I have experienced it first hand. Never again.

Wrong question. The question is who pays that cost. It's one of those things where it's easy to externalize those costs onto somebody else. Especially early on

I don't have figures but from what I understand this is just getting the grade to the point where I can handle the number of electric cars they want to put on the road by 2030. It doesn't solve any of the security or reliability or maintenance issues. It just builds out enough capacity that the whole grid doesn't collapse under the weight of all those of EVs.

That said 20 billion dollars is peanuts. To put things into perspective California's annual GDP is well over $3 trillion. I'm no longer a fan of electric cars after I learned that they don't really solve the smog problem and after I was introduced to the concept of High-Speed rail and walkable cities, but if I can't have those things I guess I will take the facts that they at least reduce our dependency on foreign oil. We're making motions to back out of the Middle East and electric cars are a big part of why.

it happens with cops and "school resource officers" (read: cops in school) all the time. And they have way more time and training.

I think this is unnecessarily harsh. A more correct description of the process would be "informed guesses", rather than "visual hallucinations".

Of course, the information isn't there to begin with, so the AI has to make up new data that never existed in the original. But the whole reason for the exercise isn't to extract information from the image - like "enhancing" it until the face of the perpetrator is seen in a reflection. It's to create a more visually pleasant photo from one that's technically imperfect.

To do that, the AI does make up stuff and adds it to the image. However, this is not just random hallucination - the AI has been trained on a corpus of similar images and will usually create something that matches them (unless maybe it's a politically hyper-correct Google AI). So, in most cases, it will complete the images in plausible ways. It's just another tool, like all the filters or processes used by photographers for so many years, in the darkroom or digitally.

The funny thing is where they call this America's first true high-speed rail system, when it averages just 100 MPH, meanwhile parts of Acela express have been running 90 MPH for more than two decades, with peak speeds over 150 MPH. And over the course of this year, the equipment on that route is being replaced with new Avelia Liberty equipment that may actually make it average faster speeds than what Brightline is proposing.

To be pedantic, by 1985, Metroliner *barely* qualified as high-speed, because it could hit a maximum of 125 MPH, which is the absolute minimum for qualifying as high-speed rail. But in 1969, it was just 120 MPH, which isn't considered HSR.

The difference between Brightline and the California HSR is that the Brightline "high-speed" rail project involves only about 40 miles of new track, largely along an existing limited-access toll highway, with the remaining 195 miles using existing tracks, and as I understand it, exactly none of it is running at speeds that actually qualify for a high-speed rail designation (125 MPH for upgraded tracks, or 155 MPH for new tracks). In fact, it averages just 69 MPH, according to Wikipedia.

So sure, Brightline is a shining example of how to achieve "results", if by results, you mean spending as much money as California's high-speed rail system has spent so far, while only building 40 miles of track and setting up a new passenger train line that on average is within the margin of error of being the same speed as driving. If they get the speeds up, it might eventually be interesting, but right now, it just seems like a huge money pit to me.

At least California's HSR is designed for actual high speeds (max 220 MPH), rather than for half that speed, and when it eventually gets finished, will provide a very real benefit. And if Brightline had to deal with a decade of environmental reviews like the California HSR project did, they probably wouldn't have even bothered starting to build it. The delays in California have very little to do with government running the project and everything to do with other parts of the government getting in the way of the project.

And in all likelihood the current leadership will be 'proven right' in terms of profitability. Its not like Boeing can actually fail no matter how many of their plans fall out of the sky. They are TBTF/Strategically_Important dear old Uncle Sam will step in a save them somehow no matter what. Sure if things get embarrassing enough some of the top dogs are send off with their severance packages (large enough to completely alter the life of anyone commenting here) so what do they care as individuals?

You want to crank the cynicism all the way to 11 - They have made the right call. Pumping the stock so they could sell off the options over the years, and converting the value of the company to cash dividends was and likely remains a lot more valuable than trying to build a competitive or even safe aircraft; at least as far as anyone with interest more significant than exposure via some mutual fund someplace, or handful of shares in trading account.

Just because people are useless they won't lie down and die quietly.

Twice so in a country that has more guns than people.

That's really awful if the best they can achieve on a new track is 110 MPH. High speed rail *starts* at 125, so even that doesn't qualify as HSR. Many passenger rail projects built recently achieve roughly twice that speed. 110 MPH wasn't even state of the art in the 1960s. These days, that's a joke. Is there inadequate grade separation, or did they just cheap out on the trains?

Is it? It takes 3 hours and 23 minutes to do that trip by car. You're saying it makes that trip in 21 minutes? I don't think so.

Doing some quick math, the trains leave once an hour, so your average wait time should be roughly 30 minutes (assuming randomly distributed arrival times). Add that to the 2 hours and 45 minutes for the trip, and you save... Wow! You save EIGHT WHOLE MINUTES! That is TOTALLY worth $12 Billion! Oh, wait. Some of them take two hours and 50 minutes. So only three minutes saved. Maybe not such a good deal. [rolls eyes]

And to think some people don't think the California HSR makes sense. This gives new meaning to the phrase "corporate welfare".

China may be the place where all of that continues. Unfortunately. The fact they're an almost-totalitarian dictatorship and their tyrants have a focus on hard, real technological growth, coupled with what you wrote, has a high likelihood of causing them to get the lead. Not because China, can all other things being equal, do it faster than the US, for freedom to innovate almost always beats top-down impositions. But because the US, as a whole, has decided to make things unequal in the worst possible way -- for themselves, at least.

The solution isn't to cut the long-distance routes. The solution is to fix them. Right now, those routes are pretty problematic, frequently running many hours behind because of freight trains delaying the Amtrak trains unreasonably. And the Zephyr ends up averaging just 55 MPH, which isn't really a great speed for traveling across the country, but that's not including the time spent at stops. With stops, it averages just 39 MPH, assuming it arrives on time. There are electric bicycles that can almost reach that speed (ignoring charging).

By the straightest route, I can get to my parents' house in 3 days of hard driving. By train, which doesn't go all that far out of the way, I can get there in... well, roughly three days. The difference is that by car, I would leave at 9 or 10 in the morning from my house, and on day 3, I'd arrive in the evening, whereas with Amtrak, I'd leave my house at more like 7 in the morning and arrive at... I think 3 in the morning on day 4.

In other words, the problem isn't that long-distance rail lines can't be viable in the U.S., but rather that running trains at two-thirds of 1950s train speeds can't be viable anywhere.

Compel the rail companies to comply with the law and give priority to passenger trains, run the trains closer to their maximum speed more often (which will probably require spending a lot of money on rail repairs), and reduce time spent at each station, and things will get a lot better. And of course, high-speed rail lines running at 150 MPH or faster would reduce travel time to a third what it takes on Amtrak, making it fairly competitive with air travel for most people, which would be a game-changer.

was when a shitty call center I worked for illegally fired a guy. As he was cleaning out his desk He was grinnin' ear to ear over the lawsuit he was gonna file.

The HR rep (an absolutely enormous woman) came darting out to catch him in the parking lot. Never knew someone that heavy could move that fast. He had his job back that moment and the firing manager was reprimanded.

You sure you're responding to the right person?