There is a BK in my town who hires work release inmates. All well and good, until they get released. At that point the BK fires them, because they don't want felons working at their store.
Wait, WTF?! Do the idiots running the BK somehow think they're not felons while they're still in jail?!
Spoken like someone who has never lived in the Southern US. Trust me, standing in one place outside for 10 minutes in July in Dallas (or New Orleans, or Houston, or any of dozens of other such cities on the Gulf Coast and Desert Southwest) will give you an "unprofessional sweat" no matter how good a shape you're in.
You know, the real problem here is the unreasonable expectations. What did people down here do before air conditioning? I'll bet they sweated. And I'll also bet it was okay.
I currently live in a Chicago suburb and work downtown.... Draw a horizontal line through the middle of the US. Everything below that line requires air conditioning.... In Europe and some parts of the US, elderly people die when their heat is turned off in the winter. In the south, elderly people die from heat stroke when their air conditioning is turned off.
The elderly die from the heat in Chicago too, you know.
That could of course be abused, so how is it determined whether something is employee compensation vs profit dispersal?
Not being an accountant or corporate lawyer, I don't know. However, I guess it has to do with whether or not the payment is varied according to surplus(/profit), and whether the payee is merely an employee or if he has an ownership stake in the organization.
Actually, scratch that -- it doesn't even make sense for a non-profit to be "owned" in the same way as a business, since any owner wouldn't be allowed to profit from his ownership. I just checked to make sure, and indeed non-profits really aren't "owned" by anyone.
Continuing to read that page, I see that non-profits have to specifically reveal salaries exceeding $50,000; I guess the IRS has regulations to prevent people in control of non-profits from giving themselves excessive salaries.
Drainage. Rural medians on Interstates are generally designed to be depressed compared to the road itself (3' deep for a 50' median), and the road is crowned so that half the water (from each side) drains into it. If you then put a sag vertical curve under each overpass to accommodate the train, you'd end up with water collecting at that spot and ponding on the track -- a situation which, I suspect, wouldn't be very good for either the safety of the train and maintenance of the track.
It would have to be a really long (i.e., expensive) excavation, because trains aren't designed to deal with steep grades.
Although many overpasses cross the entire freeway in a single span, many others don't. Instead, they have a support column in the middle of the median. You'd have to replace those bridges even if they would have had enough vertical clearance otherwise.
My point was that I think Americans are likely to travel that sort of distance more often than Europeans would, for several reasons:
First, we have more sprawl than most of Europe and commute longer distances on a daily basis. This changes our perception of distance, and makes longer trips seem more reasonable than they otherwise would. I've experienced this phenomenon personally: I commuted from my parents' house suburbs to college in midtown (about 20 miles each way) for several years and thought nothing of it. Then I got an apartment near campus and and started commuting less than 3 miles each way. For a while I marveled at how close and convenient everything was compared to the suburbs, but now that I've gotten used to it, it seems "normal" and driving my previous commute (to visit my parents) seems onerously long.
Second, our major cities themselves are farther apart from each other than they are in Europe. For example, if you lived near Luxembourg then Amsterdam, Bern, Brussels, and Paris are all within a 200-mile radius, and even London is only 100 miles more than that. In contrast, if you live in Atlanta then 200 miles gets you to piddly little towns like Birmingham, Chattanooga, Columbia and Macon and that's about it. Even the beach (i.e., Atlantic Ocean) is about 230 miles away at it's closest point, and that's really close compared to most of the country. In Europe it's not even possible to be more than 400 miles away from the sea unless you live in Belarus, Ukraine, or Russia, and in Western Europe that maximum drops to 300 miles. In other words, us Americans have to travel farther to get anywhere interesting.
Third, America has a much more homogeneous culture than Europe does, and no significant internal borders. When you cross from France into Germany (for example) you immediately notice that it's different, and thus become more aware how far you've gone from where you used to be. In America, you could drive through several states without even noticing if you weren't paying attention to the road signs. If you drive 1000 miles in Europe you've gone through about 4 countries, had your passport stamped* 4 times, and if you stopped to eat, ordered food from 4 different ethnic cuisines in 4 different languages. If you drive 1000 miles in America it'll still feel like you haven't even left home except that you'll get little square hamburgers from White Castle instead of Krystal and stuff like that.
(* Yes, I know about how this isn't true anymore because of the Schengen rules, but I'm sure you still get the point.)
And newsflash: we're talking about building lines from cities like Cincinnati to Buffalo, Louisville to Chicago, Chicago to the Twin Cities, San Diego to San Fransisco.
And Jacksonville to Washington (D.C.), via Atlanta. It's the 7th route on the list in the article, labeled "Southeast corridor" -- look it up. Granted, D.C. isn't New York, but we're still talking about the total length of the route and Jacksonville to D.C. is even longer than Atlanta to New York!
I took a train with what they call "sleeping cars". Everybody gets a bed. Some cars will have a bunch of beds everywhere, kind of like in cubicles without the fourth wall, more expensive ones will have suites for 4, and the most expensive ones will have suites for 2. I remember taking the middle option and paying very little.
Yeah, that's the problem: the minimum Amtrak offers -- other than plain seats -- is that "roomette" I mentioned (which has 2 bunks and is probably equivalent to the "most expensive" suite you mentioned); the only other option even includes a private bathroom and is even more expensive!
Yeah, see, on Amtrak the price difference between a seat and the cheapest bed option (a "roomette") is $120. Granted, it sleeps 2 people so if you're traveling in a[n even-numbered] group it's "only" $60 extra per person, but that's still way more than 20 euros.
The real problem is that Amtrak doesn't have any "economy" options -- there's no such thing as a "couchette" or "open section" sleeper here anymore.
Amtrak actually has one route that works this way: the Auto Train. It only works between the DC area and Orlando, non-stop...
Yeah, that's what's so fucking stupid about it: unless you want to travel between those two exact destinations, you can't use it. You could live in Georgia or the Carolinas and have the damn track running through your back yard, and the thing would still be completely useless to you because it doesn't stop to let you get on! It wouldn't kill them to have a stop in Savannah or Charlotte, but Amtrak management is too incompetent to realize it!
The median isn't there just for looks, you know. It's there to keep the traffic separated far enough apart that if a driver loses control he's not likely to careen all the way over to the opposing lanes. If you put something in the middle, you'd also have to put up barriers on each side of it.
You'd also have to reconstruct pretty much all the overpasses, because they're not high enough to accommodate a train. That's way expensive. Barring a truly massive public works project -- on the scale of the first transcontinental railroad, or the initial building of the Interstate Highway System -- you'd pretty much have to wait and upgrade the bridges as they wore out, which means you wouldn't be able to use the thing until about 50 years after you started.
Also, the replacement bridges themselves would be more expensive than they would be otherwise. Not only does making them higher also mean they'd have to be longer (because the abutments are usually sloped rather than vertical), but you'd either have to not have a support in the median (doubling the length of the main span, which would require much larger and more expensive girders), or you'd have to have two supports and put one on each side of the track (which would make the bridge more complicated to design). And on top of all that, you'd be likely to need more fill dirt to build up the longer and higher approaches.
In urban areas, medians tend to get narrower (with barriers in the middle) because right-of-way gets expensive enough to make it worth it. But that means the track would have to go somewhere else (requiring another bridge, by the way), and that that "somewhere else" is exactly where right-of-way is expensive!
Finally, right-of-way isn't the real problem for railroads anyway -- they already own, or own easements for, plenty of right-of-way along the existing rail routes. Creating new routes just to be collinear with the Interstates wouldn't provide any actual benefit. The real problem is the cost of materials, construction, and maintenance of the track itself, not so much the cost of acquiring right-of-way.
FWIW, the NY/Chicago distance is also of around that order and there's quite a few places of some size in between. Surely there'd be good grounds for the eastern half of the US to do better than at present, especially as there's lots of it that's plenty dense enough.
More like the northeast quarter. Atlanta, which I used as an example to argue exactly the opposite, is in the eastern half of the country too. But yeah, high-speed rail does make sense in, say, the Washington, D.C. - New York City - Boston corridor. But that's about the only place it makes sense, and that was only 1 of the 10 proposed routes mentioned in the article. (Well, more or less -- it's part of one route and part of another.)
Plus there's got to be smaller scale projects where high-speed rail makes sense: for example, connecting major airports to their cities so that people don't have to suffer traffic or an interminable commuter line. (Chicago, I'm looking at you here. The line to O'Hare is abysmal, and the freeway really isn't much better either.)
I was thinking about that too, and I think it's a good idea. However, it's not so much that we need to build more rail -- we have a pretty extensive network already. What we need to do is nationalize the existing track, but that would face severe opposition from the railroad companies.
Of course the airlines are getting subsidized -- but so what?!
Travelers don't care why it's cheaper; they just care that it is. The new high-speed rail is going to have to be cheaper, or nobody's going to use it. The government is going to have to subsidize it, or quit subsidizing the airlines, or both, or else it will fail. And I just don't see Congress agreeing to do that.
Traveling around Europe in so-called "night trains" is bliss: go to bed in Switzerland, wake up in Holland.
I'm sure that by "bed" you must mean "not-fully-reclining coach-class seat," right? In America at least, that's all you'd get for a price competitive with airlines. If you actually wanted something that could be described as a "bed" (e.g. an Amtrak "roomette"), it would cost about twice as much as flying (which you wouldn't need a bed for because it wouldn't take all night).
Very often it's FASTER to take a train then fly by plane [in European countries.]
That's because the destinations are very often so much closer together. For example, London and Paris are about 214 miles (345 km for you Europeans) apart, which is exactly the same distance from Atlanta, GA to Charlotte, NC -- just one of the links in the "Southeast Corridor" route mentioned in the article. And nobody really wants to go just from Atlanta to Charlotte; a lot of them would really be trying to get to points much farther north, like New York or Boston or something. In contrast, I suspect London-to-Paris is often the whole end-to-end trip in itself.
Another fun fact: if you started in London and went the same distance it takes to get from Atlanta to New York (750 miles / 1207 km), you'd be halfway to Moscow. That's the difference in scale between Europe and the U.S.!
I agree: what these funds really need to be used for heavy-rail transit (i.e. subways/elevated trains in the city) and commuter rail (i.e. regular trains that go back and forth to the suburbs and neighboring cities). Long trips are better served, at least for now, by airlines.
If they really want to spend it on long-haul stuff, they should consider improving freight rail. It's a lot more efficient and environmentally friendly than long-haul trucking, but it's been losing because the government essentially hugely subsidizes the trucking industry by maintaining the highway system, while railroads have to fund maintenance of all their track themselves.
I would love to see high-speed rail though, if only for long trips. Getting to see other parts of the country in a day rather than 2 or 3 days would energize the travel businesses.
Traveling by airplane already accomplishes that. The important distinction for high-speed rail is that it would need to be cheaper than airfare, and/or provide other benefits (e.g. the ability to take extra luggage, such as your car, with you).
The sad thing is, as much as I like trains and wish it would, I just don't see that being successful. Even the normal, slow Amtrak fares are often more expensive than discount airfare between the same two cities. I can't imagine any scenario, short of huge subsidies (which would be fine with me, but Congress would never approve it), that would allow an expensive, brand-new system to improve on that.
"Not-for-profit" doesn't have anything to do with the ratio of income to expenses; it has to do with how any profit (or "surplus," as it's called for non-profits) gets used. The question is, what would have happened to the extra ad revenue if there was a hypothetical surplus? If the owners of the site would have kept it, it's not a non-profit. If they would have set it aside for future operating expenses, or maybe donated it to the Piratbyran or Piratpartiet, it might count as a non-profit. Really though, the best thing to do if they want to use that strategy would have been to register as whatever the Swedish equivalent of a 501(c) is.
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Sure, but they have to have already collected your DNA in order to compare it and figure out that it didn't match. And then they keep it anyway.
That's what's not right!
Wait, WTF?! Do the idiots running the BK somehow think they're not felons while they're still in jail?!
Was that also true of the funding for initial construction of the Interstate Highway System, back in the '50s and '60s?
They were ready for the launch! What they weren't ready for was Gamestop moving up the deadline!
Maybe you should see if you can pack your bike into one of these (assuming Amtrak allows luggage that size).
You know, the real problem here is the unreasonable expectations. What did people down here do before air conditioning? I'll bet they sweated. And I'll also bet it was okay.
The elderly die from the heat in Chicago too, you know.
Not being an accountant or corporate lawyer, I don't know. However, I guess it has to do with whether or not the payment is varied according to surplus(/profit), and whether the payee is merely an employee or if he has an ownership stake in the organization.
Actually, scratch that -- it doesn't even make sense for a non-profit to be "owned" in the same way as a business, since any owner wouldn't be allowed to profit from his ownership. I just checked to make sure, and indeed non-profits really aren't "owned" by anyone .
Continuing to read that page, I see that non-profits have to specifically reveal salaries exceeding $50,000; I guess the IRS has regulations to prevent people in control of non-profits from giving themselves excessive salaries.
You'd still have significant problems:
My point was that I think Americans are likely to travel that sort of distance more often than Europeans would, for several reasons:
First, we have more sprawl than most of Europe and commute longer distances on a daily basis. This changes our perception of distance, and makes longer trips seem more reasonable than they otherwise would. I've experienced this phenomenon personally: I commuted from my parents' house suburbs to college in midtown (about 20 miles each way) for several years and thought nothing of it. Then I got an apartment near campus and and started commuting less than 3 miles each way. For a while I marveled at how close and convenient everything was compared to the suburbs, but now that I've gotten used to it, it seems "normal" and driving my previous commute (to visit my parents) seems onerously long.
Second, our major cities themselves are farther apart from each other than they are in Europe. For example, if you lived near Luxembourg then Amsterdam, Bern, Brussels, and Paris are all within a 200-mile radius, and even London is only 100 miles more than that. In contrast, if you live in Atlanta then 200 miles gets you to piddly little towns like Birmingham, Chattanooga, Columbia and Macon and that's about it. Even the beach (i.e., Atlantic Ocean) is about 230 miles away at it's closest point, and that's really close compared to most of the country. In Europe it's not even possible to be more than 400 miles away from the sea unless you live in Belarus, Ukraine, or Russia, and in Western Europe that maximum drops to 300 miles. In other words, us Americans have to travel farther to get anywhere interesting.
Third, America has a much more homogeneous culture than Europe does, and no significant internal borders. When you cross from France into Germany (for example) you immediately notice that it's different, and thus become more aware how far you've gone from where you used to be. In America, you could drive through several states without even noticing if you weren't paying attention to the road signs. If you drive 1000 miles in Europe you've gone through about 4 countries, had your passport stamped* 4 times, and if you stopped to eat, ordered food from 4 different ethnic cuisines in 4 different languages. If you drive 1000 miles in America it'll still feel like you haven't even left home except that you'll get little square hamburgers from White Castle instead of Krystal and stuff like that.
(* Yes, I know about how this isn't true anymore because of the Schengen rules, but I'm sure you still get the point.)
And Jacksonville to Washington (D.C.), via Atlanta. It's the 7th route on the list in the article, labeled "Southeast corridor" -- look it up. Granted, D.C. isn't New York, but we're still talking about the total length of the route and Jacksonville to D.C. is even longer than Atlanta to New York!
Yeah, that's the problem: the minimum Amtrak offers -- other than plain seats -- is that "roomette" I mentioned (which has 2 bunks and is probably equivalent to the "most expensive" suite you mentioned); the only other option even includes a private bathroom and is even more expensive!
Yeah, see, on Amtrak the price difference between a seat and the cheapest bed option (a "roomette") is $120. Granted, it sleeps 2 people so if you're traveling in a[n even-numbered] group it's "only" $60 extra per person, but that's still way more than 20 euros.
The real problem is that Amtrak doesn't have any "economy" options -- there's no such thing as a "couchette" or "open section" sleeper here anymore.
Yeah, that's what's so fucking stupid about it: unless you want to travel between those two exact destinations, you can't use it. You could live in Georgia or the Carolinas and have the damn track running through your back yard, and the thing would still be completely useless to you because it doesn't stop to let you get on! It wouldn't kill them to have a stop in Savannah or Charlotte, but Amtrak management is too incompetent to realize it!
There are several problems with that:
Yep. But what can we do about it?
More like the northeast quarter. Atlanta, which I used as an example to argue exactly the opposite, is in the eastern half of the country too. But yeah, high-speed rail does make sense in, say, the Washington, D.C. - New York City - Boston corridor. But that's about the only place it makes sense, and that was only 1 of the 10 proposed routes mentioned in the article. (Well, more or less -- it's part of one route and part of another.)
I completely agree! In fact, I mentioned the same thing myself. However, that's not what Obama proposed.
I was thinking about that too, and I think it's a good idea. However, it's not so much that we need to build more rail -- we have a pretty extensive network already. What we need to do is nationalize the existing track, but that would face severe opposition from the railroad companies.
Of course the airlines are getting subsidized -- but so what?!
Travelers don't care why it's cheaper; they just care that it is. The new high-speed rail is going to have to be cheaper, or nobody's going to use it. The government is going to have to subsidize it, or quit subsidizing the airlines, or both, or else it will fail. And I just don't see Congress agreeing to do that.
I'm sure that by "bed" you must mean "not-fully-reclining coach-class seat," right? In America at least, that's all you'd get for a price competitive with airlines. If you actually wanted something that could be described as a "bed" (e.g. an Amtrak "roomette"), it would cost about twice as much as flying (which you wouldn't need a bed for because it wouldn't take all night).
That's because the destinations are very often so much closer together. For example, London and Paris are about 214 miles (345 km for you Europeans) apart, which is exactly the same distance from Atlanta, GA to Charlotte, NC -- just one of the links in the "Southeast Corridor" route mentioned in the article. And nobody really wants to go just from Atlanta to Charlotte; a lot of them would really be trying to get to points much farther north, like New York or Boston or something. In contrast, I suspect London-to-Paris is often the whole end-to-end trip in itself.
Another fun fact: if you started in London and went the same distance it takes to get from Atlanta to New York (750 miles / 1207 km), you'd be halfway to Moscow. That's the difference in scale between Europe and the U.S.!
I agree: what these funds really need to be used for heavy-rail transit (i.e. subways/elevated trains in the city) and commuter rail (i.e. regular trains that go back and forth to the suburbs and neighboring cities). Long trips are better served, at least for now, by airlines.
If they really want to spend it on long-haul stuff, they should consider improving freight rail. It's a lot more efficient and environmentally friendly than long-haul trucking, but it's been losing because the government essentially hugely subsidizes the trucking industry by maintaining the highway system, while railroads have to fund maintenance of all their track themselves.
The sad thing is, the Amtrak fare would likely have been more expensive than flying with a discount airline (e.g. AirTran) anyway.
Traveling by airplane already accomplishes that. The important distinction for high-speed rail is that it would need to be cheaper than airfare, and/or provide other benefits (e.g. the ability to take extra luggage, such as your car, with you).
The sad thing is, as much as I like trains and wish it would, I just don't see that being successful. Even the normal, slow Amtrak fares are often more expensive than discount airfare between the same two cities. I can't imagine any scenario, short of huge subsidies (which would be fine with me, but Congress would never approve it), that would allow an expensive, brand-new system to improve on that.
"Not-for-profit" doesn't have anything to do with the ratio of income to expenses; it has to do with how any profit (or "surplus," as it's called for non-profits) gets used. The question is, what would have happened to the extra ad revenue if there was a hypothetical surplus? If the owners of the site would have kept it, it's not a non-profit. If they would have set it aside for future operating expenses, or maybe donated it to the Piratbyran or Piratpartiet, it might count as a non-profit. Really though, the best thing to do if they want to use that strategy would have been to register as whatever the Swedish equivalent of a 501(c) is.