Trains are running more safely, efficiently, elegantly, and reliably than both cars and airplanes, and they have consistently done so with a much longer track record.
No experience myself, but from past comments on HN, I understand the company Amtrak provides pretty good service within the areas it can control. It's just that the US rail network prioritizes freight every time (even though legally it's not supposed to).
I don't love Amtrak on the East Coast. But on the West Coast, it can be really nice. Coach on the West Coast is like Acela on the East Coast. Even the cheapest seats have nice tables with outlets, and the views on the Pacific Surfliner can't be beat!
There are innumerable ways to avert the worst iniquities of private equity without going Full Communist Revolution. Of course, the longer that plutocrats try to wring the system dry, the more likely the latter is to happen, but I suppose it would be incoherent of me to expect private equity to understand the concept of thinking in the long-term.
That’s the problem right there. We never try to solve problems until it can’t be ignored. We’re tackling economic inequity the same way as global warming; by mostly ignoring it.
I get what you’re saying but that’s not really true, is it? You can ignore social injustice, economic inequality and environmental harm but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem. In fact, one might even argue that just because the decision makers can ignore a certain problem, it doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t impossible to ignore by a large swathe of the population.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed here; regardless of what you're for or against, it destroys what this site is supposed to be for.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
The so-called "Linux enthusiast community" is better described as the Linux corporate enterprise community. Understanding this makes your comment make a lot more sense. The "specific applications" are in fact merely the priorities of the giant corporations who fund the overwhelming majority of Linux development for the purpose of accumulating profit.
That's certainly not my experience. Practically every rant about systemd includes the idea that evil corporations are trying to force it on everyone rather than letting them use some random login daemon whose last commit was in 2008.
Corporate interests are generally biased in favor of avoiding hyper-specific modifications that mess with their own economies of development scaling, not seeking them out.
The corporate enterprise community is who appears to create most of the attempts at user friendly, one size fits all, stable standards, because.... that's what seems to sell, and what saves development budgets not having to support lots of different OSes, as Windows has shown.
Many of the non corporate hobbyists are fine with everything needing tweaking and maintenance, they chose Linux specifically because they want to tweak stuff.
Not sure what point you're trying to make but the "non corporate hobbyists" are ineffective to the point of irrelevance when it comes to Linux core development. Everything they do is downstream from the influence of giant corporations.
If you watch the video, at the end they show a road runner. I was bracing myself for the poor little guy to get blasted to atoms. Spoiler: road runner survived.
I work in the opposite field of weapons but from the moment I saw zipline I thought their quick launching and distance was interesting. Maybe this is already how drones are launched in places like Ukraine, I don't know. I do understand that the road runner is probably much faster and able to intercept jets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c
I'm not really looking forward to drone warfare, tbh.
Amazon is a private enterprise and its profit is soaring, which means this is simply a non-issue. I thought HN knew how free markets worked but I guess not.
Amazon's market cap soared when profits were negative. Amazon was building up reputation, logistics, and customer relations. As far as I can tell, they've been torching all of that long-term value for about the past three years.
When were profits negative? AFAIK Amazon.com may lose money but AWS more than makes up for it. Amazon.com is a long game to monopolize retail logistics, which they are just now starting to offer as a service to other retailers, meaning Amazon.com is of less importance.
Amazon was losing money for nearly the first decade of its existence. It was a bit of a laughing stock among the traditional business community: "Lose money on every sale, but make it up in volume!" The loses were considered astronomical at the time; in 2000, it lost over a billion dollars.
The strategy was the right one, though. To put all of that in perspective, in 2018, it earned over 10 billion, and many businesses have since followed the Amazon model.
It's sort of a classic case study in business schools now.
You must be joking. Since tyrant Robert Moses, NYC is undeniably built for cars. Maybe if anything had changed since then you would have a point, but the fact is American society is wholly incapable of even maintaining, much leas building, public infrastructure due to its demented obsession with privatization and profit, so NYC's transit system is a clusterfuck of rot and in no way something to be proud of.
>public infrastructure due to its demented obsession with privatization and profit
It's not privatisation that created laws forcing a minimum number of parking spaces. You can bet if there were no zoning laws or mandatory parking space requirements US cities would be a lot more walkable, like Asian cities.
>It's not privatisation that created laws forcing a minimum number of parking spaces.
It is privatization that renders the government only capable of punitive solutions (regressive fees, etc.) rather than constructive ones (public infrastructure upgrades, etc.). Realize the revenue from these fees will be 99% laundered and swallowed up by private contractors. That ink is already dry.
>You can bet if there were no zoning laws or mandatory parking space requirements
Nonsense. This is the demented obsession I described above. You aren't making any sense at all. Working people aren't lobbying for parking space requirements; petty business owners are.
No, it's a scam that will backfire and ultimately end in regression. You can't just get rid of cars. You have to replace them with something. Working people will feel the pain of this because the trains are already way too overcrowded.
Punitive measures in the absence of constructive measures will absolutely fail. This isn't complicated.
This would be a more reasonable argument if we were talking about a city like Dallas. Manhattan is one the most transit oriented cities in the US. Bus, ferry, and train service already exist. All that require would be an increase in frequency as people leave their cars.
Yes, of course Manhattan is one of the five boroughs of greater NYC. Yes, you are also correct that mass transit in the US — with a few exceptions— is pathetic.
Having said all that, NYC has one of the best transit systems in the world. Looking just at the subway system, it moves 1.8 billion people a year, using 424 stations spread across 248 miles of tracks. Throw in the various bus, ferry and rail systems and NYC is one of the best served cities in the world.
The infrastructure is there to handle drivers who will to leave their cars after congestion pricing is in place.
A so-called "2 state solution" is an oxymoron. A state, by definition, has a sovereign monopoly on violence. Your 2 states already exist and they are inevitably at war.
It's the "solution" part that is important, i.e., agreeing on the border that satisfies both, solving other claims towards each other, removing the presence of each state from the other state's territory, etc.
Mere "peace" is absolutely not the meaning of the phrase. If it were, the phrase would be unnecessary.
The phrase was dreamt up by Western Israeli allies to promote an oppressive pipe-dream border arrangement that was not even remotely acceptable by any reasonable standards. Only propagandized westerners even speak of it.
This is done so the Western media can frame Palestinians as uncooperative.
extending, perhaps, "from the river to the sea"? How do the most fervent of the people who fight for that ideal feel about tolerance, democracy, pluralism, etc?
