Living in the area at the height of the protests, so I can fill in.
Some of the reasons: many people (including experts) argued that the project could have been done for half the price with almost the same effect by upgrading the existing station above ground instead of building an entirely new underground station, for example. Costs kept increasing – nothing new for big public infra projects, of course. But when a multi-billion euro project slowly triples its budget, people start asking questions.
That way it also took away funding from other smaller necessary projects. One should consider here that DB (railway operator) has been shutting down smaller, rural lines for decades making it harder and harder to rely on them, when you don't live on the main intercity network.
There were ecological concerns about the planned changes to Stuttgart's inner city layout and how it affects the already bad micro climate.
Plus there was a general sense of the project being pushed through by stubborn DB officials and state government as a kind of vanity project despite the aforementioned concerns. They acted completely tone-deaf to the protests and in one instance used excessive police force to crush a peaceful assembly. Just altogether bad topics, which did not make the project more popular.
I would add that the train station part freed up a lot of prime real estate in Stuttgart's city center by moving the railways, and the station, underground. I always had the impression that played a big role for everyone involved (DB, the city, politicians,...) in the decision to not budge on the train station part. The rest of Stuttgart 21, all the new tunnels and bridges and railway lines, are quite reasonable IMHO.
> Plus there was a general sense of the project being pushed through by stubborn DB officials and state government as a kind of vanity project despite the aforementioned concerns.
A public referendum was held in 2011. 58.9% voted for the project to be continued.
A state-wide referendum was held on the entire project, including the hundreds of kilometers of new tracks, tunnels, and bridges, a long-distance station for the Stuttgart airport, and a new station on the Swabian alb. There was never a referendum only on the new main station.
Says the person with free time to write, freedom to express an opinion, food in their belly, shelter, hot water, a computer in their pocket, access to a free vaccine, yada yada yada.
What the parent comment describes is what people who aren't capable of material or intellectual contribution do to products to create the illusion of value where none exists, or to manipulate users into paying as much as possible regardless of the effective value of the product.
This stifles development of things that are actually useful. It puts money and influence in the hands of people who shouldn't have either, creating bad incentives in the market and within the company. It gives marketing a gloss of false legitimacy, allowing for all the things that have us in a feverish race to the bottom.
Everything you just touted has been achieved despite the Idiocracy fan-fic that seems to be the current mission statement of corporate America.
> It is the most successful social welfare system ever implemented, saving billions and billions of dollars for everyday Americans without costing taxpayers a dime. It is a testament to the power of compounding interest, to the power of a focused plan executed violently for decades.
A social welfare plan? Are you for real?
Both Walmart and Amazon are pioneers of modern union busting practices. They screw workers over as much as they can get away with to squeeze out the maximum amount of labour. Instead of writing this you could as well spit in the face of working class people.
The premise of this article so willfully ignorant of material reality, that it is impossible to take this serious.
I was once a happy employee of Sam's Club, which is owned by Walmart. They paid more than other jobs available to me, I was provided a 15 minute break every two hours, good times.
I didn't feel like anyone was spitting in my face when I read the article.
FWIW, Starbucks copied its profit sharing (and other ideas) from Sam Walton. Walton's bio pop biz book was widely read (early 90s). Starbucks was considered very progressive for the time (by us "carpet walkers", what the blue collar workers called us office workers). Lot's of happy worker bees.
But at some point, Walmart took a hard turn to the right.
And to my own shame, I didn't understand how anti-labor Starbucks was at the time. There was always grumblings and heresay. It was easy to dismiss as sour grapes and cranks. Then Schultz became a candidate for President and all the knives came out.
Moving forward, I just want what's fair. I don't understand how it's okay for the top of the heap to become billionaires while the minions are making starvation wages. It doesn't have to be 50/50 even split of the spoils. But upgrading from 1/99 to 10/90 or even 20/80 would materially improve the lives of millions of people.
The median wealth in the US is $70k. The ratio is more like 1/100,000 for your average billionare, and 1/10,000,000 for zuckerberg, gates, and bezos. In this scheme 1/99 would be downright communistic.
They could have afforded to pay you more, but they chose not to. You may or may not have been an outlier in the distribution of wages, but overall wages have not increased with productivity.
This is literally true for anyone who has savings above subsistence. We could all afford to pay people more or we would have no surplus in our bank account.
I mean, you can spin it the way the author does. But those maximised supply chains are also really good at killing small business, and historically, small business has been a lot more important to free western societies than major companies with perfect supply chains.
So you could also spin it as corporate slavery for all the people living paycheck to paycheck that are unable to ever break that cycle because it’s impossible to build something that would compete with Amazon.
You can really spin the Amazon story whichever way you want. Over all, monopolies tend to be a net negative for society though.
I think he is referring to some studies that suggested Walmart's presence lowered the living costs of low income families by $1k-$2k due to the availability of lower priced food and goods compared to the smaller shops available prior to Walmart's rise.
I don't think he is referring to the workers, and I agree calling it a welfare system is a bit silly and an overreach, but he is trying to say that it had an impact on household expenditure.
> Walmart's presence lowered the living costs of low income families by $1k-$2k
These studies are useless in isolation. If the super-optimisation of production and supply chains (less factory workers, drivers, other lower skilled labour) and moving production to lower cost economies (far, far less factory jobs) also reduced the average income, then the benefits are far less clear, and may disappear altogether.
Nothing happens in a vacuum. If the people who are supposedly benefiting from these low prices are the same people who lost their jobs to the MNCs in the first place, I doubt they're feeling all that grateful.
But the people negatively affected are few compared to those positively affected.
note: I don't actually buy into this idea that these so called positives are worth the cost. I believe we would be better off and happier if we still had the small businesses that were displaced.
of course as the middle-class is vanishing the correspondence is perhaps not as valid as before, but everyday Americans would once have been understood as a reference to middle-class Americans.
When you have a random variable with log-normal distribution, such as income or wealth, unless the fundamental mechanism is changed to be additive (normal) instead of multiplicative (log-normal), you'll end up with the bulk of people at the low end of that curve. The existence of a large middle class was an anomaly.
Agreed 100% -> Both Walmart and Amazon are pioneers of modern union busting practices. They screw workers over as much as they can get away with to squeeze out the maximum amount of labour. Instead of writing this you could as well spit in the face of working class people.
History of taking advantage of people and the country
It’s completely naive and overwrought, however I think it’s quite arguable that Walmart and Amazon have done a lot for society in terms of passing down cost savings and customer satisfaction. This is why they have been successful. This is at the price of how they treat their labor, which is a political failure of the USA.
This isn’t too different from much of modern capitalism: globalized cheap labor with poor conditions and limited collective bargaining power makes your phone, textiles, and appliances.
I see corporatism as passing down costs and not savings.
What costs have gone down over time? The highest expenditures I think for most people are housing, healthcare, education? What percentages have they been driven down by our system?
Food? According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, prices for food were 769.75% higher in 2020 versus 1962 (founding of Walmart).
What's up with that weird tangent about feminism? It's not like no feminist ever noticed the bottled-up toxic masculinity in some gaming communities and started analysing that.
Do more sports is definitely one of the more naive "solutions" I've come across.
You'd have a hard time arguing that breaking GDPR is the only way to stay in business. There are enough compliant news websites to undermine that argument.
Nix contributor here. You are completely right, that is missing. Unfortunately the documentation is somewhat fragmented and its structure makes it quite hard to find relevant information, especially to newcomers.
We started to work on making official guides for common Nix tasks, about how to get a development environment set up, how to build a Docker image… focus is on the DevOps side at the moment, not so much on the desktop user, as we see that as the most valuable use case. This is part of the work of the NixOS marketing team to facilitate adoption of Nix into the mainstream.
Have a look at https://nix.dev/ for the first guides being worked on – pretty barebones so far, but we are aware and working on it.
You can get pretty far with a statically typed, purely functional language. For example, Elm's package manager enforces semantic versioning: https://elm-lang.org/
Yes, cyclists should not run red lights. But we need to improve cycling infrastructure a lot. Right now there is a lot of incentive to break the rules in small ways here and there, because the situation is pretty bad.
There are quite a few places in my city, where I have no idea what the legal way to get from one side of a large road to the other. Sure you can always act like either a car or a pedestrian, but that is either dangerous or slow. For example, I find it quite unfair, that many left turns require me to either ride between cars or stop twice.
Some bike paths just look like the planners reserved space at the roadsides and simply skipped coming up with a solution at the intersection. And that is frankly disappointing.
Some of the reasons: many people (including experts) argued that the project could have been done for half the price with almost the same effect by upgrading the existing station above ground instead of building an entirely new underground station, for example. Costs kept increasing – nothing new for big public infra projects, of course. But when a multi-billion euro project slowly triples its budget, people start asking questions.
That way it also took away funding from other smaller necessary projects. One should consider here that DB (railway operator) has been shutting down smaller, rural lines for decades making it harder and harder to rely on them, when you don't live on the main intercity network.
There were ecological concerns about the planned changes to Stuttgart's inner city layout and how it affects the already bad micro climate.
Plus there was a general sense of the project being pushed through by stubborn DB officials and state government as a kind of vanity project despite the aforementioned concerns. They acted completely tone-deaf to the protests and in one instance used excessive police force to crush a peaceful assembly. Just altogether bad topics, which did not make the project more popular.