Actually a decrease in the money supply would both cause an increase in secondary lending rates (because money is more scarce and therefore more burdensome to loan) and also in a fractional reserve system like the one you are complaining about could be caused by an increase in the federal funds rate as opposed to a decrease like you claimed. But don't let your complete lack of knowledge regarding monetary policy stop you from opining on something you know nothing about.

For those who actually care, if the central bank decreased interest rates as the parent post suggested, more people would borrow more money and therefore lead to more money creation, not less.

-AndrewBuck

Actually I have been wondering for a long time why trains don't do exactly what these trucks are doing. Many (most?) trains now (at least around here in the US) are deisel-electric with a deisel engine running an on-board generator to make electricity for the wheels. If you had retractable electrical things on the top of the engine to connect to overhead wires you could use grid electricity for the steep grades and other fuel demanding portions of the trip (like the first couple miles out of major rail yards where you are still getting up to speed) and then spin up the diesel as you get into the long stretches of mainline where you only need to overcome air and rolling resistance which are both minimal for a train.

In addition to this you could do regenerative breaking on these same stretches of tracks to feed power back into the grid when slowing down. Many locomotives already use electrical generators in the wheels (basically just using the motors as generators) as this avoids wear on the wheels and brakes by avoiding the older mechanical brakes. However on long down grades they still have to use the mechanical brakes since they have no way to get rid of the excess energy; the electrical generator brakes just heat up an onboard tank of water which can only take so much heating before they have to fall back to the mechanical brakes.

So basically all of the things you need to do a hybrid system like this are already onboard a modern locomotive, the only thing missing is the wires above the tracks and the thing on top of the locomotive to connect to them. The thing on top would be a very small cost to add, the wires would be a lot more expensive per mile, however you can choose which sections of rail to electrify since you are going for a hybrid approach which lets you only electrify the most beneficial parts of the rail network.

Overall I think it is a very good idea and I am surprised I have not seen it implemented or at least discussed. Maybe I am missing something but it seems like it would work well. I guess the main issue would be the large power surge to the grid from regenerative braking and the huge temporary draw when getting up to speed but it seems like this would be addressable without too much difficulty.

Awesome work. This kind of feedback is exactly what OSM needs to become the best map. Right now there are places where it is better than other maps and places where it is worse, but it does not take very many people deciding to do what you just did to make it the best everywhere.

-AndrewBuck

The different routers update on different schedules, but they generally take at least a day to do so. Redrawing the map to show an update only modifies the local area, whereas updating the routing graph can have large changes. I know work is being done to support incremental updates but I am not sure when this will be supported (and again each routing engine would do it on their own since they all work differently, they just pull down the same data from OSM). I know for OSRM they update once a day by rebuilding the entire routing graph from scratch and then dropping the old graph table and loading in the new one. Building the worldwide routing graph takes like 18 hours so they can only do it once a day currently.

-AndrewBuck

I have noiced the same thing on my skype in the past. I am fine with contributing some p2p bandwidth but wish the program was a bit more upfront about telling you about it.

On a separate but related issue, I used to use netstat for the same kind of thing you did, but now I run a program called nethogs, which is a command line tool a lot like top, but shows bandwidth usage by process in real time in more sane units like kb/s instead of the ugly packet buffer counts netstat uses which are kind of hard to read. It also sorts by bandwidth similar to how top shows the high cpu users on top by default so it is easy to see what the "random process eating your network" is.

-AndrewBuck

So just to be clear, what you are saying is that the science is in such broad agreement that climate change is real and is man made, that it is not even worth spending more money to research it, right?

-AndrewBuck

Oh yeah, that sweet sweet grant money. Everyone knows scientists who support global warming are all riding around on their private yachts paid for with the grant money they lied in their research to get, whereas the poor defenseless honest scientists who are sceptical of global warming are all broke and starving because no one will pay them a dime.

-AndrewBuck

No need to worry, I have it on good authority from all the libertarians who frequent this site that you can easily move to a more nuclear friendly town. No need to stay in that oppressive communist hellhole where you live now.

-AndrewBuck

Seems like he might have been referring to this, moron.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Here are the relevant bits...

Next time you feel like being a pretentious twat, why don't you just keep it to yourself.

-AndrewBuck

We actually have a wiki page about that exact issue. We have worked on this quite a bit to work out the best way to tag the roads in Africa to handle the huge variety of what they have there. It really makes you appreciate the infrastructure that the developed world has when you see how difficult it would be to travel in these parts of the world.

-AndrewBuck

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has been working with WHO, MSF, and Red Cross since the outbreak began in march to map roads and villages in the affected areas. These maps are used by medical teams to move people, medicine, and equipment around, as well as to do "contact tracing" of infected people to see who they might also have infected. The maps are crowdsourced and released under a copyleft license like wikipedia uses. If you want to help out you can check out a task to work on on the HOT task manager and help improve the maps these organizations are using to do their work. There are some instructional videos on the MapGive site run by the US State Department which has donated a bunch of imagery for us to better map the affected areas.

Please take some time to learn how to help with this mapping and help these doctors do what they need to do.

-AndrewBuck

It was a bit clumsily worded. I meant "the opposite of hiding", so I was not saying that you want to do the opposite of hide, not the opposite of what you suggested. In any case, clumsy wording or not, glad to hear that you understood my message and are joining the effort.

-AndrewBuck

Quite the opposite in fact. In my opinion when your government starts making lists of "the bad people" then I think it is your moral duty to make sure you are one of the people on the list. From the recent NSA leaks (this one may not actually be from Snowden, which is interesting) the NSA considers anyone who uses or runs Tor to be an extremist, so apparently I make the list twice; just glad to be doing my part. I also installed PGP and use encryption whenever possible, although that is rare because I only know a few other people using it, and most of the communicating I do with them is on a mailing list anyway so encryption doesn't really work. Still I do what I can to throw up a bit of "chaff" to make their job just that little bit harder.

You posted your comment anonymously (or as anon as you can be on slashdot), but I won't post mine that way. My government knows who I am and what I think and I couldn't be happier. Fuck the motherfuckers.

-AndrewBuck

Wow, way to totally miss the point. I am not even going to bother putting into words why you are wrong since everyone (including probably yourself) knows what was actually meant by that analogy.

-AndrewBuck

So the global average was the warmest on record, and you point out that the US was a bit cool. You think this means that global warming isn't happening (actually you are probably smarter than that you are just trying to trick those that casually read your comment); but actually what this means is that it must have been _crazy hot_ somewhere else to balance out the relatively cool US and still come out as the top temp.

-AndrewBuck