15 percent of the US population lives within 300 miles of Chicago, not all of that to the east.
Here's a free clue for you - draw a 300 mile circle around Chicago on a map, then zoom back and notice what a small portion of the country that is.
Need I drag out the satellite imagery of the United States at night?
Please do! Because it shows precisely what I am talking about - the population density and short distances of the area the OP describes are the exception, rather than the rule. There is rather more to the country than that dense conurbation, even without invoking the even vaster and emptier areas in the West.
Nope - I corrected his errors. The same error you make - as east coast means "the east coast", it doesn't mean "that portion of the east coast that is densely populated". The same goes for "California". Words mean things.
You might ask, "What about all those old movies I've seen with people traveling in elegant dining cars and trips on sleeping cars"? We did have more train routes in the past.
Yep - and elegant dining and sleeping cars cost serious money to experience while traveling too. Even Coach (the equivalent of todays airline coach class, and just as much a cattle car) cost more (historically) than the equivalent trip by air in first class today. (And historically they ran at a net loss, the big train lines operated them as loss leaders to advertise their frieght services.)
here were also lots of light rail cars, electric and horse drawn before those. 'El' lines along with subways.
And they were, by and large, crowded and smelly - and didn't run door-to-door. You still had to walk (often considerable distances) from your house to the station, and then endure the crowding of the downtown station and a walk to your place of employment. (As well as being at the mercy of their schedule.)
It wasn't the utopia you seem to think - there was a reason that anyone who could afford to didn't use these services. There's a reason why Henry Ford thought their was a large market for cheap mass produced Model T's.
Peoples experience with the public transportation would become frustrating enough that they would simply not want to deal with it.
The truth is - dealing with public transportation has never been particularly pleasant, but nostalgia and and tinfoil hat attitude towards the automobile and oil industries has given them a sheen they never had when they existed.
Probably less than roads - railway tracks need far less materials than a high speed road - a high speed line can be made up of one track each way. A high speed road tends to be six lanes wide plus a shoulder.
However, the foundations of a high speed rail line can be as much as twenty feet deep, and seperation will be required between the tracks and shoulders outside of the tracks. The materials saving is less than you might think.
I keep thinking that Amtrak could do a 150mph goods service. Link 10 cities or so in each state to each other by rail corridors e.g. San Diego, L.A., San Francisco, Sacramento, Bakersfield. Transport containerized goods only. Drive down costs through streamlining the process.
Never mind the fact that Amtrak is forbidden by law to be in the freight business eh? (Not to mention the fact that your scheme won't really work - the expensive part of moving containerized freight today is the 'last mile', and your scheme doesn't fix that.)
I don't know what the problem is. The technology exists, the market is there, but there just doesn't seem to be the will to do anything other than half-assed measures.
Sure there's the will - but there is nobody willing to pony up the cash for a multibillion dollar project that will never return the money invested in it. (The market isn't quite as large as you might think.) Historically the long distance passenger rail market has been a money loser.
Yes, back in the day the UP and the SP and all the others ran their passenger trains at a loss - but continued to run them as loss leaders (advertising) for the freight services.
The other downside is that our population centers are _far_ away from each other. People from Asian or European countries just don't understand how much space lies between American cities.
I do (I'm Swedish).
No offense - but no you don't, and your account makes that quite clear.
After taking off from New York, We reached the Detroit area after less than one hour IIRC, and Chicago less than one hour after that. But then, there were a lot of nothingness,
If you get south of that line, you pretty quickly run into a lot of nothingness too. The triangle bounded (roughly) by Baltimore, Chicago, and Boston is quite dense - and you flew right up the middle of it. But outside of the (rough) triangle, population density drops off dramatically. (And even so, there are good chunks of that dense triangle that aren't particularly crowded.)
California could probably have a HS rail network, and so could the east coast. But the land in between is probably too large to hope for a HS rail network anytime soon.
*California* is probably too large for a HS rail network - large parts of it a pretty close to empty. The bulk of the population is in three centers, fairly well clustered together. Pretty much the same for the East Coast - the Northern half might someday get a workable HS rail network, but the Southern half is quite empty by comparison.
The implication was that I am asking for a cite from a reputeable source. Scientific American is coasting on it's reputation of decades past, and to me no longer constitutes such a source. If being told the truth about your source increases your confidence in it, when the opposite is warranted... Well, that doesn't say much about you.
That's kind of like reading the National Enquirer for the latest scientific news. Ten or fifteen years ago or more, I'd regard a cite of Scientific American as valid - but it's become a tabloid piece of crap.
they now have the particulate filters that make diesels run cleaner.
No - diesels run just as dirty as ever, they *appear* to run cleaner because we convert the dirty exhaust into toxic waste. That particulates haven't disappeared, they just been collected into a box rather than being emitted into the atmosphere.
No, putting the blame for a specific problem on some US organization is not "anti US". Everybody makes mistakes, and it's good engineering practice to accept responsibility for them when that happens.
Putting the blame on another organization without having conducted a thorough investigation _is_ "anti US".
Fermilab thinks that the problem occured on their side, and they are trying to solve it.
Actually - Fermilab thinks no such thing. The acknowledge that a failure happened, noted the differences between their test setup and the full installation, and stop well short of anything other claim pending the results on an ongoing investigation.
In short, CERN _is_ making gratuitous:anti US" statements.
Working in a multi-national company with multi-national customers and designing safety-critical systems, I have some experience with handling mistakes. The best approach solving these technical issues, is to keep political games at bay as much as possible.
Yet, here is CERN starting those political games.
Investigate thoroughly, take responsibility if you own the problem, then work on solving it. Once you start thinking "it's just that the other guys hate us" you've already lost.
Yet, without possibly having enough time to thoroughly investigate, CERN is starting just that process (creating the feeling of "its the other guys that hate us). Worse yet, CERN *had* to have reviewed the magnet design long before construction began - in that light, playing political games and creating hard feelings seems to be a method of diverting attention from their role.
As a consumer of Google products, I would like the information they provide to be as accurate, up to date, and as high a quality as possible.
Then you should have no complaints about Google removing the imagery - as the 2006 imagery that has been in place (as an option) was no more accurate than any earlier imagery. (The 2006 imagery shows vast areas flooded - something not true today.)
One factor you are ignoring is that by using old images, they have made their maps less accurate.
One factor that you ignoring, is the 'newer' imagery wasn't particulary accurate either. They showed a city deluged by water - which it hasn't been for over a year now.
Niether the old *or* the new is particularly correct with regards to current conditions.
Knob. K.I.S.S. is by far the best aproach for controls. Ask any pilot. Example: a fuel control for the left tank...should the control point left up down or right when the engine is on the left tank? Ask John Denver.
Heck, not just pilots - ask the crews of HMS Thetis or USS Squalus.
Poor employee morale and low pay create the a social petri dish for employee malaise and discontent. Customer service suffers. People stop shopping there. The company continues to lower prices and pay. A vicious cycle ensues. Soon they declare bankruptcy and blame on it everything except poor management decisions driven by short term bottom line numbers.
That's a wonderful theory - care to name an actual company that has happened to?
And no, K-mart isn't it. K-marts was killed by Walmart and Target splitting K-Mart's traditional demographic between them.
Let's assume that they validly need to cut costs. Doesn't it make sense to cut the highest paid people?
Nope.
For example - at the business where my wife works as Comptroller, she is now in the top 10% of salaries paid, second only to the bosses and the sales manager. Sure, they could hire a bunch of salespeople if they fired her and promoted her assistant... But can ______ run the department as smoothly and efficiently? (Not to mention that ______ doesn't have the years of experience, or the extensive contacts with vendors, etc... etc... that my wife has.)
Or take the small public utility where a friend works as one of the department heads - the same holds true. Or another friend of mine who is production manager at a small factory (making around one and a half what a line worker makes)...
Now in the natural course of things, people will leave, die, etc... and create the same disruptions. But that's no reason to shoot yourself in the foot.
Is it better to fire 100 of your highest paid or 200 of your lowest paid? Circuit city seems to think the former, and I'm not sure they're wrong (i'm not sure they're right either).
At most places of employment the lowest paid people are the most expendable, with the least training and the least amount invested in them by the company. By and large they are easily replaceable - if they weren't, odds are they wouldn't be the least paid. Sure, you can save money - in the short run - by firing a C_O, but the reality is you'd have to pay an equally qualified replacement the same amount of money. You won't save any money in the long term, and you will suffer potential disruptions in your business.
There once was a time when people living in the richest country in the world had a reasonable expectation that they could share in that wealth as long as they worked hard and played by the rules. It's not an unfair "expectation". After all, the 50's era (a time that conservatives like yourself laud as being the American ideal) was a time where you could get a good job with great security and live well for the rest of your life. You would have health insurance, life inusrance, pension, the whole 9 yards. If someone brought that up today, they would be accused of being a communist, yet this era was considered the capitalist ideal--the idea of the American Dream came from this time period in history.
You were quite right to start that off with "once upon a time" - because what you wrote is a fantasy that bears little relation to reality. Health insurance in the 50's? Forget about it, especially if you didn't have a union job. Life insurance? Pension? Ditto. (And if you had a union job - those benefits weren't always what could be considered 'great' or even 'decent' today.) But only a fraction of Americans had union jobs.
Even crappy retail jobs that are being derided on this site had these kind of benefits. A retail person COULD own a house, believe it or not... almost impossible today.
Sure a retail person could have a house - but it was not a given (in fact it was pretty unusual), and fairly likely it would be a small and crappy one. It certainly wouldn't been like a house in the suburbs today.
It is no wonder that the United States of America is in such a bad state. It's time for America to rise up and demand the America Dream again. It is our birthright, but only if we stand up for it.
The reality is the American Dream is as viable, and hard to reach, as it ever was. What has happened is an increasing number of people who think that a house in the burbs and a fancy new car are their birthright - rather than the product of hard work, dedication, thrift, etc... etc... You want to see what's strangling the American Dream? Check out how much the average American's debt (esp credit card debt) has gone up over the decades.
The American dream is becoming just that - a dream. Best way to end up rich? Be born that way.
ROTFLMAO. Ask the dot-com millionaires (few born that way) just how remote the American Dream is. Some of 'em hit it big because they were in the right place at the right time - but more than a few because they had an idea and worked their asses off to make it happen.
The American Dream has never been easy - and the road is littered with potholes and landmines. But the road is there, and can be followed to it's end if you guts and will and just a wee smidgen of luck. That's pretty much always been true.
This time, it looks like someone purposely set up a test case at the same high school (in McLean, VA), by submitting a paper and specifying that it not be archived -- then found that it was.
Given that someone under 18 cannot enter into a binding contract - it seems likely that Turnitin.Com is not bound by such a specification.
If you're under the age of 50 and weren't born to someone who makes 7 figures a year while playing golf all day, the system is gamed to fuck you from birth to death.
The reality is plenty of people of people born in worse circumtances are doing quite well - if you aren't, the problem is either a) bad luck _or_ b) you.
Isn't that the same for most FAA airports? Basically, the airports are run by the federal agency and leased by private corporations?
No. The FAA doesn't own, or operate any (commercial) airports. Typically they are run by either a state or (more commonly) local (city/county) goverment, or by a semi-independent quasi-govermental organization beholden to a local goverment.
Secondly, isn't that part of the role of the government? To create and maintain basic infrastructure that people can use?
It is. But amusement parks aren't basic infrastructure.
I don't see how this is different from building an airport or from building roads.
Airports, highways, spaceports. Two enable transportation and commerce. One provides support for glorified joy rides. The difference should be obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a free clue for you - draw a 300 mile circle around Chicago on a map, then zoom back and notice what a small portion of the country that is.
Please do! Because it shows precisely what I am talking about - the population density and short distances of the area the OP describes are the exception, rather than the rule. There is rather more to the country than that dense conurbation, even without invoking the even vaster and emptier areas in the West.
Nope - I corrected his errors. The same error you make - as east coast means "the east coast", it doesn't mean "that portion of the east coast that is densely populated". The same goes for "California". Words mean things.
Yep - and elegant dining and sleeping cars cost serious money to experience while traveling too. Even Coach (the equivalent of todays airline coach class, and just as much a cattle car) cost more (historically) than the equivalent trip by air in first class today. (And historically they ran at a net loss, the big train lines operated them as loss leaders to advertise their frieght services.)
And they were, by and large, crowded and smelly - and didn't run door-to-door. You still had to walk (often considerable distances) from your house to the station, and then endure the crowding of the downtown station and a walk to your place of employment. (As well as being at the mercy of their schedule.)
It wasn't the utopia you seem to think - there was a reason that anyone who could afford to didn't use these services. There's a reason why Henry Ford thought their was a large market for cheap mass produced Model T's.
The truth is - dealing with public transportation has never been particularly pleasant, but nostalgia and and tinfoil hat attitude towards the automobile and oil industries has given them a sheen they never had when they existed.
However, the foundations of a high speed rail line can be as much as twenty feet deep, and seperation will be required between the tracks and shoulders outside of the tracks. The materials saving is less than you might think.
Never mind the fact that Amtrak is forbidden by law to be in the freight business eh? (Not to mention the fact that your scheme won't really work - the expensive part of moving containerized freight today is the 'last mile', and your scheme doesn't fix that.)
Sure there's the will - but there is nobody willing to pony up the cash for a multibillion dollar project that will never return the money invested in it. (The market isn't quite as large as you might think.) Historically the long distance passenger rail market has been a money loser.
Yes, back in the day the UP and the SP and all the others ran their passenger trains at a loss - but continued to run them as loss leaders (advertising) for the freight services.
No offense - but no you don't, and your account makes that quite clear.
If you get south of that line, you pretty quickly run into a lot of nothingness too. The triangle bounded (roughly) by Baltimore, Chicago, and Boston is quite dense - and you flew right up the middle of it. But outside of the (rough) triangle, population density drops off dramatically. (And even so, there are good chunks of that dense triangle that aren't particularly crowded.)
*California* is probably too large for a HS rail network - large parts of it a pretty close to empty. The bulk of the population is in three centers, fairly well clustered together. Pretty much the same for the East Coast - the Northern half might someday get a workable HS rail network, but the Southern half is quite empty by comparison.
The implication was that I am asking for a cite from a reputeable source. Scientific American is coasting on it's reputation of decades past, and to me no longer constitutes such a source. If being told the truth about your source increases your confidence in it, when the opposite is warranted... Well, that doesn't say much about you.
Got a cite?
That's kind of like reading the National Enquirer for the latest scientific news. Ten or fifteen years ago or more, I'd regard a cite of Scientific American as valid - but it's become a tabloid piece of crap.
No - diesels run just as dirty as ever, they *appear* to run cleaner because we convert the dirty exhaust into toxic waste. That particulates haven't disappeared, they just been collected into a box rather than being emitted into the atmosphere.
Which really shouldn't suprise anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of economics. Content costs money to create.
Putting the blame on another organization without having conducted a thorough investigation _is_ "anti US".
Actually - Fermilab thinks no such thing. The acknowledge that a failure happened, noted the differences between their test setup and the full installation, and stop well short of anything other claim pending the results on an ongoing investigation.
In short, CERN _is_ making gratuitous
Yet, here is CERN starting those political games.
Yet, without possibly having enough time to thoroughly investigate, CERN is starting just that process (creating the feeling of "its the other guys that hate us). Worse yet, CERN *had* to have reviewed the magnet design long before construction began - in that light, playing political games and creating hard feelings seems to be a method of diverting attention from their role.
Then you should have no complaints about Google removing the imagery - as the 2006 imagery that has been in place (as an option) was no more accurate than any earlier imagery. (The 2006 imagery shows vast areas flooded - something not true today.)
One factor that you ignoring, is the 'newer' imagery wasn't particulary accurate either. They showed a city deluged by water - which it hasn't been for over a year now.
Niether the old *or* the new is particularly correct with regards to current conditions.
The problem is - that's not a bug-as-feature as specified in TFA. It's a hack. There is a difference.
Heck, not just pilots - ask the crews of HMS Thetis or USS Squalus.
That's a wonderful theory - care to name an actual company that has happened to?
And no, K-mart isn't it. K-marts was killed by Walmart and Target splitting K-Mart's traditional demographic between them.
Nope.
For example - at the business where my wife works as Comptroller, she is now in the top 10% of salaries paid, second only to the bosses and the sales manager. Sure, they could hire a bunch of salespeople if they fired her and promoted her assistant... But can ______ run the department as smoothly and efficiently? (Not to mention that ______ doesn't have the years of experience, or the extensive contacts with vendors, etc... etc... that my wife has.)
Or take the small public utility where a friend works as one of the department heads - the same holds true. Or another friend of mine who is production manager at a small factory (making around one and a half what a line worker makes)...
Now in the natural course of things, people will leave, die, etc... and create the same disruptions. But that's no reason to shoot yourself in the foot.
At most places of employment the lowest paid people are the most expendable, with the least training and the least amount invested in them by the company. By and large they are easily replaceable - if they weren't, odds are they wouldn't be the least paid. Sure, you can save money - in the short run - by firing a C_O, but the reality is you'd have to pay an equally qualified replacement the same amount of money. You won't save any money in the long term, and you will suffer potential disruptions in your business.
You were quite right to start that off with "once upon a time" - because what you wrote is a fantasy that bears little relation to reality. Health insurance in the 50's? Forget about it, especially if you didn't have a union job. Life insurance? Pension? Ditto. (And if you had a union job - those benefits weren't always what could be considered 'great' or even 'decent' today.) But only a fraction of Americans had union jobs.
Sure a retail person could have a house - but it was not a given (in fact it was pretty unusual), and fairly likely it would be a small and crappy one. It certainly wouldn't been like a house in the suburbs today.
The reality is the American Dream is as viable, and hard to reach, as it ever was. What has happened is an increasing number of people who think that a house in the burbs and a fancy new car are their birthright - rather than the product of hard work, dedication, thrift, etc... etc... You want to see what's strangling the American Dream? Check out how much the average American's debt (esp credit card debt) has gone up over the decades.
ROTFLMAO. Ask the dot-com millionaires (few born that way) just how remote the American Dream is. Some of 'em hit it big because they were in the right place at the right time - but more than a few because they had an idea and worked their asses off to make it happen.
The American Dream has never been easy - and the road is littered with potholes and landmines. But the road is there, and can be followed to it's end if you guts and will and just a wee smidgen of luck. That's pretty much always been true.
Given that someone under 18 cannot enter into a binding contract - it seems likely that Turnitin.Com is not bound by such a specification.
The reality is plenty of people of people born in worse circumtances are doing quite well - if you aren't, the problem is either a) bad luck _or_ b) you.
No. The FAA doesn't own, or operate any (commercial) airports. Typically they are run by either a state or (more commonly) local (city/county) goverment, or by a semi-independent quasi-govermental organization beholden to a local goverment.
It is. But amusement parks aren't basic infrastructure.
Airports, highways, spaceports. Two enable transportation and commerce. One provides support for glorified joy rides. The difference should be obvious.