Lopulta tämä lähti 18:28, eli vielä 2 minuuttia aikaisemmin kuin aikaistettu arvio, joka oli 18:30.
Kysäisin konnarilta myöhästymisen syyn: Ravintolavaunu oli ollut viallinen, joten sen tilalle oli laitettu toinen. Ja se toinenkin oli sitten osoittautunut vialliseksi, joten vaihdetitin vielä kolmas. Joka nyt sitten näyttäisi toimivan. Ruokaa möivät, mutta hinnasto oli kirjoitettu kuulakärkikynällä pätkälle kuittipaperia.
Mutta siis: Tästä ei voi syyttää mitään keskieurooppalaista kalustoa, koska tuo ravintolavaunu on tuikitavallinen ruotsalainen ravintolavaunu, joka jää joka tapauksessa junasta pois Malmössä, kun se ei mahdu Tanskan ja Saksan rautateiden kuormaulottumiin.
EDIT: Kysyin konnarilta lähtövalmisteluiden viivästymisen syy, ja syynä oli vika ravintolavaunussa. Joka siis on tavalinen ruotsalainen ravintolavaunu. Vaunu oli vaihdettu toiseen, joka myöskin oli osoittautunut vialliseksi, jolloins se vaihdettiin vielä kolmanteen.
Tämä tänään ottamani kuva taitaa liittyä aiheeseen valitettavankin vahvasti:
EDIT: Ei hitto, nää ihan oikeasti hilaa lähtöaikaa 20 minuuttia aikaisemmaksi! Onneksi en luottanut tuohon 18:50 tietoon, vaan jäätiin asemalle roikkumaan.
I usually like being notified of messages in certain chats. But even with that I'd like to be able to choose which chats are allowed to disturb me no matter what and which ones should make noise but not that damn much!
Like what gets done?
Depends on whether the police like what needs to get done or not. If they like it, it gets done.
A relatively recent small anecdote:
They forbade using spikes in your winter tyres on one throughfare street in the centre of Helsinki. The police said that so many people will be breaking that rule that they cannot fine all of them, so they will refuse to go enforce the restriction. And after they had gone public with that, the signs were removed as meaningless.
I've had two cases where a car has hit me. In the other case I was in my thoughts and accidentally stood in a wrong place waiting for the light to turn green. I was technically on the roadway – it just wasn't very clear that that's a road. A van intentionally crashed into me with a relatively slow speed and I called the emergency number. He fled the scene, but had to later come to an interrogation because I had seen the number plate. The police then said that I have a possibility to withdraw my demands, and if I don't they will also fine me for having gone against the red lights. They don't have enough resources and didn't want to bother with this case, so they made sure it'll get closed. I was young and very badly out of money, so I let the thing be and allowed them to close the case.
Here's a photo from the spot. The place where I was standing is marked with a blue cross, the car came from the direction shown by the red arrow:
Then there was another case, where a car saw me about to cross a street and put the pedal to the metal in order to get past the crossing before I get there, speeding through an intersection at a ridiculous speed. As the car sped very close to me, I decided to hit its back window with an open hand to tell that "that was not okay". The driver stopped his car in middle of the street, stepped out and shouted "Who are you to touch MY car?!" and then tried to grab my throat, leaving some bruises that I then got documented by a doctor (or nurse, or whatever he was technically). The man had said that I had ran across the street crossing, endangering the traffic, and the police told me we can close the case or they can open a case against me as well. I allowed them to close the case.
Here's the spot where that happened; the car was coming from the direction of the crane, towards the direction where this picture is made from, and I was crossing the nearest crossing in the picture from right to left:
The police is so extremely under-resourced in Finland that I can absolutely understand they are kind of desperate. If they want to have time to investigate murders and other really serious crime, they have to leave something else undone. Or otherwise murderers can just run free. And because they need to choose things to ignore to save their resources, they tend to ignore things that are done by people that they assume don't agree with their political views.
Those things with the two traffic incidents would have folded out differently if I hadn't been an under 30-year-old guy with a long hair and if the the drivers hadn't been middle-aged men in both cases. The police felt like those people were their peers and symphatised with them, so they wanted me to shut up. They also really sympathise with people who drive cars and typically dislike bicyclers. Of course, in the end, that depends on the individual. Each policeman has their own values and chooses what to ignore based on what they find important.
Here's how Finland fares regarding policemen per 100 000 inhabitants:
and here's the same for Germany:
...oh, apparently Germany has cut its police force a LOT. Last time I checked, their number was far over 400.
...and then came Valmet with its Dm6.
And nobody paid anything for the intellectual property. The history of these railbuses is fascinating in how it's a chain of betrayals.
Well, yeah. Up to a point, we do.
But they tend to be based on people knowing that When I say "count the ticket, it's hundreding" in the meaning "lower the flag, it's raining" (based on the Finnish word "laskea" meaning both "count" and "to lower", "lippu" meaning both "ticket" and "flag" and "sataa" being both the partitive form of "hundred" and "it rains", the joke is about the Finnish language having funny homonyms.
And similarly here the arse of the joke is English being funny in having to meanings for the word "come"? It's not usual to make such jokes with words that are actual cognates. They are more usually made with word pairs such as read and read, or read and red. I mean, jokes are goof things to have, but they shouldn't be based on the laughee being ignorant.
What would be a fantastic name for a brothel, however, is this:
Those trains were blatantly copied by another Swedish company, and then that one was again blatantly copied by a Finnish company, leading to the models Dm6 and Dm7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR_Class_Dm7
Zero royalties paid!
I was just talking with a Russian woman I know who always seemed like a decent person.
And then she uttered "there's no leader around who would be better for the Russia than Putin is". I was left gobsmacked. I've still to go back to her and ask how the hell that's supposed to be possible in her opinion. Like, what should some other leader do in order to be even worse than Putin, really? How is killing hundreds of thousands of people, spending all the money saved for the future, torturing people en masse, destroying the own country's economy, and destroying the image of the Russia as a country and Russians as a people in the eyes of other peoples not a problem?
It seems crazy. You cannot really run a country down worse than Putin has done. Or maybe you can, by being a Pol Pot. But is there really a chance that a Pol Pot would somehow manage to seize power in the Russia? Almost anybody is better than Putin. But Russians disagree. They like their Putin the best possible president they have. They say it's sad that they've got nothing better than that asshole, but they still do think he's the best available. They think that if Putin dies, somebody "worse" will replace him. That is utterly moronic.
But shortly put: They don't get their shit together because they don't feel like there is any shit to get together. They've got a leader they like. He's making the Russia strong, and that's what they want. They've got a leader that is doing what they think a Russian leader should be doing. Or, is at least doing stuff more in that direction than anybody else would.
They like Putin. If someone tried hurting him, the whole population would get their shit together to protect him.
ATACMS. Kann man nicht aus einem Schiff schießen. Und viele Panzer. Usw.
Tästä oli siellä täällä muualla tieto, mutta tulipa mieleen, että ehkä on joku tätä tarvitseva, jonka tieto saavuttaa parhaiten Fediversen kautta.
Eli, Interrail-liput ovat tosiaan taas vähän aikaa alennuksessa. Käyttöaikaa 11 kk ostohetkestä.
So, I'm not really sure where to ask properly. So, let's try my luck here :)
A couple of weeks ago, a bunch of games I had been playing on Steam through Proton just abruptly stopped working. I got some to work by adding PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command% in each broken game's launch options. Therefore it has something to do with OpenGL, if I understand correctly.
Some games that were affected were Fallout 3 and Mafia. Now Mafia seems to run without that launch option again, but Fallout 3 still doesn't even launch without it.
If I set that launch option, I get as far as this menu:
...but clicking on Continue or Loading a save crashes the game immediately.
I've been playing Fallout 3 on this machine for over 10 hours just fine, and this problem just appeared one day. Anybody know (or could guess?) what the root cause is and what could be done about it?
Euroopan sivistysmaiden ja Unkarin rautatieyhtiöt ovat näemmä pari vuotta sitten tehneet sopimuksen, nimeltään AJC, jolla määritellään ehdot, joilla matkustaja voi jatkaa toisella junalla ilman isompia byrokratioita, jos hänen aiempi junansa on myöhässä.
Vaatimuksena on, että kyseessä on kansainvälinen yhteys, että sekä saapuva että yhteyttä jatkava juna ovat sopimuksen piirissä ja että jatkojuna on saman firman ajama kuin alunperin suunniteltu jatkojuna.
Oikeus jatkamiseen ei ole automaattinen, vaan asia on käytävä hyväksyttämässä joko aseman asiakaspalvelupisteellä tai jatkojunan konduktööriltä. AJC suojaa siis yhteyden katkeamiselta myös tilanteessa, jossa matkustaja on itse ostanut liput kahtena eri maksutapahtumana, jopa ehkä aivan eri nettisivuilta.
Oheiseen karttaan merkitsin tummansinisellä Euroopan sivistyneet maat sekä Unkarin, eli ne maat, joiden rautatieyhtiöt ovat mukana AJC-sopimuksessa. Puolan kohdalla on hyvä huomioida, että sieltä sopimuksessa on mukana vain PKPIC, mutta toinen melko paljon kaukojunia Puolassa operoiva yhtiö, läänien omistama PR, ei ole AJC-sopimuksessa mukana.
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And, the Latvian language test is hilariously easy. I have learned Latvian and listened to the test material.
In listening comprehension you hear a phone call to a bus station. The worker answering articulates more clearly than anybody ever would.
And then the multiple choice question is:
Where did the caller call?
(I don't remember the other two variants, but the point stands: the question was super easy to answer)
And then, you need to write the first verse of Latvia's anthem, in Latvian. That means having to learn a series if sounds as horribly long as 28 words.
The only way to fail that test is to have a strong principle not to want to learn Latvian or wanting to NOT know the anthem's lyrics.
There are a few more exercises, but all of them are identically ridiculously easy.
It's made so that russophiles will be unable to make themselves fill the test and everyone else will pass with flying colours.
It's the only exam I've ever seen where you need to make an effort in order to fail.