I think this is a little over-simplified. If there are only a few tables it likely happens, but with current staffing, even before covid, if a servers section is full there’s no way they can watch for tiny signals from every table. Heck it’s hard to even catch your servers attention in most restaurants during busy times between when they are taking orders and actually serving other tables.
Sub-protocol here…you can walk on the right but don’t stand on the left. Kind of like the fast and slow lanes on the road.
Well ‘the privilege of living in California’ is more accurate than it might seem. Everywhere is a tradeoff, and you could figure like 30% is ‘the privilege of living in the US’, and then everywhere else you might live is a tradeoff between taxes, higher/lower pay rate, higher/lower cost of living, more/fewer options for socialization, better/worse infrastructure, etc. Move out of the US and options increase drastically…from far higher taxes and the ‘privilege to live in a European country with lots of socialized services like health care and education’ to far lower taxes in some middle eastern countries but being extremely careful about how much skin you show, and maybe don’t mention your ‘ex’ marriage status, to everything in between.
You could move to a place with lower taxes and maybe be happier…or maybe way worse off depending on a thousand other factors. But the tax rate where you live is certainly one of the legitimate things to take into account.
Sounds like a self correcting problem? Maybe just replace the ones that protect traffic below them…
‘Most’ of the population in the US, or Texas, or wherever…. still leaves a significant number of people and cars. I’m all for trains, and making better trains will certainly be a good direction of encouraging train use, but just making an existing alternative a little better isn’t going to solve the car situation. ‘Most’ of the US car problem isn’t located within an area that can be well served by trains. Places that can be well served by trains, in general, are already served by trains. You can make some dents in the issue, and maybe some significant ones, by leaning into that solution really hard, but it will still be a dent rather than a solution.
Well if you’re arguing that walking replace cars, your 5 mile radius thing doesn’t work any better than trains. And economically viable is still relevant even if you are talking taxes and subsidies. I’m 100% in favor of trains and public transport, but that 5 and 30 mile radius is only meaningful when people are grouped in close proximity…if I only share my 30 miles with 10,000 other people, and that 30 miles is even vaguely diffuse, you cant draw up a map where a train schedule works without making have of the 10,000 people employees of the train station.
Move half of the rural population into more rural areas and you get closer to that ideal, but how do you ‘move’ people in a free country? We have a shitload of land, and a significant number of people living spread out in a way that mass transit just doesn’t make sense because not enough of them are going in the same direction at the same time to make it make sense. Even at the subsidy point, you can’t raise taxes to pay for something that doesn’t raise enough taxes to pay for itself. Just throw a dart at a map in the US and come up with a way to make a passenger train make any kind of sense within a thirty mile radius of the dart. Then, after throwing the dart a thousand times and realizing most of your hits don’t contain even 1000 people, eliminate all those areas and start throwing the dart again. Then, after a thousand hits and realizing that even then you aren’t hitting places where more than 10 people are all traveling in the same direction from the same place more than once or twice a day, maybe you’ll realize the futility of trains solving problems in most of the US.
That being said, the places where it does make sense, I’m 100% in support of exploring all kinds of ways to reduce usage of individual cars, electric or otherwise.
I feel like it won’t be AI until we figure out how to point it back at itself, have it review its own answers and then be ‘happy’ when it’s answers are right. Not necessarily like if the user gives it a good score, but if it recognizes an answer it had given was actually used, or a prediction it makes if proved true (if I answer this way, the user is likely to ask this as its next question, etc) and it starts changing its behaviour, and asking itself questions to get better at that.
Soap over the main parts, and lather with that over everything
Same reason people have gone on for a million years. Noe of that matters or is really as bad as it sound at an individual level. Individually you have it better now than at any point in history, asking why ‘you’ should go on because of the unknown future effects of the climate crisis (which is real enough, and shouldn’t be understated) sounds more like depression than a valid outlook that people should have considering actual world events.
Even the worst off people on earth, on average, are better off now than they were 1000s or even 100s of years ago. There have always been poverty, starvation, wars, rich taking advantage of the poor, and fewer safeguards or oversight on top of that.
Same reason people have gone on for a million years. Noe of that matters or is really as bad as it sound at an individual level. Individually you have it better now than at any point in history, asking why ‘you’ should go on because of the unknown future effects of the climate crisis (which is real enough, and shouldn’t be understated) sounds more like depression than a valid outlook that people should have considering actual world events.
Even the worst off people on earth, on average, are better off now than they were 1000s or even 100s of years ago. There have always been poverty, starvation, wars, rich taking advantage of the poor, and fewer safeguards or oversight on top of that.
Mostly dirt, but that dirt is also something that has to be travelled over to get between the people…and the scale of the US means there’s a lot more of it to span.
Inside a city electric trains make more sense, but unlike the EU there are very few places in the US between population centers that could economically support the infrastructure needed for high speed rail.
For example, Texas is roughly the size of France, but with only a third of the population, and hundreds of miles between population centers, none of which could expect to see the amount of travel needed to justify that much rail line.
Basically, take Europe and their economically viable rail line, get rid of 3/4 of the population and 3/4 of the cities so each stop is 3 to 4 times further away from each other and ask the people running the trains if they would still be profitable considering they’re still having to cover the same distances with a 1/4 of the income.
Mostly dirt, but that dirt is also something that has to be travelled over to get between the people…and the scale of the US means there’s a lot more of it to span.
Inside a city electric trains make more sense, but unlike the EU there are very few places in the US between population centers that could economically support the infrastructure needed for high speed rail.
For example, Texas is roughly the size of France, but with only a third of the population, and hundreds of miles between population centers, none of which could expect to see the amount of travel needed to justify that much rail line.
Basically, take Europe and their economically viable rail line, get rid of 3/4 of the population and 3/4 of the cities so each stop is 3 to 4 times further away from each other and ask the people running the trains if they would still be profitable considering they’re still having to cover the same distances with a 1/4 of the income.
Because trains aren’t economically viable for the vast majority of the US, and where they are economically they are the topic of conversation.
As far as why the conversation would center around the US, that’s just the regular American-centric tilt english conversations generally lean towards. Most of Europe has their shit together in some topics like this (public transportation, for instance) and the US is a huge consumer of automobiles and no one if building mass transit between the middle of nowhere to the other middle of nowhere where we could ‘efficiently’ move individually insignificant numbers of people at a time.
Maybe think of it like one of those big walls of post office mailboxes…behind the wall is your computer and an app might be waiting for a message at box 22 or box 45678. You could close all the boxes and nothing could get in, or you could open one or all of them and allow people to deliver messages to them.
If you connect your computer directly to the internet, anyone who knows your IP address could say 'deliver message X to port 22 at ip address <your ip address> and the program watching that box would get the message.
If you put a router in the mix, and multiple computers, the router has the same block of boxes, but if someone sends a message to one of the boxes it just sets there. If you set up ‘forwarding’, sending a message to your ip address gets the message to the router, but if you forward box 22 from your router to a specific computer on your network, then the router takes a message at box 22 on itself and ‘forwards’ it to box 22 on whatever computer you specific (using internal ip addresses).
You could map box 22 on your router to any other box on your computer…like port 22 coming into your router might get sent to port 155 on your computer…this is useful if you don’t want external people just exploring and lazily breaking into your computer using known vulnerabilities. Lots of ports are ‘common’, so an ftp hack on port 22 is easy, and might be ‘slightly’ harder if you tell your computer to actually look for ftp traffic on port 3333 or something.