What makes a fish and chips "northern"? It's just fried fish and potatoes, right?
Yes, but it's also a cheap fast food. The North is slightly poorer, but also friendlier and with smaller class differences. If I buy fish and chips from a takeaway here (as my evening meal) my friends and colleagues will think it's a bit strange -- I should know better than to eat that crap. I don't think that would be unusual in the North.
At my grandma's house (up North) she would buy fish and chips and bring them home for everyone to eat. There's no way I would do that -- if I had no time to cook I'd buy an Indian or Thai takeaway.
American is fusion. For British, try a Soul in its Coffin, Fish and Chips or a Shepherds Pie.
What's a soul in its coffin? I'm British, and I've never heard of that. Neither has Google...
Fish and chips is fast food, take that instead of a hamburger, but don't bother going to a restaurant for it. Shepherd's pie is a bit boring... traditional British cooking in general is a bit boring. Bangers and mash is usually boring; is it authentically British if the potato has herbs in, the sausage doesn't have gristle and is more than 30% meat, and there is a side of, say, steamed vegetables with a garnish?
It may not be nutritious, but it sure tastes good. I recently worked with some vendors from the UK, and they said their favorite part of America was the food.
There are plenty of British restaurants/pubs that basically serve microwaved meals. They're cheap, and quite popular because of that, but they should be considered fast food (a-bit-faster-food?). The big franchise pubs like Wetherspoons are worst for this, but even the apparently independent pub opposite work has deliveries of cardboard boxes from this company -- the much nicer pub has crates of fresh vegetables delivered.
Many British people, including my parents, refuse to see this and pretend they're simply getting a good, bargain meal (a Wetherspoons meal costs less than twice what a McDonald's meal costs).
It's 10 years since I visited the USA, and I was only 15 then, but the fast food was obvious, and the real restaurants all seemed to cook food from scratch. Walk into the nearest restaurant anywhere in the USA and I think (on average) you'll get better food than if you do the same in the UK.
I don't see why there'd be any difference between the above-average places in either country. Unfortunately, it's easy (especially for tourists) to go to a faster-food restaurant accidentally, and end up disappointed. I've written enough though, this article can take over.
I don't know about how it works for kids, but I don't notice this among adults. Heck, of all the places I've lived in so far, it feels that North America is by far the most diverse in terms of what cuisines are considered mainstream. You can eat something entirely different every day for two weeks, and in every place you go you'll see plenty of genuine Americans.
Britain is at least that diverse, except there's hardly any pride (if that's the right word) in traditional British food, which leaves even more space for everything else. Good luck finding a "traditional British pub" that doesn't have at least one curry and lasagne on the menu.
The microwave meals section of a supermarket will have roughly the same amount of shelf-space for British, Indian, Chinese, Italian, Mexican and French. None of these are considered at all exotic, although you won't see anyone Indian, Chinese, Italian, Mexican or French buying them.
children are stupid. The ones under 13 are very, very stupid. I know this because I work in education and have done for almost a decade.
Nice generalisation there.
Facebook, and many other social network sites, ignore children. Wouldn't it be far better to officially allow access to the site for people of any age, but set a much more restrictive default set of privacy settings for those under 13? I think they already do this for anyone age 13-17.
I just looked it up. $44 -- sounds like good value for the 12-hour trip;-).
London to Sheffield is 166 miles by road. By train (2 hours 8 minutes) if you book in advance with a non-flexible miss-it-you're-screwed ticket it's as little as £12 each way (you can get that fare tomorrow very late at night, or at a convenient time in a couple of weeks. The price gradually increases as the train is booked up). One-way tickets valid on any train without booking are roughly £60 off-peak, £100 peak-time, with returns costing the same amount -- British rail ticket pricing makes no sense whatsoever, and can be moaned about if you're bored of moaning about the weather/football. There are various offers and deals, especially when travelling off-peak. Continental Europe generally has cheaper fares, but less-frequent service. Trains to Sheffield are every 20-30 minutes: http://traintimes.org.uk/stp/shf/1200/monday The trains have WiFi, power points, a snack bar, drinks trolley, wheels, windows etc.
A bus (we call a long-distance bus a coach) is £10-20 non-flexible, I can't see flexible fares. It takes 4h20m. According to adverts I see everywhere these tickets start at £1 or £2.
267km @ 6L/100km (40 mi/US-gal) is 16L of petrol, costing £22 (plus wear and tear, parking, congestion charge during a weekday). Google says the journey takes 3 hours, it will be significantly more at busy times (especially the London end).
There are no scheduled flights for such a short distance.
I remember when I was a child going into an Amtrak station with my parents, who asked how much a train journey cost (I think to New York -- my dad didn't want to drive there). It was ridiculous, so my parents asked how much the bus cost. The ticket seller said she wouldn't sell a family with nice children tickets... in the end we drove to a station at the end of a subway line, and took the subway in.
Walmart's huge buying power gives it an incredible advantage over its suppliers. They may only make 4% profit; but the farmers are making a lot less than that.
Let's suppose I want to go from Houston to Austin.
I've not been to Houston, but just 18,000 people used Houston's Amtrak station last year. For comparison, 16,000 people used the station in a village of 1,200 people in the English countryside. The nearest big city to that village, Birmingham (pop. 1M, 2M in the conurbation), has several large stations. The largest had 25.3 million passengers last year. Less people used a train in all of Texas combined than my local suburban station, which isn't even open at weekends.
I think you'll find there is demand for trains (of all kinds) in many settlements all around the world. Fortunately, most people don't reject solutions that don't satisfy 100% of the population.
I just get in my car, and from my driveway to my destination takes ~3 hours. (assuming I don't try to travel during rush hours, or I start at the outskirts of Houston)
This 160 mile journey consumes about $21 of fuel each way...
My parents live 100 miles away. The journey by public transport takes two hours (I allow 40 minutes to get from my house halfway out of London to the appropriate main station, the inter-city journey takes 1h10, and I like to arrive 10 minutes before the train departs) and a little walking (10 minutes). Driving, according to Google, takes 2h5. That's correct -- off-peak on a Sunday. Usually it's nearer to 2½ hours on a Sunday, or 3 hours + any other day. (The train is "normal" speed, about 110mph.)
I've no idea how much the fuel costs -- I don't own a car. My parents will take the train to visit me if it's one or two of them, but if they bring my younger brother they'll drive. I always take the train, owning a car would be a huge expense for the tiny number of journeys I'd make with it.
(Commenting on the rest of your post: if Houston built high speed rail, there'd probably be intermediate stops a few miles out (e.g. 5, 10, 20 miles) which you could travel to instead of going all the way to the centre. Even if you live on the wrong side of town [like I do for visiting my parents], the railway going in the other direction should connect to the high-speed station. 30mph average for a bus is way too high, assuming you're including stops. That's a decent speed for light rail. 10mph is more like it. For a huge city like Houston, buses only every 15 minutes would be pretty crap. Buses near my house are more frequent than that all night. If transport is reliable, you wouldn't have to wait more than a few minutes for your train. You plan to leave at the appropriate time to make the connection. How much spare time you allow depends on the cost of taking a later train [here, booking for a specific train saves money] and the time you have to wait if you miss it. Many destinations would be within a short walk of the station.)
Why are you all so negative? I'm sure it was only yesterday that people were complaining the national electricity grids in various countries were outdated. The report begins:
Sustained, effective operation of the nation’s infrastructure in the energy, water, transport and ICT sectors is vitally important to the performance of the UK economy.
Americans here often complain about their infrastructure. Well:
A study by Network Rail has been commissioned (Jul 2010) by the rail industry safety board (RSSB) to look at the impacts of climate change on exposed coastal tracks, embankments and bridges over the coming decades. The project will look at vulnerable coastal lines, the risk of flooding and landslides for cuttings and embankments alongside lines, and the ability of bridges to withstand floods
(and similarly for roads). Being proactive for this is important -- it's far better to raise a sea wall by a metre or two than to rebuild a railway/road that's washed away.
An ICT bit:
The ICT sector needs to recognise its potential role in enabling and enhancing adaptation. Early warning systems, smart equipment, sophisticated and resilient back-up systems and procedures are some of the opportunities for the sector to capitalise on. Improvements to existing products and systems e.g. the smart grid for the energy sector, telemetry for the water, and real time communication for the transport, could also generate profitable ventures.
I know he's joking too, but all that Europe did to "convert" was say "it's now 1435mm". Assuming all the European (and Canadian?) rail wagon/infrastructure manufacturers already use metric -- and I know they do in the UK -- I wouldn't be surprised if some in the US were anyway.
Europe still has a lot of little 2-axle freight cars.
I'm sure they exist and are used sometimes, but I think they're rare, at least in Western Europe. Everything I see go past my house has four axles, although most of the freight is probably on its way to France (which requires it to go on a high-speed line, so possibly only newer wagons are certified for this?)
Mixing high speed passenger trains and freight on the same track cuts severely into freight capacity. Each passenger train uses up the track time of six freights.
High speed passenger trains need dedicated lines, and it's rare for these to be used by freight (there are exceptions, like the Channel Tunnel).
But, it's correct that capacity is cut. Round here many lines are at maximum capacity with passenger trains for part of the day. But you can run a freight train from one end of this country to the other overnight (including the slow, remote bits), which is quite different to the US.
The highest "normal speed" passenger trains in Britain run at 120-140mph (or something like that), and even local trains reach 80-100mph on many lines. Many freight trains run pretty fast (60mph), some run very fast -- here is a parcels company using 110mph freight trains. Apparently sometimes they run too fast (and I see some two-axle coal wagons there...)
"New coal wagons are designed for operation at 75mph" (cite
I thought good colleges ding you for going "above and beyond" the requirements...or at least they should.
That would be ridiculous. The best people in my class at Imperial College were the ones who did what was required, then did it again in Haskell, then made it into a distributed multiplayer network game or whatever.
Sure, they might "waste" 10% of time at work doing something tangentially related to the task, but it's probably useful, and you'll get 200% of the work in the rest of the time.
i do enjoy coding a lot, as in i cant think of anything i'd rather do for a living. But in my free time, i can think of thousands of things i'd rather spend my time on, so i hardly have any hobby-projects
That alone might stop Google hiring you.
My hobby project's are generally making changes to existing open source software, where I want an extra feature, but since graduating I've not wanted to spend so long in front of a computer in the evenings/weekends so they've stagnated. (I'm ill today, and might feel more like coding.)
A "large" letter, 2nd class post, costs 68p in the UK. The cheapest way to send a letter for an individual is 36p (2nd class, normal size). I'm not familiar with bulk mailing, but it looks like sending 10,000 of either of these might get you a 50% discount.
That covers a population of 60M, but a tiny area relative to the USA, where we have nothing approaching your idea of "rural" (according to this insurance company the most remote mainland road is just 10km from a house).
>>>The power plant does this on behalf of the trains, but at minimum it's away from where people live.
Yeah it's a good thing that power plant pollution only affects the suburbanites/farmers that live next to it.
Yes, it is. A few people living next to a single power plant is much better than tens or hundreds of thousands of people living in a polluted city.
In the USA it must be easy, you have loads of pretty-much-empty land.
I'm not buying your "it's okay to pollute the countryside" argument. Can you tell?;-)
Most people think this is a no-brainer, so I think you're arguing for the sake of it. Are you arguing it's OK to increase the total amount of pollution, and have it in the city?
As for pollution, study-after-study shows trains are no cleaner than if all the passengers rode in 25 mpg sedans. Why? Because trains are 95% coal-fired.
Assuming your city doesn't use old-fashioned steam trains, trains produce almost no pollution in the city (there is iron dust from wheels/rails, but that's not thought to be harmful, and dust from brakes, which could be -- although friction brakes are only used for the final bit of stopping a train).
Cars pump nitrous oxides, sulphur oxides and unburned hydrocarbons into the air. The power plant does this on behalf of the trains, but at minimum it's away from where people live.
Please take the time to read the comment you reply to, like this bit I suspect the real work is done in India. That's a guess, but with the word "suspect" I'm not presenting it as data.
The England address is just a secretary, there to fool people like you into thinking anything happens in England other than mail forwarding.
People like me? I'm the one who isn't convinced they do any writing in England;-)
Same principle applies at the national level - just cut spending on unnecessary bullshit (like wars, studying butterfly sex, renovating congressional offices, and so on).
With the difficulty of getting public funding for science, I think you'll find the butterfly sex study is useful.
driving is a luxury. Just so long as we don't get taxed for the bus, the train, the plane or group transportation.
Why should these individuals be tax-free? I say if car drivers are hit with an additional ~25% per year, then the same thing should happen to metro/bus tickets. Add another 25% tax.
It depends a lot on the city, but it could be that the government saves money if someone switches from driving to using a train/bus -- there's less wear on the road, less chance of an expensive accident to clean up, the person might have to walk a little each way and thus be a little healthier (less sick days, less medical bills), there's less air pollution to pay the costs of, etc.
Here's something I wish someone who knew about the European tax system and the US driving expenses would do:
Compare the costs associated with owning and driving a car in the US with the extra taxes the Europeans pay for a superior public transit system.
I think if yo consider those things, the Europeans and others in "overly taxed" countries aren't as bad off as the propaganda in our country makes them out to be.
I tried to find some figures, but it's difficult as the people writing articles tend to be biased and the accounts are complicated.
For instance, there's a subsidy for buses in London, but it seems that might be so children, the elderly and the disabled travel for free; rather than everyone enjoying a cheaper ride -- or maybe that's just part of the subsidy, or a different subsidy, I don't know. For trains the accounts include figures for maintaining the rails/tunnels, which makes comparing the cost with roads more difficult -- someone else pays for them, including the bits used only by buses and the bits never used by buses. Maybe that's what the government subsidy is supposed to pay for -- without the trains we'd need much bigger, more expensive roads (if it's even possible).
There are also lots of possible external costs and benefits to public vs. private, and road vs. rail, and everything else (road accidents, train delays, air pollution, noise pollution, quality of life, accessibility, flexibility, public health,...).
Slashdot Mirror
What makes a fish and chips "northern"? It's just fried fish and potatoes, right?
Yes, but it's also a cheap fast food. The North is slightly poorer, but also friendlier and with smaller class differences. If I buy fish and chips from a takeaway here (as my evening meal) my friends and colleagues will think it's a bit strange -- I should know better than to eat that crap. I don't think that would be unusual in the North.
At my grandma's house (up North) she would buy fish and chips and bring them home for everyone to eat. There's no way I would do that -- if I had no time to cook I'd buy an Indian or Thai takeaway.
American is fusion. For British, try a Soul in its Coffin, Fish and Chips or a Shepherds Pie.
What's a soul in its coffin? I'm British, and I've never heard of that. Neither has Google...
Fish and chips is fast food, take that instead of a hamburger, but don't bother going to a restaurant for it. Shepherd's pie is a bit boring... traditional British cooking in general is a bit boring. Bangers and mash is usually boring; is it authentically British if the potato has herbs in, the sausage doesn't have gristle and is more than 30% meat, and there is a side of, say, steamed vegetables with a garnish?
It may not be nutritious, but it sure tastes good. I recently worked with some vendors from the UK, and they said their favorite part of America was the food.
There are plenty of British restaurants/pubs that basically serve microwaved meals. They're cheap, and quite popular because of that, but they should be considered fast food (a-bit-faster-food?). The big franchise pubs like Wetherspoons are worst for this, but even the apparently independent pub opposite work has deliveries of cardboard boxes from this company -- the much nicer pub has crates of fresh vegetables delivered.
Many British people, including my parents, refuse to see this and pretend they're simply getting a good, bargain meal (a Wetherspoons meal costs less than twice what a McDonald's meal costs).
It's 10 years since I visited the USA, and I was only 15 then, but the fast food was obvious, and the real restaurants all seemed to cook food from scratch. Walk into the nearest restaurant anywhere in the USA and I think (on average) you'll get better food than if you do the same in the UK.
I don't see why there'd be any difference between the above-average places in either country. Unfortunately, it's easy (especially for tourists) to go to a faster-food restaurant accidentally, and end up disappointed. I've written enough though, this article can take over.
I don't know about how it works for kids, but I don't notice this among adults. Heck, of all the places I've lived in so far, it feels that North America is by far the most diverse in terms of what cuisines are considered mainstream. You can eat something entirely different every day for two weeks, and in every place you go you'll see plenty of genuine Americans.
Britain is at least that diverse, except there's hardly any pride (if that's the right word) in traditional British food, which leaves even more space for everything else. Good luck finding a "traditional British pub" that doesn't have at least one curry and lasagne on the menu.
The microwave meals section of a supermarket will have roughly the same amount of shelf-space for British, Indian, Chinese, Italian, Mexican and French. None of these are considered at all exotic, although you won't see anyone Indian, Chinese, Italian, Mexican or French buying them.
I actually started eating vegetarian because it was an easy way to steer clear of fast food.
There's plenty of vegetarian (and some vegan) fast food. Vegetable pizzas, veggie burgers, falafel, various curries, noodles, jacket potato, ...
(Though I'm not suggesting you start eating fast food.)
The 13 limit has to do with COPPA, so even if Facebook wanted to allow under 13s it can't legally without the guardian's permission.
Other websites manage, it's up to Facebook to do the right thing.
children are stupid. The ones under 13 are very, very stupid. I know this because I work in education and have done for almost a decade.
Nice generalisation there.
Facebook, and many other social network sites, ignore children. Wouldn't it be far better to officially allow access to the site for people of any age, but set a much more restrictive default set of privacy settings for those under 13? I think they already do this for anyone age 13-17.
I just looked it up. $44 -- sounds like good value for the 12-hour trip ;-).
London to Sheffield is 166 miles by road. By train (2 hours 8 minutes) if you book in advance with a non-flexible miss-it-you're-screwed ticket it's as little as £12 each way (you can get that fare tomorrow very late at night, or at a convenient time in a couple of weeks. The price gradually increases as the train is booked up). One-way tickets valid on any train without booking are roughly £60 off-peak, £100 peak-time, with returns costing the same amount -- British rail ticket pricing makes no sense whatsoever, and can be moaned about if you're bored of moaning about the weather/football. There are various offers and deals, especially when travelling off-peak. Continental Europe generally has cheaper fares, but less-frequent service. Trains to Sheffield are every 20-30 minutes: http://traintimes.org.uk/stp/shf/1200/monday The trains have WiFi, power points, a snack bar, drinks trolley, wheels, windows etc.
A bus (we call a long-distance bus a coach) is £10-20 non-flexible, I can't see flexible fares. It takes 4h20m. According to adverts I see everywhere these tickets start at £1 or £2.
267km @ 6L/100km (40 mi/US-gal) is 16L of petrol, costing £22 (plus wear and tear, parking, congestion charge during a weekday). Google says the journey takes 3 hours, it will be significantly more at busy times (especially the London end).
There are no scheduled flights for such a short distance.
I remember when I was a child going into an Amtrak station with my parents, who asked how much a train journey cost (I think to New York -- my dad didn't want to drive there). It was ridiculous, so my parents asked how much the bus cost. The ticket seller said she wouldn't sell a family with nice children tickets... in the end we drove to a station at the end of a subway line, and took the subway in.
Walmart's huge buying power gives it an incredible advantage over its suppliers. They may only make 4% profit; but the farmers are making a lot less than that.
France runs 500kph trains and the only reason Japan doesn't is noise.
France runs trains at up to 320km/h, the speeds higher than that were only for a demonstration/recordbreaking attempt, where the noise doesn't matter.
Living near a moderate-speed line (200km/h conventional trains go past) almost all of the noise seems to be wind, not wheels, but ICVWBW.
PAR is used more often on Usenet (or it was last time I looked, which is about 2-3 years ago).
PAR leaves the original file untouched, and creates extra redundant data based on it.
I'm sure Zip could do multipart archives -- that's how I used to transfer large files on Windows machines using only floppy disks.
Let's suppose I want to go from Houston to Austin.
I've not been to Houston, but just 18,000 people used Houston's Amtrak station last year. For comparison, 16,000 people used the station in a village of 1,200 people in the English countryside. The nearest big city to that village, Birmingham (pop. 1M, 2M in the conurbation), has several large stations. The largest had 25.3 million passengers last year. Less people used a train in all of Texas combined than my local suburban station, which isn't even open at weekends.
I think you'll find there is demand for trains (of all kinds) in many settlements all around the world. Fortunately, most people don't reject solutions that don't satisfy 100% of the population.
I just get in my car, and from my driveway to my destination takes ~3 hours. (assuming I don't try to travel during rush hours, or I start at the outskirts of Houston)
This 160 mile journey consumes about $21 of fuel each way ...
My parents live 100 miles away. The journey by public transport takes two hours (I allow 40 minutes to get from my house halfway out of London to the appropriate main station, the inter-city journey takes 1h10, and I like to arrive 10 minutes before the train departs) and a little walking (10 minutes). Driving, according to Google, takes 2h5. That's correct -- off-peak on a Sunday. Usually it's nearer to 2½ hours on a Sunday, or 3 hours + any other day. (The train is "normal" speed, about 110mph.)
I've no idea how much the fuel costs -- I don't own a car. My parents will take the train to visit me if it's one or two of them, but if they bring my younger brother they'll drive. I always take the train, owning a car would be a huge expense for the tiny number of journeys I'd make with it.
(Commenting on the rest of your post: if Houston built high speed rail, there'd probably be intermediate stops a few miles out (e.g. 5, 10, 20 miles) which you could travel to instead of going all the way to the centre. Even if you live on the wrong side of town [like I do for visiting my parents], the railway going in the other direction should connect to the high-speed station.
30mph average for a bus is way too high, assuming you're including stops. That's a decent speed for light rail. 10mph is more like it. For a huge city like Houston, buses only every 15 minutes would be pretty crap. Buses near my house are more frequent than that all night.
If transport is reliable, you wouldn't have to wait more than a few minutes for your train. You plan to leave at the appropriate time to make the connection. How much spare time you allow depends on the cost of taking a later train [here, booking for a specific train saves money] and the time you have to wait if you miss it.
Many destinations would be within a short walk of the station.)
These guys must have some really good drugs.
Why are you all so negative? I'm sure it was only yesterday that people were complaining the national electricity grids in various countries were outdated. The report begins:
Sustained, effective operation of the nation’s infrastructure in the energy, water, transport and ICT sectors is vitally important to the performance of the UK economy.
Americans here often complain about their infrastructure. Well:
A study by Network Rail has been commissioned (Jul 2010) by the rail industry safety board (RSSB) to look at the impacts of climate change on exposed coastal tracks, embankments and bridges over the coming decades. The project will look at vulnerable coastal lines, the risk of flooding and landslides for cuttings and embankments alongside lines, and the ability of bridges to withstand floods
(and similarly for roads). Being proactive for this is important -- it's far better to raise a sea wall by a metre or two than to rebuild a railway/road that's washed away.
An ICT bit:
The ICT sector needs to recognise its potential role in enabling and enhancing adaptation. Early warning systems, smart equipment, sophisticated and resilient back-up systems and procedures are some of the opportunities for the sector to capitalise on. Improvements to existing products and systems e.g. the smart grid for the energy sector, telemetry for the water, and real time communication for the transport, could also generate profitable ventures.
I know he's joking too, but all that Europe did to "convert" was say "it's now 1435mm". Assuming all the European (and Canadian?) rail wagon/infrastructure manufacturers already use metric -- and I know they do in the UK -- I wouldn't be surprised if some in the US were anyway.
Europe still has a lot of little 2-axle freight cars.
I'm sure they exist and are used sometimes, but I think they're rare, at least in Western Europe. Everything I see go past my house has four axles, although most of the freight is probably on its way to France (which requires it to go on a high-speed line, so possibly only newer wagons are certified for this?)
Mixing high speed passenger trains and freight on the same track cuts severely into freight capacity. Each passenger train uses up the track time of six freights.
High speed passenger trains need dedicated lines, and it's rare for these to be used by freight (there are exceptions, like the Channel Tunnel).
But, it's correct that capacity is cut. Round here many lines are at maximum capacity with passenger trains for part of the day. But you can run a freight train from one end of this country to the other overnight (including the slow, remote bits), which is quite different to the US.
The highest "normal speed" passenger trains in Britain run at 120-140mph (or something like that), and even local trains reach 80-100mph on many lines. Many freight trains run pretty fast (60mph), some run very fast -- here is a parcels company using 110mph freight trains. Apparently sometimes they run too fast (and I see some two-axle coal wagons there...)
"New coal wagons are designed for operation at 75mph" (cite
I thought good colleges ding you for going "above and beyond" the requirements...or at least they should.
That would be ridiculous. The best people in my class at Imperial College were the ones who did what was required, then did it again in Haskell, then made it into a distributed multiplayer network game or whatever.
Sure, they might "waste" 10% of time at work doing something tangentially related to the task, but it's probably useful, and you'll get 200% of the work in the rest of the time.
i do enjoy coding a lot, as in i cant think of anything i'd rather do for a living. But in my free time, i can think of thousands of things i'd rather spend my time on, so i hardly have any hobby-projects
That alone might stop Google hiring you.
My hobby project's are generally making changes to existing open source software, where I want an extra feature, but since graduating I've not wanted to spend so long in front of a computer in the evenings/weekends so they've stagnated. (I'm ill today, and might feel more like coding.)
If you want to lower price, think taxes. Direct taxes on gas average 50 cents per gallon.
In my country, the tax is about US$5 per gallon.
Your government failed by tying you to your cars. For many people in Europe a car is a common luxury, a convenience, but not a necessity.
(Also, where do you thing those 50s go? They don't just disappear, if there was no gas tax the money would need to come from somewhere else.)
That's incredibly cheap!
(Multiply by ~1.6 to get US$).
A "large" letter, 2nd class post, costs 68p in the UK. The cheapest way to send a letter for an individual is 36p (2nd class, normal size). I'm not familiar with bulk mailing, but it looks like sending 10,000 of either of these might get you a 50% discount.
That covers a population of 60M, but a tiny area relative to the USA, where we have nothing approaching your idea of "rural" (according to this insurance company the most remote mainland road is just 10km from a house).
"European airmail up to 40g" is £1.
>>>The power plant does this on behalf of the trains, but at minimum it's away from where people live.
Yeah it's a good thing that power plant pollution only affects the suburbanites/farmers that live next to it.
Yes, it is. A few people living next to a single power plant is much better than tens or hundreds of thousands of people living in a polluted city.
In the USA it must be easy, you have loads of pretty-much-empty land.
I'm not buying your "it's okay to pollute the countryside" argument. Can you tell? ;-)
Most people think this is a no-brainer, so I think you're arguing for the sake of it. Are you arguing it's OK to increase the total amount of pollution, and have it in the city?
As for pollution, study-after-study shows trains are no cleaner than if all the passengers rode in 25 mpg sedans. Why? Because trains are 95% coal-fired.
Assuming your city doesn't use old-fashioned steam trains, trains produce almost no pollution in the city (there is iron dust from wheels/rails, but that's not thought to be harmful, and dust from brakes, which could be -- although friction brakes are only used for the final bit of stopping a train).
Cars pump nitrous oxides, sulphur oxides and unburned hydrocarbons into the air. The power plant does this on behalf of the trains, but at minimum it's away from where people live.
Please stop injecting guesses as data.
Please take the time to read the comment you reply to, like this bit I suspect the real work is done in India. That's a guess, but with the word "suspect" I'm not presenting it as data.
The England address is just a secretary, there to fool people like you into thinking anything happens in England other than mail forwarding.
People like me? I'm the one who isn't convinced they do any writing in England ;-)
Same principle applies at the national level - just cut spending on unnecessary bullshit (like wars, studying butterfly sex, renovating congressional offices, and so on).
With the difficulty of getting public funding for science, I think you'll find the butterfly sex study is useful.
driving is a luxury. Just so long as we don't get taxed for the bus, the train, the plane or group transportation.
Why should these individuals be tax-free? I say if car drivers are hit with an additional ~25% per year, then the same thing should happen to metro/bus tickets. Add another 25% tax.
It depends a lot on the city, but it could be that the government saves money if someone switches from driving to using a train/bus -- there's less wear on the road, less chance of an expensive accident to clean up, the person might have to walk a little each way and thus be a little healthier (less sick days, less medical bills), there's less air pollution to pay the costs of, etc.
Here's something I wish someone who knew about the European tax system and the US driving expenses would do:
Compare the costs associated with owning and driving a car in the US with the extra taxes the Europeans pay for a superior public transit system.
I think if yo consider those things, the Europeans and others in "overly taxed" countries aren't as bad off as the propaganda in our country makes them out to be.
I tried to find some figures, but it's difficult as the people writing articles tend to be biased and the accounts are complicated.
For instance, there's a subsidy for buses in London, but it seems that might be so children, the elderly and the disabled travel for free; rather than everyone enjoying a cheaper ride -- or maybe that's just part of the subsidy, or a different subsidy, I don't know. For trains the accounts include figures for maintaining the rails/tunnels, which makes comparing the cost with roads more difficult -- someone else pays for them, including the bits used only by buses and the bits never used by buses. Maybe that's what the government subsidy is supposed to pay for -- without the trains we'd need much bigger, more expensive roads (if it's even possible).
There are also lots of possible external costs and benefits to public vs. private, and road vs. rail, and everything else (road accidents, train delays, air pollution, noise pollution, quality of life, accessibility, flexibility, public health, ...).