I used one for 10-15 years, and the extra column of characters definitely were bad for RSI. My right ring finger’s tendon was impacted the most. The extra reach to arrows, the enter key, etc. were too much for me. I went back to a US layout and don’t have issues now.
I’ve thought about similar apps, and gave up on the end because allergies were to complex to surface through logging. What type of allergies and tracking were you working on?
The most common ones in food and the most common ones in the air.
Our idea was to track how people react, compile a log and have it processed so that we can tell them - yup you have this one allergy because of this pattern of what you ate, did, the air you breath etc. based on the evidence submitted.
It was a very long "LOG" but if people were serious about compiling it and didn't l eave things blank, the folks on our med team were certain we could have given them a "cure" that worked for their allergy.
Ofc, this wouldn't work with super extreme cases where you're allergic to a very specific uncommon thing. but this is a 80/20 solution.
Thanks for that. In my case I suffered guessing and tracking for years before I gave in and had extensive tests done. As for cures, that’s another story.
I don't think Tesla would have been possible if Toyota hadn't blasted the way for them. Before Toyota's work people didn't think any kind of EV was practical.
The classic business book on disruptive innovation, produced before the Prius existed, shows that people who cared actually knew better.
EVs were not viable until battery technology improved enough. Batteries have been improving about 7%/year. Based on those figures from the 1990s and an estimate of minimum acceleration, range, and recharge time to be acceptable on the road, EVs were predicted to become viable for the mass market around 2020.
Guess what. Those trends held and EVs became viable for the mass market around 2020. :-)
This is well put. I understand most of this now, but Talk about things I wish I understood in my early career. Along the lines of performance reviews, I've had HR try to negotiate demotions for my team members who were doing on target work. So when it comes to performance reviews, I always suspect that HR may have a metric on resource costs.
Thanks for this. It’s exactly what I’m interested in as I play with my Garmin and kayak this summer! I loved Strava in the early days, but as it tries to be a full social network, it’s lost much of its charm for me. I’m more interested in routes and stats, than what some athlete is doing in Chamonix.
This drives me nuts too. I search for “COVID Tokyo news” and it takes me to a government website (https://stopcovid19.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/en/), when what I want to do is see all the latest news indexed by google.
Amen. I miss results that aren’t just SEO optimizations. Sites like this hurt the quality of the web by suppressing results that are what people are searching for.
Good question. It sounds strange to me too. I wonder if there’s some unintuitive loophole like the paper itself doesn’t write political articles and sources them from other places.
501(c)(3)s can write political articles. They just can't engage in overt political activity. For example, my understanding is that a non-profit shouldn't endorse a candidate and certainly shouldn't make political donations or otherwise actively participate in a political campaign. They're not prohibited from covering a campaign or writing about proposed legislation though.
No, it's just what a 501(c)(3) is: a religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational organization, or a handful of other more specialized causes. Note that like a corporation, a 501(c)(3) is allowed to spend a portion of its funds on lobbying, it just can't be the prime focus.
There are other non-profit organization types that are specifically suited for political action. Labor unions are 501(c)(5) and often very political. But most political organizations are regulated under section 527 of the code.
The reason is simple: different codes require different reporting requirements. The 501 codes are heavily scrutinized by the IRS to make sure they are legitimate charitable causes. 527 orgs are overseen by the FEC to make sure that they obey political campaign financing laws. The reporting requirements for both are different.
It’s an incentives problem in the United States. In Japan, for example, the railways are private (so they need to turn a profit) and you usually have supermarkets and department stores on the stations. The stations are the hub. When you look at commuter lines into large cities in the US, you are driving hours to a parking lot with nothing but a platform near by.
As I understand it, railway companies in Japan are real estate companies in disguise. They own the land around the stations and make a significant chunk of their money from that. Real estate around train stations is quite valuable.
I think you mean several miles. Which is why the PLSS grid looks like a checkerboard out west. Alternating sections for the public and the RR companies.
It's legal and it's a model being increasingly adopted in the US, for better or worse. In the NYC metro area, both Port Authority and NJ Transit are visibly leaning on this model to drive revenue.
It's also a geographic, real-estate, and political problem. There's not enough density in enough areas with enough last-mile coverage for trains to work like other countries.
Many cities solve this chicken and egg problem by building the necessary density next to the train station. Hong Kong and Japan are the most famous examples, but it works in Singapore and large chunks of Europe as well (although Parisian banlieues may not be the best model of urban planning for other reasons...).
That falls under "political" problem. Who's going to build it? Who's paying for it? Where are they getting the land? Is it existing rail lines or new ones?
The obstacles are known, they need to be overcome, and that's very difficult in the 3rd-biggest country by population and land area with an incredibly diverse set of national and regional governance and cultures.
I have no idea why you think it has to be “twice as good” or what all that even means.
With that behind us, nobody’s proposing high speed rail from San Diego to Boston, just LA to SF and along the eastern corridor. And we can’t event have that. Let’s start small.
I don't know the full list of requirements, but a route has been chosen, some number of federal approvals have been granted, some regulatory hurdles passed, and supposedly two federal approvals remain.
The route is easier (engineering and cost-wise), due to geography, than the California rail, or anything in the Eastern corridor, and to keep it even easier they're running it along existing utility corridors where possible to further reduce the amount of private land access they have to contend with:
It means that unless the trains are moving at 400mph with perfect comfort, free wifi, and a price of $20, nobody cares.
LA to SF is a 1 hour flight as cheap as $50, with the same last-mile effort and total trip time as a train. Airlines are also elastic to meet demand without major capex.
So who's going to spend the 100s of billions to buy the land and build a line for a 2-3x slower travel option that will take a century to be paid back? California is actually trying to do this and has failed miserably because the land and infrastructure costs alone make the project infeasible.
How fast is this train going? And you still need to get to/from the station. At 200mph it'll also be a 3-4 hour ordeal at least, and more if there are stops in the middle.
Typically, the commercial speed of high-speed trains is about 300-350km/h.
> And you still need to get to/from the station.
Train stations tend to be located in the city center, not 50km away.
> At 200mph it'll also be a 3-4 hour ordeal at least, and more if there are stops in the middle.
Madrid-Barcelona takes less than 3 hours, and starts/ends near the city center (check Atocha and Barcelona Santa).
Unlike airplanes, the bulk of the trip is spent sitting comfortably in your cozy chair with plenty of leg room, internet access, electric outlets, no noise or pressure fluctuation, and a nice landscape to enjoy.
This thread has gone off the rails. The point isn't that trains are more comfortable than planes. That's obvious. It's that a train is not currently viable compared to the existing airline routes.
The US and California are not spending > $100B to build this. Even with all that comfort, people want cheap and fast. Talking more about how nice trains are makes no difference to actually getting one built unless you have a plan on how to acquire all the money, real estate and political will to get it done.
And you have wifi/mobile-net, comfortable seating, a table, power socket.
Now, that said, if the stations are not connected to the cities they are in, then that's a problem. And maybe this is a near unsolvable one, due to costs.
The train is also slower than a simple speed and distance calculation would suggest.
The route won't be as straight as the route for an aircraft. Problems along the route (tight curve, noise limit, etc.) will create low-speed zones. Every town along the way will demand a stop, so the train has to slow for a stop before even reaching full speed.
LA to SF isn't a 1 hour flight. LA to SF is: you start at downtown SF, 45 minutes later you arrive an hour early at SFO for your 1 hour 30 minute block-time flight to LA where you then take a 45 minute taxi ride to your final destination.
That's a total of 3.75 hours end to end, assuming no fog hits you at SFO, as it does on the regular. That's within spitting distance of a rail link that allow you to jump off anywhere along the way. It's by no means 2-3X slower if you take into account the entire process, with no TSA, starting at your origin and ending at your actual destination.
For instance Ottawa to Montreal is a "17 minute flight" that takes an hour of block time, and an hour on either end, for a total of 3h, or you could take the 1h 30m train ride along standard-speed rail for $20 USD. Trains can easily be faster taking into account externalities, and much more pleasant.
They usually do in fact have free wifi, better comfort, and a $20 price point -- specifically because as you point out, they're competing against air travel.
Hundred of billions is again a weird, defeatist argument. California has failed because infrastructure in America is not about building infrastructure, it's about graft, and if infrastructure gets built along the way, that's fine too. That's the saddest part, honestly.
Honestly, this is kind of the textbook example of defeatism.
For instance Ottawa to Montreal is a "17 minute flight" that takes an hour of block time, and an hour on either end, for a total of 3h, or you could take the 1h 30m train ride along standard-speed rail for $20 USD.
The even better comparison, while not in America, is the route from Tokyo to Osaka. The distance (506km) is almost the same as from LA to San Francisco.
The Shinkansen takes between 135 and 153 minutes. Granted, you have to get from Shin Osaka to the city center; an additional 4 minute train ride or you take the subway.
Let's not even get into the comparison of the travel experience between gliding in a quiet, serene manner on spacious seat past Fuji San with the experience you get in a middle seat with a 29" seat pitch in economy class of a domestic flight in the US.
Also, if you invest a few hundred yen into a bento at Tokyo station let's not even think about the comparison of the culinary delights awaiting you for the trip.
That's why I said "with the same last-mile effort and total trip time as a train".
Planes cruise at 500mph. Trains at 200mph will take 2.5x longer at best, assuming there aren't any stops along the way, and you still need last-mile transport to get to your destination. Trains are not going to be faster than planes at this distance, and that differential only gets worse as distance increases.
Meanwhile economic realities aren't "defeatist". There are much better things to spend $100B on than a slower alternative for a few people to travel between 2 specific cities. Trains may be the answer in the future, but there's a lot more that needs to change first.
Train stations tend to be located right downtown whereas airports, for various reasons, far outside. You can't exclude that delta.
SFO is in San Mateo, the next county over -- almost 15 miles away. Oakland airport is closer to 20 miles away. A minimum of 30 minutes by car, 40 minutes by Bart from downtown SF. On the other hand, the high-speed rail link would pick up at the Salesforce Transit Center (Embarcadero Station) at the corner Howard and Fremont, stopping at San Jose Diridon station.
Yes plaines are fast in the air, that's not a surprise. However, they're epically slow when parked at the gate while you clear security, epically slow as they taxi, dead stopped as they wait to take off due to ATC hold and weather issues, and similarly dead stopped when they're waiting for the previous plane to clear the gate at the destination airport, while you wait in line to get off, and while you wait for your bags, and while you wait for your taxi.
C'mon now. "Plane go fast" is just a small part of the story, and I'm an AA EXP.
Again, I think the infrastructure costs in the US tend to be massively overinflated due to graft instead of actual cost.
This conversation has gone off a tangent. The comparison isn't about trains being more comfortable than planes (that's obvious). It's about planes vs trains as a transportation option.
It's not viable to build a long-distance rail line given the same total time (even if more comfortable since people want cheap and fast), especially not at the cost of $100B+.
If you want to call it inflated prices because of graft then fine, but that means you need to solve that first. Which goes back to my original point that there are many other obstacles that need to be overcome before high-speed rail makes sense here.
You haven’t provided any data to show it doesn’t make sense to build a 300 mile long train link between SF and LA other than your gut telling you (wrongly) that travel time would be 2-3X longer when plenty of other examples all over the world show otherwise.
It doesn't make sense because they did a dreadful job of controlling costs. China pays between $17M and $21M per kilometer to build high-speed rail in challenging terrain, and even Europe only pays $25-39M per kilometer. [1]
California on the other hand was going to spend $100B for 840km (phase 1, beyond the central corridor on both sides) or $119M per kilometer. That's obviously 7X China's cost and 5X Europe's cost. Yes, that Europe, the one with the onerous regulations.
It's hard to point at California's staggeringly inefficient attempt as a reason why rail is bad.
A better starting point would be Via Rail's corporate plan 2017-2021 [2].
Montreal-Ottawa travel time is 13% faster by train than car, and 30% faster than air. Average fare is $48.50 CAD ($35 USD). For comparison, a flight would be $167 to $186 each way, 4X more expensive and 30% longer end to end.
Numbers are more comparable on the Toronto to Ottawa and Toronto to Montreal corridors, with train travel coming in approximately the same time end to end as a flight but 25% less expensive. This corridor is highly competitive and similar distance to SF/LA.
Rail does in fact satisfy your requirements for short trips.
Emperor Bezos from Elysium will instruct Count Musk from Mars to finally reinvigorate the barren wastelands of old Earth by laying hyperloops of chinese provenance across. The mutated apes will scream with joy.
There are some odd outliers such as Salt Lake City, which has pretty low density, but the transit system is well used. It's far from universal service but in the areas it serves, it is rather popular with a wide cross section of the population.
They poked the wrong dragon. It’s impressive that CF invested the resources in fighting them. What’s unfortunate is the number of small companies that have been killed by patent trolls.
