Safe??? WHERE THE HELL DO YOU PUT THE WASTE? The most toxic material mankind has ever invented, it has to remain sealed from the environment for 10,000+ years, and you call it safe? In my own state of Washington there's a little reservation called Hanford that has nuclear waste sitting in "temporary" storage for decades because there's no permanent place to put it, and it's greadually leaking out of its encasement into the groundwater.
KUOW (Seattle's NPR station) already has it. It has three channels: (1) the regular broadcast service, (2) shows that couldn't fit into the regular schedule or are time-shifted, (3) 24-hour BBC World Service. I don't have a receiver so I haven't listened to it.
There are cascading effects at work. Because we pay for incoming minutes, telemarketers are prohibited from calling us. I've never received a telemarketing call on my cell. Paying for incoming minutes bothers Americans less than paying for minutes at all. I refused to get a cell phone until 2001 because I didn't want to pay "long distance" rates for local calls.
The wireless operators originally had to be self-funding because they are (relatively) unregulated private companies, so they couldn't charge back their costs to the landline network, especially since mobile phones were seen as obscure yuppie frills in the early years, not something non-users should subsidize.
The area code issue isn't really a dilemma. Putting cell numbers in standard area codes was possible only because the "cell phone user pays" concept was already a done deal. A few cities have in fact pushed new cell/fax/pager numbers into an overlay area code to prevent a geographical code split. I much prefer the convenience of having area codes geographically based. Washington State has a good system. There used to be one code for the west half and another for the east half (or "wet side" and "dry side" as we say). Now the west has four while the east still has one, so can tell at a glance whether a number is Seattle, north/east suburbs, south suburbs, rural, or eastern Washington. Very convenient. They were going to add a shared overlay across the whole west side, but fortunately the dot.com boom crashed before that was implemented.
There's another cascading effect too. If I'm visiting somewhere, people there have to dial my home number, so they pay long distance even though I'm in their city.
"First incoming minute free" used to exist in another context but I've forgotten what. A few cellular providers are starting to offer it, to take care of the undesired calls problem. Last I saw Cingular offered that for $5/month, and for another $5 you can get unlimited SMS, but I wouldn't use either of those enough to make them worth it. But there is a poor man's version. Because caller ID and voicemail is standard, if you don't want the call you press Cancel and it stops ringing and goes immediately to voicemail. You can do that with all unrecognized numbers if you want.
I have Cingular GSM. You don't have to sign a contract to change minutes or plans. Only if you upgrade your phone do you have to sign another contract, but that makes sense since they're subsidizing the phone. For some reason their salespeople desperately want you to get a new phone every six months, but I always decline.
There's a flip side to being charged for incoming minutes. Why should the caller pay extra because you chose to have a cell phone rather than a landline? That's not his problem. It burns me up that when I call friends in the UK I have to pay their cellphone bills! ($0.35/min mobile, $0.03/min landline.) Are you charged differently for e-mail depending on whether the recipient uses mutt, Hotmail or Outlook?
It sucks that I have to pay $0.10 for incoming or outgoing SMS, but Americans just get around that problem by avoiding SMS. It's not something I miss.
Earth to wireless carriers: we don't want 3G! We don't want color screens! We just want reliable voice service at a decent price. So quit wasting money on features we didn't ask for. It's like the telcos pushing caller ID and voicemail: I didn't ask for caller ID, and my answering machine works fine.
Channels 3,6,8,10,12 are probably used by the surrounding cities. Seattle has 4.5.7.9.11.13 (and now 14,15,20,22,28). Portland and Vancouver BC (each 120 miles away in opposite directions) have 2,3,6,8,10,12 (although not all of them are used). The closest reuse of channel 9 is in Eugene, Oregon, some 250-300 miles away. 200 miles is really the closest a channel number can be reused since each station has a 75-mile radius and you need a buffer in between. (Although it may get snowy starting around 40 miles.) There are high-gain antennas that claim to pick up signals 120 miles away.
Also, the "vacant" channels may actually be used for repeaters in outlying areas, although repeaters are usually on UHF.
The report is by the Congressionally-appointed Amtrak Reform Council, dated February 2002. It details some poor financial-management and borrowing decisions, and recommends splitting Amtrak into three companies. Page 9 discusses the Midwest Regional Initiative
I don't know whether it's being implemented, and nobody in the Midwest I ask has heard of it.
It has an alternative view to the long-distance train issue
saying the long-distance routes are important because they feed into other routes. My objections still stands; how can they "feed" other routes when they don't go where most people want to go?
Acela wasn't thought through correctly. A one-way Acela trip from NY to DC takes 2.25 hours and costs $137. On a regular train it takes 3.5 hours and costs $72.00. I might be willing to pay a proportional premium ($40) for the saved time, but not the $65 difference. Actually, the time saved is worth only $20 for me. Only businesspeople with money to burn would pay the $65 premium, and even they would have problems if they travelled more than once a month. Amtrak should have checked how many passengers wouuld ride Acela at that fare before building it.
California is
building a high-speed train from San Diego to LA, Sacramento and the Bay Area along the existing routes, so it's just a matter of time (and money). It doesn't mention the SJ - Oakland - Sacramento route; maybe they'll eventually beef that up separately.
In July 2002, Amtrak was going to shut down entirely, but then it got some emergency stopgap funding from Congress. That funding is also all that's keeping the Empire Builder (Seattle-Chicago) route from being deleted. You mentioned the San Joaquin. I read somewhere the San Joaquin line is subsidized by California because Amtrak would have cancelled it otherwise.
The US does have an extensive freight-train system.
You're right about the passenger-train system, which the government never modernized from its 19th-century infrastructure, unlike the billions they poured into highway construction. I travel by Greyhound not because I want to but because Amtrak is slower, goes once a day, misses entire states, and is twice as expensive.
However, some of the Amtrak reformers have the right idea. Abandoning the long-distance lines (which attract 20% of the riders but have 80% of the costs) and increasing the regional networks. Washington/Oregon/BC are already doing this, although at a snail's pace. California is in the planning stages. I also heard one report that the Midwest was planning one (IL/IN/OH/WI/MI) but I've been unable to confirm it.
Abandoning the long-distance lines is unfortunate, but realistically nobody wants to go from Seattle (where I live) to Chicago on a train that takes longer than a bus. And it doesn't even go to many of the cities in between. You can't take the train to Missoula, Montana because the nearest stop is a hundred miles away. (Missoula is served by freight trains, however.) And in California, the railroad companies didn't listen to your geometry teacher who said the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, they listened to the economics teacher who said that building zigzag increases the total amount of land you get for free. Building an intercity maglev across the US would be ideal, but nobody is willing to spend the billions for it.
Narcotics-alternative sports is the only rational way to deal with the fact that some atheletes want to use steroids but some fans want drug-free competitions. After all, being in a narcotics-alternative league does not necessarily mean you personally are enhanced, just like sitting in the smoking section of a restaurant doesn't necessarily mean that you smoke: perhaps you're sitting there because your friends smoke, or perhaps you want to resist the restriction on principle. There's no reason why the Olympics and professional sports can't have enhanced and natural leagues, or even have both teams playing their own type at the same event. Some natural teams may even want to challenge enhanced teams head-on to prove they can beat them. Natural sportsmen will not disappear, because some atheletes will remain that way on principle, and some fans will attend only natural events.
But "narcotics alternative" is not the right term. Narcotics strictly means substances like heroin, morphene and opium (all poppy derived) that dull the senses and encourage sleep, which sports supplements aren't. Give an athelete a narcotic and watch his performance *degrade*, not improve.
Racially discriminatory clauses in Homeowners Association contracts were invalidated in the 1960s.
However, the contracts can still have all sorts of other arbitrary restrictions that effectively discriminate by class if not race. No trailers or junky cars in the driveway, no TV antennas on the roof, etc. These restrictions limit the activities you can do in your house (no letting your brother live in the trailer, no fixing cars for your hobby), or raise your expenses (have to get cable TV), so they effectively limit home ownership to those who can afford the restrictions.
Of course, zoning itself also restricts the class of people who will be your neighbors. Zoning laws in some areas say no more than four houses per acre (giving every house a large yard), and no multi-family dwellings (apartments). Market rates determine how much that kind of house in that location costs. Only people who can afford that purchase price will be your neighbors.
People who don't like that sort of social engineering live in pre-1940 cities which were built without this sort of zoning. Although nowadays these locations (Chicago, New York, San Francisco) are so popular the rents are much higher than in newer, more suburban-style cities. Somehow the zoning boards can't get it through their heads that many people *like* to live in mixed-use, mixed-income, non-automobile neighborhoods so few of them are built nowadays. That is slowly starting to change as traffic, air pollution and oil supply become more critical, but it's held back by neighbors who refuse to let the zoning laws change, assuming their property values will go down and crime will go up if an apartment building goes up next to them.
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Safe??? WHERE THE HELL DO YOU PUT THE WASTE? The most toxic material mankind has ever invented, it has to remain sealed from the environment for 10,000+ years, and you call it safe? In my own state of Washington there's a little reservation called Hanford that has nuclear waste sitting in "temporary" storage for decades because there's no permanent place to put it, and it's greadually leaking out of its encasement into the groundwater.
KUOW (Seattle's NPR station) already has it. It has three channels: (1) the regular broadcast service, (2) shows that couldn't fit into the regular schedule or are time-shifted, (3) 24-hour BBC World Service. I don't have a receiver so I haven't listened to it.
Many ballots do have a place to write in a candidate if you don't like the preprinted choices. Mine in Washington state do.
There are cascading effects at work. Because we pay for incoming minutes, telemarketers are prohibited from calling us. I've never received a telemarketing call on my cell. Paying for incoming minutes bothers Americans less than paying for minutes at all. I refused to get a cell phone until 2001 because I didn't want to pay "long distance" rates for local calls.
The wireless operators originally had to be self-funding because they are (relatively) unregulated private companies, so they couldn't charge back their costs to the landline network, especially since mobile phones were seen as obscure yuppie frills in the early years, not something non-users should subsidize.
The area code issue isn't really a dilemma. Putting cell numbers in standard area codes was possible only because the "cell phone user pays" concept was already a done deal. A few cities have in fact pushed new cell/fax/pager numbers into an overlay area code to prevent a geographical code split. I much prefer the convenience of having area codes geographically based. Washington State has a good system. There used to be one code for the west half and another for the east half (or "wet side" and "dry side" as we say). Now the west has four while the east still has one, so can tell at a glance whether a number is Seattle, north/east suburbs, south suburbs, rural, or eastern Washington. Very convenient. They were going to add a shared overlay across the whole west side, but fortunately the dot.com boom crashed before that was implemented.
There's another cascading effect too. If I'm visiting somewhere, people there have to dial my home number, so they pay long distance even though I'm in their city.
"First incoming minute free" used to exist in another context but I've forgotten what. A few cellular providers are starting to offer it, to take care of the undesired calls problem. Last I saw Cingular offered that for $5/month, and for another $5 you can get unlimited SMS, but I wouldn't use either of those enough to make them worth it. But there is a poor man's version. Because caller ID and voicemail is standard, if you don't want the call you press Cancel and it stops ringing and goes immediately to voicemail. You can do that with all unrecognized numbers if you want.
I have Cingular GSM. You don't have to sign a contract to change minutes or plans. Only if you upgrade your phone do you have to sign another contract, but that makes sense since they're subsidizing the phone. For some reason their salespeople desperately want you to get a new phone every six months, but I always decline.
There's a flip side to being charged for incoming minutes. Why should the caller pay extra because you chose to have a cell phone rather than a landline? That's not his problem. It burns me up that when I call friends in the UK I have to pay their cellphone bills! ($0.35/min mobile, $0.03/min landline.) Are you charged differently for e-mail depending on whether the recipient uses mutt, Hotmail or Outlook?
It sucks that I have to pay $0.10 for incoming or outgoing SMS, but Americans just get around that problem by avoiding SMS. It's not something I miss.
Earth to wireless carriers: we don't want 3G! We don't want color screens! We just want reliable voice service at a decent price. So quit wasting money on features we didn't ask for. It's like the telcos pushing caller ID and voicemail: I didn't ask for caller ID, and my answering machine works fine.
Channels 3,6,8,10,12 are probably used by the surrounding cities. Seattle has 4.5.7.9.11.13 (and now 14,15,20,22,28). Portland and Vancouver BC (each 120 miles away in opposite directions) have 2,3,6,8,10,12 (although not all of them are used). The closest reuse of channel 9 is in Eugene, Oregon, some 250-300 miles away. 200 miles is really the closest a channel number can be reused since each station has a 75-mile radius and you need a buffer in between. (Although it may get snowy starting around 40 miles.) There are high-gain antennas that claim to pick up signals 120 miles away.
Also, the "vacant" channels may actually be used for repeaters in outlying areas, although repeaters are usually on UHF.
Here's the Amtrak reform report Amtrak reform report (PDF, 111pp, 1.8 MB) I was talking about. (Or (one PDF per chapter))
The report is by the Congressionally-appointed Amtrak Reform Council, dated February 2002. It details some poor financial-management and borrowing decisions, and recommends splitting Amtrak into three companies. Page 9 discusses the Midwest Regional Initiative I don't know whether it's being implemented, and nobody in the Midwest I ask has heard of it. It has an alternative view to the long-distance train issue saying the long-distance routes are important because they feed into other routes. My objections still stands; how can they "feed" other routes when they don't go where most people want to go?
Acela wasn't thought through correctly. A one-way Acela trip from NY to DC takes 2.25 hours and costs $137. On a regular train it takes 3.5 hours and costs $72.00. I might be willing to pay a proportional premium ($40) for the saved time, but not the $65 difference. Actually, the time saved is worth only $20 for me. Only businesspeople with money to burn would pay the $65 premium, and even they would have problems if they travelled more than once a month. Amtrak should have checked how many passengers wouuld ride Acela at that fare before building it.
California is building a high-speed train from San Diego to LA, Sacramento and the Bay Area along the existing routes, so it's just a matter of time (and money). It doesn't mention the SJ - Oakland - Sacramento route; maybe they'll eventually beef that up separately.
In July 2002, Amtrak was going to shut down entirely, but then it got some emergency stopgap funding from Congress. That funding is also all that's keeping the Empire Builder (Seattle-Chicago) route from being deleted. You mentioned the San Joaquin. I read somewhere the San Joaquin line is subsidized by California because Amtrak would have cancelled it otherwise.
The US does have an extensive freight-train system.
You're right about the passenger-train system, which the government never modernized from its 19th-century infrastructure, unlike the billions they poured into highway construction. I travel by Greyhound not because I want to but because Amtrak is slower, goes once a day, misses entire states, and is twice as expensive.
However, some of the Amtrak reformers have the right idea. Abandoning the long-distance lines (which attract 20% of the riders but have 80% of the costs) and increasing the regional networks. Washington/Oregon/BC are already doing this, although at a snail's pace. California is in the planning stages. I also heard one report that the Midwest was planning one (IL/IN/OH/WI/MI) but I've been unable to confirm it.
Abandoning the long-distance lines is unfortunate, but realistically nobody wants to go from Seattle (where I live) to Chicago on a train that takes longer than a bus. And it doesn't even go to many of the cities in between. You can't take the train to Missoula, Montana because the nearest stop is a hundred miles away. (Missoula is served by freight trains, however.) And in California, the railroad companies didn't listen to your geometry teacher who said the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, they listened to the economics teacher who said that building zigzag increases the total amount of land you get for free. Building an intercity maglev across the US would be ideal, but nobody is willing to spend the billions for it.
Narcotics-alternative sports is the only rational way to deal with the fact that some atheletes want to use steroids but some fans want drug-free competitions. After all, being in a narcotics-alternative league does not necessarily mean you personally are enhanced, just like sitting in the smoking section of a restaurant doesn't necessarily mean that you smoke: perhaps you're sitting there because your friends smoke, or perhaps you want to resist the restriction on principle. There's no reason why the Olympics and professional sports can't have enhanced and natural leagues, or even have both teams playing their own type at the same event. Some natural teams may even want to challenge enhanced teams head-on to prove they can beat them. Natural sportsmen will not disappear, because some atheletes will remain that way on principle, and some fans will attend only natural events.
But "narcotics alternative" is not the right term. Narcotics strictly means substances like heroin, morphene and opium (all poppy derived) that dull the senses and encourage sleep, which sports supplements aren't. Give an athelete a narcotic and watch his performance *degrade*, not improve.
Racially discriminatory clauses in Homeowners Association contracts were invalidated in the 1960s.
However, the contracts can still have all sorts of other arbitrary restrictions that effectively discriminate by class if not race. No trailers or junky cars in the driveway, no TV antennas on the roof, etc. These restrictions limit the activities you can do in your house (no letting your brother live in the trailer, no fixing cars for your hobby), or raise your expenses (have to get cable TV), so they effectively limit home ownership to those who can afford the restrictions.
Of course, zoning itself also restricts the class of people who will be your neighbors. Zoning laws in some areas say no more than four houses per acre (giving every house a large yard), and no multi-family dwellings (apartments). Market rates determine how much that kind of house in that location costs. Only people who can afford that purchase price will be your neighbors.
People who don't like that sort of social engineering live in pre-1940 cities which were built without this sort of zoning. Although nowadays these locations (Chicago, New York, San Francisco) are so popular the rents are much higher than in newer, more suburban-style cities. Somehow the zoning boards can't get it through their heads that many people *like* to live in mixed-use, mixed-income, non-automobile neighborhoods so few of them are built nowadays. That is slowly starting to change as traffic, air pollution and oil supply become more critical, but it's held back by neighbors who refuse to let the zoning laws change, assuming their property values will go down and crime will go up if an apartment building goes up next to them.