crocal

Be careful, as many topics in railway signalling, this is actually fairly complicated and tricky. As I said in another comment, crossings are pure evil. They are many hazardous scenario and without any system inside the car, mitigations are not fail safe.

Personnally, I belong to the school of « remove them all, whatever the costs ». A little extreme, but €&@% I hate these things.

No, it’s really important advice.

The big issue with trains is that it has an inertia that our brain is not trained to.

As signalling engineers, we get to compute safe braking distances a lot and they are /big/, even at relatively low speed. This means that trains in curves -> do not have line of sight all the way to the next possible stop point <- so the driver may never have the chance to stop if you fall while crossing the track.

So don’t do it. Even at 30mph in curves, you are in danger.

Actually no. Cannot be too big and automatic. You need to allow a stranded car to break free. You must not crush a car that is only half way in.

Sigh.

Railway crossings are pure evil. There is no fail safe design that I know of without adding a proximity sensor inside the car (I am a railway signalling engineer). Would love to be wrong though.

This is the typical line of defense used by harassers when brought to court « I can’t be an harasser because there was no previous or other complain ». Sorry, it doesn’t work like this. Presumed harassers have to explain why the supporting evidence provided by the accusing party is not valid.

Very common tactic in Europe indeed. The new thing is that now employees retaliate... and win.

> Yes, it is. Keynes said at one point that the government printing dollar bills and burying them for people to dig up would be a valid form of economic stimulus.

This does not make it the center piece. The center piece of Keynesian economics is that state intervention is necessary to moderate the booms and busts in economic activity.

> Milton Friedman did not advocate anything like the arbitrary manipulation of the money supply by the government that is practiced by the Federal Reserve.

Sorry, but clamping the growth of money supply with a k-rule, irrespective of the market cycle, is the arbitrariest manipulation I can think of.

> No, the government printing money and giving it to a few favored parties (.../...)

We can agree there that governments giving money to the already super wealthy is a bad think. But why does it do that? Because same super wealthy have become so wealthy they can influence government.

Which brings me to your case on Rome. The reason why Roman emperors debased their coins was because they had emptied their coffers on other things yet /needed/ to keep the army strong for what was essentially a looting regime to survive. At the end of the day, Emperors are not governments, they are another form of super-rich protecting their short-term positions at the expense of longer term stability.

Err... Keynes « center piece » is not manipulation of money supply. This extreme monetarism you describe is... Friedman’s!!! And boy do I agree it does not work!

Ultra liberal economics lead to accumulation of wealth by few super riches. This happens to be one of the reason the Roman Empire fell because all this money could not be spent on keeping the army in working conditions. Super riches of the time hoarded the necessary gold for themselves.

But don’t put that on Keynes’ tab. It’s twistedly wrong.

I have to disagree. Economy is the interface between producers and consumers of resources. It’s big time a social construct, and therefore the subject of political action.

Importantly, the idea that state intervention is bad for the economy as a universal rule is simply wrong. In the long run, history clearly teaches that mixed economy work (e.g. a la Keynes), while laissez-faire (e.g. a la Friedman) or centralized economies (e.g. a la Communist) don’t. Striking the right mix requires society input in the form of political debate.

We desperately need this to happen now in the West. While I have nothing about Jeff Bezos as a person, but billionaires simply should not be allowed to exist. They are the symptom of a « Laissez Faire » system in terminal state.

It’s hard to overestimate the gigantic /smack in the face/ that Akira was when it came out on screen. Much of us had only seen Disneyish / childish stuff so far, and even adult-themed animation was cartoonish in nature. And here walks in the room bikers hitting themselves in the face with steel bars, incredibly detailed sets, flawless animation (Akira was 24 fps on one), exotic graphism and insane music. I skipped class once in my life. It was to take the train and go to the big city to see Akira.

Upvoted for mentioning Red Line, most amazing anime you have never heard of.

Yes. I miss Abba...

Bytecode, it seems :) https://mars.nasa.gov/MPF/rovercom/telem.html

Did it really cost only 5B$ to get there? I just ask because if confirmed it’s unbelievably cheap. I am /stunned/.

If only one company goes remote, then the collective power of employees certainly goes down (« divide and conquer «)

But if the entire /job market/ goes remote and access to the net is a public commodity, then you can apply for all jobs /anywhere/. Employees bargaining power increases significantly. Furthermore, any employee can start his/her competing business in an instant.

As a side effect, wages can go down but if you don’t work in the bay area you can come out /better off/.

So it’s not clear if the downside is going to be related to worker’s rights. I am personally more worried on the societal / mental issues with WFH.

Europe suckiness at R&D is well documented. I am European. It hurts.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

I don’t know how to write it well but hang in there! The fact that you worry about your children means you are a great person. Take care.

It is inevitable that in such an atmosphere unlikely targets are picked as scapegoats. If it stops at 5G antennas I guess we can consider ourselves fortunate.

I think you answered your own question with the ´Dopamine’ comment. Slack clearly has an addictive game effect on its users. And since it pleases the crowd and has no visible downside, it’s tempting for busy small/medium business owner to just let it sail initially.

Not only that. Hard work and early specialising is a recipe for depression. I have seen this pattern repeat itself over and over again.

Well, I am no big fan of Gohsn, but judging from the way the Japanese justice system treats suspects, this system deserves to be mocked, rolled in tar and covered with feathers. Ghosn is not asking to escape judgement, he is asking for a fair trial. It’s now pretty obvious no such thing exists today in Japan. Maybe he is guilty, but I find it hard to blame him for escaping, irrespective of his wealth.

These are not architecture documents but change management documents. Roll out of such decisions should, among other things, result in an update to architecture docs.

Airbus equivalent plane is taller on wheels than the 737. Thus they could mount the engines without changing the center of gravity of the aircraft.

Please. Hitler wrote a /book/ where he explained /everything/ in excruciating details. That is arguably the scariest part of Nazism. People /knew/ what they were signing for. Hitler /was/ legitimate.

I think the elephant in the room is the question of purpose. What is the purpose guiding your actions? Getting good grades is a mean that /can/ be necessary to achieve the purpose you have chosen in life. But it’s not sufficient for most purposes. On the other hand, once you have a purpose, you truly make the most of education.

Before talking about anti-safety culture, I observed that the real issue in a purely hardware/software-driven culture is that people focus on technology. For safety systems, this usually fails / overbudgets because there needs to be some systems thinking /before/ about why and how the proposed system can be declared safe. In the case of drones, I am afraid that the systems design to make these devices acceptably safe is yet to be formulated (Note: these are not planes, they fly close to the ground so they do not benefit from the safety of altitude to have time to react in case of failure)

Anyone else would like to join a trek from Balrog to Cthulhu on a frosty Plutonian summer day?

Sigh. The Lyon metro is only fully automated on line D. There is an ongoing project to automate line A and B. Lyon metro line D is relatively famous in mass transit signalling because it is one of the very first driverless metro and it features no platform doors. This is but one of the inaccuracies I found in this uninformed article.

As far as I can judge, the problem of untidy streets and insecurity in Paris have nothing to do with "uncontrolled immigration". Do you have some evidence supporting your statement?

The article misses an important point. It’s not only a problem of technology, it’s also a problem of risk acceptance. While we accept to be killed by our own mistakes at the wheel, society (we) will not accept that a machine makes the same, even if the failure rate is on average /better/. This is the fundamental issue Elon Musk has. The driverless bar for safety is way higher than very clever driver assistance or even rocket science.

This is all fine and good, but IMHO LA metro map says it all [1]. 6 lines. What a joke. This mega city should have light or heavy rail metro pretty much everywhere. It's even better if there are parking lots in abundance. Park & Ride can be put into place more easily. So, it's obviously a political choice and I am not sure more regulation on parking will have any significant impact on this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Metro_Rail