yistdaj

Ah, I must have misunderstood, sorry. Rereading your first reply to TinyBreak I see that now.

While I agree that increased bandwidth is crucial, I'm not so sure about leaving so many people and remote areas cut off over this. Especially as each generation of technology has shorter range (and therefore more expensive to service). Each generation of technology will have more people cut off, and I think there are implicit fears that one day, it will be them.

Maybe those fears are wrong, but it seems you're just as dismissive of these fears as people that dismiss future benefits from greater bandwidth.

Also, I don't know about looking to the US for inspiration, they also have a very large digital divide, largely based on the wealth of the local area.

I know most call it AEST, but there are some who call it EST.

I hear timezone names can also be a slight issue at times, some Australians call the eastern time zone EST. Leap years aren't so bad at times either though. Kind of agree with the rest of it, much of the complexity is from historical dates.

I'd argue not every job will always be 9-5, so you still get people having to explain working hours with non-UTC timezones anyway, whereas all timezone conversions are eliminated if everyone uses UTC.

Although I agree that other forms of transport should be considered, I genuinely can't figure out how either a conveyor belt or autonomous carts could be better than a freight train. Both for battling decreasing manpower and for intercity freight transport.

I think both proposed ideas are better for short-distance transport, with conveyor belts better for a single direction of movement in indoor (or as the article mentions, tunnel) conditions (must be kept clear of debris in order to run, more so than track which only needs to be cleared before the next train) and autonomous carts better for transporting small packages between many origins and destinations (eg. a warehouse or maybe delivery service).

Conveyor belts might also require much more maintenance, as moving parts would be all along the length of the belt.