australian government that allows them to do "banky" things but not offer loans.
They do still offer loans, but they're "white-label" loans from other providers, which means the margins are way thinner and you're mostly at the mercy of the "white-label" provider when it comes to setting your lower threshold.
My guess is people don't mind paying an extra quarter of a percent or so if they get a really nice app and modern banking experience when interest rates are low, but with recent rate hikes they're probably shopping around and going with the best rate they can get.
The other factor is that traditional Australian banks have put efforts into modernising themselves over the past few years, spending a lot on their apps etc. so the differences between "digital" banks and traditional banks are shrinking.
A German perspective here: In high interest times all banks can offer free bank accounts, in low interest times people flee from brick and mortar banks when they start to ask fees. Even if your bank does not have a physical branch, you can still nowadays easily get your money: you can withdraw cash at the checkout of the supermarket when you are shopping for groceries, and a lot of banks offer free withdrawals at other banks.
Brick and mortar-banks have their advantage too. Most in Germany are either a credit union or owned by the public. You have someone responsible for you you can speak with in person and they can often offer you better terms on loans.
Bank's make money on loans. In order to make loans, a bank needs money to lend which it needs to borrow. A bank's customer deposits are often an inexpensive source of borrowing for the bank. It sounds like Volt was trying to grow in the mortgage loan business, but with a limited customer base, needed to borrow wholesale money. When interest rates rise, rates in the wholesale market tend to rise faster than the rate for customer deposits. As a result Volt was unable to compete for loan origination.
Edit: I just noticed that the marker style changes if I choose something other than "Equipment" from the map style dropdown, selecting "driving/stationary" certainly makes it a lot more readable.