Dutchman here. Our government has been systematically gutting funding for public transport. I have to extend my commute from 40 minutes to 2 hours if I want to take public transport. It’s also unreliable and outrageously expensive since they run it through the “free market”.
Fuck cars but there’s also no way in hell I will sell my car before they introduce some massive changes to our public transport.
I used to live there back in 2015. What’re the prices for intercity trains these days? I remember NL trains being very cheap (€20 Amsterdam to Mastricht). Here in the UK is £50 from Cambridge to London (roughly a ⅓ the distance) so I hope you’re still doing better than here
With that said, I hope you get some more green/left types in government this time around. I’m watching your election closely from here!
Yes of course long term we will need to get rid of privately owned (but not shared) cars, but time is far in the future. Even here in NL the infrastructure just isn’t there for it. Yet.
And we have no real government at the moment, and god help us with the elections coming up.
Which is why shared cars as opposed to everyone or every household owning one makes sense. You’ll be more thoughtful of when you need it rather than using it because it’s always there.
This creates availability issues for me and demand of cars issues for the market which translate immediately in loss of jobs for those who work in the sector, even mechanics and the ones who change your tires. Also the sentence “you’ll be more thoughtful of when you need it” doesn’t make sense. If I need it and it’s not there what am I supposed to do? Oh, well I should have thought about it. How could I know when I needed it? And I’m not too fond of people in general. Having some stranger drive my, ehm, our car? No.
Mechanics are going to be downsized with all the EV sales anyway. They just don’t need as much maintenance. I have had a Chevy Bolt since 2018. I haven’t had any routine maintenance, and I’ve just had to take the thing to the dealership once for a major recall, where they just flashed the BIOS. Admittedly, I don’t drive near as much as I used to, I’ve only put 60,000 miles on the ODO so far.
That leaves out a ton of people from dealerships to engineers, from body repairs shops to carwashes, from manufacture to after market components. And we’ve got two cars per household. Let’s see how it goes with a quarter or less that. No.
I love statements like this. It’s basically someone just deciding that gravity is inconvenient, so it won’t apply to them.
The world is on fire dude, and the only way it doesn’t get worse (we’re not even talking about fixing it at this point) is to dramatically change the way we live. Private car ownership is a big part of that. Your preference for living in a way incompatible with life on the planet does not entitle you to it.
But here’s the good news: you can still have a private car. You can even live in a distant suburb and the car can run on gasoline… but you’re going to have to pay for it. And you’re going to pay the actual cost to society for that preference, so it’s going to be very, very expensive.
Or you know, you can just take the train and plan your roadtrip holidays in advance.
Let’s share everything then: PCs, pianos, houses. No, a car is something too personal to be shared. I smoke, the stranger doesn’t what happens? Or vice versa. He breaks the car who pays? Legal disputes. I need the car he’s using it, what am I to do? It can work for workers from the same office. One car brings 4, it’s ok. Other than that, forget about it. Not to mention the economics at play. A whole industry would collapse. If there’s something I learned in this life is that money comes before everything else. Trying to save this planet as I watch more and more people install AC in their house is hilarious. Colder for you, hotter for everyone else. And the planet. We’ll never save ourselves. There’ll be harsh selection. And lastly, if even EVs are a problem I dunno what else to try. Public transport doesn’t get everywhere, it never will, so it’s not a solution. Oh, and we’re not talking about gravity.
The sharing concept is more like a Uber type deal, there is always a car available sort of thing. It’s not really a sharing with a neighbor or family member type thing where you are SOL if the shared car is not in your driveway.
It’s not a conflict of interest to report on something you have a financial stake in? Just because the stock is at $60 doesn’t mean you wouldn’t profit if it went to $80.
Such a small amount of money is easily explainable in the journalistic report. In fact, I did so right now. “In order to gain access to this event and be allowed the provelidge to ask follow up questions, this reporter was forced to buy one stock of Shell at $60 a share. I did my best to not let this influence my journalism in any way.”
It’s proper that a journalist should put a disclaimer in their article, stating the conflict of interest. That does not mean the conflict of interest is suddenly done away with - it’s still there.
Having a conflict of interest also doesn’t mean the person cannot be trusted. However buying shares in the company you’re reporting on would be introducing a significant doubt that isn’t really worth the minimal benefits they’d get from attending shareholder meetings.
My guy buying one share of a company to gain access to a stockholder only event is not a conflict of interest. Think about it critically for any length of time and you’ll realize this.
Mate, it’s called a conflict of interest. By owning a share in the company, you have an interest in the company’s success, and therefore an inherent bias in any reporting you do. You might not act on that bias, but it’s still there - and most importantly for journalists it’s perceptible to any and every reader.
I’m sure most journalists would not let it influence them. However the issue is it affects the quality of their writing towards their audience. It’s not about whether or not they will act on their bias, but their appearance of bias.
Ultimately, it’s just not worth the hassle. Otherwise we would already have journalists doing this - just because Shell are no longer letting journalists into shareholder meetings doesn’t mean it’s a new thing.
You’re not arguing against me thinking this isn’t a good idea, you’re arguing against the entire journalism industry thinking that.
It’s not a conflict of interest if you buy a share as part of the investigation, literally I have no clue how to tell you this in any other way. If you need to own a share to ask questions, it is only proper to buy a share and ask the questions. You are the reason journalism is dying.
The reason you buy it does not matter. Owning a share in a business you’re reporting on is a de facto conflict of interest. You merely saying it isn’t does not make your statement true. Coming up with excuses for why it was bought doesn’t either. A good journalist will at least still declare their conflicts of interest, but that declaration does not dispell it.
If only reporters had some way of telling readers about their potential conflicts of interest. Like, I don't know, telling readers you had to buy shares to participate and report on it? But that just seems to crazy to exist....
I didn’t say it would invalidate their reporting, but even with a disclaimer the conflict of interest is still there and still undermines the article. A report without the conflict of interest is always better.
Is that really worth it, just to go to their shareholder meeting and try to turn it into a mini press conference? I think most professional journalists would say no.
American oil and gas companies ExxonMobil and Chevron also don’t hold press conferences
I mean, I’m sure they’ve thought about this with regards to these other companies, yet we don’t have journalists buying shares to report on them. Maybe I’ve not hit the nail with their exact reasoning, but whatever their reasoning is no one in the industry seems to think it’s a good idea.
Yeah, I’ve read a bit more on it, and it’s not good. The regulations haven’t been changed since 1985, they need to be reformed with more power given to individuals.
Problem is most people buy shares from intermediaries where you don’t actually get registered as a shareholder with the company.
Shell's kind of got a point that the purpose of the shareholder meetings isn't to create a forum for political activists, but to report to shareholders how the company is doing. I mean, it's going to be disruptive to them doing that, because they've got a finite amount of time for that.
If you buy a share of an oil company specifically because you don't like oil companies and want to show up at the shareholder meeting and complain about oil companies, the shareholders who are interested in the thing as a business probably aren't going to appreciate it much.
If shareholders were saying "I don't agree with the CEO pay package" or something, okay, that's within the realm of the company's operations.
I'd also add that if you don't want oil extraction, Shell isn't the party to talk to, even via another route than shareholder's meetings. Shell is gonna do what regulators permit if it makes financial sense for Shell. You aren't gonna convince Shell otherwise. If you want to say "no crude oil extraction", then you want to talk to regulators and lawmakers, not to the companies operating within the bounds that they set. Hell, even if you did convince Shell, it'd just mean that another oil company would step in to do the same.
If crude oil extraction causes problems to people other than Shell or Shell customers, then that's an externality, and internalizing that is what regulators are there for. That's not the job of companies.
I’m not sure if we are on the same side, and honestly in this case it doesn’t matter, since you are right: a corporation only has to care about the externalities as much as they are forced to and not even an inkling more than that.
People who think that an enterprise in a free market will respond to any other force than economic force are wasting activism time that could be better used elsewhere.
If you want a corporation to stop performing a socially harmful business, you need to make that business unprofitable.
I agree with your sentiment, but I wouldn’t call activism (and especially not journalism) a wasted effort in that regard. Bringing issues to light is the first step in creating a visible dent in the balance sheets. Public perception shapes consumer behavior to some degree and can put pressure on lawmakers to introduce legislation against harmful conduct. On the other hand, if the general public only hears the company’s side of the story underlining how clean and ethical they are, there will never be any pressure for change.
Again though, Shell aren’t going to push for that. Their beneficiaries aren’t either, unless the rest of us make it untenable for legislators to fail to ban such donations.
Translation: We’re making sooo much money off the backs of the suckers we employ that we’re concerned of the backlash if they found out just how bad we’re screwing them.
I think this is quite a common criticism to have, but a top-100 uni like this probably profits from keeping the status quo. Takes a bit of courage to step up.
Not courage, but integrity. It’s easy to criticize anything, if you don’t have to pay any price. You can either cuddle yourself comfortly in your nice words or act on them, but only the latter is what counts.
Yes, in the business world this often comes with the Icarus paradox, a phenomenon that eventually leads to a business’s failure by the very elements that brought its temporary success before.
MedUni near me used to be like that, which ended up deteriorating the quality of doctors they put out so considerably, the hospitals in the country that historically would employ the graduates coming out of there instantly, were starting to hire primarily elsewhere.
They since switched to being far less "churning out papers" focused and putting a lot of time and effort in applicable research and experience training and that turned everything around again.
Their ranking on that shitlist Times puts out dropped (considerably) as a result, yet the request from foreign students to study there surged.
Your reputation in your region and sector is still more important than some fictitious score some media outlet gives you.
How do you rank research output consistently. Every university is expected to create their own exam content, how do you effectively measure education attainment across universities?
Push for research outputs can also create perverse incentives for rapid publishing in whatever is considered quality journals - which are usually themselves associated with universities - rather than the pursuit of quality research and academic integrity.
It leads to increased strain on researvhers and a unfruitful obsession with any kind of academic output that can be easily counted. Of course research outputs are inherently important, but the whole academic publishing industry has just gotten weird the last decade or so.
A university I know of brought in a policy of only two terms for postdocs, so regardless of where they were in their research, they either had to become a lecturer or move on.
The reason behind this was to bring new postdocs in. Not to increase the quality of the research, but because it was a very effective way of opening up access to new funding streams.
These funding streams are of course very time limited and commercially driven, so what normally happens is some half assed piece of work is produced, with possibly an attempt to monetised and then more often than not discarded. Actually producing work that furthers an academic field seems to be very much down the list of priorities…
The "integrity" part is a very valid criticism. A big part of these rankings is how many papers the faculty publish per year. So you see a lot of higher ranked universities' professors adding their names to a lot of reasearches where they didn't really do anything except review/advise.
Good someone , i.e. Utrecht, started to bail out of the current ranking system. Continental Universities are hard to compare with British & American ones, afaik. The teacher- student contact is more on the foreground compared to the latter.
Ergo, if teachers need to write papers all the time to maintain ranking, they’ll have actually less time to bother with teaching and maintaining contact with students progress & question. Imo, this is a very important element in (higher) education. *Edit
Did you not read the article and just react based off what you think is in it? What they are protesting is the relocation of the red light district to outside the city
The Dutch are about the least afraid-of-sex people there are. It sounds like the mayor is corrupt and developers want the land (which is prime real-estate right near the central train station) for luxury Russian oligarch stolen-loot banking schemes, which is pretty much what the central city of every major European capital is used for these days.
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