agrammatic

I would agree. To the extend that OP's thesis is true (which I don't think is fully true, but also not fully wrong either), I also find that the readiness to compromise both at the EU level and in most member-state parliaments that eventually need to transpose the directives into national laws, is a difference that stands out.

A multi-party system helps too, because there can be situational alliances that do not divide the parties internally. E.g. in one topic the Social Democrats, the Moderate Right and the Liberals can be on the same side and pass something (probably a free-trade deal) and on another topic the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Left can pass something else (probably an environmental regulation). When there are only two parties in the legislature, such alliances break party lines, so it's a higher hurdle to overcome.

Oh, lucky. Meine Probe BahnCard läuft diesen Monat ab. Guter Deal, danke OP!

Thunderbird's Calendar supports local, off-line calendars and tasks.

It's the best FOSS calendar I have used, even if it has its rough edges.

Ich war lange Zeit sehr zufrieden mit BackInTime.

und diese dann synchronsiert werden wenn ich die Festplatte angeschlossen habe

Es gibt zwei Optionen unter Schedule: Repeatedly oder When drive get connected.

That’s how American ISPs do it.

That's how the German Telekom does it too with other connection options. It's definitely not an insurmountable problem for ISPs.

Please note that the question is not whether delivery vans can be replaced by cargo bikes. In most situations, the answer is clearly yes, no doubt.

It's about whether cargo bike-based delivery can guarantee the same level of service that customers expect now from delivery vans, or that, indeed as the Dutch politician warns, people will have to accept that same-day delivery can no longer be promised.

I'm inclined to agree with you. For me personally, at-home delivery is a new thing completely, let alone same-day. Where I came from, that's still not the norm, we would just go to the post-office to pick up our items.

After some initial interest in at-home delivery when I moved to Europe, I realised that I now find it much more comfortable to redirect my parcels to a Packstation and pick them up on my own schedule.

At the face of it, it seems plausible to me that cargo bikes do not offer the capacity needed to guarantee same-day delivery to all of those who currently use such services.

That seems to capture the intuitive idea of discontinuity for me, thanks!

I would imagine using some sort of shapefile that I can run calculations in a scripted manner. So, in that case it will depend on the resolution of the shapefile.

Thanks for the proposal. That gets us somewhere already, although only for non-landlocked countries. Using the perimeter also opens us up to the coastline paradox.

I guess you’d have to decide if archipelago nations are measured as the geometry of the sea they own, or as discrete islands.

I think that it might serve us better to consider them as distinct islands, to keep the measures comparable with landlocked countries.

That's likely.