x2Zero7

Tbh it's just hard to see the value proposition in the age of cloud computing. I think aspects of the underlying technology are cool but basically every crypto project that comes to mind has been an actual scam. Sure there's eth and RDNR that was built on top of it but why should i spend what will ultimately be more money in periods of high demand (gas goes up when more people use the network) when i can just plug my credit card into amazon or microsoft AND get the benefit of infosec regulation like PCI-DSS. Crypto just doesn't ever inspire confidence because bad actors consistently shit in the punch bowl while providing no extra utility over existing cloud providers.

When distilled down crypto-compute just seems like cloud compute with extra steps, which is already just using a computer with extra steps.

We already can rent GPUs to run AIs with tokens - those tokens are just managed by govt instead of some random.

I'm still in that "just build almost everything in grassy fields" phase but i chose train anarchy instead.

I was just gonna say. So many good memories with my dad going to Fry's. The sole reason i went HARD into techie stuff

The McDonald's coffee story is kinda interesting to bring up here, as it may not make the point you think you are making. It's important to remember that, at the time, it was standard policy for McDonald's to be serving hot coffee at ~190 °F. Far hotter than people would serve themselves, and dangerously hot to be handling in general. If I spill my coffee on me at work, I don't end up with third-degree burns - just a stained shirt.

Not only, in that decade prior McDonald's had received ~700 reports of people being burned this way.

The lawsuit determined that McDonalds was knowingly serving to people a dangerous product that had the capacity to cause significant, material harm and gave no warning to its inherent danger.

So, to circle back to the comparison here, are video companies creating products they know are addictive to the degree that material harm is caused and no reasonable person would have the wherewithal to foresee those addictive properties unless they were prominently displayed on packaging material prior to their purchase? I don't think it's quite like the McDonald's coffee suit in terms of the intensity of [alleged]harm, but maybe in terms of how [allegedly] widespread it is? There's more than sufficient academic material that sheds light on the addictive properties of some aspects of implementation of lootboxes and modern gaming rewards.

That being said, it's foolish the leave this problem to be solved only from the industry or regulation. Shouldn't it be enough for companies that include lootboxes or whatever somewhat addictive reward system just put a disclaimer or something? Parents shouldn't be expected to keep up-to-date on reward mechanisms that encourage replay and enable additional monetization, but it should be more apparent if such mechanisms are used so parents can stop and say "Probably don't want little Timmy playing this game...I remember what happened with the PokeMon cards" etc. etc.

McDonald's Sources:
https://www.enjuris.com/blog/resources/mcdonalds-hot-coffee-lawsuit/ https://www.rd.com/article/hot-coffee-lawsuit/ https://www.morrisdewett.com/personal-injury-blog/2022/march/mcdonald-s-hot-coffee-case-the-real-story-why-it/ https://www.thedailymeal.com/1393392/infamous-mcdonalds-coffee-story-explained/

EU Commission Report:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/652727/IPOL_STU(2020)652727_EN.pdf

Reliability is absolutely an issue that turns lots of people off - Just yesterday I had to switch to a different line in chicago bc of a delay. But to say that the "large physical size of the US" has allowed aircraft to out compete rail is disingenuous. It is so because it ignores the reality of strong city pairings for rail corridors and such line of thinking doesn't often take into account the boarding process' impact on total journey time. A 45 minute flight is going to require you to get there an hour early for security processing and boarding. You don't just show up 5 minutes before the plane takes off, yet that reality is true for the choo. Even then you still need to offboard, stop by baggage to get your goods and really hope they didn't lose them and have them unpacked in a few minutes. These bottlenecks just do not exist for rail. You get on in the city and get off right in the city. 10 minute taxi to your hotel and bob's your uncle. You simply cannot say the same for any metropolitan airport (Except metro ports that have a dedicated line from the airport to the city center). It won't be viable everywhere but that's not the point. The point is to remove the systemic barriers that prevent market competition where it can thrive (precision rail scheduling in many areas has made it physically impossible for freight to yield to passengers) and to provide reliable, predictable transportation not to the whims of traffic or those who can afford to purchase a vehicle.

Good transit utilizes the best modes for the best routes and this is why high speed rail is really starting in cali and the texas triangle - It's always gonna be faster for rail between two urban areas right next to each other than it is to fly, despite the fact that flying is far more common between such city pairs when people want to avoid driving or need to be there in the city center fast.

I'm far from an expert but I know for fact the United States has many cities that could be covered by HSR that are closer or the same distance as Tokyo -> Kyoto (one of the first HSRs); Keep in mind the shinkansen route is separate from the commuter route and only has a couple of stops. It's not like they reused significant portions of commuter rail, they built a new link.

I'll leave some reading here for more info because there's a lot of worthwhile knowledge to try and understand in projects like these:

CityNerd - Urban planner guy who knows a thing or two about transit

City Pairings for HSR by 2050 - More about city pairings, which is specifically worth focusing on for HSR bc that's how lines get started

America was quite literally built on the railroads. We take for granted the interstate highway system and don't realize its exorbitant cost, but if we had given rail even half the attention we gave the interstate since its inception rail would certainly be competitive. The interstate is national, so why not the rails too? It's not like CSX actually has to compete with BNSF - they don't serve the same area and are inherently monopolies. A business in Montana wanting to use rail for freight has to use BNSF because they're the only freight rail operating and owning lines there. For Denver you're stuck with UP for the same reasons. Most areas are lucky to have a duopoly, and anywhere there is competition is area that has several rail lines merging together, which also makes it perfect for transit.

Per Amtrak (Pg 2, 2021 Report Card) freight rail caused 900,000 minutes of passenger delay across all lines, and in 2023 (Through April, Host Railroad report pg 4) the major freight carriers were responsible for 67.8% of total delays, despite freight being legally obligated to yield to passenger trains most major operators generally ignore that law (Pg 2, Amtrak 2021 report).

So what's the point? Trucking companies don't get to clog the interstate and force passenger cars to yield so deliveries are faster. Passenger planes don't yield to FedEx/UPS/Amazon and circle above landing strips so freight planes get to land first. As a society we don't generally desire to systematically degrade the quality of transit, but we do so for rails because we're conditioned to believe that they are outmoded and just don't work for passengers. If that was true, no where in the world would they be used. Europe and Asia do in fact have more, higher density population centers but this fact does not preclude the capability of passenger rail in America, and we shouldn't believe in this logical fallacy that rail is outcompeted or out moded because of density. China is an interesting example, in that they too have a massive geography that is nearly as varied as America, and not every single city is inherently massive and super dense. Of course being a command economy makes it easy to do infrastructure projects but the viability of those projects doesn't change just because a different government is involved. While we were buying into the hype of hyperloop and slowing down California's HSR project, they built a solid 1000km+ of HSR where there originally was not.

We can do it, in many places HSR is very competitive, and it is economically viable. There does in fact exist a sweet spot of transit, long neglected in the market, where driving is just a bit too cumbersome, but taking a plane isn't any faster.

Of course, I'm just a radical who hates driving and loves trains because of the freedom to goon around with my friends in the city and bar hop without having to DUI or spend $45 on an uber.

I've been making a simple 8-bit game with the pygamer board from adafruit/digikey and CircuitPython. It's incredible to be able to run python on microcontrollers and it's a really simple workflow, though customizing your environment can be a little difficult when working on a constrained platform.