Archive for gilets jaunes
burn baby burn…
Posted in pictures, Travel with tags agricultural subsidies, agriculture, environment, EU's common agricultural policy, European subventions, European Union, farmers' market, French politics, gilets jaunes, greenhouse-gas emissions, pesticides, polluters, protest, subsidies, unions on January 28, 2024 by xi'an
j’adôre la bagnole [not!]
Posted in Books, pictures, Travel with tags car culture, carbon tax, climate change, congestion tax, ecological disaster, Emmanuel Macron, French politics, gilets jaunes, Libé, political cartoon on November 1, 2023 by xi'an:quality(70):focal(1064x865:1074x875)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/liberation/7VYHMCLMKVBZFCUOD6BFZL3MKU.jpg "A political cartoon from Coco, in Libé, about Président Macron declaring his love of cars while presenting his plans for a much needed ecological transition. Catering to car loving electors who had already grabbed their yellow jackets from the boot of their car to oppose gas taxes...")
another round of mostly useless road death statistics [and a terrible graph]
Posted in Books, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel with tags 2022, bad graph, bike accident, bike safety, driving, France, gilets jaunes, Le Monde, left-hand driving, mortality, ONISR, Paris, road death, road statistics, speed limit on February 16, 2023 by xi'an
Another terrible report on (French) road accidents and deaths Le Monde pointed to. The entire analysis does not consider once the number of people on the roads or the death per kilometer ratio. Which makes the absolute figures as those represented in this ugly graph hard to comment. For instance, the number of persons cycling to work has increased more than the number of bike deaths. (And, contrary to a urban myth, cycling in Paris should not be considered as a extreme sport: only one [too many] cyclist died there in 2022.) I also find surprising the (a)symmetry in the age distributions of (overall) road deaths,
since the percentages of evolution between 2019 and 2022 almost exactly compensate for one to the next across the age groups. Any significance in these figures? The statistics that makes the most sense in the report is the comparison of counties where the 90km/h speed limit was reinstated and those where it stayed at 80km/h: an increase of 1% versus a decrease of 2%… As signaled by Le Monde car doors are bike killers: when getting off a car, use your right hand to open the driver’s door (except in Australia, Britain, Japan and 72 other left-hand driving countries!!).
easy does it?! [fuel crisis]
Posted in Statistics with tags fuel saving, gilets jaunes, infographics, meat industry, Nature, Russian invasion, Solidarity with Ukraine, speed limit, Ukraine on July 9, 2022 by xi'an
élections #1
Posted in Statistics with tags distorsions.fr, electoral posters, extreme-right, French elections, French politics, French presidents, gilets jaunes, Libé, Marine Le Pen on April 13, 2022 by xi'an:quality(70):focal(744x511:754x521)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/liberation/CNWWGEAFURBUNFU4A2C6FUYQAE.jpeg "Pastiched electoral posters for V. Pécresse as an LGBT+ militant, E. Macron as a gilet jaune, M. Le Pen and E. Zemmour as converted to Islam")
On the evening of the first round of the French præsidential elections, I took part in the dépouillement (a strange term meaning a passive or active removal of one’s property, which sounds related to poux (lice), meaning taking everything from someone, including their lice!, but actually originate from despoliare, which also led to despoil) of the votes in the local precinct, which consisted in opening the blue envelopes and sharing the name of the candidate with my colleagues. Surprisingly, there were no null vote and very few empty envelopes. In my rather working class precinct, the far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélanchon, came close to the majority of the votes, an indication of a vote utile as the other leftist candidates got hardly any vote. (The far-right candidates got around 20% of the votes.) This clashes with the overall results for my town, where Emmanuel Macron got 40% of the votes.
Xi'an's Og 