serhei

Agreed.

The Swiss did study something similar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissmetro) but their proposal looks a lot more expensive and is entirely in-tunnel.

"200MPH is not high-speed."

Says who?

Originally anything over 125mph was "high-speed rail" simply because it required new engineering techniques to be developed (existing trains and tracks were physically not engineered to withstand those speeds). As the engineering was developed further, 125mph became old news and the 'typical' definition became more like 160mph [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail

If you compare to highway travel, even 100mph would be "high speed" because people aren't going to drive 100mph on the Interstate. If you compare to airplanes, nothing is high speed, not even maglev. No one is planning to build maglev with a cruising speed of 550mph.

Another important point is that high speed rail is still rail, whereas maglev requires a custom alignment. This could be important or it might not matter at all, depending on where you're building -- e.g. France's system relies heavily on the TGVs being able to use existing conventional tracks (to reach the centre of Paris, and to branch out into smaller cities that don't merit constructing a dedicated line), Japan's doesn't (because the conventional railways in Japan are narrow-gauge).

Likewise, California HSR plans to share most of the peninsula rail corridor with Caltrain. Theoretically it's a win-win (HSR doesn't have to tear a completely new alignment through a heavily-built-up area, Caltrain gets financial support for upgrading its corridor) -- you couldn't do that with a maglev. In practice, the project is not well-coordinated, but see what I said above about Brezhnevian stagnation.

All that said, a train that can travel on both maglev and conventional track would actually be an interesting next step for high speed rail. It doesn't seem impossible.

A typical third rail metro moves at around 25-30mph if you factor in station stops. Top speed varies, e.g. for Washington Metro the cars can accelerate up to 75mph but could plausibly be much slower depending on the track characteristics, how well sections of it are maintained, and how well the trains are scheduled. Hence it's unsurprising that Metro trains will get passed on a freeway unless there's a traffic jam.

Where Metro wins is on capacity. When the trains are full, one track of Metro carries an amount of people that would fill up 10 lanes of freeway. Of course, one major problem is that building mass transit is sold to the public as a way to 'reduce congestion' i.e. "other people will ride the subway so that my freeway will be clear". Due to induced demand from other people shifting their travel to the highway, this is not really truthful advertising.

It's more accurate to say that the mass transit provides an alternative for people who are fed up with traffic jams and want a more predictable way of getting downtown. Buses fail to provide that alternative, because unless the transit agency manages to get a dedicated bus lane along the whole route (it's probably not), they are going to be stuck in the same traffic that an ordinary car is stuck in.

Many of the existing freight rail corridors are twisty and not designed in a way that works for high-speed rail at all (unless you buy land anyways to straighten out the more extreme curves) [1]. They might work for conventional passenger rail if you could get the freight railroads to play nice and do better maintenance on the tracks.

[1]: typical example -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_Curve_(Pennsylvania)

[2]: For a detailed example of what's possible & what isn't with existing corridors, you can look at this independent engineer's study of how to upgrade a rail route through Northern California: http://zierke.com/shasta_route/

The dilemma is no different from "should I buy Product X now, or wait a year for version 2 of Product X", only on a national scale. Needless to say, if you play to this psychology successfully, you can delay a project indefinitely.

I'm actually very skeptical about Hyperloop, but it seemed a good way of getting my point across. USA doesn't build stuff not because of technological viability but purely for political reasons.

For those who think it's because of geography / hyperloop is better technology anyways / any other red herring besides Brezhnevian political stagnation:

It's not completely implausible that, 30 years from now, most of Europe and Asia are connected by hyperloops while the US has built nothing and Internet commentators are arguing that hyperloop is old news compared to yet-unproven teleportation technology, and anyways the population density of the US doesn't support hyperloops.

Until you have hard data on how people born and raised in <40% Earth gravity turn out, moving to other planets is only a possibility, not something you can plan for.

Hypothetically, if miner profits went into freefall, the alternatives would be to raise tx fees even further (making the network less usable), or to change the protocol to mint more coins. You are correct that the latter would massively discredit the project's original goals, and is therefore unlikely (since it would damage the value of the currency).

The network relies on having a large ecosystem of miners to prevent anyone from mounting coordination attacks. Those miners are paid either by new bitcoins (out of the finite supply), or by tx fees.

The real metric to watch (but the hardest to get) is "number of users" and particularly "number of users doing things other than buying coins/tokens in hope of capital gains".

Org format is great, but the designs of many of its more advanced features rely heavily on the Emacs editor's ability to collapse metadata. Once you've built a file that uses drawers, tags, some spreadsheets, and several levels of nesting, the resulting file can be too cluttered with metadata to be easily understandable in other plaintext editors.

Canada is currently in an awkward middle ground between capitalist free-for-all and European-style welfare state. Thus, people who care more about money, and people who care more about good social support (which includes things like healthcare, public transit, clean streets, and so forth that benefit people regardless of level of income) can both find something to complain about.

Variations on octagonal rooms could be a good approximation. For example, bay windows are practically a way to achieve a similar effect, without departing from a rectangle structure too much.

The most interesting thing about the procedurally-generated portraits (and earlier work on other generated art [1]) is that the the results completely squick out some people while other people don't seem to notice what the problem is and think we'll be drowning in 4k procedurally-generated Ghibli movies on Netflix in a few decades from now (see [2]). Clearly the two groups are looking at the pictures in two completely different ways.

(Personally, I tend to fall into the 'squicked out' category. I don't like the way objects in [1] melt into each other, like the artist is a lobotomy patient who can no longer separate objects, or like the picture is depicting a hideous Lovecraftian fractal dimension.

The faces are actually better because the author iteratively upscales something that looks like a face at every stage, instead of just running one step to generate an alien blob of too many eyes and noses that happens to pass the neural network. Besides dead eyes, they tend to suffer from the problem of the two halves of the face trying to make completely different expressions.)

[1] - https://research.googleblog.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-d...

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14510453

There's definitely value in cryptocurrencies, in the sense of significant promise of being useful for new types of financial instruments and transactions. This does not preclude the possibility of there being a crypto bubble, i.e. demand/excitement causing the price of the currency to rise far far above its current level of usefulness.

The ultimate usefulness of cryptocurrencies is determined by things that may take years or decades to figure out a way to do: everything from 'is it a good store of value' to 'can I shop with it on Amazon?' to 'can I use it to issue equity for my startup?' This gradual growth in usefulness does not really match the tendency of coins to double in price in very short periods of time, so the question is whether the temporary bubbles and disappointments are severe enough to disrupt the gradual growth in base value. This is no different from real estate bubbles potentially making things painful for people who just want to buy a house to live in it.

"Why? Robustness (more use cases, platforms), efficiency/cost, and more user friendly."

More fundamentally, the second platform benefits from the hindsight of the first platform's experiences, having the opportunity to fix any mistakes that happened to be hardcoded into the first platform's design.

God, I hope not. It makes zero sense to have TSA theater for high speed intercity trains but not local public transportation, because the latter has far greater passenger volumes. If terrorists wanted to cause mass chaos using a public transit system, they would go for local subway and commuter train lines.

You get to decide based on how much transaction fee you're willing to pay to the miners that confirm your transaction.

The simplistic explanation is that the Bitcoin network effectively incorporates a hard upper limit on the number of transactions per unit time. (Every new transaction must be recorded in the blockchain, and the blockchain only grows so fast.) So as the currency becomes more popular and demand for transactions increases, either your waiting time to get the transaction confirmed on the blockchain increases, or your transaction fee has to increase.

Fair enough. But you've made me very curious to see a widely-agreed-upon list of which systems qualify as light rail according to a definition that excludes trams. (Wikipedia does not attempt to make any distinction -- e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tram_and_light_rail_...)

Edit: another example of Wikipedia not being able to agree with itself on a distinction -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail_in_North_America lists the Toronto streetcar system as "the busiest LRT system in North America" even though it's definitely a traditional tram system with mostly street-running. Below it calls it a light rail ('in the case of Toronto, actually streetcar').

Incidentally, Japan's maglev project (unlike their ordinary trains) is being done at ridiculous costs and ridiculous timeframes ($80 billion USD spent over 31 years -- 2014-2045 see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen). Seems like the technology is very tricky and 90% of it will have to be built in tunnel.

They can support this because their ordinary transit infrastructure is built out already, the Tokaido high-speed line is at capacity (trains every 5 minutes at peak hours)! Effectively, they have the money and they've run out of more reasonably scaled infrastructure projects to build.

Longest?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DART_Light_Rail -> System Length 93 mi (150 km) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Melbourne -> System Length 160 miles (250 kilometres)

However, your point that the decentralization plays a difference is very valid. The Melbourne network is a dense grid which serves a much more compact area whereas the Dallas system consists of a small number of lines that stretch very far out into the low-density suburbs. Hence, far fewer people are near a DART station.

If you did a detailed audit, you could also price adjust for things like land and end up with a comparison that reflects how each project is being managed.

I suspect that part of the reason cities like San Francisco, New York, and Vancouver are so ludicrously expensive in North America are because there are far more people that hate cars than there are cities which are amenable to their preferences.

So, if a minority, then a very under-served one. Those cities are going to stay expensive unless the supply of walkable cities increases.

When I read about proposed public transit projects in Boston that were never built, most of them had actually been _court mandated_ by the Big Dig mitigation lawsuits, but they still didn't get completed. Very mysterious.

To be fair about the 'single small bridge', it seems like smaller projects suffer proportionately larger delays due to being considered low priority, ridiculously lax work scheduling, etc. Although the financial scales are completely different, it takes my city (Toronto) approximately the same time to build a subway extension as to renovate the bike trail that runs near my house.

I am suggesting that the fact that I (the perceiving subject) am myself (the biological entity) rather than you (a different biological entity, but ostensibly subject to the same laws) is (a) an objective fact (b) not within the domain of science. I do not expect this fact to map to any observable physical properties.

Both the Lucas-Penrose argument and the counterarguments seem to assume that consciousness is a phenomenon within the laws of physics which arises from more fundamental laws (e.g. chemistry or quantum mechanics), which is (to me) a completely non-obvious assumption.

For example, I perceive my own thoughts rather than other people's. This implies that my own thoughts would have an additional physical property, that of being perceived by me, which the thoughts of other people lack. However, according to all up-to-date theories of physics and neurology, there is no difference between my own thoughts and other people's that would explain the presence of this additional property.

A collection of loosely coupled computational systems still forms a computational system, not some fundamentally different entity.

Wikipedia describes Godel as a nonreligious theist who believed in the existence of an afterlife. In that context, it is not surprising that he would draw far-reaching conclusions that a human being's behaviour cannot be described by a formal system.

It drew SkyTrain as an ordinary railway (part of the map layer), which is probably treated the same for transit directions, but nevertheless an odd choice visually, since it gets lost in the tangle of freight railways which are drawn identically and which SkyTrain frequently runs alongside.

I really like the approach described in these links. Targeted algorithms solve specific problems (e.g. ILP to decide ordering of adjacent lines) instead of someone trying to put together a Grand Unified Machine Learning Algorithm that ends up having to be fudged manually after it gets 99 cases right and makes an egregious mistake in the 100th one.

The more general problem Transit seems to be trying to solve (that no one else is) is having a map that can be kept up-to-date with transit alerts and diversions with minimal hassle. For example, it looks like their launch-time picture of Toronto's streetcars (in the first link) was generated when there was trackwork at the College and Bathurst intersection and the corresponding streetcar lines were being diverted around it.

The second link explains rather well the reasons behind some of the problems evident in Google's Toronto map. For example, the unsnapping issue for adjacent lines occurs a lot because streetcar lines are heavily interlined.