It's worse still. At $50/ticket you need 274k daily riders.
$50? No way. That is 12c per mile. No other high-speed train in the world has ticket prices anywhere near that cheap. In France, the cost is 50c per mile. In Germany it is 40c per mile. Even in China, where costs are way lower, and rail is heavily subsidized, the cost to the consumer for high speed rail between the big cities is 22c per mile.
The tickets for LA->SF are going to be over $100, and likely closer to $200. So it will be both slower and more expensive than flying. It will be also be way more expensive than driving, or taking a bus.
It's quite relevant because it is an indication of whether the high-speed rail is economically viable.
No it isn't. All the people taking planes are not going to switch to the train. The planes will still be available, and will still be faster. And there will be other options 20-30 years from now, when this train is finally ready,... like high-speed self driving vans/buses, and slow self-driving "sleeper vans" that pick you up at 11pm from your home, and deliver you, fully rested, to the front door of your destination at 8am the next morning. They will be electric (no CO2) and since they drive slowly and can convoy in platoons, they will be very economical. If they cost $50k each, then 10 of them will cost less than the capital cost of a single seat on the train.
The "cost per seat" of the train is only meaningful if you know you can fill it. If you look at the projected ticket prices, and the other options that will be available, that is very unlikely.
a kid growing up in manhatten doesnt need to know things like hunting where a kid in the adirondacks would get much more from learning how to hunt than say...spanish
thats just one example
Elementary schools teach neither hunting nor Spanish, so that is a pretty dumb example. Why would something like math, or reading, need to be taught differently in Manhattan vs the Adirondacks?
If you divide the likely cost of this train by the number of seats, it will cost about $500,000 PER SEAT.
Just how much is the capital cost per seat of the planes that are the real competition for this train?
Irrelevant. Those are either sunk costs (airports) or paid for by the private sector (planes). If it isn't going to be paid for with my future taxes, I don't care what it costs.
No one wants it but politicians and construction companies.
This is not true at all. I live in California, and most people I know think it is great idea. It is voter approved. The only people that are opposed to it, are those that can do math, and there aren't many of them left in California.
In Japan the rail company builds large shopping centres around each station. The rent it gets subsidises the fares.
In America, we build huge parking lots around the train stations. The assumption is that everyone will drive to and from the train station at each end of their journey.
By the sound of it It's going to be so expensive that if I could afford to take it I'd just take a plane instead.
This project will take decades to complete. By then there will be self-driving battery powered buses on I-5, for 1/3 the price of a ticket on this train. If you divide the likely cost of this train by the number of seats, it will cost about $500,000 PER SEAT. That is just the construction and capital cost. The operating cost will add even more. Nobody will be able to afford it without big on-going subsidies. Meanwhile, for the cost of a single train seat, you could buy several buses with over a hundred seats in total.
The solution is obvious: We need to ban the buses.
Nope. Three times over budget is typical for public works projects. It is how the game is played. The numbers are intentionally lowballed to get the project approved. The politicians play along because these boondoggles are always popular in the beginning. Once the schedules start to slip, costs start to mount, and public opinion starts to sour, it is too late. There is too much sunk cost to abandon the project, and the politicians that approved it are either no longer in office, or nobody remembers who voted for what anyway. The contractors win, the politicians win, and the taxpayers are left paying the price. Meanwhile everyone thinks the next big project will be different.
A solution for this is to fund these big projects with private investments. Then the government will buy the services that they provide, such as, say, a guaranteed $100 subsidy for each passenger that takes the train from downtown SF to downtown LA. Since this train is projected to cost $500,000 PER SEAT, that would mean a payback after 5000 trips. If no private investors can be found, that should be an obvious indicator that the project cannot be built at the projected cost.
Think of looking as not just looking with eyes passively but also shining a high energy flashlight in the direction of looking.
You are missing the point. What happens when you shine the high energy flashlight, but DON'T LOOK at the result? An observed system behaves differently, whether there is energy input or not.
In money terms it's about $9 million, that's what NJ spent to replace the sand along one stretch of beach. 150 dump truck loads is a lot.
If each grain of sand is 1 mm^3, then a trillion grains is 1000 m^3. So NJ paid $9000 per cubic meter. When I built my son's sandbox, I paid $50 for a cubic yard (slightly less than a cubic meter). Somewhere in NJ, there is a very rich dump truck driver. Probably Chris Christie's brother-in-law.
Intelligence is the ability to formulate an effective initial response to a novel situation. Having a large database (ie: knowlege) of other problems and solutions, is a big part of that, because you can often adapt the solution to a similar problem, to the current situation. Intelligence is the application of knowledge.
You are assuming this was done through Git. But the best way to pull a prank like this is to paste it directly into a co-worker's editor when they get up to go to the toilet.
pretending its some mental thing where if a PERSON observes it, that locks it down.
This is not an invention of "the media". Many famous physicists have hypothesized that consciousness causes collapse, and this has never been conclusively falsified.
It's still kind of looking if you arrange for it to do something that you can look at later to indirectly observe what went on when you weren't looking.
But if the behavior is different if you watch continuously vs. looking away and then looking back, then how does the universe "know" that it is being observed? The obvious answer is that the universe isn't real. It is a simulation run for our benefit, so it only continuously generates what we can see. If we look away, the simulation is paused, and then when we look back it is quickly updated in batch mode.
This is just like rotating a multi-faceted polyhedron in OpenGL. The shaders skip the hidden polygons, and then quickly update them as they rotate into view.
All those people and only one phone? Why not both.
Because that will sow confusion, and likely cause delays. Security will call 911 within a few seconds anyway. So now 911 is getting two calls, tying up two operators, who have no way to know that they are the same incident. So two emergency response teams will be dispatched. One will be directed, by security, to the patient. The other will be looking around, trying to figure out where the patient is, and which door they should go in. When they see the patient being treated by the other team, they will assume they are there for someone else. So they will wander around some more, trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Meanwhile, somewhere else in the city, someone is dying because an EMT is not available.
How would they know what the atoms do without observing them?
Check back later, and see how many tunneled while they weren't looking. If they tunneled, they will be in a different location.
If they find there was tunneling while they weren't looking, that is pretty strong evidence that we are living inside a simulation. The universe behaves differently if we are not looking, so that God can save computing resources. There is no point in calculating details that no one will see. Just like the way OpenGL can skip the shading of hidden polygons.
How about "Call 911 AND Security", or is that too complicated?
In a medical emergency, the most important priority is getting the first trained people to the patient. The first people to arrive are going to be Amazon's in-house EMT. By calling them second, you are delaying medical care, and endangering the patient.
They are taking a step towards solving the problem of base load.
Except "base load" is NOT a problem. It may be a problem someday. But it is not a problem today. The problem today is that solar costs three times what it needs to cost to be competitive. Unless that problem is solved, everything else is irrelevant.
Solar is great, but it's not steady.
When it is less than 1% of the supply, it doesn't need to be steady.
The solution to steadiness is smart meters and demand driven pricing, not molten salt.
Solar thermal is a solution to the wrong problem. Electricity demand, and thus prices, are highest in the daytime, and lowest late at night. So by shifting production from day to night, they are turning gold into lead.
There may be a time, decades hence, when solar makes up a big enough slice of electricity supply, that it needs to provide base load power. But that time is not now.
Except with healthcare. More government control has been proven to be a good thing.
... and roads. Also public health and sanitation. And peace and public order. And the aqueduct. But apart from the aqueduct, roads, public health, sanitation, peace, public order, education, and healthcare, what have the Romans... uh, government, what has the government done for us?
How about if in the course of applying, the fake person also describes a lifestyle that qualifies them for completely subsidized care
Who cares? Now they have a FREE insurance policy that is worth $0 because it is in the name of someone that doesn't exist. Since no doctor is going to treat someone whose name and SSN doesn't match their insurance card, this would cost the taxpayers nothing.
But are you ok with them submitting and getting paid for claims for that fictitious person?
Claims have to be submitted through a medical office, which checks your ID. Besides, if you want to submit false claims, you can do that as easily for a real person as a fictitious person. The only difference is that the real person will have much less difficulty cashing the checks. Banks also check IDs.
Sorry, but I just don't see the point in getting an insurance policy for a non-existent person.
The AC has it right.. If they're THAT corrupt to even consider a policy like this...
I doubt if the severance agreement was written, or even seen, by the evil hearted CEO. Most likely it was thrown together by some drone in the HR or legal dept.
The CEO might be out of a job once the shareholders figure out that YouTube's new premium service (YouTube Red) seems to be named after a porn site (RedTube).
As long as it increases traffic and revenue, why would the shareholders care?
Slashdot Mirror
It's worse still. At $50/ticket you need 274k daily riders.
$50? No way. That is 12c per mile. No other high-speed train in the world has ticket prices anywhere near that cheap. In France, the cost is 50c per mile. In Germany it is 40c per mile. Even in China, where costs are way lower, and rail is heavily subsidized, the cost to the consumer for high speed rail between the big cities is 22c per mile.
The tickets for LA->SF are going to be over $100, and likely closer to $200. So it will be both slower and more expensive than flying. It will be also be way more expensive than driving, or taking a bus.
It's quite relevant because it is an indication of whether the high-speed rail is economically viable.
No it isn't. All the people taking planes are not going to switch to the train. The planes will still be available, and will still be faster. And there will be other options 20-30 years from now, when this train is finally ready, ... like high-speed self driving vans/buses, and slow self-driving "sleeper vans" that pick you up at 11pm from your home, and deliver you, fully rested, to the front door of your destination at 8am the next morning. They will be electric (no CO2) and since they drive slowly and can convoy in platoons, they will be very economical. If they cost $50k each, then 10 of them will cost less than the capital cost of a single seat on the train.
The "cost per seat" of the train is only meaningful if you know you can fill it. If you look at the projected ticket prices, and the other options that will be available, that is very unlikely.
a kid growing up in manhatten doesnt need to know things like hunting where a kid in the adirondacks would get much more from learning how to hunt than say...spanish
thats just one example
Elementary schools teach neither hunting nor Spanish, so that is a pretty dumb example. Why would something like math, or reading, need to be taught differently in Manhattan vs the Adirondacks?
Just how much is the capital cost per seat of the planes that are the real competition for this train?
Irrelevant. Those are either sunk costs (airports) or paid for by the private sector (planes). If it isn't going to be paid for with my future taxes, I don't care what it costs.
No one wants it but politicians and construction companies.
This is not true at all. I live in California, and most people I know think it is great idea. It is voter approved. The only people that are opposed to it, are those that can do math, and there aren't many of them left in California.
In Japan the rail company builds large shopping centres around each station. The rent it gets subsidises the fares.
In America, we build huge parking lots around the train stations. The assumption is that everyone will drive to and from the train station at each end of their journey.
By the sound of it It's going to be so expensive that if I could afford to take it I'd just take a plane instead.
This project will take decades to complete. By then there will be self-driving battery powered buses on I-5, for 1/3 the price of a ticket on this train. If you divide the likely cost of this train by the number of seats, it will cost about $500,000 PER SEAT. That is just the construction and capital cost. The operating cost will add even more. Nobody will be able to afford it without big on-going subsidies. Meanwhile, for the cost of a single train seat, you could buy several buses with over a hundred seats in total.
The solution is obvious: We need to ban the buses.
This is absurd
Nope. Three times over budget is typical for public works projects. It is how the game is played. The numbers are intentionally lowballed to get the project approved. The politicians play along because these boondoggles are always popular in the beginning. Once the schedules start to slip, costs start to mount, and public opinion starts to sour, it is too late. There is too much sunk cost to abandon the project, and the politicians that approved it are either no longer in office, or nobody remembers who voted for what anyway. The contractors win, the politicians win, and the taxpayers are left paying the price. Meanwhile everyone thinks the next big project will be different.
A solution for this is to fund these big projects with private investments. Then the government will buy the services that they provide, such as, say, a guaranteed $100 subsidy for each passenger that takes the train from downtown SF to downtown LA. Since this train is projected to cost $500,000 PER SEAT, that would mean a payback after 5000 trips. If no private investors can be found, that should be an obvious indicator that the project cannot be built at the projected cost.
Think of looking as not just looking with eyes passively but also shining a high energy flashlight in the direction of looking.
You are missing the point. What happens when you shine the high energy flashlight, but DON'T LOOK at the result? An observed system behaves differently, whether there is energy input or not.
In money terms it's about $9 million, that's what NJ spent to replace the sand along one stretch of beach. 150 dump truck loads is a lot.
If each grain of sand is 1 mm^3, then a trillion grains is 1000 m^3. So NJ paid $9000 per cubic meter. When I built my son's sandbox, I paid $50 for a cubic yard (slightly less than a cubic meter). Somewhere in NJ, there is a very rich dump truck driver. Probably Chris Christie's brother-in-law.
Intelligence is not knowledge.
Intelligence is the ability to formulate an effective initial response to a novel situation. Having a large database (ie: knowlege) of other problems and solutions, is a big part of that, because you can often adapt the solution to a similar problem, to the current situation. Intelligence is the application of knowledge.
Somebody reverts your code.
You are assuming this was done through Git. But the best way to pull a prank like this is to paste it directly into a co-worker's editor when they get up to go to the toilet.
pretending its some mental thing where if a PERSON observes it, that locks it down.
This is not an invention of "the media". Many famous physicists have hypothesized that consciousness causes collapse, and this has never been conclusively falsified.
It's still kind of looking if you arrange for it to do something that you can look at later to indirectly observe what went on when you weren't looking.
But if the behavior is different if you watch continuously vs. looking away and then looking back, then how does the universe "know" that it is being observed? The obvious answer is that the universe isn't real. It is a simulation run for our benefit, so it only continuously generates what we can see. If we look away, the simulation is paused, and then when we look back it is quickly updated in batch mode.
This is just like rotating a multi-faceted polyhedron in OpenGL. The shaders skip the hidden polygons, and then quickly update them as they rotate into view.
All those people and only one phone? Why not both.
Because that will sow confusion, and likely cause delays. Security will call 911 within a few seconds anyway. So now 911 is getting two calls, tying up two operators, who have no way to know that they are the same incident. So two emergency response teams will be dispatched. One will be directed, by security, to the patient. The other will be looking around, trying to figure out where the patient is, and which door they should go in. When they see the patient being treated by the other team, they will assume they are there for someone else. So they will wander around some more, trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Meanwhile, somewhere else in the city, someone is dying because an EMT is not available.
How would they know what the atoms do without observing them?
Check back later, and see how many tunneled while they weren't looking. If they tunneled, they will be in a different location.
If they find there was tunneling while they weren't looking, that is pretty strong evidence that we are living inside a simulation. The universe behaves differently if we are not looking, so that God can save computing resources. There is no point in calculating details that no one will see. Just like the way OpenGL can skip the shading of hidden polygons.
How about "Call 911 AND Security", or is that too complicated?
In a medical emergency, the most important priority is getting the first trained people to the patient. The first people to arrive are going to be Amazon's in-house EMT. By calling them second, you are delaying medical care, and endangering the patient.
They are taking a step towards solving the problem of base load.
Except "base load" is NOT a problem. It may be a problem someday. But it is not a problem today. The problem today is that solar costs three times what it needs to cost to be competitive. Unless that problem is solved, everything else is irrelevant.
Solar is great, but it's not steady.
When it is less than 1% of the supply, it doesn't need to be steady.
The solution to steadiness is smart meters and demand driven pricing, not molten salt.
Solar thermal is a solution to the wrong problem. Electricity demand, and thus prices, are highest in the daytime, and lowest late at night. So by shifting production from day to night, they are turning gold into lead.
There may be a time, decades hence, when solar makes up a big enough slice of electricity supply, that it needs to provide base load power. But that time is not now.
Except with healthcare. More government control has been proven to be a good thing.
... and roads. Also public health and sanitation. And peace and public order. And the aqueduct. But apart from the aqueduct, roads, public health, sanitation, peace, public order, education, and healthcare, what have the Romans ... uh, government, what has the government done for us?
How about if in the course of applying, the fake person also describes a lifestyle that qualifies them for completely subsidized care
Who cares? Now they have a FREE insurance policy that is worth $0 because it is in the name of someone that doesn't exist. Since no doctor is going to treat someone whose name and SSN doesn't match their insurance card, this would cost the taxpayers nothing.
But are you ok with them submitting and getting paid for claims for that fictitious person?
Claims have to be submitted through a medical office, which checks your ID. Besides, if you want to submit false claims, you can do that as easily for a real person as a fictitious person. The only difference is that the real person will have much less difficulty cashing the checks. Banks also check IDs.
Sorry, but I just don't see the point in getting an insurance policy for a non-existent person.
I'm sure submitting false information on those forms is illegal.
Why should it be illegal? If you want to buy insurance for someone that doesn't exist, that is fine with me.
The AC has it right.. If they're THAT corrupt to even consider a policy like this ...
I doubt if the severance agreement was written, or even seen, by the evil hearted CEO. Most likely it was thrown together by some drone in the HR or legal dept.
The CEO might be out of a job once the shareholders figure out that YouTube's new premium service (YouTube Red) seems to be named after a porn site (RedTube).
As long as it increases traffic and revenue, why would the shareholders care?