bobthepanda

To be fair, that specifically is not a US phenomena. Flagship stores that operate as a loss purely for the prestige of a location have existed basically since the dawn of modern retail. Operating in Manhattan or on the Champs Elysees is a sign you are a serious grownup store.

They sell fairly space-efficient, expensive products or services. Generally speaking, the higher you push rent per square foot, the fewer types of businesses you can operate, because people and products take up space and have throughput limits. Nail and beauty services can get spendy fast.

The US has something similar going on with medical and dental offices for the same reasons.

Thats kind of the whole point, it’s the only way land based high speed transport would work economically. Rubber wheels would be likely to blow out and increase energy costs substantially

This happens with aircraft tires and those get used for a very short duration at high speeds

Local gov can only prop up so long as they have money; and their balance sheets are strained due to ballooning debt funded by a deflated property bubble.

The automatic system will fail at some points so manual dispatch is needed, which is how this all happened

Chinese brands are all relatively young and even healthy looking major companies have a habit of spectacular sudden failure due to less good bookkeeping and auditing practices.

Trains take a long time to stop even at moderate commuter train speeds because they are so heavy, let alone high speeds of 300km/h+.

At least one of the failures here is that the dispatcher authorized such a high speed, in other systems I am familiar with, generally the procedure with a signal fault is to crawl at a speed such that the train can stop in line of sight distances.

In fact, that is the Spanish protocol, which for some reason was bypassed by dispatch even after the train driver had questioned it:

> Under normal protocols, the driver would be expected to continue moving at a maximum of 40km/h according to their line of sight, and not at normal speed on a track designed for speeds of up to 200km/h.

not an instacart user, but as a carless person an ebike has really saved me hundreds of dollars on DD fees just by doing pickup, and it really shortens the amount of time; even a very slow biking pace of 8mph is orders of magnitude faster than walking. and with bike panniers you can carry two grocery bags' worth of stuff. a decent ebike assists up to 20mph.

basically the only things i bother online delivering grocery wise are bulky dry goods (e.g. paper towels)

The original comment is clearly an expression of schadenfreude.

WA conducts vote by mail like this, and it works fairly well; we’ve had scantron technology for decades at this point.

It’s time and labor intensive and you generally need to compensate focus groups for their time. Sometimes that overlaps with laziness or apathy, but who hasn’t worked on something and been told the business can’t afford the time or money to do it right?

The research and guides went out of fashion because actually methodically studying users costs money. I worked at a place that allegedly prioritized design and was really trying to launch more redesigns but also somehow kept losing positions for designers.

Its basically a drop in the bucket. If you look at five year plans the nuclear share is continually dropping.

By 2030 there is 110GW planned of nuclear and 2800GW of solar and wind.

At this point there isn’t much additional space you could dam without adverse impacts. The flood barriers for New York at the mouth to the Atlantic were rejected both for being too costly and for screwing everyone outside the dams.

Fish ladders and fish cannons do not work very well. https://e360.yale.edu/features/blocked_migration_fish_ladder...

It’s not even that it’s overregulated but that the amount of power it brings online at a time is just too big.

Individual wind turbines aren’t very big, solar panels get laughably small, and while they are not efficient at their small form factors they are very easy to scale up and down. Nuclear is the exact opposite, representing a very large single point of failure, and even under pre-renewables hard to absorb; some of the first pumped hydro was developed to take excess nuclear capacity because it cannot scale up or down very easily.

Also, it is a good idea to see where Chinese leaders are expanding focus to see what their thoughts on viability are.

Nuclear has declined as a share of power being built out in 5 year plans. The projected output of nuclear in 2030 is 100GW vs 2800GW for solar+wind.

The Chinese strategy right now is to just massively overbuild renewables so that even fallow periods generate a substantial amount of energy.

I mean that is why the EU is so gung ho on increasing cross border transmission capacity

If you want to see true evidence of this, look at the rebates power companies offer.

In all the places I’ve lived there are generally large incentive programs to convert air conditioners and old heaters to heat pumps, and other efficient appliance replacements, install better insulation, etc. because that rebate dollar stretches a lot further than building new power plants, transmission lines, etc.

It is tax code and efficiency standards; SUVs are legally speaking light trucks and have lower fuel economy standards, so the Big 3 in the US just made their cars bigger rather than try to compete with the likes of Toyota and Honda on fuel efficiency.

Also, if it’s truly interpretive it leads to a “bus factor” of one, where somebody going on vacation or whatever represents a real timeline risk.

Beijing has a substantially worse median price to income ratio, though

It is possible to grow in a pleasant way without mallification, seems like a lot of projecting. And it’s not like the current approach is preventing that; insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

I mean, stopping housing construction hasn’t stopped the new money from pushing out the old soul. Given the US enshrines the free movement of people in the Constitution, it’s make room or have someone outbid you for yours.

the power that giveth can also taketh away.

similar to how eventually AWS started making their own chips for data centers, and Apple did that for their hardware, it's not a ridiculous thing to plan for the AI companies to start making their own chips to optimize for their use cases and cut out the middleman for margins.

Fundamentally, anything going to a second or third party puts you at risk of being ensnared by mandatory reporting laws, whether that is a human or a corporate entity. Loose lips sink ships.

I mean really, we do know what a solution to this is; the EU caps interchange fees, without much harm to the fraud settlement part of the network. Just the crazy points programs like Amex Platinum go away.

If it worked with apple pay debit, that would be a nice compromise. I wonder what the fees are there.

There is already a deep recession in the creative industry in LA, film jobs are down by a third since 2022. They’re not negotiating from a position of strength