The Eurobean Mind Cannot Comprehend

eugene171@lemmy.world to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 490 points –
119

Oh, the entire continent is fair game?

5 days 20 hours to drive from bottom of Panama to top of Alaska

Oh the entire continent is fair game

Don't make me post a journey from County Cork to Vladivostok you daftie 😂

That spans multiple continents. The pan american highway, if it weren't for a small gap in panama, would be over 20,000 km.

It would have been a continent and a whatever Central America was when I was in school but the younguns nowadays tell me that Central America is included in North America now. And most of South America seems to think that North and South America are all one continent. If we went with that we could make a really long transcontinental path.

Continents are inherently arbitrary and have always been so. We divide north and south America by an impenetrable jungle that even drug smugglers cross by boat. Similarly, for the last few hundred years Europe doesn't think that they can get past the Turks.

Vladivostok is Asia imo. East of the Urals/Turkey is Asia by most definitions.

Eurasia is one continent

186 hours to Magadan. 22 hours more than to Vladivostok.

Not from County Cork, but from Zapolarny to Magadan:

Route to Magadan is usually longer

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OP said eurobean. As far as I know, Europe is a continent. Anyway, borders are meaningless.

Someone show this pale blue dot to Isreal, Palestine, Russia, and Ukraine, stat! /s

All I'm saying is, if we're comparing data we gotta at least keep the confounding variables consistent. Not that it matters, it's literally a bean meme lol.

I'm not sure why you included Ukraine or Palestine as if they chose what happened to them.

Geology says Eurasia is continent

except that's not the continent, that's all within the EU, which is equivalent to the USA.

The uncomfortable truth is that the US isn't special, and you can't use the size of it to justify things being shit.

The EU is not at all equivalent to the USA. The US federal government has a looot more power than the EU and the states a lot less autonomy than EU countries. Also, culture is more homogeneous across the US than across the EU.

Also, the US is 9.14 million sq. km of land, whereas the EU is 4.29 million sq. km of land

EU is still smaller

But the main reason the US can't handle the same stuff at a federal level that the EU can is population density. The US government can't afford to nationalize rural healthcare given how rural the US can be--especially with their debt/GDP at the moment. Give it another few hundred years and the US might catch up to Europe in that respect.

I just learned the Faroe Islands is connecting all their islands (Exploring New Road Tunnels and Power Generation in Faroese Islands). Even to islands that only have 500 people living there.

I don't see why the USA couldn't increase its railway (hell, you can learn from Japan if it needs to be earthquake resistant) starting today.

That's fascinating, and I agree with you. Why the US hates the idea of high-speed rail is beyond me, especially because they prided themselves so much on the rail system they put together earlier in their development. In any case, the US can't do much of anything with its debt-to-GDP as high as it is right now. They can hardly keep from shutting the government down entirely because they won't even agree to a government budget.

Counterpoint: all countries in the European case are in the Schengen area, and you can make the entire journey without ever having to take your passport out of your pocket. The same cannot be said in the American case.

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If we're staying on land within the Schengen Area, from the sea in southwest Portugal, all the way to just before the Estonian-Russian border at Narva is 2 days. And it's Schengen the whole way there, so no border checks anywhere on the way.

Is this something people actually do? I know here in the states we have the cannonball run. I doubt people actually drive the whole route very often.

It’s conceivable as an adventure trip or if a Portuguese wanted to see Northern lights. But I guess the trip NY–LA is way more common.

The States’ population centers are on the far edges of the continent. That’s not the case in Europe, where they’re more evenly distributed.

There's a blog/website about the logistics.

People have certainly done it. You can ship a vehicle around the Darien gap. Or potentially sell one car and buy another one (probably pay some customs duties).

This is shitposting

Oh I was genuinely curious if people drive across Europe like this often.

No they don’t. It’s super far. If one did it would be to move but without paying for a moving service or for some very long road trip like an entire summer

Holy shit, i just took that same freaking screenshot..

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The Eurobean Mind Cannot Comprehend

Cannot comprehend miles? Yeah, use a measurement system that makes sense!

What's so hard to comprehend? 4 inches to a hand, 3 hands to a foot, and 5280 feet to a mile. It's a straightforward pattern!

(I hope it's not needed, but this is definitely sarcasm)

Everybody loves those explicit sarcasm indicators. Really makes the whole joke hit harder.

Statute mile is based on 1000 paces, and came from Roman soldiers marking that distance on roads. The pace is related to height, and people used to be shorter on average.

Nautical mile is based in the circumference of the earth, with 1 nautical mile being 1 minute of one degree

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My mind can't comprehend those walking and biking numbers. The walking is about 70 miles a day. That's more than double the average distance of a one day ultra marathon done everyday for a month and a half. The biking distance is about 255 miles a day. Roughly 2.5x the average daily distance for the Tour de France. I want to meet the people who can do that.

Google maps doesn't account for breaks. They're assuming you can walk at 3mph, and however much time you need to rest and eat is up to you.

Just like 1 day and 23 hours is only drive time. They're not accounting for the naps that you will definitely need.

Yep, doing that drive in that time would essentially require at least two people taking shifts driving - or one dangerous madman on some kind of drugs.

This is why the Cannonball Run was created

It takes me 20 minutes to walk one mile at a normal pace. That would mean walking pretty much the whole 24 hours.

The real thing that breaks the Euro mind about this is that you go all that way and cross 3 rails, all quite close together all things considered

#america

if you are on an expressway, and often roads smaller, usually grade crossings are avoided if possible. either the rail is on a bridge, and the road dips under, or the road is on a bridge and crosses the rail. it won't show as a hazard on the route in either of those cases.

It's also insanely inconsistent about showing them depending on zoom level when you look at the same route

I was just making a joke at our piss poor rail systems expense

You are still not wrong about our rail system, god forbid a passenger train hold up a freight train for one second, won't someone think of the shareholders???

It's cause on that route the rails are over/under passes

Try getting from one side of NYC to the other.

Two days is child's play.

Take the L train like everybody else.

Or the E if you’re uptown

The L train smells funny.

Move to another car?

Anyway, you get used to it. Subway smell is part of nyc life

E doesn’t even go north of 53rd st, not even reaching Central Park and thinking you’re uptown hurts to think about.

I said uptown, not Connecticut, Lol

Where you goin’?

But why does the train take twice as long?

Most railways are privately owned by freight companies which passenger trains must also use. Because of this, freight trains always get priority for using the rail first while passenger trains have to wait for the line to clear before proceeding.

47 hours isn't so bad. I drove San Fran CA to Charlotte NC once and it took 69 hours with stops for sleep included.

But, your core point is still valid, I've kinda always wondered that too. I guess the other replyee explained it, freight trains get priority.

To compare a train ride I took once, I took a train from Charlotte NC to Detroit MI and that took 24 hours. The drive is 10 hours.

My takeaway, maybe we should build dedicated rails for hauling people.. wait, the auto industry doesn't want us to have that and lobbies expressly against it? Fuckers. Back to reality, all US politicians are owned by corporations and oppose train infrastructure expansion, and yes, I recognize the main opposition is conservatives. But on this topic quite a few liberals are probably opposing it also, I actually don't know and am speaking from generic observations.

Nonetheless, corporate lobbying is the root cause. Aka legalized corruption.

The reason I highlighted conservatives is because they oppose absolutely anything that costs money (which is everything), and they spend all their efforts banning books/lifestyles/scientific-phrases and well, science and medical advice from science and medicine experts. That's all banned too. But not guns, because "bans don't work," (except in every other civilized first world nation in existence, but wait that doesn't feel good to think about) so conservatives ignore that.

So you know, I guess it's not my fault that I assume Republicans are the root cause to this problem too, since they are the root cause behind most Americans' ills.

For all you "both sides bad" people, great, so introduce ranked choice voting in your state. That would disrupt both conservative and liberal life-long politicians. If you won't do that, when you say "both sides bad" you are actually saying "Republicans aren't that bad".

Ranked choice voting, bitches. Do that shit. Read about how it works before you go ask the people in power and media-shills about it, spoiler, they fucking hate the idea because it would dethrone quite a few of them.

(Shoots AR15 into the air, the traditional American greeting and salutation for departure).

Have a nice day.

The big difference here is that most Europeans would never make that drive, while an American would cherish it as a holiday.

To be fair, the US has the better National Parks that one could visit along such a trip. Europe is denser.

You must know some rich Americans. 2 days off of work is quite a bit more expensive than flying.

Yeah, no idea what a mi is in sensible units.

A thousand Roman paces. A pace is two steps, each about 1m, so 1mi is about 2km. The conversion from paces to meters isn't exact, and definitions have shifted over time.

Amazing!

That sucks - I keep hearing that kind of thing from more and more people, the last person telling me that in Canada. Fwiw, it is a Saturday Night Live sketch, poking fun at ourselves as to how we inconsistently use measurement schemes, like some less popular sports use meters, but the most popular ones use the English ones like feet. I wonder why it is blocked, wherever you are.

If anyone knows, I would be interested in hearing: like should I not share YouTube videos anymore these days? Or only share/avoid certain corporate types? (Whereas certain others such as CPG Grey's videos would truly be a tragic loss if they could not be shared) I presume Piped videos would likewise be blocked too? Are they blocked only in certain countries, or like most ones outside of the USA? Is the URL still useful, like to put into Vanced or some such, or would something else help better like the title, or again should I just not share them? I don't know any of these answers but in any case, thank you for sharing with me your experience here.

I presume Piped videos would likewise be blocked too?

It depends which proxy piped.video happens to use at the moment. It's a dice throw as far as I can see... I successfully watched the video this morning but neither yesterday nor right now the video is loading for me.

Oh wow, I didn't realize it differed on the client side, I presumed it was only server.

It's Saturday Night Live. It's an American Humour* channel by the corpos.

* the cringy type of humour - I do not understand why people like it. Oh well.

In freedom land, we spell that American Humor, you commie

Learn some proper English, you cappie

I speak 'Murican, brother. And jokes on you, I don't even wear too much hats! Except mah trucker hat when I'm drinking my bud light and firing off freedom fighting bullets from my truckkk.

That's about 1609 times the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum in one 299792458^th^ of a second.

A mi is one mile in sensible units.

Multiply by Phi (1.6) / the Golden Ratio (still 1.6) to get km.

Typically, this is what you need to know:

100 miles = 160 km 60 miles = 100km

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The selected route has tolls in Kansas. The northern route will be pretty similar but free, at least until Illinois, I've never gone beyond that.

It's weird that it's not putting you on I-44 from St Louis to OKC.

It's the "avoid tolls" part. I didn't even know you could have the primary lanes of an interstate be a toll road, but I guess so. TIL.