My understanding is that the problems of NYC -> Boston high speed rail are purely political, and basically come down to CT resistance to change
The current track alignment is not conducive to high speed travel, and CT as a state has no interest in supporting a new alignment that is conducive because they would likely get _negative_ value out of it: as it stands, Acela trains pretty much all stop in New Haven and Stamford: why wouldn't they?
If you go with a high speed link that aims to speed up Boston <> New York travel, it's more likely that you have trains that skip those stops, because additional stops are much more expensive for HSR from a speeding up and slowing down perspective, from a percentage of time added to trip perspective, and for an inefficient alignment perspective.
In my view this is kind of a microcosm of the political problems of the geographically small states of the north east: states like CT/RI/DE especially have very narrow and niche concerns but because of their geographical position have effective veto power over regionally important things like "how expensive are the tolls to drive between New York and DC?" and "can you have HSR between new york and boston?"
It's not about skipping stops, it's about the amount of eminent domain you'd have to do to eliminate curves thru Connecticut's oldest and richest suburbs.
Which is why proposals to route it via Long Island and building a 16-mile tunnel under Long Island Sound get consideration.
Yeah that's true, even in the Netherlands our high-speed line between Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Antwerp was a nightmare. It cost billions, way more than budgeted, many of the bridges turned out to have construction faults (despite all the cost overruns) so the trains aren't able to actually go fast, and the high-speed trains were bought on a budget and had so many flaws that the Belgians refused to allow them. Now we're stuck with a non-highspeed train on the track that was supposed to be highspeed and cost a fortune to build.
In other countries like Germany, France and Spain the high-speed network works like a dream though. Though the good stuff is all nationally focused.
I'm not surprised, building a new high-speed line between the largest cities in the Netherlands must be a nightmare, that's connecting and going through some of the most densely populated areas in Europe.
The German railway network (including the high-speed part of it) has loads of
issues, and it's hardly working like a dream. That said, the interconnect between large cities is pretty great when it works. For these intermediate distances (around 500 km) it's about as fast as flying would be once you factor in getting to/from the airport (vs the more central train station), being there early etc; and much faster than driving by car.
> I'm not surprised, building a new high-speed line between the largest cities in the Netherlands must be a nightmare, that's connecting and going through some of the most densely populated areas in Europe.
Well, yes and no. Most of it goes through the 'green heart' of the most populated area. There's mostly farms there. The route also goes mostly along existing highways and train tracks so it was just a matter of widening the infrastructure zones that were already there. Holland is very planified so usually these things are already taken into consideration. We don't build housing right besides infrastructure anymore.
However, the environmental red tape is pretty heavy these days. The whole country is at a standstill (house building, traffic, farming) due to limits of nitrogen deposits being exceeded.
So I think it was more that than actual infringements on people's living space. Some tunnels and overpasses were made, yes. Those are the ones that are falling apart already after 10 years :')
>The site in Grand Traverse Bay is best described as a long line of stones which is over a mile in length.... Dr. John O’Shea from University of Michigan has been working on a broadly similar structure over in Lake Huron... [He] thinks that it may be a prehistoric drive line for herding caribou.... It is highly possible that the site in Grand Traverse Bay may have served a similar function to the one found in Lake Huron.
So not like Stonehenge but seems interesting to me.
The "Stonehenge" reference is likely utilized as an imagery anchor that most people will recognize. Whereas the implication is that it is suspected that the possible structure under discussion and Stonehenge are similar because they both may be intentionally built megalithic structures (generally from the Neolithic). Of which there are a lot of worldwide examples that are in straight lines, as well as other configurations.
I do think it’s an arms race where in many instances legal filing will be aided by AI and then the other party will also use AI to synthesize and summarize the filings or do similar analysis. The filings themselves will not actually be written or read by real human beings
I think you are misinterpreting that article. The MTA board approved the plan to spend $68B but they depend on the state to give them funds. That’s the amount of money they are asking for based on the projects they want to complete. The state government has to pass a budget to fund that plan (or do something else). Additionally several current, already started projects are on hold due to the “pause” of congestion pricing which was going to be a funding source.
Just because a volcano eruption can cool the planet doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. The cooling would only be temporary anyway.
Check out the Year without a Summer for a historical example:
> The year 1816 AD is known as the Year Without a Summer because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1 °F). Summer temperatures in Europe were the coldest of any on record between 1766 and 2000, resulting in crop failures and major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.
> Evidence suggests that the anomaly was predominantly a volcanic winter event caused by the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in April in the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia).
People need time to adapt to things. We often stereotype old people as being stuck in their ways and, while they can change, they typically appear much more reluctant to, or have real trouble even if they want to (such as when needing to learn how to drive an automatic, or how to work with that new laptop OS version, or now how to use a touchscreen phone with a notification area: my parents barely get it, let alone my still-alive grandparents). Changes like an electric vehicle are difficult because charging works very differently from refueling and you need to additionally know how to use a phone to find charging spots while you may be stressing about being in a foreign country and needing to get somewhere (this is how a ~60 year old family member experiences it at least). These sorts of "we can't go on like this" versus "things were better 20 years ago" also reflect in elections, but the scales tip over time and what were once young people's opinions become the new normal.
Eventually, the new generation replaces the old, but that will not be in time for global warming to remain under the identified likely tipping points. If we can make do with artificial cooling for two or three decades, that may be the crucial amount of time we need to deal with the overshoot.
I don't know if we will need this, it's just that dismissing it as "it's just temporary, what's the point" does not consider whether that temporary effect is useful
And, increase CO2, increasing warming, in the long term. I would also naively assume that the reduced light would somewhat pause natural sequestration, from plants, for the duration of the cooling.
The article noted the CO2 released matches what humans do in 2.5 hours. Yet, some eruptions have lowered temps globally for months/years. The long term effect from the CO2 is real, but also a tiny drop in the bucket compared to humans
I feel that this articles’ purpose is to keep the status quo. Especially, that it starts with a strawman, and even contradicts itself during dissecting that. I like the individualistic aspect, but it’s completely orthogonal to everything else in the article.
Yes, it’s a strawman even in ‘93, and time already ran out in the context of ‘93.
It’s a strawman, because it’s so simplified that they lost all meaning. Except the first one which means even more than what was originally meant to be, but it’s not surprising from a “spritiual leader”. It’s easy to construct situations which contradicts the notion that anybody ever thought these things, or the opposite of these (e.g. the future matters, I give you 100 dollars now, but I shoot you in 10 minutes).
When people says that we need to act now, or there will be consequences, the consequences are already happened in context of ‘93, or 100% they will happen (like collapse of Atlantic currents are certain now). Today, the consequences are wildly different.
> It’s a strawman, because it’s so simplified that they lost all meaning.
In other words: nobody ever thought these. Thoughts are way more complex.
Also writing more sentences without any substance is not expanding.
Edit: to expand a little bit. Nobody thinks that time runs out. They think that time runs out about X in the context of Y. Even when people use the absolutist version there is always a context. Author transformed these to the usual religious absolutism nonsense with no good reason, except of course that absolutists statements are easier to attack, hence the strawman.
My company is largely the same. I’m an MLE and partner with data scientists. I don’t train or validate the models. I productionize and instrument the feature engineering pipelines and model deployments. More data engineering and MLOps than anything. I’m in a highly regulated industry so the data scientists have many compliance tasks related to the models and we engineers have our own compliance tasks related to the deployments. I was an MLE at another company in the very same industry before and did everything in the model lifecycle and it was just too much.
I admit that I don't understand the full details of what they did (the article doesn't get too in-depth with it), but here's what the DOJ press release [0] says:
>Anton Peraire-Bueno and James Pepaire-Bueno manipulated and tampered with the process and protocols by which transactions are validated and added to the Ethereum blockchain. In doing so, they fraudulently gained access to pending private transactions and used that access to alter certain transactions and obtain their victims’ cryptocurrency. Once the defendants stole their victims’ cryptocurrency, they rejected requests to return the stolen cryptocurrency and took numerous steps to hide their ill-gotten gains.
>Anton Peraire-Bueno and James Pepaire-Bueno meticulously planned the Exploit over the course of several months. Among other things, they learned the trading behaviors of the victim traders whose cryptocurrency they ultimately stole. As they planned the Exploit, they also took numerous steps to conceal their identities and lay the groundwork to conceal the stolen proceeds, including by setting up shell companies and using multiple private cryptocurrency addresses and foreign cryptocurrency exchanges. After the Exploit, the defendants transferred the stolen cryptocurrency through a series of transactions designed to conceal the source and ownership of the stolen funds.
Factually, they appear to have found a software bug. The community at large expected some range of inputs to the software, but as part of a cheat these folks provided inputs outside the range accepted by the community, which federal prosecutors are using as a substitute for proving an actual false statement, which is the real element.[1] It's interesting because the inputs apparently weren't "false" and maybe they weren't the sort of thing capable of falsity. Instead, they violated a community expectation -- that maybe wasn't documented.
Putting consciousness of guilt and money laundering aside for a moment... the government just charged exploiting a software bug for profit as a wire fraud.
