Comment Re:Hey, credit due... (Score 1) 106
Yes, what an odd coincidence, with a completely unexpected side effect.
Yes, what an odd coincidence, with a completely unexpected side effect.
Shouldn't wide open areas make it even more suitable for trains?
No, and because of passenger density and volume issues that affects costs. For high speed rail to pay for itself, you need fairly dense-packed areas with high traffic between each other. For HSR to successfully operate on a large scale in the US, it's going to have to be a political decision to subsidize it and eat the costs (see: the Acela).
Even liberal-ish groups that Rah-Rah things like public rail admit that it simply isn't self-supporting in the US. A decade ago, Brookings did a study on American rail, and concluded that if AmTrak was to be "saved", it was going to require a mix of killing off some routes, and subsidizing the remainder:
What Brookings found is not surprising. There are only two routes that do better than break even — New York – DC and New York – Boston — and even those only make money on an operating basis, they don’t cover their capital costs.
Brookings finds that the operating profits (if the federal government subsidizes capital expenses) would cover the top 26 Amtrak routes (which carry 80% of passengers). They recommend having affected states cover the losses of other routes if they want those to survive.
I’m not sure how it would no longer be a subsidy if the states are paying rather than the federal government, but the supposition is billion dollar operating subsidies may no longer be in the cards for Amtrak. So how can they save the service that people actually use, while recognizing that the Chicago – California routes (Chicago Zephyr and Southwest Chief) are unaffordable. Fifteen routes account for over $600 million in annual operating losses.
Put a different way, Amtrak’s long haul operation is bleeding the entire system of the funds it needs to maintain shorter and medium-length routes where the passengers are.
HSR tickets are also naturally going to be more expensive than snail-rail fares, too, further hurting traffic numbers, especially over the longer distance routes.
One human pyromaniac with a bic lighter can probably do more damage.
I'm planning on replacing one of my cars with one.
I'm picturing a robot powered dog sled.
Some countries just can't do infrastructure. The US and UK are prime examples.
The US can do infrastructure just fine. What it can't do is ape a European rail model that is unworkable in the US. The United States, geographically and culturally, is as different from Europe as it is from Japan. It's a huge, wide-open area with large spaces between major metro areas outside of a small cluster in the Northeast US. Very unlike Japan and Europe in that regard. The train romanticists simply refuse to accept reality on that.
although it mixes tenses which is maybe what's confusing.
Yeah. I'd expect journalists to know basic grammar and not use present tense when talking about last year.
It's hard to write something that will blow peoples' minds when you're writing in a genre that's had decades of writers mining the same material. But we ought to beware of survivor bias; the stories we remember from the Golden Age are just the ones worth remembering. Most of the stories that got published back then were derivative and extremely crude. Today, in contrast, most stories that get published are derivative but very competently crafted. I guess that's progress of a kind but in a way it's almost depressing.
I think the most recently written mind-blowing sci-fi (or perhaps weird fiction) novel I've read was China Mieville's *The City & the City*, which tied with *The Windup Girl* in 2010 for Best Novel Hugo. I was impressed both by the originality of the story and the technical quality of the writing.
I recently read Ken Liu's translation of Liu Cixin's *The Three Body Problem*, which I enjoyed. In some ways it reminds me of an old Hal Clement story in which the author works out the consequences of some scientific idea in great detail, but the story also deals with the fallout of China's Cultural Revolution and the modern rise of public anti-science sentiment. So this is a foreign novel which doesn't fit neatly into our ideas about genres of science fiction. It's got a foot in the old-school hard science fiction camp and foot in the new wave tradition of literary experimentation and social science speculation camp.
Ha, actually laughing out loud at that.
If I ever need an example of dramatic irony, I'll have to remember this one.
Lol, that joke hit too close to home for a couple of mods.
They're all LED displays. The nano ones are just smaller, which is what you need to make smaller displays while keeping the resolution the same.
Those video walls you see in stadiums and Times Square and everywhere else today are LED displays, except they use non-micro (i.e. bigger) LEDs so they're big and/or low resolution. I have a couple of the panels, they're squares with 30 cm sides and 64 x 64 LEDs. A few TV manufacturers made high res video walls with the smallest LEDs they could make, which at the time came out to 150" 4K displays. It looks like they've whittled that down to 75" or so now.
Quantum dots are hunks of semiconductor pretty much like all other LEDs except they're so small their size influences the colour they emit. You don't have to change the materials to tune the bandgap, you just change their size. So if you want to make LEDs really small you're eventually going to end up with quantum dots. To be fair, the dots are about 5 nm across, so they are nano. You'd never make single dot pixels for a TV though.
Since Reddit announced it was going to sell "its" data (i.e. the data it was given for free by all the redditors), I've been busy deleting most of my posting history, and pumping old posts I left there full of technical idiocies and fake facts,
Why you ask?
Because 1/ it hurts Reddit and 2/ it trains AI on bad data.
I have no intention of helping business models based on mooching off people's contributions.
"May your future be limited only by your dreams." -- Christa McAuliffe
