I spent many, many years in two of its European siblings, the 100, and loved them for their roomy cabin, great trunk and comfortable motorway ride.

Blessed Be The Fruit

My favourite odd Norwegian (or should that be Norwegian Odd?) is not Odd Nerdrum (whose even odder son is sadly named Öde Nerdrum rather than Odder Nerdrum, but given that Norwegian uses Ø instead of Ö, his name is still very odd), but rather lieutenant general Odd Bull, who spent an unusually large share of his…

If only they would copy Saab properly, implementing night panel, great visibility and easily memorized physical buttons...

Looks chonky.

I’m not surprised. I’ve worked with a great number of Filipino officers, and while most of them are clearly sufficiently competent, I’ve also met more than a handful whom I suspect must have attended colleges with incompetent lecturers, or simply purchased the desired certificates outright.

Yes, I’d say so. Think of it not as 90 % using seat belts, but 10 % not using them, and you’re seeing non-usage 2-5 times higher than Canada, Japan and many European countries (which I hope the average US citizen would consider more relevant countries for comparison than for example Zimbabwe or Cuba). That said, US…

They could have saved so much money, and brought so much joy to the world, by simply firing their exterior designers when the E38 was done, and sticking with the correct exterior design.

A couple of ideas from a guy from Norway (the safest non-microstate country in the world in terms of road traffic whether you look at per citizen, per vehicle or per distance) currently suffering through US east coast traffic:

Well, that’s the thing, most unions in this country are pretty reasonable. We don’t have the “traditions” of for example the US, where unionized labor is a tiny minority with a death grip on their particular field. We have >50 % unionization, and unions are not just respected, but generally welcomed by serious…

A relative used to work as an ATC in a different European country. While he was making a lot of money and got to live and work in his favorite major city (highly unusual for a junior, most are posted to smaller airports and transfer to the attractive cities only when they have ample seniority), he was deeply…

Yup, I used to work for a company that supplied communications equipment to ships, and a small part of that business was supplying and installing communications and tracking equipment for the panic rooms. The outdoor parts of such installations would frequently be concealed to look like something else, or even better,…

I look at them, I desire them, and I realize I simply can’t give them the care they need, so I need to not buy them.

That would be the visually similar W126, the car in the article is a W116. The 116 range-topper was the 450 and eventually the 450 6.9, while the 126 range-topper was initially the 500, later the 560.

Crew are indeed not passengers, but crew, unlike passengers, are required to have their papers and training in order. I’ve seen a few “creative” attempts to bend the rules and bring more passengers by declaring them to be crew, and on the very rare occasions were the port state authorities can be bothered to do their…

Many of them are available for rent (only to the right people, of course, and not openly advertised), or are used to provide a good time to people the owner wants to influence, where the owner is only around for a little bit of the trip, or not at all.

Whoa. Mega-flashback.

Nice to know.

You need any reasoning beyond the state legislators being in the pocket of oil companies and ICE car dealerships?

While major outbreaks are not a regular outbreak on Hurtigruten, their handling of Covid was absolutely disgraceful: