To everyone saying SF-LA already has plenty of flights, consider the following benefits of trains:
- No need to worry about how much luggage I have. It will likely be a minimal charge if there is even one
- Trains are more comfortable with larger seats, usually
- Trains will make tickets cheaper, putting downward pressure on flight tickets as well (competition)
- Less security theatre and less worrying about what I can and can't carry
- You can still have good internet access
This is in addition to the environmental benefits of trains.
Perfect is the enemy of good. More sections and branches can be added. Piecemeal is how transportation infrastructure grows everywhere. It does not come to fulfill everyone's needs all at once.
You know most of these are business travelers right?
The last thing I want (as a former consultant who did like 400k plus miles flying) is to spend more time traveling.
Not to mention flights booked out in advance are like sub 200 bucks, or even 100-150. It takes like 2-3 hours from leaving home to arriving at destination.
Have you flown between SFO and LAX? SFO is easy to get to, no real headaches. So is San Jose and Oakland. LA is a hellhole when it comes to getting to an airport regardless of where you are in that sprawl. LAX is a nightmare unless you’re already working in El Segundo. Otherwise you’ll fly out of Burbank or the other one I forget the name now depending on where you are.
Once you have flown like 4-5 weeks in a row you learn how to board your flight just-in-time. I’d almost always arrive at the gate like 5-10 minutes before departure and never missed a single flight.
The train is slow AF and from experience riding Amtrack (daily for over a year) if it’s anywhere similar to that the train will be delayed more often than the flight.
I’m sure Europe has nice trains. I’ve rode the best trains in the world in Japan.
America is a completely different dynamic and is not at all comparable to Europe nor Japan.
The culture here has always revolved around cars (objectively better IMO for ME, I don’t like tiny cramped cities like in EU or Japan), and our roads are big and our buildings are large and really nice. New builds especially in cities like SF or LA.
SF to LA is about 400 miles. Going from LA to SD is another 120 miles. Spain by itself is like 150 miles wide and 500 miles long. It’s about the same distance, sure, but totally different dynamics. It’s hard to explain unless you’ve been here.
Besides, nobody really has a need to travel between LA and SF that regularly unless it’s for business. People might visit their families every month or two. But most of the travel is for business.
Comparing Europe and America is apples to oranges.
I live in America. I have all my life. I've ridden on nice trains in Europe and Japan. The culture in the last 80-100 years has revolved around cars, but before that relied heavily on trains.
I much prefer riding a spacious train to riding in a cramped airplane. I like to be able to get up and walk around while the train is traveling. I prefer the minimal security processes on a train to an airplane.
Driving 6-10 hours is pretty miserable. I would much rather take a train or fly unless there are specific reasons why I need to drive.
It may be like comparing apples and oranges, but some people prefer apples. The good thing is that you can still eat oranges if you like.
Right but have you flown for business every few days like that? It seems like you’re still thinking about leisure travel between LA and SF.
My whole point was about business flight. Sure for leisure I’ll take a train. But if I’m flying for work I’d rather deal with a consistent (mostly, compared to any rail I’ve taken) experience.
I would not describe LA to SF as a consistent experience. I had an 8:30 PM flight delayed until 1:30 AM. Actually, the only consistency I've had with those flights is that they are consistently delayed.
I've heard that the flight delays cascade throughout the day. So if the first flight is 10 minutes delayed, all SF-LA flights are delayed for the rest of the day. Since SFO has a lot of fog, my understanding is that it's often delayed.
Maybe it's okay coming from Burbank, but I live on the Westside so I have to take LAX.
I would love to have another option. Ideally, a train would decrease the load on the airlines so that they could handle delays better.
To answer your question directly, no I don't have to do work trips every couple of days, but I do have work trips from LA to SF every couple of months.
> Thankfully California is, last I checked, in one country
You can replicate the experience between Caltrain and BART.
To my knowledge, the HSR will share tracks with other trains. That makes the sort of scheduling problems that make Amtrak a pain more of a possibility. Not a reason to shoot down the project. But a decent reason to take OP's concerns seriously.
Caltrain and BART are rarely delayed by a significant amount, and they run frequently enough. Not as much as I'd like, but frequently enough that you're not ever going to be waiting more than 30 minutes. I don't think it's comparable at all to a cross-country journey that may require switching trains and different jurisdictions. Heck, Caltrain shares its own track already and it does just fine, and HSR will mostly have its own track except when it needs to share with Caltrain.
30 minutes is a lot between just the Bay Area when the entire flight between LA and SF takes 90 minutes.
Not to mention, you have to get to and from the train station or airport.
For example from where I live in SF, it takes about 20 minutes (depending on traffic) to get to King St station. It takes about 30 minutes to get to SFO. If I was taking MUNI to king street, looking at like 40+ minutes plus walking.
I’m a seasoned traveler so I’ll get there JIT for my flight.
In LA, if I’m going to El Segundo or Santa Monica, it’s like 10-30 minutes uber. If I was going to Pasadena or La Canada I’d fly to Burbank.
So yes the train is a silly idea to start with, unless it would be direct from heart of LA to SF, going like 300 mph (it is not). Not to mention once you’re in LA you have to get to your final destination which might take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour or more. And LA has horrible public transit
This is of course a personal choice but I really can't understand people's insistence that a train that takes a single minute longer than a plane ride is inferior. I actually like planes, especially going down the California coast, which is pretty much every day of the year. But plane seats are cramped, and half the time you can't use your computer even if you wanted to. I usually fly from SJC if I want to go to LAX, and I think SFO and SJC are two of my favorite airports, but even then it's a bunch of walking to get to your terminal, and you're still going to be going through security. They're nothing like LAX, which is miserable in comparison, but an airport can only be so good.
But if we're going to talk about time: I don't agree with your numbers. SFO to LAX is like 50-60 minutes in the air. I feel like your 90 is a reasonable number for gate-to-gate. Arriving 30 minutes before departure at SFO will probably just get you to do your gate on time for last call on boarding. Add another 15 minutes to get out of LAX. Then, on both sides, whatever transportation you need to get to and from the airports, which I think is reasonable to cancel out when compared to the train.
For a train they're targeting a little over 2.5 hours for the journey. I can be outside in 5 minutes, and I can also feel comfortable arriving five minutes early. Let's be generous and say it takes 3 hours, curb to curb. The plane does the same in like 2-2.5 hours. I don't really see this being significantly different.
The train will use shared tracks. I will bet one million dollars it will run into scheduling issues and when you’re stuck on land it will suck. Source: former Amtrack customer. Same story, and I doubt a project that’s been mismanaged so far will fare any better if actually realized.
I take the Caltrain to work almost every day and it's on shared tracks (in fact it will the same shared tracks that HSR uses). It's rarely late by more than a few minutes.
Were there any serious claims that street lights would entirely eliminate crime? A "sizable reductions in nighttime outdoor index crimes" sounds like a pretty positive result.
I can't claim anything objectively because I never truly looked at it scientifically.
I simply come from bad neighborhoods and the amount of times I heard "shhh, don't go there, people will see you" from guys who clearly were looking to start for trouble, was substantial in its own right.
Anecdotal evidence, sure, but from a psychological point of view the people who want to steal or harm others feel much safer doing so in the darkness, I have found.
In Mechanical Engineering, this is 100% a thing with fluid dynamics simulation. You need to know if the output is BS based on a number of factors that I don't understand.
>How could theocratic states with no separation of religion and government score higher than India? How could a country with universal suffrage and constitutional rights rank below nations that didn’t even hold elections?
Since the article talks quite a bit about Sanjeev Sanyal, I think it might be interesting to point to some of his podcasts.
Similarly, India has taken criticism from the West over its more ambitious projects like Sardar Vallabhai Patel's statue, and the space program. So taking the West's word with a grain of salt is quite valid.
Further, the article points out that the government is trying to game the ranking while outwardly saying that they don't matter. This seems hypocritical at first glance but it also points out that having lower rankings affects investor confidence and borrowing rates. You can be against a broken system while still trying to appease it because it's not going to change immediately. The Indian Government needs to work within the system until something better can be created.
I am not fully supportive of everything the NDA government has done but I don't think there is another leader in India who can feasibly win an election right now and I refuse to support INC until they get rid of the Gandhi dynasty.
Also, please look at the podcast from this timestamp[2], where he further shows why people in general but Indians specifically should be skeptical of Western narratives. This is also supported by the book Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl
Sometimes I do find it bizzare when western media praises a theocratic absolute monarchy like Saudi Arabia for “modernizing” (by allowing women to drive and allowing them to not have chaperones) while simultaneously these same media organizations accuse a constitutional liberal democracy like India (which has strict separation of powers and an active independent Supreme Court) of somehow being authoritarian or fascist or some other slur.
The BJP is certainly authoritarian and fascistic, this is not contested. The country itself though probably isn’t. They failed to get an outright majority in the recent elections, and perhaps the main reason they still win is the opposition is completely incapable of reform (like the OP said they keep putting up members of the Gandhi family despite them losing elections repeatedly).
It's hard to define that - on average? In the long run? What would a Indian who is Muslim say - 'well, it's ok because on average or in the long run, it's ok'?
Every leader in the world gets criticized to some degree. It's nonsense to compare criticism of Vajpayee over nuclear tests with Modi or Gandhi rolling back freedom and democracy, and killing and brutalizing people.
Media sensationalism is everywhere. But I’ve become especially distrustful of these rankings and labels from random think tanks or nonprofits. A good example is the one the other day from “civicus that claimed civic freedoms were disappearing in the US even though no law has changed that would affect civil rights. When you look at their report it basically complains about political decisions rather than civic freedoms. I imagine the bias is 10x worse for India.
Civil rights are declining for immigrants, the press, speech - just because a law hasn't been passed doesn't mean rights haven't changed. The idea that it all depends on law is naive or disingenuous.
The entire premise of the Trump admin is that the President has enough control and power to significantly alter the functioning of the US government with no new laws being passed
WebKit for Windows is not in a particularly well-maintained state, where WebKit-GTK (which is probably what Orion for Linux is built with) is in reasonable shape since it’s already used by GNOME Web (aka Epiphany). That might have something to do with it.
The gap between the Windows and GTK ports is shrinking. Every JIT tier has been enabled for JSC on Windows[1], and libpas (the custom memory allocator) should get enabled soon.
The Windows port is moving from Cairo to Skia soon as well, matching the GTK port (though I think the focus is enabling the CPU renderer to start).
Webkit's CI (EWS) is running the layout tests on Windows, and running more tests on Windows is mostly a matter of funding the hardware.
There's a few things still disabled on the Windows port, some rough edges, and not a lot of production use (Bun and Playwright are the main users). It'd definitely be more work than Linux, but it's not as bad as you'd think.
The question is, is it better to wage a massive war that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars and many lives than to make an equal investment into the semi-conductor industry.
If anyone has heard Joe Armstrong's talk about how communication is limited by latency and data can only travel so fast. I think having smaller a partitions locally is an optimal point.
If You want global consistency then you'll have to either spend some time at runtime to achieve it, Have complicated protocols, fast networking, synchronized clocks.
Does this look like actor model (from Erlang) if you squint a bit?
You might also appreciate this talk on building a loosely related architecture using Erlang, though it doesn't implement an actor-per-database pattern – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huGVdGLBJEo
I was thinking something very similar. Once you've accepted any need at all for global state the next move is to reorient to minimizing it with horizontally scalable point local state and a small targeting dataset and tiered caching system.
- No need to worry about how much luggage I have. It will likely be a minimal charge if there is even one
- Trains are more comfortable with larger seats, usually
- Trains will make tickets cheaper, putting downward pressure on flight tickets as well (competition)
- Less security theatre and less worrying about what I can and can't carry
- You can still have good internet access
This is in addition to the environmental benefits of trains.
Perfect is the enemy of good. More sections and branches can be added. Piecemeal is how transportation infrastructure grows everywhere. It does not come to fulfill everyone's needs all at once.