I'll also add that my point of view is more nuanced than "Trains bad" -- Of the proven technologies I'd like to see have more widespread adoption, we know trolleys both tracked and trackless are proven and were in service in the worst conditions for 50 years before being converted to fossil fuel buses which are now being converted to what I consider objectively worse but more expensive battery electric buses, I think that's something we need to revisit in most cities. Similar to my support for hydroelectric and geothermal but my skepticism of widespread adoption of wind or solar -- One of them has a century of proven reliability under bad conditions, the other is always waiting for another breakthrough that's been 5 years off for 25 years.
Honestly, you should probably wait until closer to the end of the season to catch up. There's a lot of episodes with everyone talking at a table at first, we're just getting to the point that interesting things are happening.
I'd throw your logic right back at you.
Are you sure all the reasons I've given why trains aren't particularly popular in the sparse population of continental North America outside of specific high population density areas aren't the reasons why there are already trains in a limited number of places but other places that had trains for a long time saw passenger service end? Why are you so fixated on this one solution?
Have you ever heard the phrase “First they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world”? You might think it was someone inspirational who said it -- maybe Steve Jobs or Mahatma Gandhi? It was said by the recently convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes about the multi-billion fraudulent company Theranos she created and led.
As a technologist, I often end up having to be the person reminding everyone else about the reasons why promoted technologies aren't going to be the panacea the salesmen claim. Despite being a highly technical person who embraces technologies, I'm also a boots on the ground guy who has to make promises using technology and keep them professionally, so I'm used to having to be skeptical of technological claims because a lot of the time they aren't telling you the whole story.
As someone who works industrial maintenance, once the project team has their cake and their party and pat each other on the back for their successful project completed on time and under budget before moving onto the next, I remain to see what happens next, and I'm often personally accountable for trying to pick up the pieces when reality hits.
I often have to experience the reality of failed projects. Entire huge constructions that take tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and took huge amounts of resources to build sitting and rotting because they were sold on broken promises. It would shock you the waste that can just happen and after a lot of 16 hour days and perhaps even more material being used sometimes for months or years on end it's abandoned.
Besides that, as a scientist, I have to rely on the scientific method. You aren't trying to prove your point correct, you're trying to prove yourself wrong, and if you can't then maybe you're right. If there's a bunch of reasons it might go wrong that nobody is talking about, that doesn't mean it is going to go wrong, but it's a reason to be skeptical.
I'm open to being wrong, and I would like to be, but experience tells me to be careful because ignoring important details has often led to massive waste and at times it has led to massive human suffering.
You asked in another post, here's a link to a US government website showing fatality statistics for different forms of transportation and showing the extraordinary safety of the airline industry: https://www.bts.gov/content/transportation-fatalities-mode
Anyway, it's been a fun conversation.
Are you sure all the reasons I've given why trains aren't particularly popular in the sparse population of continental North America outside of specific high population density areas aren't the reasons why there are already trains in a limited number of places but other places that had trains for a long time saw passenger service end? Why are you so fixated on this one solution?
Have you ever heard the phrase “First they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world”? You might think it was someone inspirational who said it -- maybe Steve Jobs or Mahatma Gandhi? It was said by the recently convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes about the multi-billion fraudulent company Theranos she created and led.
As a technologist, I often end up having to be the person reminding everyone else about the reasons why promoted technologies aren't going to be the panacea the salesmen claim. Despite being a highly technical person who embraces technologies, I'm also a boots on the ground guy who has to make promises using technology and keep them professionally, so I'm used to having to be skeptical of technological claims because a lot of the time they aren't telling you the whole story.
As someone who works industrial maintenance, once the project team has their cake and their party and pat each other on the back for their successful project completed on time and under budget before moving onto the next, I remain to see what happens next, and I'm often personally accountable for trying to pick up the pieces when reality hits.
I often have to experience the reality of failed projects. Entire huge constructions that take tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and took huge amounts of resources to build sitting and rotting because they were sold on broken promises. It would shock you the waste that can just happen and after a lot of 16 hour days and perhaps even more material being used sometimes for months or years on end it's abandoned.
Besides that, as a scientist, I have to rely on the scientific method. You aren't trying to prove your point correct, you're trying to prove yourself wrong, and if you can't then maybe you're right. If there's a bunch of reasons it might go wrong that nobody is talking about, that doesn't mean it is going to go wrong, but it's a reason to be skeptical.
I'm open to being wrong, and I would like to be, but experience tells me to be careful because ignoring important details has often led to massive waste and at times it has led to massive human suffering.
You asked in another post, here's a link to a US government website showing fatality statistics for different forms of transportation and showing the extraordinary safety of the airline industry: https://www.bts.gov/content/transportation-fatalities-mode
Anyway, it's been a fun conversation.
One of my future books I'd like to do a sci-fi thinking about the neurological effects of having a brain implant that connects you to an AI or the Internet. One thing I've thought about is that a mind that simply has access to all the information won't have a reason to spend the energy on neurons for memory if it can just outsource that expensive function to machines. In that way you could end up fully dependent on your implant and if the Internet goes down or something you could have people who literally shut down like a web appliance when the network is down because their brains aren't wired to have critical infrastructure without the assistance provided by the implant's always online features.
Pretty sure thats Epstein's former personal assistant.
Hollywood in a nutshell: "I'm such a good person. Say, do you have any underage daughters or sons? Just asking for a friend, no reason"
Hollywood in a nutshell: "I'm such a good person. Say, do you have any underage daughters or sons? Just asking for a friend, no reason"
Not specifically, and my ability to speak Russian is non-existent so I can't even guess what the nature of the channel is.
"Carbon-free Steel" is a contradiction in terms. It's like saying hydrogen-free water. It's part of the fundamental make-up of the thing. It was a mistake I made as well in my 2009 study.
The steel itself gets its properties from carbon in an alloy with the iron. You can use hydrogen to make sure the steel is in an oxygen poor environment, but you can't replace hydrogen with carbon in the metallurgy of the metal.
So what's really going on here is that it's a reduction in carbon in one or two parts of the process, but it isn't carbon free steel even at the point of manufacture, just steel with reduced requirements for carbon emissions. Moreover, the mining process is very likely to require fossil fuels, as well as the processes for creating reagents and things like the anode mentioned in the article. I believe earlier I talked extensively about looking at the entire supply chain, because it's important not to just look at one part of the process to make assumptions about things being carbon neutral or good for the environment.
Another thing I need to remind you of is that every step using green energy will require a significant portion of the world's renewable electricity generation at scale. This is one of the things about doing stuff at an industrial scale, that something perfectly clean in a lab has a large impact at scale. If you're using electricity to heat the ore, electricity to run electrolysis, electricity to melt the refined iron, electricity to hydrolyze water for the blast furnace, that's each a step that will use significant amounts of renewable energy that will then not be available for other uses. Given that it must be base load electricity, that could be a significant problem.
With respect to your comments that trains slowing down for sections of track or for sharp turns would be also at risk while entering or leaving a station, there's a lot of risk analysis that goes into something like that because both situations are potentially dangerous.
There's a big difference between varying speed in a straight line and varying speed because you're going to hit a turn too fast, since failing to slow down at a station could potentially just mean going past the stop, whereas hitting a corner too fast could derail the entire train.
In London in 2016, an accident occurred on a railway track that was converted into light rail. The new rail stop needed a sharp turn to be added to the route. The turn required speed changes and the driver failed to change speed and blew the turn. The train derailed, landing on its side. 7 people were killed, 19 were seriously injured, and 42 recieved minor injuries.
However, stations are potentially dangerous places as well. A 2002 crash in England, one of a surprising number of deadly crashes in that time period, caused by a faulty set of points. It killed 5, severely harmed 10, hurt 70, and demolished a large part of the train station. There are also known major accidents where trains failed to speed up correctly or slow down correctly at a station causing deadly accidents.
Trains are as a matter of statistical fact less safe than planes. It's still safer than riding in a car, but when things go wrong they can go insanely, horribly wrong -- the deadliest train accident I was able to find killed almost 2000 people (though it wasn't directly related to speeding up, slowing down, or turning but rather a natural disaster). The deadliest aircraft disaster I'm aware of was in 1977, when a pair of 747s collided on the ground. Just as with rail where station stops are particularly dangerous parts of the trip, the most hazardous time for airplanes is when they're taking off and landing, and in that case 248 passengers on one plane and 335 on the other were killed, with only 61 people managing to escape, all while the planes were on the ground.
Unlike rail, airplanes are generally safe once in the air since they're not reliant on tracks and there aren't obstacles or unexpected situations such as railway crossings for vehicles or pedestrians, particularly when they're flying at high altitude since while it's true a plane that catastrophically fails at altitude is going to kill all aboard, that's typically not the way things happen. I'm aware of one example of that happening on an Air China flight in 2002 where a plane hit its tail on the runway during a difficult landing in 1980 and instead of fully replacing the damaged portion of the tail as the Boeing manual required, the technicians welded a patch on instead. That's a relatively unique example.
The steel itself gets its properties from carbon in an alloy with the iron. You can use hydrogen to make sure the steel is in an oxygen poor environment, but you can't replace hydrogen with carbon in the metallurgy of the metal.
So what's really going on here is that it's a reduction in carbon in one or two parts of the process, but it isn't carbon free steel even at the point of manufacture, just steel with reduced requirements for carbon emissions. Moreover, the mining process is very likely to require fossil fuels, as well as the processes for creating reagents and things like the anode mentioned in the article. I believe earlier I talked extensively about looking at the entire supply chain, because it's important not to just look at one part of the process to make assumptions about things being carbon neutral or good for the environment.
Another thing I need to remind you of is that every step using green energy will require a significant portion of the world's renewable electricity generation at scale. This is one of the things about doing stuff at an industrial scale, that something perfectly clean in a lab has a large impact at scale. If you're using electricity to heat the ore, electricity to run electrolysis, electricity to melt the refined iron, electricity to hydrolyze water for the blast furnace, that's each a step that will use significant amounts of renewable energy that will then not be available for other uses. Given that it must be base load electricity, that could be a significant problem.
With respect to your comments that trains slowing down for sections of track or for sharp turns would be also at risk while entering or leaving a station, there's a lot of risk analysis that goes into something like that because both situations are potentially dangerous.
There's a big difference between varying speed in a straight line and varying speed because you're going to hit a turn too fast, since failing to slow down at a station could potentially just mean going past the stop, whereas hitting a corner too fast could derail the entire train.
In London in 2016, an accident occurred on a railway track that was converted into light rail. The new rail stop needed a sharp turn to be added to the route. The turn required speed changes and the driver failed to change speed and blew the turn. The train derailed, landing on its side. 7 people were killed, 19 were seriously injured, and 42 recieved minor injuries.
However, stations are potentially dangerous places as well. A 2002 crash in England, one of a surprising number of deadly crashes in that time period, caused by a faulty set of points. It killed 5, severely harmed 10, hurt 70, and demolished a large part of the train station. There are also known major accidents where trains failed to speed up correctly or slow down correctly at a station causing deadly accidents.
Trains are as a matter of statistical fact less safe than planes. It's still safer than riding in a car, but when things go wrong they can go insanely, horribly wrong -- the deadliest train accident I was able to find killed almost 2000 people (though it wasn't directly related to speeding up, slowing down, or turning but rather a natural disaster). The deadliest aircraft disaster I'm aware of was in 1977, when a pair of 747s collided on the ground. Just as with rail where station stops are particularly dangerous parts of the trip, the most hazardous time for airplanes is when they're taking off and landing, and in that case 248 passengers on one plane and 335 on the other were killed, with only 61 people managing to escape, all while the planes were on the ground.
Unlike rail, airplanes are generally safe once in the air since they're not reliant on tracks and there aren't obstacles or unexpected situations such as railway crossings for vehicles or pedestrians, particularly when they're flying at high altitude since while it's true a plane that catastrophically fails at altitude is going to kill all aboard, that's typically not the way things happen. I'm aware of one example of that happening on an Air China flight in 2002 where a plane hit its tail on the runway during a difficult landing in 1980 and instead of fully replacing the damaged portion of the tail as the Boeing manual required, the technicians welded a patch on instead. That's a relatively unique example.
Canada's central bank blinked and just cut rates.
lol yay I love perpetual stagflation! Let's get to Back to the Future 2 and let it be 100 dollars for a can of coke!
lol yay I love perpetual stagflation! Let's get to Back to the Future 2 and let it be 100 dollars for a can of coke!
It occurs to me that 265 is a statistically insignificant number, especially given the extremely high chance being a single mom has of causing bad ends for your kids.
(Shit happens and sometimes you need to leave of course, but the data is so overwhelming that it seems to me like evidence of a poor psychologist not to recognize the material risk of one and the virtual impossibility of another)
(Shit happens and sometimes you need to leave of course, but the data is so overwhelming that it seems to me like evidence of a poor psychologist not to recognize the material risk of one and the virtual impossibility of another)
If he does his job once he gets in its going to be a painful period fixing everything up, but a lot of us are willing as long as there's a light at the end of the tunnel.
"of cooooourse if someone found that the vaccines were dangerous they'd want to publish immediately! The fact nothing has been published shows there's no evidence!"
No kidding.
I don't know how anyone could make a reductive statement that COVID restrictions and forced vaccinations saved lives when the realities are so much more complex.
-increased "deaths of despair" such as suicide, drug overdoses, and death by alcoholism immediately and directly due to lockdowns
-increased deaths due to abuse not being intervened because abused were legally stuck in the house with their abusers
-economic stress leading to long term effects due to poverty (and for idiot boomers who think the economy is going well because their 401(k)s are going up, most people don't have significant retirement savings or investments -- millions are putting stress on food banks because people who never had to use them before are going now, and there's tent cities in many cities that never had them before because so many people are being bumped out of permanent housing)
-Gen Z kids in high school and college have major problems due to subpar education. Reading, writing, and math competency levels are massively affected particularly among vulnerable communities which will have knock-on effects for generations we won't even know.
-Gen Alpha kids born immediately before or during the pandemic are developmentally delayed due to massively reduced exposure to critical stimuli early on in life which will have knock-on effects for generations we won't even know.
-Gen Alpha kids born earlier and so in kindergarten are facing early developmental setbacks such as poor socialization which will have knock-on effects for generations we won't even know.
-Donald Trump's project warpspeed by definition sped up development of COVID vaccines by speeding up basic testing, and by giving drug companies liability waivers so they could toss their Latest R&D out there without regard for long-term efficacy or long-term side-effects. Trump-haters correctly pointed out that it takes decades to properly test a vaccine, but magically forgot that fact when their political leaders took on vaccination as their authoritarian cause du jour. "Oh, a bunch of people didn't immediately die when they took the vaccine" you might counter, to which I'd point to many things that have long term effects such as cigarette smoking, asbestos, DDT, lead paint, or radioactive substances. To give it an immediate and obvious example of how long-term testing wasn't done and nobody really knew, it was originally stated that getting vaccinated was enough, but for people following along at home they'd be on like their 8th booster at this point.
-some might argue "oh none of this was the doctors fault, it was caused by the virus", but we have a growing body of evidence from official sources suggesting that the NIH was illegally funding coronavirus gain of function research in Wuhan and so there's a direct csusal link between fauci and the novel coronavirus.
-some might argue "the vaccine saves lives among the vulnerable such as cancer patients or the elderly", which I would potentially accept, except it wasn't just rolled out to people who were vulnerable and people who were worried and wanted additional protection, it was mandated to many people who were healthy and could have withstood the virus without taking experimental drugs and didn't want to take it but had to or lose their jobs or freedom to travel. Some countries following Americas lead forced everyone to get vaccinated period, and it was common for politicians to make certain levels of vaccination in the population conditions of easing restrictions, an authoritarian measure that took everyone's freedom hostage.
-it is now proven beyond any doubt that the federal government directly interfered with science, using levers behind the scenes to reward certain viewpoints and totally silence others. Besides the immediate harm from causing potentially false science to be published about the pandemic, the damage to science as an institution will have long lasting knock-on effects we can't predict and likely won't be able to measure given the dataset we have.
-the lockdowns and other measures such as mail-in voting can be seen as having a direct causal link to both left wing and right wing riots which even if you justify your own side's riots can at least be seen as harmful due to the other side's riots. These events have long tail effects I doubt we can easily measure, but increased political instability can have larger effects than even the most charitable COVID death tolls.
-the weakening of the west due to COVID measures could be seen as having a direct causal link to Putin's decision to invade Ukraine, seeing a moment of weakness as a good time to strike. Of course it is a complex issue and perhaps he would have done it anyway, but if he wouldn't have but for the intense weakening of the west due to the self-imposed measures due to a potentially self-inflicted virus, then a lot of peoples miserable deaths may be attributed to it.
-there are a number of deadly regional conflicts which can be shown to have been causally linked to COVID restrictions. As just one example, Sri Lanka was doing very well before the pandemic, but due to travel restrictions lost a key revenue stream ultimately leading to mass starvation and political revolution.
So to summarize: there are broad and far-reaching effects of everything that was done during the covid-19 pandemic such as lockdowns and forced vaccinations, and the pandemic itself may have been caused by the Fauci-led NIH, and the overbroad nature of pandemic measures increased the harm done. It's really difficult to legitimately say Fauci saved lives in the long term with any level of certainty.
Certainly, the point that I'm making is not necessarily that the response was wrong on its face, but rather that stating unequivocally that they saved lives is extremely naive and imprecise. Even the stuff that looks really bad like the gain of function research or the censoring of academics may have been done with the absolute best of intentions, but good intentions don't prevent policies from having unintended consequences.
I don't know how anyone could make a reductive statement that COVID restrictions and forced vaccinations saved lives when the realities are so much more complex.
-increased "deaths of despair" such as suicide, drug overdoses, and death by alcoholism immediately and directly due to lockdowns
-increased deaths due to abuse not being intervened because abused were legally stuck in the house with their abusers
-economic stress leading to long term effects due to poverty (and for idiot boomers who think the economy is going well because their 401(k)s are going up, most people don't have significant retirement savings or investments -- millions are putting stress on food banks because people who never had to use them before are going now, and there's tent cities in many cities that never had them before because so many people are being bumped out of permanent housing)
-Gen Z kids in high school and college have major problems due to subpar education. Reading, writing, and math competency levels are massively affected particularly among vulnerable communities which will have knock-on effects for generations we won't even know.
-Gen Alpha kids born immediately before or during the pandemic are developmentally delayed due to massively reduced exposure to critical stimuli early on in life which will have knock-on effects for generations we won't even know.
-Gen Alpha kids born earlier and so in kindergarten are facing early developmental setbacks such as poor socialization which will have knock-on effects for generations we won't even know.
-Donald Trump's project warpspeed by definition sped up development of COVID vaccines by speeding up basic testing, and by giving drug companies liability waivers so they could toss their Latest R&D out there without regard for long-term efficacy or long-term side-effects. Trump-haters correctly pointed out that it takes decades to properly test a vaccine, but magically forgot that fact when their political leaders took on vaccination as their authoritarian cause du jour. "Oh, a bunch of people didn't immediately die when they took the vaccine" you might counter, to which I'd point to many things that have long term effects such as cigarette smoking, asbestos, DDT, lead paint, or radioactive substances. To give it an immediate and obvious example of how long-term testing wasn't done and nobody really knew, it was originally stated that getting vaccinated was enough, but for people following along at home they'd be on like their 8th booster at this point.
-some might argue "oh none of this was the doctors fault, it was caused by the virus", but we have a growing body of evidence from official sources suggesting that the NIH was illegally funding coronavirus gain of function research in Wuhan and so there's a direct csusal link between fauci and the novel coronavirus.
-some might argue "the vaccine saves lives among the vulnerable such as cancer patients or the elderly", which I would potentially accept, except it wasn't just rolled out to people who were vulnerable and people who were worried and wanted additional protection, it was mandated to many people who were healthy and could have withstood the virus without taking experimental drugs and didn't want to take it but had to or lose their jobs or freedom to travel. Some countries following Americas lead forced everyone to get vaccinated period, and it was common for politicians to make certain levels of vaccination in the population conditions of easing restrictions, an authoritarian measure that took everyone's freedom hostage.
-it is now proven beyond any doubt that the federal government directly interfered with science, using levers behind the scenes to reward certain viewpoints and totally silence others. Besides the immediate harm from causing potentially false science to be published about the pandemic, the damage to science as an institution will have long lasting knock-on effects we can't predict and likely won't be able to measure given the dataset we have.
-the lockdowns and other measures such as mail-in voting can be seen as having a direct causal link to both left wing and right wing riots which even if you justify your own side's riots can at least be seen as harmful due to the other side's riots. These events have long tail effects I doubt we can easily measure, but increased political instability can have larger effects than even the most charitable COVID death tolls.
-the weakening of the west due to COVID measures could be seen as having a direct causal link to Putin's decision to invade Ukraine, seeing a moment of weakness as a good time to strike. Of course it is a complex issue and perhaps he would have done it anyway, but if he wouldn't have but for the intense weakening of the west due to the self-imposed measures due to a potentially self-inflicted virus, then a lot of peoples miserable deaths may be attributed to it.
-there are a number of deadly regional conflicts which can be shown to have been causally linked to COVID restrictions. As just one example, Sri Lanka was doing very well before the pandemic, but due to travel restrictions lost a key revenue stream ultimately leading to mass starvation and political revolution.
So to summarize: there are broad and far-reaching effects of everything that was done during the covid-19 pandemic such as lockdowns and forced vaccinations, and the pandemic itself may have been caused by the Fauci-led NIH, and the overbroad nature of pandemic measures increased the harm done. It's really difficult to legitimately say Fauci saved lives in the long term with any level of certainty.
Certainly, the point that I'm making is not necessarily that the response was wrong on its face, but rather that stating unequivocally that they saved lives is extremely naive and imprecise. Even the stuff that looks really bad like the gain of function research or the censoring of academics may have been done with the absolute best of intentions, but good intentions don't prevent policies from having unintended consequences.
Thinking you can just swap out one tech company for another and you're gonna find shelter from the storm is absurd. Everyone and everything is always for sale, and if there's one quick and easy company to buy out or to sue, it's a squishy target.
"I sense some sort of dog whistle in this message. Like maybe he doesnt like someone and wants to cause them harm but is trying very hard to hide it!"