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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • dnick@sh.itjust.workstoFuck Cars@lemmy.world'My car is more convenient'
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    1 month ago

    It doesn’t require suspension of critical thought when you can look around the world and see that nowhere does anyone have high speed rail spanning distances and population densities equivalent to what the US would need to go from, say, New York to LA, it East to West Coast in general. There are plenty of examples similar locally to East or West Coast population centers, but nothing in between. High speed commercial routes? Maybe. High speed commuter rail? It’s not even close to being worth the cost: utilization.


  • dnick@sh.itjust.workstoFuck Cars@lemmy.world'My car is more convenient'
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    1 month ago

    Not sure what you are arguing with exactly, theres a huge difference between commercial and commuter ‘profitability’. Things that freely allow for commerce like a road can be justified from many different direction where a periodic service only makes sense based on demand. That isn’t to say that maintaining an underutilized route with the goal of it becoming utilized based on is availability is always a bad idea, but a road can be built and it’s cost can at least roughly be correlated to it’s use. If you had to periodically rebuild every road, at roughly the same cost whether it was used or not, they would end up with the same ‘profitability’ concern, but mostly you have to build all the roads for minimal usability and then spend the most money on the most used roads. Freeways are understood to improve commercial visibility and are funded by taxes for that reason. The entire country benefits by having clear routes for good to move. Commuter rail primarily benefits a local area and is funded heavily by fares and local taxes.







  • Not sure I get it, is this the meme thing where they’re slamming liberals for some obviously bad outcome? I mean, that would be hilarious to realize how annoying that phrase might be to the people who would be bothered by it, but aside from that it’s hardly a ‘bad outcome’.

    Or maybe the meme is being used ironically. is there even a way to tell?



  • I don’t think it’s that, i think it’s the part of about acting like biden being a bad choice is fairly comparing him to a alternative. It’s like saying Biden is a car that might break down so don’t buy it…but the car that’s already broken down, had knives for seats and only plays white supremacy youtube stations on loop on the radio. I mean we can admit a lot of flaws on the democrat side before we have to actually start comparing it to the republican options.






  • I think you are stretching the semantics pretty far…the US is primarily rural geographically and urban only in very sparsely spaced cities…where Europe is urban in more condensed areas. The US doesn’t make everything ‘more inconvenient’ for the most part, most things are simple more inconvenient by nature.

    On the other hand, within cities themselves, the US does shoot itself in the foot with it’s policies and what it subsidizes. Overall, though, most people don’t realize how really big the US is, space vs population-wise, compared to Europe or Japan.


  • There is no way a US federal high speed rail would look anything nearly as successful as ones in europe or other highly populated locations. I think people fail to realize that for the most part the US is very sparsely populated. with the exception of maybe 2-3 ‘regions’ that might look close to the population density and public transportation feasibility of Europe, there just wouldn’t be enough people going between each individual point to make it profitable, even if subsidized. Imagine putting up 300 miles of high speed rail that cost many millions of dollars to build, millions of dollars a year to maintain, and thousands of dollars to run each round trip, and then finding out there are only a few dozen people that need to go between those particular terminals each hour. Trying to adjust by running less often just makes things worse because running less often means fewer people yet will find it convenient…running more often makes it less profitable…so you end up like the US and basically don’t bother making routes and stations without enough traffic.


  • 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.