So, since their trains don't do 220 mph, ours should? Building a line like that is Just Not Possible in the only areas of the US where it would remotely make sense, because it would be incredibly cost-prohibitive just to get the right of way and carry out the environmental studies (imagine trying to put a high-speed line across the Meadowlands today).
The Amtrak Auto Train costs a little over $1500 for a family of two adults, two kids, and a normal car. It's only 816 miles between the endpoints, so the standard writeoff would be $416 for traveling that distance. And it takes about 24 hours to make the trip by train, once you count loading and unloading. 800-900 miles is an easy day's drive if you slip the kids some Benadryl and have in-car entertainment for them, and you're checked into your hotel and ready to see the Mouse first thing in the morning.
Greyhound sucks in the US, too, but that's not the service I'm talking about - I'm talking about premium bus lines. And even those do it for such a small fraction of the cost that anyone who is price-sensitive is going to use them. The passenger rail system in the US may be archaic, but the freight system is one of the best (if not the best) in the world. These are mutually exclusive to some degree; the time-sensitivity of passenger traffic means that it screws up freight all the time.
Furthermore, if Europeans love trains so much, why have Ryanair and similar made such inroads? Yes, trains on dedicated tracks are a pretty good way to get between closely spaced cities, but once you start traveling any meaningful distance it's time to get in the air - and in the US, it's almost always a pretty meaningful distance.
It gives me freedom to go wherever I want, whenever I want. I am hostage to nothing but the supply of gasoline. It's not supposed to make money for me any more than rail, air, walking, bicycling, or anything else will make money for me. Transportation is an expense that I must bear in order to make money. The fact that it's an expense for me suggests it's a profit for someone else - and indeed, lots of people profit from me driving a car. Just like people should profit from me taking a train... except that they don't.
Private bus services in the US are thriving. In the most train-friendly setting in the US - the Northeast Corridor - you can pay $111 for a ticket from Washington Union Station to New York Penn Station to get there in 3h 30m, or $168 to shave 45 m off that time - or you can take the Bolt Bus for $17.50 and have free WiFi all the way, at the cost of taking 4h 15m to get there.
Trains, like ships, are a very, very efficient way to transport freight over long distances when time is not at a premium (like commodities, where you don't care how long it takes to get there so long as you have the amount you need every day). They are just not efficient for moving people around, because time has value to people. If enough people are riding in it, even a large SUV becomes very efficient per passenger mile.
Having your own car means the freedom to go wherever you want, whenever you want - and people are willing to pay a very large premium for that, because it is a much superior product.
Fidelity is a function of kilohertz; you can accurately reproduce any sound of half your sampling frequency or lower - or are you holding back a disproof of Nyquist and Shannon? Humans generally can't hear anything beyond about 20kHz.
Dynamic range is a function of bits. Given that the 96 dB of CD audio is roughly the difference between a whisper and a rock concert, yes the SACD has more information. But it's almost certainly beyond the ability of your equipment to reproduce or your ears to hear.
relying on the "real ratings agenc[ies]" simply means substituting (and abdicating) one's parental responsibilities for one particular and frankly peculiar brand of moral hygeine.
I'm glad to see that I inspired yet another partisan-blinded Internet lurker to make his second comment ever. In the meantime, those of us who live on Planet Earth will recognize that CBS ran a story based on a document that was obviously fabricated. I'm not much worried about what some random site with a bunch of dead links says.
I suppose Breitbart just made it all up about Weiner, right?
Because I might decide to take my future purchases to the website, or to Best Buy or Wal-Mart or Target or any of the other places that sell Apple products. Your point, however, is well made.
It doesn't cost any money to process warranty claims?
I've had a bad run lately with my wife's second-generation Kindles. I bought the extended warranty, but they're not making the device anymore and so the replacements are refurbs. The first one lasted a year and a half; the second lasted four months. Number three died after five weeks, number four was DOA, number 5 lasted two weeks, and I just got number six. Amazon has paid to ship them both ways as well as to replace the device. Do you really think that's free?
If the workers are simply not responsible for the quality of the product they produce, then they're unskilled labor and should be compensated accordingly.
If you're inclined, go listen to this for some insight into the incredibly poisonous management-labor relationships at GM. I'll also note that there were a couple of stories in this book that detailed how workers intentionally screwed cars up as a fuck-you to the company.
Yes, cheap parts mattered, but shoddy work is shoddy work.
If you can offer a ninety-day warranty in the US (and you can), and you are forced to offer a one-year or longer warranty in another country, it's going to cost you more to sell that product outside the US. I'm not sure why this is controversial to you. Extended warranties cost money to provide.
I was once told in these very pages that in the UK, you can get warranty service for at least one year (or was it two?) just by taking it back to the store that sold it to you. In the US, that period is 15 to 30 days, max. After that, it's you and the manufacturer.
Wages have been flat in the US for too many years.
If you include benefits, they haven't been.
It's worth noting that the US has such horrendously adversarial union-management relationships because of the way our law works - a single union per workplace, with mandatory contributions (whether you belong or not), etc., is just an invitation to disaster.
I have always liked the line (supposedly) from Charles De Gaulle: The graveyards are full of indispensable men.
The world is littered with the corpses of companies and governments that died from the loss of visionary management. It's not really a counterargument to say that someone could, theoretically, be replaced; you have to demonstrate that you can easily acquire someone of equal skill in a short period of time.
The only decent answer in that piece is "GM stopped making cars people wanted to buy". This is true but unilluminating. The problem is that they made unreliable cars - I'm happy to blame GM's management 100% for ugly designs and underpowered Xeroxmobiles, but the workers put together the cars that squeaked, creaked, and leaked after just two years.
No shit. I walked into an Apple store today to buy a Father's Day gift - a 27" iMac. I walked in the door, met the greeter, and told him I was here to purchase - not to look, not to think, TO BUY. It took them over ten minutes to get someone over to me. Hello? I want to give you money. People who walk in the door and say "I'm ready to make a purchase, right now, no questions asked, please" are a retailer's dream. But it didn't seem to matter to them - they had almost a dozen people doing the soft sell routine on random people in the store, but nobody who could just walk up and process my purchase.
When I was a kid, there was no particular effort to review or control what was consumed nor what was provided
You sound like you're about my age - mid-late 30s. No effort had to be made back then - there were so many barriers in the way of getting something that wasn't "family-friendly". Porn, for example. There is more porn, of a greater variety, on/b/ right now than my friends and I ever saw while growing up - and yes, we had older brothers and all that. Video games didn't feature graphic violence because the graphics weren't that good.
People aren't usually looking for this sort of thing for teens - they're trying to keep their five-year-olds from running into it.
Slashdot Mirror
So, since their trains don't do 220 mph, ours should? Building a line like that is Just Not Possible in the only areas of the US where it would remotely make sense, because it would be incredibly cost-prohibitive just to get the right of way and carry out the environmental studies (imagine trying to put a high-speed line across the Meadowlands today).
The Amtrak Auto Train costs a little over $1500 for a family of two adults, two kids, and a normal car. It's only 816 miles between the endpoints, so the standard writeoff would be $416 for traveling that distance. And it takes about 24 hours to make the trip by train, once you count loading and unloading. 800-900 miles is an easy day's drive if you slip the kids some Benadryl and have in-car entertainment for them, and you're checked into your hotel and ready to see the Mouse first thing in the morning.
Greyhound sucks in the US, too, but that's not the service I'm talking about - I'm talking about premium bus lines. And even those do it for such a small fraction of the cost that anyone who is price-sensitive is going to use them.
The passenger rail system in the US may be archaic, but the freight system is one of the best (if not the best) in the world. These are mutually exclusive to some degree; the time-sensitivity of passenger traffic means that it screws up freight all the time.
Furthermore, if Europeans love trains so much, why have Ryanair and similar made such inroads? Yes, trains on dedicated tracks are a pretty good way to get between closely spaced cities, but once you start traveling any meaningful distance it's time to get in the air - and in the US, it's almost always a pretty meaningful distance.
going anywhere you like in the country in a third the time,
Show me one route in the US where the train time station to station is even 2/3 as fast as cars door to door.
It gives me freedom to go wherever I want, whenever I want. I am hostage to nothing but the supply of gasoline. It's not supposed to make money for me any more than rail, air, walking, bicycling, or anything else will make money for me. Transportation is an expense that I must bear in order to make money. The fact that it's an expense for me suggests it's a profit for someone else - and indeed, lots of people profit from me driving a car. Just like people should profit from me taking a train... except that they don't.
Private bus services in the US are thriving. In the most train-friendly setting in the US - the Northeast Corridor - you can pay $111 for a ticket from Washington Union Station to New York Penn Station to get there in 3h 30m, or $168 to shave 45 m off that time - or you can take the Bolt Bus for $17.50 and have free WiFi all the way, at the cost of taking 4h 15m to get there.
Trains, like ships, are a very, very efficient way to transport freight over long distances when time is not at a premium (like commodities, where you don't care how long it takes to get there so long as you have the amount you need every day). They are just not efficient for moving people around, because time has value to people. If enough people are riding in it, even a large SUV becomes very efficient per passenger mile.
Having your own car means the freedom to go wherever you want, whenever you want - and people are willing to pay a very large premium for that, because it is a much superior product.
Fidelity is a function of kilohertz; you can accurately reproduce any sound of half your sampling frequency or lower - or are you holding back a disproof of Nyquist and Shannon? Humans generally can't hear anything beyond about 20kHz.
Dynamic range is a function of bits. Given that the 96 dB of CD audio is roughly the difference between a whisper and a rock concert, yes the SACD has more information. But it's almost certainly beyond the ability of your equipment to reproduce or your ears to hear.
I wondered if anyone would notice that ;)
It has 65,536 volume levels and can accurately reproduce any sound below 22 kHz. If your hearing is better than that, you're probably a dog.
relying on the "real ratings agenc[ies]" simply means substituting (and abdicating) one's parental responsibilities for one particular and frankly peculiar brand of moral hygeine.
That's what I was responding to.
Congratulations, you just invented the ratings agency.
I'm glad to see that I inspired yet another partisan-blinded Internet lurker to make his second comment ever. In the meantime, those of us who live on Planet Earth will recognize that CBS ran a story based on a document that was obviously fabricated. I'm not much worried about what some random site with a bunch of dead links says.
I suppose Breitbart just made it all up about Weiner, right?
Because I might decide to take my future purchases to the website, or to Best Buy or Wal-Mart or Target or any of the other places that sell Apple products. Your point, however, is well made.
It doesn't cost any money to process warranty claims?
I've had a bad run lately with my wife's second-generation Kindles. I bought the extended warranty, but they're not making the device anymore and so the replacements are refurbs. The first one lasted a year and a half; the second lasted four months. Number three died after five weeks, number four was DOA, number 5 lasted two weeks, and I just got number six. Amazon has paid to ship them both ways as well as to replace the device. Do you really think that's free?
If the workers are simply not responsible for the quality of the product they produce, then they're unskilled labor and should be compensated accordingly.
If you're inclined, go listen to this for some insight into the incredibly poisonous management-labor relationships at GM. I'll also note that there were a couple of stories in this book that detailed how workers intentionally screwed cars up as a fuck-you to the company.
Yes, cheap parts mattered, but shoddy work is shoddy work.
If you can offer a ninety-day warranty in the US (and you can), and you are forced to offer a one-year or longer warranty in another country, it's going to cost you more to sell that product outside the US. I'm not sure why this is controversial to you. Extended warranties cost money to provide.
I was once told in these very pages that in the UK, you can get warranty service for at least one year (or was it two?) just by taking it back to the store that sold it to you. In the US, that period is 15 to 30 days, max. After that, it's you and the manufacturer.
Funnily, the movie that made me realize that one "fuck" means PG-13 and two means "R" was Spaceballs (PG-13).
Wages have been flat in the US for too many years.
If you include benefits, they haven't been.
It's worth noting that the US has such horrendously adversarial union-management relationships because of the way our law works - a single union per workplace, with mandatory contributions (whether you belong or not), etc., is just an invitation to disaster.
I have always liked the line (supposedly) from Charles De Gaulle: The graveyards are full of indispensable men.
The world is littered with the corpses of companies and governments that died from the loss of visionary management. It's not really a counterargument to say that someone could, theoretically, be replaced; you have to demonstrate that you can easily acquire someone of equal skill in a short period of time.
You probably have a country with saner labor laws than the US.
The only decent answer in that piece is "GM stopped making cars people wanted to buy". This is true but unilluminating. The problem is that they made unreliable cars - I'm happy to blame GM's management 100% for ugly designs and underpowered Xeroxmobiles, but the workers put together the cars that squeaked, creaked, and leaked after just two years.
In at-will states, they don't have to provide a reason to fire you. Just like you don't have to give a reason to quit.
No shit. I walked into an Apple store today to buy a Father's Day gift - a 27" iMac. I walked in the door, met the greeter, and told him I was here to purchase - not to look, not to think, TO BUY. It took them over ten minutes to get someone over to me. Hello? I want to give you money. People who walk in the door and say "I'm ready to make a purchase, right now, no questions asked, please" are a retailer's dream. But it didn't seem to matter to them - they had almost a dozen people doing the soft sell routine on random people in the store, but nobody who could just walk up and process my purchase.
Than Europe, yes. All those vaunted consumer-protection laws aren't free.
When I was a kid, there was no particular effort to review or control what was consumed nor what was provided
You sound like you're about my age - mid-late 30s. No effort had to be made back then - there were so many barriers in the way of getting something that wasn't "family-friendly". Porn, for example. There is more porn, of a greater variety, on /b/ right now than my friends and I ever saw while growing up - and yes, we had older brothers and all that. Video games didn't feature graphic violence because the graphics weren't that good.
People aren't usually looking for this sort of thing for teens - they're trying to keep their five-year-olds from running into it.