The most ironic thing to me is the amount of coddling these self-purported “strong men” need. The idea that someone wouldn’t blindly accept what they say is enough to throw their egos into self-protection mode.
The most ironic thing to me is just how fast the political pendulum swings.
One day you have kente cloths and taking the knee everywhere, and before you know it, right-winger bloggers are running the law enforcement.
This is no way to live, 80%+ of the population is neither committed progressives nor committed conservatives/reactionaries, but they rule (or ruled) the social networks and thus dominate(d) in elections.
By the grace of the algorithm, you majesty the king.
1. Before: People warning about a problem of corrupt police forces of power-tripping fools and bullies that routinely get away with murder.
2. After: A corrupt police state has metastasized onto the national state age, with its own fools and bullies, including illegally imprisoning and murdering people.
I wouldn't label that a "pendulum swing" between opposite situations.
Taking the knee because everyone around you is taking it as well. Pure social pressure. Remember the soccer matches in places like the UK, where some continental teams or players were booed for not doing so?
Political theatre by people who wouldn't be able to tell you who was the Prime Minister, how much does milk cost etc.
Even well-meaning US liberals overestimate the count of black people shot by the police by three orders of magnitude. That is some serious divergence from reality, and it was hyped by social networks.
Whoah, hold up: One of these things is not like the others. (♫ One of those things just doesn't belong.♫)
The Prime Minister's name shows up regularly in news stories, and the price of milk is literally in front of you as you buy it...
So why are you expecting anybody to be decent at "estimating" even the easier version of "all people shot by police this year"? It's not like there's a daily figure shared after the weather-report.
> Even well-meaning US liberals overestimate the count of black people shot by the police by three orders of magnitude. That is some serious divergence from reality, and it was hyped by social networks.
> Taking the knee because everyone around you is taking it as well. Pure social pressure
Pure social pressure. Whereas now everything is completely political pressure dictated from the top down. Idk social pressure seems more organic at least. Biden didn't order that anyone who didn't take a knee will be deported to a torture prison in Guatemala
By the grace of first past the post, winner takes all. This ancient system prevents people from picking shades of grey parties, since they simply don't exist in any significance. And from the other end it doesn't allow parties to split, since it will mean than the smaller block is immediately equal to zero (zero votes, zero seats). In when parties aren't allowed to split, they trend towards reactionism and radicalism, when radicals can hold the whole party "hostage". Applies to both sides btw.
The standard complaint is the opposite. In a generic first past the post two party system you should end up with two barely distinguishable centrist parties.
But the US system is far from generic. Instead it has several tweaks that make it tend towards extremism. The primary system is probably the biggest factor.
> One day you have kente cloths and taking the knee everywhere, and before you know it, right-winger bloggers are running the law enforcement.
How are these at all comparable? One is a photo op at the Capitol, and one is leading a massive immigration raid campaign full of civil rights violations. Even if you believe these raids are lawful, they are not performative like the photo op stunt was - they are massive operations that greatly affect millions of lives.
If you are making a “both sides are bad” argument then that is a pretty poor comparison.
This did not happen fast though, but over decades.
On one side, the right preparing by slowly taking over positions, on the other side people ignoring the problems of many.
Here in Germany I fear the AfD too may get into power, because instead of fixing the problems that people complained about for decades (costs, bureaucracy, rents, no vision apart from "consume and work") people are fixated on that right wing party itself.
When I did some skydiving in my youth I was fascinated by watching sooo many skydivers barely avoiding the lone single tree near the landing zone. Turns out, if you concentrate on something ("I must avoid that tree I must avoid that tree...") you end up steering towards it. The winning move is to instead concentrate on where you do want to go. There are precious little positive ideas in our politics, it's mostly about what we don't want, or distractions on things that while it sounds nice and it's definitely okay when it gets done should never be the main focus.
> the problems that people complained about for decades (costs, bureaucracy, rents, no vision apart from "consume and work")
Insofar as people are actually going over to AfD (and it's not just exaggerated hysterics, the sky is always falling these days...), it's probably got something to do with the issues which are conspicuously absent from your list, which AfD ostensibly addresses, at least more convincingly than the other parties. Namely, immigration. You may not want to admit that as a real problem at all, but that refusal to engage with the issue is the primary reason people line up for the politicians who at least pretend to care about it.
> When you tell people their problem isn't real, (...)
Their problems might be real, but they sure are not caused by immigration. The Trump administration boasts about having deported 1M immigrants, and yet everything turned to shit, there are less jobs, pay hasn't increased, and things haven't became more affordable.
The first step to fix a problem is to identify it. Failing to do so risks aggravating the actual problems.
Tons of morons bought the Trump administration lie that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets. Their problem isn’t real. They are complete idiots with zero critical thinking skills who have more influence in elections than more rational populations due to this stupid ass country’s prioritizing empty land over actual citizens. Isn’t it funny how when “centrists” compromise with conservatives it always seem ruin things for decades if not centuries?
I had some hope as a millennial youth that we were “evolving” past the conservative mindset. It was insane to me that an ideology that has been consistently wrong from supporting slavery to opposing women’s suffrage would continue to have any support. But here we are still talking about gay marriage again because fucking conservative bigots cannot let anyone live in peace. But I’m sure you consider their “concerns” to be very valid and worth entertaining.
well, the concerns do need to be addressed. it is important that everyone gets an opportunity to voice their grievances and not be ignored. but grievances that come from lack of understanding the reality can only be addressed with education.
you are missing the point. addressing people concerns doesn't mean conceding that they are right about the cause of those concerns. it means listening to them and work with them to find the actual root causes and then fix those. it means taking people seriously with the fact that they have concerns and not ignore them.
ignoring people because you consider their concerns illegitimate doesn't wok when they make up more than 50% of the voters. it doesn't even work when they make up more than say 20% of the voters.
but as i keep repeating, addressing concerns means educating people, not letting them have their way.
i am not telling people that their problem isn't real. i am telling them that their understanding for the cause of their problems isn't what they think it is, or what they are being told it is.
the people who are having problems finding work, facing crime, etc, do not actually have a problem with immigration. they are only getting told by deceptive politicians that dealing with immigration would solve their problems. they are the ones being lied to. that's the nature of a scapegoat.
Tomato, potato. If you refuse to address the issues people have, or even just wrongly feel they have, and the only party that even pretends to care is your spooky boogieman right wing party, and you're so sincerely worried about the implications of that, then pull your head out of your ass and meet people where they are.
Me personally? Right now I'm most bothered by a large splinter in my finger. I'm pretty comfortable and my grander concerns relate not to immigration but rather how America will handle the demise of their global hegemony, if America will go to war with China over Taiwan.. That's what worries me the most.
But concerning immigration, you seem to think that people have other (perhaps even real) problems which they are falsely attributing to immigration. Like "Oh I can't afford a big house because of those damn immigrants" when really the problem is a lack of affordable housing, or some other real issue which you happen to agree is a problem. And to be sure, there is some of that kind of thinking going on. But for the most part, I think people who are upset about immigration really are upset about the immigration itself, particularly from substantially different cultures. There is a prominent belief among anti-immigration people that their governments are trying to ethnically replace them. They want to continue living in the society they grew up in, not in New New Dehli. I suppose you might think they're wrong to want this, we're all one race, the human race, etc. Whatever, all that ideological rhetoric doesn't change the way people vote when they begin to feel like foreigners in their own country.
you seem to think that people have other (perhaps even real) problems which they are falsely attributing to immigration
the only problem that can be directly attributed to immigrants is xenophobia. the solution to xenophobia is education.
really the problem is a lack of affordable housing
and that has to do what with immigrants? no, immigrants are not taking away affordable housing. whatever housing policy is responsible for the lack of affordable housing needs to be changed and can be changed in such a way that there would be enough housing for everyone, including immigrants.
I think people who are upset about immigration really are upset about the immigration itself, particularly from substantially different cultures.
as i said. xenophopia. excuse me if i don't take pity with that. the solution is education, to learn about compassion, care, tolerance, build communities, loving your neighbor, which btw, is a deeply christian value, so before people complain about different cultures how about they actually honor their own culture.
There is a prominent belief among anti-immigration people that their governments are trying to ethnically replace them
and you take this seriously? do you really think people are that dumb, to believe such nonsense?
I suppose you might think they're wrong to want this, we're all one race, the human race, etc. Whatever, all that ideological rhetoric doesn't change the way people vote when they begin to feel like foreigners in their own country.
what then is your proposal to address those issues?
i already shared mine: education, build communities, and fix whatever other real problems people have (housing, jobs, etc)
Most of this is just name calling now, blah blah xenophobia, who cares. I'm talking about the way people feel and you're talking about whether or not they're in the moral right to feel that way. It doesn't matter, people do feel this way and if you refuse to address their concerns then they'll fall in behind others who do.
Remember, the context of this conversation is "Here in Germany I fear the AfD too may get into power, ..."
> muh education though
Do you really believe tha Germans of all people haven't had enough Holocaust Class in school? Get real. You either have to meet people where they are, or accept that they're going to be voting for people that you aren't comfortable with.
what exactly does "meeting people where they are" mean?
if people fear foreign cultures, then the only way to deal with that is to get them in contact with these cultures and learn that these are nice people too. like therapy. that is what i mean by education. not learning about the holocaust, but learning to get along. there is no other way to address this.
you keep telling me that my approach does not work, but i am still waiting for your proposal how to address the issue.
People/institutions didn't want to fix real problems. This unwillingbess/inability causes problems to spiral and more and more problems to appear. Including the clash.
Cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo weren't killed by capitalism or global climate change.
Personally, I consider the chilling effect of such events on freedom of speech and art quite a huge problem. This freedom was crucial to European prosperity.
Well, roots of everything are long. We are a long-lived species and our political attention spans decades or longer. People still think of the Roman Empire and write in Latin alphabet, after all.
But the actual short-term jumps in policy are absolutely wild now. That wasn't the case in the 1990s.
Imagine left leaning orgs being as organized and funded as the right.
GP made the same mistake by putting the AfD on the right and anything else on "the other side that ignores problems". This other side is not the left, its the center or the non-left, which gets good funding too.
The decades of political development were always meant to bolster the current power structures, and i am not talking about pol. parties or the interests of the many and their problems. From that angle, the current political swing is not suprising. Musk and Co are winning their war on the left mind virus, which is much older then them.
If you are left (I am not, but I have observed it) and you agree with 90 per cent of the ideas of some group, but disagree on the remaining 10 per cent, they will turn on you in fury, denounce you as a traitor, hate you more than an actual opponent. Deviation from orthodoxy is a capital sin.
(This is not new, see how Trotskyists were extirpated by their Stalinist comrades 100 years ago. Heresy is simply not tolerated.)
The right wingers of today are a lot more capable of building a bigger tent, at least right now. Personally, I am somewhat rightwing, but very secular, as usual in Czechia. I still get invited to Christian events even though they know that I am not a believer, and they won't grill me to convert.
The same can be said about the right, but you are correct, infighting is stronger on the left.
But...
Orthodoxy (or better: tribalism) is actually stronger on the right, the key difference is, the right has less political complexity to argue over. "Our pure native culture will fix our problems and the other left outgroups must be suppressed" is pure identity politics, which is imo the core of the right.
The left has, tribalism aside, at least identity independent topics like wealth distribution. Which, unfortunately, threatens the existing power structures.
I can confirm the left ostracizing their own. It happened to me too, but i still consider myself left, because my political ideals are based on more than a group membership.
I think you underestimate the complexity of the right. It is not just secular nationalists all the way down.
First, there are still religious people there, and this very wing is splintered among several groups at least. Famously, many Catholics including JDVance were in a value conflict with their own late Pope Francis. The actual religiously educated people tend to be very good at writing, because the schools that they graduated from are good at teaching persuasion.
Second, there are libertarians, not very numerous but somewhat influential, especially in tech circles.
Then, there still are some trigger-happy neocons, nowadays marginalized, but they may yet come to the fore in case of a bigger war that directly involves the US.
Then, there are reactionary types like Curtis Yarvin, who dismiss any nationalist ideas as blind alley of "demotism".
Even the practical question of "how many people from which country should get a visa yearly and under what conditions" will hit enormous ideological differences in the right-wing tent.
To me, religious people, simple racist and libertarians all suffer from a identity-based cognitive bias. "Our groups or my well being is the ideal to project onto the nation/world." (Neocons dont fit in here, i have to admit. Maybe its abuse of power pleasing the monkey brain, but resulting wealth certainly too.)
I think self-withdrawal is more frequent in left leaning individuals for this exact, more unbiased/intelligent/educated reason.
But you are correct again. There is a lot of complexity on the right, if you look deep enough. But this depth does not cause as much infighting compared to the left, because, again: tribalism taking over higher order reasoning.
How is that my mistake??? YOU came up with "left". I very deliberately did not say such a ridiculous thing, given that any "left" party has never in power.
I would also appreciate if you did not paraphrase what I wrote when what I wrote still is right there, or at least don't attribute your words to me.
I always find it fascinating, and quite disturbing, how people rewrite what other people wrote to base their "counter-"argument on their rewrite.
> On one side, the right preparing by slowly taking over positions, on the other side people ignoring the problems of many.
You bisected the political landscape, but not into left and right. I did this and, as you may agree on, the center is shifting right too. An aspect i wanted to bring up by adressing your "problems of the many" and where/why the political focus has been on in the past.
Maybe you are familiar with the whole lefty concept of "capitalism inevitably turning into fascism". The right and the status quo center have more in common, so you can group them together and i called it "your mistake".
The reality is that Northern Europe is the safest, most free and wealthiest part of this godforsaken planet.
People don't know how good they have it.
It is understandable that Germans voted for the Nazis in 1933. In 2025 they have no excuse.
When Germans get grand ideas inside their heads everything always goes bad.
The economic difference between rural former GDR and, say, Denmark, is pretty huge, and AfD mostly dominates in the former GDR regions, where local industries collapsed almost overnight and all talents got picked off by West German employers.
I traveled around most of Europe with a backpack. Former GDR is a dying country, and no amount of subsidies into fixing roads will help it. You cross the border to Poland, nominally you entered a poorer country, but everything is so much more lively there. Poles are so much more optimistic about their future than Germans in general, and East Germans extra.
This psychological difference cannot be appreciated if you only look at GDP per capita tables.
People don't compare themselves with countries on other continents, but with their neighboring countries or with the memories of their own country (how it was in the past).
Swedes look at the statistics of bombing and shooting incidents in this century, while Finns look at economic growth, GDP and salary growth in the last twenty years, especially compared to other Nordic countries.
> One day you have kente cloths and taking the knee everywhere,
Voluntary actions including a protest against police brutality ..
> and before you know it, right-winger bloggers are running the law enforcement.
.. versus the pro-brutality side of the argument. Social media has made it more acute, but the same line runs through e.g. the pre-social-media Rodney King riots. I think people mistook a suppressed problem for stability.
Of course, suppressing problems works quite well for stability. We can see in Hong Kong how having several tower blocks burn down might be destabilizing. There were calls for accountability. Accountability would be destabilizing to the political and real estate elite, so that can't happen and now everyone is quietly agreeing that it was just a tragic accident, no need to investigate further.
The pills originally come from Lewis Carroll, where Alice could change size by taking them. Jefferson Airplane used that metaphor to sing about psychedelics. The Matrix adapted Carroll's pill motif to represent an alteration in one's perceptions of reality. In the broad sense, yes, in the narrower sense, no.
The Wachowskis themselves pulled from gnosticism, eastern religions etc.
Pahlaniuk used the term "snowflake" to refer to people who were brittle and "not beautiful and unique" (his words from memory). He is/was a left wing anarchist.
I think you've experienced a bit of Mandela effect. Alice in wonderland is in fact mentioned as a metaphor in the movie. However, Alice would eat cake and take pleasant tasting potions to change size.
The famous song White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane uses an extended metaphor based on Alice In Wonderland, and has the lyrics:
> One pill makes you larger
> And one pill makes you small
> And the ones that mother gives you
> Don't do anything at all
> Go ask Alice
> When she's ten feet tall
I've never read the Alice in Wonderland book, but the Disney adaptation of it from the 50s had cake and a drink I recall, and no pills.
I believe that was the point of both what I and GGGP wrote. Pahlaniuk would not be one of "those who love using the term snowflake", in its current context.
This is a Reddit-tier quip that keeps being repeated. It doesn't spark curious conversation:
"I consider myself fairly strong and self reliant."
"Okay well we are going to kick you off of every private website, try to make you lose your livelihood, and mock you relentlessly on most media broadcasting networks!"
"Well, I am going to attempt to stop you from doing those things, since I don't like them. "
"Ironic! You need coddling and aren't strong at all, haha, your ego is so fragile."
Do recognize, you're voluntarily participating in a highly moderated forum. If one were principled in their opposition to moderation, one would not voluntarily choose to use said forum for nearly a decade ;)
Part of what makes Hackernews enjoyable to read is the strong and very reasonable moderation. We aren't subject to walls of Viagra/Cialis ads or back-and-forth flamewars.
I'd argue it's because of content moderation that HN is an environment that generally promotes a marketplace of ideas.
> Part of what makes Hackernews enjoyable to read is the strong and very reasonable moderation.
I agree with the enjoyable part but "reasonable" would require careful examination of the things that didn't make the cut and is highly subjective. I have no idea what "strong" means.
Most moderation seems to get done by the voting system (powered by weak and very unreasonable users?)
What is missing is a user manual to formalize this social credit system. I never knew that I have to upvote the correct posts. I thought the system was curious about my opinion. Quite preposterous in hindsight. Ill make more of an effort, who knows, in a few years we might go full North Korea retroactively.
The "marketplace of ideas" narrative was always a trick. And it worked.
Conservatives and reactionaries want to get their ideas into the mainstream but they know that just going straight out and saying race science or whatever will not get play in mainstream media. So they make the argument about how these ideas (which they claim not to hold) are being silenced by illiberal institutions. Then centrist organizations, who do at least want to believe that they ascribe to these principles, take the bait. Suddenly the New York Times is writing feature story after feature story about how universities are being oh so mean to the professor who writes "I don't shy away from the word 'superior'" and "everybody wants to live in the countries run by white people" (she didn't even get fired, by the way).
This convinces some center-left folks that various institutions have gone to far and they become participants in efforts to expel black people, women, and lgbt people from institutions of power.
But now people like Chris Rufo don't need the New York Times anymore, so they are happy to start saying that actually businesses should be allowed to only hire married men and that the civil rights act should be overturned.
It's a shame, the censorship process would make them look much more sane than they are. We do still get some opinions that seem worthy of burning someone alive but it would be better to get the full insanity on public display and score enough internet points for the padded cell.
They want to reduce censorship, not force people to "coddle" them. Anyone on the left can still criticize the current US administration if the censors give up. The only difference is, people on the right will be able to do the same to the next Democrat administration. If you don't think that's fair, you're the one who needs coddling.
I’m always _this_ close to adopting Zed, but I just can’t get used to the project search. I’m too used to telescope now. Maybe I need to bite the bullet because I think Zed’s search is objectively better. Old dog, I suppose…
To me, the question is less about “how do we make more energy” and more about “how do we make LLMs 100x more energy efficient.” Not saying this is an easy problem to solve, but it all seems like a stinky code smell.
I'm pretty confident that if LLMs were made 100x more energy efficient, we would just build bigger LLMs or run more parallel inference. OpenAI's GPT-5 Pro could become the baseline, and their crazy expensive IMO model could become the Pro offering. Especially if that energy efficiency came with speedups as well (I would be surprised if it didn't). The demand for smarter models seems very strong.
There’s alternatives to wiping out the company that could be fair. For example, a judgement resulting in a shares of the company or revenue shares in the future rather than a one time pay off.
Writers were the true “foundational” piece of LLMs, anyway.
If this is an economist idea of fair, where is the market?
If someone breaks into my house and steals my valuables, without my consent, then giving me stock in their burglary business isn't much of a deterrent to them and other burglars.
Deterrence/prevention is my real goal, not the possibly of a token settlement from whatever bastard rips me off.
We need the analogue of laws and police, or the analogue of homeowner has a shotgun.
I don't much like the idea of settling in stock, but I also think you're looking for criminal law here. Civil law, and this is a civil suit, is far more concerned with making damaged parties whole than acting as a deterrent.
I understand that intentional copyright infringement is a crime in the US, you just need to convince the DOJ to prosecute Anthropic for it...
I love this type of practical optimization for DB queries. I’ve always liked how [rom-rb](https://rom-rb.org/learn/core/5.2/combines/) made the combine pattern easy to use when joins are slow. Nice to see this implemented at DB layer
Having a base level of trust in your government can have incredibly positive effects on society. In the US, I dream of the day where government could try out ideas without the pitchforks coming out. Sure, some ideas will be terrible and that’s OK as long as we throw them in the trash can.
There is nothing more saddening than the state of America’s train situation. It’s like we’re fundamentally incapable of understanding the value of shared infrastructure.
In the rare case that a state escapes the matrix and actually realizes the benefit, we can’t get the damn thing built.
I want a packed bullet train, not a fucking slow private train car.
Land was granted to the railroads with the agreement that they would run passenger rail services. When passenger rail became so unprofitable that it was bankrupting rail companies, they lobbied to make it the governments responsibility to move people around and leave them to make money shuffling freight.
Part of the way this worked was that USPS was actually paying for a lot of the rail services to deliver mail (which is also what the government wanted more so than passenger rail service.) The moment USPS pulled contracts in favor of long-distance airmail the whole model went belly-up.
Most rails were not land grant. Those were what you read about in history, but most had to buy their own land. Land grant mostly was for places where today almost nobody lives and even less back then.
Unlikely. Because they tend to be close-coupled units with distributed power and traction control. In case of anything Talgo-related with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobs_bogie 's even more so.
American trains are the best in the world - at freight. even overall I'd call us rail best in the world - the state of freight rail is that bad in most of the world.
of course people see passanger trains and don't think of freight. However that is missing the true picture.
That is a factor in India's favor, but there are a lot of other factors. Overall India just doesn't move that much freight when you examine everything so I still give the point the the US despite things not being perfect.
Of course how you weigh the various factors in subjective. The more important take away is there are lots of different things in the world and you should be working on where your weaknesses are not trying to claim you are great despite them. (I'm only claiming US good here in reaction to the passenger focus - I'm aware of plenty of problems with US rail that are not on topic so I'm not giving indication of being aware. I don't know you, hopefully you are honest about the shortcomings of whatever your system is and working on fixing them where it it appropriate)
The USA moves an incredibly insane amount of bulk goods by rail ridiculously long distances.
It’s so insane that it’s probably too cheap and we should do something else, but there are trains full of petroleum because a pipeline hasn’t been built.
And if coal is being brought to Newcastle it likely crossed the USA in a bulk train.
Strangely enough, Florida, of all places seems to be having really good success with their Brightline rail network. The initial system runs from Miami to Orlando, with a few stops in between. They're planning on expanding up north and east into the panhandle. Financially things are a bit dicey, but it got built, and it's reliable. Ridership is increasing, which takes cars of the road, and property values in the areas it stops are going up. Meanwhile California doesn't even have their tiny "initial operating segment" built, and is projecting to be up to 3-4x their original budget of 33 billion dollars.
This is an important example; Brightline feels qualitatively different from Amtrak and they get points for actually delivering new passenger rail service. They have a newer, cleaner, faster product. I rode once from Orlando to Boca and sat next to some British rail fans who went out of their way to try "the new train" on their way to a cruise out of Ft. Lauderdale.
Unfortunately despite significant capital investment to run double track on the FEC corridor from West Palm to Miami (their initial route before expanding north), they and the FEC have been unable/unwilling to do much about the fundamental flaw of rail in densely populated South Florida: at-grade crossings, many in no-horn zones because nearby residents have lobbied for that. This has been a problem for decades even when the line was freight-only.
All too predictably, a recent investigation [1] found Brightline is the deadliest passenger railroad in the US. Good data visualization and sobering reporting in that article. The railroad wants to socialize the costs of upgrading the crossings but of course privatize the profits. That said, I feel communities that want the density/development benefits of "transit" should be prepared for the costs of achieving that safely.
> All too predictably, a recent investigation [1] found Brightline is the deadliest passenger railroad in the US.
Gosh, why won't those awful railroad do something to stop their trains from suddenly and completely unpredictably swerving into automobiles?!?
There ought to be a law requiring them to put up signs to notify motorists about the hazard these big dangerous trains that can just suddenly appear out of nowhere. We should also demand bright flashing lights on the fronts of trains as well, so the public can see them at night.
Additionally, I know this might be controversial, I think they should install some kind of automatic motorized "gate" with flashing red lights anywhere that a train might flitter near a roadway. The gate would block the road any time a train is nearby to prevent anyone from getting close to the train. In my imagining, railroads would be required to post signs at these "crossing gates" with the phone number of a 24/7 staffed call center that can stop trains if a car is stuck near the gates or the gates are working.
Boy, I sure wish someone would have thought to install basic precautions like these before allowing these trains to just dart all over the place, willy-nilly.
Brightline missed ("deferred") a bond payment last month:
> Brightline, the private rail line linking Orlando to Miami, refinanced $985M of junior debt at a record-high 14.89% yield, reflecting deep investor concern after delaying a July interest payment on $1.2B in munis. The company, already downgraded deeper into junk by S&P and Fitch, faces falling ridership (53% below projections) and revenue (67% below estimates), plus a potential cash shortfall this quarter without an equity infusion.
The only halfway competent rail in the US is that northeast corridor in New England. Everything else is crap. And even that northeast corridor is only halfway competent. That people are raving about any of the rail in the US only betrays a lack of use of many foreign rail services. Particularly those in Asia.
It’s sad, because I believe we have the ability to outdo everyone, but we can’t get it done.
Auto Train is a great train within the constraints of the existing system (turns a passenger train into a car hauling freight and that’s so valuable people take the trade-offs).
Well there was that whole genocide of Native Americans thing. And that Civil War thing where half the country was killing the other half. Black people were slaves, women couldn't vote (or own property, or a bank account, etc), being gay was illegal, the Irish were the immigrant whipping boys. Then there was the Jim Crow era, WWI, the Depression, Prohibition, WW2, McCarthyism, the Korean War, Vietnam (when the last Jim Crow laws were repealed).
But, sure, right now is the most depressing time in US history.
To be clear women gained the right to have bank accounts in 1974.
American Indian parents didn't gain the right to decide on their children's schooling until 1978.
The recency of these atrocities never ceases to surprise me. It's incredible how long we keep up barbaric practices and then how quickly they finally come to an end.
Marriage equality in the United States is only 10 years old. Anyone remember the debates as recently as the early 2010s? How many of us have high school diplomas older than any gay marriage certificate in the United States of America? It's absolutely ridiculous to look at arguments made barely over a decade ago about a thing that is now completely normalized and benign.
The legal right to open a bank account in her own name was codified at the federal level in 1974, but that's all it was - codification. Women had already gained that right on a state-by-state basis prior to 1900.
It's technically true, but it hides the actual reality.
> The legal right to open a bank account in her own name was codified at the federal level in 1974, but that's all it was - codification. Women had already gained that right on a state-by-state basis prior to 1900.
What's your source on this? What I seem to be able to find that seems consistent is:
* California was the first state to guarantee women the right to independently open bank accounts in 1862.
* Some individual banks not subject to a state mandate to do so chose to allow women (often with restrictions, conditions, e.g. relating to marital status, that did not apply to men) to open accounts independently.
* I can't find any source that indicates that being able to open independent depository accounts on the same basis as men was nationally acheived state by state as a legal right at all, much less prior to the 1900s.
* There's a common, consistently unsourced claim that the right to open an account (but not to be free of discrimination in terms, or to access credit on equal terms to men, etc.) was generally guaranteed by the states "in the 1960s"; but at least several sources expresses skepticism of this consistently unsourced claim and suggests it may be a myth originating in the fact taht Canada protected women's right to open bank accounts in 1964.
* Technically, women didn't get federal protection of a right to open bank depository accounts in their own name without discrimination in 1974, either, they got a right to equal treatment by institutions issuing credit. This had a side effect of guaranteeing equal access to those depository accounts that came with credit features, because those constituted issuing credit.
So, when did women federally get guaranteed equal treatment in bank depository accounts indepedently of those that also count as issuing credit? The same time that was guaratneed on the basis of race -- never. (There have occasionally been efforts to address this, and other permitted-disccrimination effects of the fact that banks are not included as public accommodations under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but none have passed that explicitly did so; the CFPB's power under the CFPA to address "unfair practices" was used to target race, gender, and other discrimination in financial services not subject to the ECOA or CRA, but that that was within the scope of "unfair practices" was a matter of agency rules and interpretation, not explicit in statute.)
“Actual reality” is women actually being able to open their own independent accounts. The laws you cited are technicalities. The history of civil liberties in this country is full of examples of institutions simply refusing to do the right thing until forced.
Ask your nearest boomer woman when she actually opened her own bank account without the approval of a man. I bet the results will surprise you.
My mom couldn’t deposit her babysitting money in rural Idaho without a signature from my grandfather. She couldn’t independently buy a car with that babysitting money. Her younger brother of course could. She rightly remembers this injustice.
Regardless of the laws or when they were passed the idea of financial discrimination against women is completely outside the Overton window today but it was the norm in living memory.
I bet the result won't surprise me. It might surprise you, though. My mother toured the US with a friend in 1960 and never had any trouble with banking. Not with getting an account, nor writing checks, nor withdrawing cash.
I'm not surprised your mother couldn't get a bank account without an adult cosigner if she was a minor. I had the same problem.
The interstate system was originally built so that the army could move quickly from one place to another in the event of a war. I love how things happen in America.
I’d be curious to hear a follow-up article about what Palantir doesn’t do. For better or worse, I think we are living in a time where companies should take principled stands about anti-features.
It’s good to build in all of these optional data and privacy knobs, but I fear that’s not enough.
Iran believes in martyrdom, which absolutely changes the reasoning. They would destroy Israel in a heartbeat even if it meant losing 90% of their population.
Don't confuse religious rhetoric with actual state behavior.
In Iran’s case the highest religious authority has repeatedly issued a fatwa declaring the use of nuclear weapons forbidden.
Pakistan’s army motto invokes jihad, yet it has treated its arsenal as a shield against invasion so far, not a ticket to paradise.
Israel’s so-called Samson Option evokes a biblical suicide attack, but I doubt they'll use nukes for anything but deterrent.
North Korean propaganda urges citizens to die for the Leader, and I'm sure there are other nations I've not listed who's dominant religions have some sort of martyrdom idea, which use nukes as deterrents.
Look at political interests, command structures, and the costs of escalation, not whether a nation honors death in battle (which one doesn't?)
I first read this as referring to Trump but I can't quite place the rest of the comment. Do you mean whoever is in charge of Iran or is it a way of saying both/either?
Supreme Leader (officially Supreme Leadership Authority) is the head of state of Iran, combining both political and religious ultimate power, appointed for life.
Sad