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It would be expensive to build a new train to JFK. The unions and regulations in NYC make those projects very long and very expensive (look at the 2nd Ave subway line). There is an "AirTrain" to JFK but you have to take other trains to get to it first. There was supposed to be one to LGA but it got cancelled. We used to have a really nice water shuttle to LGA but that also stopped many years ago. People didn't want to travel to the water shuttle and pay $20 to get to the airport in 15 minutes. I'm hard pressed to see how a cheap quadcopter ride is going to be anything other than a novelty unless the FAA allows the heliports to be built inland -- we've had a bad history with blades flying through the streets.

Funny how every other developed country manages to build more infrastructure cheaper despite having stronger unions and stricter regulations.

> Funny how every other developed country manages to build more infrastructure cheaper despite having stronger unions and stricter regulations.

Every country says this about every other country. The UK has HS2, and we point to Germany. Germany has Stuttgart 21 and they point to Spain. Spain has the Sagrada Familia. Spain points to China, and China has the HZMB [0]

This stuff is really really hard, and standards have evolved hugely. The london underground would never be built today, because of the ignored costs. HS2's massive problem isn't that we spent £100m on a Bat tunnel [1], it's that nobody was willing to say no because that decision is pinned to you but the blame absolving is "someone elses problem".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong%E2%80%93Zhuhai%E2%80.... [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wryxyljglo


I'm not exactly sure the point you're making about each country pointing at another as a positive example. The chain you've listed (US->UK->Germany->Spain->China) is a pretty good list of countries in descending order of cost to build infrastructure (it's not a straightforward analysis, but see https://transitcosts.com/new-data/ for example). There are always boondoggles, but the scoreboard is pretty clear -- each country in that list is better than the country before at building rail infrastructure.

Your analogy is like saying that everyone thinks someone else is a faster runner: amateurs point to collegiate athletes, collegiate athletes point to elites, elites point to Olympians. You can find someone in each of these categories who has run a bad race, but that doesn't invalidate the existence of the differences in ability.


No, my analogy is that everyone assumes that everyone else is an Olympic runner, when we’re all just college athletes.

There are plenty of countries winning gold medals for massive infrastructure projects while the richest one can’t even get into college

The comment I replied to said:

> Funny how every other developed country manages to build more infrastructure cheaper despite having stronger unions and stricter regulations.

I picked a handful of absolutely colossal overspends on massive infra projects to point out that no, not every other western country is doing so. All countries have their success stories and mega disaster projects


> All countries have their success stories and mega disaster projects

What mega project success stories does the US have in the last 20 or 30 years?


I mean, I'm not sure that the Sagrada Familia is a good example. It taking a long time to build was arguably part of the _point_, and was planned from the start.

I wasn’t sure if I should leave it in or not, it was more tongue in cheek than anything. The train between Madrid and Barcelona is a real example [0]

[0] https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2014/05/13/inenglish/13999...


Isn't it? Look up the California high speed rail. There is massive corruption, incompetence, and red tape.

One thing that some cities have done where awkward infrastructure is required to get a train to the airport is to, essentially, borrow money to do it, and make the fares to the airport very high to compensate.

Notably, getting to Brussels airport, which takes about 15 minutes from Brussels Nord, costs about 15 euro. For a 15 minute train journey. Hands-down the most expensive train per minute (or per km) I've ever been on. But, at least in theory, it's paying for this thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabolo_project

(That's by no means the only one; lots of airports are in awkward places so running rail to them is expensive, and it's common for it to be paid for by special, more expensive services. And people use them.)


Yep, Stockholm's Arlanda express train is costly as well

Even at 15 Euros I bet its way cheaper than a helicopter or electric VTOL aircraft

Oh, yeah, and it can and does handle a scale of traffic that a helicopter service obviously couldn't. I think each train takes about a thousand people and they're every ten minutes or something.

The "use helicopters for airport access" thing seems, at best, extremely niche.


Joby plans to expand way beyond airport access, it’s meant to be basically flying rideshare. The key enabler is they designed it to be quiet enough to not annoy everyone around like a helicopter, so that it would be reasonable to have this thing taking off from residential neighborhoods. JFK access is just a very visible first test run.

I guarantee France have stronger unions and regulations, and still managed the GPE. 3 years late and with 20% cost overrun, sure, but to be fair, they had to deal with floods twice, which wasn't planned and broke equipment and reseted some tunnels.

20% cost overrun is nothing if you look at the typical cost overrun of a US infrastructure project. UES extension in NYC a prime example of that. And 3 years late? How about 50 years late?

yeah lol, in NYC 3 years and 20% would be regarded as an unprecedented success

I don't see how unions cause any of those problems. Corruption and incompetence comes through administration and management not the average worker wanting a decent pay and 2 weeks of vacation.

NYC unions are not your average worker. In my north of NYC town the labor rate for a union worker is 3x that of non union..and state laws mandate govt projects must pay that rate.

Yeah, that is what unions are for, protecting worker wages from the ever tightening noose of greedy capitalists that would otherwise use slave labor if they still could.

unions are often a form of corruption themselves. If, as is often the case, there's only one union that can do a job, that means that that union is a monopoly.

I don't see how that is corruption. Unions can be corrupted when the union leader's goals diverge from the average union members, but the whole point of a union is to collectively bargain as one to try and make up for the inherent power imbalance that capital holders possess. If workers were being treated well and not taken advantage of a union wouldn't form in the first place and people wouldn't want to join it.

They all too often use the together for political purposes that are corruption. If I legally have to hire union that is corruption.

There's a free bus to LaGuardia from the subway.

If you go back a few million, that's also climate. We're still in an ice age. https://www.climate.gov/media/16817

And human civilization entirely sprung up during it, all of our nations, our cities, our pastures, our lives are built on the ice age. We need to start cooling the world down and we're doing the opposite

The population explosion of the 20th century, and our modern way of life in general, has been powered almost entirely with fossil fuels. The lives of everybody living today and all our societies including 3rd world ones is built on coal and petroleum. Except the North Sentinel Island people.

It will not be possible to keep things going they are, no matter what actions or inactions we need or should take.


We can make cheap modular energy capture devices in robotic factories now.

Things will not stay the same anymore than they could when people found oil.


People have been claiming for at least a quarter of a century that coal was dead, killed by much cheaper renewables. Today, we will consider ourselves very lucky if we have only just (i.e., in 2024-25) passed global peak coal. All those people and "experts", wrong. Repeatedly and totally wrong. Why? There must have been terribly bad data, bad models, bad economics, or bad assumptions they had been using. I have heard very little in the way of acknowledgement about that or any effort to find and fix the root causes of such failures. Are today's claims still coming from these same flawed approaches?

And it's not just coal of course. Coal was the proverbial canary in the proverbial coal mine because it was supposed to have been killed off long ago. But there's gas and petroleum and we are a decade from global peak carbon even by presumably the same kind of wildly optimistic / flawed projections.

And just passing peak carbon is not the goal. 1990 level carbon emissions were considered catastrophic and we're nearly double that now. Getting it down to well below those levels is just so uncertain and such a long way out that nobody really knows what that will take or how long it will be.

Making solar panels in Chinese coal powered factories doesn't just magically fix everything. Just like it didn't 25 years ago when they said it had killed coal.


You appear to have invented a totally different history to the one we just lived through so you can be grumpy about it.

Why was coal going to be phased out ages ago?

I remember a global scramble by some of the best minds on the planet to drive the cost of solar below the cost of coal because that was the only way they saw coal being displaced.

Like Google's Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal, or RE<C. Launched in 2007, or the US government's DoE Sunshot initiative in 2011 to reduce the cost of solar by 75%

What do you remember from your parallel timeline?


China is installing new solar faster than anybody else, in case you weren't aware.

Longer periods can be called paleoclimate. As you may have noticed, most types of humans did not exist in previous climates, and we are unfamiliar with the conditions of those time periods, much less if we were to bring them upon ourselves in a period of time that isn't even capable of being shown on the chart you've chosen to use.

I'm just clarifying parent comment that "1200 years of data is climate" by saying that longer periods also are climate data. I could have posted a graph of the holocene as well (I don't know that it would materially change my point). I made two points. The other was that we are in an ice age.

Normally, discussions of climate refer to the last 12k year interglacial period as having come out of an "ice age". You're using the broader geologic term referring to any presence of any polar ice cap as an "ice age", which would cover the last 3 Million years. So what you're saying is that in the 300k years homo sapiens have never existed outside of an "ice age" and that the our speciation (eg in savannahs of Africa) was driven by the many glaciations of this current Ice Age? Even homo habilis hasn't been around that long.

That's saying that since the continents and earth's currents haven't changed, we're in the same age, AMOC is a minor technicality, and the oceans would need to rise to the straight of Panama to be significant.


No, climate is based on consistent weather data over a long period. Across long enough periods the underlying assumptions that make climate a meaningful thing to talk about fail due to orbital mechanics etc.

Plate tectonics for example shows you can’t even assume an area’s latitude is consistent, just look at the fossil history of Antarctica. Humans have dumped so much carbon and methane in the atmosphere even 100 years ago was quite different.


It very much reads like you feel like you need to offer those particular points here to try to diminish concerns about global warming informed by the 1200 year Kyoto cherry blossom record. Is that not the case?

Yes I am diminishing the case of global warming about the tree. The tree they kept records of 1200 years ago is not the cultivated one seen in many parks now. That tree is about a million years old. Article just says "Kyoto’s cherry trees", which would include the old and new ones. Importantly, the new cultivated ones bloom earlier.

This could be a case of trying to make a climate argument, when the underlying data is more nuanced. Maybe we should just say it's nice the trees are blooming earlier.


The trees are unambiguously blooming earlier because of climate change.

My understanding is three-fold

- The climate has *always* changed. It’s been warmer. And yes, it’s been cooler. There is nothing abnormal about the climate changing.

- There is actually very little scientific proof that the current up tick, is human-made. Yes, there’s correlation with the Industrial Revolution, but that’s all it is atm, correlation. There’s little verifiable proof. It’s speculative. It’s a theory. Yes, there’s overwhelming consensus, but that’s still doesn’t make it fact. And consensus has been off target plenty of times in the past.

- “The science” isn’t always as fact / truth based as it would like us to believe. Scientists are human too. Egos, career aspirations, groupthink, jealousy, etc. The scientific method is a stunning standard. Unfortunately, it’s implemented / executed by humans, flawed humans.

There’s three sources exemplify #3, of course there are others.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-has-there-been-so-littl...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/dinosau...

https://longevity.stanford.edu/how-the-sugar-industry-shifte...


While the climate has always changed and there's nothing abnormal about that, it has never, ever changed anywhere near so radically in such a short period of time; the rate is what's abnormal. XKCD has a fantastic visualization of this:

https://xkcd.com/1732/

So pair that with the correlation with the Industrial Revolution/increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and with the verifiable scientific fact that carbon dioxide works to trap heat...and surely you can at least see why there's overwhelming consensus, right? What would compel you to operate as though this isn't the most likely explanation for the unprecedented rate of warming we're seeing?


We better hope we're the cause of the warming, because then we conversely have a shot at slowing it or stopping it. If we are incapable of causing a change of this magnitude, then the actions we are taking to slow the change would likely be ineffective too, in which cause coming generations are in for a world of hurt.

As such, it always strikes me as bizarre when people question human contribution to climate change without by extension freaking out far more about the urgency of taking drastic action.


>> then the actions we are taking to slow the change would likely be ineffective too.

Many countries are taking steps which are mitigated by many developing countries who rely on cheap energy to grow and build out of their third world status.

So yes, on the one hand a lot of countries are doing something but will it ever be enough to counter other countries continuing to pollute at unprecedented levels? I don't know.


Look at the climate record, what leads you to believe this isn’t natural and we should have a chance to “reverse” it.

In this very thread, two posts up, the direct parent of the comment you're replying to, I gave you a link to a visualization of the climate record and asked you to look at it, and pointed out that the sudden and unprecedented rapid rate of change since the Industrial Revolution is precisely what leads us to believe this isn't natural.

You responded by insisting (without evidence) that "the climate record over the looooong term simply is not that accurate". And now here you are telling someone else to "look at the climate record", the climate record that shows precisely what they're saying, the very same climate record you cast dispersions on moments ago, hoping to somehow trick them into not believing their own lying eyes. You're not operating in good faith.


I have, and the dramatic change correlating with the rise of human release of co2 makes it highly improbable that it is natural. But as I said: If it somehow is natural we're far more screwed so we better hope it isn't, because if it is natural the cost and resource impact to protect us against the effects would be far more brutal.

It's almost certainly caused by man as all of the evidence suggests that it is. But if it's not, that's a much more serious problem since if it's some unknown natural phenomena we probably can't do anything to stop or slow it from happening and we don't know how hot it will get or how quickly. Maybe humans have triggered a yet to be discovered tipping point and there's no stopping it.

Some reports are already saying that global warming is progressing faster than predicted... maybe we're on an exponential slope to higher temperatures and don't know it yet.


Simple enough… share links to the science that thoroughly proves what you’re saying. “Al Gore said it, it must be true,” isn’t going to cut it.

As for the “never ever”, that’s another assumption. The climate record over the looooong term simply is not that accurate.

Of course, there is a fair amount of correlation and circumstantial evidence, but parroting that as absolute fact and causation does make it scientific. There is a lot of “telephone” on this issue. Those using hundreds of years or even thousands should be met with skepticism.

To clarify: I agree 100% that the climate is changing. It always have. Unfortunately, the rabbit hole of proof is not that deep. Most of “proof” is based on consensus and groupthink dictated by “the experts.”


"the experts"

You mean those who have dedicated their careers to learning the science and studying the various evidence and using that as a base of reference?

Who would you cite otherwise?

Those providing the alternate view to "the experts" all seem to be seriously lacking in any related qualifications. Politicians, radio personalities, fossil fuel industry lobbyists, marketers, advertising executives. They're all pundits, they're not experts, they literally don't know what they're talking about.

If you believe everything, or even most things, those various groups tell you, well, I'm not sure how to help.


> Most of “proof” is based on consensus and groupthink dictated by “the experts.”

Ah of course, because the 'experts' are tainted by 'groupthink' any 'rebuttal' made by armchair internet warriors must therefore be absolutely true.


If anyone were to share a link, you'd doubtless say it isn't thorough enough.

Can you give any thorough scientific evidence as to why we should consider this unprecedentedly fast change normal?


> To clarify: I agree 100% that the climate is changing. It always have [sic].

Did anything I said imply that I didn't recognize that? There's no need for you to clarify, I was very clear myself that I was responding to your lack of understanding about the nature of the changing climate.

The XKCD comic I already linked shows you the climate record for the past 22000 years; you can see with your own eyes that the rate of change since we began burning hydrocarbons on an industrial scale, particularly since the year 2000, has been precipitous and looks like nothing that's happened in the entire history of humanity as depicted. Maybe you missed it - it's a little subtle - but the comic already lists its sources on the side. At a high level, they determine the climate record by examining things like tree rings and ice cores; if you're curious, those sources are happy to explain their methodology in detail. Beyond that, do you have a specific reason for casting doubt on those sources?

So let's see - going back to my comment, I pointed out the climate appears to be warming up faster than ever before; I (well, XKCD) has given you sources for that. You yourself acknowledged that there was a correlation between the warming climate and the Industrial Revolution, but I suppose we need a source for the correlated rise in carbon dioxide. Here's a graph from climate.gov using data from NOAA, ETHZ, Our World In Data, and the Global Carbon Project. If you visit each of those sources (which are linked to from the graph) you can then drill down and how they themselves synthesized it (as we know, that's how science works).

https://www.climate.gov/media/12990

Finally, I guess I asserted that carbon dioxide traps heat. Here's a paper from 1856, where a simple experiment demonstrates the effect:

https://www.risorsa-acqua.it/PDF/eunicefoote.pdf

So at this point we have evidence of a phenomenon (the planet suddenly warming much faster than before, per the XKCD visualization and its sources) and we have a demonstrable mechanism (the warming effect of carbon dioxide, per Eunice Foote's experiments circa the mid-19th century) matching our data (the increase in carbon dioxide, per NOAA and ETHZ and Our World In Data and the Global Carbon Project) that solidly explains it. That looks like science to me. Further skepticism without any contradictory evidence and you're just getting into poor epistemology frankly, and I'll just have to start throwing around metascientific ideas like Occam's razor and Russell's teapot and post-critical logic. You keep demanding more "science", but what does that actually look like to you? You look at the entire scientific community (who you scare quote as "the experts") and their body of work and mindlessly dismiss it for not being "scientific" enough. It's a rhetorical feint, not genuine intellectual curiosity.

To be honest with you, I haven't even seen An Inconvenient Truth myself. Have you? Does Al Gore just come on-screen and assert things, or does he give explanations for you to ignore? Sources for you to ignore?

If my tone is short, it's because it's both frustrating and amusing to be treated with such airs of intellectual condescension when at this point the evidence and consensus for anthropogenic climate change is so strong. When everyone who's devoted their life to understanding something says you're wrong - even if you think you may actually be right! - it'd probably be better to argue from a position of humility, because the odds are very good that you are in fact wrong. As Carl Sagan said: they laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

A few years ago I was walking through Queen's Park in Toronto and saw a Flat Earther accost people with the same sort of arrogance. Most laypeople walking through the park on a sunny weekend afternoon, it turns out, couldn't tell you off the top of their head about how we know that the Earth is round; whereas Flat Earthers performing a stunt are more than prepared to tell you why they know that the Earth really is flat. And I guess there's something valuable about court jesters making people aware of how much common sense they take for granted, but that doesn't make them any less worthy of ridicule.


Apparently humans can't survive outside of an ice age, then. Maybe we shouldn't end it prematurely.

Have we ever actually tried?

I actually live in a city that usually gets over 50 degrees Celsius for weeks and we pay a LOT on energy just to keep the A/C on. I don't think it is sustainable for the whole world and I'm afraid of what will happen here once we reach higher temps.

Yes. You can try right now, in the Sahara desert

Central Europe looks like it would have been lovely!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Interglacial#/media/File:...

The linked picture is just an artist's interpretation, not a photo, and I assume you were mostly joking too. I think we agree that it's not a good idea to hurry in warming the planet.


A steamy, stuffy jungle without airconditiong might be a more appropriate example.

I don't think the local plants and animals there match what used to be typical around the world prior to our current ice age.

As a human, I do tend to mostly care about the period of the Earth's history that has allowed humans to exist. I'm sure the Mesozoic was nice, but I wouldn't want to live there!

The argument that tries to belittle the current warming by pointing that in the past there have been times when it was warmer, does not have any value.

Besides the fact that a much lower temperature than in the past can do a lot of damage to the present-day beings that are not adapted to such temperatures, those higher temperatures from the past had been stable for long periods.

Now, when such a higher temperature from the past will be reached, there is no guarantee that the warming will stop there.

The greatest danger of the current warming is that, if we do not do anything about it, nobody can currently predict with any certainty that it would stop at a still acceptable temperature, matching a temperature from the distant past, instead of continuing towards even higher temperatures.


A better time range would be the average species lifespan of the plants and animals we eat. Too short a range highlights noise; too long a range highlights unrelated data.

Okay? Let's keep it that way then I suppose.

I'd trust such data a lot more, from any other source.

It's about trust anyway.

Weird that there are any downvotes. The current administration in the US, spent its first few months literally pulling down and replacing data on US government websites. These included many categories of scientific data, including most especially climate data.

HN was literally in an uproar, some users were trying to back up data. And yet now we see people posing such questionable data from US government websites?

Please. No output from the US should be trusted at this point. It's all ideologically tainted.


I think he ran on ending "forever wars", not whether or not Israel could flatten Palestine. He would probably also argue that Iran is a 47 year forever war that he is finally ending.

I guess one of the Koreas should watch out since Trump might want to end that "forever war" as well. Flip a coin to decide which one.

He made efforts to end that already by being the first sitting president to meet with them during his first term, so I guess we'll see but Cuba is apparently next in line...

I have an early 13 and find the expansion cards take a lot of effort to remove, so maybe it’s a batch thing. Seems like the new 13 redesigned it a bit anyway. I’ll probably get the new bottom so I can use the new battery.

That's because most liberals don't like to be questioned or defend their positions, in general. On X they are forced to confront or actively block people. Note that the your comment is downvoted for essentially saying "twitter is still good" with no malice, and parent is still totally fine after saying (speciously) "twitter is for horny cryptobros". They have no actual response other than to downvote or leave for an echo chamber. This has been hashed out here many time before. Truth does not mind being questioned. A lie does not like being challenged.

It would be helpful if somebody could post what it looks for so I can add it to fail2ban. I tried opening up my website temporarily but it will cancel out if it doesn't find something at /. When I retry sometimes it also says it is blocked when clearly there is not anything in my logs so it is not retrying.

Clearly the Economist and their panel of experts.

So basically the same 5 men, considering that the Economist is the mouthpiece of the capitalist global oligarchy

Before we had facebook and iphones the only people that were able to run a home lab were technically adept. In 1998 I used Avantgo and Vindigo to browse the news on the train and find restaurants when nobody else could. In 2005 I remember running my netgear mp101 upnp player and everybody was impressed how I could stream music. Then we made things like iphones and facebook which got everybody on the internet, and we made all the “hard” things like music, video, news, reservations, etc.. a “service” – democratizing it (what a nice word). But for technical people it was actually shittier than just running it on your own. Not right away -- there was small overlapping period from 2005 to 2014 or so, where the pace of advancement of technology was complementary to hosting it yourself, but after the corporate monopolies got fully involved everything just went to shit. I think it has come full circle again, where the “technically illiterate” will just consume the shitty services, and will be happy or oblivious to it – they are actually serfs giving their labor/money away and they don’t care. The rest of the technical folks are just going to do their own thing again because we’re sick of the crappy services. And it will be better than the general public can ever do, just like 1998 again.


No it’s because lots of us grew up in the 70s with asbestos, lead, chlordane, ddt, etc… and we are still alive and thriving. We played with radioactive chemistry sets and even made our own plastic animals inside enclosed areas and loved to breath in the vapors : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thingmaker

PFAS is the least of our concerns.


Was it costing a lot of money or resources to say on X? If they got few impressions what does it matter? You can write the content once.


> Was it costing a lot of money or resources to say on X?

Yes.

> If they got few impressions what does it matter?

Because, it was costing a lot of money or resources to stay on X. Kind of an odd follow up to your previous question.

> You can write the content once.

Pretty sure they know how to write content considering we are reading it.


I’m pretty sure it doesn’t fit with the founders intention.

“We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

Apparently X.com doesn’t fit in that world anymore.


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