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".

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.

No it's not. You're not wrong about Instagram and other platforms but even the Gen Z'ers who think those platforms == the Internet still use Google. With the possible exception of Reddit (always a toxic place and now that it's public it seems highly probable they'll add 'enshittification' to the toxicity) what platform can you use to find recipes, instructions to repair a broken appliance, swap a part on your car, reviews on some product you're looking for, experiences people have had with credit cards, airlines, etc.?

Google is still highly relevant, for better or worse, and the erosion of their core product is so commonly known that it has been covered by the MSM. Google Search is objectively less useful than it ever has been. Google (err, Alphabet) as a company lost its way a long time ago, probably around the time "Don't be evil" was removed, and it has been run by the same MBA asshats that ruined everything for at least the last decade if not longer.

You sure you're responding to the right person?

Yeah, because of the limited speeds involved, the only way high-speed rail travel makes sense is if it is Amtrak-style, where there's approximately zero security other than having police at major stations, with the occasional bomb-sniffing dog.

And that's a perfectly reasonable level of security, too. Trains aren't like airplanes, where if something goes wrong, police can't respond. Trains are on the ground, and if somebody starts something, someone will call 911, and police will meet the train within single-digit minutes at the nearest road crossing.

And trains also aren't like an airplane, where terrorists plausibly might try to smuggle a bomb onto an airplane to bring it down. There are far too many easier ways to attack a train, like sabotaging the rails or putting a bomb on a railroad bridge, and none of those require the attacker to blow him/herself up in the process or put him/herself at risk of getting caught carrying a bomb. So exactly nobody even remotely in his or her right mind would attack a train in that way (though I don't mind seeing the dogs just as a hedge against people who aren't even remotely in their right minds).

And trains also aren't like airplanes, where terrorists could take them over and crash them into a building. Trains pretty much only go where the rails go, and attempting to make them go somewhere else will not be particularly successful.

So there just isn't any rational reason for having any sort of security before boarding a train. All it does is cost travelers a whole lot of time, money, and convenience, all for approximately zero actual increase in public safety.

Weird. I've ridden Amtrak many times and have never experienced that. I do vaguely recall a point in the distant past where the TSA tried to muscle their way into doing random checks, and it caused so many problems that the Amtrak Police escorted them off of the premises. Maybe you were unlucky enough to have traveled on one of those days. :-)

Of course, it is connecting to an existing train station and, presumably, to the existing rail system. So assuming that there are some parallel tracks through certain stations or other sidings that they can use to pass the trains that already run on that track, nothing necessarily prevents them from running trains from Las Vegas all the way to LA Union Station at that point.

I'll sign it without hesitation. Non-competes are illegal in my jurisdiction, and illegal clauses in contracts are void.

Startups around here get hoovered up including the former owners as "consultants". Basically that means you get money for doing nothing, at least as long as you don't try to start a competitor because guess what "consultation" is no longer needed should you try that...

C'mon. Please. When has the free market ever tied the hands of corporations? If that ever happens (and yes, there is indeed that nonzero chance that we're heading into an employer market, at least in some fields), rest assured that the game will be rigged some more in your disadvantage.

The only reason that corporations were fine with government letting "the market" sort it out was that until now, they had you by the balls. Let's wait what's gonna happen should this change.

Here's the thing, though: I am needed. But unfortunately, I'm one of the few.

But that's besides the point. What matters is that the replacement rate of young people vs. old people is only at about 80%. And that's not gonna change in the near future. For every 5 people leaving the workforce, only 4 will join it. Save immigration, of course, but let's face it, you only need so many goat-herders...

And that's the point. It's not just the burger flippers and shelf stockers that retire. It's also the researchers and doctors, the finance gurus and the engineers. Yes, there has never been a shortage of unskilled idiots. And that shortage sure isn't in any danger of growing, considering that the bar to enter the workforce sure rises yet again with AI taking over more and more unskilled jobs. So I don't fear for the low level jobs that they may go unfilled.

What I fear is that high level, senior positions will be hard to fill. For two reasons: First, the aforementioned 80% replacement rate. But even with 100% replacement rate, if we replace our juniors with AI, where should they get the experience to become those hard to find and highly sought seniors?

How about this one?

Funny that to you, "Israel" and "Jews" are synonymous. As if all Jewish people unconditionally support all actions of the state of Israel, even those which are highly controversial within Israel itself.

This false synonymy creates an extremely harmful backlash. Stop doing it.

That's because almost nobody has released games for this thing yet. I mean, apart from subscription-only Apple Arcade games, I really didn't find very many out there that are worth playing.

For me, the killer app would be a virtualization environment running macOS Sonoma, combined with high-quality vision analysis that can let you type on a virtual keyboard floating in front of you.

Not to mention that screens tend not to move with you on the Vision Pro, and neither do physical keyboards and trackpads. Their text input story, other than with a keyboard (where you might as well use a real computer) is basically nonexistent, and a "spatial computer" that can only be used for media consumption device and gaming doesn't make much sense (because you might as well buy a Quest for a fraction of the price).