As in Margaret Thatcher was an Englishman?

People are working on it. A good start is trying to live as long as you can. I would advise avoiding sugar, processed food.

I found a video interview of someone aged 82 who looked and moved like someone less than half that age. A beef farmer. They seem on the right track. They don’t eat anything they don’t grow or hunt

So my commute is on the order of 20km, and that’s quicker by bicycle than bus (on my specific bus route), and much cheaper than parking a car

As a bonus I can park my bike in the office basement parking, versus walking from the nearest bus stop, or parking a car and walking from however far away your budget allows

Where I live it costs $40 to drop a mattress off for recycling, and almost anyone who will sell you a mattress will take the old one away for about $40

Chronic flow in an engaging project. Start on a Saturday morning, feel like a coffee since you’re a bit sleepy, notice it’s Sunday

I had a team of contractors working on some code. They had learnt in their previous jobs to document everything in the work wiki (aside from the design documents which have their own repository)

And it was good they did, since the project was put on hold due to too much mismatch between backend and front, and all the contractors were fired (a day before Xmas) leaving the useless doco as the best reference for whoever needs to resurrect our code

“republic” is opposite to “monarchy”. It is unrelated to democracy or authoritarianism. Nazi Germany was a republic. France is a republic.

Your republic is flawed by design. Your founders didn’t trust democracy so they weakened it, the country hasn’t managed to improve the democracy since.

Australia is also a Federation, but a monarchy not a republic. Australia is quite a bit more democratic than America

Luckily we don’t build clocks for n-dimensional time

My grandfather clock is correct* about once a week when I wind and correct it

*It must be correct as it’s very slightly fast (less so than can be fixed with a quarter turn off the pendulum screw) and I set it slightly in the past

In Rome they tell you the fountain water is fine. Though I suspect some is fed through lead pipes

Adelaide water is fine now

Australian here, yes. Our tap water is pretty good

That’s a feature, not a bug. The trick is there needs to be alternatives that aren’t slowed by the same traffic

You make driving slower, people take the tram, or ride a bike

It’s better when they slow them down with road design, rather than waiting for them to be caught and fitting a speed limiter (which presumably won’t stop them going highway speeds in residential streets)

Imagine what the hundred million dollars per mile that extra lane cost could have otherwise been spent on

What public transport or and bike infrastructure

Then think of the cost of maintaining that road

Correct, the southern part, hence no mention of a tram

I get you’re joking, but to address the person you’re parodying: yeah 'cause the homeless are commuting to work too

I believe it was the widening project, +1 lane each way for 100M per mile, probably including acquiring what used to be high density residential buildings

A big part of the problem is the same people tasked with modelling traffic are well paid to design roads. Funnily they find that more road is always the solution

I live in a small Australian city designed by an American when America was first embracing highways. It has a city centre which had until recently only a thousand single family homes within walking distance*, then there are suburbs accessed by small highways (typically 2 lanes each way)

But it has reasonable public transport, and good bike paths between suburbia and the city away from the highways (or if you prefer, on painted lanes on some of the highways)

*Now we have mixed use towers in town

My part of suburbia to town is 20 minutes by car, 40 in peak, 45 minutes by express bus in peak, 55mins to 1hr 15 by off peak bus, and about an hour by the isolated bike path, 45 mins by the painted bike lanes (and sometimes nothing)