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Would a Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel ever happen? It sounds like a crazy but fun idea to be honest
Personally I'd like a freeway/railway over the Åland archipelago from Stockholm to Turku. That'd be pretty cool!
The Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel is actually something that might be built, and not in the very far future, but in the late 2020's. The proposal has been put forward to the EU for evaluation. The cost is estimated to be around 13 billion € in today's money, and that's less than Trump's wall.
The hyperloop is again speculation, but scientists are somehow quite interested about a Helsinki-Turku-Stockholm route. A motorway from Stockholm to Turku was proposed for the first time in the 60's, and that is never gonna happen. It's impossible to make any economical sense.
looks like there's already a ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn, is the volume of traffic worth it to build a tunnel between the two?
That ferry takes 2 hours to dock between the cities. A train running 200 km/h it would be 40 minutes - a commuter time. 4% of the total Estonian GDP is of Finnish tourism.
Of course the tunnel would be the longest ever built by mankind, but some sincerely believe that it would be a feasible operation.
There has already been a jokeful Coat of Arms designed:
And people wonder why I hate living here sometimes. I hate the British. People can deny that Brexit wasn't about racism or xenophobia all they want but they're deluding themselves.
People also wonder why liberals choose to live in a bubble of their own making when so much of the country is a ****hole.
I think it's a bit facile how so many people are broadly labelling all or even most Brexit supporters as racists or xenophobes.
I mean, all of the people who voted for Hilary Clinton for example are not necessarily exemplary human beings. In her supporters were surely some people who want to continue to use the labour of illegal immigrants and pay them exploitatively low wages.
BTW I was not for Trump nor did I think Brexit was a good idea.
Selectively reported anecdotes. With enough digging, it's possible to put together similar compilations within practically any country in the world. It's a lazy way to represent an issue, Britain has 65 million people, even if you could bring me examples of 1000 incidents, logically you would still be blowing it out of proportion.
The media has been deliberately misreporting on this issue. The number of reported hate crimes has increased, but the actual numbers that have actually been referred for prosecution, due to strong evidence, has remained pretty much the same.
It's also rare to see an acknowledgement that this goes both ways. The debate has often been very toxic, and the nasty words and behaviour isn't just coming from the Brexit supporters. There has been many examples of widespread hatred and social discrimination against Brexit supporters, especially if they happen to be old and white. Of course it's a minority of idiots who do this kind of stuff, but were it the other way around the media would jump all over it.
I actually find it funny that, in my experience, Leave voters tend to get irate if you even remotely imply that the UK isn't great, or might be worse than other countries in any way at all. In my opinion, sticking one's head in the sand and refusing to acknowledge your nation's shortcomings and issues is damaging to its welfare. The only way you tackle issues is by admitting they exist in the first place. You also can't default to 'the media are biased' or anything of the sort just because they're representing something you don't want to hear about. Now that is lazy thinking (and is usually the domain of paranoid conspiracy theorists who think 'the establishment' is out to get them).
Genuine racists and xenophobes have been given the impetus to do what they do because, in their mind, the Brexit vote validated their views. Those people who think old white men are the scourge of society are idiots as well, but they're on the losing side anyway so are much less relevant.
And, for the sake of clarity, and to avoid anyone in particular getting butthurt - I don't think anyone who has concerns regarding immigration is a racist or xenophobe. Even I can admit that our large immigration levels had some issues (mostly relating to strains on services and infrastructure), or that certain immigrant groups have difficulties integrating (but that is unrelated to the EU as these groups primarily come from Asia and Africa anyway).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
I think it's a bit facile how so many people are broadly labelling all or even most Brexit supporters as racists or xenophobes.
I mean, all of the people who voted for Hilary Clinton for example are not necessarily exemplary human beings. In her supporters were surely some people who want to continue to use the labour of illegal immigrants and pay them exploitatively low wages.
BTW I was not for Trump nor did I think Brexit was a good idea.
I don't think most Brexit supporters are racist or xenophobic, but I bet most racists and xenophobes supported Brexit. I think that is an important distinction to make.
I have no love for Clinton - she's a typical careerist with no convictions - so I can well imagine that many of her supporters were awful people as well. I'd hazard a guess that most left-wingers and even many centre-right liberals supported her simply because they disliked Trump more. In reality, the two choices for US president last year had to be amongst the worst if not the worst. I'm just happy that we don't have a populist like that in power over here - I don't like Theresa May but at least she appears sensible.
Think big. Turku has toyed with the idea by creating a hyperloop connection to Stockholm. The travel time is estimated to be 11 minutes.
It was mooted about 9 or 10 years ago as well. The government won't electrify some railway lines because it costs too much. I can hardly imagine them spending billions to dig a tunnel under the Pennines to make way for a super-fast maglev. No UK government, regardless of political leaning, has spent enough on our infrastructure over the past 30 years.
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