SPICLK2

You need to state your premise to enable a reasonable discussion. I've been talking about energy or fuel efficency when it comes to public transport (I see you don't have any return for this, because the facts are indesputible).

However, your premise is that "people must use (I assume, electrified) HSR to stop burning oil". This is an entirely different discussion. In many ways, it is significantly less efficient when looking purely at an energy usage perspective, especially when considering new routes across sparsely-populated expanses with relatively low demand.

You're joking, right?

Passenger capacity is part of the design of air travel. Even so, a plane could be at 1/3rd capacity before it's less efficient than a singly-occupied car.

Trains are largely a relic of the Industrial Revolution - except for those places where population distribution has made it feasible to invest in specialised passenger rail, the degree of infrastructure investment required makes them economically infeasible given a blank slate today.

If we were really concerned about transport efficiency, long-distance bus routes are the answer. Per-seat energy usage is comparable to trains, but with a fraction of the infrastructure cost, and significantly more flexibility. Countries that have a blank slate and are only interested in maximum transport for minimum cost (ie, the developing world) have gone that way for a reason.

We accept nearly empty trains, despite them needing at least 30 passengers to be competitive from a fuel efficiency standpoint with a singly-occupied car, because trains are largely seen as a service. Very few passenger trains are economically viable without government support.

And Linus was given a hard time because he gets a bit shouty in emails.

The absolute double standard of how we know and accept that the upper layer of our society, encompassing almost anyone who has sufficient wealth and/or power, is part of this.

Edit: Now you've clarified your question.

There's nothing special about HSR when considering fuel (or energy) efficiency, except that it's probably less efficient over all due to increased air drag, and that it needs very particular infrastructure and passenger demand to make it work.

I'd hazard a guess that many (most?) flight routes are nowhere near popular enough to make them viable for train replacement.

Eg. The bullet train in Japan has a peak capacity of over 20,000 passengers per hour.

The most popular flight route in the US has around 3 million passengers per year, or ~340 an hour.

So does Claude provide all of the value to those billable hours?

It varies so much depending on passenger occupancy rates. Planes tend to run near 100%, and cars (at least in the US, although I'm sure other countries aren't much better) at near 20%.

Assuming 1mpg for the entire train, it needs at least 100 passengers to compare to a fully-occupied passenger plane.

CREE offer a variety of LED types with efficiencies 150lm/w (eg CMB, XT-E), up to 230lm/w (eg, 5050).

While 100lm/w is typical for domestic LED lighting, it's going to cause problems when the total power is several orders of magnitude higher but the form factor is approximately the same size. That heatsink will probably fry an egg, and I wonder about the lifetime of the diffuser plastic.

Aerodynamic drag accounts for more energy losses than tyre friction (and tyre friction can be relatively easily changed with tyre pressure or tyre type).

~100 lumens per watt is rather poor, especially given the cost. It's the same as a standard LED lightbulb, and that includes the miniature AC voltage converter.

150lm/w would make it at least a cut above domestic lightbulbs.

200lm/w would make it a premium product.

Modern jetliners get a higher miles per gallon per seat than most US (ICE) cars. They easily beat any ICE car with a single occupant in miles per gallon equivalent. If you want to minimise fuel usage and can't find someone to share with, it's better to fly! The issue is almost entirely the distance travelled.

I did something similar, but then found I almost never needed the EDC items I'd split out from my phone (for me, camera, torch, audio player and notepad). Some of those are in my rucksac for longer trips out of the house.

Audio players really seem to be the sticking point. Speaking as someone who spent most of my teenage years plugged into an audio player, I'm not sure it was a net positive. It could be said that continuous access to pre-recorded music reduces demand and desire for new music, and that it is another distraction from free thinking time. On the other hand, I don't currently regularly take long bus/train rides, nor do I generally listen to as much music as I did.

There's another benefit - you don't have to keep refactoring to keep up with "progress"!

That might be true (although you do add in the mess of web frameworks), but I strongly believe that resource usage must factor into these calculations too. It's a net negative to end users if you can develop an app a bit quicker but require the end users to have multiple more times RAM, CPU, etc.

I've been saying this for a while. WW3 is already over and we lost, we just haven't noticed yet. It was fought against the West (primarily the US) using their own tools and ideologies.

Just because the idea of F/OSS software is/was relatively radical and a certain type of political act when applied in certain situations, does not mean that it necessarily needs to concern itself with any other political act. After all, all acts are political, right?

To extend your world picture just one more step - for those people whose "existance is political", a F/OSS world that does not concern itself with irrelevant politics provides that very haven where only the merit of ideas is considered.

The guy seems very upset about something, but it's really unclear what exactly that is. He talks about a crossroads and the loss of democracy - is this about the EU re-aligning itself away from the US and towards China?

Technology can't compete with how easy it is to make more human-based navigation devices ;-)

Or a signal that Amazon has reached the required level of incumbency that it doesn't need to worry about speed any more.

>an explosion of software in small and midsize companies

For me, that is nightmare fuel. We already have too much software! And it's all one framework or host app version update away from failure.

China already has one (if we're insisting on solar power generation) - 700,000 sq. mi of desert.

It's also not just aesthetic - flat terrain is just so much more practical.

A modern F150 doesn't have "max utility". It's for site foremen and driving to Walmart.

Given the vast amount of flat, well-lit terrain within the borders of China, it should be clear that the pictured projects (and the other "blanket a mountain in solar panels" projects that are easily discoverable) are not about the economics of power generation.

I find the idea of blanketing mountainous wilderness in relatively short-lived e-waste just awful. Surely there are much better terrains for solar panels?

Not much money * quite a lot of people = not very much money

(this holds true for all of the other times this idea has been suggested, too).

And this does not take into account the various fees, taxes etc, that will be removed before any money gets into an OSS developer's bank account.

That is an interesting precedent. However, Ukraine is not a breakaway state from an existing EU member state (or a state which has been in the EU). There are numerous regions in the EU on a similar path, and none have yet succeeded (including Kosovo, which has been independent since 2008).

I'm also not talking about the defence of Scotland itself, I'm noting that monitoring and curtailing Russian naval activity in the Baltic Sea corridor is of wider strategic importance. If Scotland became unable to do this, Russia would have an easy exit path for naval vessels from its Baltic Sea ports.

In your example, Ireland as an EU member has significantly more access to military resources than otherwise.

The EU has not yet set a precedent for allowing breakaway states into full membership, so it's far from a given that an independent Scotland would be able to rejoin the EU.

Scotland is of enormous strategic importance due to its location relative to Russia's naval ports. An independent Scotland with no other backing would have minimal resources to monitor and deter Russian naval activity.

There's no margin on averting the Climate Catastrophe!

Thin in form factor only! Phones and tablets represent the cutting edge of what humanity can mass-manufacture, and prices and difficulties are only going up.

These supply chains have very non-linear responses. Relatively small fluctuations in demand can have enormous effects on prices and leadtimes.

It's a one-way journey, unless we can adapt quickly enough to a drastic reduction in the general availability of compute power. IMO, our reliance on bloated tech is an existential risk, and reverting to some reasonable baseline needs addressing as urgently as any other current crisis.