Matej Žganec
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mzganec.bsky.social
Matej Žganec
@mzganec.bsky.social
82 followers 680 following 17 posts
Friendly neighborhood Eurocrat.

Discussing transport, mobility, urbanism, environment, energy, sustainability, EU and international relations.
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Reposted by Matej Žganec
thetnholler.bsky.social
Wow
January 8, 2026 at 2:51 AM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
paleofuture.bsky.social
These freaks want territorial expansion and they know Trump will do everything he can to deliver.

This isn’t just a tweet from some random asshole either. This is Stephen Miller’s wife. Miller was in the room with Trump during the kidnapping of Maduro.
Katie Miller tweet with text that reads “SOON” and a map of Greenland with an American flag overlayed
January 3, 2026 at 9:22 PM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
eastangliabylines.co.uk
The story of Europe’s economic decline while US is 'soaring' is everywhere.

But it is wrong. It is a myth.

Europe delivers more leisure, longer life expectancy, less inequality than the US.

Gabriel Zucman dismantles the myths.
Decline, what decline? The myth of dying Europe
There is a widespread view that, by comparison with the USA, Europe is in economic and social decline. But, Zucman argues, it's not true
eastangliabylines.co.uk
January 2, 2026 at 7:44 AM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
mattbinder.bsky.social
Elon Musk promised a lot of things by 2025

- colonists arriving on Mars
- xAI achieving AGI
- Tesla robotaxis serving half the U.S.
- completely driverless robotaxis
- a Tesla Roadster demo
- DOGE cutting trillions

none of them happened
mashable.com/article/elon-mus...
Everything Elon Musk promised in 2025, but didn't deliver
Musk is now infamous for his false promises, but even this is excessive.
mashable.com
December 31, 2025 at 4:29 PM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
edzitron.com
Enshittification's first three stages - from a platform people love to a platform businesses profit off of to a platform that hurts consumers and businesses alike - are well-known. But I argue we're in a fourth stage where stocks have become enshittified too.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshitti...
Image Alt Text: We are watching one of the greatest wastes of money in history, all as people are told that there “just isn’t the money” to build things like housing, or provide Americans with universal healthcare, or better schools, or create the means for the average person to accumulate wealth. The money does exist, it just exists for those who want to gamble — private equity firms, “business development companies” that exist to give money to other companies, venture capitalists, and banks that are getting desperate and need an overnight shot of capital from the Federal Reserve’s Overnight Repurchase Facility or Discount Window, two worrying indicators of bank stress I’ll get into later. No, the money does not exist for you or me or a person. Money is for entities that could potentially funnel more money into the economy, even if the ways that these entities use the money are reckless and foolhardy, because the system’s intent on keeping entities alive incentivizes it. We are in an era where the average person is told to pull up their bootstraps, to work harder, to struggle more, because, as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, it’s socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor. The “free market” is a fucking con. When you or I run out of money, our things are taken from us, we receive increasingly-panicked letters, we get phone calls and texts and emails and demands, we are told that all will be lost if we don’t “work it out,” because the financial system is not about an exchange of value but whether or not you can enter into the currently agreed-upon con. By letting neoliberalism and the scourge of the free markets rule, modern society created the conditions for what I call The Enshittifinancial Crisis — the place at which my friend Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification Theory meets my own Rot Economy Thesis in a fourth stage of Enshittification. :In November 2025, Reuters revealed that Meta projected in late 2024 that 10% of its annual revenue ($16 billion) would come from advertisements for scams or banned goods, mere weeks after Meta announced a ridiculous $27 billion data center debt package, one that used deep accountancy magic to keep it off of its balance sheet despite Meta guaranteeing the entirety of the loan. One would think this would horrify investors for two reasons: Meta’s business is both supporting and profiting from organized crime, and at 10% of its revenue, it’s also kind of dependent on it. Meta is using deliberate and insidious accounting tricks to act like a data center that it is paying to build and will be the sole tenant of is somehow an “off balance sheet” operation. One would be wrong. Morgan Stanley said a few weeks ago that it is “one of the handful of companies that can leverage its leading data, distribution and investments in AI,” and raised its target to $750, with a $1000-a-share bull case. Wedbush raised Meta’s price to $920, and Bank of America staunchly held firm at…$810. I can find no analyst commentary on Meta making sixteen billion dollars on fraud, because it doesn’t matter to them, because this is the Rot Economy, and all that matters is number go up.
December 29, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
adamserwer.bsky.social
The people who profited most from the cancel culture/free speech panic were less interested in actual freedom of speech than establishing their own control over public discourse. You don't even have to take my word for it. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...
Every society that has ever existed has had views that are mainstream and views that are fringe. The free-speech frauds who captured the discourse over the past decade understood this, but their true objection was that they did not unilaterally have the power to define which was which. For example, in a 2018 Times column, Weiss complained that “leftists” were engaged in a “concerted attempt to significantly redraw the bounds of acceptable thought and speech.” This was meant to sound sinister, menacing. In fact, this is politics. Every faction is always trying to “redraw the bounds of acceptable thought and speech.” In a free society, the government allows people to have those arguments. Such disputes are not a threat to free speech; they are free speech. When I say that CBS News’s Bari Weiss understood this, you needn’t take my word for it. In November, shortly after being given the reins to one of the oldest broadcast-news organizations in the country, Weiss used identical language to describe her own project: “I think it’s about redrawing the lines of what falls in the 40-yard lines of acceptable debate and acceptable American politics and culture,” Weiss said at the Jewish Leadership Conference. “And I don’t mean that in, like, a censorious, gatekeeping way.” What’s the difference between her “redrawing the lines” of acceptable speech and other people doing it? What makes one “censorious” and “gatekeeping” and the other not? Well, because she gets to decide. That’s what so much of the free-speech panic was ever about: making sure the right people were in charge of what you see, hear, and read. Notably, this has very little to do with reporting the news, which is supposed to be what CBS News does. But if the point of installing Weiss was to ensure that she would gatekeep on behalf of right-wing interests, that is precisely what she appears to be doing.
December 23, 2025 at 6:17 PM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
ebharrington.bsky.social
Thing is: this should have been obvious BEFORE regulators greenlit Waymo.

Having business be the tail that wags the dog of government--as neoliberal ideology would have it--simply privatizes gains and sticks ordinary people with the costs of being corporate guinea pigs.
jessearreguin.bsky.social State Senator Jesse Arreguin @jessearreguin.bsky.social · 17d
Autonomous vehicles that are unable to adapt to emergencies present a risk to our public safety. With such vehicles being considered for deployment in the East Bay, more must first be done to ensure they will operate safely when the unexpected happens.
Waymo halts service in SF as cars stall at intersections
A spokesperson confirmed Waymo has suspended service.
www.sfgate.com
December 23, 2025 at 10:49 PM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
kostyack.bsky.social
US tech leaders say we need climate-disrupting and water-depleting data centers because we need the US to be the leaders in GenAI innovation. Apparently their idea of innovation is overwhelming our information ecosystems with deception & manipulation.
craigsilverman.bsky.social Craig Silverman @craigsilverman.bsky.social · Dec 9
I've been investigating digital deception for ~15yrs and 2025 was the worst year.

VC-backed bot farms, endless AI slop, industrial level scams, abusive AI nudifiers, Meta paying $ for hoaxes... Deception was legitimized, monetized & shoved down the public’s throat:

indicator.media/p/2025-the-y...
2025: The year tech embraced fakeness
This year, powerful people, companies, and institutions welcomed digital deception like never before. The rest of us faced the consequences.
indicator.media
December 17, 2025 at 10:29 PM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
benelgin.bsky.social
How Elon Musk's DOGE became a fiasco of deception and accounting gimmicks -- failing in its mission to slash government waste

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/u...
How Did DOGE Disrupt So Much While Saving So Little?
www.nytimes.com
December 23, 2025 at 5:36 PM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
marklevinenyc.bsky.social
Year 1 data on congestion pricing in Manhattan…

* Vehicle traffic: -11%
* Foot traffic: +3.4%
* Storefront vacancy: -0.9%
* Pollution: -22%
* Revenue for mass transit: $548M

So YES this has been a huge success.
December 23, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
zackpolanski.bsky.social
This is obscene. Why can't other politicians say that?

The 25 richest families are collectively $358.7 billion richer than a year ago, with a combined fortune totaling $2.9 trillion.
Worlds richest families have never been richer - Walton's lead with net worth of $513bn
December 18, 2025 at 9:00 AM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
janrosenow.bsky.social
No surprise: new analysis shows that heat pumps can deliver excellent performance even in older buildings with no meaningful correlation between building age & heat pump efficiency.

This is in line with my own experience of having a heat pump in a 1880 Victorian home with only modest insulation.
December 13, 2025 at 10:21 AM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
nixonsimon.bsky.social
Amazing, the @dailymail.co.uk manages to publish an entire lengthy feature bewailing (!!!!) the exodus of Poles from Britain without once mentioning Brexit. Apparently this outcome (which is surely exactly what they campaigned for in 2016) is all the fault of Keir Starmer.

mol.im/a/15379789
The great exodus: How Poles are ditching UK for their booming homeland
New statistics reveal that while 7,000 Poles arrived in the year ending last June, 25,000 returned home: a net outflow of 18,000. The UK's total Polish population has shrunk to 750,000.
mol.im
December 13, 2025 at 9:26 AM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
janrosenow.bsky.social
Energy transitions can happen faster than we think:

In 2000 almost 90% of Denmark's electricity was from fossil fuels.

In 2024 less than 10% of Danish electricity was from fossil fuels.
December 1, 2025 at 4:18 PM
mzganec.bsky.social
Zagreb against fascism ❤️
November 30, 2025 at 12:56 PM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
joerglau.bsky.social
Gedankenspiel: Donald Trump ist ein Scheinriese. Die Umfragewerte sind rekordniedrig. Er hat den Handelskrieg gegen China verloren. Russland gegenüber knickt er immer wieder ein. Die Europäer haben seinen “Friedensplan” verhindert. Bald kommen die Epstein-files.
Someone call the bluff!
November 29, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
davekeating.substack.com
Lesson for Europeans sucking up to Trump - look how much you're getting screwed while Brazil, India & China defy him and end up winning.

"When Macron's like, 'Oh Donald you're a genius'" says Ben Rhodes, "they keep getting the rug pulled from under them"
podcasts.apple.com/be/podcast/p...
November 27, 2025 at 3:04 PM
mzganec.bsky.social
2nd day of #POLIS25 Impressive list of Sustainable Mobility Indicators by Budapest #SUMP
November 27, 2025 at 9:44 AM
mzganec.bsky.social
Full house at the #POLIS25 plenary session on mobility and health.
November 26, 2025 at 3:50 PM
mzganec.bsky.social
Day one of the Annual #POLIS conference. Talking about innovative digital cycling solutions.
November 26, 2025 at 8:30 AM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
davidzipper.bsky.social
BTW, a 2021 Carnie Mellon study found that ridehail's arrival in a new city *increases* car ownership.

The reason: Few residents ditch their car, while some become ridehail drivers and buy vehicles.

www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
November 12, 2025 at 8:34 PM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
cyrushall.bsky.social
There is no reason to believe Waymo or Zoox will be any different.
davidzipper.bsky.social David Zipper @davidzipper.bsky.social · Nov 12
Remember all the hype about how Uber and Lyft would allow people to live car-free?

Well, it turns out ridehail has no discernible impact on car ownership at all.

Analysis from Glenn Mercer's excellent newsletter:
glennmercer.substack.com/p/the-impact...
November 12, 2025 at 10:37 PM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
katie.bzky.team
[wild speculation voice] a significant portion of LA's hyper obsessive health, fitness, and hiking culture can likely be attributed to the primal subconscious compensating reaction of living in a car dependent wasteland that is antithetical to the existence of people or even life itself.
katie.bzky.team Katie Tightpussy, Editor-In-Chief @katie.bzky.team · Nov 17
i need to leave this concrete death trap
Los Angeles Building New $1.5 Billion Road Ahead of Biggest Sports Event in the World
November 17, 2025 at 5:39 PM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
olivia.science
"data centers already accounted for 22% of Ireland's total electricity consumption in 2024. In the Dublin/Meath area, where a third of Ireland's population lives, 48% of the electricity was used by data centers in 2023." @abeba.bsky.social & @krisshrishak.bsky.social

✍🏼 www.iccl.ie/press-releas...
November 17, 2025 at 2:24 PM
Reposted by Matej Žganec
brianvan.bsky.social
So it turns out... the US air travel system was incredibly, deeply dependent on federal funding to just run day-to-day all this time, to the benefit of private airline shareholders, when everyone thinks that state-run trains are leeching off the government. Weird!
November 9, 2025 at 12:10 AM