>>In case you haven't picked up on it yet, temperature, like I.Q., is a human construct. It is what we define it as.
Actually, temperature is like mass. It exists independantly of perception.
Our perception of temperature ("it's hot outside!") might vary from person to person, but the actual temperature does not. I think philosophers have a term for quantities like that, but I can't recall it off the top of my head.
My girlfriend (yeah, yeah, it's Slashdot, I know) lives in a fairly dense residential area. There's 5 open WAPs from her room with 2-3 bars each. There's about a hundred doors where those WAPs could be located within radius. It's ridiculous to assume it's practical to find out where the signal is coming from.
The fact is, the person is broadcasting a signal into my room. It's incorrect to say it's illegal to do it. The guy that got arrested was like loitering in a parking lot somewhere, leeching excessive amounts of bandwidth (hurting the network) IIRC. AFAIK, there's never been a case where a guy has been arrested because he accidentally connected to his upstairs neighbor instead of his own WAP. Happens all the time... Windows just picks one at random if you don't have a priority list set up.
I played during the EQ beta, and considered it both new/innovative and crap at the same time. I didn't buy it. I also beta tested UO and AC1, and was given AC2 for free. I played long enough to learn that I'd really hate playing it for real, and so I didn't buy any of them. I was tricked into buying FFXI, but cancelled my account after a few months.
Even though I'm a pretty hardcore gamer, I hate MMORPGs in general.
Amazingly, WOW has held my interest for the last 1.5 years, and will continue to do for the forseeable future. What did they do differently? They put so much content into the game it is possible to hit level 60 without grinding once. And grinding is the reason I find other MMORPGs so intolerable. In WOW, I don't need to grind for anything. I do an MC, an AQ and a ZG once per week, and that gives me all the gear I need to support my PVP habits.
FFXI-II. And then the next revision will be FFXI-II V.II. Eventually Final Fantasy games will become long random alphanumeric strings to differentiate them from each other.
At least if FFXI-II follows the path of FFX-II, then there'll be a lot more fan service. On the downside, you'll have to punch your eardrums out all over again with the horrid singing. The worlds first MMORPG featuring pop stars! I'm a level 13 black vocalist!
Sigh...
Actually, FFXI was a decent game, for the first 10 or 20 hours or so. Then they just appeared to run out of ideas, and required quests (like for Lu Sheng's Ultimate Fishing Rod(tm)) that just required stupid amounts of repetition to complete. I know repetition is a hallmark of any MMORPG, but FFXI took it to extreme levels.
>>Ignoring, for the moment, that you don't provide any substantiation for that claim (which I find highly doubtful, seen in any categorical way)
I kept the article in my closet for a while which had the reference, but since moving I can't find it. A quick google on Life Expectancy of Christians shows +3 years.
>>I'd say you're confusing causation and correlation - the hallmark of weak conjecture and rhetoric. >>What mechanism would mysticism emply to, say, make you less susceptible to carcinegens and car accidents?
As a statistician, I understand the difference. And yet I think there's something to it. Stress & worry kills. Look at ole Ken Lay, or Charles Lewis. There are schools of Buddhism that aren't mystical, but purely internal meditative arts. You can be a Buddhist and an atheist at the same time without being a hypocrite. Christians don't stress themselves too much about death or anything else because they know they'll be taken care of in the next life.
What mechanism? Possibly Interleukin-6, probably a lot more.
I find it ironic that religious people live 7 years longer (after factoring out other factors) than atheists then. If you're an atheist, the most logical thing to do is pick up a religion -- both Christians, Hindus and Buddhists live longer, so you can take your pick. It's the most logically selfish thing to do, especially if you only have one go-round.
The public education system was copied from Scotland, IIRC, after seeing how a well educated populace did wonders for Scotland, who went from being a backwater to a head of philosophy, steam engines, etc., in about a generation.
Eh, sometimes. The law is actually unclear on if a car is protected from search. There's conflicting supreme court decisions on it.
And I've watched that video before. It's an ACLU video about how not to get caught if you commit a crime. And it won't even work. The best way of getting out of a traffic stop without getting searched is to present a friendly, somewhat bored expression. Don't admit to speeding, but don't pretend to be a lawyer if you're not. Don't not insist on your rights, but don't act like the tards in that video either.
I don't think there is anti-Swiss sentiment because, frankly, most people don't know very much about Switzerland. Like how they don't have Habeas Corpus. My uncle was held in a Swiss prison for four years and never charged with a crime (they suspected him of some form of embezzlement). They only released him when he got cancer and it became too expensive to treat him.
It's amusing they would complain about Gitmo (which I do consider unconstitutional) while essentially Gitmo-ing overweight 60-year old businessmen.
Don't get me wrong, Switzerland is probably the most beautiful country on Earth, and I'd love to live there one day, but what they did to my uncle was pretty messed up.
>>Read about the Crusades, in which "noble" men came to the holy land >>to massacre people and honestly believed that every kill was an act >>of redemption (as I happened to read earlier today).
Most people think the Crusades were started in response to the Muslim capture of Jerusalm.
On the contrary.
A quick background to the Crusades: 1) Muslims took over Jerusalem in 638. 2) There was no reaction from the Western world as the arabs allowed Christians to come to Jerusalem to worship. 3) Four hundred years later Arabs start massacring westerners coming to worship, and burn the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. 4) The Western World gets pissed off about these acts of (essentially) terrorism and marches to Jersusalem, slaughtering most anyone in their way.
It's not a proud history, but it's hardly the unprovoked attack by the Western World you get in history classes these days (if it gets taught at all, and not just hand-waved as an example of how Christianity is evil).
A common argument by the politically correct crowd goes something like, "If something isn't perfect, then it is wrong." There were atrocities on the parts of the crusaders, but if the same thing happened today -- suppose terrorists started murdering every person that drove along a road in the desert -- what else would you do? Sit back and watch? Or would you send in armed forces?
I have no use for pacifists. Sometimes military force is necessary, and the ongoing slaughter of civilians is one such time.
>>This article is about ancestry, and makes a simple mathematical argument that human beings are all related. It doesn't make a commentary about race or geographical diversity. Get a grip.
Simple, and wrong, because the authors don't understand the very basic concept of the pigeonhole principle.
Politcally correct is right. I got flamed by some Irishman who got upset when I posted that a survey found that 0% of Irish and German had the liver deficiency that a lot of asian people have (causing the so-called "Asian Curse", flushing and inebriation with relatively small amounts of alcohol). He was like "What kind of racist BS is this? Har har make fun of the drunken paddies" and claimed I was racist, made it all up, etc.
I think sent him a link to over 200 articles on pubmed on pharmacogenetics, including something like 10 on the subject of corrolating race to the liver deficiency. Like most people in the PC crowd that get called out for being provably wrong, he just tried to change the topic.
But you're absolutely right. There's no need to get into complex discussions over whether race is even real or not. Self-reported ethnicity is one of the best ways of predicting certain sets of genes on a human (for sickle-cell, for example), and so is demonstrably not JUST a social construct.
Authors don't understand the pigeonhole principle:
(From the FA): "Keep going back in time, and there are fewer and fewer people available to put on more and more branches of the 6.5 billion family trees of people living today. It is mathematically inevitable that at some point, there will be a person who appears at least once on everybody's tree."
No, not at all. You could have, for example, two completely separate branches of humanity (say one in the Americas and one everywhere else) that never interbred except at the very beginning of the human species. Pigeonhole Principle. The only thing thats mathematically inevitable is that at least two ancestors somewhere is shared. Somewhere. For example, mathematically, a very prolific couple could have been responsible for all X billion people minus a small group living in an uncharted area, whose roots go all the way back to the beginning.
There actually is a rail route that runs up the middle of California... but Amtrak decided it was too expensive to run rails through the mountains north of LA... so if you take a train from SD to Fresno, you ride a train to LA, then they put you on a bloody bus for 100 miles to Bakersfield, and then you finish the ride on a train.
Personally, I'd love to see a high speed line running through the city centers of each major city in California. I hate driving between SF and SD, and too it all too often these days. The expense of about high speed rail are tremendous. The CA HSR board anticipates a cost of $9B (with cost overruns, it will probably come in at double that) to build one line down from Sacramento to SD. California's annual budget is $8B, and has been very short on funds since the tech crash. It will be interesting to see if a bond measure can pass.
I understand how you feel. I often find that Americans have a hard time understanding that not all European countries are Luxemburg-sized.
Mmm, as I said, this isn't a bigger is better argument. Hell, I'd love it if the neighboring cities all my friends live in don't take 3 (LA), 6 (Pheonix), and 10 (SF) hours to get to. I am simply making that observation that when dealing with a lot of my European friends, what they picture in their mind is Europe, but where everyone speaks American English. It's not unreasonable -- that's just how human beings are. The point of my post is to make Europeans exactly how bloody big the American West actually is.
Paris to Marseilles covers most of the country. San Diego and San Francisco are about the same distance away, and thats one state. I can say from personal experience that there's a lot more between Paris and Marseilles than there is between SF and SD.
The long amount of time it takes to travel by car in America really does isolate cities from each other. Many of my European friends travel between cities, states, and countries in a fashion that is alien to most Americans. Even Mexico is far away in our cognitive map, and it's only about an hour trip. When it's six hours to visit my friend in Phoenix, I don't do it. Especially since the drive is so mind-numbingly boring. I only see him when I fly in on business.
Total train trip time, from city center to city center: 3 (THREE) fscking hours with the TGV train. No, that's not a typo.
Um, thanks for noting something I already said (check the thread)?
A TGV from Paris to Marseilles costs $100 and takes 3 hours. An airplane from San Francisco to San Diego costs $35 if you get a good fare, maybe $100 if you don't look hard and takes 45 minutes.
If you can get a ticket for 25 bucks, then it's indeed competitive with airfare, though still slower. If you airport is hard to get to, then, yeah, a train might be superior.
My experiences were of travelling from one place in North Carolina to another place in North Carolina --- not a particularly large distance, and it's got a high enough population density to make a local network worthwhile.
I'm not familiar with North Carolina, but I just got back from a business trip to South Carolina. Same situation, airport 5 miles outside of town, no clear mass transit available. But that's kind of what I'm talking about. American towns cover such a large geographic area that having a car is almost a prerequisite these days. Suppose you were able to take a bus right from the airport to downtown. Then what?
When I arrived in Paris at the Gare du Sud, I simply tossed on my backpack and walked to the Gare du Nord (or northwest, whatever it's called), detouring along the way to see pretty much all the sights in Paris (Les Invalides, Le Tour Effiel, Jardin des Tuileries, the Champs Elysees, etc.) If you were to take a bus from the airport in San Diego to downtown San Diego (about a 5 minute ride), you'd be in... downtown San Diego. No place to possibly walk to, only a few hotels in the area, all of which are outrageously priced. San Diego does have a metro rail network, but it's basically a joke. The geographical size of San Diego is so large, and the metro line can cover such a small area, that it's essentially useless unless you happen to be lucky enough to both live right next to a stop, and your destination also happens to be along one of the lines. Remember what I said about LA essentially covering most of the southern half of England. The density is too low to support a rail line, unless you're using substantial government subsidies, which is not particularly appealing to the American taxpayer. We reluctantly support Amtrak just so that we have a minimum reserve of rail lines in case of emergency.
A TGV from Paris to Marseilles costs $100 and takes 3 hours. An airplane from San Francisco to San Diego costs $35 if you get a good fare, maybe $100 if you don't look hard and takes 45 minutes. Same distance, air is cheaper and faster. Plus every 8 round trips I make I get a free round trip fare anywhere in the county (up to $500-$600 depending on destination), which makes short haul trips cheap/free/profitable, depending on the fares and wherever I end up finally flying to.
I suppose there's a bit more of an overhead dealing with airport security and whatnot (tack on 30 minutes), but I usually just carry-on all my luggage on short trips, so there's no delay leaving.
Sign, burning two mod points on this (both +funny, whatever), but it's an issue that comes up whenever I talk with Europeans about mass transit, and how they can't understand why we don't have a rail system.
The fundamental problem is that Europeans cannot fully grasp the difference in scale invoved in America, especially in the American West. (It's big. It is really really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. You may think it is long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to Texas.) I travel rather often from San Diego, through Los Angeles, and to the Bay Area / San Francisco (these are the three major cities in California, incidentally). The trip takes 8-10 hours to complete, depending on traffic passing through Los Angeles. There is a single rail line that runs down the coast. Once per day it travels between SF and SD, and you have to get up at 5AM to catch it. It takes 11 hours.
San Francisco and San Diego are 500 miles apart.
By comparison, Amsterdam to Paris is 500 *km* apart. The distance from San Diego to San Francisco would span the breadth of England (London to Inverness was 8 hours by train, and is about 550 miles, as is Paris to Nice). When I was in Europe, I was constantly surprised about how little time it took to travel from one city to the next while I was on a train. When you live in the American West, you get used to 6 hour drives at 75-80 miles per hour where you literally see no living human beings outside of the gas stations and rest stops. And maybe some farms.
Europe is very heavily built up. It's dense. Rail networks make a lot more sense in dense networks than in sparse ones. That same rail line that runs to Oxford (60 miles from London) can be used to connect to Warwick, or Stratford-upon-Avon (if my memory serves). The rail network in California is essentially a 3-node graph with a line between SF, LA, and SD. With two mountain ranges in between, to boot. The train company loses money on the line pretty consistently. There's literally nothing in between to make the run profitable. San Luis Obispo and Santa Cruz are nice places, don't get me wrong, but they simply aren't volume destinations. And because it's not profitable, there won't be any more private infrastructure development. The State of California has been toying with the notion of building a high speed line from SF to SD for a while now, but, hell, I ran the numbers myself. Japan wouldn't have built a high speed rail line if their cities were all 500 miles apart. It's too costly. The main island of Japan is about 600 miles long, total.
It's not a better-than or worse-than comparison, I'm simply stating the facts. You have to have a certain critical mass of density to make rail networks worth your while. An analogy that works well with Europeans I've met: Imagine France. Now imagine there is nothing in the country but Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. None of the little villages, towns, and cities. Nothing but desert. Now consider the practicality of a rail network in the country. This is Texas.
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This isn't an America-is-bigger-is-better argument. In fact, I can pretty firmly say that I would greatly prefer being able to travel to another city in an hour or two. I lose an entire day whenever I make the trip. A drive to Phoenix, first major city east of San Diego (Yuma doesn't count) is 6 hours (@75 MPH) through almost nothing but desert. To the average San Diegan or San Franciscan, the other city is akin to a vacation destination. Road Trips are boring as hell unless you find a way to entertain yourself -- I personally go through audiobooks like water.
Rail Networks simply don't work when the graphs are so sparse. Out in the middle of the desert, a car moves faster than a train, and costs less, so why bother going to the hassle of parking your car in long term parking (unless you have a garage of your own), and paying more money to travel slower? I'd do it just for the scenic-ness of it, except you have to board at 5AM to get in
Climate may change in different ways in different places, but no individual weather event is, by itself, proof of climate change; at most it's merely a data point. Anyone who doesn't recognize this isn't necessarily a nut -- they may merely be misinformed.
The downsides? I can only think of one: when the thing gets stolen, I'm required to report it and get a new one. That means paperwork and a couple of trips to city hall. Big fucking deal.
I think mainly the aversion Americans (and British, check the news) have to a national ID card is how it smacks of the Nazi PAPEERS PLEESE! It's the Godwin's Law of the Gestalt.
(You might remember the Nazis from such wars as "12 hours in Belgium" and "Belgium -- Road Bump or Traffic Stop?")
I fully agree with you that a National ID card isn't a big deal as long as the government is just and has your best interests at heart.
Slashdot Mirror
>>In case you haven't picked up on it yet, temperature, like I.Q., is a human construct. It is what we define it as.
Actually, temperature is like mass. It exists independantly of perception.
Our perception of temperature ("it's hot outside!") might vary from person to person, but the actual temperature does not. I think philosophers have a term for quantities like that, but I can't recall it off the top of my head.
My girlfriend (yeah, yeah, it's Slashdot, I know) lives in a fairly dense residential area. There's 5 open WAPs from her room with 2-3 bars each. There's about a hundred doors where those WAPs could be located within radius. It's ridiculous to assume it's practical to find out where the signal is coming from.
The fact is, the person is broadcasting a signal into my room. It's incorrect to say it's illegal to do it. The guy that got arrested was like loitering in a parking lot somewhere, leeching excessive amounts of bandwidth (hurting the network) IIRC. AFAIK, there's never been a case where a guy has been arrested because he accidentally connected to his upstairs neighbor instead of his own WAP. Happens all the time... Windows just picks one at random if you don't have a priority list set up.
Yes, it will be *terrible* when we'll have to switch to the much cleaner Fischer-Tropsch oil. :p
I played during the EQ beta, and considered it both new/innovative and crap at the same time. I didn't buy it. I also beta tested UO and AC1, and was given AC2 for free. I played long enough to learn that I'd really hate playing it for real, and so I didn't buy any of them. I was tricked into buying FFXI, but cancelled my account after a few months.
Even though I'm a pretty hardcore gamer, I hate MMORPGs in general.
Amazingly, WOW has held my interest for the last 1.5 years, and will continue to do for the forseeable future. What did they do differently? They put so much content into the game it is possible to hit level 60 without grinding once. And grinding is the reason I find other MMORPGs so intolerable. In WOW, I don't need to grind for anything. I do an MC, an AQ and a ZG once per week, and that gives me all the gear I need to support my PVP habits.
FFXI-II. And then the next revision will be FFXI-II V.II. Eventually Final Fantasy games will become long random alphanumeric strings to differentiate them from each other.
At least if FFXI-II follows the path of FFX-II, then there'll be a lot more fan service. On the downside, you'll have to punch your eardrums out all over again with the horrid singing. The worlds first MMORPG featuring pop stars! I'm a level 13 black vocalist!
Sigh...
Actually, FFXI was a decent game, for the first 10 or 20 hours or so. Then they just appeared to run out of ideas, and required quests (like for Lu Sheng's Ultimate Fishing Rod(tm)) that just required stupid amounts of repetition to complete. I know repetition is a hallmark of any MMORPG, but FFXI took it to extreme levels.
It's amazing that you know exactly what I've seen.
No, I'm not talking about losing water weight or temporary weight losses. Unless they quit martial arts, the weight loss is permanent.
You can lose weight, it just isn't easy.
I've been doing martial arts for 10 years and seen lots of people lose weight on it. Walking isn't really high intensity enough.
>>Ignoring, for the moment, that you don't provide any substantiation for that claim (which I find highly doubtful, seen in any categorical way)
I kept the article in my closet for a while which had the reference, but since moving I can't find it. A quick google on Life Expectancy of Christians shows +3 years.
>>I'd say you're confusing causation and correlation - the hallmark of weak conjecture and rhetoric.
>>What mechanism would mysticism emply to, say, make you less susceptible to carcinegens and car accidents?
As a statistician, I understand the difference. And yet I think there's something to it. Stress & worry kills. Look at ole Ken Lay, or Charles Lewis. There are schools of Buddhism that aren't mystical, but purely internal meditative arts. You can be a Buddhist and an atheist at the same time without being a hypocrite. Christians don't stress themselves too much about death or anything else because they know they'll be taken care of in the next life.
What mechanism? Possibly Interleukin-6, probably a lot more.
I find it ironic that religious people live 7 years longer (after factoring out other factors) than atheists then. If you're an atheist, the most logical thing to do is pick up a religion -- both Christians, Hindus and Buddhists live longer, so you can take your pick. It's the most logically selfish thing to do, especially if you only have one go-round.
The public education system was copied from Scotland, IIRC, after seeing how a well educated populace did wonders for Scotland, who went from being a backwater to a head of philosophy, steam engines, etc., in about a generation.
Eh, sometimes. The law is actually unclear on if a car is protected from search. There's conflicting supreme court decisions on it.
And I've watched that video before. It's an ACLU video about how not to get caught if you commit a crime. And it won't even work. The best way of getting out of a traffic stop without getting searched is to present a friendly, somewhat bored expression. Don't admit to speeding, but don't pretend to be a lawyer if you're not. Don't not insist on your rights, but don't act like the tards in that video either.
Stress kills.
/waves hands vaguely
One of the corrupt San Diego city councilmen was facing a lot of jail time. Charles Lewis. Keeled over just like Lay. He was only 40 or so.
Or it could be all a conspiracy to kill people instead of sending them to jail.
I don't think there is anti-Swiss sentiment because, frankly, most people don't know very much about Switzerland. Like how they don't have Habeas Corpus. My uncle was held in a Swiss prison for four years and never charged with a crime (they suspected him of some form of embezzlement). They only released him when he got cancer and it became too expensive to treat him.
It's amusing they would complain about Gitmo (which I do consider unconstitutional) while essentially Gitmo-ing overweight 60-year old businessmen.
Don't get me wrong, Switzerland is probably the most beautiful country on Earth, and I'd love to live there one day, but what they did to my uncle was pretty messed up.
>>Read about the Crusades, in which "noble" men came to the holy land
>>to massacre people and honestly believed that every kill was an act
>>of redemption (as I happened to read earlier today).
Most people think the Crusades were started in response to the Muslim capture of Jerusalm.
On the contrary.
A quick background to the Crusades:
1) Muslims took over Jerusalem in 638.
2) There was no reaction from the Western world as the arabs allowed Christians to come to Jerusalem to worship.
3) Four hundred years later Arabs start massacring westerners coming to worship, and burn the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
4) The Western World gets pissed off about these acts of (essentially) terrorism and marches to Jersusalem, slaughtering most anyone in their way.
It's not a proud history, but it's hardly the unprovoked attack by the Western World you get in history classes these days (if it gets taught at all, and not just hand-waved as an example of how Christianity is evil).
A common argument by the politically correct crowd goes something like, "If something isn't perfect, then it is wrong." There were atrocities on the parts of the crusaders, but if the same thing happened today -- suppose terrorists started murdering every person that drove along a road in the desert -- what else would you do? Sit back and watch? Or would you send in armed forces?
I have no use for pacifists. Sometimes military force is necessary, and the ongoing slaughter of civilians is one such time.
>>This article is about ancestry, and makes a simple mathematical argument that human beings are all related. It doesn't make a commentary about race or geographical diversity. Get a grip.
Simple, and wrong, because the authors don't understand the very basic concept of the pigeonhole principle.
Politcally correct is right. I got flamed by some Irishman who got upset when I posted that a survey found that 0% of Irish and German had the liver deficiency that a lot of asian people have (causing the so-called "Asian Curse", flushing and inebriation with relatively small amounts of alcohol). He was like "What kind of racist BS is this? Har har make fun of the drunken paddies" and claimed I was racist, made it all up, etc.
I think sent him a link to over 200 articles on pubmed on pharmacogenetics, including something like 10 on the subject of corrolating race to the liver deficiency. Like most people in the PC crowd that get called out for being provably wrong, he just tried to change the topic.
But you're absolutely right. There's no need to get into complex discussions over whether race is even real or not. Self-reported ethnicity is one of the best ways of predicting certain sets of genes on a human (for sickle-cell, for example), and so is demonstrably not JUST a social construct.
Authors don't understand the pigeonhole principle:
(From the FA): "Keep going back in time, and there are fewer and fewer people available to put on more and more branches of the 6.5 billion family trees of people living today. It is mathematically inevitable that at some point, there will be a person who appears at least once on everybody's tree."
No, not at all. You could have, for example, two completely separate branches of humanity (say one in the Americas and one everywhere else) that never interbred except at the very beginning of the human species. Pigeonhole Principle. The only thing thats mathematically inevitable is that at least two ancestors somewhere is shared. Somewhere. For example, mathematically, a very prolific couple could have been responsible for all X billion people minus a small group living in an uncharted area, whose roots go all the way back to the beginning.
Bad math, shame on the authors for writing it.
>>With storms getting worse and worse
People always tend to overdramatize current events. How many storms of the century did we have during the last century?
More than one, I think
There actually is a rail route that runs up the middle of California... but Amtrak decided it was too expensive to run rails through the mountains north of LA... so if you take a train from SD to Fresno, you ride a train to LA, then they put you on a bloody bus for 100 miles to Bakersfield, and then you finish the ride on a train.
Personally, I'd love to see a high speed line running through the city centers of each major city in California. I hate driving between SF and SD, and too it all too often these days. The expense of about high speed rail are tremendous. The CA HSR board anticipates a cost of $9B (with cost overruns, it will probably come in at double that) to build one line down from Sacramento to SD. California's annual budget is $8B, and has been very short on funds since the tech crash. It will be interesting to see if a bond measure can pass.
I understand how you feel. I often find that Americans have a hard time understanding that not all European countries are Luxemburg-sized.
Mmm, as I said, this isn't a bigger is better argument. Hell, I'd love it if the neighboring cities all my friends live in don't take 3 (LA), 6 (Pheonix), and 10 (SF) hours to get to. I am simply making that observation that when dealing with a lot of my European friends, what they picture in their mind is Europe, but where everyone speaks American English. It's not unreasonable -- that's just how human beings are. The point of my post is to make Europeans exactly how bloody big the American West actually is.
Paris to Marseilles covers most of the country. San Diego and San Francisco are about the same distance away, and thats one state. I can say from personal experience that there's a lot more between Paris and Marseilles than there is between SF and SD.
The long amount of time it takes to travel by car in America really does isolate cities from each other. Many of my European friends travel between cities, states, and countries in a fashion that is alien to most Americans. Even Mexico is far away in our cognitive map, and it's only about an hour trip. When it's six hours to visit my friend in Phoenix, I don't do it. Especially since the drive is so mind-numbingly boring. I only see him when I fly in on business.
Total train trip time, from city center to city center: 3 (THREE) fscking hours with the TGV train. No, that's not a typo.
Um, thanks for noting something I already said (check the thread)?
A TGV from Paris to Marseilles costs $100 and takes 3 hours.
An airplane from San Francisco to San Diego costs $35 if you get a good fare, maybe $100 if you don't look hard and takes 45 minutes.
If you can get a ticket for 25 bucks, then it's indeed competitive with airfare, though still slower. If you airport is hard to get to, then, yeah, a train might be superior.
Sorry, meant to say Highway 80. At least, thats the number it has on Google maps for the road I was on.
My experiences were of travelling from one place in North Carolina to another place in North Carolina --- not a particularly large distance, and it's got a high enough population density to make a local network worthwhile.
I'm not familiar with North Carolina, but I just got back from a business trip to South Carolina. Same situation, airport 5 miles outside of town, no clear mass transit available. But that's kind of what I'm talking about. American towns cover such a large geographic area that having a car is almost a prerequisite these days. Suppose you were able to take a bus right from the airport to downtown. Then what?
When I arrived in Paris at the Gare du Sud, I simply tossed on my backpack and walked to the Gare du Nord (or northwest, whatever it's called), detouring along the way to see pretty much all the sights in Paris (Les Invalides, Le Tour Effiel, Jardin des Tuileries, the Champs Elysees, etc.) If you were to take a bus from the airport in San Diego to downtown San Diego (about a 5 minute ride), you'd be in... downtown San Diego. No place to possibly walk to, only a few hotels in the area, all of which are outrageously priced. San Diego does have a metro rail network, but it's basically a joke. The geographical size of San Diego is so large, and the metro line can cover such a small area, that it's essentially useless unless you happen to be lucky enough to both live right next to a stop, and your destination also happens to be along one of the lines. Remember what I said about LA essentially covering most of the southern half of England. The density is too low to support a rail line, unless you're using substantial government subsidies, which is not particularly appealing to the American taxpayer. We reluctantly support Amtrak just so that we have a minimum reserve of rail lines in case of emergency.
A TGV from Paris to Marseilles costs $100 and takes 3 hours.
An airplane from San Francisco to San Diego costs $35 if you get a good fare, maybe $100 if you don't look hard and takes 45 minutes.
Same distance, air is cheaper and faster. Plus every 8 round trips I make I get a free round trip fare anywhere in the county (up to $500-$600 depending on destination), which makes short haul trips cheap/free/profitable, depending on the fares and wherever I end up finally flying to.
I suppose there's a bit more of an overhead dealing with airport security and whatnot (tack on 30 minutes), but I usually just carry-on all my luggage on short trips, so there's no delay leaving.
Sign, burning two mod points on this (both +funny, whatever), but it's an issue that comes up whenever I talk with Europeans about mass transit, and how they can't understand why we don't have a rail system.
The fundamental problem is that Europeans cannot fully grasp the difference in scale invoved in America, especially in the American West. (It's big. It is really really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. You may think it is long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to Texas.) I travel rather often from San Diego, through Los Angeles, and to the Bay Area / San Francisco (these are the three major cities in California, incidentally). The trip takes 8-10 hours to complete, depending on traffic passing through Los Angeles. There is a single rail line that runs down the coast. Once per day it travels between SF and SD, and you have to get up at 5AM to catch it. It takes 11 hours.
San Francisco and San Diego are 500 miles apart.
By comparison, Amsterdam to Paris is 500 *km* apart. The distance from San Diego to San Francisco would span the breadth of England (London to Inverness was 8 hours by train, and is about 550 miles, as is Paris to Nice). When I was in Europe, I was constantly surprised about how little time it took to travel from one city to the next while I was on a train. When you live in the American West, you get used to 6 hour drives at 75-80 miles per hour where you literally see no living human beings outside of the gas stations and rest stops. And maybe some farms.
Europe is very heavily built up. It's dense. Rail networks make a lot more sense in dense networks than in sparse ones. That same rail line that runs to Oxford (60 miles from London) can be used to connect to Warwick, or Stratford-upon-Avon (if my memory serves). The rail network in California is essentially a 3-node graph with a line between SF, LA, and SD. With two mountain ranges in between, to boot. The train company loses money on the line pretty consistently. There's literally nothing in between to make the run profitable. San Luis Obispo and Santa Cruz are nice places, don't get me wrong, but they simply aren't volume destinations. And because it's not profitable, there won't be any more private infrastructure development. The State of California has been toying with the notion of building a high speed line from SF to SD for a while now, but, hell, I ran the numbers myself. Japan wouldn't have built a high speed rail line if their cities were all 500 miles apart. It's too costly. The main island of Japan is about 600 miles long, total.
It's not a better-than or worse-than comparison, I'm simply stating the facts. You have to have a certain critical mass of density to make rail networks worth your while. An analogy that works well with Europeans I've met: Imagine France. Now imagine there is nothing in the country but Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. None of the little villages, towns, and cities. Nothing but desert. Now consider the practicality of a rail network in the country. This is Texas.
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This isn't an America-is-bigger-is-better argument. In fact, I can pretty firmly say that I would greatly prefer being able to travel to another city in an hour or two. I lose an entire day whenever I make the trip. A drive to Phoenix, first major city east of San Diego (Yuma doesn't count) is 6 hours (@75 MPH) through almost nothing but desert. To the average San Diegan or San Franciscan, the other city is akin to a vacation destination. Road Trips are boring as hell unless you find a way to entertain yourself -- I personally go through audiobooks like water.
Rail Networks simply don't work when the graphs are so sparse. Out in the middle of the desert, a car moves faster than a train, and costs less, so why bother going to the hassle of parking your car in long term parking (unless you have a garage of your own), and paying more money to travel slower? I'd do it just for the scenic-ness of it, except you have to board at 5AM to get in
Climate may change in different ways in different places, but no individual weather event is, by itself, proof of climate change; at most it's merely a data point. Anyone who doesn't recognize this isn't necessarily a nut -- they may merely be misinformed.
I prefer to call them journalists.
The downsides? I can only think of one: when the thing gets stolen, I'm required to report it and get a new one. That means paperwork and a couple of trips to city hall. Big fucking deal.
I think mainly the aversion Americans (and British, check the news) have to a national ID card is how it smacks of the Nazi PAPEERS PLEESE! It's the Godwin's Law of the Gestalt.
(You might remember the Nazis from such wars as "12 hours in Belgium" and "Belgium -- Road Bump or Traffic Stop?")
I fully agree with you that a National ID card isn't a big deal as long as the government is just and has your best interests at heart.