Restrooms along the Norwegian Scenic Routes

I guess I just expect a high baseline from...everything else. It's hard to avoid these days.

It's definitely been increasing compared to what it used to be, but this may also be natural consequence of the fact that big tech itself has become much more "political". It didn't use to be the case that the owners and managers of technology corporations displayed their political preferences quite so brazenly (in the case of Elon Musk, even to the point of taking on a leading government position).

Of course, corporations have always had policy preferences, but those tended to be mostly about taxation and regulation, where debate is less emotionally charged, and compromise is more achievable. These days, though, it seems that tech and political culture have become almost inextricably linked.

Iceland is not Scandinavian, but it is Nordic (as a Scandinavian, English speakers conflating the Nordics and Scandinavia is a pet peeve)

I wish Americans would stop conflating some small part of Europe with the entirety of Europe. Scandinavia is of course within Europe, btw. Things may be handled vastly different depending on where you are in Europe. One small part of it does not define the rest of Europe. This is why you can't really compare "the EU" to "the USA" (Norway, while being part of Europe, is outside the EU btw). Not directly, anyway. Maybe some day, Europe will be much more homogeneous, but for now it's a pretty culturally, politically and economically diverse continent. Some European countries have epic public toilets. Others, not at all. It all depends on which country or culture you visit.

That tracks, I was actually shocked by the state of the average public restroom in Switzerland.

Gas station restrooms in Germany are possibly bearable, but annoying since you need to ask for keys - I have used them about twice in 25 years of driving. Autobahn restrooms are either pretty disgusting or paid.

> Awful everything is an American thing.

There is no need to be like that about it. The free market is going to come along and solve it, any day now.

Isn't this a private gas station? Certainly some brands differentiate on rest room availability and cleanliness (I'm partial to Love's when traveling) but I believe parent was referring to state run rest areas.

Some of the most beautiful English-language writing I've read is describing the interplay of light and shadow under a canopy. This is an area where I think having a single word description is a linguistic loss.

Thanks! I was scrolling for this helpful comment with the link!

Most of Australia does that, TBF.

Yes, there's litter in Australia of course, but most Australians are taught from a young age to leave nothing but footprints and trek out whatever they bring with them when moving about a city, a park, wild areas.

Relative lack of litter and glares from Australians when tossing stuff on ground as a tourist is apparently enough to make a number of those daft "10 things about Australia ..." videos and listicles.

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Only slightly.

The major differentiator for Norway is policy, not oil quantity.

Bad example because that country has been under American economic sanctions for the past 12 years.

If you can't trade with the rest of the world your life gets hard very quickly

The UK had a tiny amount of oil compared to Norway if you adjusted by population so it’s not a fair comparison. Also I’m not sure the share of the revenue the British government was getting was massively much lower than the case in Norway.

To be fair US is extremely rich in other natural resources other than oil. It is not the richest country in the world because Americans are such misers. Norways oil money could go to some Exxon or such and regular Norwegian could live in poverty.

OK, so the US' sovereign wealth fund would be 5-6x less per capita than Norway's, so less effective, but nonetheless capable of benefitting Americans substantially.

Except that ... it doesn't exist, because, from the beginning, we've given it all away to Big Oil, who spend some of it making sure that politicians get elected who keep supporting Big Oil.

So yes, a very fair comparison.

Schindlers List has a scene sort of tile that too.

> In 2019, fossil fuels contributed 48 percent of Norway’s export revenues of around $53 billion. And that number is much, much larger today, thanks to ballooning demand for natural gas in the wake of the Ukraine war.

How do you propose they kill the public company exactly? At least in Australia, govt. revenue is barely reliant on fossil fuels.

Norway is more reliant on oil/gas money than almost every country on Earth. e.g. to its small population it produces significantly more oil per capita than Saudi Arabia. So yeah for instance it is/was way easier for Britain to kill its privatized oil industry.

Should we then also understand that perhaps some struggle to parse https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50324525 ?

A cultural love of the dunny.

eg: https://www.absolutely-australia.com.au/culture-and-history/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_(2006_film)

I Hope Your Chooks Turn Into Emus (and kick your dunny down) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpg22KSrswc

Just as Australians share a love of the BBQ with parts of the USofA.

Of course you can. Your handlers have to know what they’re doing, of course, but the candidate themselves? They don’t even have to be able to speak coherently (Bush II had some issues in that direction, and of course Trump pretty much just babbles nonsense, for hours, and people put up with it).

Exhibit A: George W. Bush

This says more about how much you value intelligence than whether it takes intelligence to get elected in the US.

You obviously can. An EU delegation had to explain the EU to Trump using colored cards as if he was a small child and it took many attempts before he got it. So the deciding quality must be something else.

There's nothing more amusing than watching a butt-hurt thin-skinned Trump cult member lose his shit and pathetically attempt to defend him whenever somebody makes a joke at his expense that's funny because it's true.

Trump's reaction to Robby Roadsteamer singing "Trump went on the Jeffrey Epstein plane" was priceless. If he wasn't on the plane, then why doesn't he release all the Trump-Epstein Files (TM) like he promised?

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2Tj-j9IcdIc

Enjoy the midterm elections, and keep up the performance for our amusement. Now do "Trump's not racist"! Then "Trump's not demented!" Then "Trump's not a rapist!" Then "Trump's not a pedophile!"

I don't disagree, but the name is pretty much where trump gets Norway from. He doesn't comprehend that our heads of states dont have the power to influence this in the first place.

Well, it's a bit more muddled than that, to quote wikipedia:

" Five members are appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. In his will, Alfred Nobel tasked the parliament of Norway with selecting the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. Despite its members being appointed by Parliament, the committee is a private body tasked with awarding a private prize. In recent decades, most committee members were retired politicians. "

IIUC, USA is ~60x more people than Norway.

Increasing the tax rate by ~8x to match Norway would drop 60x to ~8x. What percent of Norway's per capita is from Oil & Gas? I have to imagine that 10% of that is actually still meaningful for an average American.

There's a great TV adaptation of Utvandrarna.

In fact, immigration to Norway from Sweden started already back then. My great great grandfather moved from near Bullaren to Southern Norway in the late 1809's. But then emigrated with most of his family onwards to the US a couple of decades later as Norway was also poor at that time.

What was Norway's way out of the worst of that poverty apart from reduced surplus of people from emigration was shipping, and several of his sons, including my great grandfather ended up working on ships (and my great grandfathers family ended up moving back to Norway, supposedly in part because his wife got tired of the warm summers in Brooklyn...)

> we in Sweden are Norways poles/polacks due to cheap labour from Sweden.

Hopefully you'll be treated "with love" on your binge drinking trip to Gdańsk because simply buying and drinking a bottle of wine is a challenge back home.

The craziest thing is he promised this the last time in some form and these people just … forgot

My parents and inlaws are all in their late 70s/early 80s. Facebook is an amplifier for the cohort in question...it's an addictive product experience delivered to an audience without lifelong training in how to spot memes vs sincerity, ragebait vs news, and now, AI vs reality.

I think the "it's Facebook" crowd are people who either weren't around for or don't remember before then. I don't remember before the "It's fox news" time but I now suspect there was probably something before that too.

I think a lot of it has to do with the young and idealistic clashing against the old and jaded and both groups yelling at strawmen of each other.

There are issues that animate the left that are similarly trivial and en vogue.

How important is it right now to a very vocal group of people that you attach the word genocide to gaza?

Yes, see AfD in Germany, Vox in Spain, …

In the aggregate people are easily manipulated. We've known this since Freud. With mass media and the Citizens United decision, the elite have a much easier time pushing through their agenda. Obviously there is a lot more going on that can't be easily expressed in a brief forum comment, but it's just not true that the electorate is simply morally corrupt.

That is a high expectation of people being driven by predictable human emotions, lacking the ability to think critically through everything in front of them.

The real issue of our media landscape (information feeds controlled by the elite), probably could have been nipped in the bud some years ago but it may be a little too late for that.

The problem is greatly exacerbated by two-party system. If there was a solid third or fourth choice, then at least people wouldn't be given two bad (in their opinion) choices. Many people don't vote at all, being disillusioned with the voting system.

Can we do something about it? The winner-takes-all Electoral College certainly contributes to two-party system [1] and to narrow margins [2]. There are two states who don't do winner-takes-all (Maine and Nebraska), and we can force all states to split their electoral votes.

[1] https://www2.law.temple.edu/lppp/electoral-college-two-party...

[2] https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/108/3/727/11948...

He is not, remotely, “like them all”, and I think if you are dealing with your remorse this way then, respectfully, you have a little more work to do, not least because it will give you the skills to help you negotiate the current moment where the tech industry has some people who are aberrant in similar ways.

The threat posed by Trump to the USA was evident from the day he announced his candidacy. That his whole presidency would one way or another be about his awful approach to immigration and to Ukraine was evident by the time of the Republican National Convention.

That he would try to overturn an election that he lost was evident before he ran for one.

If you cannot see that this man’s essential pathology is dangerous, I worry you cannot see dangerous parallels in several current tech CEOs (at least two, fairly arguably four or five).

There are many bad and crooked politicians; there are many their colleagues hate. Trump is not a crooked politician except as a side effect.

He’s not the same kind of “bad person” at all; most of us never meet anyone as dangerous.

I think you do need to recognise that you (and don’t get me wrong, millions of others!) voted for someone who is essentially evil (in the literary sense of evil). And really you should have been able to see it, because it wasn’t that hidden.

It shouldn’t stop you voting again because genuinely so few people are like him, though he has found fellow travellers in this administration. (Notably RFK Jr — a shockingly awful man)

But it would be healthy to look at what it was that let you look past his evil.

He is much more full of shit.

Spoken from a place of true entitlement. Voting is a luxury some of the poorest can't afford, and the republicans have made sure to make it even more difficult now that the supreme court gutted the civil rights act.

I'm guessing you'd have a different opinion if you personally had to wait in line for HOURS because the Rs in your district closed down voting stations specifically to make it nearly impossible to actually vote in precincts that are predominantly liberal or people of color. And it has only gotten worse and more widespread since 2020.

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/17/924527679/why-do-nonwhite-geo...

Remember that the republicans have made it very difficult to vote in a lot of states (huge lines, hurdles, etc.) such that only their demographic has time to vote.

This is why they are so against mail voting. It levels the playing field.

To be fair it's a non-political post with a political title which invited a conversation/argument completely unrelated to the contents. I'm not against politics here but this is exactly the low quality flame bait that this site would be better without.

Except for all the canceled projects like returning samples from Mars.

It's honestly somewhat refreshing. Politicians are all sociopaths who say all the right things while keeping their true thoughts secret. Trump calls other countries shitholes, and that's actually what he thinks. No doubt it's a diplomatic nightmare but I can't help but muster a small amount of respect for the sheer brazenness of it.

It's a reaction to President Trump's latest remarks. Listen to it straight from the horse's mouth: https://www.bluewin.ch/en/news/international/trump-rants-abo...

"Norway has become a shithouse country, actually"

He served a couple of terms as one of a dozen Deputy Chairmen of the State Duma (an administrative rather than leadership role), and got single digit percentage vote shares on the five occasions he ran for President.

So, yes, he was a thuggish populist troll, and I agree that his mode of operation was often comparable to that of Trump. But he never had power, and never came close to getting it.

For that reason, I think most would see Trump as being in a completely different league.

Weird to assume it was forced.

More lies. Not forced. Inappropriate? Extremely.

And how does that compare with the Epstein level shenanigans of trump? The cheating on all his wives? The banging of a p0rn star with no protection? Grab them by … all these rape accusations?