𝕮𝕬𝕭𝕭𝕬𝕲𝕰

We have the benefit of a private education system whose primary output is financiers and politicians - give the septics time to figure it out.

One of my go-to pizzas back in the day was sweetcorn, pineapple, and black olives.

I love traditional pizza, but sometimes, you want to get your freak on.

It’s mildly infuriating that I don’t have this slce of pickle pizza in my mouth right now.

Honestly I don’t know enough about the way that it’s run to give a correct answer!

I mean even pre-privatisation the rail service was being reduced (Beeching’s cuts etc.) so there’s clearly a cultural element at a government level, but the actual running of the rail firms is pretty opaque; there’s a lot of subcontracting, and the profitability is high, with reinvestment in the railway services not being proportional to that. I suspect that the culture around rinsing public services for private gain isn’t quite so dominant in Japan, but again, I couldn’t comment on that really.

We also have relatively old infrastructure, comparably narrow gauge railways that we would struggle to update because the country was built up around it, but this might be a bit of an old-fashioned take. I’m sure some transport historians could set me right!

Wait until you hear about the UK! I own the freehold to my land, but technically it’s gramted by the crown, so I could in theory at any moment have my home taken from me.

I think people forget that many of the highways in The West™ were created as part of glorified jobs programs too.

These projects run like utter shit now in places where work is tendered out to corporations now of course, because they’re being driven by private bodies whose sole motivation is profit, not the creation of useful infrastructure. In my own country HS2 is a beautiful example of this.

Fixing things is nearly always cheaper than buying new

This really depends on what you’re fixing. My laptop has a crap battery. To buy a new one is a few hundred quid. Plus various proprietary/niche screw bits. Plus the time to actually do it.

An equivalent new laptop is fractionally more expensive, and I can have it delivered to my home, freeing up the time element.

Tomfix my bicycle? I might need some internal components for my brifters; cheap AF and I know what I’m doing (and where to buy from). New shifters several orders of magnitude more expensive.

Or tubular!