It's not through the middle of nowhere. It's through the densest corridor of population west of Texas. Almost all of the cities in California line up in a neat line connecting north and south through the central valley, and it's not that way by accident. It's because that's *where the railroads put them in the first place*. It makes sense to put HSR there, so you can connect the vast majority of California's population.
I know if you drive down I-5 it looks like the valley is empty -- but that's because I-5 was built as a bypass. The ACTUAL corridor that follows the old railroads (where CA-99 follows as a highway) has sizeable towns and cities every dozen miles all the way from Sacramento to Bakersfield. Over 6 million people.
And the advantage of the train is that local services can stop along the way to service all these millions of people instead of treating them as "flyover" country. That's something people forget about HSR -- it's not just about nonstop trips from SF to LA, it's also about Stockton and Fresno being served in a way that aircraft can't. There is no such thing as a plane stopping for 90 seconds to pick people up at a city it's flying over.
tl;dr the reason you thought the Amiga had fuzzy graphics was because you were looking at a fuzzy monitor (probably a TV).
EGA was slightly sharper but its default text mode (which is what everyone used if they didn't boot into a graphical display) was still the CGA noninterlaced NTSC timings.
It wasn't until VGA came out that people started using higher-refresh displays, and even then they only used it to go from 80x25 to 80x50 text (and tons of systems still ran in the old 80x25 NTSC timing mode, doublescanned to 31Khz). And it wasn't until SVGA came out that they moved away from the old horizontal resolutions.
IBM PCs were introduced with MDA and CGA, both of which output noninterlaced NTSC timings -- 15Khz horizontal, 60Hz vertical refresh. Their 80 column text modes ran at 640x200. MDA output on a single on/off I signal with an optional analog luma output. CGA output digital RGBI along with an optional composite NTSC output.
This screen timing and geometry is the *EXACT SAME* as you get when you boot an original Amiga in its default configuration. The only difference is that the Amiga's video port included analog RGB signals in addition to the digital RGBI lines (since RGBI limited you to 16 colors and the Amiga had 4096).
In practice, clarity was identical. If you plugged an RGB monitor into the Amiga 80-column text looked just as good as plugging an RGB monitor into the IBM PC. If you plugged a composite NTSC television into the Amiga, it looked just as shitty as plugging that NTSC television into the IBM PC's CGA card, only more colorful.
(Note that CGA did not have native interlacing support, so unlike the Amiga it couldn't output a "real" NTSC signal for genlocking, etc. Not that crappy 4-color CGA would look any good for those purposes anyway. The main point is that for the 80-column modes that the original IBM PC used, the Amiga pumped out that exact same quality of text resolution *BY DEFAULT*.)
He's saying Instructions Per Clock has peaked, not clock frequency (though silicon clock frequency has been hitting a wall too). Peak IPC is peak IPC whether you run it on 5Ghz silicon for 500Ghz photonics or whatever. The process doesn't matter other than adding/removing some small delays due to speed of light distances and thermal management (and this is combatted with pipelining to semi-mitigate the problem). In the end though there's only so much speculative execution you can do, only so much instruction level parallelism to exploit, etc., it's a matter of diminishing returns and you have to throw more and more logic elements at new attempts to wring out a tiny bit more parallelism and stall prevention for ever-smaller gains.
Any other improvements have to come from completely different computing paradigms like thread-level parallelism (i.e. pre-sorting the work for the ALUs to hit in parallel), or quantum computing (essentially using the multiverse to give you an infinite number of speculative-executing ALUs if you go by the many-worlds interpretation). Standard old single-thread logical execution can only be stretched so far.
You might be less likely to want that cast in the first place if it were shown that casts resulted in mass uncontrollable mummification fetishes that caused millions of suffocations worldwide and tens of millions more people unable to function in society because they can't help but bind themselves in bandages and plaster to even stay sane for a day.
Drug-detection kits should be sold in every drugstore, but that's not going to happen as it would be seen as somehow "enabling" drug use. The only detection kits the government will ever support over-the-counter are the kind that detect it only after a person has consumed them (i.e. too late to save the user, but good for persecution/prosecution of the user).
What if the user got hooked on opiods in the first place because his government-sanctioned doctor prescribed him drugs from a government-sanctioned pharmaceutical manufacturer?
You're expecting responsible behavior and the maintenance of large quantities of dilute with strict quality control from some guy with unknown education working in a basement somewhere with no oversight, and a customer base that literally cannot say no.
He almost certainly doesn't *want* to kill his customers, but that doesn't mean he has the know-how and discipline to do a good job of it, and the shadowy nature of the job means you can't just go by yelp reviews.
Fentanyl actually has a fairly wide therapeutic index -- i.e. the dose that offers benefit vs. the dose that causes harm -- so it's fairly safe (at least as safe as a highly-addictive opioid can be) as far as prescription drugs go. IIRC acetaminophen (Tylenol) is actually easier to OD on. The problem is potency and the fact that pill pressers are buying pure fentanyl and trying to meter out the microscopic doses using crude tools.
It's easy to measure grams of a substance, so if 1 gram gets you high but 10 gram kills you, it's not hard to press out 1 gram pills and tell people to never take more than 3 of them.
Now imagine 1 microgram gets you high and 100 micrograms kills you. In terms of therapeutic index, it's actually 10 times safer. If you could reliably press out 1 microgram pills, nobody would ever accidentally OD on 100 pills. The problem is that joe schmoe pill pusher in his basement cannot accurately separate out 1 microgram of a pure substance, so he wants up cranking out pills that have anywhere from 3-50 micrograms of ingredients. You wind up with a bunch of pills where 2 of them might get you nicely really really high, but then another 2 will randomly kill you. Couple that with some people having high tolerance due to longtime use while other people are just starting out, one pill might be enough to kill a first time user if they're unlucky enough to get that one where joe pill pusher's hands slipped when he was pressing it.
The solution would be for the labs producing the stuff to only sell it in dilutions of 0.1% or so, but the market doesn't want that because mr. fentanyl smuggler only has to get one shipment from China through customs to make a million pills if he brings in the pure stuff. This is actually fentanyl's awesome market-winning feature -- its potency minimizes the smuggling risk, and this is why it's taken over the market from heroin in the U.S. for low-budget opioid addicts.
Of course the real truth of the matter is that opioid addiction is a fucking curse and the best thing to do is never ever start, but unfortunately big pharma likes it profits and creates tons of future fentanyl users every time it writes a new painkiller prescription. Next time your doctor considers writing you a scrip for some of the good stuff -- say sorry, I'll just take an aspirin and maybe smoke some weed.
They had a 99% working prototype. Testing exposed a user-interface flaw (pilot could prematurely disengage safety lock on the feathering mechanism in a single motion without an override step), destroying the test article and killing half the crew, which rightfully led to a review looking for other potential avoidable PEBKAC scenarios. This is not unusual in aerospace and is why "test pilot" is generally regarded as a high-risk profession. Historically the majority of high-performance aircraft development has resulted in crashes of test articles, and a fair number of those have resulted in fatalities due to ejection accidents. Ejection seats are pretty good now but they're still far from failsafe (early ejection seats killed as many people as they saved -- the F-106 ejection seats started off with a 100% failure rate and killed the first *12* people who used them).
What's not normal is taking 4+ years to return to the same level of testing. That seems indicative of a funding problem.
I now suddenly wish I could use mod points to upvote your post, but it's in reply to a thread I've posted in. =(...but yeah, I remember my grandparents scheduling their time so they were in the living room to watch the evening news, or a particular show they liked. Now the only schedules that really matter are work/school, plus random special events -- not everyday entertainment.
Also DST was not implemented to give people leisure time. It was first implemented as national policy by the Central Powers during World War I in a (failed) attempt to save fuel to revive their war effort. The Entente/Allies followed suit since they didn't know if it would work or not but didn't want to risk giving any advantage to Germany and her allies. After WWI most places promptly dropped the practice.
Then WWII came around and a bunch of countries tried again, hoping to save fuel. It didn't help.
The current iteration of DST stems from the oil crisis of the 1970's (notice the pattern?) . It didn't help then either, but since there wasn't a clear "end" condition like the end of the world wars, nobody got around to repealing it this time.
You're confusing the benefit of accurate timekeeping for the purposes of coordination with the dogmatization of the INDICATED time taking precedence.
i.e. is 6:30PM dinnertime because we agreed to have it at the time that will be indicated at 6:30PM today, or is it because dinnertime is somehow inherently 6:30PM?
The benefit of the accurate timekeeping is that you can all have dinner at the same time -- and that time will happen whether your clock says 6:30PM, 6:30AM, or is marked with random trapezoids ("dinner time is at rhombus-o-clock!"). What's important is that you are picking the appropriate time, ahead of time, and your clocks are in sync so people know when it is.
The alternative (that many people seem to practice now) is worshiping the symbols on the clock rather than the time they represent. I.e. people feeling they MUST have dinner at 6:30PM even though it's been 25 hours since 6:30PM yesterday due to the DST change. If the government declared that the clock moved ahead by 23 hours at 7PM, it would follow that you'd have dinner twice in an hour since 6:30PM the next day would occur an hour after 6:30PM today..... and if the government replaced the numbers with aforementioned random shapes you'd NEVER EAT DINNER AGAIN because it would "never be 6:30PM ever again", only Rhombus-O-Clock. Guess you have to starve.
That's the silliness -- instead of using the numbers to keep track of time, you're DEFINING TIME TO BE THE NUMBERS. It would be like if the U.S. switched to the metric system and you suddenly felt thin because you now weigh only 113 kilograms instead of 250 pounds.
Or someone born in 1980 claiming to be only 9 years old because they were born on Feb 29th and they've only had 9 birthdays since. =P
It means that local "noon" will be roughly equivalent to one hour before the sun reaches maximum elevation around that longitude.
The basic idea is that people are firmly entrenched in the idea of what happens at what particular number is indicated on a clock, moreso than simply adapting to whatever actual time happens to be advantageous.
i.e. getting to work at "9AM" is an immutable, unchangeable state of the universe, while the actual position of the sun in the sky relative to your location on earth at 9AM is something that has to be legislated.
In the old days, people in high latitudes just had "summer hours" and "winter hours" where they'd open/close stores and show up to work based on whatever was advantageous for that time of year, and weren't wedded to the idea of having an unchangeable schedule on the clock. Businesses and families made or did not make changes as independent units, and the decisions were based on the nature of the activity.
Now the clock is somehow more important than actual, physical reality.
DST is just tricking people into changing their schedules while they somehow think their schedule has stayed the same because they do things at the same indicated time their clock has always told them to.
i.e. humans are incredibly stupid creatures sometimes.
Cupcake bakeries need to hire more employees with degrees in astrophysics, bringing their much-needed understanding of electron degeneracy pressure in white dwarfs and pair-instability supernovae to the cupcake industry.
Afternoon child daycare centers need to hire more trained welding technicians, who understand when to use arc or gas welders depending on the material used and the appropriate flux needed for strong joints in compressive or tensile loads in bridges, skyscrapers and submarines. This is vital for the children's well-being.
Most importantly, symphony orchestras (whether public or privately-managed) need to get on the bandwagon (as it were) and hire more software engineers adept in low-level microcontroller coding in assembly language, supplemented with theory-oriented CS graduates who can develop better sorting algorithms for the violin section.
A common misconception is the idea that those pregnancies in other countries are "unplanned". In most human cultures (and in most species), maximizing offspring is a good thing -- it increases the survivability of your species/race/culture/family. It's only in certain very wealthy cultures where the value of the individual has eclipsed the value of a family that people no longer want to reproduce. Even then in these wealthy cultures, many older individuals wind up spiraling into depression because they don't have children or grandchildren.
That's why some third world countries have incidents where they violently oppose vaccination programs -- because sometimes someone starts a rumor that the vaccines are secretly including contraceptives. People still want to have 10 children to make their family and tribe strong with many providers/fighters.
You're basically bringing up the big problem with the American mall. A lot of American malls are named "Blahblah Village" or "Blahblah Town Square" -- but what is a village or town without RESIDENTS? American malls are basically hamlets without the "ham" (in this case, they etymology of "ham" being a cognate for "home").
If you stack apartment buildings on top of a shopping mall, you get a traditional walkable village with the added benefit of climate control. Your mall will now never become a dead mall because it has its customer base built-in, and nobody needs to drive on a daily basis because most of their daily needs are within walking distance (and if they work in a different mall-town you can easily build quick transit between them).
To be fair, the NsDAP did have a fairly large socialist contingent early on, favoring such traditionally-leftist ideals such as nationalization of the means of production and such. Early on the movement was characterized almost entirely along populist, nationalist/ethnic goals and wasn't as unified in terms of economic policy.
Most of the socialist contingent was purged in the Night of Long Knives, though. After that, the party was firmly in favor of capitalist corporate entities supported by a fascist state.
That's not really true. It is *TOTALLY* doable. In fact, the prequels (as badly-written as they were) provide a perfect counterargument.
Ewan McGregor seemed like he was channeling the deceased spirit of Sir Alec Guinness. He *was* Obi-wan. I'm amazed at how good his delivery was given the crap direction that Lucas provided (as seen how otherwise awesome actors like Natalie Portman were rendered like, well, petrified statues with hot grits).
If they'd searched long and hard enough they certainly could have found someone who could *be* Han Solo.
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, Alec Guinness himself made a pretty good Hitler, and Bruno Ganz was flat out iconic. Nobody complains that they're not as good at being Hitler as the real Hitler.
The solution is called an "Express Train". For traveling short distances, you hop on the local train. For traveling long distances you take the express. You can even have multiple kinds of express train:
1. Simple express that only hits major stations. 2. Half-express that hits local stations in one half but expresses on the other half (with a mirror twin that serves the opposite halves). 3. Skip-stop trains that stop at every other station or every third station (with 1-2 other trains that mirror the behavior but hit the opposite stations.
If you mix all three kinds of train during busy hours, you can rapidly improve travel time for many people, assuming the frequency is high enough. This especially improves travel time for people who are only using the train as a connection between transit hubs on a longer journey (getting to another line on the same system, or switching to a long-distance train or heading to the airport).
If you're in the SF Bay Area you can see a mixture of solutions 1 and 2 on Caltrain. Unfortunately the frequency of Caltrain isn't quite high enough to see across-the-board improvements (due to it being low-acceleration Diesel, partially), but as frequency increases with the electrification project and more track being added, you'll see it improve.
The downside of this is you need more track. 3-4 tracks the whole way, or at least much of the way (how NYC subway express trains work), or at bare minimum some strategically placed passing tracks (how Caltrain works).
In the end though the extra expense is well worth it and it makes the system competitive with driving for many trips. (An express train in NYC beats a car almost every time.) Plus you get the benefit of 24-hour service if you triple or quad track (close 1-2 tracks for maintenance at night and run just local service during this time -- just like freeways close all but one lane down at night when they need to do maintenance).
Driving everywhere only works well in super spread out places. The downside is that now everything is far apart and you have to drive 1-10 miles to get to the nearest market instead of walking to the market down the block. i.e. in a dense transit-rich city, you don't even NEED that transit for many of your trips because the majority of your trips will occur within walking distance in an area the size of a suburban parking lot. i.e. the subway is how you get to work and the nightclubs (like driving in the suburbs), but NOT how you get your sandwich, beer, haircut, home-improvement hardware, insurance agent, dentist, etc. -- because these are all right outside your house.
Yeah the keyboard mod looks great, and it's on the cusp of getting released. It may have been slowed down thanks to these layoffs though. =( I pray that it gets released and is available to as many people as possible since it may make the Moto Z2 the last useful landscape QWERTY phone for a long time. >.;
I can't think of a single breakthrough in terms of new technology coming out of China (in the modern era). China's entire education system is built around rote copying, to the point where if you teach a class in China you will frequently get the exact same paper handed in by your students. Why? Well if it's the "best paper", and you want your students to be the best, they should learn how to turn in something better that someone else made rather than turning in their own, inferior product.
In short the cultural institutions of China really suck at *discovery*, because they try to teach everyone to be the best, which means parroting the best. Innovation requires creation, but teaching creation means that, initially, everyone will come up with something inferior, because by definition only one person can ever have the best independent creation at any given moment. The best calculus class I ever saw for Junior High students had the students *INVENT* calculus together in small groups, with the teacher giving only vague hints to spur them along. This is exactly the kind of class that you would never see in China.
China is becoming better at refinement -- the Japanese comparison is somewhat apt -- but unlike Japan, China lacks any meaningful environment of business ethics. This means that any refinements you make will be immediately stolen by your competitors, so any changes you make need to be small and fast-to-implement such that you can milk your advantage for the X number of weeks it takes for everyone else to copy you. There is zero incentive to produce breakthroughs, but massive incentive to produce something 1% cheaper/faster for a few weeks.
The breakthroughs that DO come from China are mostly *engineering* breakthroughs rather than theory, and they are based on theories developed in the west that could not be refined due to regulatory reasons. China is on track to become a great innovator in human medicine thanks to non-human medicine developed in the west. The breakthroughs get developed in the west in animal models, but ethics concerns prevent human testing, so instead the *implementation* breakthrough gets to come from China.
If the Chinese culture suddenly did a 180 and became built around independent thought, I have zero doubt that they would dominate the world in all fields. This is not going to happen.
Japan got a head start but only made small progress in cultural change -- now they have some innovation but mostly they became the global leader in refinement, and fortunately they have a strong sense of business ethics such that success is not immediately stolen. Their ethics now mean they can't compete on production, so they're forced to compete on quality, which is why Japanese products are the best in the world for just about any product imaginable (not just for electronics, but for produce, furniture, etc.)
tl;dr Chinese "innovation" doesn't stem from some sort of inventor's spirit, but rather from them having the balls to do what western countries are too afraid/timid to do, and less moral opposition to a take-no-prisoners piratical approach to technological development.
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...is Elon Musk building his launchpads partly in Mexico/within feet of the border? Isn't that a security risk to the launchpad?
It's not through the middle of nowhere. It's through the densest corridor of population west of Texas. Almost all of the cities in California line up in a neat line connecting north and south through the central valley, and it's not that way by accident. It's because that's *where the railroads put them in the first place*. It makes sense to put HSR there, so you can connect the vast majority of California's population.
I know if you drive down I-5 it looks like the valley is empty -- but that's because I-5 was built as a bypass. The ACTUAL corridor that follows the old railroads (where CA-99 follows as a highway) has sizeable towns and cities every dozen miles all the way from Sacramento to Bakersfield. Over 6 million people.
And the advantage of the train is that local services can stop along the way to service all these millions of people instead of treating them as "flyover" country. That's something people forget about HSR -- it's not just about nonstop trips from SF to LA, it's also about Stockton and Fresno being served in a way that aircraft can't. There is no such thing as a plane stopping for 90 seconds to pick people up at a city it's flying over.
tl;dr the reason you thought the Amiga had fuzzy graphics was because you were looking at a fuzzy monitor (probably a TV).
EGA was slightly sharper but its default text mode (which is what everyone used if they didn't boot into a graphical display) was still the CGA noninterlaced NTSC timings.
It wasn't until VGA came out that people started using higher-refresh displays, and even then they only used it to go from 80x25 to 80x50 text (and tons of systems still ran in the old 80x25 NTSC timing mode, doublescanned to 31Khz). And it wasn't until SVGA came out that they moved away from the old horizontal resolutions.
IBM PCs were introduced with MDA and CGA, both of which output noninterlaced NTSC timings -- 15Khz horizontal, 60Hz vertical refresh. Their 80 column text modes ran at 640x200. MDA output on a single on/off I signal with an optional analog luma output. CGA output digital RGBI along with an optional composite NTSC output.
This screen timing and geometry is the *EXACT SAME* as you get when you boot an original Amiga in its default configuration. The only difference is that the Amiga's video port included analog RGB signals in addition to the digital RGBI lines (since RGBI limited you to 16 colors and the Amiga had 4096).
In practice, clarity was identical. If you plugged an RGB monitor into the Amiga 80-column text looked just as good as plugging an RGB monitor into the IBM PC. If you plugged a composite NTSC television into the Amiga, it looked just as shitty as plugging that NTSC television into the IBM PC's CGA card, only more colorful.
(Note that CGA did not have native interlacing support, so unlike the Amiga it couldn't output a "real" NTSC signal for genlocking, etc. Not that crappy 4-color CGA would look any good for those purposes anyway. The main point is that for the 80-column modes that the original IBM PC used, the Amiga pumped out that exact same quality of text resolution *BY DEFAULT*.)
He's saying Instructions Per Clock has peaked, not clock frequency (though silicon clock frequency has been hitting a wall too). Peak IPC is peak IPC whether you run it on 5Ghz silicon for 500Ghz photonics or whatever. The process doesn't matter other than adding/removing some small delays due to speed of light distances and thermal management (and this is combatted with pipelining to semi-mitigate the problem). In the end though there's only so much speculative execution you can do, only so much instruction level parallelism to exploit, etc., it's a matter of diminishing returns and you have to throw more and more logic elements at new attempts to wring out a tiny bit more parallelism and stall prevention for ever-smaller gains.
Any other improvements have to come from completely different computing paradigms like thread-level parallelism (i.e. pre-sorting the work for the ALUs to hit in parallel), or quantum computing (essentially using the multiverse to give you an infinite number of speculative-executing ALUs if you go by the many-worlds interpretation). Standard old single-thread logical execution can only be stretched so far.
You might be less likely to want that cast in the first place if it were shown that casts resulted in mass uncontrollable mummification fetishes that caused millions of suffocations worldwide and tens of millions more people unable to function in society because they can't help but bind themselves in bandages and plaster to even stay sane for a day.
Drug-detection kits should be sold in every drugstore, but that's not going to happen as it would be seen as somehow "enabling" drug use. The only detection kits the government will ever support over-the-counter are the kind that detect it only after a person has consumed them (i.e. too late to save the user, but good for persecution/prosecution of the user).
What if the user got hooked on opiods in the first place because his government-sanctioned doctor prescribed him drugs from a government-sanctioned pharmaceutical manufacturer?
You're expecting responsible behavior and the maintenance of large quantities of dilute with strict quality control from some guy with unknown education working in a basement somewhere with no oversight, and a customer base that literally cannot say no.
He almost certainly doesn't *want* to kill his customers, but that doesn't mean he has the know-how and discipline to do a good job of it, and the shadowy nature of the job means you can't just go by yelp reviews.
Fentanyl actually has a fairly wide therapeutic index -- i.e. the dose that offers benefit vs. the dose that causes harm -- so it's fairly safe (at least as safe as a highly-addictive opioid can be) as far as prescription drugs go. IIRC acetaminophen (Tylenol) is actually easier to OD on. The problem is potency and the fact that pill pressers are buying pure fentanyl and trying to meter out the microscopic doses using crude tools.
It's easy to measure grams of a substance, so if 1 gram gets you high but 10 gram kills you, it's not hard to press out 1 gram pills and tell people to never take more than 3 of them.
Now imagine 1 microgram gets you high and 100 micrograms kills you. In terms of therapeutic index, it's actually 10 times safer. If you could reliably press out 1 microgram pills, nobody would ever accidentally OD on 100 pills. The problem is that joe schmoe pill pusher in his basement cannot accurately separate out 1 microgram of a pure substance, so he wants up cranking out pills that have anywhere from 3-50 micrograms of ingredients. You wind up with a bunch of pills where 2 of them might get you nicely really really high, but then another 2 will randomly kill you. Couple that with some people having high tolerance due to longtime use while other people are just starting out, one pill might be enough to kill a first time user if they're unlucky enough to get that one where joe pill pusher's hands slipped when he was pressing it.
The solution would be for the labs producing the stuff to only sell it in dilutions of 0.1% or so, but the market doesn't want that because mr. fentanyl smuggler only has to get one shipment from China through customs to make a million pills if he brings in the pure stuff. This is actually fentanyl's awesome market-winning feature -- its potency minimizes the smuggling risk, and this is why it's taken over the market from heroin in the U.S. for low-budget opioid addicts.
Of course the real truth of the matter is that opioid addiction is a fucking curse and the best thing to do is never ever start, but unfortunately big pharma likes it profits and creates tons of future fentanyl users every time it writes a new painkiller prescription. Next time your doctor considers writing you a scrip for some of the good stuff -- say sorry, I'll just take an aspirin and maybe smoke some weed.
They had a 99% working prototype. Testing exposed a user-interface flaw (pilot could prematurely disengage safety lock on the feathering mechanism in a single motion without an override step), destroying the test article and killing half the crew, which rightfully led to a review looking for other potential avoidable PEBKAC scenarios. This is not unusual in aerospace and is why "test pilot" is generally regarded as a high-risk profession. Historically the majority of high-performance aircraft development has resulted in crashes of test articles, and a fair number of those have resulted in fatalities due to ejection accidents. Ejection seats are pretty good now but they're still far from failsafe (early ejection seats killed as many people as they saved -- the F-106 ejection seats started off with a 100% failure rate and killed the first *12* people who used them).
What's not normal is taking 4+ years to return to the same level of testing. That seems indicative of a funding problem.
Well, bike lanes do make it a little *MORE* livable at least. If they're not blocked by homeless tents/boxes. =/
I now suddenly wish I could use mod points to upvote your post, but it's in reply to a thread I've posted in. =( ...but yeah, I remember my grandparents scheduling their time so they were in the living room to watch the evening news, or a particular show they liked. Now the only schedules that really matter are work/school, plus random special events -- not everyday entertainment.
Also DST was not implemented to give people leisure time. It was first implemented as national policy by the Central Powers during World War I in a (failed) attempt to save fuel to revive their war effort. The Entente/Allies followed suit since they didn't know if it would work or not but didn't want to risk giving any advantage to Germany and her allies. After WWI most places promptly dropped the practice.
Then WWII came around and a bunch of countries tried again, hoping to save fuel. It didn't help.
The current iteration of DST stems from the oil crisis of the 1970's (notice the pattern?) . It didn't help then either, but since there wasn't a clear "end" condition like the end of the world wars, nobody got around to repealing it this time.
You're confusing the benefit of accurate timekeeping for the purposes of coordination with the dogmatization of the INDICATED time taking precedence.
i.e. is 6:30PM dinnertime because we agreed to have it at the time that will be indicated at 6:30PM today, or is it because dinnertime is somehow inherently 6:30PM?
The benefit of the accurate timekeeping is that you can all have dinner at the same time -- and that time will happen whether your clock says 6:30PM, 6:30AM, or is marked with random trapezoids ("dinner time is at rhombus-o-clock!"). What's important is that you are picking the appropriate time, ahead of time, and your clocks are in sync so people know when it is.
The alternative (that many people seem to practice now) is worshiping the symbols on the clock rather than the time they represent. I.e. people feeling they MUST have dinner at 6:30PM even though it's been 25 hours since 6:30PM yesterday due to the DST change. If the government declared that the clock moved ahead by 23 hours at 7PM, it would follow that you'd have dinner twice in an hour since 6:30PM the next day would occur an hour after 6:30PM today. .... and if the government replaced the numbers with aforementioned random shapes you'd NEVER EAT DINNER AGAIN because it would "never be 6:30PM ever again", only Rhombus-O-Clock. Guess you have to starve.
That's the silliness -- instead of using the numbers to keep track of time, you're DEFINING TIME TO BE THE NUMBERS. It would be like if the U.S. switched to the metric system and you suddenly felt thin because you now weigh only 113 kilograms instead of 250 pounds.
Or someone born in 1980 claiming to be only 9 years old because they were born on Feb 29th and they've only had 9 birthdays since. =P
It means that local "noon" will be roughly equivalent to one hour before the sun reaches maximum elevation around that longitude.
The basic idea is that people are firmly entrenched in the idea of what happens at what particular number is indicated on a clock, moreso than simply adapting to whatever actual time happens to be advantageous.
i.e. getting to work at "9AM" is an immutable, unchangeable state of the universe, while the actual position of the sun in the sky relative to your location on earth at 9AM is something that has to be legislated.
In the old days, people in high latitudes just had "summer hours" and "winter hours" where they'd open/close stores and show up to work based on whatever was advantageous for that time of year, and weren't wedded to the idea of having an unchangeable schedule on the clock. Businesses and families made or did not make changes as independent units, and the decisions were based on the nature of the activity.
Now the clock is somehow more important than actual, physical reality.
DST is just tricking people into changing their schedules while they somehow think their schedule has stayed the same because they do things at the same indicated time their clock has always told them to.
i.e. humans are incredibly stupid creatures sometimes.
Cupcake bakeries need to hire more employees with degrees in astrophysics, bringing their much-needed understanding of electron degeneracy pressure in white dwarfs and pair-instability supernovae to the cupcake industry.
Afternoon child daycare centers need to hire more trained welding technicians, who understand when to use arc or gas welders depending on the material used and the appropriate flux needed for strong joints in compressive or tensile loads in bridges, skyscrapers and submarines. This is vital for the children's well-being.
Most importantly, symphony orchestras (whether public or privately-managed) need to get on the bandwagon (as it were) and hire more software engineers adept in low-level microcontroller coding in assembly language, supplemented with theory-oriented CS graduates who can develop better sorting algorithms for the violin section.
If you can't physically lift your date, either you are very weak or she is very large...
A common misconception is the idea that those pregnancies in other countries are "unplanned". In most human cultures (and in most species), maximizing offspring is a good thing -- it increases the survivability of your species/race/culture/family. It's only in certain very wealthy cultures where the value of the individual has eclipsed the value of a family that people no longer want to reproduce. Even then in these wealthy cultures, many older individuals wind up spiraling into depression because they don't have children or grandchildren.
That's why some third world countries have incidents where they violently oppose vaccination programs -- because sometimes someone starts a rumor that the vaccines are secretly including contraceptives. People still want to have 10 children to make their family and tribe strong with many providers/fighters.
You're basically bringing up the big problem with the American mall. A lot of American malls are named "Blahblah Village" or "Blahblah Town Square" -- but what is a village or town without RESIDENTS? American malls are basically hamlets without the "ham" (in this case, they etymology of "ham" being a cognate for "home").
If you stack apartment buildings on top of a shopping mall, you get a traditional walkable village with the added benefit of climate control. Your mall will now never become a dead mall because it has its customer base built-in, and nobody needs to drive on a daily basis because most of their daily needs are within walking distance (and if they work in a different mall-town you can easily build quick transit between them).
To be fair, the NsDAP did have a fairly large socialist contingent early on, favoring such traditionally-leftist ideals such as nationalization of the means of production and such. Early on the movement was characterized almost entirely along populist, nationalist/ethnic goals and wasn't as unified in terms of economic policy.
Most of the socialist contingent was purged in the Night of Long Knives, though. After that, the party was firmly in favor of capitalist corporate entities supported by a fascist state.
That's not really true. It is *TOTALLY* doable. In fact, the prequels (as badly-written as they were) provide a perfect counterargument.
Ewan McGregor seemed like he was channeling the deceased spirit of Sir Alec Guinness. He *was* Obi-wan. I'm amazed at how good his delivery was given the crap direction that Lucas provided (as seen how otherwise awesome actors like Natalie Portman were rendered like, well, petrified statues with hot grits).
If they'd searched long and hard enough they certainly could have found someone who could *be* Han Solo.
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, Alec Guinness himself made a pretty good Hitler, and Bruno Ganz was flat out iconic. Nobody complains that they're not as good at being Hitler as the real Hitler.
The solution is called an "Express Train". For traveling short distances, you hop on the local train. For traveling long distances you take the express. You can even have multiple kinds of express train:
1. Simple express that only hits major stations.
2. Half-express that hits local stations in one half but expresses on the other half (with a mirror twin that serves the opposite halves).
3. Skip-stop trains that stop at every other station or every third station (with 1-2 other trains that mirror the behavior but hit the opposite stations.
If you mix all three kinds of train during busy hours, you can rapidly improve travel time for many people, assuming the frequency is high enough. This especially improves travel time for people who are only using the train as a connection between transit hubs on a longer journey (getting to another line on the same system, or switching to a long-distance train or heading to the airport).
If you're in the SF Bay Area you can see a mixture of solutions 1 and 2 on Caltrain. Unfortunately the frequency of Caltrain isn't quite high enough to see across-the-board improvements (due to it being low-acceleration Diesel, partially), but as frequency increases with the electrification project and more track being added, you'll see it improve.
The downside of this is you need more track. 3-4 tracks the whole way, or at least much of the way (how NYC subway express trains work), or at bare minimum some strategically placed passing tracks (how Caltrain works).
In the end though the extra expense is well worth it and it makes the system competitive with driving for many trips. (An express train in NYC beats a car almost every time.) Plus you get the benefit of 24-hour service if you triple or quad track (close 1-2 tracks for maintenance at night and run just local service during this time -- just like freeways close all but one lane down at night when they need to do maintenance).
Driving everywhere only works well in super spread out places. The downside is that now everything is far apart and you have to drive 1-10 miles to get to the nearest market instead of walking to the market down the block. i.e. in a dense transit-rich city, you don't even NEED that transit for many of your trips because the majority of your trips will occur within walking distance in an area the size of a suburban parking lot. i.e. the subway is how you get to work and the nightclubs (like driving in the suburbs), but NOT how you get your sandwich, beer, haircut, home-improvement hardware, insurance agent, dentist, etc. -- because these are all right outside your house.
Replying to this to boost thread rating:
Yeah the keyboard mod looks great, and it's on the cusp of getting released. It may have been slowed down thanks to these layoffs though. =( I pray that it gets released and is available to as many people as possible since it may make the Moto Z2 the last useful landscape QWERTY phone for a long time. >.;
I can't think of a single breakthrough in terms of new technology coming out of China (in the modern era). China's entire education system is built around rote copying, to the point where if you teach a class in China you will frequently get the exact same paper handed in by your students. Why? Well if it's the "best paper", and you want your students to be the best, they should learn how to turn in something better that someone else made rather than turning in their own, inferior product.
In short the cultural institutions of China really suck at *discovery*, because they try to teach everyone to be the best, which means parroting the best. Innovation requires creation, but teaching creation means that, initially, everyone will come up with something inferior, because by definition only one person can ever have the best independent creation at any given moment. The best calculus class I ever saw for Junior High students had the students *INVENT* calculus together in small groups, with the teacher giving only vague hints to spur them along. This is exactly the kind of class that you would never see in China.
China is becoming better at refinement -- the Japanese comparison is somewhat apt -- but unlike Japan, China lacks any meaningful environment of business ethics. This means that any refinements you make will be immediately stolen by your competitors, so any changes you make need to be small and fast-to-implement such that you can milk your advantage for the X number of weeks it takes for everyone else to copy you. There is zero incentive to produce breakthroughs, but massive incentive to produce something 1% cheaper/faster for a few weeks.
The breakthroughs that DO come from China are mostly *engineering* breakthroughs rather than theory, and they are based on theories developed in the west that could not be refined due to regulatory reasons. China is on track to become a great innovator in human medicine thanks to non-human medicine developed in the west. The breakthroughs get developed in the west in animal models, but ethics concerns prevent human testing, so instead the *implementation* breakthrough gets to come from China.
If the Chinese culture suddenly did a 180 and became built around independent thought, I have zero doubt that they would dominate the world in all fields. This is not going to happen.
Japan got a head start but only made small progress in cultural change -- now they have some innovation but mostly they became the global leader in refinement, and fortunately they have a strong sense of business ethics such that success is not immediately stolen. Their ethics now mean they can't compete on production, so they're forced to compete on quality, which is why Japanese products are the best in the world for just about any product imaginable (not just for electronics, but for produce, furniture, etc.)
tl;dr Chinese "innovation" doesn't stem from some sort of inventor's spirit, but rather from them having the balls to do what western countries are too afraid/timid to do, and less moral opposition to a take-no-prisoners piratical approach to technological development.