then you don't know your history

this is not a dating site. if you're interested in such things you should be happy to know that gay rights are increasingly accepted. good luck to you and your romantic interests

there have been exotic glimmers of true fairness and equality, always. but they were on the edges of civilization, were fragile and fleeting, and not enshrined rights hard fought for at the centers of power. now they are

progress is not a straight path, it's two steps forwards and one step back. it will always be a fragile growth prone to breakage and backsliding. and then pick up again and resume

and if some horrible world changing event occurs: an asteroid, a plague, then i am sure we will backslide back into barbarism and lose our progress

but as long as civilization is stable, then we are on a new path of rights we have never, ever had in this world anywhere remotely on this scale before. your exotic historic oddities don't remotely compare

yup

the arc of history is clear: progress is real. it wasn't long ago the idea of gay marriage rights or marijuana legalization seemed distant and impossible

bigots, sexists, racists: they may whine and bitch, or go full douchebag and do immoral things, but their fate is clear and certain: the dustbin of history. they are losing, and they will lose in the end

don't get me wrong, sexists, racists and such losers will always exist. it's just that they will no longer dominate the social, legal, and political status quo like they used to. the fact that they no longer do is, like the arrow of time, proof of the march of history and progress

you will always encounter sexists and racists. a moronic comment on slashdot. a throwaway comment by a loser coworker. a catcall or a tweet from who knows where that momentarily catches your eye

ignore them. they hold no power

such shitbags will always linger like a fungus in a dank basement, the socially malformed pathetics of any society. serious civilization has moved on without them, and will continue to make them more and more irrelevant

like cannibalism and slavery, things that also do still exist, and always will exist, in the dark cracks. but are now an exotic shocking fringe, and no longer dominate our societies

while i agree with you that this story sounds like bs, i despise this "always dealing with rational actors" argument

people do insane things. all the time. if your argument depends upon how someone you don't know is perfectly sane and rational, your argument sucks

in normal human conversation, errors are expected and normal

if someone is corrected and they flip out because of it, they are not socially well adjusted

if someone catches someone in an error and they flip out because of it, even after a normal, gracious apology, they are not socially well adjusted

congratulations, your behavior in this thread defines a deficiency in your basic social development

welcome to slashdot i guess

No-fault is about taking money away from lawyers, who used to litigate each and every auto accident as a lawsuit in court before the insurers would pay. Eventually the insurers decided that they spent more on lawyers than accident payments, and they had no reason to do so.

If you want to go back to the way things were, you are welcome to spend lots of time and money in court for trivial things, and see how you like it. I will provide you with expert witness testimony for $7.50/minute plus expenses. The lawyers charge more.

In general your insurer can figure out for themselves if you were at fault or not, and AAA insurance usually tells me when they think I was, or wasn't, when they set rates.

If we don't have more than two children per couple, the human race would've died out a long time ago.

I think the proper way to state that is "If we didn't in the past", not "If we don't". If we were to have 2 children per couple (approximately, the real value is enough children to replace each individual but not more) from this day on, it would not be necessary to adjust the number upward to avoid a population bottleneck for tens of thousands of years.

The Northern California Amtrak is actually pretty good for commuting from Sacramento to the Bay Area and back because the right of way is 4 tracks wide in critical places and it has priority over other trains for much of the time.

Acela in the Boston/NY/DC corridor is also good, because the right of way is 4 tracks or more for most of the way, and it has a track to itself along a lot of the route. Other railroads run on parallel tracks.

For the most part, though, Amtrak suffers from not having exclusive track. It runs on freight lines that host cars so heavy that the rail bends an inch when the wheels are on top of it (I've seen this first hand).

And Germany is a nation the size of New Mexico with an economy the 5th largest in the world. Starting pretty much from zero 70 years ago.

Maybe having good trains is part of that.

No. If anything, I assert that good trains are a hallmark of the set of good economic policies that lead to the general well-being of the citizenship.

Poor people are poor because they can't get jobs. One of the reasons is that they can't get to jobs. Can't afford a reliable car and insurance and gas in the US? Can't work! Too often, that's the equation.

The other reasons they are poor are that we were equally bad in investing in other things we should have spent more upon publicly, like good primary education. This is caused by more wealthy folks not wanting to pay the necessary taxes.

I have a lawn and there are turkeys and quail in the front yard today and we can hear the coyotes howling some nights (that's on the edge of Berkeley where it meets Contra Costa county). If I want to be in San Francisco, I have to get to the train station, which is a mile away (convenient, by the way, to lower income homes). And then it's all train from there, under the Bay, out again in the middle of the city.

In two more years, I will be able to get to San Jose that way. Right now, that is an hour and twenty minute drive if I start at 6 AM, and two hours if I start later. It will be a shorter time on the train, more relaxing, a hell of a lot safer, and will allow me to work on the way.

This is what railroad transportation can mean for people with lawns.

Well, I am not convinced by the auto ownership report that failed to include the purchase price (really!)

I think there's a lot about European behavior you're not taking into account - like the kind of car they actually buy (really small compared to ours) and what they use it for (often, just getting to the railroad station), and the clear indication that car ownership was because of their larger middle class which is itself an indication of better economic policies - like having good mass transit.

I think you have the tax picture wrong, and it's still the better-off people who are contributing the most to mass transit through their taxes.

Regarding the bus, I'm not convinced. The biggest problems are that it can't be connected to electricity efficiently (San Francisco's catenary busses can't exceed 40 MPH while on the wire, and rarely approach that speed because they share the route with cars), it is labor intensive compared to rail, and it has the traffic and safety issues of an automobile. And too often light rail is little better than a bus. It's only when there's an exclusive right-of-way that you get efficiency.

And ultimately there may still be people who vote against mass transit, but they are shooting themselves in the foot.

That's the average for the entire country.

Read the figures in the brochure. I think a lot of people don't realize all of the separate expenses that should be counted as part of automobile ownership.