You are comparing the best the US has to offer with the standard for European employees.
Here in Germany, you have health insurance, no student debt, multi-month paid maternity/paternity leave, 30 days of vacation per annum, paid sick leave, multiple bank holidays.
Notice how I didn't specify a company or location?
Because this is the standard for every full-time employee in the whole country, irrespective of location or profession.
The German model has two draw-backs: Pay never reaches the levels in the US and it is relatively hard to land your fist job. Also, some gig economy jobs fall through the cracks.
For an honest comparison and a complete picture, you can't take a software engineer from SV and compare it to a software engineer from Berlin.
At least not just.
For a complete picture, you should also compare a software engineer from Boise to a software engineer from Düsseldorf. And a call center employee from Oklahoma with a call center employee from Mecklemburg-Vorpommern.
The ones who "made it" will always be better off in the US. But everybody else, not so much.
Pickup trucks indeed have their advantages over the vehicles I listed. However, I would disagree somewhat regarding where the advantages are.
I'd say that the vehicles I listed and pickup trucks manage fairly equally in the above transport categories (tools, furniture, kayak, bike). The way to go about it is just different.
But: Pickup trucks outclass all the vehicles I listed as soon as you leave the tarmac. Here in Germany, many people in rural areas who would own a pickup truck in the US also own a "family tractor" for working in the woods or in other off-road locations.
Then again: The vehicles I listed will always be faster on the Autobahn than a pickup truck. I regularly see people in station wagons go 160km/h and above for prolonged distances on the A3 at night.
In the end, I find it extremely fascinating how a different regulatory environment has bred different 'species' of utility vehicles on both sides of the Atlantic.
There are even rooftop containers for kayaks and specific cycle holders for the rear of the car so that you can go camping with a typical European station wagon without having to use a trailer.
I'm not trying to complain about the choices you made, but rather trying to emphasize the point of the article. Pickup trucks are more of a cultural phenomenon than a practical necessity. If the emission standards are raised, other solutions will appear without much/any loss in convenience.
I'd like to point out two things regarding the size of Frankfurt.
Frankfurt is no London and no Paris, this is clear. However, that's also related to the way in which Germany as a whole functions. The individual cities aren't all that big, but they are clustered in metropolitan areas.
If you live in the vicinity of Frankfurt, you can just drive to Heidelberg for a Saturday night out (about an hour). Or, if you're more interested in food, theater or classical music, you have a large selection from Mainz to Aschaffenburg, all of which is easily reachable from Frankfurt.
Equally, the pool of support staff you can draw from isn't recruited from the minuscule population of Frankfurt (700k), but from the whole metro region (5.5 million). I myself live at the outermost boundary of the metro region and know many people who commute to Frankfurt.
The second point is that the relatively small size of the city of Frankfurt is an asset in one critical regard: Frankfurt is first and foremost a banking city (and secondly an airport city). If banks want to exert some influence over policy there, they have all the leverage they could want. This is not the case in Paris.
Personally, I'd be surprised if there was anything other than a somewhat even split of relocations between Frankfurt and Paris. And I'm fairly certain that the TGV service between Frankfurt and Paris will also be extended beyond what exists today.
I'd say that the explanation is actually less contentious than it might seem.
He has mastered the art of going viral. Right now, even the people that hate him are promoting him by giving attention to the controversies he manufactures.
You don't even need humans for safety features to become a problem: Every day, I drive on a road that goes through the German woods. The road is barely wide enough for two average-sized cars to pass each other. If one car is wider than average, then one of the cars has to go off the road onto the dirt-and-stones shoulder.
The speed limit there is 60km/h. Nearly all the humans drive 80. If you drive 60 there, you will cause a queue to form behind you, because there is so much traffic on that 5km stretch of road.
The reason why I consider this to be such a good example is because there is no solution here for self-driving cars that will work in the real world.
If you just put self-driving cars as they are on that road, then you'll convert it into a giant traffic jam.
Of course, the only _logical_ way forward would be to widen that road so that it can actually sustain its traffic load, but that is not a real-world solution.
Because a) The local levels of government are too broke to fix all the roads like this even on a time scale of decades (!) and b) the road was built on the private property of local nobility in the 1920s (for weird historical reasons) and they have refused to give up the land for the road to be widened on at least one occasion in the past.
Now, this is Germany, possibly the most orderly car-nation on the planet. What about Italy? Or India? Or South Africa?
Self-driving vehicles will become ubiquitous on the Autobahns and in rectangular American cities. I would be very surprised if there were still many human truck drivers doing cross-Europe tours 30 years from now. But human-driven cars will not disappear in the lifetime of anybody reading this, simply because outside of a few well-planned environments, you have to bend the rules to maintain traffic flow.
It is easy to lie to oneself that sleeping less is great if the activities done throughout the day are interesting.
However, if all that added time is used for mind-numbing tasks, the true destructive nature (physically and mentally) of sleep deprivation becomes apparent, as many parents of small children can attest.
It also used to be about retaining mobility once you get old.
When you can't run around outside for more than a few minutes and can't ride a bike any more, a car becomes you sole connection to the physical world.
Today, I'd say it is more of a bet: "How certain am I that the 100% self-driving car revolution (as in: needs no license) will reach the place I live in before I get old?"
Well, from my experience, that is simply not true.
I held out until December of 2014 before joining Facebook. Before then I found (and still find) the interface horrible (being much more happy in my RSS reader and mail client) and was squeamish regarding the privacy, as Germans like me tend to be.
I noticed, though, that it was becoming harder and harder to contact people outside of the professional realm. Often they would not check their email accounts for weeks or not even give out an email address to anybody.
The moment to give up came when I noticed that even using Doodle to schedule an event did not work as good as it used to since some people seemingly migrated off of email in their private lives.
As far as I know, the NOX problems that were masked by the VW software cheating are not the kind of problems that everybody driving behind the car in question can smell.
As somebody who has driven only Peugeots for 14 years now, I can attest that the exhaust system of any Peugeot at any point in time is primarily occupied with rusting. I have to change some part of the exhaust every odd year. Most likely the smelly French cars you observed also have problems with rusted through exhausts.
Also: As somebody plagued with respiratory problems, I feel your pain. My health massively improved when I moved from the city back to my home town in the German woods.
If that is the case, then it really doesn't belong to HN. In the background information it says that they closed down due to financial reasons. There is no free speech angle here.
Reddit is currently being overrun by a wave "Islamists/Muslims/Refugees are destroying Europe" fearmongering.
Here's some info that might be interesting to you, altbeit it is not helpful for the original poster: I used to work at GSI (center for heavy ion research in Germany) and the heavy ion irradiation method developed there can alleviate some of the problems with treatment (primarily the roots problem).
The therapy consists of irradiation with heavy ions, which have two important helpful characteristics: a) they cause more severe cell damage, making therapy of some radiation-resistant tumors possible, and b) their damage is extremely localized in a so-called Bragg-peak, which means you don't have to destroy every cell on the path to the tumor.
Since it is a beam of charged particles, magnets are used to rasterize the tumor, irradiating only the exact tumor location and very little healthy tissue.
Unfortunately, a massive fuckup in the German health system has led to a situation in which there is currently one center that treats patients (HIT in Heidelberg), one completed center that can't go into operation (!) and there will be no new centers built for a few years to come.
The center in Heidelberg is understandably overrun with patients and only young, healty patients with inoperable brain tumors are treated (the precise localization of the cell damage allows for irradiation of tumors close to the eye or the brain-stem).
Also, what about Slashdot? The Jargon file? Usenet?
I've been on the Internet since the mid-90s and have purposefully avoided 4chan since I first heared of it.
At no point has it been difficult to avoid 4chan. I gather it has been very influential in the niche of image memes and I vaguely remember something about teenagers calling everybody a "fag" a few years back, but otherwise I couldn't say what the influence has been.
I think I have a plausible explanation (please beware, this is 100% conjecture).
Hypothesis 1: Jackson's AMA went badly, he/his team was specifically pissed at Victoria and demanded consequences, threatening a public campaign against reddit.
Hypothesis 2: Conde Nast is not happy about the public perception of reddit as the biggest blob of hate on the Internet. So they might have given them a "one more headline news scandal" ultimatum.
In that situation, there are no winners, only losers, there is nothing to gain and there isn't even a 100% guilty party.
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The best way to get yelled at or down-voted on HN is having a basic understanding of how EU regulations and the EU legislative process work.