This is for the PNW. The Bay Area is south of that. We won't be hit by one that big. "The big one" here will be an 8, not a 9.
449 karma · joined September 7, 2009
The ethics aren't what you say they are either. First, while if a startup crowd funds a product and fails, you're SOL. When a billion dollar company crowd funds a product, even if the platform makes no guarantees, if it fails do deliver then you have recourse against the company. Second, Why should only small players be able to address previously unaddressed markets? Isn't that one of the complaints about big companies, that they ignore small markets? And now that they've got the ability to actually test out a market - and serve it in the process! - that's a bad thing too?
The criticism of Ahab having no method to his madness is on point as well.
You'd also break dynamically adding methods to classes.
And yes, it is significantly faster. Avoiding writing assembly seems like an awfully odd goal to have for a language runtime.
Much like moaning during a TSA pat down, I wonder how well a mass campaign doing that would demoralize CBP officers.
Eisenhower had two sources of inspiration when pushing the interstate highway system. The well-known one was seeing the autobahn in Germany, but the second one was an experiment he was put in charge of in 1919, to see, using the existing US highway system, how long it would take to get a military convoy from one side of the country to the other. The answer was 23 days, with many bridges broken and having to be repaired, with an average speed less than 6 mph. This was obviously inadequate for defense purposes, so even if the most common purpose today of the EIS is private car and commercial truck transport, it was worth building for its defensive role.
Repurposability: the EIS is useful in more ways than HSR would be. HSR is useful only for passenger trains. The EIS works with cars, cargo trucks, tanker trucks, buses, tanks, and in an emergency many parts can be used as runways. In addition, it's connected with the rest of the North American road network, something which would not be true of CA HSR. The best you could get would be intermodal stations, probably at the terminal stops. HSR can't carry freight of any type, and the tracks are meant to be grade separated from the existing freight rail network.
Capacity: At the peak hour, 12,000 people cross the bay bridge westbound vs 28,000 through the BART Transbay Tube westbound. Seems like a win for rail, right? That's with 2.5 minute headway on packed commuter trains feeding from 4 different lines. HSR trains won't have the capacity of BART trains, nor the frequency. Even if each individual's trip is faster, the total throughput is lower. CA HSR specifies 900 seats on a 12-car train (or rather, 450 seats on each of 2 6-car trains which can be joined together). Just to have the capacity of I-5, (which we'll take to be 2/5 of the Bay Bridge capacity for simplicity (2 lanes vs. 5)) there would need to be a train every 11 minutes 15 seconds. Worse, to meet the "expected" ridership of 33.1 million people/year, trains will have to run with an average of 708+ people, assuming the trains run 24/7 (which seems extraordinarily unlikely).
In terms of construction costs, a rough estimate puts the cost of the 375 miles of interstate freeway between SF and LA at $4B (assuming costs of the entire EIS were spread evenly over every mile, but they weren't; the actual cost was lower, excluding the bay bridge, which is tolled). HSR is currently trending towards $62B. Ongoing subsidies are, using the same metric, $321M/year vs. ??? The HSR group claims it will break even before phase 1 completion (they estimate millions of people/year want to go between San Jose and Bakersfield, which seems pretty ridiculous), and be operating-and-maintenance profitable throughout in 2029 when the SF-LA line is brought online. It's hard to find in the 2016 business plan, but the O&M estimates are there: ~$1.1B/year in 2029 (excluding trainset lifecycle cost averaging). The state is on the hook for all of that that doesn't get covered by fares.
So that's ultimately why we should hold transit to a higher standard - more uncertainty, less utility.
To be fair, I think that's a perfectly reasonable goal in and of itself - showing how to set up an OS X app "from scratch" is definitely something I'm interested in - but we shouldn't pretend this isn't strongly relying on Objective-C to actually get things done.
EDIT: indeed, the makefile copies main.c to main.m before invoking clang, which means it's using the Objective-C compiler.
What would be much more impressive is if this used only the C Core* frameworks (Core Foundation and Core Graphics in particular) to do the same thing.