I skipped two grades back in elementary school. Endured a decade of being the youngest and smallest in every class and was assured by elders that it would all be worth it some day.
Now, if I write my college graduation year on a resume, I'm thought of as being two years older than I am, unless I find some way to write my actual birthdate without it being conspicuous. And even that would be like a kind of hidden attempt at bragging; inviting people to ask why I graduated so young.
If there's a silver lining in this cloud, it's that I get to feel what it's like to be 40 when I'm only 38.
People who live in big cities where apartments of 344 square feet are normal don't waste massive amounts of space on parking for cars -- there will be stores within walking distance, and they probably take the subway to work.
If the guy lives by himself, 344 ft^2 really isn't small at all. My wife and I share just under 38 m^2 (408 ft^2) and, while not spacious, our apartment certainly isn't tiny. We have a kitchen, living room, and bedroom, plus a bathroom, and a balcony on which to hang the laundry. This is in Tokyo, where density is about the same as Hong Kong.
When we have a kid, then we'll start to feel cramped. But there are other people in our building raising kids in rooms the size of ours!
The only 'tax' non-fossil fuel vehicles should pay is a nominal road maintenance fee - where I come from it's already included in our property taxes.
If that's the case, then any property owner who doesn't own a car, or has some physical disability that prevents them from driving one, is getting shafted.
If the wear on the roads is porportional to the fourth power of the weight of the person/vehicle, that means that a 70-kg person puts (forgive the scientific notation) 2.4e6 kg^3 of burden on a road compared to 1.6e13 kg^3 for a two-ton SUV.
No one without a car should have to pay road maintenance fees in any form -- the burden they put on the roads is literally less than a millionth that of a motor vehicle!
It's not clear form your post if you have a non-fossil-fuel vehicle or if you have no motor vehicle, but if you don't have a motor vehicle, you should protest your city for making you subsidize vehicles through your property tax. The amount may be small, but that doesn't make it just.
Some, but not all, German speakers have changed the [r] sound into an uvular one, as has most of France.
I learned my German as textbook Hochdeutsch, with trilled [r], and without "ch" merging with "sch", and the first time I met a speaker who changed those two things, saying recht as if it were something like ghescht, I could barely understand him! But that doesn't mean that it's not a legitimate variety of German. That's how language variation gets started.
Why Germans get so much guff for the supposedly-throat-clearingly-unpleasant sound of their "ch" whereas French people's "r" goes unnoticed is a great injustice. The French must have better PR.
I want public transit to die. I don't use it, and all they do is say that they need more money, every year, right after they've been given 1.1 billion dollars. So I'd scrap it. Let people learn to work closer to where they live, and learn to live closer to where they work.
Living near where you work is admirable, but plenty of those newfangled office "parks" built near highways literally have no residences within walking distance of them.
You might want public transit to die because you choose not to use it. But we visually impaired people are not allowed to drive automobiles. Any employer with no public transportation or residential districts within walking distance is a place where we can never work.
And the billions spent on public transportation (which, again, you choose not to use) are dwarfed by the billions spent on maintaining highways and other automobile-related infrastructure (which your non-driving counterparts are forbidden from using). We could stop funding both -- but something tells me you wouldn't enjoy all those potholes.
I'm supposed to pay $0.05 per plastic bag at the grocery store -- the dumbest law in the world. So instead, I tell them I've brought my own -- and I steal them from the next cash register that's closed.
Forgive the bluntness (and the fact that we're straying far afield from copyright laws), but based on the above two attitudes, I'm glad I don't do business with you.
Or plutonium. You probably think that here in high-tech Japan, we can just walk into the corner drugstore and buy plutonium. Unfortunately, even here it's a little hard to come by.
They do, but they don't have the capacity to convert the amounts of power that the Kanto side suddenly needs. It's unfortunate that they didn't invest in more conversion capacity before this disaster, but then again, it probably would have been viewed as a waste of money, as few people could have imagined a power shortage of this scale before.
A few years ago the government began urging offices to keep their indoor temperatures at 28 degrees C (82 F) to save energy; there are doubts as to its efficacy as the increased sweat and lethargy bring greater water usage (more laundry) and lowered productivity.
I despised this program but could certainly endure it this year when there are so many people suffering from a lot more than an overheated working environment, but the silver lining is that when power capacity does finally get back up -- the Fukushima reactors were nearing end-of-life and new ones were already scheduled for 2013 -- regular folks might be able to work in air-conditioned offices again. After what we've been through, it sure will feel like a luxury.
Japan is as rich as the USA, has vastly greater savings, astronomical foreign trade surpluses, etc. I'm saying this not to castigate but to support my argument.
<p>I recognize the fact that Japan is one of the rich nations of the world. But using "greater savings" as support from your argument doesn't make sense to me. Japanese people are somehow less deserving of aid because they diligently save money? If they were irresponsible spendthrifts who emptied their bank accounts as soon as the money came in every month, and buried themselves in debt, they'd be somehow more deserving of help?
<p>Yes, the leadership is imperfect. But the people shouldn't be denied assistance because they were competent at managing their lives before the disaster.
AC, I'm trying to start one right now as those workers are literally giving their lives to keep the rest of us safe. US and Canadian news outlets, who carried some good stories about the "Fukushima 50" and their brave efforts, are geared toward publicizing existing charities and not toward starting up new ones; they weren't much help when I called. I'm going to call Okuma City Hall and Fukushima Prefectural Hall and see if they can get something going. If that happens, I'll pass on the info so that donations can get directly to the plant workers. Remember those firemen who came down with all kinds of health problems after goinginto the World Trade Center in 2001? These plant workers will have it even worse. The least we could do for them is to help make their remaining years easier.
Jez, this plant was in fact nearing the end of its life, and had been designed to withstand a quake almost as big as this one. Its retirement, and the introduction of a newer and safer plant, was already on the schedule when the quake came.
TEPCO has told many lies to the public over the years, but the long-term planning of nuclear power and even this plant in particular isn't something that can be faulted. It's not even that close to Tokyo, despite the "Tokyo Electric Power" name -- roughly the same distance separates Fukushima and Tokyo as does Three Mile Island and New York (260 km / 160 mi).
I do want to see heads roll over this, though. They lied during the Tokaimura incident a decade ago and have been obfuscating things all through this incident.
tlhIngan, in central Tokyo (for what that's worth), everything is still open, but hoarding is getting ridiculous and essentials are becoming harder to find. Milk, rice, bread products of all kinds, and noodle products of all kinds are scarce. Unhealthy cup ramen, a staple "emergency" food, is completely unobtainable. Fresh fruit and vegetables are more easily obtained than dried noodles!
Nerves are fraying more at the train stations, where lines to get on are stretching out the station and down the block. Some places are getting one train every half hour where they normally have a train coming every 2-3 minutes. There were stories on the news of knife fights as people tried to cut in line at gas stations.
I'm very thankful that Japan isn't as automobile-centric as the US is. Four of the five supermarkets withint walking distance of me have no parking, so we're all on an even footing when it comes to carrying our goods out of the store. In a car-oriented society (and rural Japan is one, somewhat), people would be loading up their monster SUVs with many times their own weight in food, and there would be nothing left for anyone who's limited to a few dozen pounds of goods.
Living through this situation makes me fully understand that visual impairment -- enough to prevent you from driving, anyway -- is, in the US, a handicap just as debilitating as more-recognized ones. If any of you readers work at your town or city halls, make "getting food and transportation available to people without cars" a main pillar of your disaster plan. It's not these people's fault that American society was built around something they have no access to.
You know what, DNS-and-BIND, I retract my recommendation to come over and help people in your case. Your attitude isn't needed here and wouldn't be appreciated by anyone.
We will continue to help each other through the situation, whether it's the minor annoyance of not having enough food in Tokyo thanks to panic buyers, not being able to get to work because trains aren't running, not having power, or the serious crisis of not having a home to go back to up in Miyagi and Iwate. Or even the annoyance of dealing with idiots who falsely accuse us of carnig more about Tokyo than the countryside. We will get through our problems, large and small. Keep calm and carry on!
Hey, some of us live in Japan and are members of both Slashdots! (I admit, though, that I post on this one far more often than the Japanese one, which I mostly just read.)
Everyone here in Japan appreciates the outpouring of support that we're getting from the world.
If you can spare some money, donate it to the newly-homeless residents of Miyagi and Iwate. And if you're planning a visit to Japan in a year or so, when things have settled down, visit the afflicted areas and help them get back on their feet.
I myself was in Tokyo, far from the epicenter, and even all the way out here buildings shook, books tumbled from shelves, and appliances flew around the room. Still assessing the damage. The trains stopped and lots of people were stuck spending the night in their offices, or walking huge distances back home.
Right now it's best to leave assistance work to the professionals, but in a month or so I plan to go up north to help out, even if it's just assisting oldsters with putting the shelves back up and carrying things.
To everyone who's thinking of us out here, thank you again!
... location tracking will always be possible. That's why there are laws that restrict access to such records.
Are there? A week or so ago, a boy taking the entrance exam for the University of Kyoto tried to cheat by sneaking his cell phone into the exam room, posting questions on the Japanese equivalent of Yahoo Answers, and getting answers from the internet hive-mind.
You'd think that being caught would just invalidate his test and havie him kicked out, but in fact the ridiculously-overzealous police then charged him with the crime of "obstruction of business", They then found the boy a few days later all the way up at his home in Sendai (hope he's OK now, quake-wise) using his cell phone GPS records.
Did the police get a warrant from a judge so that they could obtain that information? Who knows? Given how quickly they got it, and the total lack of debate of the legality of this in the press afterward, no one seems to care.
There are only laws to restrict access to this kind of tracking because the police departments of the world choose to let those laws stand. Given how ignorant the average person is to this kind of thing, I worry that the indifferent majority will crush the concerned majority.
Thanks, Tempe. I live in Tokyo and it's 5:25 AM here; I'm going to bed in half an hour. I told F.lux that I was in Dublin so that my computer behaves like it's early evening, and the screen is a bit reddish, as if a sunset were streaming in from behind me.
It looks from the f.lux page that the application automatically adjusts the light based on where you live.
I'm a night shift worker and have trouble getting to sleep when I arrive home at 5 AM. The sun has just come up then, so I imagine that the computer screen will be at full brightness.
Would it be advisable to somehow try to fool f.lux into thinking I live in a place where normal people are about to go to sleep, or are the default setting better even if you need to be awake at night and sleep in the day?
The idea that you can just choose to drive is a pernicious one. I have bad eyesight and will never obtain the privilege to drive an automobile. Someone with 20/20 vision can purchase a car and drive it across the country if they don't like airline security (and future bus/train security, if the DHS gets its way), but everyone else is forced to walk?
Where is my right to travel if not on an airplane, train, or bus? Did I "choose" to waive that right when I came out of my mother's womb with impaired vision?
If there's one person in the world who's entitled to the sweat of his brow, it's the man who makes a movie version of Bioshock. So I'm willing to pay the regular way.
Why can't we afford it? The market is willing to buy our debt at attractive interest rates and if the return from this project is greater than the interest rate, then we should do it. A successful high speed rail network would lower road maintenance costs and reduce the need for emergency services. It would lower traffic congestion, which would result in a faster commute for car drivers. Other benefits include lower gas prices which translates into a stronger US economy and less money for petro dictators. IMHO fixing the transportation system is our only chance to pull ourselves out of this mess and that's why we can't afford NOT to build this. Our ability to repay our debt depends on making society more efficient.
In addition to all the benefits you describe, it also decreases society's dependence on automobiles. Assuming that these high-speed trains will be joined by regular express trains stopping in mid-sized cities, it will once again be possible for visually-impaired people and everyone else who can't drive an automobile to actually participate fully in society. As it is today, such people are virtually shut out of the job market everywhere except in the inner cities, and there's no affirmative action or any other social programs to help them out. They have to pay taxes to subsidize an infrastructure that they can never use themselves.
When we talk about which members of society are "privileged", things like race and gender are usually mentioned first. But I can think of few privileges more underappreciated than the privilege to operate an automobile.
I'd love to see them reuse the assets -- it would be great to actually get to wander freely in all those amazing places in Cocoon that you were froced to sprint through without ever smelling the roses.
It shouldn't be hard to create something interesting between groups of people: Cocoonians (Cocooners?) who go down to Pulse to explore what they once thought of as hell, Cocoonians who resolve to stay behind and make their home a paradise by human hands, and of course (this should have been in the original) humans already living on Pulse, whom we never met in the original game.
(Some of the "side" material from the producers indicates that in the game's ending, one-third of Cocoon is destroyed, so presumably they can make sure that the more interesting areas are part of the two-thirds that remained intact, or just retcon it and let it all stay intact. While the linearity was no fun, very little of what we saw of Cocoon is worth throwing away.)
There's so much good background material in this game thtat it's a shame how the actual experience didn'T live up to it for the player. Let's see them try to make something a little better now that the pressure is off.
I agree; society is designed around the car, which causes businesses and residences to become more spread out, which makes even more people switch to driving; the vicious circle continues until just about everyone had a car and a car-dependent lifestyle to match.
I'm looking forward to self-driving cars because they'll be able to finally eliminate one of the most unnoticed discriminations in society today: the plight of the visually impaired, who are fully capable of working the vast majority of jobs, but are denied the right to work there because so many employers are accessible only by automobile. (Places of employment are required to make their facilites accessible to people with almost any handicap, but there's no penalty for setting up shop in an area that can only be reached by car.)
In "The High Cost of Free Parking", an excellent book on parking and its contributions to automobile-centric society, author Donald Shoup estimates that over 88% of all commutes in the USA are done by car. That doesn't mean that all 88% are accessible *only* by car, but that number has to be close.
Is there any other minority whose work opportunities are so restricted? We would be appalled if some race or ethnic group were barred from working at seven-eights of the jobs in the country, yet few drivers ever consider the plight of the non-driver (who is stuck paying for all thise automobile infrastructure that he's legally forbidden to use).
I can't wait to see these self-driving cars become a reality. Thousands if not millions of people who are partially blind or have other conditions that prevent them from driving will finally be able to live full, unimpeded, unrestricted lives.
Has it come time to ban some of the classics before someone else goes out and breaks a few bricks with their heads after eating a large mushroom?"
Minor point, but Mario isn't actually using his head. Look carefully; it's his fist that's breaknig the bricks!
So if someone shows up at the hospital with a head injury in this situation, it means he wasn't paying enough attention not just in life, but in the game as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I skipped two grades back in elementary school. Endured a decade of being the youngest and smallest in every class and was assured by elders that it would all be worth it some day.
Now, if I write my college graduation year on a resume, I'm thought of as being two years older than I am, unless I find some way to write my actual birthdate without it being conspicuous. And even that would be like a kind of hidden attempt at bragging; inviting people to ask why I graduated so young.
If there's a silver lining in this cloud, it's that I get to feel what it's like to be 40 when I'm only 38.
Car keys?
People who live in big cities where apartments of 344 square feet are normal don't waste massive amounts of space on parking for cars -- there will be stores within walking distance, and they probably take the subway to work.
If the guy lives by himself, 344 ft^2 really isn't small at all. My wife and I share just under 38 m^2 (408 ft^2) and, while not spacious, our apartment certainly isn't tiny. We have a kitchen, living room, and bedroom, plus a bathroom, and a balcony on which to hang the laundry. This is in Tokyo, where density is about the same as Hong Kong.
When we have a kid, then we'll start to feel cramped. But there are other people in our building raising kids in rooms the size of ours!
The only 'tax' non-fossil fuel vehicles should pay is a nominal road maintenance fee - where I come from it's already included in our property taxes.
If that's the case, then any property owner who doesn't own a car, or has some physical disability that prevents them from driving one, is getting shafted.
If the wear on the roads is porportional to the fourth power of the weight of the person/vehicle, that means that a 70-kg person puts (forgive the scientific notation) 2.4e6 kg^3 of burden on a road compared to 1.6e13 kg^3 for a two-ton SUV.
No one without a car should have to pay road maintenance fees in any form -- the burden they put on the roads is literally less than a millionth that of a motor vehicle!
It's not clear form your post if you have a non-fossil-fuel vehicle or if you have no motor vehicle, but if you don't have a motor vehicle, you should protest your city for making you subsidize vehicles through your property tax. The amount may be small, but that doesn't make it just.
Some, but not all, German speakers have changed the [r] sound into an uvular one, as has most of France.
I learned my German as textbook Hochdeutsch, with trilled [r], and without "ch" merging with "sch", and the first time I met a speaker who changed those two things, saying recht as if it were something like ghescht, I could barely understand him! But that doesn't mean that it's not a legitimate variety of German. That's how language variation gets started.
Why Germans get so much guff for the supposedly-throat-clearingly-unpleasant sound of their "ch" whereas French people's "r" goes unnoticed is a great injustice. The French must have better PR.
Map with local magnitudes (on the Japanese "shindo" scale):
http://tenki.jp/earthquake/detail-4575.html
Tenki.jp was my go-to site during the last quake. It shows quakes and tsunami warnings, updated almost instantly.
I want public transit to die. I don't use it, and all they do is say that they need more money, every year, right after they've been given 1.1 billion dollars. So I'd scrap it. Let people learn to work closer to where they live, and learn to live closer to where they work.
Living near where you work is admirable, but plenty of those newfangled office "parks" built near highways literally have no residences within walking distance of them.
You might want public transit to die because you choose not to use it. But we visually impaired people are not allowed to drive automobiles. Any employer with no public transportation or residential districts within walking distance is a place where we can never work.
And the billions spent on public transportation (which, again, you choose not to use) are dwarfed by the billions spent on maintaining highways and other automobile-related infrastructure (which your non-driving counterparts are forbidden from using). We could stop funding both -- but something tells me you wouldn't enjoy all those potholes.
I'm supposed to pay $0.05 per plastic bag at the grocery store -- the dumbest law in the world. So instead, I tell them I've brought my own -- and I steal them from the next cash register that's closed.
Forgive the bluntness (and the fact that we're straying far afield from copyright laws), but based on the above two attitudes, I'm glad I don't do business with you.
Or plutonium. You probably think that here in high-tech Japan, we can just walk into the corner drugstore and buy plutonium. Unfortunately, even here it's a little hard to come by.
^_^;
They do, but they don't have the capacity to convert the amounts of power that the Kanto side suddenly needs. It's unfortunate that they didn't invest in more conversion capacity before this disaster, but then again, it probably would have been viewed as a waste of money, as few people could have imagined a power shortage of this scale before.
A few years ago the government began urging offices to keep their indoor temperatures at 28 degrees C (82 F) to save energy; there are doubts as to its efficacy as the increased sweat and lethargy bring greater water usage (more laundry) and lowered productivity.
I despised this program but could certainly endure it this year when there are so many people suffering from a lot more than an overheated working environment, but the silver lining is that when power capacity does finally get back up -- the Fukushima reactors were nearing end-of-life and new ones were already scheduled for 2013 -- regular folks might be able to work in air-conditioned offices again. After what we've been through, it sure will feel like a luxury.
Japan is as rich as the USA, has vastly greater savings, astronomical foreign trade surpluses, etc. I'm saying this not to castigate but to support my argument.
<p>I recognize the fact that Japan is one of the rich nations of the world. But using "greater savings" as support from your argument doesn't make sense to me. Japanese people are somehow less deserving of aid because they diligently save money? If they were irresponsible spendthrifts who emptied their bank accounts as soon as the money came in every month, and buried themselves in debt, they'd be somehow more deserving of help?
<p>Yes, the leadership is imperfect. But the people shouldn't be denied assistance because they were competent at managing their lives before the disaster.
Oh, I completely missed that, AC! You're a sharp one!
I'm American, for the record, and *this* American is trying to be as compassionate as he can.
AC, I'm trying to start one right now as those workers are literally giving their lives to keep the rest of us safe. US and Canadian news outlets, who carried some good stories about the "Fukushima 50" and their brave efforts, are geared toward publicizing existing charities and not toward starting up new ones; they weren't much help when I called. I'm going to call Okuma City Hall and Fukushima Prefectural Hall and see if they can get something going. If that happens, I'll pass on the info so that donations can get directly to the plant workers. Remember those firemen who came down with all kinds of health problems after goinginto the World Trade Center in 2001? These plant workers will have it even worse. The least we could do for them is to help make their remaining years easier.
Jez, this plant was in fact nearing the end of its life, and had been designed to withstand a quake almost as big as this one. Its retirement, and the introduction of a newer and safer plant, was already on the schedule when the quake came.
TEPCO has told many lies to the public over the years, but the long-term planning of nuclear power and even this plant in particular isn't something that can be faulted. It's not even that close to Tokyo, despite the "Tokyo Electric Power" name -- roughly the same distance separates Fukushima and Tokyo as does Three Mile Island and New York (260 km / 160 mi).
I do want to see heads roll over this, though. They lied during the Tokaimura incident a decade ago and have been obfuscating things all through this incident.
tlhIngan, in central Tokyo (for what that's worth), everything is still open, but hoarding is getting ridiculous and essentials are becoming harder to find. Milk, rice, bread products of all kinds, and noodle products of all kinds are scarce. Unhealthy cup ramen, a staple "emergency" food, is completely unobtainable. Fresh fruit and vegetables are more easily obtained than dried noodles!
Nerves are fraying more at the train stations, where lines to get on are stretching out the station and down the block. Some places are getting one train every half hour where they normally have a train coming every 2-3 minutes. There were stories on the news of knife fights as people tried to cut in line at gas stations.
I'm very thankful that Japan isn't as automobile-centric as the US is. Four of the five supermarkets withint walking distance of me have no parking, so we're all on an even footing when it comes to carrying our goods out of the store. In a car-oriented society (and rural Japan is one, somewhat), people would be loading up their monster SUVs with many times their own weight in food, and there would be nothing left for anyone who's limited to a few dozen pounds of goods.
Living through this situation makes me fully understand that visual impairment -- enough to prevent you from driving, anyway -- is, in the US, a handicap just as debilitating as more-recognized ones. If any of you readers work at your town or city halls, make "getting food and transportation available to people without cars" a main pillar of your disaster plan. It's not these people's fault that American society was built around something they have no access to.
You know what, DNS-and-BIND, I retract my recommendation to come over and help people in your case. Your attitude isn't needed here and wouldn't be appreciated by anyone.
We will continue to help each other through the situation, whether it's the minor annoyance of not having enough food in Tokyo thanks to panic buyers, not being able to get to work because trains aren't running, not having power, or the serious crisis of not having a home to go back to up in Miyagi and Iwate. Or even the annoyance of dealing with idiots who falsely accuse us of carnig more about Tokyo than the countryside. We will get through our problems, large and small. Keep calm and carry on!
Hey, some of us live in Japan and are members of both Slashdots! (I admit, though, that I post on this one far more often than the Japanese one, which I mostly just read.)
Everyone here in Japan appreciates the outpouring of support that we're getting from the world.
If you can spare some money, donate it to the newly-homeless residents of Miyagi and Iwate. And if you're planning a visit to Japan in a year or so, when things have settled down, visit the afflicted areas and help them get back on their feet.
I myself was in Tokyo, far from the epicenter, and even all the way out here buildings shook, books tumbled from shelves, and appliances flew around the room. Still assessing the damage. The trains stopped and lots of people were stuck spending the night in their offices, or walking huge distances back home.
Right now it's best to leave assistance work to the professionals, but in a month or so I plan to go up north to help out, even if it's just assisting oldsters with putting the shelves back up and carrying things.
To everyone who's thinking of us out here, thank you again!
Are there? A week or so ago, a boy taking the entrance exam for the University of Kyoto tried to cheat by sneaking his cell phone into the exam room, posting questions on the Japanese equivalent of Yahoo Answers, and getting answers from the internet hive-mind.
You'd think that being caught would just invalidate his test and havie him kicked out, but in fact the ridiculously-overzealous police then charged him with the crime of "obstruction of business", They then found the boy a few days later all the way up at his home in Sendai (hope he's OK now, quake-wise) using his cell phone GPS records.
Did the police get a warrant from a judge so that they could obtain that information? Who knows? Given how quickly they got it, and the total lack of debate of the legality of this in the press afterward, no one seems to care.
There are only laws to restrict access to this kind of tracking because the police departments of the world choose to let those laws stand. Given how ignorant the average person is to this kind of thing, I worry that the indifferent majority will crush the concerned majority.
Thanks, Tempe. I live in Tokyo and it's 5:25 AM here; I'm going to bed in half an hour. I told F.lux that I was in Dublin so that my computer behaves like it's early evening, and the screen is a bit reddish, as if a sunset were streaming in from behind me.
I'll try it out for a while and see what happens!
It looks from the f.lux page that the application automatically adjusts the light based on where you live.
I'm a night shift worker and have trouble getting to sleep when I arrive home at 5 AM. The sun has just come up then, so I imagine that the computer screen will be at full brightness.
Would it be advisable to somehow try to fool f.lux into thinking I live in a place where normal people are about to go to sleep, or are the default setting better even if you need to be awake at night and sleep in the day?
Wish I had mod points; this deserves a +1.
The idea that you can just choose to drive is a pernicious one. I have bad eyesight and will never obtain the privilege to drive an automobile. Someone with 20/20 vision can purchase a car and drive it across the country if they don't like airline security (and future bus/train security, if the DHS gets its way), but everyone else is forced to walk?
Where is my right to travel if not on an airplane, train, or bus? Did I "choose" to waive that right when I came out of my mother's womb with impaired vision?
If there's one person in the world who's entitled to the sweat of his brow, it's the man who makes a movie version of Bioshock. So I'm willing to pay the regular way.
Why can't we afford it? The market is willing to buy our debt at attractive interest rates and if the return from this project is greater than the interest rate, then we should do it. A successful high speed rail network would lower road maintenance costs and reduce the need for emergency services. It would lower traffic congestion, which would result in a faster commute for car drivers. Other benefits include lower gas prices which translates into a stronger US economy and less money for petro dictators. IMHO fixing the transportation system is our only chance to pull ourselves out of this mess and that's why we can't afford NOT to build this. Our ability to repay our debt depends on making society more efficient.
In addition to all the benefits you describe, it also decreases society's dependence on automobiles. Assuming that these high-speed trains will be joined by regular express trains stopping in mid-sized cities, it will once again be possible for visually-impaired people and everyone else who can't drive an automobile to actually participate fully in society. As it is today, such people are virtually shut out of the job market everywhere except in the inner cities, and there's no affirmative action or any other social programs to help them out. They have to pay taxes to subsidize an infrastructure that they can never use themselves.
When we talk about which members of society are "privileged", things like race and gender are usually mentioned first. But I can think of few privileges more underappreciated than the privilege to operate an automobile.
Bring on the train infrastructure!
I'd love to see them reuse the assets -- it would be great to actually get to wander freely in all those amazing places in Cocoon that you were froced to sprint through without ever smelling the roses.
It shouldn't be hard to create something interesting between groups of people: Cocoonians (Cocooners?) who go down to Pulse to explore what they once thought of as hell, Cocoonians who resolve to stay behind and make their home a paradise by human hands, and of course (this should have been in the original) humans already living on Pulse, whom we never met in the original game.
(Some of the "side" material from the producers indicates that in the game's ending, one-third of Cocoon is destroyed, so presumably they can make sure that the more interesting areas are part of the two-thirds that remained intact, or just retcon it and let it all stay intact. While the linearity was no fun, very little of what we saw of Cocoon is worth throwing away.)
There's so much good background material in this game thtat it's a shame how the actual experience didn'T live up to it for the player. Let's see them try to make something a little better now that the pressure is off.
I agree; society is designed around the car, which causes businesses and residences to become more spread out, which makes even more people switch to driving; the vicious circle continues until just about everyone had a car and a car-dependent lifestyle to match.
I'm looking forward to self-driving cars because they'll be able to finally eliminate one of the most unnoticed discriminations in society today: the plight of the visually impaired, who are fully capable of working the vast majority of jobs, but are denied the right to work there because so many employers are accessible only by automobile. (Places of employment are required to make their facilites accessible to people with almost any handicap, but there's no penalty for setting up shop in an area that can only be reached by car.)
In "The High Cost of Free Parking", an excellent book on parking and its contributions to automobile-centric society, author Donald Shoup estimates that over 88% of all commutes in the USA are done by car. That doesn't mean that all 88% are accessible *only* by car, but that number has to be close.
Is there any other minority whose work opportunities are so restricted? We would be appalled if some race or ethnic group were barred from working at seven-eights of the jobs in the country, yet few drivers ever consider the plight of the non-driver (who is stuck paying for all thise automobile infrastructure that he's legally forbidden to use).
I can't wait to see these self-driving cars become a reality. Thousands if not millions of people who are partially blind or have other conditions that prevent them from driving will finally be able to live full, unimpeded, unrestricted lives.
Minor point, but Mario isn't actually using his head. Look carefully; it's his fist that's breaknig the bricks!
So if someone shows up at the hospital with a head injury in this situation, it means he wasn't paying enough attention not just in life, but in the game as well.