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Just because something is not profitable does not mean it shouldn't be built. Trains are one you've already mentioned, roads another...

Why shouldn't roads, especially limited access roads, pay for themselves 100% from gas taxes and other user fees instead of less than half? And why should truckers continue to be heavily subsidized for the massive damage they cause to our roads?

And with all those road and trucking subsidies, is it really too hard to understand why it's so difficult for trains to turn a profit?

Meanwhile, is it possible that we've committed ourselves to maintaining more than the economically optimal amount of infrastructure, that people intuitively realize this and that's why we aren't willing to raise taxes to keep our roads and bridges from crumbling? Or to look at it another way, what would "too many roads and bridges" look like? The answer to this question is important in determining whether we're already past that point.

Perhaps if truckers were required to pay their fair share, they might reduce their axle loading a little in order to avoid damaging the pavement, saving taxpayers money. And if the roads were required to pay for themselves, grocery stores might again locate themselves near railroad spurs, as they did before the Interstate Highway System came along, saving themselves and their customers money. More freight would be transported by rail which is three times as fuel-efficient as trucks, reducing our carbon emissions. But none of this magic will happen as long as we cling to the belief that roads need not pay for themselves.

Don't worry, a train can take the load of 280 trucks off the road.

Mandatory nit-pick: Turbines are also internal combustion engines.

Also, it's been done, although at a larger scale -- the Union Pacific Railroad used to have these beauties, which they liked for exactly the flex-fuel reason you mention. They could run on ultra-cheap heavy diesel oil.

They weren't especially efficient users of energy, however -- turbines are great at full power, but at low power loads, they still use almost as much fuel per unit time as at full power.

In a modern hybrid application, where there's a large battery to store energy, it may well work better.

A tax on carbon is a tax on everything.

Yes, but less so on stuff produced and transported efficiently. As a result, manufacturers and shipping companies will have a greater incentive to be efficient, and people will have a greater incentive to cut down on driving, make their homes more energy efficient, etc.

Refund all of the revenues equally to everyone, and the carbon tax will be a net zero cost to the average person while still providing an incentive to conserve.

The price of everyhtng transported by road or rail will rise.

But more by road than by rail, because railroads are three times more fuel-efficient than trucks.

Indeed--- as a result, even the poster children of truck shipping, UPS/FedEx, have moved much of their cross-country shipping to rail. If you order something FedEx to Texas from the Northeast, for example, chances are it'll make a stop in Hutchins, Texas.

It depends. Wider is more stable, but wider *greatly* increases the minimum turn radius that the track can make, as well as (obviously) requiring more physical space. In Colorado, narrow-gauge railroads, at 3' wide, were standard through the Rockies, with the 'normal' 4'8 1/2" gauge going eastwards into the plains. The narrow-gauge railroads could stand 5% up and down grades (standard could only go to maybe 3 1/2%) and could be snaked up crazy narrow canyons, and tunnels and roadcuts were less expensive because they were narrower. The narrow-gauge engines had drivers maybe 2' in diameter, max, which is why they could handle the steeper grades. Some engines, like the massive Union Pacific Big Boy freight haulers, could only operate in some parts of the US because 'standard' standard-gauge turns were too tight for them, and only especially straight roadbeds could accommodate them.

The one issue with this is that Real Estate agents, by their nature, are always looking for houses to sell (or better be!). So they are willing to pay a monthly fee to maintain the local MLS. The local realtor board is able to depend that all active agents in its geographic area will use the MLS, and thus pay into the system. So the MLS can have someone that maintains the MLS, even if its not their full time job (or several someones if it's a large MLS).

A Job Bank MLS (JBMLS) fails on the revenue side of things. Since there are often only a few, high-turnover places constantly hiring (low paying manufacturing jobs, low paying retail jobs, heck, just about any low paying job), a JBMLS doesn't have a steady stream of income if the employer pays. And you don't think that someone paying minimum wage and minimal benefits should have to pay to get the low quality applicants their positions attract, do you?

Granted, there are some areas where certain employers are in a long term hiring mode and would sign up for several years. But most, I suspect, would only want the service for a short time. A short listing means nearly as much work as a long term listing, and that means short timers pay a higher cost per candidate. And many major employers have decided they can do the job better internally, http://www.uprr.com/employment/index.shtml or have states where the state employment bureau already does a fair job.

If the service is free to employers, you have to charge the job seekers. Certainly in the on-line dating world, there are both pay and free services, so it would seem in the job hunting world it would work. However, if it is free to employers, you'd have to spend a great deal of time manually weeding out the head-hunters that were there just for resume collection. That increases your costs, but without it you're no better than the free sites. There has got to be a better way!

It seems the easiest path to finacial success is to emulate the dating sites entirely, where both users pay (job hunter and employer). In fact, to a desperate job hunter OR desperate employer, the process is just like on-line dating. The key would be to deliver good candiates to the employers (which by virtue of being a pay site, would seem to improve the odds) and deliver quality jobs to the job seekers (avoiding the fishers). Keeping up both ends of the bargain means you can get both sides to pay, and probably gladly pay.

And here's a picture of SMP (Steam Multi Processing) in action.

I wouldn't have been so hard on the guy - everybody seems to love analogies here even well after they have fallen apart. This one happened to fall apart sooner than most.

Reversing (and breaking) the analogy, here's what might have been considered a "dual core" steam engine. Ok, forget the analogies, it's an impressive machine.

Well, you can try asking for one. The railroads (in the US) are hiring right now due to the combined effects of the recent economic upswing and new retirement rules, which caused an unexpected surge in early retirements. Here's some sites to check out:
Demand clogs traffic, profits for Union Pacific
Union Pacific website
BNSF website
and more

Large Railroads of North America:
Union Pacific
Burlington Northern Santa Fe
CSX
Norfolk Southern
Canadian National
Canadian Pacific
Kansas City Southern
And then there's Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern, which wants to became a bigger player in the transportation market through their proposed powder river expansion project

And it's all run without your tax dollars.

Now, of course, the automobile dominates passenger traffic and the trucking industry dominates freight and our potentially efficient rail infrastructure is a government-subsidized crumbling ruin that neither the auto, trucking or oil industry is interested in seeing re-emerge.

Wrong. Railroads in the United States are profitable, privately run companies, which make their money from hauling freight. 40% of all frieght travels by rail in the US. Rail infrastructure is not a "government-subsidized crumbling ruin," as you claim. It is very much intact and well maintained by private money. The railroads were deregulated around 1980, and have been doing fine ever since. The fastest growing area in the industry is intermodal: hauling trucks and containers on flat cars. Research, man! Try it sometime!

Association of American Railroads

Union Pacific Railroad Homepage

DM&E expansion project. This page is a little sparse, so try Google.

There is a web page with a short history of these locomotives here. They were delivered to Union Pacific starting about 50 years ago. Union Pacific had 55 gas turbine locomotives. They were noted for their noise and high fuel consumption.

Union Pacific Railroad is in the midst of converting everything over from NT to Apache running on Solaris. The NT webservers were way too unstable, crashing several times per week.

Where I work, Microsoft salespeople came into our group, and started telling us that IIS is behind 70% of ALL e-commerce sites. We laughed them out of the building. We asked to be explained why to use their product, we did not ask them to lie to us about made-up things. iPlanet had just told us a few weeks ago that THEY have 70% of the eCommerce market. Hmmm... That adds up to 140%, someone must have been doing math in the vicinity of a black hole again...

Don't believe the marketspeak - it's usually fabricated, unverifiable bullshit. Tell them "Show me the money - set up identical Apache and IIS servers here and prove your distorted figures."

I adminned IIS servers for 5 years, and just in the last year started doing Apache. At first, the lack of a GUI is intimidating, but once you get familiar with the configuration file, you find that Apache can do all kinds of things that IIS never dreamed of...

The failure of technology today is that it has minimized the awe inspiring side effects. Now we need artificial side effects of glowing LEDs, neon tubes, and bogus megahertz readouts. We no longer know how to build technology that is visually impressive merely as the result of its essence. Like the fake decorative window shutters without hinges on bogus ``colonial'' American homes, our technological monuments are phony, and unable to be even minimally monumental. Thank God that Y2k will soon change the course of history, and bring about a reformation to what technology was and can be again.