Parking is only expensive if you’re not a resident there. It’s also easier to travel by public transit to and fro in and around Amsterdam.

'sides, the 30 km/h is good for safety in pedestrian areas. So I feel like this measure actually improves general wellbeing.

A livable city is a city of pedestrians, bicyclists, and public transit. Cars should only be necessary for ambulances, firetrucks, police, and transport. (And while we’re at it, kick out those disgusting American monster trucks!).

Now, the housing affordability, that one’s a great and valid concern - I think we should allow squatting if people keep it clean, and push away from people owning several homes to rent at extortionate rates. We’ll need to encourage building in a lot more towns and mid-sized villages around, instead of only in the Randstad. If we want the NL to be balanced and prepared for sea level rise, we better gotta build in the south and east.

On the sex level, I disagree with Halsema’s proposal to move out the prostitution to a remote area which may be less safe for them. I think it’s better to coordinate w/ the prostitutes etc themselves to increase safety w/o laying foundations for surveillance states.

Balkanise Russia instead

UK are participating in terrorism now, aren’t they? They should jail & reform apartheid defenders instead.

There is a European alternative to Visa/Mastercard! It’s Wero.

Oh definitely, she’s an enabler. What we need to do, as leftists, is to look at WHAT the fascists are doing to win votes, and use their own tactics but tweaked for the left.

See: Yesilğoz, a Turkish liberal politician who betrayed the Socialist Party to work for the corrupt, big company party (VVD), and now clails to be a minister, despite effectively calling Douwe Bob’s refusal to have a pro-Israeli concert, “a normalisation of Jew hatred”.

Fuck her, she’s not my minister. And when Douwe Bob got death threats due to HER words, she refused to cave in until the latest moment. Fuck that piss minister, bought by Israel’s genocidal lobby.

I hate her and I think she is actively enabling antisemitism and fascism. And she indeed is! She tried to proclaim that antifascism is a danger.

Fascists never tell you they become fascist. They start with declaring an enemy. And let us then make sure they will regret that, and reform to be good citizens.

Sadly so far only Belgium, Germany, and France. Why those already managed to put in Wero while the rest hasn’t, is beyond me.

Are there actual, practical reasons? Or are other countries’ governments being lobbied too hard to not put through with Wero?

iDEAL from what I know is basically Wero, just local. So you’re already kind of using it, if you do so.

fascist*

Should also add that a lot of libertarians in reality tend to be more of the “I want the freedom to repress others” people, eg wanting homeschooling (which can increase abuse), opposing measures that would improve every person’s quality of life (such as universal healthcare) etc.

Anarchists on the other hand, tend to be more often on the socialist or communist kind, in where they favour the abolition of hierarchy and thus favour an egalitarian society, by abolition of private (but not personal) property.

Rutte cozies way too much up to Trumpler.

Who was the journalist? Is there film evidence?

Doubt it’s that expensive. A locker can be made for like $500. But then you’re thinking of sheds with a simple lock. If you want something actually safe, you’d need a bike garage, and those can go up to like $4k a piece., or $5k if we’re counting cargo bikes.

To install them, you need labour as well. Assuming a $40/hr wage (could arguably be higher, depending on source), and a team of 8 people doing this for 8 hours a day, that’s $2,560 a day for labour in total. Two isolate the area, keep the area clean, two drill holes in pavement and breaks up stuff so the boxes can get in there, two transport the materials, and two assemble.

So, assuming 4 boxes a day of $5,000 each, so it’s now about $22,560 in total per day (wages included). Let’s assume $22,500 here per day. 500 lockers divided by 4 (amount installed per day) then yields 125 days (4 months, 3 days) to install all of them. Thus, that’s $2,812,500 in total.

But we’ll also need permits. The build plan needs to be assessed for transparency, environment, construction drawings, and the impact for the neighbourhood. It’s complicated, but let’s say $500 per balcony-like area (a balcony being about as big as one of those 3-bike boxes). So that’s $250,000 in total for the permits.

We then end up with a total cost of 3,062,500, or let’s call it 3,100,000. Because building often has additional hidden costs and maintenance, I’m assuming 1/3 extra, so it’s even better when it turns out to cost less. Then we end up with about $4,000,000, or $0.45 per NYC inhabitant.

Even if wages were $250/hr, it’d end up costing only $36,000 a day total (labour+construction), and thus totals $4,750,000 (including permit). Hidden costs, delays and maintenance included, that’s $6,175,000 in total, a fraction of the $25,000,000 that is claimed, with 6 months build time in total (the 2 extra months are part of this ‘extra cost’ if that happens).

This would mean all of the 500 boxes cost less than a dollar for all NYC inhabitants in total!

That while it gives much more freedom in the form of bicycles. There are no additional fuel costs, yearly checkups, and so on, and you get fitter and stronger, thus reducing your healthcare costs. Bikes literally make you richer.

As a Dutch person, my recommendation:

get a folding bike. They’re pretty cheap and useful primarily for biking a few km.

Alternatively, get an omafiets, make it look rusty and shoddy, but give it a few distinct characteristics so you can recognise it easily when stolen. Nobody wants to steal a bike that doesn’t look valuable, and yet is recognisable. You can also twist how it steers, takes training to bike on it, but thieves will always fall.

Netherlands; Nordics, but especially Norway, for nature.

No thanks. I’m not gonna help the car lobby create arguments to limit our freedom and shove off the ‘guilt’ of accidents on us.

Never fell, the single most common cause of bicycle accidents are car drivers – especially drunk ones who speed. You ain’t gonna protect against that with a helmet.

No we don’t need helmets. Cars must be kicked out of the bicycle’s areas instead. Fuck that carbrained propaganda.

Electric bicycles are popular and encouraged. Fatbikes however, have often caused much more accidents on account of their popularity among the youth for being;

1. cheap (not the issue, but it explains their abundance)
2. easy to jailbreak their speed limit
3. hard to brake and steer

They’re also imho ugly, but that aside. I would probably mandate they can only drive on new lanes for speed pedelecs & fatbikes, and make it much harder to jailbreak their speed limit (should also happen for cars). It’ll help motorbikes and scooters become less common.

Nokia has some!