I hear whatever's left of AT&T's telegraph operation can be had for a steal and is sure to take off like a rocket any time now.

They're passenger (and freight) trains. The rails were built for travel, not for scenic display.
OTOH, the sure aren't high speed rail. Most of the lines were build over 50 years ago.

OTOH, the BART example was for a "high speed train", though I believe the speed is limited underground. But the rise is from perhaps two or three stories below ground to about 1 story above ground. That said, I believe that the rise is about 2-3 miles long, so it's not steep.

They don't have the authority to arbitrarily decide where to put fracking wells either. Or mines, or oil rigs, or chemical factories...

In fact they technically get permits to do basically everything everything they do. Or at least that used to be the case when the EPA actually meant something. Never stopped them from completely fucking everything up to save money though, did it? And I bet you know it.

I guarantee that if any of these get built and fails, the way the public finds out about it is someone noticing a spike in cancer rates.
=Smidge=

>"I'd say the same for YouTube. It's used to watch videos. The number of people who comment on them is minimal compared to the userbase."

That is exactly what I came to post. I use YouTube all the time. I have *never* logged into it. So for tons of people, it is not "social media".

Facebook, on the other hand, is mostly useless without a login. You can see a bit of it, then it stops.

>"I'd be very curious to the exact definition of "social media" they use is. I don't think it's what most people consider to be social media."

Bingo. Plays right into my comments last week about the stupid Virginia law trying to force "age checking" for "social media" and they don't even define what "social media" is or is not. As if everyone knows exactly what it is. Yet, somehow, stripping adults of their privacy and rights will save children (since parents refuse to restrict or withhold internet-connected devices from their children).

Is Slashdot "social media"? How about my local LUG's forum? What about the comments section on Amazon or Walmart product pages? Or reviews of apps on Google Play? A USENET group? Chat sessions in online games? If just watching videos is "social media" does that make broadcast TV or cable TV or a movie theater "social media"?

I, for one, have complete confidence in corporate industry's ability and willingness to respect the environment and the safety of the general public.

=Smidge= /s

N.B.: I good system of automated taxis could do the job...but note "good system". Most places I've ever lived the taxis were both too expensive and to difficult to use to do the job.

A HSR network is really problematic without a really good local transit network. (One you can reasonably carry your baggage on.)

Sometimes using the highway ROW works, other times it doesn't. This partially depends on the design of the highways, and partially depends one whether they have the same destination. A train station under a section of elevated roadway can work well...but if you don't have that convenient elevated roadway things can get more difficult.

I can't even estimate costs, but they can get pretty high. (And sometimes it's easy.)

Since there are trains that go over the rocky mountains, I think that argument fails. (But it might succeed if you argue practicality rather than possibility.)

FWIW, The SFBay Area BART system has high speed trains that move from elevated to underground. It's not a steep grade, of course, but it's done. (IIRC "high speed" for the BART system is around 70 mph, and is only obtained on the long straight sections. Of course, my knowledge is multiple decades old.)

There are also real problems with sparsely available origin and destination points. And the cost of building the lines through developed areas.

If you build a good system, it will be more efficient for the areas that it serves. But rail transit has fixed routes. This makes it inflexible. And you really need to multi-track the rails, because breakdowns will occasionally happen.

FWIW, I feel that streetcars are much more plausible/effective/significant per unit cost than are high speed rails. High speed rail is useful AFTER you solve the local distribution problems.

Most geothermal heat plants aren't long term without repair for various different reasons. IIRC, internal fouling is one of the main reasons. This sounds like it might be a different approach, though of course you need a volcano to make it work.

Well, when you extract the heat from the rock it becomes less fluid.

> Have grade-separated tracks that go above or below the roads.

Easier said than done.

Grade for typical trains is something like 2% or less, so raising a railway high enough to get over a roadway needs almost a quarter mile of track on either side minimum, so for a single rail bridge you just created at a half mile of impassible wall and cut a whole neighborhood in half. Automotive roads are better but still limited in a similar way. maybe triple the grade/a third the distance but you're still making a huge barrier.

So if you need to get through a town without having grade crossings you're basically stuck building the *entire* thing 14+ feet in the air, including the stations, which is outlandishly expensive both to build and to maintain.
=Smidge=

>"but really HSR should be focused on interstates. "

Exactly. That is about all we can expect would be workable/affordable. Otherwise it requires extremely expensive elevated tracks. The problem with many Interstates is that some of them now are nearly "full", having expanded multiple times for more lanes. There isn't an usable center area and sides are pinned in.

A typical Briton will only see lower energy bills when wholesale prices stay low, grid congestion costs stop wiping out those gains, and OFGEM ensures those savings actually reach the meter. While these record wind outputs are absolutely real and frequently drive wholesale generation costs down to near zero, the price Brits pay is currently dominated by the archaic rules of the UK energy market and the physical cost of moving power from Dogger Bank to London.

The primary culprit is the sad fact that dead dinosaurs are still setting the marginal price. Under the current "pay-as-clear" market structure, the price of electricity is set by the most expensive generator needed to meet demand at that specific moment. Even if wind is providing 55% of the power for pennies, if the grid needs a single gas peaker plant to turn on to meet the last megawatt of demand, every generator gets paid that high gas price. Until market reform decouples renewables from fossil fuels, gas prices will largely dictate a typical Brit's electric bill regardless of how hard the wind blows -- this is the only thing that keeps gas peakers economically viable. As soon as renewables are decoupled from dead dinosaurs in OFGEM's repricing algorithm, fossil fuel generation will stop being a guaranteed profit maker, and start becoming a guaranteed loss. The fossil fuel industry knows this, and will do everything in its power to keep that decoupling from happening.

This is compounded by a massive hidden tax caused by grid congestion. As the Times mentions, Britain has spent nearly £1.3 billion this year paying wind farms to turn off because the cabling network physically cannot carry that much power south. Brits then have to pay gas plants closer to London to fire up to replace them. Realistically, consumers won't feel the full financial benefit of Dogger Bank, Hornsea, and Beatrice until the transmission upgrades catch up to the generation capacity. Brits are likely looking at 2026 for the first bottlenecks to clear, but true structural price drops won't arrive until the late 2020s when new transmission lines come online and the "gas-setting-the-price" mechanic is finally reformed. Wind is doing its job; the grid and the regulators just haven't caught up yet.