Fern_Blossom

Sunshine bear, check out the menu on that link. Hit load all from the past week. Next, search the LA to SF proposed HSR route. There were 2 dozen earthquakes along the route between 1-2.5mag and 1 at 2.5mag in the last week. The route was hit by more seismic events in one week than France experiences in a year. Yes, they are planning for earthquakes, as they should. It will be hit one day, in the next decade or so by a large event, and should be well prepared for it. The same way how many states are enacting building codes to reflect 100 year flood statistics instead of treating them as rare events. Long term projects need long term expectations of problems and methods to overcome them. You can't just replace rail like you replace your iPhone. This will inevitably cost them more per mile compared to France. That's actually an very intelligent move to make regarding long term infrastructure.

It's funny how the same complaints tech folks make of the construction industry are in parallel with what construction folks say of the tech industry. Both are based off ignorance. I have the pleasant curse of having a foot in both fields.

Real world construction is far more complex and difficult than what you imagine. Wide sweeping statements like, "incompetence of the construction companies and their governmental overseers" stinks of you having an cartoonish armchair understanding of what it actual takes from visualized computer renders to a real standing structure. Because civil engineering in the modern age has been a total failure, har har har. Honestly, it's people like you that are easily persuaded to vote for abolishing OSHA on the grounds to hasten construction times and lower costs. Because guess what, Cali construction costs are pretty high due to safety regulations. This is where... oh God forgive me for saying this... I agree with a lot of Cali construction code even though it can be excessive at times, it's warranted a lot of time. Especially because some of it is set for their specific region's character of obstacles... almost like local authorities know best and should enact laws how to construct depending on their local area's nuances! They shouldn't base their construction methods on regions from the other side of the planet!

You fail to understand construction reality.

The LGV route is a far more open and "flatter" (relatively speaking) than LA to SF. There's way less for them to tunnel or grade, which gets expensive quickly. HSR requires more gentle changes in direction than traditional rail. Building on flat, open terrain that no one is using is great... but that kind of terrain is already in use or owned by someone. Thus, easements or having to outright purchase the land. If not and you go for cheap land, it's going to come with downsides, like being mountainous.

At that, France sees less than 10 earthquake events over 2 magnitude a year on average. In the past week, there were already 6 events over 2 magnitude between LA and SF alone: https://www.cisn.org/map/index.html An LA to SF line is practically on a fault line. Devastating earthquakes are a real reality for a Cali line, not so much for France. The Cali standards for building rail are going to be higher than France, and for EXTREMELY good reason. Thus, price goes up for construction.

There's a lot more at play to building these things. What I mentioned barely scratches the surface to the complications. Claiming NIMBY is pretty naive if you don't take into consideration the real world problems and needs to achieving something compared to the lofty, idealistic wants of a project.

I'm going to fully agree to this. There's a huge obsession with bloated pages for the sake of bloat at that. Somehow they're using it as an excuse to why they need the whole per-instance cloud setup when, as you said, a $5 (cheeseburger-meal) priced a month VPS would do the equivalent job. Maybe you'd have to pay 2 or 3 cheeseburgers a month to upgrade when things get heavy... if you setup your site correctly.

Don't get me wrong either, I thought the site was awesome and visited it often during that week. Reading the post-mortem of it was super cool too... until I read how the site was developed. I get the idea of a practicing small sites with a framework of choice. You need to practice, especially in a real world environment. Nothing wrong there. But the site could have been made in strict HTML and CSS, by hand, and called it a day. No one would know the difference. It was a super simple, basic site. There was zero special in it that needed anything more than that. Sure, maybe something was going on the background, but if that ended up not being useful for the dev, it was surely a zero value addon for the user. A lot of these frameworks are the equivalent of hiring a semi-truck with a 53 foot trailer to move a couch across town. Yes, it works. Yes, there are potential benefits if something were to pop-up. But, a small city van or pick-up truck would have gotten the job done easier, cheaper, and faster. 99.9% of the time, that's all you need. If you're moving a couch, the likelihood of you needing the extra space because someone calling you up to move pallets worth of stuff is minimal. Same goes with small, single purpose sites. Basing everything on that 00.1% chance is pretty silly.

War and Peace (the book) in simple text is roughly 900kb from Project Gutenberg if I remember correctly. That's how many hours of reading? 587,000 word count. Average adult reading speed is about 200 words a minute. 2,935 minutes or 48.9 hours of reading. 2 days worth of constant reading. Minus pictures and videos, when you traverse the web, how many pages require more than a mb worth of data for providing 10 minutes worth of reading content? Twitter is probably the ultimate champion in bloat for mb to read time ratio. Design and styling is one thing that people are going to use as some excuse for the bloat. But with all the people that use HN, don't piss in my pocket. Overly graphic designs aren't needed for conveying content well. I hope I don't have to get into how all the background tracking needs to go straight to the same ring of hell that holds people who kick puppies and kittens.

I remember a day when programmers valued themselves in being efficient in delivery. Oh, the good ol'days. Now get off my lawn!

Yet the world keeps spinning just fine since it was adopted as the main language of the world. French has its own insanities and it was the lingua franca beforehand. Looks more like the more weird a language is, the more likely it will be internationally adopted. Every language has its quirks. The mere concept that a handful of people should have the dictative right to alter any of them in their own image, with force adoption by all, is far more insane than the quirks themselves. If you learn the history of the standardization of spelling, most of the fuckups we groan about to this day you can find roots in some authoritative asshole going, "You know, English needs to be a lot more like XYZ language." You see this is many words where they try to formalize English spelling using Greek and Latin spelling principles or word origins. Even if the English word was never derived from Greek or Latin, but it made it look better. Off top of my head when I read about this long ago, the word island. It's like isla or isula for Latin that relates to the concept of an island. So someone thought that English speakers saying, "iland", should add an s in there. The whole English spelling issue is a far more deep rooted and complex problem than your hand-wavy comment gives it credit for. In truth, folks with your attitude are what led us to the current mess because, "they knew better than all those low lives".

>They/them works if you don't want to think about it.

Except that's it's typically used a plural. Referring to one person as multiple is weird, awkward and clunky. Or, you're making a multi-personality joke. I thought we were at the point where poking fun at mental illness was a no-no? That's micro-aggression behavior there on your part. So sure, if you don't think about, it works. Just like saying apple instead would work if you don't think about it.

Yes, languages differ. Why anyone still uses accent marks is weird too. Oh well. A few people forcing their own ideals on the masses isn't right either. Two wrongs don't make a right.

People have also gotten rich off the lottery. Doesn't mean that's something you should always bank on. People have different lifestyle desires with various degrees of risk tolerance. There are different locales that benefit to different lifestyles. Understanding that difference allows people to live happier lives. Everyone catering to one lifestyle because a handful of people like it is not exactly ideal for any society.

Just want to throw it out there. Sure, you have a sub-six-figure salary in different parts of the country, but your rent/mortgage for a similar sized home is a third. Compared to Cali, your taxes are less too in most states.

While your absolute salary is less, your purchasing power is far greater compared to SV, SF and LA. I know someone is going to pick some outliers like NYC, Seattle and so forth. There's still more places to live than that.

Yea, but that's not a "farming" or "meat" problem. That's a human problem. A well known one for a long time at that. If everyone owns it, no one takes care of it. Someone has to be responsible and thus, manage it. There are people who will always abuse a system because they simply don't care. The same as people litter. Pretending to be surprised and blaming anything else is fruitless. "Well, it's the bag's fault for existing, that's why there's trash." or "It's the consumption of meat's fault that the land was stripped bare". No, an asshole did it. An asshole is responsible. Hold particular humans responsible for their personal actions. Don't blame someone or something else.

That all depends how you want to look at it. It's a fun thought experiment but extremely problematic since we're talking about the interaction of global supply chains and how other countries fair/react, which then requires countries to react, and then other countries react to that and so forth.

Could small countries grow the current plethora of fresh fruits/veg that would be technically out of season? Not at all.

Calorically adequate, yet boring, repetitive foods along with preserved? Probably.

Very, very, very few countries are at agricultural limits. Prepped and ready to go? Maybe you can argue that. A month or two of razing? They got it.

If it was a decade long issue, and be foreseeable as a decade long, I'd imagine you'd see more farming gluts of grains and easy to preserve fruits and veg. A lot of fun, exotic foods would go bye-bye. Then lots of canning. Short term, man... that's a hard call. I don't know if most countries are prepped for such shocks to the system. Some will fair better than others, but just like how Covid proved some things did better than others, don't really know until it happens. Problem would be, with huge spikes of global starvation, war is a real threat. That's going to throw some extra problems into the mix.

Meat will go up in price, but won't disappear. People like to think that animal husbandry is meaningless. Literally their poop will be black gold. Thousands upon thousands of years we relied on animal husbandry for good reason. People need to get off their vegan high horse. Meat production levels will probably maintain, maybe lower a little, but not by much. To maintain those crop production needs, because there would be a panic and lower crop rotation rates, you'll need to fertilize like hell. Depending on worldwide logistics and that country's natural resources, artificial fertilizers may not be as readily available as today. At that, the price would skyrocket due to the crazy demand and strategic stockpiling (toilet paper crazy times 100). Locally sourced fertilizers, cow/chicken/sheep/goat shit, will be more valuable and available. It's still an active industry in the USA, but small. I know there are some startups in Africa using rabbits for both meat and fertilizer production. So I assume there are plenty of places worldwide doing it. So that ramp up would not be too far off. Maybe though, the price of meat won't increase by much. If a majority of value from the animal will come from their poop, instead of meat, the meat prices might be slightly stable (still go up in a famine of course). Breed reliance would probably change. Less broilers (chickens) since you need a slightly active chicken if you're going to have them produce compost. That'll increase harvest time though as modern commercial broilers are like 8 week birds while a normal breed is like 20 weeks (depends on breed of course). Eggs would probably become a bigger staple since chickens are good at making lots of compost rather passively.

I'd bet this, pork will be the first to go up in price and by a lot. Unlike most other common livestock, a good amount of feed for pigs comes from taking food waste. They're straight up trashcans and can eat anything without worry. Chickens and ducks too depending on the farm. But you see it more in pig farmers. Famine like conditions, there would presumably be less food waste in general. Then more would be spent on pig feed, thus pork prices go up.

That and Victory Gardens will be a thing again. That'll be nice. Any home owners association or city ordinance that reframes from farming on a lawn/city limits would be told to stfu. That'll be nice too. In truth, you'll see a decent CO2 drop just because the logistics of moving food would diminish drastically. Homesteading will be a big thing again.

Generally, there are ways for people to adapt to this.

That's over grazing. That's lazy, over zealous and/or careless herders who fucked up. You rotate your herds on different land so they don't strip the vegetation. Allowing it to regrow quickly. You're managing the land just as much as your flock. This has been known for thousands of years by people who actually farm and not armchair farm.

Except there are already laws that exist in these countries that need to be enforced. An extra-judiciary force for something that should be taken care of in-house is just unnecessarily power wielding that will be abused. If it was an investigative force that questioned and pushed why certain countries were unevenly utilizing certain laws already enacted, awesome. Sort of like oversights for elections. That I can hesitantly get behind.

All this current concept of political environmentalism does is give another law enforcement and judicial system in the hands of a political few.

Also, don't think I'm for dawdling. You know the best way to get people to stop kicking dogs? Bounce their heads off pavement. I take a very rash and violent viewpoint on how to curb purposeful misdeeds. My biggest thing, make sure you uphold a systematic process of judicial proceedings. Fair trials. Rules and procedures are clear and easy to follow. Evidence based. Ability to fully defend yourself in a court of law. Context. Even legal handedness. The most guilty piece of shit still deserves a fair trial and to be considered innocent until proven guilty. This whole ecocide thing smells of "guilty because we say so".

There's a system already in place to deal with the problems. The issue is, average people aren't educating themselves on it and how to utilize it. I can't speak for every country obviously, but I'm pretty sure most 1st world countries have some similar functions that allow petitioning and suing corps and gov like we can in the USA. The ability to sue is a dangerous tool as well, that is obviously abused. But it's useful as hell too.

And you totally didn't argue against the point I'm making. Just stating that, "It's about saving the world maaaaaaan."

I'm for environmental protection. I'm the guy that will gladly vote for implementing policy that lets gov hire PMCs to hostile takeover GUILTY polluting companies. I'm fine with that. Especially if they stream it live. Watching teams sweep buildings is always fun.

That's not what these ecocide laws are going to be. These will have less to do with environmentalism and more to do with creating an extra-judicial force bullying politicians and governments.

Another commenter mentioned this. If these politicians actually cared about these environmental policies, they would implement it on their own. They might need to rework some of the laws they already have at worst case scenario. Like, you don't get it, most 1st world countries and the EU already have enforceable environmental protection laws. Damn strict ones too. Most of which can be implemented right now to stop a lot of current companies doing current bad deeds. Here's the sticklier, THEY'RE NOT PUBLICLY USEFUL POLITICAL WEAPONS. There's no extra vote potential from using those laws. Most politicians are looking for an endorsement from Greta than actually doing anything meaningful, which again was the point to my rant about the Paris Accord. Hell, when Trump backed out of it, USA companies then decided to start implementing their own environmental policies as a "reaction". Dude, they all should have started doing that beforehand. If they really cared, they would be doing something pre-Paris Accord. They don't actually care. They want the headline spotlight for "caring about the environment". When people get bored a week later and turn away, the policies and efforts magically disappear.

This again, is my point. You care. I believe that. You thinking that the ecocide idealism policies will make a difference, you're being lied to. An extra-judicial international force made up of whom? With what limitations of power? Because it already seems like they want the ability to hammer and hammer hard at their own discretion. Because power never corrupts, right?

What are we supposed to do? Real accountability. Call out political lip service. Shut them down for political rhetoric and force real answers to real questions. Show records of how ineffective politicians have been in their votes and endorsements. Don't allow vague rulings to persist. Push hard and fast when uneven judicial actions are taken. Actually read the fucking law proposals/bills of your country. Everyone keeps thinking that Paris Accord was some mantra of greatness. It was a fucking blank check for career international politicians. The original document is there for everyone to read, but no one read it. Don't take any media or anyone else's take on something. Not even mine. Go read the docs yourself! Please! Do so! Those are the first lines to draw and the most powerful. Until those are done by the general public of most countries, everything else is moot. We don't need extra enforcement agencies oversight our every move. We need people to be accountable for themselves and hold their government accountable.

But I'm sorry, what I mentioned requires effort. It's easier just to agree when someone says, "Old people bad. I care about the environment. Big evil corporations are hiding in your closest. Vote for me because I care about the poors. Don't worry about my lavish lifestyle." That's pretty much every eco-politician in a nutshell. Gets old when they're just as bad as the previous set of politicians.

Yes. In general, I'm not against "eco laws". If they are hard set rules and if they are applied evenly amongst all countries and politicians, I'm for them. I really am. But we all live in the real world and recent history shows environmentalism based laws and policies are political tools... mostly political weapons. Not about actual environmentalism.

You 100% missed the point.

There's something totalitarian about setting vague rules to hold people responsible when you deem fit to prosecute. As an example of how this is going to be politically misused, if you actual read the Paris Accord, you'll know that this ecocide law set is going to be a shitshow. In the Paris Accord, it literally summed up, "You need to sign this agreement, pay the commission $100m, and then we'll setup a commission to figure out what the commission should look like that'll setup the various commissions that'll determine the environmental laws that you have now agreed to." I'm not kidding, what so ever. There were no targets or plans in the original accord that countries had to sign, which preemptively had them agree to whatever the hell the commission would decide YEARS later. Why is anyone to think more of these harsh "environment laws" are going to be precise or even effective if we're to be honest.

I guarantee you that these ecocide rules are going to be just as vague as anti-mercenary international laws. However, ecocide is going to be a political tool to bully countries to toe a line or face severe penalties. Other countries performing ecocide, as long as playing ball, won't face charges.

This is a case of helping make sure that, "everyone is guilty of something". Toss in the public impression of, "That political figure is committing ecocide!", even when they're not, you now have yourself the ultimate political weapon.

Just because someone claims they want to save the world, doesn't mean they actually intend to. There's this thing called lying for personal gains. Fairly new invention, but you should be aware of it. A very small amount of politicians do it and only recently.

I totally agree with you and probably that's my problem with the whole tidbit info thing. Does it actually matter if it was a German, Chinese or whoever that invented the first printing press? I mean, yes, it's nice to give credit where credit is due. Nothing wrong with that. That doesn't mean, "We [insert country] invented the [insert invention], we are all your rulers!" I feel like people take a little good (or bad) and run too far with it. Which probably leads to your propaganda point. Just because you share a nationality with someone that was useful, doesn't immediately make you useful. This also goes for wars. There's just this weird want to associate certain facts with bigger concepts and ideals for no good reason. A lot of the things people praise or denounce are far more isolated compared to what they try to apply it to.

Maybe you're more right about the thing with being curious and what it leads it. At a certain point, I at least, learned how both connected and disconnected many things are from each other. Especially from ideologies. Man, I think that pisses me off the most. I can't stand how any ideology tries to wrap themselves around anything by using the loosest relation they can think of.

Floridian here, travelled the country for about a decade and came back to Florida the past few years.

Until you see how other state, county and municipality governments function, you can't really appreciate how well Florida gov generally works. When growing up in Florida, I was led to believe it was the most backward ass state in the country. Didn't help I also lived in a rural county. After living in half a dozen states in a decade (and visiting many more for long periods)... no. Florida has its shit together compared to most other states. Are there problems here, absolutely. But no where near as bad as other states. Especially when it comes to environmental planning and protection. Still some problems in the Everglades area with some fucktards, but on a whole, environmentalism is more active here than anywhere else. Just the news coverage is dismal.

While I'm on the Space Coast, you're right to not be that worried in Miami. Plus, there are massive seawall projects that are supposed to start soon if they haven't already. I know they were planned for 2020, but the whole covid thing through a monkeywrench in that. Last I read, there's some $20b being spent in the Miami-Dade area in the next decade all in response to climate change. A lot of the infrastructure is getting reworked, along with water management.

It's like people think we're surprised that nature can kill us. We "worry" about it half of the year, every year. We welcome the challenge... as long as we stock up on alcohol. Then bring it on. But if those liquor stores close, it's panic time.

You said that perfectly. From beginning to end, it's amazingly spot on.

The goal was to help 50k people commute between two cities. One potential solution is to widen the highway by one lane on both sides. One other solution is to setup a dedicated commuter rail. The money was being spent for commuters, you are basing cost to commuter capacity ratios. Even if an HSR train could take 50k people is one go, that still doesn't make it better. In reality, everyone will not show up at the same time. In reality, the 50k people that do commute, not all of them could use the rail due to their occupational requirements of tools/material transpo and/or needed to travel throughout the city during the work day. In reality, operational costs out weigh the benefits.

An HSR is like the Gravina Island Bridge project, aka, Bridge to Nowhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge

A $400m dollar bridge to replace a ferry for a town of 50 people. Yes, the bridge has a better capacity than the ferry. It still isn't useful because of all the costs associated for so few people.

I do hope you're not considering the highway system as a short-term, disconnected system. Last I checked, it's been a pretty good long-term, networked infrastructure project.

How would HSR differ from traditional rail infrastructure in the modern age? Rail was phenomenal pre-affordable automobiles. I get that it was the cornerstone of America's rise to power in the 19th century. But even back in its heyday, it crumbled, pre-automobile. The over development of rail was a massive problem for the American economy due to its limitations. It's expensive to lay rail. It's expensive to maintain. It can't go in all the places roads can. Rail is niche in transportation and does what it does well, mass heavy cargo transpo to far distances, like 1k mile distances. Shorter than that, it's not really that economical. This is why you see lumber, coal, gypsum and other raw materials normally moved on rail. Or slow container goods from coast to coast. It's not used for as many goods as people think. If we, as an economy, dropped just-in-time-inventory practices, yes, rail would come back. Absolutely. But we moved to lean/just-in-time-inventory styles of production. That requires nimble transpo on accessible and prevalent paths to final destinations. Unloading train cars isn't efficient whether it's conexed or binned in small quantities. You better have ordered a few train cars worth of materials in one go to make it worth it. There's a good reason why in many industrial areas the rails are overgrown and decayed. No one uses them anymore because a semi-truck takes it straight to the commercial customer without extra logistical steps of coordination.

At that, there's the drawbacks to HSR. You only achieve those speeds on long, straight stretches. If you've road tripped the USA or worked as a truck driver for a while (I did for 7 months OTR), there are these things called mountains. It's cheaper to go around or over, not through. HSR currently can't be fully utilized at it's desired speeds with too many bends or severe changes in elevations. Semi trucks and cars do far better in these aspects. HSR would have to slow down to conventional speeds too often to see much for benefit. Trains need long braking distances in miles, not feet. As a practical example, this is the problem with the north east HSR. There are only a few stretches where it's fully utilized, giving marginal benefit to regular rail. I think it was some 20% of the length is actually "high speed".

Like, this is my big problem with people who have never worked in logistics. The articles written about HSR are best case scenarios in places that it happens to work in. Then, the general public gets a hard-on for HSR when they don't understand a single thing about the process. It's survivorship bias and dunning kruger. Hell, I know I'm barely scratching the surface of the issue at that. Yes, it works in places where the ground is flat, the population density is high and the country's gov can take land without paying for it. One of those applies decently to a decent portion to the US, but then population density there is extremely low. Then, eminent domain is an extremely touchy subject in the USA.

I'm not a fan of the angle of, "It'll improve people's lives" as some blanket concept. Not only has Silicon Valley abused the hell of the concept, "Making the world a better place through xyz", if you can't point exactly how, it's not a real argument. Which seriously, you've just been keyword dropping, not giving hard facts of benefits. You saying that makes it seem you're assuming I want to harm the general American public. Yea, I want all American's lives to improve. I completely believe HSR will not achieve any betterment. I actually think it'll harm more. You saying, "it'll help people" doesn't make all the problems of HSR okay. How does HSR improve lives more? Faster commutes, to where? No one WANTS to commute. People don't want to commute 10 minutes to work. Now it's cool to wait at a station for 10-15 minutes to get on a train, for 20-40 minutes of the commute, to then walk/taxi to their work? Then do it all over again the other direction? Hopefully you don't want to hang out with your coworkers in whatever town you commute to. Commuter rails aren't 24/7. They operate only during rush hours. People want to work in-town as much as possible. That's a better investment strategy for a city to optimize. At that, low-income jobs should not require high commute times. That's what's worth tackling, not trying to increase that distance. There have been many programs trying to transpo low-income workers to farther distances. It has always locked those people into those jobs because of the time sink of those commutes. HSR isn't going to magically fix that.

If you take Japan as an example, their HSR didn't fix commute times: https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commu... Over time, jobs get displaced to more centralized areas. Better paying jobs that would be in smaller cities, get sent to other cities and congregate there. Just like you have Silicon Valley and New York. Industries like to mingle with each other closely if possible. Now, you force more people to travel farther than needed. Economic competition is just going to snowball it more. If HSR is going to give us Japanese 1 hour plus commute times, no. Just plain no. It defeats the whole damn purpose.

Also, the fed doesn't just "print" money. That's a youtube cartoon understanding of how the financial system works. It's covered by bonds. Essentially loans with a few extra steps. This creates debt, which yes, is a problem. But this isn't "money printer go brrr".

Amtrak is pretty much nationalized and is a giant clusterfuck. Nationalize all the things isn't the best strategy.

And yes, this topic peeves me. It's a Haliburton like scheme for certain firms to make a ton of money off of taxpayers in the disguise of, "It's all about helping the poor people. If you hate HSR, you hate poor people." No.

Don't know if it's my end, but your links aren't working. Did a quick search, is it this site you're referencing?

https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/federal_subsidies_t...

Okay, but does it add 5 times or more value? We're not talking about a 10% difference in price tag. Both are a long term maintenance drain, yes. But one has wide potential use, the other is niche. One is civilian commuter only. The other is civilian commuter, commercial cargo and even military transport (the amount of convoys using I25 in that area is extremely frequent). The city got donations and grants to widen the highway because of wide usage. While I do see your argument that a rail can lighten the traffic load for I25, is $1.8B worth it? It already wasn't worth it when thinking in terms of 50k usage. You're now saying it's going to have less and that's still good?

Local gov don't get to treat money like the fed. They ultimately do have to act like a business with profit and loss ratios. While their profits are to be used for expanse of civil and social programs, they can't operate at losses indefinitely. Detroit is a fantastic example of what happens when a city doesn't do responsible fiscal planning. Just because it isn't directly "your money" doesn't mean you can dumpster fire it on super sexy ideas. HSR is all about the dick measuring of, "Look what we have. It doesn't do much, but we have it. We're just like Japan and Europe. We so cool." It's like that $700 Juicero, over engineered, wifi enabled juicer that squeezed pre-juiced drinks into a glass. Packets of juice that could be squeezed by hand or just cut open with $5 scissors and poured into a glass. Fuck, you had to provide your own drinking vessel to that Silicon Valley stupidity. At least Bolthouse drinks don't require anything more than unscrewing the cap. Just because something is cool, popular and sexy doesn't mean it's the right solution.

It makes more sense to expand the highway and just fully subsidize the Mustang service between the two cities for poor commuters. It'll be far cheaper on the tax payers and still provide the benefits for the local community. This is the point. Why spend $1.8b on something when there's a more effective $350m solution?

Yea, but let's reframe this... does it matter? Let's say people thought Bozo the Clown invented the printing press. What does it change? I'm not trolling. This might be more of me having too deep of thought on the matter. I'm the kind of guy that'll rabbit hole into the history of Macedonia for too much of 3 weeks because I came across an article about them having trouble getting into NATO due to the country's name (yes I did this). I know more about Macedonia (now North Macedonia) than 99% people... so what?

Better example, I enjoy watching sports with friends and with alcohol. Every now and then, commenters and friends will mention some sort of niche bit of info. Like a certain football play and what it means. Knowing or not knowing the specifics of game plays changes zero of my entertainment of the game. In truth, it wouldn't mean anything to my friends either in reality. Any of us knowing or not knowing the exact, specific details of football changes nothing. We still watch it on ESPN. We still hang out at someone's house. We all bring food and booze. It matters to the players, coaches and anyone else directly involved. Them flubbing a named detail can change the game, yes. Me knowing? I could call American football, "ice skating" and it'll change zero in the real world. That's not a football, it's an ice cube. Pauly Shore was the nickelback for the Bucks in the last Nachobowl.

99% of people can get through life just fine thinking the printing press was invented by a hamster. That knowledge doesn't change the utility of a book. I think I'm just overthinking it, but maybe culturally we apply too much value on tidbits of facts.

The widening of I-25 between Denver and Colorado Springs, about a 60 mile stretch, is a great example as to why you're wrong.

To add an extra lane to help the load of roughly 20% of Colorado Springs residents (~50k people) that commute between the cities, costs $350 million. To build an HSR would be around $1.8 billion. There was a push to put in a rail as this seemed like a perfect use case (spoiler alert, it showed how niche HSR actually is and how it was a bad idea for lots of places) Even if you charged $10 for a day pass and you had a 100% usage rate by those commuters on every work day (22 workdays a month) that's an income of $132 million a year for the HSR. Hopefully energy, labor, insurance, repair, and upgrades for the rail will be free for the lifetime as well. That's just a constant sink for the public for hair thin marginal benefit. If you make that trip often, you get a fuel efficient car at around 30mpg (what I did). That's about $10 in gas a day. Why would I pay to wait and be on someone else's time? Most commuter rails have narrow commuter hour windows. Not like you can hang out in the city. Worse when you need to travel around the spanse of the city quickly throughout the day. As in, on your time, not on someone else's. Btw, that 50k population ground that commutes, a lot are contractors. As in, they use vans and trucks to carry tools, equipment and materials... so, the practical number of regular users is going to be less.

So, will a politician like to try to convince a population for tax raises for $350 million or for something that's 5 times more expensive? Spoiler again, when it comes to you having to pay for it, you're going to be economical. People were cool with the slight tax hikes for the widening of I25. Not for the major hike that the HSR would need. Doesn't seem political to me. Ain't get more practical than that there good buddy. Let that marinate.

Source, I lived there when this was going on. It's all easy to research since it was a well reported issue. Also, I made that commute somewhat often. HSR wouldn't have worked for me since I was an IT contractor for different companies in the city and needed to move nimbly throughout Denver.

What is with this closed loop fascination? 100% of your time has to be devoted to benefiting humanity? I'm all for ranking certain careers and their value to society, but if someone who is apart of Doctors Without Borders likes to drink shitty Pats Blue Ribbon and watch a Kardashian show at the end of a long day... so? Whatever they have to do to ready for the next day with enthusiasm, who the fuck cares? Why does their relaxing, time off endeavor have to benefit someone else?

Get off your Silicon Valley, always got to hustle hamster wheel. Go watch a sunset.

If they're using their profits for purchases or hiring folks for new shows, the "tax" comes out of the sales tax and the income tax. I mean, this isn't as mustache twirling as people are making it out to be. The tax code is not that messed up. It has problems yes, but being pissed at a company that's reinvesting their income and not showing a profit is like complaining that the guy/gal that's been running for years won a race. It's not like the tax code is reserved only for a select few. It applies to all Americans. Play the game.

No, humans coordinate. The idea of dropping a tool of coordination because you think it's about the numbers and not the utility is a terrible argument. Yes Mars will not have a 24 hour day. That doesn't have a single thing to do with, "legacy timekeeping". Timekeeping was not built on the idea of a "24 hour day". Timekeeping is built on coordinating humans to accomplish things whether recreational or utilitarian. Right now, our best system is based on the arbitrary divisions of an Earth day cycle. The base features of seconds, minutes and hours work. The day length, which is only about 37 extra minutes, doesn't require a brand new system. Hell, an Earth day isn't a perfect 24 hours either. Drastically altering the system just because you're terrible at showing up on time for meetings is pretty dumb. Since Mars is going to be in tight communications with Earth, especially coordinating resources, why have drastically conflicting systems? People bitch enough if you only give imperial or metric measurements online, "Where's my favored unit of measurement? I can't convert it on my own!" You really think different methods of time keeping are going to work out well?

So no, my take on the argument was appropriate. Their stance was an absurd concept based in teenage destroy-the-system angst rather than taking reality as it is. If there's a truly better way of making sure two parties show up at the same "when", then let's hear it.

Because time is a social construct and humans have no business having any form of social norms or social rules. It's not like humans are social creatures. Abolish all the social constructs!

I know, it's the weirdest thing calling folks. People pretending like calling others with a phone is the purpose of them. Jeez, the audacity. Not following social rules of using a phone. People need to construct some socially agreed concepts to help cooperate with each other.

Same here, this is so far the best one yet. Far better than VW's shitty attempt.

Though, it dawned on me, Mars could have real time zones. Not the stupid political mess we have today. Perfect, logical longitudinal time zones from the get go. That right there is more than enough reason for me to leave this planet.

But let's be honest, Mars will be colonized, politics will arise and the same fuckery will happen eventually.

I literally just did a huge rip on crypto currencies the other day, mostly regarding bitcoin. However, there's one aspect to Filecoin that I do see as... potential is a strong word, but maybe appropriate still. It's not entirely fair to lump it in with other cryptocoins. There is some value behind it, in means of distributed storage. While I would argue it's more efficient, easier and all around better to use standard alternatives since Filecoin adds a layer of complexity to marginal benefit... I can never argue it's completely useless. There is some economic value backing it since it provides a service outside of just being a cryptocurrency.

If I woke up from a 15 year coma and was quickly told about Bitcoin and Filecoin, one had a value of $200 each, the other $50k. Then asked which one was the $50k one? I'd first say, "Filecoin obviously" and second, please just kill me I don't want to live in this bizzaro reality.

I love how you proved the essay's point even better than the actual essay, while using a poem.