These are just the (little) costs of democracy. If you aren’t ready to pay them, you haven’t really considered the alternatives.

In all decent democracies elected politicians have immunity or similar safeguards, since the separation of powers (as theorized by Montesquieu in the middle of illuminism) which represents the foundation of democracy demands that both the legislative and executive power be separated from the judicial one.

“Making the politicians pay for their crimes” is often just a populist argument, while there are ways to incriminate them, expecting that they can be prosecuted like us normal citizens is not compatible with democracy.

You may not like what I said but I said it. Go read the original works by Montesquieu, he understood it first.

And people sometimes overestimate their designs because beauty is subjective, and because all children are beautiful in the eyes of their parent.

Also, there’s a reason why the mass adopted plastic, monobloc, stackable chair design is worldwide common and is studied as a cornerstone of design.

If anything, the fact that this is what he arrived at, even when starting with the opposite position, is proof of the validity of this result.

But if you want to preserve the original composition of classical music, you have to play the track start to finish, preferably with a small pause between tracks as well.

There is digital compression, but the original media you'll play will already be compressed, and good-enough digital compression is not noticeable unless you're using a good DAC with a good pair of studio headphones.

If you're in professional audio production, get a decent DAC and something like the M50x headphones, if you want to play stuff off your phone, just use a wireless option.

If you have the slightest knowledge of classical music you would know it should not be mixed like in a dj set, and you would not optimize your dj algorithm for it.

Being outside the city you'll have fewer vectors with less frequency (more than 30mins in between), which will get you in the city somewhere, and from that you'll take city-local public transport to your final destination.

I'd say in this case the 40 min car commute turns into 1h 20, with some luck too.

It's not really a collective decision, it's the decision of governments, but also it was a temporary decision (basically every pandemic in history lasted a maximum of about 3 years), not a permanent one.

With a longer time-frame, there is time for people to elect new governments, and guess what would happen when a new politician comes along pitching: "hey i will stop all this green stuff which costs money and i'll give it to you curing poverty and making you richer, the other countries are still polluting who cares anyway". Meanwhile the other politicians pitch is: "No we have to make sacrifices to reduce our emissions, we can give up some comforts or pay more for them".

Guess who would win that election...

I think you're referring to inflation with that? I wouldn't necessarily say that inflation is the result of a "decision", certainly not a direct decision of any single person nor any collective group. Economies can move around in weird and unpredictable ways, and they are also quite intertwined at the global level making policy decisions even more complicated and unpredictable.

The "money printing" decision wasn't made by asking the public: "would you like to help our economy and businesses and our essential public services in this tragic event? Oh btw you'll be paying for all of this with inflation, are you still sure?". Politicians tend to conveniently leave the second part out, and also, this questions wasn't asked to the public at all. I believe a sizeable amount of the public would've responded "no, let the people die, let the businesses die, i'm not paying for them".

Which is why for example, in many democracies with tools of direct democracy, such tools cannot affect fiscal policy, because people are dumb and they would just say "i want all of the welfare and zero of the taxes", bringing the country to ruin.

Good, working and efficient public transit still means having significantly less comfort compared to having your private vehicle. Pretty much the only exception is using the metro in a congested downtown area at peak traffic (still, your metro experience will also be degraded by the peak traffic), or perhaps if parking your vehicle will be very difficult. And i say this as someone in a rather big city in Europe who is currently only using public transit. And there is a lot of stuff that i'd like to do but i can't do since i currently don't have access to a car or motorbike.

People don't just want "useful", at least the majority of people in developed countries also want "comfortable", and "nice", and "easy", and "enjoyable". A peak-hour metro ride or missing your tram by one minute is none of that.

But hey, at least you get to keep 99% of your comfort while making 50% less emissions! (if it really is that much).