nbailey

Local options are always better. The Mexican joint sells you a massive breakfast burrito for $6. Nepalese takeout will feed you for days for $16. Hot dog truck will fill you up with delicious processed meat for $4.

Subway? Subpar lunch made out of cardboard and ground up yoga mats for almost $20.

GOAT vehicle. It’s purely functional in pristine egg form. Bulletproof drivetrain. Comfy as hell, even by today’s standards. If one ever comes up on autotrader in good condition I’m buying one.

So the reality is a bit more complicated than “big sparse country”. Freight railroads don’t really care about population density, just distance and operating margins. It comes down to who owns the rails and their motivations.

A big capital investment like electrification is actually extremely profitable long term. Over 30-40 years it would save a class 1 railroad about 25% of their operating expenses for fuel and maintenance (diesel-electric units are complex high maintenance systems compared to big-ass AC motors). Even when factoring in debt servicing over that period it’s still a large overall win.

The problem is that a big investment like that isn’t attractive to CN or CPKC, because they’re mainly concerned with positive quarterly reports. It’s the same reason our tracks are so shabby, it’s not that they can’t afford to it’s that their motivation is to move freight for the absolute lowest cost, speed and reliability be damned.

In Europe & Asia the infrastructure is commonly owned by a state corporation, and they’re generally more willing to take on big projects like that so they can get more revenue from the train operators themselves. More passengers and higher speed = more tax revenue. The incentives are just different in that situation

Another fun fact… if you were to add up the bonuses, dividends, buybacks, and dumb vanity projects (CN Tower) in the past half-century, they’ve already blown through more than double what it would cost to electrify and upgrade the most serviced trackage in the country. Instead we made some old guys obscenely wealthy.

If we play our cards right, they might open for 2028 in LA…

I feel like “weird” misses the mark. It’s quite hurtful to people who are outside the norm and proud of it.

“Creepy” is a way better description of those guys.

It sort of does make sense, since it’s how trains work so well! A single locomotive can haul dozens of carriages way more efficiently than putting a single small motor on each carriage. It also has way less aerodynamic losses since the trailer is right in the slipstream for the truck!

The problem is that this also applies within a radius around a “port of entry”. So everybody that lives within about 100 miles of the coast, an airport, or a rail line that crosses a border — which is probably about 80+% of any country.

It’s a good week to be a Gojira fan 🤘

Well, yeah. The rate of increases is slowing, but prices are still high. There isn’t, and won’t be, deflation, that’s a catastrophically bad long term economic effect (at least, according to economists)

Agree. Ford’s auto braking and lane keeping in insane and dangerous. It constantly feels like somebody neurotic is reaching over from the passenger seat to grab the wheel. And sometimes it will look at a pothole or puddle and decide to stomp on the brakes. Happened only twice in about 1500km/four days, but that’s still twice too many. Car “automation” tech is still deep in its infancy.

So instead of clipping a wire you plug in a Bluetooth OBD interface and flip a bit in the car’s memory that the engineers conveniently forgot to remove which disables the beeps…

Trust me, if you go to Japan you will go to a 7-11 whether you want to or not. They are absolutely everywhere, like “ubiquitous” is an understatement. I think when we were there we went to 2-5 convenience stores per day just because they were just so… convenient…