It works great in Japan and Europe where towns are closer together.
That makes no sense--with high speed rail, you want fewer stops and longer runs, not stops that are close together. One of the challenges is that every town with rail running through it wants the HSR to stop there. Once it does, it's not "high speed" anymore.
First off, you do make some good points (especially with regard to the utility of having the station in the city center, instead of a 30-60 minute drive outside of town), but, that said, you're also oversimplifying things. Probably the most egregious example is to suggest that building the hyperloop replaces the cost of two airline terminals (especially using JFK as a model). JFK serves dozens, if not hundreds, of discrete destinations, while the hyperloop serves two. Worse, the hyperloop destinations are only a few hundred miles apart. JFK has flights to six continents. In other words, unless you are advocating replacing all air travel with hyperloop style transport (something that would cost several orders of magnitude more than the short range test project) you are comparing apples to oranges.
Lastly, you are looking at sunk costs vs new investments. It's not "we can pay for the hyperloop instead of the airport" because the airport already exists.
I'll bite: me. They take great care of me. I've got a gigabit ethernet circuit running a thousand miles or so (Knoxville to Houston) that never even hiccups. My 150/20 HFC circuit has seen maybe 30 hours of downtime over the last five years. Pricing on both is quite good (I actually couldn't believe the price on the gigabit circuit).
Their project management does leave a little to be desired (I was VERY frustrated with the PM on the gigabit circuit install---her communication skills were lacking, and she seemed to have no concept of deadlines) but the pre-sales guys (both sales and engineering) do a hell of a job, as do the field guys, and the back end guys I talk to.
It adds up quick. If 100 people paid their bill in an average day, and the average bill is $100, that's $10k. Some people are past due, some have higher bills, and some offices do more business than that, so...
With regard to more security than a bank, I believe it. You rob a bank, the feds get involved. You rob the cable company, it's like robbing a liquor store. Take a look at the average check cashing place some day.
The reason for the security is that it's a payment center. Think tens of thousands in cash on hand, with a LOT less of a law enforcement response than if you rob the local bank.
Oooo, a tone troll, how original. What's the real problem: that people are fed up with zombie lies, or that people keep repeating them now matter how many times they are debunked. Remember Republicans spending years blaming Clinton for Waco and Ruby Ridge, when the former happened five weeks into his presidency, and the latter happened before Clinton was elected, much less took office?
Sorry for not addressing the above. I do remember that. People are idiots, and most of them simply stop responding when you point out that the first Bush was president during Ruby Ridge. I'll disagree with your blowing off of Waco, though--as Harry Truman said, "the buck stops here." Saying "Clinton was only in office for five weeks" is like saying "Bush was only in office for 8 months before 9/11." The failures happened on their watch, blaming the last guy is just blame shifting.
I am one of those people who is extremely irritated by inaccuracy in arguments, regardless of the side I happen to be in favor of. I cannot tell you how often I point out to fellow advocates of the 2nd amendment just how much damage they are doing when they make shit up. Facts are usually fairly easy to check, and arguing from a false position makes it easy to dismiss you completely from a rational conversation.
You mistake me. I am not trolling, nor do I care about the argument you are having with everyone else in this thread. One guy posted data, you did not. You have, in the post above, followed up with data, which makes your argument at least worth considering. I will note, however, that it refers to ballots where people either voted twice, or ballots where people did not actually punch the candidate and instead left a slight impression, rather than what most of us would think of when the word "recount" is used.
I will leave it to the people you are arguing with to decide if the evidence moves them, but I am reasonably certain it will not (to be fair, I'm pretty sure if you had voice recordings of Justice Scalia saying, "Dude, we totally stole that election," you wouldn't convince them. I am equally certain, though, that no amount of evidence will convince you that you are wrong, either).
Your surety is in error. You are talking about the Vietnam war, a decade later. US air to air victories over the North Koreans were something like 10:1.
It's fairly unsurprising. When you look at his record as a state senator in Tennessee, it's basically the opposite of his politics once he became a "national" politician. Tennessee has many conservative democrats, and this didn't sit well with them.
AC posted actual data above. I can't state with any authority that this data is accurate, but it shows multiple scenarios, under which EITHER candidate may have won. You're throwing around insults and screaming without anything to back you up other than a hand wave toward "press reports" that state your candidate wins under any circumstances.
This is now how you win an argument. This is, in fact, how you compromise the point you are arguing in favor of.
FWIW, that is not, strictly speaking, true. I agree that votes are not cast by machine, but it was reported in various places that the votes were tallied using a Microsoft supplied device (for both the Republican and Democratic primaries). Take that however you want to.
Per wikipedia, 11 new satellites have been launched in the last five years, 18 in the last ten. This argues against your "we just afford to can't replace them" claim.
Same for me... I was also home sick, and got to watch the launch. I remember being really confused, then in denial ("it didn't explode, the SRBs are supposed to do that.") It wasn't until years later that I realized that I didn't just watch 7 astronauts die, I watched the death of the American space program. Columbia was the nail in the coffin, but we never actually recovered from Challenger.
There are a very limited numbers of ways to create wealth. The two most common are digging it out of the ground (i.e. mining, agriculture), or taking those things dug out of the ground and adding value to them (i.e. manufacturing (which includes things you wouldn't intuitively think of as manufacturing, like a pastry chef baking a pie--he has added value to the raw ingredients)). Pretty much everything else you can think of is just moving wealth around from one entity to another.
Europe has plenty of old areas. Many of them were bombed back into the stone age 70 years ago, and had a chance to build new infrastructure when they were reconstructed. When someone does an ROI calculation, it's a lot easier to get things done when the choice is "Spend 20% more to install buried lines rather than overhead lines" vs "spend 120% more to replace existing, working, overhead lines with buried lines."
Not saying this is right, but it is reality. It's probably why the US infrastructure is in such a shitty state, because it "works" (after a fashion) and replacing it is seen by many (on both sides of the political spectrum) as an unnecessary cost. You only have replacements when something horribly wrong is discovered, like the Lake Champlain Bridge.(which was found to be catastrophically unsafe, was closed, and dropped into the lake in a two month period). The replacement opened two years later. I can only imagine what kind of economic damage that caused, as routing around that bridge probably added 1-1.5 hours to transit times each way.
The Wikipedia page doesn't say he didn't credit them. In fact, the footnote for that paragraph (footnote four) leads here, which includes scans of the material where the thief was introduced. Once again, in the very first paragraph credit is given. I'll quote: "Recently, I received a telephone call from Gary Schweizter [bits about California removed]. Anyway, during our conversation, he mentioned that his group was developing a new class of character--thieves."
So I'm wondering what constitutes "credit" to you guys. Does it involve bold 72 point font on every D&D product ever released that says, "Dan Wagner created the original thief rules in 1974?"
The story is just flamebait. In the linked wikipedia article (with the label "Gygax had something of a reputation for borrowing things without giving proper credit") the very first paragraph after the index references Gygax giving credit for it: "In his article "Jack Vance and the D&D Game", Gary Gygax stresses the influence that Vance's Cugel and also Zelazny's Shadowjack had on the thief class."
I really, really dislike people that submit stories like this, and the "editor" that posted this should be ashamed (I'm looking at you, Timothy).
Fleet vehicle usage is almost always going to be higher than personally owned vehicle usage (regardless of whether the driver is a robot or a human) because in one case, the car is a return producing asset that makes no money when it's not working, and in the other case, it's more of a convenience item. That said, the taxi model works significantly better in cities (high population density) than it does in flyover country, so I fail to see how this is a "solution" to the "problem."
Another company, Catalyst Game Labs, is in business today, keeping several game lines (BattleTech and Shadowrun) in print and growing. Yes, their fanbase is smaller than it was back in 1990, when they were created/owned/run by The FASA Corporation.
I feel really nostalgic right now, but I've gotta say I really started disliking Catalyst when they annihilated my Kell Hounds.:(
Slashdot Mirror
It works great in Japan and Europe where towns are closer together.
That makes no sense--with high speed rail, you want fewer stops and longer runs, not stops that are close together. One of the challenges is that every town with rail running through it wants the HSR to stop there. Once it does, it's not "high speed" anymore.
First off, you do make some good points (especially with regard to the utility of having the station in the city center, instead of a 30-60 minute drive outside of town), but, that said, you're also oversimplifying things. Probably the most egregious example is to suggest that building the hyperloop replaces the cost of two airline terminals (especially using JFK as a model). JFK serves dozens, if not hundreds, of discrete destinations, while the hyperloop serves two. Worse, the hyperloop destinations are only a few hundred miles apart. JFK has flights to six continents. In other words, unless you are advocating replacing all air travel with hyperloop style transport (something that would cost several orders of magnitude more than the short range test project) you are comparing apples to oranges.
Lastly, you are looking at sunk costs vs new investments. It's not "we can pay for the hyperloop instead of the airport" because the airport already exists.
I'll bite: me. They take great care of me. I've got a gigabit ethernet circuit running a thousand miles or so (Knoxville to Houston) that never even hiccups. My 150/20 HFC circuit has seen maybe 30 hours of downtime over the last five years. Pricing on both is quite good (I actually couldn't believe the price on the gigabit circuit).
Their project management does leave a little to be desired (I was VERY frustrated with the PM on the gigabit circuit install---her communication skills were lacking, and she seemed to have no concept of deadlines) but the pre-sales guys (both sales and engineering) do a hell of a job, as do the field guys, and the back end guys I talk to.
It adds up quick. If 100 people paid their bill in an average day, and the average bill is $100, that's $10k. Some people are past due, some have higher bills, and some offices do more business than that, so...
With regard to more security than a bank, I believe it. You rob a bank, the feds get involved. You rob the cable company, it's like robbing a liquor store. Take a look at the average check cashing place some day.
The reason for the security is that it's a payment center. Think tens of thousands in cash on hand, with a LOT less of a law enforcement response than if you rob the local bank.
Oooo, a tone troll, how original. What's the real problem: that people are fed up with zombie lies, or that people keep repeating them now matter how many times they are debunked. Remember Republicans spending years blaming Clinton for Waco and Ruby Ridge, when the former happened five weeks into his presidency, and the latter happened before Clinton was elected, much less took office?
Sorry for not addressing the above. I do remember that. People are idiots, and most of them simply stop responding when you point out that the first Bush was president during Ruby Ridge. I'll disagree with your blowing off of Waco, though--as Harry Truman said, "the buck stops here." Saying "Clinton was only in office for five weeks" is like saying "Bush was only in office for 8 months before 9/11." The failures happened on their watch, blaming the last guy is just blame shifting.
I am one of those people who is extremely irritated by inaccuracy in arguments, regardless of the side I happen to be in favor of. I cannot tell you how often I point out to fellow advocates of the 2nd amendment just how much damage they are doing when they make shit up. Facts are usually fairly easy to check, and arguing from a false position makes it easy to dismiss you completely from a rational conversation.
You mistake me. I am not trolling, nor do I care about the argument you are having with everyone else in this thread. One guy posted data, you did not. You have, in the post above, followed up with data, which makes your argument at least worth considering. I will note, however, that it refers to ballots where people either voted twice, or ballots where people did not actually punch the candidate and instead left a slight impression, rather than what most of us would think of when the word "recount" is used.
I will leave it to the people you are arguing with to decide if the evidence moves them, but I am reasonably certain it will not (to be fair, I'm pretty sure if you had voice recordings of Justice Scalia saying, "Dude, we totally stole that election," you wouldn't convince them. I am equally certain, though, that no amount of evidence will convince you that you are wrong, either).
Your surety is in error. You are talking about the Vietnam war, a decade later. US air to air victories over the North Koreans were something like 10:1.
It's fairly unsurprising. When you look at his record as a state senator in Tennessee, it's basically the opposite of his politics once he became a "national" politician. Tennessee has many conservative democrats, and this didn't sit well with them.
AC posted actual data above. I can't state with any authority that this data is accurate, but it shows multiple scenarios, under which EITHER candidate may have won. You're throwing around insults and screaming without anything to back you up other than a hand wave toward "press reports" that state your candidate wins under any circumstances.
This is now how you win an argument. This is, in fact, how you compromise the point you are arguing in favor of.
FWIW, that is not, strictly speaking, true. I agree that votes are not cast by machine, but it was reported in various places that the votes were tallied using a Microsoft supplied device (for both the Republican and Democratic primaries). Take that however you want to.
[citation needed]
Per wikipedia, 11 new satellites have been launched in the last five years, 18 in the last ten. This argues against your "we just afford to can't replace them" claim.
Same for me... I was also home sick, and got to watch the launch. I remember being really confused, then in denial ("it didn't explode, the SRBs are supposed to do that.") It wasn't until years later that I realized that I didn't just watch 7 astronauts die, I watched the death of the American space program. Columbia was the nail in the coffin, but we never actually recovered from Challenger.
We are a bunch of risk-averse pansies.
Q: Where did Christa McAuliffe go on vacation?
A: All over Florida.
I'm sad now. :(
None of this produce real wealth anymore.
It doesn't "create" ANY wealth, and never has.
There are a very limited numbers of ways to create wealth. The two most common are digging it out of the ground (i.e. mining, agriculture), or taking those things dug out of the ground and adding value to them (i.e. manufacturing (which includes things you wouldn't intuitively think of as manufacturing, like a pastry chef baking a pie--he has added value to the raw ingredients)). Pretty much everything else you can think of is just moving wealth around from one entity to another.
Europe has plenty of old areas. Many of them were bombed back into the stone age 70 years ago, and had a chance to build new infrastructure when they were reconstructed. When someone does an ROI calculation, it's a lot easier to get things done when the choice is "Spend 20% more to install buried lines rather than overhead lines" vs "spend 120% more to replace existing, working, overhead lines with buried lines."
Not saying this is right, but it is reality. It's probably why the US infrastructure is in such a shitty state, because it "works" (after a fashion) and replacing it is seen by many (on both sides of the political spectrum) as an unnecessary cost. You only have replacements when something horribly wrong is discovered, like the Lake Champlain Bridge.(which was found to be catastrophically unsafe, was closed, and dropped into the lake in a two month period). The replacement opened two years later. I can only imagine what kind of economic damage that caused, as routing around that bridge probably added 1-1.5 hours to transit times each way.
Hope you can hold your breath long enough for the rescue guys to cut you out of the car...
The Wikipedia page doesn't say he didn't credit them. In fact, the footnote for that paragraph (footnote four) leads here, which includes scans of the material where the thief was introduced. Once again, in the very first paragraph credit is given. I'll quote: "Recently, I received a telephone call from Gary Schweizter [bits about California removed]. Anyway, during our conversation, he mentioned that his group was developing a new class of character--thieves."
So I'm wondering what constitutes "credit" to you guys. Does it involve bold 72 point font on every D&D product ever released that says, "Dan Wagner created the original thief rules in 1974?"
The story is just flamebait. In the linked wikipedia article (with the label "Gygax had something of a reputation for borrowing things without giving proper credit") the very first paragraph after the index references Gygax giving credit for it: "In his article "Jack Vance and the D&D Game", Gary Gygax stresses the influence that Vance's Cugel and also Zelazny's Shadowjack had on the thief class."
I really, really dislike people that submit stories like this, and the "editor" that posted this should be ashamed (I'm looking at you, Timothy).
Fleet vehicle usage is almost always going to be higher than personally owned vehicle usage (regardless of whether the driver is a robot or a human) because in one case, the car is a return producing asset that makes no money when it's not working, and in the other case, it's more of a convenience item. That said, the taxi model works significantly better in cities (high population density) than it does in flyover country, so I fail to see how this is a "solution" to the "problem."
Long time no see... great to see that you still play Battletech! :)
1. Not "my" article.
2. The article in question says (or rather, implies) that the changes are starting in the next TV season.
By the way, I gotta ask: Chas_Wolf @ 56?
Kinda obvious that part of the goal was to get all the people with Plot Armor off the table, and I can respect that... but it still sucked. :(
Another company, Catalyst Game Labs, is in business today, keeping several game lines (BattleTech and Shadowrun) in print and growing. Yes, their fanbase is smaller than it was back in 1990, when they were created/owned/run by The FASA Corporation.
I feel really nostalgic right now, but I've gotta say I really started disliking Catalyst when they annihilated my Kell Hounds. :(