This has already taken more time than it deserves from either of us. My criticisms were uninformed, sorry, I still think it's a shit idea. I don't want to stay in a hotel in which for significant portions of my stay I can't leave. I realise it's not really different from a cruise - I think cruises sound awful too, and this just adds on that some of the time you can't even go outside.
Still this approach seems wasteful. Just making it sufficiently far from the surface travelling in the right direction should be enough... As long as you aren't in a rush.
I looked it up, the real number across Europe is between 1 and 1.2%. Source here, although this only considers those of African descent, not sure how that affects the final total.
Your point remains valid if you consider only one cohort of national leaders. 44 countries in Europe, it seems reasonable that none would be black if only 1% of the population of Europe is black. But there isn't just one cohort of leaders to consider... There's another cohort every, 4-5 years or so. Even going back only to the beginning of the century that's over 200, suddenly it seems like we should have had at least one. Obviously demographics have changed over time, but nonetheless it remains significant that there has never been one.
That's reasonable - the source I checked didn't use the fourth power, and it was taking into account the number of wheels as well. Anyway, I think the point still stands that just like cars there is a place for busses in a more sensibly designed transit system, despite this one specific disadvantage. Bikes are obviously superior in many ways to other transport but are only really practical over quite short distances (I'm not averse to cycling 10+ miles to get somewhere but I'm gonna need a shower when I arrive lol).
So, I'm not the previous commenter, and I'm not about to suggest we should ban cars outright (there are quite obviously situations where cars are needed... I mean, anyone who lives in an isolated place literally has no better option)... That said, I would love to see cities free of cars entirely.
Buses are more damaging to roads, yes (although I'm confident that your 10,000 number is hyperbole, I found a source which suggested than an empty bus does ~170 times the damage of an SUV, or 1,700 times the damage of a compact), even per passenger - which is surprising. But the benefits are quite significant in other regards - energy, pollution, road space, safety, etc. Plus, you can in fact design busses which are less damaging to roads by giving them more wheels!
Road damage is a relatively small part of why people like me want to see cars be (where practical) a thing of the past. There is a place for busses in that world, alongside other less damaging forms of transit - especially bikes and trams within cities where busses would be the competition. Certain routes are too far for a bike to be practical and too sparse to warrant a tram, so busses make sense in that case.
That is why he was elected. The point is not that we should elect the wrong people just to sort out the demographics ffs.
Let's say that black people make up 5% of the European population - idk if this is true but the exact number is not important - and they make up 0% of the national leaders. This is unusual, we should expect that at least some of the black people have the "merits" needed to be elected, right? So either 1) they don't for some reason or 2) they do but they don't get elected for another reason.
Either of those points towards systemic issues. 1 suggests there might be biases in education, or cultural reasons that black people aren't politically engaged. 2 suggests that the political industry is systematically racist in some way. Those are the problems that need to be solved... The demographics will naturally sort themselves out in a fairer society.
Sometimes so called "affirmative action" or "positive discrimination" is needed when 2 is the issue, because the good candidates exist but they are discriminated against by systems that are not easy to fix directly. Part of the reason is that diverse organisations are less likely to be institutionally racist (or sexist, homophobic, etc), so actually manually correcting the diversity repairs the root problem in the long run. Politics isn't really the place for this, obviously, but I wanted to mention it because it doesn't (when done well) mean that we aren't choosing candidates for some position on their merits - we are, in fact, making it more likely that candidates will be fairly selected for their merits.
Is there a pun here I'm not getting or is this just absurd?