NYC is the one U.S. city that is completely and totally dependent on subways. It would not continue to function normally if even a single important line were shut down for a nontrivial period of time. Night/weekend closures, though they aggravate me (I'm rarely in NYC *except* on weekends), are about the most that can be done without inflicting total chaos.
Agreed, but . . . not to defend any of the players . . . politics is an ugly, dirty game that *very* few people ever survive with any vestige of their integrity or honor intact.
It sure appears that way on the surface. But I suspect that Mr. Trump is playing the long con most of the time. I don't think he's unaware of the reactions his seemingly unpresidential, inflammatory, and childish tweets will inspire. I think he is counting on them.
Libertarians such as myself believe in limited government. They are therefore assumed to be in total opposition to transit. But that's not always the case. While in a perfect world, markets would evolve to address transportation and most if not all other human needs, the world in which we actually do live is one in which cars, roads, oil, and other car-related infrastructure has been heavily subsidized in many places, for decades. Particularly in the U.S. where I live. This has created unsustainable and costly patterns of development, including sprawl, that almost everyone acknowledges but almost no one knows how to fix. And since it's kind of essential to understand what's going on, I'll point out that public sector unions have been heavily subsidized as well. This has grossly distorted transportation markets, resulting in entire countries such as the U.S., Canada, and probably many others, developing unsustainable levels of suburban sprawl that cannot be adequately served by transit as it is currently imagined.
I would propose a re-imagining of transit as we know it here today. States and the federal government already devote substantial resources to transportation in general. But most of it has been to benefit cars, not transit. This has created patterns of development that require cars, which require continuing investment in roads, etc., ad nauseam. I propose they shift a portion of these resources away from cars, particularly inside established cities, and toward transit. This represents a very small, baby step toward shifting back to what transportation looked like before all of this massive market distortion. Where transit dominated at least in and near cities, with most private car usage being found elsewhere.
And I also would either negotiate with transit unions for more sustainable wage structures, or - and, yes, most will consider this drastic, but remember I'm a libertarian so this is a concession for me as well: fire them all and replace them. There is nothing about operating a subway train that should cost $100k a year. Technology is going to replace most unskilled labor sooner than most folks realize. It's high time to serve notice to those who make very high wages for unskilled work that they need to retrain NOW, while they still have their current jobs, so that, when those jobs go away - which they will - they will be ready for other and better ones that are currently going unfilled for lack of properly trained workers.
And as I already touched on, automation can and should solve a lot of the cost issues. With proper signaling and safety technology, train operation can be largely if not completely automated. Driving huge buses on busy and chaotic city streets is a far greater challenge, but it is being worked on. Since buses are as big and as infrequent as they are now as a result of the need to minimize labor costs, automation over time should result in smaller, but more, buses, probably operating more frequently and in more places than they can now.
Last but not least, the one cost faced by both cars and transit, making both more expensive than they need to be, is energy. Technology is trying desperately to solve this problem. And politics is trying desperately to get in the way of that solution. We need to find genuinely better alternatives to fossil fuels, an we need to do that ASAP, preferably now while we still have them. We know how to produce energy cheaply in places with a lot of sun, or wind, or waterfalls. If we ever get nuclear fission right (thorium fuel cycle?) or even fusion, we can produce it even more cheaply. But how do we get it to where and when most of it is used, including either public or private transit vehicles? That's the biggest challenge right now. If we solve that problem, the cost of transportation, whether public or private, reverts to somewhere near the cost of infrastructure. No huge labor costs because automation; no huge fuel costs because of fusion + fuel cells or whatever. When these costs become low enough, we
Some American cities including Cleveland where I live, and most notably Detroit, have been partially abandoned, leaving many formerly paved surfaces in varying stages of reverting to nature. And in such places you can clearly see that unmaintained surfaces, whether asphalt or concrete, will degrade quickly over time even in the absence of traffic or road salt. Our winters are just the right temperature to maximize the number of freeze/thaw cycles, and these destroy most commonly used road surfaces over time. Tiny cracks form in them, water gets in, it freezes and thus expands, forming a deeper crack. Then melts, and the cycle repeats. Often several times in a single day, and very reliably a hundred or more times a year. The famous Roman roads for the most part did not face this challenge, and neither do surfaces in much warmer areas that rarely freeze, or much colder areas where water remains frozen throughout much of the winter. It's just a natural cost inflicted by our climate and the only real solution I can think of is for us to migrate over time to fewer but better maintained and probably higher capacity roads, bridges, tunnels, buses and rail lines (notably missing from much of the U.S., but, insofar as they do exist, used mainly in the New York and New England areas which feature fairly similar climates).
It is true that the perpetrators of abductions, molestation, etc. are typically related and/or known to the victim. However, if you think that pedophilia is rare, then you may want to look at the stats of how many women report having been sexually assaulted when much younger. Granted, it is usually in their teens which doesn't fit the strict definition of pedophilia. But even pre-pubescent girls are VERY commonly sexually abused. And sometimes boys. And if it happened to your child, you would not care how "rare" it might be. It wasn't rare for him or her. I'm every bit as inconvenienced by Amber Alerts as anyone, and possibly more so since I have extreme difficulty sleeping. But it's an inconvenience I will happily live with, if it might save a child from something that could not possibly be rare enough.
We do in the Cleveland area sometimes. I presume that this may result from there being some nexus with the area, for instance, perhaps the child was abducted elsewhere but is believed to be near here, or the suspected abductor has ties with the area, and so forth. Our rapidly declining population means that there are far more people with connections to our area than there are who still live here.
Rock now meets hard place. When speed limits are set too low, it is almost always to extract revenue, not to promote safety. And jurisdictions that behave this way will not want to allow semi- or fully-automated vehicles over their artificially slowly set "speed limits." However, their potential drivers won't want to die by not going at least as fast as the minimum safe speed. So, until laws and/or enforcement of those laws change, drastically, you won't be seeing too many partly or fully automated vehicles in those jurisdictions.
Bad idea IMO. We are symbiotic with our microbiome. Anything that indiscriminately kills the viruses that make up a small but important part thereof, will damage our health, far more than the cold virus possibly can. Same reason antibacterials are a bad idea (beyond that they also help to breed resistant pathogens). Also same reason why antibiotics/antivirals/antifungals in the food supply are a bad idea. It is being learned, slowly and gradually and with a lot of resistance from "mainstream" medicine and Big Pharma, that when we ingest otherwise harmless things that harm our microbiome, even if they do not target or otherwise affect human cells, there are negative repercussions to our health, including very serious ones. Autism, dementia, allergies, autoimmune disorders in general, developmental delays, and higher susceptibility to cancer, metabolic syndrome, and many other disorders are now either known or highly suspected to be related to the microbiome. So, no, I don't think that broad-spectrum antivirals are a good idea, except when they are genuinely and truly needed in order to prevent even more serious harm. Certainly they should not be used to target the common cold, except possibly in immunocompromised individuals or others for whom it would be a far more serious condition than it is for most of us.
Definitely easier to preserve Free and Open content including software. But it can still effectively die if not maintained. Case in point . the hoops I had to jump through to convert some documents I'd stored in KWord format, which AFAIK no currently maintained Free Software supports. I don't remember exactly what I did to convert it but I'm pretty sure it involved installing a very old Linux distro inside a VM.
Because they tend not to take into account the falling purchasing power of the dollar over time (one definition of inflation, although, strictly speaking, that is an effect of inflation, the cause of which is the expansion of the money supply at a higher rate than the expansion of production). They do attempt to take inflation into account, but using a very misleading measure thereof. A better measure of economic well-being would be the median disposable income properly adjusted for the effects of inflation and purchasing power parity. By that measure, I think you'll find that there is some growth in China, very little in the U.S. if any at all, and either a bunch or a negative bunch in Russia depending mainly on oil prices.
Fair enough. Going back further, it turns out that the Semitic alphabet of circa 2000BC is the ancestor of just about every alphabet in widespread use, and this, in turn, probably descended from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The following is a fascinating read.
Same thing when, e.g., speakers of Romance languages type on U.S. keyboards. Accents and some punctuation get dropped. It's usually easy for native speakers to use context to figure out what was meant, but not terribly easy for others. And Google Translate isn't usually smart enough to handle this situation.
Cyrillic was invented for the South Slavic language family, and intended to be purely phonetic (as most if not all alphabets were at first), using characters from both Greek and Latin as well as a few I don't believe are found in either. As it spread north and eastward, it adapted to some degree to the different phonemes available in various (mostly) Slavic languages. The Cyrillic alphabets used for Macedonian, Bulgarian, Russian, and others are slightly different, just as are those of various Romance languages, but are still fairly close to being phonetically correct in each of them.
The only mildly hard thing about learning the Cyrillic alphabet is that some characters look the same as *different* Latin characters and vice versa and at first it's easy to confuse them. In time one gets used to this and it's not hard to switch between them.
My wife is from Macedonia. I believe only Cyrillic is official there, but the Latin alphabet is very widely used also, and when texting, posting on FB, etc., Macedonians typically type in un-accented Latin characters simply because those are the easiest to use, and the lack of accents rarely causes ambiguity in south Slavic languages. It does make it impossible to use Google Translate though. (It's close to Bulgarian, but not quite close enough.)
Aversion to bugs in general is culture, not shared across all cultures or parts of the world. But domestic cockroaches are scavengers and carriers of gross diseases, and aversion to cockroaches specifically, while also not universal, seems far more widespread. I'll agree I'd way rather eat plants though.
Racist prick. Granted, Detroit has its problems, but they were not caused by Black people, but by job loss, aided and abetted, deliberately, by unions as well as local, state and national governments. Like all U.S. cities there are large areas you should avoid if you can. The rest is just fine. The suburbs are for the most part just fine. The suburban and downtown job markets are surprisingly strong, and even the worst parts of town are gradually improving, many of them being repurposed as urban farms and other greenspace. The corruption sucks, but not drastically more so than in any other Demoncrat-led city. Lose your ignorant prejudices and get a life already.
4 lanes per direction is not a particularly wide road by large, car-oriented-city standards. The metro area I live in (Cleveland) is not even a fifth of LA's size.. by any reasonable measure it's more like a tenth. But we have 10 lane roads (e.g., I-271 - 3 local and 2 express lanes) that regularly turn into parking lots. Toronto, closer to LA's size but with much better transit and I believe higher density, has roads like 401 with 18 lanes, which also still get congested. Houston has some very wide roads also. Now, obviously, you can't always add enough lanes to meet demand, and sometimes you can't add any at all. And sometimes adding capacity results in added demand via sprawl. I'm not suggesting otherwise. I am saying, though, that a 4 lane can easily be a bottleneck in even a drastically smaller town, so it's hard for me to believe that it wouldn't be in LA.
In many places, and that includes some right here in the U.S., some of the things truly necessary in life, such as clean water and healthy food, not to mention basic safety, are very expensive, more so than technology. But when Internet access comes along, people can learn how to purify and test tainted water, how to find or grow fresh produce, or how to avoid and/or deal with unsafe neighborhoods. It's not been an awful thing here in inner-city Cleveland, Ohio, that almost everyone has a smartphone, even many of the homeless. It is not as important as the things you mentioned, but it is useful, in part because it helps people to be able to find those things.
More or less, that is what many lines in NYC do. There are separate express and local tracks, accessible from the same platforms (usually), allowing both services to run in parallel and for relatively painless transfer between them. But NYC is one of only a few U.S. cities with enough ridership to justify separate tracks. Maybe the only one. Others do offer express or skip-stop service, but with far less efficiency since express (typically in one direction only) and local trains must share the same tracks
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NYC is the one U.S. city that is completely and totally dependent on subways. It would not continue to function normally if even a single important line were shut down for a nontrivial period of time. Night/weekend closures, though they aggravate me (I'm rarely in NYC *except* on weekends), are about the most that can be done without inflicting total chaos.
Agreed, but . . . not to defend any of the players . . . politics is an ugly, dirty game that *very* few people ever survive with any vestige of their integrity or honor intact.
It sure appears that way on the surface. But I suspect that Mr. Trump is playing the long con most of the time. I don't think he's unaware of the reactions his seemingly unpresidential, inflammatory, and childish tweets will inspire. I think he is counting on them.
Libertarians such as myself believe in limited government. They are therefore assumed to be in total opposition to transit. But that's not always the case. While in a perfect world, markets would evolve to address transportation and most if not all other human needs, the world in which we actually do live is one in which cars, roads, oil, and other car-related infrastructure has been heavily subsidized in many places, for decades. Particularly in the U.S. where I live. This has created unsustainable and costly patterns of development, including sprawl, that almost everyone acknowledges but almost no one knows how to fix. And since it's kind of essential to understand what's going on, I'll point out that public sector unions have been heavily subsidized as well. This has grossly distorted transportation markets, resulting in entire countries such as the U.S., Canada, and probably many others, developing unsustainable levels of suburban sprawl that cannot be adequately served by transit as it is currently imagined.
I would propose a re-imagining of transit as we know it here today. States and the federal government already devote substantial resources to transportation in general. But most of it has been to benefit cars, not transit. This has created patterns of development that require cars, which require continuing investment in roads, etc., ad nauseam. I propose they shift a portion of these resources away from cars, particularly inside established cities, and toward transit. This represents a very small, baby step toward shifting back to what transportation looked like before all of this massive market distortion. Where transit dominated at least in and near cities, with most private car usage being found elsewhere.
And I also would either negotiate with transit unions for more sustainable wage structures, or - and, yes, most will consider this drastic, but remember I'm a libertarian so this is a concession for me as well: fire them all and replace them. There is nothing about operating a subway train that should cost $100k a year. Technology is going to replace most unskilled labor sooner than most folks realize. It's high time to serve notice to those who make very high wages for unskilled work that they need to retrain NOW, while they still have their current jobs, so that, when those jobs go away - which they will - they will be ready for other and better ones that are currently going unfilled for lack of properly trained workers.
And as I already touched on, automation can and should solve a lot of the cost issues. With proper signaling and safety technology, train operation can be largely if not completely automated. Driving huge buses on busy and chaotic city streets is a far greater challenge, but it is being worked on. Since buses are as big and as infrequent as they are now as a result of the need to minimize labor costs, automation over time should result in smaller, but more, buses, probably operating more frequently and in more places than they can now.
Last but not least, the one cost faced by both cars and transit, making both more expensive than they need to be, is energy. Technology is trying desperately to solve this problem. And politics is trying desperately to get in the way of that solution. We need to find genuinely better alternatives to fossil fuels, an we need to do that ASAP, preferably now while we still have them. We know how to produce energy cheaply in places with a lot of sun, or wind, or waterfalls. If we ever get nuclear fission right (thorium fuel cycle?) or even fusion, we can produce it even more cheaply. But how do we get it to where and when most of it is used, including either public or private transit vehicles? That's the biggest challenge right now. If we solve that problem, the cost of transportation, whether public or private, reverts to somewhere near the cost of infrastructure. No huge labor costs because automation; no huge fuel costs because of fusion + fuel cells or whatever. When these costs become low enough, we
Some American cities including Cleveland where I live, and most notably Detroit, have been partially abandoned, leaving many formerly paved surfaces in varying stages of reverting to nature. And in such places you can clearly see that unmaintained surfaces, whether asphalt or concrete, will degrade quickly over time even in the absence of traffic or road salt. Our winters are just the right temperature to maximize the number of freeze/thaw cycles, and these destroy most commonly used road surfaces over time. Tiny cracks form in them, water gets in, it freezes and thus expands, forming a deeper crack. Then melts, and the cycle repeats. Often several times in a single day, and very reliably a hundred or more times a year. The famous Roman roads for the most part did not face this challenge, and neither do surfaces in much warmer areas that rarely freeze, or much colder areas where water remains frozen throughout much of the winter. It's just a natural cost inflicted by our climate and the only real solution I can think of is for us to migrate over time to fewer but better maintained and probably higher capacity roads, bridges, tunnels, buses and rail lines (notably missing from much of the U.S., but, insofar as they do exist, used mainly in the New York and New England areas which feature fairly similar climates).
It is true that the perpetrators of abductions, molestation, etc. are typically related and/or known to the victim. However, if you think that pedophilia is rare, then you may want to look at the stats of how many women report having been sexually assaulted when much younger. Granted, it is usually in their teens which doesn't fit the strict definition of pedophilia. But even pre-pubescent girls are VERY commonly sexually abused. And sometimes boys. And if it happened to your child, you would not care how "rare" it might be. It wasn't rare for him or her. I'm every bit as inconvenienced by Amber Alerts as anyone, and possibly more so since I have extreme difficulty sleeping. But it's an inconvenience I will happily live with, if it might save a child from something that could not possibly be rare enough.
We do in the Cleveland area sometimes. I presume that this may result from there being some nexus with the area, for instance, perhaps the child was abducted elsewhere but is believed to be near here, or the suspected abductor has ties with the area, and so forth. Our rapidly declining population means that there are far more people with connections to our area than there are who still live here.
Rock now meets hard place. When speed limits are set too low, it is almost always to extract revenue, not to promote safety. And jurisdictions that behave this way will not want to allow semi- or fully-automated vehicles over their artificially slowly set "speed limits." However, their potential drivers won't want to die by not going at least as fast as the minimum safe speed. So, until laws and/or enforcement of those laws change, drastically, you won't be seeing too many partly or fully automated vehicles in those jurisdictions.
Bad idea IMO. We are symbiotic with our microbiome. Anything that indiscriminately kills the viruses that make up a small but important part thereof, will damage our health, far more than the cold virus possibly can. Same reason antibacterials are a bad idea (beyond that they also help to breed resistant pathogens). Also same reason why antibiotics/antivirals/antifungals in the food supply are a bad idea. It is being learned, slowly and gradually and with a lot of resistance from "mainstream" medicine and Big Pharma, that when we ingest otherwise harmless things that harm our microbiome, even if they do not target or otherwise affect human cells, there are negative repercussions to our health, including very serious ones. Autism, dementia, allergies, autoimmune disorders in general, developmental delays, and higher susceptibility to cancer, metabolic syndrome, and many other disorders are now either known or highly suspected to be related to the microbiome. So, no, I don't think that broad-spectrum antivirals are a good idea, except when they are genuinely and truly needed in order to prevent even more serious harm. Certainly they should not be used to target the common cold, except possibly in immunocompromised individuals or others for whom it would be a far more serious condition than it is for most of us.
Nah. All they have to do is to pass some anti-piracy legislation. Like the DMCA. :)
But why would I want to pay $1 to be bored when I can hang out here on Slashdot for free?
Definitely easier to preserve Free and Open content including software. But it can still effectively die if not maintained. Case in point . the hoops I had to jump through to convert some documents I'd stored in KWord format, which AFAIK no currently maintained Free Software supports. I don't remember exactly what I did to convert it but I'm pretty sure it involved installing a very old Linux distro inside a VM.
Because they tend not to take into account the falling purchasing power of the dollar over time (one definition of inflation, although, strictly speaking, that is an effect of inflation, the cause of which is the expansion of the money supply at a higher rate than the expansion of production). They do attempt to take inflation into account, but using a very misleading measure thereof. A better measure of economic well-being would be the median disposable income properly adjusted for the effects of inflation and purchasing power parity. By that measure, I think you'll find that there is some growth in China, very little in the U.S. if any at all, and either a bunch or a negative bunch in Russia depending mainly on oil prices.
It was an attempt to fight bigotry with worse bigotry. Wrong in principle. IMO, his reaction was quite tame considering.
Fair enough. Going back further, it turns out that the Semitic alphabet of circa 2000BC is the ancestor of just about every alphabet in widespread use, and this, in turn, probably descended from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The following is a fascinating read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Same thing when, e.g., speakers of Romance languages type on U.S. keyboards. Accents and some punctuation get dropped. It's usually easy for native speakers to use context to figure out what was meant, but not terribly easy for others. And Google Translate isn't usually smart enough to handle this situation.
Cyrillic was invented for the South Slavic language family, and intended to be purely phonetic (as most if not all alphabets were at first), using characters from both Greek and Latin as well as a few I don't believe are found in either. As it spread north and eastward, it adapted to some degree to the different phonemes available in various (mostly) Slavic languages. The Cyrillic alphabets used for Macedonian, Bulgarian, Russian, and others are slightly different, just as are those of various Romance languages, but are still fairly close to being phonetically correct in each of them.
The only mildly hard thing about learning the Cyrillic alphabet is that some characters look the same as *different* Latin characters and vice versa and at first it's easy to confuse them. In time one gets used to this and it's not hard to switch between them.
My wife is from Macedonia. I believe only Cyrillic is official there, but the Latin alphabet is very widely used also, and when texting, posting on FB, etc., Macedonians typically type in un-accented Latin characters simply because those are the easiest to use, and the lack of accents rarely causes ambiguity in south Slavic languages. It does make it impossible to use Google Translate though. (It's close to Bulgarian, but not quite close enough.)
I think you just insulted 6 billion cockroaches.
Aversion to bugs in general is culture, not shared across all cultures or parts of the world. But domestic cockroaches are scavengers and carriers of gross diseases, and aversion to cockroaches specifically, while also not universal, seems far more widespread. I'll agree I'd way rather eat plants though.
Racist prick. Granted, Detroit has its problems, but they were not caused by Black people, but by job loss, aided and abetted, deliberately, by unions as well as local, state and national governments. Like all U.S. cities there are large areas you should avoid if you can. The rest is just fine. The suburbs are for the most part just fine. The suburban and downtown job markets are surprisingly strong, and even the worst parts of town are gradually improving, many of them being repurposed as urban farms and other greenspace. The corruption sucks, but not drastically more so than in any other Demoncrat-led city. Lose your ignorant prejudices and get a life already.
4 lanes per direction is not a particularly wide road by large, car-oriented-city standards. The metro area I live in (Cleveland) is not even a fifth of LA's size .. by any reasonable measure it's more like a tenth. But we have 10 lane roads (e.g., I-271 - 3 local and 2 express lanes) that regularly turn into parking lots. Toronto, closer to LA's size but with much better transit and I believe higher density, has roads like 401 with 18 lanes, which also still get congested. Houston has some very wide roads also. Now, obviously, you can't always add enough lanes to meet demand, and sometimes you can't add any at all. And sometimes adding capacity results in added demand via sprawl. I'm not suggesting otherwise. I am saying, though, that a 4 lane can easily be a bottleneck in even a drastically smaller town, so it's hard for me to believe that it wouldn't be in LA.
In many places, and that includes some right here in the U.S., some of the things truly necessary in life, such as clean water and healthy food, not to mention basic safety, are very expensive, more so than technology. But when Internet access comes along, people can learn how to purify and test tainted water, how to find or grow fresh produce, or how to avoid and/or deal with unsafe neighborhoods. It's not been an awful thing here in inner-city Cleveland, Ohio, that almost everyone has a smartphone, even many of the homeless. It is not as important as the things you mentioned, but it is useful, in part because it helps people to be able to find those things.
More or less, that is what many lines in NYC do. There are separate express and local tracks, accessible from the same platforms (usually), allowing both services to run in parallel and for relatively painless transfer between them. But NYC is one of only a few U.S. cities with enough ridership to justify separate tracks. Maybe the only one. Others do offer express or skip-stop service, but with far less efficiency since express (typically in one direction only) and local trains must share the same tracks