dcel · HackerTrans

hace 17 díasdiscuss

This is a project designed to last for centuries. We’re not even fossil free yet and already seeing days of negative electricity cost thanks to renewables. In 50 years the extra energy cost is going to be a rounding error. Locking ourselves into 300km/h forever to save a relatively small sum is unfathomably short sighted.

dcel

hace 17 díasdiscuss

High speed rail does not need to be straight! You can get away with 6km radii at 360km/h on dedicated passenger lines. The high power output of the EMUs they’ve selected and all new OHLE power supplies mean that trains can accelerate and decelerate much more aggressively than on legacy mixed use lines like the WCML, allowing smaller radii in practice with short slower sections. It’s a myth that HS2 is expensive because it had to be straight.

The vast majority of the tunnelling for HS2 has been either to get in and out of dense urban areas without too much demolition, or to reduce the political cost of driving a building site through Tory heartlands (Chilterns AONB).

dcel

hace 17 díasdiscuss

The messaging, in general, has been abysmal. But capacity and speed are not separate concerns. Consistently high average speeds increase capacity - I wish this had been actually communicated.

dcel

hace 18 díasdiscuss

Max line speed of HS2 is 360km/h, with provision for 400 in some sections in future. This is entirely in line with many other modern HS lines. China’s been running regular 360km/h services for years.

This is a project with a 200+ year shelf life. Designing to 300 or less would have been short sighted, and many of the changes to accommodate such high speeds actually reduce costs in the long term (slab track, headroom to catch up delayed services, ability for one trainset to operate more services per day etc).

The cost overruns of HS2 are primarily from plain old poor project management, complex planning law and constant political meddling, not engineering decisions.

dcel

hace 4 mesesdiscuss

The UK spends around £200bn a year on public healthcare that covers everyone, for a population around 1/5th the size. Scale that up and convert to USD and you’re still well under half the $3tn figure you quoted.

dcel

hace 7 mesesdiscuss

I feel like I could’ve written exactly this myself.

The first point is the hardest. It affects every aspect of my life and I have no idea how to really tackle it. This is the first year where I feel the need to take drastic action to achieve some kind of improvement.

What’s your plan? How is it working?

dcel

hace 7 mesesdiscuss

The Ayn Rand quote ("Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon") neatly distills precisely what worries me the most about an AI dominated future: that those in control of our destiny seem to have swallowed her misanthropic philosophy that (to paraphrase Rand again) "he is not a social animal".

Man, in fact, cannot survive without society. You don't have to be a communist to realise this. Until now the stratification of society has had certain unavoidable limits - everyone has a finite lifespan, everyone has an upper bound of intelligence and physical ability - as well as self imposed limits of regulation through states or unions. When kings and empires have come to dominate, revolutions have at least attempted to reform the social order, if not reset it. I fear that with AGI in the hands of the likes of Musk and Thiel we may soon be entering an age when men with Rand's worldview have the kind of power that makes them utterly untouchable and any chance of building a just and democratic future becomes impossible.

dcel

hace 7 mesesdiscuss

Sometimes I feel a deep sense of loss of the old web that grew up with -full of niche interests, unashamedly earnest and rich in subcultures- has been lost in a sea of corporate slop and clickbait social media.

Then occasionally I come across something like this and it feels like all is not lost. Conway's GoL was one of the first C programmes I ever wrote and I've long been distantly fascinated by cellular automata but I had no idea that there was such a depth of research (work, experimentation, collaboration? how do you even describe this kind of collective endeavour?) into GoL lurking out there all these years.

dcel

hace 8 mesesdiscuss

I'd argue that the upswing had started in the 1980s and took a hit along with the economy between black monday (87) and ERM2 crash/black wednesday (92)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...

dcel

hace 8 mesesdiscuss

Graham Dennis (author of the article) absolutely does not ignore this. He regularly points out that Irish rail ridership exploded almost in lockstep with GB rail network growth despite remaining entirely publicly run. Even right at the top of this article he points out that the growth had begun long before privatisation. He goes into a lot more detail in his book.

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