Mass transit sounds utopian but is mostly nonsensical to Canadians who live outside of the few big cities and understand how goofy it would be to put thought into it. Toronto and Ottawa and Montreal don't represent the rest of the country, but unfortunately their voices steer policy in ways that don't serve the rest of the country very well.
Buses are a thing of the past in Canada, they're far too slow and the countryside is too spread out to make feasible routes. They also used to cost almost as much as a plane ticket and take 10x the time. When intercity lines outside dense population centers DID exist they were pretty much empty all the time, hence their extinction.
High speed rail could only serve major centers across the country. Other than the Toronto to Montreal corridor, population centers along the rail lines are too far apart. For example the distance between Toronto Ontario and Kenora Ontario is roughly 1500+km, so a high speed rail trip would still take 6-8 hours between them at best. The train would be mostly empty too because there's just not a lot of people going between non-major cities. It's not like just because a rail line appears between places people are going to start going between those places all that much more. There's just no way the operation costs for high speed rail would be covered by fares from a handful of people.
Air transportation is only good for longer trips between two major centers in Canada. If you're going to/from
smaller regional centers for most of Canada the commercial airports don't even exist, and if they do the flights are infrequent and the costs to fly in/out of them are absurd and the flights might even take far longer than just driving. For example to fly between Kelowna BC and Kamloops BC, a 150km drive, costs $300-$500+ for the ticket and takes about 5 hours (not including travel to/from the airport, check-in time + waiting at the gate + waiting for luggage) due to a stop in distant Vancouver. It's just not feasible to airlines to have short direct routes, so they don't. But again you're not going to find airports with commercial flights for about 90% of the towns in the country because the towns are small and don't have airports (except if they don't have roads to connect them like in the north).
To summarize, unless you don't go anywhere or you're only going between Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal by train or flying between distant cities or in a remote village, you're likely going to want to use a car otherwise the alternatives can be absurd.
You're kind of handwaving away the fact that most of the country lives in major centres.
Connecting just the majoriest of cities, the Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Toronto/Hamilton, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec, and Halifax metro areas would cover, by some quick math, over half the country's population already. You'd get a good chunk more if you add in the rest of the Golden Horseshoe - Waterloo/Kitchener, London, Windsor, Kingston - and a few other major regional centres (your Sudburys or what have you) to break up the trip.
A hub-and-spoke model - with high-speed rail connecting those major centres, conventional rail connecting those to smaller - but still regionally significant - large cities like Kelowna and Kamloops, and then buses from there to further flung places would easily cover a more-than-sizable majority of the country's travel needs.
On the one hand - part of the reason for poor ridership - and thus poor cost efficiency - of buses and trains is a consequence of a 20th century planning mindset that prioritized car infrastructure. And it was a vicious cycle. Service was infrequent and slow, so people preferred cars; people preferred cars, so more infrastructure was built for cars; fewer people road the trains or buses, so economies of scale got worse, service was made even more infrequent and funded even less...so more people buy cars. More people will ride trains and take buses if they run more frequent and are faster, especially as the cost of operating a personal vehicle has gone up. If you build it they'll come and all.
But on the other hand, to me much of your cost analysis is moot. Trains and buses won't make much money in ticket sales - well, so what? How much do roads for cars make in "ticket sales"? The governments have happily funded car-related infrastructure for decades despite the fact that they don't, directly, get a penny back from it. Why do rail and bus have to play by different rules?
I get what you're saying, in effect a chicken and egg paradox with cars vs public transit. I think that's a fair argument when it comes to commuter transit, but ultimately the horses have already left the barn. The vast majority of the country is now set up for car dependency (except in about 4 cities), and considering the climate it's going to be almost impossible to compel our fat aging population to stand in -20 degree weather waiting for a bus or train to get groceries unless you're 25 years old and have an abundance of time and energy.
To your other point, the hub and spoke trigonometry doesn't apply to Canada, the population's not laid out in that way. It's already for the most part a linear layout produced by a set of parallel competing rail lines running a couple hundred km from the US border. The rail was the factor that made the majority of the country's settlements. In America or other countries I think your point is absolutely fair though, because there's actually vertical girth to the nation that makes an actual hub and spoke system feasible.
Ultimately though I just don't believe anyone would use a train to spend 15-20 hours to get from Toronto to Calgary on high speed rail. Or even 4-6 hours to get from Vancouver to Calgary (likely not possible anyway considering the terrain). They're going to fly.
And almost no one is going to take a train from Regina to Winnipeg when they absolutely need a car at their destination to do anything anyway. Even the proposition of connecting Calgary to Edmonton is massively ridiculed because people understand how exceptionally light-weight your trip must be to forgo a vehicle at either end for the sake of saving maybe an hour by taking a train. It just seems silly considering the realities.
I was writing code for a Raspberry Pico and a beginner at it. The Pico is hooked up to a little display with no documentation other than a few horrible convoluted and broken-english examples with hundred line functions, and I had no idea what to do to just display some things on this little screen.
So I simply dumped the code examples into ChatGPT and said "Given these examples that display text and boxes on a screen, can we write a simpler interface and straightforward small functions for the display code?"
And it was done.
This wasn't code I wanted to mess with, I really just wanted to build my application rather than spend any time messing with the code to interact with this proprietary display. It was fantastic!
I've been in the web development industry for roughly 17 years and loved most of it until Agile took over.
Now everything is reduced to ticking off tasks and almost zero room for creativity. Meetings after meetings. Overcomplicated development workflows, or really just everything is overcomplicated. Twenty people to do the job of two, checkups, check-ins, checkouts, checkboxes. Gratuitous positivity makes any genuine gratitude hollow and meaningless.
I've taken the last two years off aside from a little bit of contracting to pay the bills and serves to remind me of how awful it's become. The only times I'm happy is when I can work on weekends or holidays and no one will be pinging me haha.
I've always seen this as a weird argument. Are people just opening and quitting their IDE/editors constantly all day?
So what if it takes 30 seconds to start if it's done once or twice a day (or once a week or less in my case). What the heck kind of environment are people working in or mindset are people in when they can't tolerate 8 seconds for their IDE to open? (And then use that as an argument why the IDE is inferior.)
It sounds like I had a similar experience as you, I'm also 6'4". I had the largest Aeron and it was terrible, especially the hard plastic sides that pressed/cut into my outer thighs. The seat hurt after an hour or two without any real support under, and there was just no configuration that could be done to make any of it comfortable.
I'm not really capable of not-manspreading in order to minimize the Aeron seat side lip pain so one day I brought a belt to the office to tie my legs together so I could relax ... which helped but was just as ridiculous as it sounds. So I just went and bought my own chair instead for my home office and never went back to the office again.
Thanks for mentioning the Titan, it looks like my next chair!
You described my experience perfectly. I too have big thighs that make it hard to sit with my legs pressed together. 20 years of mountain biking will do that. Also I have some organs ther ethat make it hard to do that too.
I accidentally got th eOmega first, and it hasweird hard plastic in the seat at the sides that also pressed into my thighs, so I went for the Titan. No regrets. I got the cloth ones, not the fake leather. In my experience fake leather peels in 2 years.
What's more likely though: military experts who can't possibly know everything going in all aspects of not just the entire US military but also all of the world's militaries AND the private sector
- OR -
things are extraterrestrial in origin
I'm sure the are aliens out there, but I think jumping to the conclusion that all of these reports are alien technology leaps right over a ton of possible reasonable explanations.
I call it Made-By-A-Macitis because it's so common in this industry since MBP's are issued by default almost in web dev companies, which inevitably leads to weird scrollbars here and there on their startup websites until someone else finally reports it or a dev finally breaks down and tests it on any other non-Apple device.
> dev finally breaks down and tests it on any other non-Apple device
Why the need for an extra device? There's a setting in the System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars: "Always".
Or it will automatically show scroll bars if you're using a mouse.
If you're a web developer and your target audience is not limited to only macOS and mobile, you should have the Show scroll bars set to Always. I'm using a mbp for most of my web dev career and I've always caught these bugs during development.
What I do agree is that Windows or Linux makes this setting a default, which makes it more obvious. While testing on different devices is always better, it's not necessary to catch these trivial problems.
I imagine Trump's installed someone in charge of the USPS to destabilize it in a hurry in order to erode confidence in the USPS to be able to handle mail-in voting.
Perhaps he'll get the public behind him enough to somehow stop mail-in voting if the next few months the mail system falls apart. Or if not and he loses the election, he'll blame it on the incompetent mail service and demand an election redo or whatever Trumpy things he normally does when he loses.
It seems to me that it's everything to do with the election, nothing to do with improving the USPS.
Certainly a fire produces light in this wavelength, but also in many other wavelengths nearby, so since a narrow band seems to be the requirement for the eyesight improvement, it's probably not optimal.
Buses are a thing of the past in Canada, they're far too slow and the countryside is too spread out to make feasible routes. They also used to cost almost as much as a plane ticket and take 10x the time. When intercity lines outside dense population centers DID exist they were pretty much empty all the time, hence their extinction.
High speed rail could only serve major centers across the country. Other than the Toronto to Montreal corridor, population centers along the rail lines are too far apart. For example the distance between Toronto Ontario and Kenora Ontario is roughly 1500+km, so a high speed rail trip would still take 6-8 hours between them at best. The train would be mostly empty too because there's just not a lot of people going between non-major cities. It's not like just because a rail line appears between places people are going to start going between those places all that much more. There's just no way the operation costs for high speed rail would be covered by fares from a handful of people.
Air transportation is only good for longer trips between two major centers in Canada. If you're going to/from smaller regional centers for most of Canada the commercial airports don't even exist, and if they do the flights are infrequent and the costs to fly in/out of them are absurd and the flights might even take far longer than just driving. For example to fly between Kelowna BC and Kamloops BC, a 150km drive, costs $300-$500+ for the ticket and takes about 5 hours (not including travel to/from the airport, check-in time + waiting at the gate + waiting for luggage) due to a stop in distant Vancouver. It's just not feasible to airlines to have short direct routes, so they don't. But again you're not going to find airports with commercial flights for about 90% of the towns in the country because the towns are small and don't have airports (except if they don't have roads to connect them like in the north).
To summarize, unless you don't go anywhere or you're only going between Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal by train or flying between distant cities or in a remote village, you're likely going to want to use a car otherwise the alternatives can be absurd.