🙅 THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
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Planes will continue to be better along the longer routes, and for the shorter ones, cars tend to be better, especially since if you take a train, you probably end up renting a car at the other end.
Planes make sense for transcontinental distances.
Trains make a lot more sense for medium distance travel, as they're not significantly slower than planes for that distance and yet are more comfortable. They also don't force you to pay attention on your driving. (From where I live, London makes sense to take the train — even if it isn't currently HSR — because driving through all that traffic would be awful despite the distance not being too bad and the road itself good, and taking the plane leaves me stuck in an airport and going through “security” checks.) One upshot of this is that city centre locations become much more desirable for businesses, going quite a long way toward countering your infamous problems with urban sprawl in the US.
But failure is always an option, as is doing nothing and stagnating.
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Trains make a lot more sense for medium distance travel, as they're not significantly slower than planes for that distance and yet are more comfortable. They also don't force you to pay attention on your driving.
Maybe in Europe this makes sense. A train may be more comfortable, but you're paying a premium for that comfort vs your car and you're paying a time premium vs sitting on an airplane. And then you still have to rent a car.
But failure is always an option, as is doing nothing and stagnating.
Exactly! That's why we moved beyond passenger trains for inter-city travel.
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Omaha to Denver via airplane: 1 - 1.5 hours.
Omaha to Denver via car: 8 - 10 hours.
Omaha to Denver via dirt bike (yes I've done this): 11 - 12 hours but with LOTS of stops.
Omaha to Denver via train: 15 hours, assuming 35mph which is about the fastest I've ever seen a train around here go.
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Omaha to Denver via train: 15 hours, assuming 35mph which is about the fastest I've ever seen a train around here go.
Christ on a Shinkansen! That's a hell of a long time for just over 500 miles. For reference, our local stopping commuter trains do 90mph when the distance between stations is long enough…
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Amtrack says it takes about 8 hrs. The train presumably gets going faster across the Nebraska wastelands. And a 1 way ticket is $153. A quick google search shows me that Frontier flies that route in about an hour and a half for about $100.
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I flew Omaha to Denver for a friend's wedding a few years ago. A round-trip ticket through Frontier Airlines was $150.
The funny thing was my friend who drove, thinking it would be cheaper than flying. Joke's on him!
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Or maybe they could just get surgery that connects their esophagus directly to their ass.
Don't forget your colostomy bag/take-home-a-sack!
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The funny thing was my friend who drove, thinking it would be cheaper than flying. Joke's on him!
Depends on duration and whether you need to rent a car at the other end, usually.
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Not giving US Americans enough maps to learn about geography, or something...
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High speed passenger rail in the US.
"High-speed rail was supposed to be President Obama’s signature transportation project, but despite the administration spending nearly $11 billion since 2009 to develop faster passenger trains, the projects have gone mostly nowhere and the United States still lags far behind Europe and China."
Sounds like the perfect signature, to me. A Democrat spending someone else's money to not build stuff that no one really wants.
FTFY
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I'm thinking an even shorter distance than that.
San Diego to Los Angeles, or Boston to New York.
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What? I can't even...
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Getting your twitter account firebombed because you're ignorant.
Is that... His Greatness NGD?
Filed under: If he's a dumbass, then god help the rest of us!
Indeed.
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A train may be more comfortable, but you're paying a premium for that comfort vs your car and you're paying a time premium vs sitting on an airplane.
Speak for yourself. Trains here are uncomfortable as hell, but significantly cheaper than driving.
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Speak for yourself. Trains here are uncomfortable as hell, but significantly cheaper than driving.
I was speaking for @faoileag. I presume he's referring to stuff like being able to get up and walk around or whatever. Been a long time since I've ridden anything except a subway or airport terminal train, so I can't say much more than that.
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San Diego trolley expansion project definitely qualifies as a bad idea
http://www.sandag.org/index.asp?projectid=250&fuseaction=projects.detail
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This is really just a misleading post title, but it made me go, WTF:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/adding-jquery-to-posts/18598
tl;dr He wants to style posts using jQuery...well, I think he's really just doing something stupid like this to figure out how the plug-in system works, but all of that probably fits in this thread.
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San Diego trolley expansion project definitely qualifies as a bad idea
http://www.sandag.org/index.asp?projectid=250&fuseaction=projects.detail
It is not obvious to me from skimming that page why it's a bad idea, although it does seem discriminatory to extend Federal endangered species protection to San Diego fairy shrimp when that protection is not available to straight shrimp.
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Yeah, the downsides aren't all covered there, since it's the official site. Problems range from putting a station in a canyon with nearly no access to this just being part of the I-5 expansion project that has an estimated finish date of 2040.
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We all knew what you meant
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And if there's any doubt.
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@da_Doctah said:
You are what you eat.I eat cows.Cows are herbivores.Therefore I am a vegetarian.
I eat pizza.Pizza contains bread, cheese, tomato, and meat.I am bread, cheese, tomato, and meat.@Roy 'Chubby' Brown said:
You are what you eat. I must be a cunt.
<nbsp>
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Boston to New York.
Just over 200 miles. Should be possible to get a train do that in about 1h30 (or more if you make more stops). Good luck getting close to that with a plane, once you add in the fact that you've got to be at the airport earlier than at the station and that you've got to get from the airport into the city. (Flying might make sense if you're going to near an airport, but the effectiveness of doing it that way drops off quite quickly.)Once distances get over around 500 miles or so, it starts to be more sensible to fly. (Or take a sleeper train, but they're not usually HSR.) The key is that flying has a higher per-trip overhead (in time terms) when you're not actually moving. If you've not clogged the line up with slow traffic or put in masses of halts, trains are really good there. (Below a hundred miles, driving might be better. The issue is that driving is one hell of a lot more tiring than the alternatives over the same distance.)
Only total cheap-ass plebs take long-distance busses. (Or people going to Brno, the second city of the Czech Republic. Because.)
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I was speaking for @faoileag. I presume he's referring to stuff like being able to get up and walk around or whatever. Been a long time since I've ridden anything except a subway or airport terminal train, so I can't say much more than that.
Long-distance trains tend to be a lot better. Even the cheap seats tend to have more room with a table (or drop-down seat-back thing), there's usually somewhere to plug your laptop/phone in to charge it, you can get up and use the toilet any time you want, and there's usually food available too. They're typically a lot less miserable than cattle-class air travel. (First class long-haul air is better, but it's also O!M!G! expensive.)
No idea why things are so shitty around where @Onyx is. Probably overcrowding if they're a cheap option.
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Problem is, most places I go to tend to be across oceans.
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Should be possible to get a train do that in about 1h30
AHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAH
Sorry.
For reference, here a express train does 175 miles in 2:40. And that's assuming you can afford an express train (arguably not that hard), and that you're lucky enough to travel between cities which have a direct connection to each other (way more difficult). If you're less lucky, you're going to end up traveling the whole day, taking three separate trains and waiting 2 hours for each one.
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No idea why things are so shitty around where @Onyx is. Probably overcrowding if they're a cheap option.
Welcome, to the ex-communist Croatia, where they fucked everything up even more when switching ownership over to private companies so there's never any money left to fix shit, where trains are, at average, some 30 years old and poorly maintained, where there's plenty of swampy land around, upon which poorly made foundations were made for the tracks, except they are so bad the train has to slow down to under 40 kph due to fear of everything just collapsing...
It's fun!
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where they fucked everything up even more when switching ownership over to private companies so there's never any money left to fix shit, where trains are, at average, some 30 years old and poorly maintained,
Man, it's almost as bad here. Except we have some pretty amazing, new, shiny trains, which replaced the old, rusty things with toilets literally having
"Passengers will please refrain
From flushing toilets while the train
Is standing in the station"written above them...
...replaced them, that is, only on local routes, up to perhaps 150km.
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Hah, we're even on Wikipedia in that matter:
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It's strange how that sign does not have French and German diacritics.
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Welcome, to the ex-communist Croatia, where they fucked everything up even more when switching ownership over to private companies so there's never any money left to fix shit, where trains are, at average, some 30 years old and poorly maintained, where there's plenty of swampy land around, upon which poorly made foundations were made for the tracks, except they are so bad the train has to slow down to under 40 kph due to fear of everything just collapsing...
It's fun!
What are you talking about? I can't relate to that at all.
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"Passengers will please refrain
From flushing toilets while the train
Is standing in the station"I can provide pretty much the same image.
What are you talking about? I can't relate to that at all.
I'm going to assume missing sarcasm tags. If not, I'm moving. Any good housing options you know of?
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Hmm, under a half-collapsed unused train bridge? We have plenty.
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It's strange how that sign does not have French and German diacritics.
... and that English has an all-uppercase "DO NOT USE", while all other languages just use normal case.
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... and that English has an all-uppercase "DO NOT USE", while all other languages just use normal case.
Who knows, perhaps some Englishman crapped in the middle of Warsaw Central once, and they decided to yell at them from now on.
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Just over 200 miles.
That's right about the magic spot where it takes roughly the same time to fly, drive or take the train (total trip time, not moving time). Now, NY/Boston has a history of trains and enough traffic that prices are cheaper for rail than air. But toss that out the window if you want to upgrade to HSR.
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If you're less lucky, you're going to end up traveling the whole day, taking three separate trains and waiting 2 hours for each one.
That's why I don't take the train to Amsterdam. One short flight, or all day by any other means.
The timezone difference on that hop is sometimes amusing. I was once asked by a nice checkin desk lady in San Francisco why I didn't drive that given as it was “just a 10 minute flight”; not with the timezone difference it isn't — 50 minutes in the air is more accurate, and add another 20 for screwing around on the ground — and by road it is literally a whole day to drive because you have to all the way down to Calais to get to a crossing place, or take an overnight ferry. Drive it? In that traffic? No way!
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Running the scrolling script on the Likes thread at work to like posts and gather some stats.
Fucking <audio> tags somewhere around post 10k...
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First shave in 3 years, going from full crazy wild-man-of-the-woods beard+tache to clean shaven (but still long haired)
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What's the bad idea there? The shitty filters applied to the photo? They don't appear to be taunting the bear with food.
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And this will be an improvement?
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Which makes all the people using the Sensa diet system automatic sociopaths.
That's the kind of thing you tell your waiter before you submit your order.
If you have ordering requirements, and they are within reason, you can tell your waiter. If you are concerned that the restaurant cannot handle the request, you ask the host. Once seated, you should already know if the restaurant can give you the experience you want.
Once your food arrives, you should already know it is within your needs.
These are your responsibilities.
Then you taste the food, then season to taste.
There is a way to have all your needs met, and not be the most rude hedonistic asshole.
But we are raised today being taught that our "rights" are the most important thing, being more important than learning to act civil. It's ironic that the sector of the public that thinks it is enlightened and civilized and that the past is obselete, is the most uncivil and rude class of person I've ever seen.
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Automatic sinks. There's no way to control the temperature, and I might need more than a 2 second burst of water.
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Time spent in a public restroom:
5%: Doing your business.
15%: Frantically waving your hands in front of the sink to activate it.
50%: Washing and rinsing your hands with the super low-flow faucet.
25%: Trying to dry your hands off with the air blower.
5%: Drying your hands off on your pants and leaving the restroom.
