> I wonder who pays for the real cost of the ticket

Everybody already has local regional tickets anyway. And most people can't be in more then one place at the time anyway. And most people stay in the same region most of the time anyway.

So really you are not losing much compared to having separate local region tickets in a system where the long distance trains are separated.

> who cleans and repairs the trains

The already existing organizations that have run the trains for a long time.

> who invests in infrastructure and all that

The government ...

> I always wonder how the germans can pull this off for 50 Euro. Magic.

Its not magic its just a transportation policy and taxes.

I think what Steve added to Apple more than anything was being the biggest asshole in the room who was willing to point at a fellow high-up person and tell them their idea sucked ass, and you may be surprised to read what comes next, I think that's critical to a good product line. There are numerous problems caused by having too many stakeholders, too many cooks in the kitchen if you will, steering your given ship, and sometimes exactly what you need is one guy who knows damn well what needs to be made, and isn't afraid to tell you to take a hike if you want to die on the hill in question.

That all being said, he got it wrong a lot too. You have the good decisions: the original Macs, the iPhone, banning Flash from iOS, backing Pixar, demanding the iPad Mini be better before it goes to market, etc. But he got it wrong a lot too: the Apple III, very strict App Store policies, not replaceable batteries in the iPhone which would eventually infect every Apple product, and I'm sure there's plenty more.

The one thing though that prevents me from truly looking up to him though is he was, by all accounts, an absolute fucking asshole to work for. I appreciate a man with a vision absolutely, as should be evident, but there's also something to be said for being able to navigate those difficult conversations with class and kindness, even when you need to tell someone their idea sucks ass, you can do it in such a way where they don't want to quit outright. And those failings were mirrored in Jobs' personal life, too. Dude just had no fucking ability to People at all.

So yeah. Complicated guy. I think he represents both the best and worst of what can happen when you empower one person with a lot of good ideas- and some bad- to lead a company. I think it's broadly a good thing; and I also think if I worked under him, I probably would've ended up knocking a tooth of his out.

I have 2000s web nostalgia, but I think the modern dot com and onward software SV was, frankly, mostly up to stupid shit. Not something to romanticize

Good things to look forward to are:

- Lean and mathlib revolutionizing math

- Typst replacing latex and maybe some adobe prosuc

- Fuschia/Redox/wasi replacing Unix

- non-professional-programmers finally learning programming en mass

I think the latter is maybe the most profound. Tech may not grow at a break-neck pace, but erasing the programmer vs computer illiterate dichotomy will mean software can way the world in much less Kafkaesque ways.

It’s truly remarkable to me that in the late 70s/early 80s it was considered that programming your own computer in basic was not something that required special skills or technical ability.

It just goes to show how far out expectations have dropped, with basic human ingenuity and capability for expression having been crippled by reliance on increasingly advanced automation with increasingly simple interfaces.

Humanity is not going to fare well in the world of pervasive synthetic intelligence with simple language interfaces. I fear we will see an unprecedented dumbing down of the population, a new “dark age” perhaps.