jnty

Decision fatigue and opportunity cost aversion is a big factor too, I think.

When comparing consumer products where there's lots of choices, I find myself finding an OK options and 'falling in love' with it - when I reflect, it's basically a way of cutting through all the reviews and deciding that one is the best and I've no reason to regret buying it or need to do any more trawling through reviews and comparisons. I'll just buy this one and be done with it.

This strategy often works, to be fair!

No, but you can't browse in a shop while filling up with petrol (at least in the UK where we don't have those locks which keep the pump on while you walk away.)

What happens if you uninstall the app before going back online? You'd need to rely on the ticket being scanned at some point to ensure the person was charged, which isn't guaranteed on many transport systems (including the British rail network.)

They do in a lot of metros, although it's often very hard to retro-fit. The DLR got it at build-time. [1]

One of the big issues is 'degraded working' where there's been some sort of failure (or perhaps adverse weather conditions) which means trains have to operate on vocal authority to proceed on sight. The problem then becomes as hard as driverless cars - you have to know when you've reached milepost 70 or the next set of points by sight and it's really bad if you miss them. Arrival to and dispatch from stations without platform-edge doors is also tricky and human staff are often required to manage the process.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway

"In 1524, Henry VIII received a box of “marmaladoo” as a gift from a Mr. Hull of Exeter. Although the name of the treat was glaringly and oddly misspelled on the box..."

Was the concept of 'misspelling' a thing in 1524? The first dictionary hadn't been published yet!

What part of 'let's communicate the case for our new infrastructure' translates to 'shut up'? If anything, they're saying they need to move away from steamroll it through and try and make the case to local communities that they'll benefit from this and should be singing its praises.

I don't think it's beyond the wits of engineers to work out which parts of the track need to be 250mph capable given the acceleration profile of the trains that are likely to use it. The ECML out of King's Cross is a 125mph route but unsurprisingly the points outside the station aren't designed for anything close to that.

Cost is a different issue - I'd be very surprised if the subsidy profile of planes vs. trains vs. motoring stays the same over the coming decade.

Unless you live airside at Heathrow and your destination is the Edinburgh duty free shop, I sincerely doubt your journey will take 1.5 hours total. More realistic timings allowing for 30mins travel either end and arriving an hour early for your flight bring it up to 3.5h - the fastest current London-Edinburgh expresses are just over 4 hours.

At those timings, high speed rail starts to look quite attractive, considering it's much easier to work and relax on a train and you don't have to waste time shuffling through the airport and waiting in queues.

Equally, we've delivered plenty of surface railway projects on time and on budget - the Borders line and Airdrie to Bathgate in Scotland come to mind. It's a pretty defeatist attitude to cancel ambitious projects because they sometimes go over-budget and leads to countries having terrible infrastructure.

Yes - the speed is required for capacity, to minimise journey times to Scotland and ensure competitiveness with air travel and other existing links. Even for closer destinations like Birmingham 35 minutes is a huge improvement on a ~1h20m journey.

Basically, no - upgrades to the existing rail network are exceedingly expensive and disruptive (the whole East Coast Mainline is basically closing this weekend because a single junction needs to be renewed.) HS2 provide lots of fast intercity capacity meaning existing lines can be freed up for a massive enhancement to local services. The high speed also helps reduce demand for domestic air travel which is vital for combating the climate emergency.

This map shows where capacity will be unlocked: https://twitter.com/HS2ltd/status/1158403767756316672

And this comprehensively explains why more capacity is needed and a new high speed railway is the solution: https://medium.com/@garethdennis/high-speed-two-and-the-need...

Why did these never take off, even in a 'big niche' way? Is corrected typing on a smartphone sufficiently speedy for it not to matter? Is the skill required more at the 'musical instrument' level than the 'touch typing' level? Something to do with voice recognition always getting better?

Emergency response drivers never assume they've been heard by any road users and are trained to look for signs of acknowledgement and awareness before doing anything unusual for exactly this reason. They certainly don't blast at speed around blind corners against the lights.

I see that rule as avoiding the search for perfection - otherwise you might spend hours picking up different stones and contemplating as if it were a jigsaw puzzle, when in actual fact there are 'solutions' everywhere.

Hang on - how are you paying for all these services? The money will almost certainly 'touch' a legacy banking mainframe at some point.

I was a bit surprised by this too because Maggie's is actually a cancer charity in the UK. [1]

As I say I imagine it's being handled fairly sensitively in reality. I'm more objecting to the whimsical feel-good description in the article which sort of denies agency to the dementia patients and treats them as funny props.

[1] https://www.maggiescentres.org/about-maggies/

It's not a coincidence that the 'original story' completely elides any negligence or wrongdoing by the police.

It seems like a well-meant idea but how do you prevent it becoming exploitative? Exposing dementia patients to random members of the public in a service role with no understanding of the state of their condition seems like a pretty good way of frequently upsetting them. And how does employment by consent work when you can't actually quite remember why you're in a situation and how you got there?

It sounds like - probably to address these concerns - this is a short-lived 'activity' rather than a going concern, potentially with hand-selected and well-briefed guests rather than arbitrary customers off the street.

Yes - this definitely reads a bit naively, like people saying they "don't have an accent". She almost certainly had a leg-up compared to other kids, even if it was just related to how much she overheard her parents talk or having them make an active effort to chat to her. Other kids have to make do with much less. To realise that sounds link together into certain words, you have to know the words in the first place.

I think you've misunderstood the use of semantic here - it's semantic for all text files. Instead of describing very exactly 'put 8 spaces here' you're saying 'for some reason this line needs to be indented once, take this information display this as you wish.'

This is pretty amusing but highlights the distortions caused by the huge implicit rent subsidy that car parking usually receives. Where else can you hire private space in the centre of a city on an hourly basis for the rates that car sharing companies charge?

I've certainly encountered channels where lack of image embedding is less of a feature and more of a mental health necessity!

This isn't exclusive to blue collar jobs. Software engineers seem positively allergic to unions!

Microaggressions are definitely a thing and one misuse of the word does not invalidate the concept. If you see a misuse of the term 'sexism' it's not okay to say "I suppose this is the natural consequence of making 'sexism' a thing." The same is true here.

"The fact that the combination was in a specific pattern and did not appear to be a random combination of numbers could also factor into a calculation of the odds, he added."

Hehe. I guess he'll have to produce a list of non-random numbers to work those odds out.

Maybe it's time to go retro. I don't see any 'ONE MILLIONTH VISITOR!' banner ads any more, time to bring those back..?

Does the evidence from countries with tax-funded healthcare and social care bear this out? Are you assuming that everyone will eventually have a Japan-style ageing population timebomb?

No - the whole point of pooling would surely be that you don't pay for your own misfortune (or profit from good fortune.)

It really just becomes a poorly implemented version of general taxation though. Funding health and social care from taxation is of course not a new idea...

Have we not been optimising for power usage for the last ten years at least? It's really important for tablets, phones and laptops.

Is this really that much of a thing? Presumably we're mostly dealing with groups - probably mostly charities. Is it really so hard to create public consciousness that releasing a tonne of baloons into the air for no reason is littering that putting loads of effort into designing and promoting alternatives is worth it?