> Public transit that is not subway on rails suck big time.
Bus Rapid Transit called. It promised 95% of the raw speed and 4x the service frequency at 25% of the cost.
12,396 karma · joined October 6, 2010
Bus Rapid Transit called. It promised 95% of the raw speed and 4x the service frequency at 25% of the cost.
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"It is the beginning of Man Immortal and Man Ubiquitous," said Straik. "Man on the throne of the universe. It is what all the prophecies really meant."
"At first, of course," said Filostrato, "the power will be confined to a number--a small number--of individual men. Those who are selected for eternal life."
"And you mean," said Mark, "it will then be extended to all men?"
"No," said Filostrato. "I mean it will then be reduced to one man. You are not a fool, are you, my young friend? All that talk about the power of Man over Nature--Man in the abstract--is only for the canaglia. You know as well as I do that Man's power over Nature means the power of some men over other men with Nature as the instrument. There is no such thing as Man--it is a word. There are only men. No! It is not Man who will be omnipotent, it is some one man, some immortal man. Alcasan, our Head, is the first sketch of it. The completed product may be someone else. It may be you. It may be me."
"A king cometh," said Straik, "who shall rule the universe with righteousness and the heavens with judgement. You thought all that was mythology, no doubt. You thought because fables had clustered about the phrase 'Son of Man' that Man would never really have a son who will wield all power. But he will."
"I don't understand, I don't understand," said Mark.
"But it is very easy," said Filostrato. "We have found how to make a dead man live. He was a wise man even in his natural life. He live now forever: he get wiser. Later, we make them live better--for at present, one must concede, this second life is probably not very agreeable to him who has it. You see? Later we make it pleasant for some--perhaps not so pleasant for others. For we can make the dead live whether they wish it or not. He who shall be finally king of the universe can give this life to whom he pleases. They cannot refuse the little present."
"And so," said Straik, "the lessons you learned at your mother's knee return. God will have power to give eternal reward and eternal punishment."
That's generally expected when interest rates rise. Most assets have value now because they ought generate returns in the future -- but you can get interest between now and in the future, and if you can get a lot of that interest now, why would you spend so much on what is still a long way off?
(This is also how airport lounge abuse is done.)
"You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war." — Hearst, apocryphally
a little spooky to hear about someone being talked down off the golden gate bridge
doubly spooky during the Giants-world-series riots
"I am an endocrinologist working in the biopharmaceutical industry, and it surprises me that we still need to scapegoat drugs like insulin for high drug prices (“Injecting Some Insulin Reality,” Review & Outlook, April 6). Absent from the discussion is the dramatic improvements in marketed insulins over the past 25 years.
When we talk about modern insulin therapy, we aren’t talking about the old insulins. These agents required patients to carefully plan what they ate well before they did—they should rightly be cheap. Modern insulins allow patients better control of blood sugar and more flexibility. It takes large investments to develop medications. How much is it worth to not have to determine what you will put in your mouth 30 minutes prior to doing so? It is good those days are over."
— Coleman Gross, M.D. Letter to the Wall Street Journal, published there 14 April 2022.
"As a legal claim, the 'human right to adequate food' may seem thin gruel, but George Kent enriches the concept with data-based policy analysis, compelling ethical arguments, and a full review of concerned international, national, and nongovernmental organizations. He persuasively makes the case for accountability where the face of famine, malnutrition, and starvation confront the hands of those who hold political power at every level in our new global economy."
Effectively hiring, retaining, evaluating and rewarding competent staff is hard. Even at a big company the datacenter can be a really small world, which makes it hard for your best employees to grow. Things are especially hard when you don't have a tech brand to rely on for your recruiting, and the staff's expertise is far outside the company's core business, making it harder to evaluate who's good at anything.
Hang onto your inflation hedges, because it doesn't look very good for America.
In the meantime, the acre is the standard unit of area for farms, fields, residential property, other property, parks, and certain other uses of land. A house on a quarter-acre lot generally has a backyard, and would fit in most suburbs. A house on a half-acre lot has a big backyard with plenty of room for your kids to run around. A full acre is getting pretty decently big — it's more like the size of a small field that you'd use for growing crops (which is the origin of the measure: 1 farmer-pair-of-oxen-plow-day.)
Rain is measured in inches and feet.
Just multiply two values people use in practice and get another that they can use in practice: acre-feet. Are you forecast for three inches (0.25 feet) of rain, on your forty-acre property? That's 10 acre-feet of water you can get from the sky instead of the irrigation authority. Like most things customary, it's easier to use in some ways, harder in others.
I would also like to draw attention to the distinction between Wake Forest University (of Winston-Salem, NC, via GSO airport) and Wake Forest, NC (closer to RDU airport). The latter was of course the home of the original Wake Forest Baptist Manual Labor Institute.
I’ve had to pick someone up at the wrong airport, you see. It was quite a drive.
Let’s see. It’s the 1980s, and our economy has been beset by 8-12% annual inflation, amidst general stagnation.
Is there anything we could do in this situation to increase economic output, and thus the supply of goods and services, and maybe even increase employment at the same time? Might any of those, perhaps, be promoted through the investment of capital, in any manner at all?
No!!! Like Nixon and Ford and Carter before us, we shall maintain very high taxes on the returns from capital investment, as we try subsidizing demand once again with stimulus spending! It’s sure to work this time.
At that point it turns into a big-system management game with a variety of mechanisms to trip you up, starting with the raids and megabeasts attracted by wealth, vampire infiltration, cranky nobility, and other ways that your system turns self-destructive.
That doesn't make it a great game — it can be incredibly tedious — but, it sounds like you played until you reached prosperity, and just declared the first 1/3-of-the-game-tops as too easy.
If all you have to improve the construction industry is better scheduling and supply-chain management, that's something. But the poster above seemed to be hinting at things more like new construction techniques.
Your value judgment on investment is, ah, popular in some circles, but its placement on the Y Combinator news forum is ironic.
The correct modern solution is probably mostly drones. This idea has been floated but is not presently legal, and the scaffold companies will lobby the government and cry bloody murder, so expect the scaffolding to continue for the next 300 years.
In no small part because the platforms are too narrow — something that getting rid of several tracks would readily fix. (Just fill in the space between two platforms and you have a nice, very wide platform.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/nycrail/comments/l57nw2/map_of_the_...
(LIRR Montauk branch is longer, but I'm less familiar with it.)
I'm a nonexpert who has some vague idea of how these things work.
There's two kinds of accelerator: circular and linear. In either case, you have a tube, often underground, a bunch of accelerator components along the tube, and a detector component. I believe but I am not sure that a key advantage of the circular one is that you can accelerate the particles in the beam as they take multiple loops around the tube. The disadvantage is that when charged particles turn they lose energy by emitting electromagnetic radiation, and the whole point of the accelerator is to stuff these particles full of energy to make interesting collisions. This is mitigated by having higher-radius accelerators, which is the key reason we build things like the Large Hadron Collider and make it so very large in the first place, instead of just trying to add stronger stuff at existing accelerators.
So what do you intend to do in space?
The quasi-achievable near term might see a linear accelerator that consists of two components orbiting and firing particle beams into a third (the detector) because we are obviously not orbiting the mass of the LHC in the near term, and we're not orbiting anything that's rigid and also substantially larger than a rocket payload. It will no doubt be tricky to align the beams, as the orbits are ellipses and the beams need to be approximately straight lines (or close enough, blah blah spacetime). But the fundamental problem is that you're going to need to do all your acceleration all at once, at the accelerators, which immediately negates any possible advantages you could possibly have from space.
Perhaps you could do something very clever with an orbit-sized circular accelerator with accelerators spaced at intervals around the planet. You'd need a lot of launches of some intense equipment (I believe the Earth-based accelerator components are giant supercooled magnets). You'd also need an energy source, lots of engineering prowess to get everything in good working order (LHC bringup was very hands-on) except any adjustments will have to be done in orbit, and then when it's running you'd face the problem of LOLmaintenance.
I'm going to be honest, I'm more skeptical about this than about the Mars colony.
The people of Northern Ireland today tend to want either continued union with the kingdom ruling Great Britain, or union with the rest of Ireland — depending whether their families are of British origin or Irish. The thought of post-Brexit passport control and customs for travel between the territories comprising Northern Ireland and either Great Britain or Ireland is thus a major political football (far worse in the case of the border with Ireland, because it is a land border and that requires walls.)