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The ends of education

So we're into the Conservative Party leadership run-off campaign, and the two candidates are throwing policies at the base that, to outsider ears, sound increasingly bizarre. But there's a lot we can learn from them about how the Conservative elite perceive the state of the UK today, and some of it (who am I kidding? Most of it!) is disturbing.

In the latest move, potential Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (the richest MP in parliament, a former Goldman Sachs employee and hedge-fund manager who married a billionaire) has vowed to phase out university degrees that do not improve students' "earning potential":

... Yeah, I know what you're thinking: "train the serfs for work, actual education is for the wealthy elite". But there's a lot more to it than that.

The Guardian: Rishi Sunak vows to end low-earning degrees in post-16 education shake-up

For starters, "earning potential" is only testable in hindsight. Work is changing, many jobs are being automated, and the earnings of graduates with a given degree over the previous decade is not a good predictor for the success of new graduates with that degree.

I have two STEM degrees from the 1980s which are totally obsolete now and of almost no relevance to my current occupation.

You can't predict educational outcomes for future employment on the basis of priors because, like the old "job for life" culture, the degree-for-life has died. Personal anecdote: after a regrettable initial career choice—nobody needs a pharmacist with ASD/ADHD, it's a really bad combination of personality traits for that career—I returned to university (something I wouldn't be able to do today) and graduated for the second time, with a CS degree, in '90, right in the middle of a recession. The only work I could find was as a technical author (I had the writing chops and bluffed my way in). I have worked as a programmer since then, but only for 5 years out of the past 33. For 18 out of those 33 years, my occupation has had almost nothing to do with either degree. And today, a 1990 CS degree is about as useful in the CS workplace as a 1923 aerospace engineering degree (if such a thing existed).

Priors are not predictors, especially in an unstable working environment.

Here's an illustrative thought experiment: imagine you have a time machine. Now pick a worker at random from some time and place in the past 5 centuries, and carry them forward by 30 years. will they be able to earn a living?

Until 1900 the answer was probably "yes", because most work was unskilled agricultural or factory labour. (Even basic literacy was optional.)

Then it got harder. A 1945 factory worker might be able to adapt to work in a 1975 factory. But a 1975 factory worker would be utterly adrift in a 2005 factory that had gone from drill presses to CNC tools, from painting stuff by hand to using robots.

And it'd be the same with office workers, medics, miners. A 1800 doctor would have relatively little to learn to practice in 1830. Even a 1910 doctor wouldn't find the innovations of 1940 too complex to grapple with. But the shift from medicine in 1960 to 1990 is dizzying: that was the era of the pharmaceutical revolution, when all sorts of new treatments became available, things that hadn't even been recognized as disease states became medical specialities, and a whole new set of diagnostic tools became available. A 1960 doctor in 1990 who hadn't kept up with their training might as well start from scratch all over again.

So: I'm going to hammer this point again (it's vital context for understanding what higher education is for) a degree does not equip you for a job, even for a specific job for a couple of years in the very near future.

So what's Sunak really talking about?

Until the 1990s universities in the UK were private entities that ran almost entirely on government funding for higher education. (The Polytechnics were vocational training institutions, and state-owned, until they were renamed Universities and privatised in the 90s.) With privatization the government gradually withdrew the education funding: first loans were brought in for subsistence, replacing the previous student grant, then tuition fees were added on top. All to a background of trying to push as many people as possible through the institutions of higher education in order to certify that the individuals were sufficiently tractable to obey orders, perform rote tasks, and conform to expectations—necessary prerequisites for employment.

(Because in an unstable working environment HR departments can't rely on references from previous employers.)

What evolved was essentially a Ponzi scheme. Workers needed a certificate of obedience to show they were suitable employees. The universities that issued such certificates were private institutions: the more certificates they could issue, the more money they could make. At the same time, the finance sector boomed—not so much through student loans at first (the Student Loan Company was thoroughly regulated initially) but through side-projects like the highly profitable student housing construction boom. Also, once a worker-unit was certified and in employment, paying off their student debt, they could be trained to accept other debts. Credit card debt, mortgage debt, anything at all that could be monetized. And the universities that could recruit and certify the most students made the most money.

All good things come to an end, though. The slow-motion economic disaster that is Brexit (hint: 13% inflation predicted later this year, close to full employment but nearly half the in-work population qualify for Universal Credit—government income support—because they're so badly paid, economy in recession for the next couple of years and expected to shrink by about 6%), combined with a global energy crisis and a pandemic, is choking off the supply of willing debtors needed to sustain the Ponzi scheme.

The sheepskin is no longer enough to get you a job that pays well enough to cover the interest on the loans you took out to buy the sheepskin. So why buy the sheepskin?

Sunak is coming at this with the mind-set of a financier—and specifically, a disaster capitalist. His objective is typically short-sighted: he wants to deflate the higher education bubble in the UK just enough to stave off a catastrophic crash (damaging to the interest of the investor class), and he's going to do so by shedding the least-remunerative debtors, the ones who earn below the loan repayment threshold.

(Now would be a good time to sell your shares in student housing companies if you have any, by the way.)

The stupidest aspect of this is that for cultural reasons specific to the Conservative party membership he's going to trash arts education funding.

The UK arts sector includes film, media, computer games, and music: it's one of the UK's most profitable export industries. For every £1 of government money going into it, roughly £5 in foreign earnings comes back.

But it's ideologically suspect to gammons' eyes. Gammons—the Tory party membership, whose support Sunak is canvassing—are predominantly white males aged over 60 living in the South East of England, authoritarian by inclination and well-off but poorly educated.

Authoritarian followers are very conformist: submissive towards those they perceive as powerful, need rigid guidelines for conduct, and distrust and despise nuance and complexity.

Art, by its very nature, can't be conformist. So they hate it and have no use for it, and it's easy to rally them against "liberal arts" long-hairs.

So, in order to prevent a chunk of the financial sector imploding due to the higher education certification Ponzi scheme crashing, Sunak is going to wreck the UK's biggest export-earning industry.

Nicely played!

PS: this is how you get V for Vendetta.

1004 Comments

1:

PS: My beating on Rishi Sunak is emphatically not an endorsement of his rival Liz Truss, who Dominic Cummings rightly described as "a grenade" (you don't want to be around when she goes off). Typical Truss here.

2:

I returned to university (something I wouldn't be able to do today)

About that -- I returned to university in 2015 and graduated in 2020 with a PhD in Applied Mathematics. So it's not yet impossible for a person to do it. But it is very, very unusual.

3:

A higher degree isn't the same as what I did -- going back for a first degree in an entirely unrelated field I had greater aptitude for. (It's officially an MSc in comp. sci., but as a conversion degree it's basically a first CS degree that got bumped a notch -- a one-year death march because the students were all STEM honours grads who were assumed able to drink from the firehose: they threw the syllabus at us hard, sink-or-swim.) That sort of degree isn't on offer any more, it was an artifact of the Thatcher government panicking about a shortage of CS grads in the late 1980s and providing funding inducements to make up the shortfall.

4:

Is the asterisk in para 6 a typo? "I have* worked as a programmer ..."

5:

going back for a first degree in an entirely unrelated field I had greater aptitude for.

Well, that's pretty much what I did. My previous degrees were in an unrelated field -- biochemistry. That is no more closely related to AMath than pharmacy is to CS.

But as for the subject line: "The ends of education", I did it for fun. And it was fun, and I'm very glad I did. Of course, few people are in a position to set life aside for five years for fun, and of those, there are not many whose idea of fun is "get a full-time advanced degree". So as I said, it was "very, very unusual".

6:

IMHO we send way too many people to college here in the US.

For my construction sites I cannot find (even pre-covid) enough masons, cement pourers, pipe fitters, geosynthetic installers, electricians, auto/truck/equipment mechanics, etc. Covid made it worse.

None of these jobs can be done by robots.

7:
IMHO we send way too many people to college here in the US.
For my construction sites I cannot find (even pre-covid) enough masons, cement pourers, pipe fitters, geosynthetic installers, electricians, auto/truck/equipment mechanics, etc. Covid made it worse.
None of these jobs can be done by robots.

But by saying, "IMHO we send way too many people to college", you also seem to be suggesting that the jobs cannot be done by people who have been to college.

8:

Student loans are (for now) written off after a fixed number of years and the repayments are scaled by earnings, not the size of the loan. So its more a tax than a loan, but nobody wants to admit they've created a new tax. So the calculation for a student is based on the earning threshold for paying this tax and the tax rate, both of which have varied over time.

The current figures used means that very few will ever pay off their loan, which leads to an accounting loss/write-off of monies that never really existed.

The wealthy can avoid this tax by either not taking the loan at all or by finding a tax efficient way of paying it off. This provides their kids with additional nett earnings over their peers for 20+ years (irrelevant for the very wealthy, of course).

9:

Just to add that the loan write-off amounts are controlled by the government but its not clear if they will involve passing huge sums of tax payers' money to the private sector (any bets ?)

10:

I happen to have a young relative who started doing a CS degree in 2019 at a Russell Group university. He spent most of 2020 listening to videoed lectures at 1.5x speed, putting in minimal effort on his classwork, and co-running an (ultimately failed) startup the rest of his time. (He was already a reasonably accomplished coder when he started Uni).

His experience of a CS degree was that it was primarily about training software engineers how to write big software, but without ever actually getting any big software to practice on. As a result it was a mixture of noddy programming exercises and irrelevant lessons on the theory of software architecture. The worrying thing was that most of his class had zero coding experience when they started, and were struggling with the basics. They had no interest in coding, and seemed to be aiming to become managers of coders rather than actually ever getting their hands dirty at the code face.

After a year of this he dropped out, initially with an option to rejoin, but never looked back. He's currently on his third start-up. If this fails, he'll simply go for a fourth.

How this looks as a long-term career is still an open question, but I'm pretty sure that given a choice between a wet-behind-the-ears graduate who can barely code FizzBuzz and a coder with a track record of building entire product web sites in 6 months, any sane employer is going to go for experience (and the ones that demand a degree, he probably wouldn't want to work for anyway).

Apparently law in America has/had a similar problem (sorry, paywall, but double-click the reload button a few times and you can interrupt it). TL;DR law school teaches its students how to think and lots of relevant case law. What it doesn't teach is the stuff the lawyer in the room needs to do when e.g. a company merger is agreed.

I suspect that part of the problem is that an awful lot of the core Tory membership (the voters in the current election, remember) either didn't go to University or have no clue what University does for you today. I was the first generation in my family to get a degree (my father left school at 14: most people did back then). My parents saw a degree as the step up from the lower-middle class they inhabited to the middle-middle and maybe even the upper-middle with a bit of luck. And back then it was true. But I'm still at the younger end of the Tory membership; many of them either didn't go (because most people didn't), or did go and then turned that degree into a lifetime of employment in one of the big companies or the civil service (and there wasn't a lot of distinction between them in those days). They may have children or grandchildren who are carving a different path, but there is a lot of social inertia and most people still think that a University degree is the key to a guaranteed good career. They also think of an Arts degree as being a luxury, preparing you only to be a barely-surviving writer or painter, because back when they were students or leaving school that was the reality.

Equally, its quite possible that neither Sunak nor Truss believe any of this; they are politicians desperately trying to get votes, and the voters in this case are not at all like the rest of the country. Their message is pitched at Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells because he's the vote they need.

Incidentally, there is an article in the current Economist (sorry, don't know how to evade that paywall) about how the Tories are systematically alienating a key part of their constituency. There are, it seems, a lot of white collar workers in the south east who used to commute to London but now work from home. A lot of them are "woke", which is a Tory-party sneer-word for the socially liberal kind of person who worries about trans rights, institutional racism and the plight of refugees. They aren't generally members of the Tory party, but in elections they have reliably voted Tory because they don't trust Labour or the Lib Dems to actually run the country (and especially not Jeremy Corbin). Being white-collar professionals they value competence and diligence, and they object to being laughed and sneered at. As a result they may not be so happy to vote Tory at the next election. OTOH Kier Starmer is very much their kind of person. The next General Election could be very interesting.

11:

a degree does not equip you for a job, even for a specific job for a couple of years in the very near future.

Totally agreeing with the points of your post.

But a slight disagreement over this exact statement. But I think you'll agree with me.

My son really wanted to become a nurse. He wanted to care for people. After 2 years or so of doing badly in that college course program he admitted to himself that he just wasn't wired for all the crazy fact learning the degree required. Caring and empathy just wasn't enough. So to not wast his time totally he switched majors (and transferred schools) and got a double degree in anthropology and psychology. Then started a job search. 100+ applications later he got an entry position in tech support of a company even tech people have mostly never heard of. But you know most of their clients and their product is for people with 10 of thousands OR MORE Windows PCs. Now after less than 10 years he manages a group of specialty support staff.

Turns out those degrees plus his desired to help people fit in well with learning how to keep large corporate customers happy.

But drawing a line from anthropology and psychology to where he is now would never happen in any planning sense.

12:

For my construction sites I cannot find (even pre-covid) enough masons, cement pourers, pipe fitters, geosynthetic installers, electricians, auto/truck/equipment mechanics, etc.

If you want see people (parents) start plucking chickens and melting tar, go into a high school in the US and start talking about how some of the "college" bound kids should really be headed to a vocational school. Make sure you know where all the exits are for your quick getaway.

Many of those trades folks, but not all, first go to a 1/2 year or 3 of college before they flame out and start learning a trade. While paying off their debt.

13:

I'm afraid I can't agree with your claim that a 90s CS degree would be useless.

Most of the algorithms and data structures used day to day have been known since the 1960s.

The huge changes in things like CPU performance and the appearance of GPUs have changed things but not as much as you might think.

Fast CPUs, caches and slow RAM mean out of core data structures designed in the 70s migrate into memory and become awesome again. GPUs make the forgotten chapter about sorting networks in Knuth vol 2 relevant again etc.

High end graphics and GPU compute work is all about the data flow graphs.

Loads of new stuff too of course but an early 90s grad would absolutely get it.

14:

Just remembered the following Douglas Adams quote:

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Seems germaine. The problem is the number of inventions is increasing exponentially. I mean, who would imagined you could get a career (or at least, silly amounts of money) making dumb 1-minute video clips that aren't about anything.

There is also a book "Tomorrow Now" by Bruce Sterling (sorry if that's the wrong one), where he looks at the future from 2000. His chapter on education covers much the same ground:

An information economy is inherently low in backwaters, shelters, sinecures. [...] It follows that, in an information society, a formal education aimed at vocational success would not be about values or canons. [...] It would lack the very things that teachers and scholars traditionally consider the sacred torch. [...] That is the kind of steadying education provided by fundamentalist Islamic madrassas.

15:

Most of the algorithms and data structures used day to day have been known since the 1960s.

Yes, but the difference is that today you don't need to know them. I learned how to sort a list, insert an item into a hash table and balance a red-black tree when I did my degree, along with shift/reduce parsing and a ton of other stuff. But in the last couple of decades I've used that knowledge about as often as I have done long-division, and for much the same reason. The only people who need to know that stuff are the very few who write the libraries that everyone else imports, and they can just look it up on Wikipedia.

16:

I always recommended to my students that they looked seriously at getting trades papers as well as a university degree (if so inclined), to provide an alternative income but also to learn that there's nothing to sneer at in someone who works with their hands.

Not the most popular course of action with many parents :-/

17:

The only people who need to know that stuff are the very few who write the libraries that everyone else imports, and they can just look it up on Wikipedia.

Yes. Totally. As a lead applications developers in the 80s we did our OWN DB, file structures, screen handling, and so on. We put our applications on top of that. Now days we'd be considered weird to say the least.

For the last 20+ years I've mostly been a systems admin. I tell people that 1/4 to 1/2 of what I know and use at any point in time will be unused in 2 years to so. And it is a continuous operation.

People who develop TCP/IP stack low level code may be different but to admin systems or develop applications you have to continuously learn. Not the accounting but how to implement it on modern systems.

18:

I got to see it from all sides growing up.

My father (a WWII vet) wound up a the production manager at a nuclear fuel cascade plant. But he built houses on the side. So I grew up using our small farm tractor mowing fields to earn extra money, working for my father as a construction gopher, and getting excited about computers while still in high school in 72.

The day I got my driver's license he had a talk with me. As long as you're not stupid you have the use of the car whenever he was not using it. But nearly every day he would be giving me a list of things for the crew. If they ever told him they had to stop work because they were missing something I was supposed to have delivered I'd loose the car privileges. I was stupid a few times but keep the crews supplied.

I KNOW the value of an electrician who has gone through the 4 years of apprenticeship to get licensed. Or a plumber. Or a mason. Or ... But just like college is not for everyone, being a mason isn't either. I grew up to despise working outside in cold weather. So my career in computers served me well. But I can sweat solder copper plumbing, flare copper gas lines, wire up a house for most electrical needs if I want/need to do so, frame a wall, finish sheet rock, etc... But you don't want to hire me for any of that.

My next big deal may be to buy a very small mini excavator then sell it 6 months later. That way I'm not looking at the rental clock every day I don't feel like using it to re-arrange my yard. Last time I rented one the weather forecast changed that day from 2 days of rain over the next two weeks to rain more than half the time. Sucks to be me those weeks.

My point is those parents who want their kids to go to college and not get their hands dirty need to get over it.

19:

The 'degree as qualification' idea has always been a myth. Some degrees are more useful than others, but they tend to be where they give a solid grounding in principles, and then are mostly useful if the job is vaguely related or they teach the students how to learn and think. It's both that people rarely work in precisely that area and that the details change, as you say.

I think that you are under-estimating the debt peonage aspect. The increase in renewable, fixed-term contracts and the demand for PhDs for jobs that need no more than a couple of years university-level training isn't accidental. This is done for commercial and industrial non-research jobs, too. And PhDs are of no bloody use except for people going into research in a closely related area. This is to keep the majority of technopeasants docile, nothing to do with education as such.

Despite being broke, in the 1950s and 1960s, we led the world in many areas of innovation and research. But, now? It is noticeable that the areas in which we do best are those that are furthest from central control. To take a random Website on this matter, the UK wouldn't have been classified like this even in 1990, though a lot of us in research and academia knew where we were going.

https://worldresearchranking.com/

Damn academic research. This ALSO includes innovation in areas where we desperately need solutions to real problems, and existing ones simply don't cut the mustard.

20:

I spent my life advising on this sort of thing. That is totally wrong. If you don't know the principles, you have no context to judge whether the method will solve YOUR problem and, much, much worse, when and where that method is likely to start giving wrong answers or failing on YOUR data.

No, you don't need to know the details, nor is a deep grounding in compiler theory very useful. But algorithmics, whether computer science, statistics or numerical analysis is, as is a solid grounding in practical program design, testing etc.

21:

Yeah, I've worked in UK University finance departments for 20 years (currently Assistant Director of Finance at a post-92)

The Tory policies for the last 10 years have clearly been aimed to recreate the old university vs poly divide, presumably on the basis that universities should still exist for their children, but other people's children shouldn't dare aspire, and should be happy working in supermarkets for minimum wage.

I still believe in what we are doing, in giving opportunities for people who wouldn't traditionally have gone to university, but it's harder and harder to believe in the wider context.

(It's now true that privileged kids can maybe do better outside of uni, if they have other connections to call on and family money to let them live at home while they're experimenting, but our kids - and our adult learners - often don't have those things, so for them uni may still be a better choice.)

And of course a student's access to jobs after their degree is very largely determined by their degree of privilege going in. If you don't know anyone who works in an office, getting a degree doesn't magically tell you how to impress people at job interviews, or what to wear or how to behave or anything like that.

So judging universities and degree subjects on people's earnings after graduation, e.g. LEO or similar, ends up deciding that universities which attract the greatest number of privileged kids are also magically the best at educating them, because they must have done because earnings are the determination of value.

The indices we use used to be benchmarked against the intake population, so universities were judged against how other similar populations had done, but no more. Now we're judged on our failure to produce Oxbridge outcomes without an Oxbridge intake.

22:

No, you don't need to know the details, nor is a deep grounding in compiler theory very useful. But algorithmics, whether computer science, statistics or numerical analysis is, as is a solid grounding in practical program design, testing etc.

I agree with this. The basics are very important.

Anecdote time: I have a Masters in Space Technology, with a minor in embedded systems. Mostly my degree was in signal processing and software development, though I might know what a link budget or delta-v is if asked. I graduated in 2004, after a long time (started in 1995, but let's not go into what the Finnish university culture was at the time).

I've been doing basically IT jobs for the last 18 years, mostly software development but also different IT security things. I don't use any specific things I was taught (I remember implementing multiple sorting algorithms, for example), but in my opinion the most important thing I learned was how to learn. A close second is an understanding of how a computer works, so it's easier to understand how it should be massaged to do what I want.

For my whole career, it's always been learning new stuff. The systems I did in 2005 were software development as well as the thing I'm doing now, but the specifics have changed. Most of the stuff is still old and was known earlier in principle, it's just that the particulars have changed. (I admit that doing 6510 assembler is just for fun nowadays, though.)

(In 2005 I was working with CVS, C, TCL, and had dedicated servers for compiling and building packages. Installed software went into rack computers. Now it's git, Python/Java/node.js, and the rack computers are abstracted away into 'the cloud', which is of course only somebody else's rack computer we just pay for. I find the current things more fun to work with, but principles are pretty much similar.)

I think with a 1990 degree in CS you could get up to speed pretty well in the current environments. Depends on the degree and the workplace, of course, but many things were talked about already 30 years ago.

23:
  • I can sweat solder copper plumbing, flare copper gas lines, wire up a house for most electrical needs if I want/need to do so, frame a wall, finish sheet rock, etc...* In other words, all the construction craft skills that used to be taught (in the UK) by a 4 year apprenticeship combined with one day a week day release at a technical college. Not skills you ever pursued by doing a full-time HND or university first degree.
24:

It's sound advice if you can manage it. I worked a series of part-time jobs while at university, mostly because I needed the money, but also because the jobs themselves proved progressively more applicable and useful towards eventual employment after graduation.

My IT career (admittedly not for everyone, or even most people) most likely wouldn't have gotten started without the student worker jobs in various university offices and computer labs along the way towards a CS degree.

The work experience was arguably more valuable than the degree itself, though I suspect that CS degree did open some doors for me early on which might have otherwise been closed. Dunno how true that might be today.

25:

The basics are very important.

Ha! Not too long ago I got to explain twos complement arithmetic to one of my office-mates. It's frankly a little surprising to me how often, even in these days, it can become relevant to understand how a computer actually represents signed integers.

26:

Before I get into anecdote, I want to point out something important: degree relevance to job varies both by field and by school. We've got a preponderance of CS talent here, and experience there may not translate very well to other fields.

My experience was getting a masters in botany at Humboldt State (recently renamed Cal Poly Humboldt, and high time), and a PhD in botany at UW-Madison. Then I walked out into the Bush II War on Science and that was that.

Anyway, while I was starting my masters, my uncle had retired after 20 years working for an electronics company that did military contracting. He'd dropped out of college in the 1960s, did a stint in the military including electronics school, went from there into the industry and learned to program by doing. After he retired he went back and got his CS degree at the local university. He was rather sad that what he was taught in class was easily 10 years behind what he'd been working on a few miles down the road in one of the town's local employers.

As a botanist, my biggest benefit so far has been that HSU degree. "The Humboldt Mafia" is aging out, but for a long time, the mid-level environmental bureaucrats in California were disproportionately HSU grads, and they were the ones who got stuff done. Being one of them opened some doors.

Thing is, what I did in class and research is still 10-20 years ahead of what I could do as an environmental consultant, even in California, even decades after I got my degree. This is in large part due to how governments treat environmental issues in general, and malign neglect seems to be the default. It's not a good situation.

27:

If one of the two Tory idiots wasn’t going to end up running the country it would be hilarious. Both of them spewing standard policies out of a 20 year old playbook and not an original idea in sight. Even when there’s the faintest flicker of a light bulb it’s something like Suank’s degree idea.

The concept they are pitching tax cuts to their membership who already barely pay any tax (most of their equity is in housing) would be mind boggling if they weren’t so serious about it. There are signs in pre-electoral polling that a outright majority of voters see tax cuts as disastrous whilst the country slowly falls apart.

28:

'Arts Education'

Have the Tories become so self-centered that they're deliberately blinding themselves to what goes on in the rest of the world? 'Cause there's a real-life example of how supporting the arts including arts education is a win-win-win -- South Korea.

Apart from recorded music, these grants which started around 2014 also support various types of live performance theater. Tickets for their musicals sell out in minutes - and depending on the season, most ticket buyers are foreigners/tourists (esp. from India, China).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/shainshapiro/2021/07/06/want-proof-investing-in-music-works-look-at-south-korea/?sh=188cfc43cb4b

And the above live performance arts don't come close to the money-making of K-Pop which btw has also strengthened SKorea's international appeal in many ways. BTS is this decade's contemporary musical global phenomenon - they've won the biggest/most prestigious music industry prizes recently, often have to add dates to their sell-out concerts, were invited to speak at the UN and were also invited to the White House. A few years back when BTS was becoming a big name in NA, I saw a video about this group's background/formation: most if not all of them studied performance arts (music, voice, dance, music production/recording) at some point.

Historically, 'The Arts' have been used to rate a civilization's accomplishments/status. Which particular art is most notable is a crap shoot - sometimes you get a Da Vinci and sometimes you get a Shakespeare.

And over the past couple of decades there's growing evidence that 'The Arts' actually contribute to our psychological, physical, and cognitive well-being.

Yeah, sure - 'the arts' are useless! [sarcasm]

This pol and platform policy - uninformed idiocy. [no sarcasm intended]

PS - I just checked to see whether the SKorean gov't is still providing arts support - yes!

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/south-korea-president-orders-major-arts-investment-2150304

29:

Have the Tories become so self-centered that they're deliberately blinding themselves to what goes on in the rest of the world?

Yes.

They even turned down an EU offer of reciprocal short-term visa waiver travel for performers out of fear that horrible EU musicians might get to tour the UK. With the result that British musicians can no longer afford to tour in the EU (a new visa is required for every country, meaning a new visa every night for each member of the band and the roadies: gets expensive fast). Example of the side effects: Sir Simon Rattle, conductor of the LSO and one of the pre-eminent orchestra conductors of the century, just applied for German citizenship and is moving to Berlin.

It's insane.

30:

“Have the Tories become so self-centered that they're deliberately blinding themselves to what goes on in the rest of the world? '”

Hah! Yes, that is pretty much the definition of current ‘conservative’ politics. Reality? “No thanks, we want the distorted memory of what we fantasise our parents promised us things were like in the good old days “

As long as it involves torturing poor(er) people they’re all for it.

31:
Rishi Sunak (the richest MP in parliament, a former Goldman Sachs employee and hedge-fund manager who married a billionaire)

Seems like overkill to me. But then as we all know, money goes to money.

32:

I retired from professional software development 14 years ago, but I still get a laugh out of the monthly news articles about which computer languages a dev should know to make the most money. In my experience the answer is “several different ones” and be ready to learn new ones as necessary, because the ones you’ll use on the job will change, sometimes between projects, and you may need to get up to speed fast.

I still think I was lucky to have Lisp as a first language, and 8080 assembler as a second. From there picking up 3rd Gen languages like Pascal and C was easy.

33:

This post seems contradictory and confused.

  • Contradictory: on the one hand, you seem to be arguing that university education is desirable, but then on the other hand you're deriding it as just producing obedient serfs. That seems contradictory to me.
  • Confused: University funding & loans aren't a Ponzi scheme. Graduates don't get income by bringing in new students, which is what a Ponzi scheme would entail.

Which isn't to say that the student loan system is well designed. It was introduced in part to expand university education while getting the funding off the government accounts; until very recently each loan was actually recorded as a reduction in public debt. Thankfully that scam has been stopped now, which indeed may explain why Sunak is keen to reduce university spending, as the treasury can't hide it anymore.

I see no evidence in a drop of demand for university places. if anything, the opposite; there are more people of school leaving age in the UK than in recent years and many of them are looking for a university education. The UK still attracts large numbers of international students (though less from the EU after Brexit). So if you have an investment in student housing, it's probably pretty secure.

Several people in the IT world are keen to show how people can learn IT online without having to go to Uni. That does work for some people, but not all, and it doesn't generalise to all subjects.

(As someone noted above, for most people a student loan functions as a graduate taz rather than a loan. Indeed, the wonks at WonkHE have suggested that students should be campaigning to have tuition fees doubled - the increase in university income would fund more staff to teach them and after the students graduate they'd still only be paying the same percentage of their salary each year. WonkHE are being facetious, of course, but it illustrates how the system doesn't actually function as a loan).

34:

Hah! Yes, that is pretty much the definition of current ‘conservative’ politics. Reality? “No thanks, we want the distorted memory of what we fantasise our parents promised us things were like in the good old days “

Are you sure you are not talking about American conservatives?

35:

We don't always see eye to eye but I agree with this. Libraries are fine until they aren't*, and you always need to know the characteristics of the algorithms you are using even when the details don't matter much.

I have found a niche where the ability to pull an order of magnitude speedup out of the bag is actually appreciated. Most of the time replacing standard library stuff isn't worth it but when it is it *really pays off.

36:

Also, I made a mistake. Sorting is vol 3. 2 is the unloved seminumerical algorithms volume.

37:

I have a ‘92 CS degree, and find much of it is still relevant - some of of it more relevant now than it was then - RISC, OO, Unix.

But the thing I really appreciate is the way we blitzed different programming languages and language schools - functional, declarative logic, as well as imperative. It’s a really good foundation to having to debug problems in client code written in a language you’ve never seen before.

Think I was lucky to go through before a lot of courses started focusing on Java or Microsoft stack training - CS courses should not be producing developers with very specific shortage skills, and certainly not taking direction from an industry that could not predict the rapidity with which iOS and Android would displace Windows.

But with you completely on the short-sightedness of wrecking the arts. I know someone who has working on Star Wars since The Force Awakens - props for both film and TV series, but that gig only started when he hit his 40s, after years of lower paying prop work for toddlers puppet animation shows. I know, from people working on both, that one of Madonna’s European tours opening in Cardiff because of number of local costume makers, which in turn was down to Dr Who. (And the same holds for a lot of film production in South Wales. Who was the seed capital for a lot of small film services related companies)

Or the academic in clothes and fashion with a sideline in providing consultancy to video games, and similarly for the orchestral musicians working on TV and game soundtracks.

An awful lot of the reason why the arts are a profitable export industry is that they don’t pay that well at the lower levels.

38:

Re: 'They even turned down an EU offer of reciprocal short-term visa waiver travel for performers ...'

Idiocy!

I haven't checked how this isolationism applies to other academic fields but am aware that the EU has been trying to get more integration/synchronization across educational levels and areas of expertise (e.g., medicine*) within the EU membership. Some non-EU members have also signed on.

BTW, while the UK is not listed as a participant in the Bologna Process, it is listed in the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_Process

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Credit_Transfer_and_Accumulation_System

*I was trying to find out why displaced Ukrainian physicians and nurses were having a hard time getting jobs during a global pandemic.

39:

I agree on not just the arts in particular, but the humanities and sciences.

One of the things academia does is to cover a lot of crazy bets. You work people hard for low wages. Most of these bets fail to make bank (raises hand), while a few go on to be phenomenally successful and cover the rest. Academia at its best is basically nesting habitat for black swans.

The part the conservatives choose not to pay attention to is that black swan success is a crap shoot. You can look at all the failures and say it's a waste, or you can look at the whole system and see if the successes cover the bad bets.

Unfortunately, this is a complex argument. In American politics, it's been a truism for awhile that having the intelligent people on your side is not enough to get you elected. Apparently this is true in UK politics too?

40:

I object to the view that University training must be vocational.

Vocational schools and some degree tracks obviously should be focused on job skills. But not every degree is about job skills. Students should have the choice in an education to broaden their mindset as thinking person with humanities, art, music, stem, and an academic background.

Narrowly educated people make the kinds of public decisions prevalent on both sides of the Atlantic.

41:

Paul - yes, I find it fascinating how little the Conservative party is attempting to woo me - over 50, higher rate taxpayer, homeowner in Iain Duncan Smith’s constituency, nouveau riche.

By old logic, I should have drifted towards the Right, but I remain well to Left of New Labour - while repulsed by the Russia-Today-is-Great element of the Labour Party.

But I know people who voted for IDS to keep Labour out . . . who have become increasingly vocal in their criticism of the Conservatives since Brexit. I’d describe then as very mainstream in their economics, laissez-faire Liberals rather than Tories. And what they are seeing horrifies them. Too much belief and not enough ‘dismal science’

Also - they don’t have any stake in levelling up. The Conservative Party does, but these are not natural Conservatives, they are people who vote Conservative out of self-interest.

But, as yet, I don’t think Labour have anything to say to them either, because it’s not yet politic to blame Brexit.

(Even Mick Lynch will blame everything except Brexit for inflation)

42:

Just to point out two key aspects.

  • Its the STEM degrees that are being deemphasised - because they are expensive to deliver, and students don't actually want a hard time learning, they just want the piece of paper that they did something.

  • Although there is a claim of near full employment, that's not in productive useful jobs. Rather it's in 'diversity consultants', or 'health and wellbeing manager' - fluff jobs that don't positively support real earning and trade. In fact they get in the way of delivery, introducing speedbumps to justify the careers of the same people who got a 'degree' in point 1.

  • It's obviously not sustainable, but all the while those 'degrees' and 'jobs' fester - they will introduce a kind of catabolic collapse to the economy - sand in the engine of industry. Death by telephone sanitiser, third class.

    43:

    The part the conservatives choose not to pay attention to is that black swan success is a crap shoot.

    Not just conservatives…

    Back in the 80s I heard a friend's sister swearing about her boss (a freshly-hired MBA), who was demanding a timetable for her department with the dates when they would make each research breakthrough (not to mention wanting details of the scheduled breakthroughs).

    44:

    In Soviet Union there was a joke about some research institute pledging to "make a discovery of regional importance within a quarter, a discovery of national importance within a year, and a discovery of global importance within 5 years". I would not be surprised if such pledge actually happened -- it is exactly the kind of trolling Soviet scientists liked to indulge in.

    45:

    IMHO we send way too many people to college here in the US.

    Completely agree. In far too many cases, the only use for a degree is getting an entry-level job somewhere - often a job in an unrelated field, or a job simple enough to not really need a degree. Employers often (usually? always?) require a degree as a way to filter out people without them and reduce the burden on HR. Of course, I realize that testing people for their actual capabilities is difficult / impossible and almost certainly expensive.

    Requiring degrees has also spawned the growth (and profitability) of way too many colleges / universities, and the attendant rise in fees. The funding of people trying to get degrees has been immensely profitability for the financial sector.

    46:

    Re: '... her boss (a freshly-hired MBA), who was demanding a timetable for her department with the dates when they would make each research breakthrough'

    However, and it's likely that some folks here would know: when applying for a research grant (whether from the gov't or a charitable foundation) do you provide a likely timeline for research results?

    The only major research institute that I'm aware of that isn't anal about researchers sticking to their original proposal is the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

    47:

    Well, here in the US in less than another generation only the scions of the obscenely wealthy will be going for education at any level.

    They have made the teaching profession such a frackin misery, such a dangerous misery, and will not pay teachers a living salary -- or let them, actually teach either -- they are quitting in droves. As the new school year looms, schools across the country just don't have the teachers, at any level, from pre-school on up through 12th grade. Districts are going for 4 day -- even 3 day sessions. Districts are wanting to hire retired veterans to teach (why vets in particular?) or anybody at all. They are granting teaching certificates to people who don't even have degrees.

    The Reichlicans have achieved another of their long time goals of removing anything that has to do with safety, health, education from the public sphere -- now its the end of public education.

    48:

    why vets in particular?

    The only honest reason I can think of is that it could make getting the criminal-history-check and therefore the working-with-children endorsement process slightly cheaper, because veterans have a verified identity and a gazillion publicly accessible records detailing their biographies. But I forget, you guys have a national citizen identifier anyway, so that's not as big an advantage as it might be here (not that it's much of one here). I struggle to imagine another. If we can still go with the law of the excluded middle, that leaves dishonest, or at least dishonourable reasons, but I'd be more interested to hear about any reasons anyone else can think of that could be spun as legitimate to wider society, not just the flag-worship bubble. If it's just "playing to the base", it's... well we know that short-termism is ultimately self-defeating, but we also know that the people who "play to the base" are not members of that "base" themselves.

    49:

    I’m pretty sure I’m talking about all political conservatives

    50:

    Not skills you ever pursued by doing a full-time HND or university first degree.

    My implied point was that I don't look down on those career paths. They are valuable and needed. And require as much skill (different but a skill non the less) as many white collar jobs. More in many cases.

    And if you've every had to dig up a back yard sewage drain field you tend to have a different appreciation for what can go down a drain or toilet from many.

    I appreciate my father teaching those things to his kids. And I tried to pass such on.

    51:

    I still think I was lucky to have Lisp as a first language, and 8080 assembler as a second.

    Sort of like a one time acid trip. You're either enlightened or your brain is fried and you switch careers.

    52:

    Before I get into anecdote, I want to point out something important: degree relevance to job varies both by field and by school. We've got a preponderance of CS talent here, and experience there may not translate very well to other fields.

    Oh, yes, absolutely! The field and school matters hugely. I have been lucky in many ways, not least being born when I was and being interested in computers. Many other fields would be very different from what they were 30 years ago. I'm not sure how useful my almost-20-years old Space Tech masters would be now in the space technology business, not that there is much of it here anyway. I'm not sure how Arianespace recruits, either. (Building scientific instruments for satellites is done in Finland, but that's again somewhat different from building rockets and satellites.)

    ALso I don't really know how many people to educate to what degree and for what. Not everybody needs a university degree, especially not the specififc one for their job, but then I've had multiple friends doing a PhD just for fun, alongside their normal day job. I wouldn't make that impossible either.

    (Well, I have a solution but it'd be the 'UBI and let's do less damaging work and more of the stuff that a) keeps us fed and clothed b) is fun'. More of an endpoint, though...)

    53:

    Not everybody needs a university degree, especially not the specififc one for their job...

    I should point out that I quite agree with that, and with Duffy.

    It's unpopular in the US, but it might be useful to have the need or strong possibility of national service (either military or preferably non-military) for Americans in the 17-20ish age bracket, to do semi-skilled jobs and figure out if they were happier going more trade-related or more collegiate-related stuff. It would play merry hell with the student debt market, let them get some uninformed decisions out of their lives, hopefully without PTSD, and give them (possibly!) some idea of what they'd like to do. If they want to install solar panels and do the unskilled part of building affordable housing, why not?

    I also agree with doing the PhD for fun. As a challenge, it might be more rewarding than some other things one could do to prove they've still "got it."

    54:

    Elderly Cynic @ 20: I spent my life advising on this sort of thing. That is totally wrong. If you don't know the principles, you have no context to judge whether the method will solve YOUR problem and, much, much worse, when and where that method is likely to start giving wrong answers or failing on YOUR data.

    I do sort-of agree with you. My young relative asked my advice about a CS degree. I advised him to go for it, making much the same kind of argument as you do. Also others here have chimed in on the importance of a broad education in different paradigms, and that was my experience too. On the other hand I've also heard from people who were forced to do a course in Haskell as part of their degree. That meant getting maybe 30 hours of lectures and doing 30 hours of exercises, which is only enough to scratch the surface of the language. From their point of view it was just a weird language that forces you to jump through complicated theoretical hoops to do stuff that every other language does naturally, for no benefit.

    My relative found himself asking: "is this worth 3 years and £50k?", and the answer was "not really". 99% of everyday programming doesn't need degree-level knowledge. Of the remaining 1%, most can be looked up on-line (Wikipedia is quite good on CS, and there are more resources, including a lot of University undergraduate lecture notes if you want them). Of the remaining gotchas, the probability that any particular instance will have been covered by your degree, and remembered, and recognised in the wild, and not also learned elsewhere, is pretty low.

    Its always been a truism in the software business that the best developers are the ones who taught themselves out of sheer fascination. For these people (including me and my young relative) the degree is merely the cherry on the cake. For me it was an opportunity to learn more cool stuff, some of which has occasionally come in useful. My first year was primarily Pascal. My only previous languages had been BBC Basic and 6502 assembler, so structured programming and data structures were new and exciting. For my relative, who grew up hacking Java and JavaScript, the first year was a tedious recapitulation of stuff he already knew, with no particular expectation of much improvement thereafter.

    55:

    I don't think you understood my underlying assumptions, which are that education is a social good, but our universities have been monetized and turned into diploma mills to certify people as being appropriately submissive employees, thereby requiring them to get a degree whether or not they have any aptitude for academia or any desire to learn. And to get into debt in the process, which benefits people of Sunak's very specific class.

    It should (my emphasis: this is an ideal) be possible to find appropriate employment without spending four years and £40-80,000 to purchase a certificate while memorizing a bunch of stuff you're probably never going to use and jumping through flaming hoops to demonstrate obedience.

    56:

    University degrees fulfil 3 functions:

  • Education. In the widest sense of the word.

  • Academic Filtering. Proof that you are academically capable of getting that degree.

  • Social filtering. Proof that you are the sort of person who has the social status (social connections, or family money, or background knowledge picked up by being the 'right' sort of person) to get admitted and acquire that sort of degree.

  • 57:

    ...today you don't need to know them. I learned how to sort a list, insert an item into a hash table and balance a red-black tree when I did my degree...

    To illustrate how true that all is, I'm going to mention that I have a slide rule in my computer case and occasionally bring it out to check something. A slide rule! I had it out last night. But I can't remember the last time I wrote sorting code or even looked at a hash table.

    58:

    a claim of near full employment, that's not in productive useful jobs.

    IME a lot of those "more than half an hour a week means you're employed" are working shit jobs, or even shittier "not jobs" for Uber or some other giant tax evasion scam. They're precariat, in other words, and definitely not up in the better paid "diversity consultant" ranks, unless it's the "paid for one hour to teach staff, expected to have a degree and spend 3-4 hour preparing and another hour following up, then 5-10 hours trying to get their invoice paid" type of consultant.

    I know a lot more under-30's who work in supermarkets than as consultants, put it that way. And an ungodly number of 40-60 year old consultants who spent far more time chasing payment than whatever their nominal field is.

    59:

    I think it's more an understanding of how you evaluate sorting algorithms and other general principles. Why is it even important to choose a good algorithm, or how would you know that it's time to ask that question.

    Right now 99% of what I do performance doesn't matter. I have a stable codebase that performs adequately, most code is "make a small change to extend functionality, test it as thoroughly as possible, and think about how you detect problems once it is in production". The latter is the most important task by far.

    But that's also because I have explicitly delegated the "business analysis" or people management side of things to someone else. Normally half my job is understanding what I'm expected to do. "Sam wants XKCD integration ASAP"... yeah, thanks boss, I'll get right on whatever the hell that is for whoever this Sam peep is.

    I get the impression that icehawks #3 is all about the latter aspect of most jobs. It's not enough to have the official skills, you need to have the skill of "working out what the boss actually cares about" and the other skill of "making sure you do what the boss actually wants not what you're told to do".

    60:

    Rather it's in 'diversity consultants', or 'health and wellbeing manager' - fluff jobs that don't positively support real earning and trade

    You are really, REALLY, wrong about that.

    Seriously: "health and wellbeing" means that you don't get sued into a smoking hole in the ground when one of your employees ends up permanently disabled due to inappropriate working conditions caused by poor ergonomics -- for example, cheaping out on height-adjustable office equipment. "Diversity consultants" likewise ensure that, at a minimum, you don't get sued into an etc. for unfair dismissal due to racism/sexism/ageism in the workplace: but they can also direct your attention to new market demographics and explain how to attract new customers rather than alienating or offending them.

    Obviously the need for this stuff is a function of scale -- small businesses have less call for any and all specialists outside their immediate work-related field -- but I think you've been uncritically assimilating right wing culture wars garbage.

    61:

    OGH said: Seriously: "health and wellbeing" means that

    I would say that 99% of my training as a commercial diver basically falls under that category. Not dying, not killing your workmates was basically the whole job. How to actually pour concrete or weld underwater was basically an aside.

    62:

    I can't comment on a 90s degree, but I recall the gaps in 80s CS school and university level education. Books like the Knuth series teach the real deep CS. I wish more programmers would read the classic papers, like On the Design of Display Processors. https://doi.org/10.1145/363347.363368 Consider how that applies to today's "displays", e.g. browsers and server protocols etc. (Also: the risks of making your attack surface Turing Equivalent, and all the relevant papers.)

    My main issue with education in general is the lack of applied teaching. Theory is great, but applying maths and CS to real world problems also matters. See the examples above.

    Your point about caching reminds me of Terje Mathiesen's sig file. ISTR him saying a few years ago, "L1 is the new tape" in comp.arch, where he's been talking about caching for many years. I also recall an interview with one of the RAID inventors where he talked about similar issues regarding capacity and access bandwidth, suggesting that disk is the new tape. He was using FedEx to ship data in servers around the world.

    So this seems to apply at every level in the memory heirarchy. It's almost like there's some fundamental physics that always applies, and no magic "silver bullets" can make it disappear. An incomplete education may be worse than no education when the result is programmers and policy-makers who create systems that fail spectacularly and publicly.

    For some hilarity, look at the job requirements for companies like Serco. No wonder their "solutions" fail. A little CS education could've avoided a lot of wasted taxpayer's money. Nevermind the political fallout. Sadly, I've been watching gov IT fiascos for four decades, and only the names of the contractors have changed. The failure modes remain the same.

    So I can appreciate your points on the links between politics and education. Thanks.

    63:

    Employers often (usually? always?) require a degree as a way to filter out people without them and reduce the burden on HR.

    Not just employers…

    Back in the 80s when I was a community college lecturer, one of the filter courses to get into cosmetology was OAC math*. Not because you needed calculus or advanced functions for cosmetology, but because they had ten times as many applicants as openings and the college was looking for a filter.

    *Roughly equivalent to the first month or two of first-year university math.

    64:

    why vets in particular?

    Plays well to the Republican base. Military trends right-wing at lower ranks, so jobs for the faithful. Acts to distract from how little support veterans* actually get from Republicans. Assumption veterans are used to obeying orders and won't be 'woke' (whatever that means to Republicans).

    Any of the above, really.


    *As opposed to military suppliers and contractors.

    65:

    Yep. It's basically fodder to make a campaign ad.

    66:

    Re: 'Normally half my job is understanding what I'm expected to do. "Sam wants XKCD integration ASAP"... yeah, thanks boss, I'll get right on whatever the hell that is for whoever this Sam peep is.'

    Sounds like you don't have access to direct communication with your user/client. Based on personal experience, it's not a productive environment for a project team if only one team member is in on the project briefing. Weird stuff sometimes comes up and the more ears (POVs), the better for avoiding snafus.

    I'm not a techie, but ... My impression of programmers is that they've got a built-in project mapping system to navigate whatever code they think they're going to have to write to achieve the stated end result. (I've watched the assigned project programmer for startle responses/tells during briefings, as in: Oh, crap - this bit is going to be a problem!)

    67:

    XKCD integration sounds pretty awesome, actually.

    (I'm assuming an automatic link to the most relevant xkcd cartoon(s) for each post.)

    68:

    LAvery @ 7:

    But by saying, "IMHO we send way too many people to college", you also seem to be suggesting that the jobs cannot be done by people who have been to college.

    At the same time, most college grads don't WANT to work at manual labor, even if it is a skilled trade. And they expect to make more money than manual laborers, even those in skilled trades.

    69:

    Of course, I realize that testing people for their actual capabilities is difficult / impossible and almost certainly expensive.

    And in some cases illegal.

    It is illegal in US to give an applicant intelligence tests, unless the test material is directly related to the job description (i.e. if the job involves a lot of arithmetic, then it is OK to give the candidates an arithmetic test). But IQ test or something similar are a big no-no.

    So the employers use college degree as a marker to indicate that the candidate is not completely stupid. Somehow, I always felt that $100,000 is far too much money to pay for "I am smart" certificate...

    70:

    They are granting teaching certificates to people who don't even have degrees.

    Florida (of course!) just set the new low bar for begin a teacher: Military veteran or married to a military veteran. In other words, being married to someone who spent two years in the Army without catching Bad Conduct Discharge, qualifies one to be a teacher in Florida.

    When my wife saw this, she asked me: "So that means I can be a teacher in Florida? Or does my Master degree disqualify me?" My response was "no, but it will definitely put you at the back of the line".

    71:

    40 - AFAICS no-one except Rishi Rich is arguing that "university education must be vocational".

    50 - Absolutely agreed; my point (maybe not explicitly stated) was that there is no such thing as, say, a B Eng (Plumbing). OK yes there is a Bachelor's in Automotive Engineering, but that's about designing cars, not servicing them.

    72:

    Damian @ 48:

    why vets in particular?

    Veterans often have life skills that translate (mostly in training other soldiers). And frequently come with the GI Bill attached to (mostly) pay for college so they don't cost the school district as much. Veterans can get a provisional teaching certificate while still going to college part-time to earn their "education" degree.

    Plus there are Federal subsidies for hiring veterans.

    And many already have experience being shot at ...

    73:

    ilya187 @ 69:

    Somehow, I always felt that $100,000 is far too much money to pay for "I am smart" certificate ...

    Especially since the degree process doesn't really appear to weed out the stupid. Many can "earn" a four year degree and still be fuckin' idiots.

    74:

    Sorting is a hopeless example, because decent methods almost always 'fail gracefully'; computational areas that don't are common, but mostly unintelligible to outsiders. Numerical algorithms are solid with cases where it is easy to get complete nonsense and not notice. But, to move more towards Heteromeles's areas, a basic understanding of statistics is essential for handling most real data, and far too few people have it (especially among those that think they do).

    In areas like biology and ecology, there are similar issues. I have picked up some over the years, but still am woefully ignorant of far too much of the basics. Unfortunately, it is demonstrable that a huge proportion of people who work in those areas (especially at the policy and managerial levels) know vastly less than I do, and think they know more.

    This issue is separate from the original points of this thread, but is another example of how badly modern education (in at least the UK) has gone wrong, though a lot of it is NOT due to education as such. It interacts with the downgrading of technical and scientific skills in employment and politics, and the domination of policy and management by people who are both clueless and arrogant about what they are doing.

    75:

    At the same time, most college grads don't WANT to work at manual labor, even if it is a skilled trade. And they expect to make more money than manual laborers, even those in skilled trades.

    I've got to point out that the second sentence doesn't follow from the first. I personally prefer intellectual work to manual labor, but I don't expect to be paid more for my work. And I'm not. The boss of the crew who installed my solar panels was making low six figures, without going to college, and I'm fine with that. Demand is fickle, and we live in a world that pays basketball players more than teachers or firefighters. Go figure.

    Where I'm going with this is that some people shouldn't be in college at 18. Athena Scalzi (on Whatever) has been quite public about failing out, and I had a nephew who did the same thing she did. Ramming them in to an expensive failure system was and is a bad idea. They're far from alone.

    Now I'm going to strongly nuance this, because the population of people who fail out of college is disproportionately slanted towards the poor and minorities (Hispanic, Black, Native American, immigrant/first generation, non cis/hetero), so I want to make it emphatically clear that this isn't about saying "those people" are too undisciplined or stupid for college. Far from it. It's simply that there are a fair number of people who, even given the best prep and support*, won't thrive in a collegiate classroom when they're 18, and it's worth acknowledging this.

    *I'm reminded of the periodic stories of how Ordinary Children of Rich Parents get their degrees, not by studying, but by having the 'Rents make a big donation to the school, and also hiring poor post-graduates to write their term papers for them. Meanwhile, the Mundane Offspring get a rather different education...

    76:

    was that there is no such thing as, say, a B Eng (Plumbing)

    Actually in the US there is. Especially for plumbers and electricians. Past those there are (mostly union) ratings for masons, carpenters and others I can't think of. Steel workers?

    But plumbing (which includes natural gas in the US) and electrical in the US are consider life safety issues and so are fairly decently regulated. Both require 2 to 4 years of an apprenticeship to get licensed.

    But mom typically wants Johnny to get a nice office job and gets in a snit if the education system gives even a hint that maybe Johnny should skip the college route.

    77:

    And my neighbor who has been in London visiting with his daughter and the new grandson is also working to update/fix various things around her house. He got stuck staying an extra 2 months just to wait for a plumber to be able to schedule them in for some repairs.

    Demand there is.

    78:

    Part of the problem, I think, is that modern programming languages and their associated libraries are huge: to properly get to grips with one and learn it inside-out really takes 6-18 months of full-time employment-level engagement. Even if the core language itself is compact the associated tools and libraries can be vast -- and you need to understand a whole bunch of CS concepts before you can use them effectively. Just knowing there's a method called treewalk() that you can call on an object that's the root of a tree of entities doesn't tell you what you might want to do if there's some sort of pathological condition (your tree is equivalent to a linked list[*]), or how to check for exceptions, or how to handle them when they emerge, and ... that's the procedural stuff, not type safety or how to use a test harness, and so on.

    There are small/compact languages, but they're mostly old lineages or domain-specific toys or have subtle semantics.

    A sane CS course since about 2000 really ought to be split into two halves -- theoretical, and applied -- with the understanding that the applied side is what you'll need in the workplace and is all about how to do the thing, which the theory side is not oriented around any specific task but explains why you might want to do the thing.

    [*] PS: no, you do not need to tell me how to turn a linked list into a balanced tree.

    79:

    In response to ilya187:

    Florida (of course!) just set the new low bar for begin a teacher: Military veteran or married to a military veteran. In other words, being married to someone who spent two years in the Army without catching Bad Conduct Discharge, qualifies one to be a teacher in Florida.

    False. Having taught in Florida, I ain't goin' back, but it ain't as described above.

    Military spouses / former-military spouses are granted a fee waiver, nothing else. Source: https://www.fldoe.org/teaching/certification/military/

    Sources are good.

    80:

    Oops. Yes, I should have fact-checked it. I will have to console my wife that she is not in fact qualified to teach in Florida.

    81:

    A sane CS course since about 2000 really ought to be split into two halves -- theoretical, and applied

    In the US at least you can be a Computer Engineer which is more or less applied CS. In my very biased opinion it's a much more valuable degree, but due to university politics the CS professors very understandably are constantly fighting against the computer engineering department as they feel it infringes on their turf.

    82:

    SO
    No degrees for musicians - who earn vast amounts of money (m Until the tory party fucked that over with Brexit ) or artists or poets, or any of the finer feelings. Right.
    I have two STEM degrees from the 1980/90s which are totally obsolete now and of almost no relevance to my current occupation. - tell me about it! {BSc Physics later, MSc Engineering }
    Oh yes - quote: The words Culture, Secretary & Nadine Dorries should not be in the same sentence ... ahem.

    AT ONE: PLEASE DO NOT MENTION Hyacinth Truss { a.k.a. Liz Bucket } - gives me the all-over shudders even worse than even BoJo or Grease-Smaug ...

    gordycoale
    Um - correction - 120year old paybook, it's a Taff Vale director's wet dream, from about 1905 - mustn't let the serfs get above themselves.

    SFR
    over the past couple of decades there's growing evidence that 'The Arts' actually contribute to our psychological, physical, and cognitive well-being.
    LONG BEFORE THAT
    And ever since
    Especially if you know what the words mean & their contexts ...

    Charlie
    Not quite - * visa waiver travel for performers out of fear that horrible EU musicians might get to tour the UK.* CORRECTED VERSION: - visa waiver travel for performers out of fear that horrible EU AND UK musicians might be ruled by the EU court of justice, which they are utterly obsessed over.

    ilya 187
    NO
    The tories see the US "R's" & are slavering, if not foaming at the idea.

    Jules.Lt
    You must live close to me, if you are in Ian Duncan Croak's constituency ( Stella is my MP! )

    LAST NOTE:
    Qualification Apartheid
    I have an Engineering MSc, but I'm NOT ALLOWED to do even house mains wiring, because I'm NOT "An Electrician" - not that little thing has stopped me, just not for money. { Ditto Plumbing,incdentally }
    Um.

    83:

    NO The tories see the US "R's" & are slavering, if not foaming at the idea.

    I am confused. Which of my posts are you responding to?

    84:

    Damn, that would have been nice.

    Son of a factory worker and a secretary. Unfortunately, had fist kid at 20. Paid child support, starting a couple years later.

    WORK FULL TIME, for real wages, NO OTHER OPTION. Not really into reuping my math (I got as far as intro to diff eq in '85).... IMO, you are rich.

    85:

    People who go to college hope/expect to get jobs in their degree field.

    My late ex, with an MS, told me about the time she was at a high school doing job presentations, and was surprised to learn that a plumber earned as much as she did, working for the US gov't/NASA at the Cape.

    86:

    Mid-eighties, I wrote a d/b system. Had I ever gotten around to migrating it from Basica (yes, really) to C, Oracle would be toast, as it was smaller and faster IN INTERPRETED BASIC on an 8088 than anything.

    87:

    Oh, there'll be people going to college. In "blue" states. And finding jobs and creating business there. Texas, on the other hand, is in deep do-doo.

    88:

    Absol-frelling-lutely. I've done a Mickeyshaft "VB course" which would be more accurately titled "Here's What's New in VB N", and failed to actually do much more than show you some of the new methods and auto-completes. If you weren't already a practicing VB programmer, that course was dismally inadequate for making you into one.

    89:

    The DP course at Philly Community College late 70's-early 80s: first term, a pseudo-assembler with 13 instructions (including add...), written by the systems programmer (a late buddy of mine). Second term: BAL (IBM mainframe assembler). If you got through those, you really were interested in programming computers.

    90:

    Real life career: until I got to be a senior programmer, we NEVER got to talk to end users, or the managers who determined what we'd do. Ever. Std. line going back to the 80's: programmers are treated like mushrooms - keep 'em in the dark, and feed 'em bullshit.

    91:

    What a college ed really means: as far back as the mid-seventies, it proved to employers that you were fit for office work, much as decades before, a high school diploma did. It was well-known back then that Penn Mutual Insurance would hire you with any degree for clerical jobs, and I heard there were great water-cooler discussions of art history, and....

    With a buddy's help, I got my first programming job before I got my AA (2 yr degree). I did part time (see previous post about HAVING TO WORK FULL TIME FOREVER) college, on and off - skipped a few years after moving to TX, no way to have enough hours in the day with one vehicle living in the exurbs). Got my B.Sc in 95, though I'd been working as a programmer since '80. Started with Ameritech (a Baby Bell) that Sept. A few months l asked my managers if the degree helped: they told me that they didn't care, they wanted my experience... but that it helped get me through HR.

    Several years earlier, in TX, I applied for a job, had a really good interview... and then was told no. Talked to someone in personnel.. and she said, in so many words, that she didn't care if the ad said "2 years work == one year college", SHE was requiring a degree.

    And that's where it really stops: HR, what used to be "personnel" but isn't any more, is even outsource. The people there HAVE NO IDEA what the company does, or what the hiring manager wants, so they require degrees or certificates, which they take in place of knowledge on their part. And they keep asking more, the less they know. For example, years and years back, I, and others, saw an ad requiring 5 years of python... when the language had only been released three years earlier. Really.

    92:

    I loved reading both Vols 2 & 3. I may be unusual. I only read half of Vol 1 as the maths in the first half was beyond me at the time. I expect most of it still is. However, I can now appreciate the need for a firm basis on which to read everything else in the series.

    Guy Steele's lecture on the history of maths notation educated me on that matter. Whether or not his belief is correct (that a formal notation for CS could be made into a programming language) is another question. The practicality of that language would then be a follow-up question. Until then, it's an interesting project, but I suspect he may be making the same mistake as Hilbert. Even if this is so, his project and is less ambitious and something useful could still emerge from it, so I wish him all the success that is possible.

    For all I know, Steele may have already abandoned it. ;)

    93:

    Similar experience to your Python, but the advert was for a new version of Lotus Notes, released the previous month.

    94:

    but I'm NOT ALLOWED to do even house mains wiring, because I'm NOT "An Electrician" - not that little thing has stopped me, just not for money. { Ditto Plumbing,incdentally }

    In the US with a few notable exceptions you are allowed to do your own electrical work. NYC and Chicago being the two exceptions I can think of off the top of my head. But you can do it only on your own property (residential) and only only only if you do it right. The local code folks really want you to check with them before and after and if not licensed take a test to make sure you're not an idiot.

    But I think there are laws in all states that if the work will be sold or rented to someone else within a year, licensed only. Which is why when I work on my kids houses I make sure they are there and I point out what I do. The point being to keep amateur flippers from killing folks.

    Plumbing similar but less stringent. If you want to flood your house and the insurance company doesn't want to pay you for it, well, sucks to be you.

    If you collect money for someone for work in electrical or plumbing you'd better be licensed.

    I just did some checking about code on a wiring change to my son's new to him and my knowledge of physics said I could do something but the code said not. So I didn't.

    95:

    Same experience but for HTML authoring(!) with five years experience required: posted on a W3C mailing list in 1994.

    As someone replied to the recruiter, "I'm sorry but Tim Berners-Lee is busy right now."

    96:

    It's simply that there are a fair number of people who, even given the best prep and support*, won't thrive in a collegiate classroom when they're 18, and it's worth acknowledging this.

    When Ontario went from a five-year secondary program to a four-year one, profs said it was really obvious in first-year classes who was who. Not because the five-years knew more (they didn't need any more credits), but because they were one year more mature, and that made a big difference in how they handled university.

    97:

    Sounds like you don't have access to direct communication with your user/client.

    That's common in programming generally, and I was speaking generally rather than specifically. And for the most part I prefer it that way. Getting useful information from users is a skill, and telling them about limitations without offending them is also a skill. I'm not great at those skills, and I'm bad at selling (most obviously when it comes to negotiating my own salary and conditions. Like a lot of people, I change jobs rather than learn to sell).

    But also, that's what business analysts do, for the most part. Once you have users it's also what tech support does. It can be useful to have occasional access to specific users, but for the most part unless you're writing bespoke software... wait, that's "specific users". I've written software for the path lab a few floors above us, and that was great. I could go up any time and wander round talking to whoever I needed to. But it was also very specific, the second lab we sold to required quite a lot of rework.

    Burglar alarms work very differently. We manufacture hardware that we sell to (importers who sell to) installers/security companies who sell to end users. Loosely. Some of the software is free, some is app store prices, but the overall service is paid monthly. Even the "pay once, service forever" tier is not exactly a scam but it's designed for the sort of customer who will accept minimal service to save money, so it's basically "anything that doesn't cost us detectable money, less a couple of selling points for the paid services". So there's real questions about who exactly the user is, and for most of our software the person paying us isn't the user.

    The other thing is that alarm systems are surprisingly complex, so the people who set them up have a fair investment in knowing the product. They don't want change, or they want it to come in small doses. Part of what we're doing is removing the need for that, and another part is simplifying the interface. That's necessarily complex, the security industry "standards" tend strongly towards describing what existing players do rather than providing a mandatory common subset... so "we interface with everybody" means inevitably some poor schmuck has to work out exactly what the other end expects and explain that to our system.

    98:

    You are really, REALLY, wrong about that.

    I think you did a pretty good job of demonstrating my point and why its a real, significant, problem. Rather than the time, attention and money going into productive efforts, they are going into preventing lawyers from screwing over the company. In the UK we used to laugh at the litigious nature of the US - but we've now caught the same disease. Others haven't.

    And it brings on a second thought - automation is not only much cheaper for a company, it comes with none of this baggage. Where people were only ever meat sack machines to feed the business process, there's a lot of benefit in just dumping them.

    So, bring that together with the 'full' employment numbers, whilst productivity and growth are in reverse, and take that as a scenario to move forward. Historically change comes in big globules, and usually after big crashes. And we are due a big change as previous paradigms have run their course.

    99:

    The original news stories stated that being a military spouse was good enough to get the temporary teaching certificate, same as being a veteran. They were posted before the bill was introduced, so it's possible that provision was contained in a draft (or possible a reporter misread something).

    An earlier version of this article stated spouses of veterans could receive a five-year teaching voucher. The Florida Department of Education, however, has clarified that spouses are only eligible for fee waivers.

    https://www.gainesville.com/story/news/2022/07/20/military-veterans-spouses-can-now-teach-without-degree-florida/10084909002/

    100:

    Since we're trashing HR (or whatever they call themselves this week), there was one Larndarn based company who said "HR head honcho couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery".

    HRHH in question discovered that you could rent the Fullers Brewery for private functions and told everyone that her next birthday party would be on dd/mm/yyyy at Fullers Brewery in Chiswick. Come the date, come the hour everyone turns up to find the brewery gates locked because she'd booked the wrong date!

    101:

    Sounds like another case of violently swinging between the extremes whilst completely missing the problem.

    My generation (I'm 33) were sold a huge lie on universities. They were meant to be the guarantee of a good job, you absolutely had to go. I remember the utter horror of my teacher when I said I might do an apprenticeship instead. But so many of the degrees on offer are utterly dire. Not in any particular subjects, though as noted above, the arts are cheaper to teach, and often seen as an easy subject. I know far too many people who took these, got the debt but none of the supposed benefit. Something needs to be done, but it'll be done by people with very dodgy motives, as has already been said.

    I am immensely glad I took the apprenticeship route, but that seems to be dying off too. Cameron did a good job of trashing the name by turning it into a way of getting people to work for free. I've had direct comparison with other countries systems, we are well behind.

    102:

    automation is not only much cheaper for a company, it comes with none of this baggage

    I get you are playing to your username, but that's just not true.

    Automation that is cheaper is often done, frequently without a second thought. New office printer can attach to the network... done. An AI assistant for a lawyer sold as "smart search" probably comes as a hidden upgrade rather than an explicit feature.

    Flip side is that automation that isn't done is generally not cheaper. Just because the costs aren't obvious doesn't mean they're not there. There's often major investment required, and often training for people who now have to prepare inputs for the automation and clean up the output. The "baggage" often object too, and not always in the trivial luddite way, sometimes through political action and other times by sulking (dropping a shoe in the machine, so to speak).

    103:

    In other sad news Mock of the Week is ending after this season. I'm sad.

    Even Dara has been forced to accept that the show is called that. Which is also sad. But it makes me laugh, which is kind of the point.

    104:

    Heteromeles @ 75:

    At the same time, most college grads don't WANT to work at manual labor, even if it is a skilled trade. And they expect to make more money than manual laborers, even those in skilled trades.

    I've got to point out that the second sentence doesn't follow from the first. I personally prefer intellectual work to manual labor, but I don't expect to be paid more for my work. And I'm not. The boss of the crew who installed my solar panels was making low six figures, without going to college, and I'm fine with that. Demand is fickle, and we live in a world that pays basketball players more than teachers or firefighters. Go figure.

    I'm talking about recent graduates, especially NOW that a four year degree can cost north of $100K even at a "STATE" school. Try to think about it and remember what the expectations were when you went to college? What message did society send about the relative worth of a Bachelor's Degree and a High School Diploma?

    Where I'm going with this is that some people shouldn't be in college at 18. Athena Scalzi (on Whatever) has been quite public about failing out, and I had a nephew who did the same thing she did. Ramming them in to an expensive failure system was and is a bad idea. They're far from alone.

    BTDT-GTTS I graduated from High School in June 1967. I started my Freshman Year in September 1967 (at 17). I was at college for 5 years before I finally gave up chasing the degree1. During that 5 years there was only a single "semester" when I did not work a full 40 hour week to support myself and save to pay the next semester's tuition. This at a STATE University (in fact NC State University) that did not offer night school, so I worked nights to go to school during the day and worked as a laborer during the summer.

    I don't disrespect "those" people, because I know from first hand personal experience what they're going through. I just had the lucky break to go through it BEFORE you had to mortgage your future with student loans.

    Working your way through college was HARD when I did it, but at least it was still doable.

    I wish I had finished High School and joined the Army, grown up a bit and qualified for the GI Bill (which was still pretty good in 1967 before the post Vietnam War cuts kicked in). But you only have the choices you know about and I literally did not know I could do that.

    I KNEW from before the day I started first grade that I was going to college. I knew that was REQUIRED of me. I had to go to college so I could get a good J.O.B. And that fact was drummed into me again with EVERY report card I received in school.
    --

    1 I would have had that degree if not for the goddamn foreign language requirement and how I was screwed over by being REQUIRED to take Latin in Junior High and High School. I think I've mentioned that before.

    When I dropped out of college I had enough credit hours for the degree, I just lacked 6 hours (2 semesters) credit for a foreign language. I had a 3.2 GPA DESPITE having failed Spanish twice. In the early years after I left college I tried several times to take Spanish at the local Community College, but work always interfered. I just never had the time to spend in the language labs PRACTICING and by then my brain was to fossilized to learn a language just from a text book.

    105:

    I had a related experience at uni; those of us in the 2nd year of a “thick sandwich “ course (which is to say a sponsored first year at an engineering company - Rolls-Royce Aero in my case - then 3 years at the uni, with summers working with sponsor, then a final year with the sponsor) were noticeably more like adults than any of the kids that arrived straight from a school. Some experience in living alone, handling actual real money, dealing with life problems and paperwork etc made a huge difference.

    A ‘gap year’ is not really the same thing. And besides, this was the UK in the early 80s. We didn’t have any fun.

    106:

    No degrees for musicians - who earn vast amounts of money (m Until the tory party fucked that over with Brexit ) or artists or poets, or any of the finer feelings. Right.

    I think this may be a case of survivorship bias.

    Only an extreme minority of musicians make a lot of money. Very few musicians even get a record contract, but those who do sign are immediately placed in dept to the label. This dept (charges for services not yet delivered) can only be paid off by delivering albums etc. It's a lovely system for the labels, but most artists will struggle to make any money or escape from their label.

    Consider how Miles Davis made his move from Prestige to Columbia Records. He was contracted to record four more albums, so (many details redacted) he recorded four albums worth of music in two marathon sessions, fullfilling his contractual obligations. He could do that because he, and the quintet he formed for these sessions, had that much music in them. They were all outliers. Extreme outliers.

    Meanwhile, most musicians never get anywhere near signing a contract, so they don't get publicists etc. The vast machinery of the music business ignores them. So does the general public.

    Fortunately, there now exists this new Internet thing with loads of multimedia hosting sites. Some of these platforms even have a sales system, allowing musicians to make some money. Some use Patreon for support. Hosting sites also help people discover these musicians. They don't have the resources the music industry has to promote acts, so they have to do it all themselves, mainly on YouTube.

    Some of these artists are classically trained musicians. Please recall the earlier comments in this thread on musicians.

    A few classically trained musicians I follow (and others I've also discovered) sell sheet music of pop/rock music they've transcribed for their instrument. When they can, they also perform live.

    One musician I've followed for years is a Ukranian classically trained pianist now living in Germany with her mother. Her father insists on staying in Ukraine, where he has a job.

    None of them are rolling in money. There's no glamour, and no fame, but you can see from their YouTube accounts that they have followers. The subscriber counts vary; some have hundreds, while others have hundreds of thousands. I think the artists you're talking about have much larger numbers, like millions to many millions, but they're the outliers. They have a vast industry to support (and exploit) them.

    107:

    classically trained musicians ... None of them are rolling in money.

    Masayuki Tayama is a pianist who lives on a canal boat and grinds away doing canal boat music tours with a piano in his boat. Oh, and also recording his way through Rachmaninoff's oeuvre. You can buy the CDs. Has a youtube channel that is worth skimming through even if (like me) you're not really into piano music.

    But the idea of a world-level classical soloist being that close to busking while also having a "proper" career is more than slightly scary.

    108:

    I'm talking about recent graduates, especially NOW that a four year degree can cost north of $100K even at a "STATE" school. Try to think about it and remember what the expectations were when you went to college? What message did society send about the relative worth of a Bachelor's Degree and a High School Diploma?

    You're talking to the wrong guy. One of my roommates from grad school is now a professional tree-trimmer, after his timber cruising career died with the rise of GIS.

    A friend of mine, who surveys rare desert plants for a living, clocked 23 km of walking today, in the desert (posted on FacePalm). A number of my former classmates do field surveys for a living, even though we're all entering middle age.

    Admittedly, I'm a sedentary nerd (thank various gods I don't have to do those desert transects any more!), but not everyone goes to school to get a corporate desk job, BS or otherwise.

    Expectations? School I went to, everyone went to college. I was lucky that way. As an undergrad and grad student, though, I got to watch a bunch of people fail out (mostly undergrads), quit (mostly grad students), or commit suicide (one roommate). I'd suggest that, like Robert Prior, I might have a bit of knowledge about expectations and realities of college?

    109:

    A geologist I went to uni with has posted here on occasion. At one stage I think his professional work involved a mule and random bits of Chile. I suspect the adjective is "trudging" but I wouldn't want to put words in his mouth...

    https://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=6693

    110:

    A geologist I went to uni with has posted here on occasion. At one stage I think his professional work involved a mule and random bits of Chile. I suspect the adjective is "trudging" but I wouldn't want to put words in his mouth...

    Trudging may be the accurate verb. However, "systematically surveying in a stratified random fashion" would better justify the mule as a line item in the grant.

    Code switching is a key academic skill after all.

    111:

    103 - Reasons why MtW is no longer a satirical show include Bloody Stupid Johnson, Demonic Raab, Rishi Rich, Liz 4x2, Kier Stammers...

    107 - Go to YouTube and search for Boogie Woogie. Then look for artists like Ladyva and Dr K.

    112:

    In the OP OGH wrote:

    The UK arts sector includes film, media, computer games, and music: it's one of the UK's most profitable export industries. For every £1 of government money going into it, roughly £5 in foreign earnings comes back.

    On the other hand Martin Rogers @ 106 wrote:

    Only an extreme minority of musicians make a lot of money. [...]

    Its one of those long tail things where a substantial fraction of the money goes to the outliers. One of the oddities of such distributions is that the average is pretty difficult to find. In fact, some such distributions don't have an average.

    Intuitively, think about taking a sample of such a distribution. You pick 10 random musicians, and of course you can find an average of their income. But then you notice that a quarter of the total income came from just one musician; if your sample hadn't happened to include them then your average would have been a lot less. So you expand your survey to 100 musicians, hoping to get a more representative sample. But then the same thing happens: one of those musicians is an outlier who earns more than the bottom half of your entire sample put together. So you go for 1,000 musicians; same thing. As your sample size increases, so does the probability of including some outlier big enough to significantly change your average. Which is part of the reason why income statistics concentrate on the median (i.e. sort into order and take the one in the middle of the list) rather than the mean (add up and divide by the number).

    This matters here because Sunak wants to limit degrees based on the income of graduates: if degree holders have low average income then, from a purely financial point of view, there isn't any point in investing money in those degrees. (Of course this ignores the non-financial value of the degree). However the expected return on such investment is, essentially, the average of the income. If the income doesn't have an average then the whole exercise becomes meaningless.

    More likely Sunak as PM will demand information about the average incomes and be given the medians, because that's what the professional statisticians at the Office for National Statistics will do. Sunak will then look at the medians and declare that therefore all these arts degrees are not worth the money because he doesn't know the difference between mean and median.

    113:

    ADDENDUM: I also have an HNC Electronics, but I'm still not allowed to work as an "Electrician" - fucking mad, isn't it?

    Off-topic: I was made to think, by a closing piece on the Commonwealth Games, today. (!)
    Now, you know my views on compulsory spurts & "games", but they were interviewing Tom Daley, about anti-LGBT prejudice { As well as horrendous legal penalties } in this area. Euw.
    And, well done Mr Daley.
    .... Which links back to Florida & it's non-education system.
    How would Florida & it's foaming Repugnats react to Tom D, I wonder, in a major sporting event?
    Could be "interesting"

    Paws
    😈

    114:

    (Damn, hit submit and then realised I hadn't finished. Continuing 112)

    Of course capitalists know about this; the whole Venture Capital industry is based on the idea of investing in lots of failures because the [one unicorn pays for the rest]. So perhaps instead of student loans for the arts, we'll see student shares: we'll pay for your degree in return for 1% of your lifetime earnings. Most of the students won't ever make enough to make that worth while, but a few will become literal rock stars and pay for all the rest.

    I'm still trying to decide if that would be a good thing.

    115:

    The other thing is that for most of us unless you're mentoring or have a suitably aged young adult around, our views on University Education are woefully out of date. What and how they teach is wildly different compared to even 10 years ago.

    My university, which I graduated from some 20ish years ago has roughly doubled in number of FTE students, from 22000 to 43000. And they're still looking for more - undergraduate education is their primary income stream, and accounts for 90% of graduates.

    So assuming 38000 undergrads doing the traditional 7 papers a year at ~1k per paper, that's $270m in fees alone, vs 185m public sector research income and 18m private sector.

    That very much is a factory definition of education. Bums on seats comfortably beats research.
    Oh, and it's all taught by just 2500 academic staff, the remaining 3500 are classed as "professional" and are largely middle management.

    116:

    I'm still trying to decide if that would be a good thing.

    Ultimately, this repayment method is essentially what UBI and especially the negative taxation implementation of UBI does, just for all industries. The actual cost of simply funding all the education* as much as it can usefully be funded ought to be pretty insignificant in the scheme of things when the system is set up so that no-one is too poor to participate.

    * With some sanity checks. When the only filter is "the market", you get some egregiously bad things passing themselves off as education.

    117:

    And again. Sorry. The one unicorn pays for the rest link is about the companies invested in by Y Combinator. It includes a really neat pie chart of their values. The average value would be a lot less if it didn't happen to include AirBnB.

    118:

    My daughter is in the last semester of an arts degree. My brother has an MSc and is in the first year of a teaching degree (which he's doing in his 50's because he's mad). He sends me his assignments to proof read.

    I can't disagree with anything Charlie has said. In fact I wish I could convey it to my brother (Lord knows I've tried). He keeps arguing with his teachers (in writing, he keeps a record of everything). He's right. Always right. Except that what he cannot digest is that he's being trained to follow orders no matter how stupid. He keeps pointing out to the staff that the orders are stupid, and explains why in excruciating detail. All this is getting him is complaints lodged against him by the staff. (did I mention he's mad?)

    119:

    A few points: It is really worthwhile following Matt Read's blog over at https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean to understand the pressures that the US Community College system is under. For instance the demand that they offer more vocational courses without any acknowledgment that smaller classes, specialized equipment and people all cost more than filling a lecture hall with 200 people for an English course.

    He also states that he wanted to be a lawyer until a couple of weeks in a law office woke him to the day-to-day reality.

    As has been stated on this blog before, the problem is of resource allocation: How do people at a young age find the careers most suited to them? The careers advice in most schools tends to be limited to a single 15 minute interview. Has any systematic work been done to improve on this? What seems to happen at present is that developing minds are imprisoned in the school system receiving an "education" that is of no interest to them, simply to keep the youth unemployment figures down.

    Apprenticeships have been mentioned, but they are far more limited than they were. In the early 1980's there was a MOD organisation called "Aquila" that was responsible for stress testing equipment before procurement. They had a large apprentice school, and it was made clear that most apprentices would pass their training but not join the organisation. The place was run to deliberately produce a supply of trained people for the local employers. This was seen as an unnecessary expense at privatization and was shut down.

    In my industry there have been cases of apprentices recruited at age 16 going on to very senior levels in the company, but I think the mechanisms for that have broken as the company fragmented after privatisation. I certainly think that more effort could have been made to sell this route to a debt-free degree.

    Frankly I would let people leave school at 14, with the ability to get 10 years of fully state supported education as and when they feel ready for it and know what they want.

    120:

    @100 "Since we're trashing HR (or whatever they call themselves this week)"

    In the case of my employer, "The People Team". Really.

    However, having said that, they are really good people who have helped me through some really bad events in the last three years.

    121:

    I loved reading both Vols 2 & 3. I may be unusual. I only read half of Vol 1 as the maths in the first half was beyond me at the time. I expect most of it still is. However, I can now appreciate the need for a firm basis on which to read everything else in the series.

    I think I chose my words poorly. I meant "unloved" in the sense of least used. I find occasion to refer to volumes 1 and 3 at least 3 or 4 times per year but in 20 years I haven't used anything from volume 2 in anger. Probably just an artifact of my career path but that's my experience. I doubt I will use much from volume 4[abcx] either but I'm still reading them.

    To those fans of libraries, I agree that they are great. 99% of the time it is a serious mistake to try to reinvent the wheel. That 1% of occasions when you need something really tuned or weird is when the books come out, and it can make a real difference.

    122:

    @111 "103 - Reasons why MtW is no longer a satirical show include Bloody Stupid Johnson, Demonic Raab, Rishi Rich, Liz 4x2, Kier Stammers..."

    "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize." - Tom Lehrer, about 1973.

    [N.B. this was a joke on his part; it's not why he stopped writing.]

    123:

    As has been stated on this blog before, the problem is of resource allocation: How do people at a young age find the careers most suited to them?

    As much as I can gather, by chance, mostly.

    It was the way back in my day, and looking at the next generation seems to be the way nowadays, too.

    Though I'm starting to fight against the concept of most suited careers. Just pay everybody the UBI, make sure people can live with that and let them do intereting things. We need some people to take care of growing food and maintaining a lot of stuff, but I think enough people would like to do that, too, so we'd not starve. (Also, pay the people doing enough that they feel like doing it.)

    Basically I'd like to get rid of careers like 'investment banking' or 'making printers unusable', which some people apparently choose even nowadays.

    124:

    "Many can "earn" a four year degree and still be fuckin' idiots."

    Where do you think middle management comes from? Ours is populated with people who were crap at "the job", but first rate at schmoozing the Group Leader.

    The conversation about apprenticeships is fun too. In 1990 the organisation I worked for was privatised and their research arm vanished - so I became redundant after having finally reaching UK expert level. I mentioned it to a friend who was a plumber and he offered me a position as his apprentice. He pointed out that, he was earning more in 6 months than I did in a year and he would retire earlier than me.

    He was right. He retired 10 years ago, lives in a spectacular house and spends half the year on cruises... I've still never achieved his 1995 salary.

    The main benefit of the degrees I did has been that I have rarely been bored at work. Having worked as a student in kitchens, offices and factories I can say I consider that a big win - but a salary that more comfortably covered the bills would have been nice.

    125:

    making printers unusable

    just inkjets, or all of them?

    126:

    He was right. He retired 10 years ago, lives in a spectacular house and spends half the year on cruises... I've still never achieved his 1995 salary.

    wish i'd been open to considering plumbing when i was thinking about careers, they were coining it for years, i heard polish ones were undercutting them 20 years or so ago but perhaps brexit has smiled upon them

    127:

    But they had something now lacking.

    And yet even a gap year doing not much of anything allows the brain to develop a bit more, especially in the capacity for abstract reasoning (which tends to be important in academia).

    Back in the 90s I took a group of students to Waterloo for a computer science conference*. (Back in the days when we could do such things with only the principal's permission.) Got a campus tour from one of the profs organizing the conference, who was impressed that high school students had attended. Pulled the Dean out of a meeting to chat with the kids and give part of the tour.

    Discovered when chatting with the Dean that they counted taking a gap year as equivalent to an extra 10-20% on a student's average, based on chances of successfully completing their degree. Older students, even older by one year, tended to do better in classes and didn't go off the rails dealing with campus life.

    Whether it was the extra brain development or a chance to reflect on what they wanted so were more motivated, his data showed that a gap year out of school helped.


    *Waterloo being the place to study computer science in Canada. Back then Microsoft had standing job offers to virtually the entire graduating class.

    128:

    More likely Sunak as PM will demand information about the average incomes

    and then use it as a reason to do what he wants to do anyway, no matter what the numbers show?

    129:

    I also have an HNC Electronics, but I'm still not allowed to work as an "Electrician" - fucking mad, isn't it?

    Not necessarily. I worked with electrical engineers who were banned from the lab by the electronics techs, because replacing the equipment was expensive. Being good at the theory doesn't mean you're good at the practical bits.

    Come to that, my third-year lab partner in electrical engineering was an electrician, coming back to school in his 30s so he could get promoted at the mine. Lots of interesting stories of working with electrical machines (where low-voltage was anything under 25kV). He knew more than the profs in some areas, and at least once prevented serious injury or death.

    130:

    I once saw an advertisement for 'supercomputing' support that required the applicant to be an expert on Fortran, C++ (*), share-memory parallelism, distributed memory parallelism and a few other comparably specialist skills. I didn't know anyone else in the UK who was even remotely qualified, and it was at 2/3 my salary.

    (*) It is difficult to describe just how much non-overlap there is between those communities.

    131:

    When the only filter is "the market", you get some egregiously bad things passing themselves off as education.

    Decades ago I remember reading an article in the Vancouver Sun* about student loans, and how the interest rate on a student loan was worse than that to open a new restaurant even though most restaurants fail and most student loans are repaid. According to the numbers the reporter had, student loans to student going to public colleges and universities were the most secure loans in Canada, with nearly no defaults. Even when you included dodgy (fraudulent) loans for private colleges**, student loan default rates were lower than that for business loans, and yet business loans were given better rates.

    South of the border there seems to be a whole ecosystem of dodgy private institutions that exist to get the money the federal government loans students, while providing not much in return and leaving students in debt that can't be discharged by bankruptcy.


    *Which is not affiliated with the tabloid Sun chain of papers.

    **Such as loans for incarcerated prisoners to 'attend' cosmetic classes.

    132:

    He knew more than the profs in some areas, and at least once prevented serious injury or death.

    I think that Charlie wrote about that guy in his first Laundry Files book.

    Wasn't he at some training class (that he could have taught) and some bloody idiot did something foolish with a summoning grid?

    133:

    an expert on Fortran, C++ ()*

    I already don't know anyone who fits the requested skill set!

    134:

    What your brother probably doesn't realize is that the staff he's arguing with have very little discretion and are just passing along their orders. Making exceptions or changing those orders will cost them their jobs. He needs to be arguing with people higher up the food chain.

    If your universities are like our's, most of the staff are likely sessional not tenured, and so have little role in program planning and no role in policies. They are effectively 'at-will' employees who get hired by the course with no guarantee that they will be hired next session (even if it's a course they've taught for years). Not following department policy is the kiss of death for sessionals, so they will stick to the policies.

    Even if they have a limited amount of discretion, using it requires lots of documentation and opens them up to charges of favouritism/bias/etc so posteriors must be covered.

    Even if the staff have more discretion, the extra work required to use it may well drive those who disagree with the policies away, so your brother is left with the ones who at minimum don't mind the policies enough to fight them.

    135:

    Fortran, C++: (*) It is difficult to describe just how much non-overlap there is between those communities.

    Hey, when I was doing sciency stuff, I worked with both Fortran and C++! Fortran because it was used for some simulation stuff I needed to run, and C++ because I knew it and wrote much of my stuff in it.

    I haven't used Fortran since leaving that job, and C++ I think I last used in anger in 2012, so I'm not an expert in either, if I ever was. (Might make a slight case for that C++, ten years ago.)

    Nowadays I'd probably use either Fortran, Python with NumPy, or R for the data analysis - not sure, haven't needed to do any of that in a long, long time, and everything would start with researching on what to use and what is in common use in the field I would be in.

    136:

    He should understand. He's been in academia long enough.

    I'll try mentioning it to him. He's got problems modelling others' thoughts and motivations, but he might get it explained like that. Thanks.

    137:

    For instance the demand that they offer more vocational courses without any acknowledgment that smaller classes, specialized equipment and people all cost more than filling a lecture hall with 200 people for an English course.

    And insurance.

    138:

    an expert on Fortran, C++ (*), share-memory parallelism, distributed memory parallelism and a few other comparably specialist skills

    Two thoughts --

    1) this was an advert targetted at an internal applicant, someone the manager wanted to promote or just give another two-year contract to but due to regs they had to make the offer open to all comers. Specifying an apparently odd set of requirements keeps the outsiders away.

    2) Knowing Fortran is pretty much a Masonic handshake for anyone doing number-crunching on supers, if only to maintain and support decades-old programs and libraries. Knowing C++ means the applicant can write the wrappers for the Fortran libraries to make them actually do stuff, pipe data in and out of structured databases etc. and display results in human-readable form rather than printf to boxes of green-lined fan-fold paper.

    139:

    A few thoughts.

  • Under the previous conservative administration, the Australian government recently performed a hack-and-slash of university funding and fee structuring to promote "useful" degrees. It was so haphazard that you got a sense that targets were chosen by throwing darts at the wall. For example, clinical psychology fees were cut but fees for a bachelor of psychology were raised, which you need to get into clinical psychology in the first place. Meanwhile, the fees for engineering were cut, but no extra funding was allocated to accommodate extra places. And, of course, fees for arts degrees were hiked up. I'm at least impressed that Sunak has a game-plan beyond "arts bad, science good".

  • Arts degrees are pretty useful, though. I've had quite a varied career, and at every point I've been able to draw deeply from my bachelor of history. We're just not good at talking about them. Being able to research and consolidate information from various sources and consolidate it into a coherent analysis, for example, is an invaluable skill in business and government. It's also the basis of any bachelor of arts degree, but we tend to focus on the knowledge component as if that's what the whole thing is about. But you pick up a whole more from an anthropology degree than knowledge of anthropology.

  • Incidentally, I worked as a lab assistant in a histopathology practice for a few years, and that's a job that would suit a time-traveller well. Histopathology as a whole has changed a lot over the years, but the bulk of the work is in microtomy which hasn't changed since the late 19th Century. The meat and potatoes stuff still involves taking 4-micron slices of wax-embedded tissue specimens to hematoxylin-eosin staining for pathological examination, and I suspect it's going to be another century again before the task is successfully automated.

  • 140:

    One of the problems we have as a society is an overly strict model of how you "should" live your life - the "standard" model is compulsory education until 14/16/18 (the age has been going up over time), optionally followed by more education (apprenticeship, degree, etc), followed by a career until old age, followed by retirement.

    There's two major problems with this model when it comes to education (plus other problems):

  • Not everyone is cut out to keep being educated until they start their career - plenty of people need some development time between 12 and 25 in order to get themselves into a state where they can absorb continuing education.
  • Many people make bad choices at the tail end of their compulsory education, resulting in their desired life looking more like compulsory education -> optional education -> career #1 -> optional education -> career #2 -> (repeat previous two steps as often as needed) -> retirement.
  • With this context, limiting degrees to those that support higher earnings later in life is foolish because it encourages people to make bad choices at the end of their compulsory education (degree in something that is expected to lead to earnings, not in something that leads to a fulfilling career), without preventing people from going through 5 or 10 careers in a lifetime trying to find something fulfilling.

    It's a good way to make the total cost of education go up while trying to be seen "doing something" to bring it down - actually bringing it down would require making it easier for people to spread their education out over their lifetime.

    141:

    I think that I would have known the person - in fact, I am almost sure I would. And there is a major difference between being able to use existing codes and writing simple wrappers etc., and being able to help programmers when they got stuck in their favoured language. The requirement was for the second.

    I suspect that it was a wish list, couched as requirements.

    142:

    gasdive @ 136: He's got problems modelling others' thoughts and motivations,

    In which case he's going to make a really bad teacher.

    143:

    A young acquaintance of mine has joined IBM straight out of A levels as an apprentice Project Manager. He didn't like school and didn't want to go to Uni, but did some work experience at IBM and loved it.

    From what I understand its a formal apprenticeship, and IBM (being IBM) take that seriously; he isn't just subsidised grunt labour.

    144:

    Well, getting back to The Candidate In Question (and others), he does have an interesting set of problems.

    Possibly, he's basically shilling for the super-rich, trying to set up the entire UK as an offshore financial center, and everybody who doesn't like it can shut up or leave. Except that they also need compliant workers to handle stuff, and ways to keep them firmly under control.

    Possibly he's of the opinion I heard from a wealthy acquaintance recently, that climate change is a problem for the poor, not the wealthy, because wealth insulates people from the problem. Therefore, getting as wealthy as possible is a primary survival tactic...

    Anyone who actually thinks this (and note, I have no evidence that he does) is trying to basically set up a Jim Crow-style system, where discrimination is based on economic status, not skin color, gender, or religion. In this regard "poorly paying education" might be anything that makes for less-tractable serfs. Parallels with 19th century Korea or Russia, or 16th century England might be apt.

    On the other hand, actually espousing this to one's less well-off voters might actually not work. So how to make these policies sound appealing to the voters who matter?

    Note that this take is both cynical and very hypothetical.

    The less hypothetical part is the William Gibson idea that The Street finds its own uses for things. I pointed out on the previous thread that much of US and UK politics is the Super-Rich street trying to institute in our countries practices that they've honed for the last three decades in smaller, offshore financial havens, and that some of these practices date back to US Reconstruction.

    I'd point out that this is not the only Street, and that anyone who finds this repugnant can equally make their own uses of things to oppose it.

    Finally, I'll reiterate the UK does have real problems with societal contraction, and figuring out how to support an aging and shrinking population is going to be difficult, at least without accepting in large numbers of skilled, motivated climate refugees who are willing to do the work and take their place. Speaking of another international Street, and remembering that Englishness is about culture, not genes...

    145:

    There's more to it than that, because an increasing number of people are taking early retirement because they are pissed off with their jobs and, especially, how they are treated. That is precisely what you DON'T want with an aging population! Figures 6 and 7 are particularly cogent.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62471260

    Short of pushing the entire population into penury, so they can't afford to retire, I can't see that the candidates have a solution to that. There are solutions that would work, but they are far too socialist for New Labour, let alone the Conservatives.

    146:

    EC, did you mean this page:

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/articles/movementsoutofworkforthoseagedover50yearssincethestartofthecoronaviruspandemic/2022-03-14#:~:text=Economic%20inactivity%20in%20those%20aged,(Apr%20to%20June)%202020.

    If so, can you expand on what it was about figures 6 and 7 you found so revealing?

    It does occur to me that in many cases the solution is not higher pay so much as better and more flexible hours and conditions. Keynes famously predicted that by now we'd all be working a 20 hour week (from memory) because money isn't worth much if you don't have time to enjoy it. Why this hasn't happened has always been a bit of a puzzle. Perhaps this is the cultural shift towards acceptance of such an option.

    147:

    I’ve always thought the problem with higher education was basically impedance mismatch. There are at least three semi independent goals we try to solve with a single process

    1: Making better humans. I am totally convinced that advanced education in science, art, history, etc leads to a citizenry that is better able to deal with life, make informed political decisions and have a better chance if reaching self actualization. It’s something that everyone should be encouraged to do

    2: getting a job: Training for highly technical careers. There are careers that are important to society that you simply cannot do without an advanced degree and there are many others that benefit greatly from one

    3: getting a job: A filter: Degrees are a useful filter for basic competencies (like being able to tackle hard problems over an extended time duration, being able to handle math and logic, creative skills etc etc)

    The issues is these three things are only loosely related and it’s difficult to impossible to design a single system that does all three well. And we (as a society and as students) are never clear in which bucket we are in.

    If you as a student KNOW your degree satisfies 1: but not 2: or 3: that doesn’t mean you don’t do it, just that you know you need a different solution for 2: and 3:

    Society will also judge the effectiveness of its educational programs differently based on which result those programs are aimed at.

    148:

    Yes. Look at the categories of people leaving early - basically, the most skilled, and people in the care sector. Those are the most difficult ones to recruit in a hurry and, in some senses, among the most important.

    I did say "and, especially, how they are treated". It's less the aspects you mention, than the manageritis and related social diseases - I know a lot of good people who retired for that reason.

    149:

    The big deal for employers is that there is per-employee overhead: two people working 20 hours a week is more expensive than one person working 40 hours a week on the same hourly wage. All else being equal (which is not often true - the 20 hours/week part timer probably gets more done in those 20 hours than the 40 hours full timer does in 20 hours), an employer would prefer one person filling a role to two people filling it.

    Which means that there's significant institutional inertia to overcome to get jobs split up - someone has to approve the extra overhead, and that person is almost certainly measured on the overhead, not on the total cost (i.e. they would be personally better off filling 200 hours/week with 5 full time employees, or 4 employees willing to work 50 hours/week without overtime pay, than with 10 employees at 20 hours/week each, even if the 20 hours/week employees were willing to accept lower pay for the flexibility).

    Add in the cost of living crisis, which means that part time workers are less likely to be happy to take a cut in their hourly wage to do fewer hours, and you have a serious problem. This is made worse by the "generation rent" problem - the over 50s will be biased towards people who've paid off their mortgage or have secure tenancies, while the young are stuck paying private sector (insecure) rent and need to get paid enough to afford to have a mortgage, since secure tenancies are rarely offered now.

    150:

    Oh, yes. I don't expect I'll ever design and implement my own FP library. I read code like that and learned all I needed - how to call the FP routines in the ROM on my first computer.

    Nor have I ever found a need to use modular arithmetic, but I do sometimes recall what I learned from reading Knuth's "how to". So I'm always looking at number problems and asking myself, "Can I get away with only using addition and multiplication?" So far, the answer has always been, "No."

    However, I immediately found a use for the lagged Fibonacci generator at the end of the first chapter in that volume. I gave my Forth implementation and Chi test to Gil Filby who published it in the next issue of Forthwrite. This was discussed at the next Fig UK meeting, which I unfortunately missed. I still kick myself for that; I would've loved to hear what those guys had to say.

    I also had some fun using my generator to make some pretty animated patterns. I learned some important lessons from that, like properly seed your generator. Don't just use whatever "random" junk the machine puts in RAM when it powers up. Risks include: changing the code may also change the seed.

    Simple lessons like this have served me well over the years, particularly when generalised to all kinds of state, storage, data and initalisations.

    Reading a biography of John von Neumann, earlier this year, gave me an insight into the quote at the start of Knuth's chapter.

    151:

    H @ 144
    Assuming you mean Sunak, all he's doing is the same as Bo Jon-Sun { shilling for the super-rich, that is } - whereas Hyacinth Truss is appealing to the very basest instincts of the tory party membership (!)

    EC @ 145
    * people are taking early retirement because they are pissed off with their jobs and, especially, how they are treated. That is precisely what you DON'T want with an aging population!* - Give the man a Giant Suasage Voucher for that one ... absolutrly right on the nail, yet the tory party can't, or more likely won't believe or "see" it.
    ....
    Which leads to Paul @ 146, & the inevitable (to me) conclusion, that a lot of people have given up on "employment" because they really CANNOT STAND, ANY LONGER ... being ordered around by incompetent arseholes, of whom the supply seems to be unending.
    ... And we are back to EC's answer in 148, which echoes my wail about incompetent arseholes, otherwise known as "British Management".

    152:

    Um, right. Musicians. I personally know a number of them. Some haven't quit their day job, and others have to constantly push to stay near the poverty line.

    And for big names? Arlo Guthrie says that it was THIRTY YEARS before he ever saw one penny of royalties from Alice's Restaurant. Janis Ian, in '11 or so, whenever it was, ranted about the MMCA, that she made most of her money touring, and selling CDs... and her label was charging her ->$11.00<- per CD.

    153:

    Something I read back in the sixties or seventies: the better a theoretical physicist is, the further they need to be kept away from the lab. That was followed by a story from the twenties? thirties? when Heisenberg, I think, was on a train that stopped three miles away from a lab, and someone dropped an expensive piece of glassware....

    154:

    Sorry Charlie, but your assumptions and reasoning seem to not only be starting from a false strawman argument, but they're not even internally consistent.

    The strawman is the idea that 30 years wasn't enough for anything to change. Unless you're doing completely unskilled manual work like digging ditches with a spade, that hasn't been true for a very long time. To pick one really obvious example, anyone with even a casual interest in British history can draw you some kind of evolutionary plan of castle designs, and you can certainly see massive differences between 1066 and 1096. So even your average conscripted spearman couldn't take their pre-Norman experience and expect it to still be valid 30 years later. In civilian life, craftsmen grouped together to learn from each other, which developed into guilds and similar organisations. There was never a time when skilled people didn't need to keep learning the latest skills if they wanted to stay relevant. You only stopped learning when you were dead. That's as true for your 1990s CS degree as it was for a Norman spearman.

    The consistency problem is that you're criticising the idea that degrees should be relevant to jobs - but then you also criticise reducing funding for arts degrees on the grounds that "For every £1 of government money going into it, roughly £5 in foreign earnings comes back." You can't have it both ways. Either funding for arts degrees results in (some of) those graduates getting jobs in the arts which produce a net profit, or it doesn't. Basically you need to pick which half of your post you disagree with, because all of it cannot be correct based on your own postulates.

    The truth is somewhere in the middle. For any given degree, some people will go into a job which uses that degree directly; some people will go into a side field which uses the degree indirectly (as you did with your technical writing, or for that matter writing a successful series of books with a lead character being an IT guy); and some people will drop it and go off to do something completely different. You don't know ahead of time who'll fall into which group, so you can't limit numbers to only filling the first two groups. But you certainly can check whether basically all your graduates end up in the last group.

    The thing you're really missing though is the question of where funding comes from for those "low-earning degrees". Most of that comes from the students themselves, not the government. We have a major problem where universities have every incentive to lie that their courses do lead to jobs, knowing that all their ex-graduates have failed to use their degrees to get jobs. Music technology is one I'm personally familiar with. From being in touch with people actually working in that sector, we have at best double-digit numbers of jobs in the entire country, mainly in live gigs. Most of those are filled by LIPA graduates. Meantime places like Anglia Ruskin are busy putting people through their sausage machine with shiny promises about working in recording studios, knowing for 100% certain that those jobs simply don't exist. And that's even assuming the students graduate, because universities are also happy to cynically admit anyone who'll wave money at them and then flunk them out in the first or second years after they've taken their money. The university system became simply a machine for separating students from their loans.

    You're right that the economy is a factor in this, but I think it's more interesting than that. The problem is the number of loans which are government-backed. When most people got some kind of productive job after uni (because a degree was a check-list item on the way to a white-collar job), this wasn't a big deal because they'd still be able to pay off their loans. But when your economy tanks, there aren't enough jobs to go round and too many of your students can't repay the loans, and then things go wrong.

    And for a further factor in this being a non-issue for the arts, a lot of your "£1 into £5" success stories are self-taught people who didn't need tertiary arts education anyway. That's not to say that tertiary arts education isn't valuable, but it's certainly not the only way in. You didn't need a degree in creative writing to write articles for White Dwarf or to turn into a full-on career, and the Arctic Monkeys didn't need to go to the RCM. In fact, if you look at all the bands and actors who are bringing in the £5, it's possible that actually the most important modern funding source for the arts may be unemployment benefit while they build their skills. And I'm not sure how you quantify that as a cultural benefit for the country. :)

    155:

    I've had a very varied 35 year career in IT but for the last 23 years I've worked on SAP. This was across functional, technical and abap programming.

    From the current SAP education website adding up the cost of all the courses I was sent on or when they came to where I worked to train a bunch of us it comes to the grand total of £53,535 (83 days training). And I didn't have to pay a penny of it :-)

    I would admit that's todays prices and it would've been cheaper back then though not by a lot. This doesn't include the cost of food and accomodation as their training centre in the UK is near Heathrow.

    You won't get any of the above SAP training from a university.

    156:

    Yeah, I sometimes wish I had done it.

    Though getting to the end of my 3 score and 10 and thinking "What Did I Achieve?" might have been problematic.

    On the other hand asking that question during you second month in Hawaii or The Seychelles might pull the sting a little.

    157:

    The big deal for employers is that there is per-employee overhead: two people working 20 hours a week is more expensive than one person working 40 hours a week on the same hourly wage.

    Your analysis assumes a typical 5/8 work week. For resturants and other venues where the day isn't always, or ever, 8 or 10 hours, part timers can be a better deal. For both sides. There are a lot of people who want to work 10 to 30 hours per week. And employers who can deal better with those setups.

    Then, at least in the US, you have the jerk employers who only hire people at 20 to 30 hours to avoid local/state/federal laws on full time employees.

    158:

    It does occur to me that in many cases the solution is not higher pay so much as better and more flexible hours and conditions.

    Well, modern capitalism seems to have the "more flexible hours and conditions" down pat — it's just that the flexibility is all at the whim of the employer. Zero-hours contracts, for example.

    159:

    Part of the problem, I think, is that modern programming languages and their associated libraries are huge: to properly get to grips with one and learn it inside-out really takes 6-18 months of full-time employment-level engagement.

    No kidding. I could teach just about anybody the syntax of Smalltalk (which is probably the simplest of any major programming language) in less than a day. But to teach somebody how to write useful (but fairly simple) programs in Smalltalk would take at least 6 months. To learn all the class libraries necessary for a fairly sophisticated application would take well over a year, and getting a useful working knowledge of all existing class libraries (just in case, you know) would eat up much of a decade.

    160:

    I guess the unasked question is - are universities still any good for any purpose?

    On the job side everyone has been willingly pointing up how what you learn is obsolete within a decade at most. On the education for education's sake side - well, the knowledge from a Bachelors was probably obsolete before it was ever crammed into the poor student's head.

    Knowledge, as in facts, proofs, and agreeing with a lecturer's preconceptions, is both pretty useless, and better found online. Skills, capabilities, innovation - these are not to be found in a university lecture theatre at all.

    Maybe its time to shutter the place and put up an 'Under Renovation' sign?

    161:

    Real life career: until I got to be a senior programmer, we NEVER got to talk to end users, or the managers who determined what we'd do.

    I worked for a couple of years writing VBA macros for a small group using MicroStation CAD software to do stuff like mapping farm fields for taxation purposes. All of us worked in the same small office, and I'd get immediate feedback - often within minutes - on the stuff I did for them. I gave them the tools they asked for - and believe me, if they didn't like it, I heard about it right away! :-)

    It was one of the most rewarding jobs I've ever had (although VBA would never be my preferred language).

    162:

    When I dropped out of college I had enough credit hours for the degree, I just lacked 6 hours (2 semesters) credit for a foreign language.

    All I lacked was 1 semester of French when I dropped out (I picked the wrong teacher and failed it). A pox on colleges that require foreign languages...

    163:

    They are, but I'd guess you've made up your mind the other way.

    Or at least, the US experience is. It's possible that the UK version is different enough for the points to not apply, but it doesn't seem to be.

    • Knowledge adds, it rarely (these days) completely supersedes, particularly in the broad stuff you get through stuff like biology, chemistry, but also literature etc. There's new stuff I could (and in some cases, have) learned, but the stuff I did learn isn't obsolete.

    This is even true of the specialized stuff I learned - most of the psychology stuff still applies, as does the basic concepts and principles of editing video. In the latter case, the tech has changed, but the basic skills and framework have not.

    • There's a skill set of how to research, collate and present things that's useful. To some extent, you need to have these to get to university/college, but they are also acquired there.

    • -
    164:

    Go to YouTube and search for Boogie Woogie. Then look for artists like Ladyva and Dr K.

    I love Dr K, especially in some of his interesting (weird?) duets.

    I recently discovered Karolina Protsenko, an incredible 13-year-old violinist with lots of busking videos. Her videos have over 2 billion views! The following one - with almost 3 million views - is typical:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz4FU991k1s

    But my favorite is her appearance on the Kelly Clarkson Show:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNyBGQyF0Ro

    165:

    Waterloo being the place to study computer science in Canada.

    I agree. Any place teaching Smalltalk can't be all bad! :-)

    166:

    South of the border there seems to be a whole ecosystem of dodgy private institutions that exist to get the money the federal government loans students, while providing not much in return and leaving students in debt that can't be discharged by bankruptcy.

    Trump University being a prime example of this... :-(

    167:

    the most important modern funding source for the arts may be unemployment benefit

    There's a whole lot of artists and activists who have "multiple years on the dole" as core parts of their CVs. And this is where a UBI would make a lot of sense. Society benefits hugely from people who have something to say that can't be immediately monetised, whether that's Wittgenstein, Ramanujan or Bakunin. All of whom shared an important characteristic... being wealthy enough to spend time doing what was interesting instead of working for a living.

    I've mostly managed to fund myself with part time work, but that's from being quite employable. I've printed T shirts to fund full time activism, for example. And taken a year off to work as a bike mechanic... compared to IT, being paid bike mechanic wages is a hobby (even just in economic "opportunity cost"). Time spent cycle touring was pure exchange of money for fun, but also very small amounts of money for large amounts of fun ("see Australia for $10/day")

    I really value having done those things, and I valued them at the time. That's why I did them :)

    Doing stuff like that I got to meet a whole range of people doing similar things, from people who'd built their whole lives around environmental activism (like Jill Redwood to people whove' somehow turned being hippity hoppity youfs into careers (Urthboy, the CEO of Elefant Trax (which I still can't write without laughing at the incongruity)).

    But they're the 1%, the rest have to compromise their values and find a job they can tolerate in order to do what they care about in whatever time is left. Time that is steadily being taken from them so that a tiny number of people can enjoy being insanely wealthy. It's not feudalism, but the economic structure looks eerily similar.

    168:

    The big deal for employers is that there is per-employee overhead: two people working 20 hours a week is more expensive than one person working 40 hours a week on the same hourly wage.

    But wages are only part of the deal. The 20-hours-a-week people are much less likely to have health insurance, sick pay, paid vacation, and the other perks of a full-time worker.

    Check out what travel nurses here in the U.S. have to deal with...

    169:

    The 20-hours-a-week people are much less likely to have health insurance, sick pay, paid vacation, and the other perks of a full-time worker.

    In the US, definitely. But those workers are also more likely to suffer a whole range of other adverse events enjoy a whole lot of other benefits that come from being in the US.

    In Australia they'd get all of those if they were permanent part time, and if they weren't they'd get a (25%?) pay loading to make up for it. And while minimum wage is lower than living wage almost everywhere, it's not as derisory as the US either.

    Many countries, Australia included, are fighting back against US companies efforts to bring US employment conditions here, and often also against their illegal imposition of those conditions on their workers here. It's interesting to watch the resulting tantrums from those corporations and their pet politicians, but fucking infuriating when those things are imposed via "free trade deals" and similar anti-democratic tricks.

    On that note, binding international treaties are one of the stronger arguments that there are no democratic countries left. "the will of the people" doesn't matter if what they want would break a treaty. And often they have no say in whether the treaty gets signed, let alone on what's in it.

    170:

    Another issue on whether 2 x 20 hr/wk part timers = 1 x 40 hr/wk full timer is the type of task the workers do and the nature of the part time work.

    For example, do the tasks undertaken by the worker(s) require/need a "handover" each time the part-time workers swap (or can they overlap - which may require a double up of space/facilities/tools) and if they are actually "job sharing" the same job.

    Also like the difference between "digging 1000 post holes" vs "carrying a baby to term". The former task can conceptually be split over multiple part time workers (even concurrent ones of you have multiple shovels). The latter task cannot. (This quite often also used to come up when project planning and working on task duration - i.e. whether "using the horde" or "rent a crowd" solution to shortening task duration could work).

    171:

    Fowl Play in Sydney! Scaredy Cats and Cautious Chickens Should Get Tested! Bird Brained Lead Spreaders to Blame!

    https://phys.org/news/2022-08-backyard-hens-eggs-australia-average.html

    We assessed trace metal contamination in backyard chickens and their eggs from garden soils across 55 Sydney homes. We also explored other possible sources of contamination such as animal drinking water and chicken feed.

    Our data confirmed what we had anticipated from our analysis of more than 25,000 garden samples from Australia gardens collected via the VegeSafe program. Lead is the contaminant of most concern.

    The amount of lead in the soil was significantly associated with lead concentrations in chicken blood and eggs. We found potential contamination from drinking water and commercial feed supplies in some samples but it is not a significant source of exposure.

    The good news is that my (now ex)partner found that programme or a predecessor so we had our soil tested when we bought the house. And we came out ok. Since then I've added about 5cm of woodchips and maybe 1cm of compost to all the non-building areas so that will have helped dilute whatever problem is actually there.

    But for people who haven't/can't do that, you might want to get both soil and eggs tested.

    172:

    On that note, binding international treaties are one of the stronger arguments that there are no democratic countries left. "the will of the people" doesn't matter if what they want would break a treaty. And often they have no say in whether the treaty gets signed, let alone on what's in it.

    Sometimes that's a good thing in my opinion: for example the right to request asylum is codified in international treaties. (Not that all countries honor those, but anyway better than nothing. See for example, well, Australia, or Japan on how to either put refugees into camps or not really allow them at all.)

    I think many places have people who very much would like no refugees, but for example here the parties who would like to take no refugees at all would kind of run into those treaties if they got to power.

    (Oh, and obviously here the colour of the refugees skin matters, the Ukrainians seem not to be a problem whereas 2015 refugees were a huge deal. There might be slight racism in play here.)

    173:

    I think there was a time when some treaties were positive, but as you mention with the "binding but ignored" problem, they largely reflect the will of the ruling class rather than being an expression of the popular will. There's been an increasing trend for "democratic" leaders to put what they want into a treaty, sign it, then say "oh no, we have to do this, our hands are tied" specifically because there's no popular support.

    If you want a really good example of the global problem you could look at the various climate change treaties. Both the "let's change the climate" ones that somehow are far more binding than the "maybe we should cook ourselves" ones. Far too often the latter are binding targets with no means to get there or penalties for failing.

    174:

    If you want a really good example of the global problem you could look at the various climate change treaties. Both the "let's change the climate" ones that somehow are far more binding than the "maybe we should cook ourselves" ones. Far too often the latter are binding targets with no means to get there or penalties for failing.

    I think the Atlantic may have a better culprit for climate inaction: the US Senate. If so, last week's vote is historic, if 30 fracking years late: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/08/senate-climate-inflation-reduction-bill-passed/671073/

    Anyway, treaties are deals, and one old-fashioned virtue is honoring one's deals. Not that the US has form for doing this, but it is something to encourage at all levels.

    175:

    (sorry, "maybe we should NOT cook ourselves". Bah!

    176:

    (sorry, "maybe we should NOT cook ourselves". Bah!

    Useful Freudian slip in its way...

    177:

    AlanD2 @ 166:

    South of the border there seems to be a whole ecosystem of dodgy private institutions that exist to get the money the federal government loans students, while providing not much in return and leaving students in debt that can't be discharged by bankruptcy.

    Trump University being a prime example of this... :-(

    Trump University was a swindle, but it was not an actual school. You couldn't get government backed loans to attend. I don't remember it offering even phony degrees.

    The Department of Education has charged several FOR PROFIT schools with fraud and cancelled $1 Billion dollars in student loan debt for 72,000 defrauded borrowers.

    More are likely to come as the Department of Education continues to investigate.

    178:

    University taught me a whole lot more than just the facts and theories of engineering. Quite aside from the fact that the first course also covered languages, philosophy, sociology, economics, along with the obvious mechanics, stress analysis, thermogoddammits, fluid mechanics, maths, more maths, still more maths, electrical stuff, electronic stuff (pretty basic in that far off era) , software engineering.. and probably more maths, there was the whole being an adult coping with real life thing. Working with people to achieve project goals even when it’s not a group of friends. You know, all that crap that is so very obviously missing in al lithe jackasses involved in politics these days. Then the art college masters taught a whole load more about thinking, collaborating to achieve aims, handling business, law, planning, ethics.. oh, and of course technique and style and taste and stuff. I suppose there is some irony in the fact that much of my career has had nothing to do with the “core” subjects I studied but the basic attitude of engineering as a way to solve and fix and improve has been central to everything.

    It created a grownup. Yes, other paths can do that too, and for some people probably better. The world is a very slightly better place because I got to go to uni twice.

    179:

    The last couple of days I've been thinking about this blog entry and Cory Doctorow's piece about printers. I think much of the careers thought of 'worth it' are basically enablers for the really cool stuff. I mean that in many cases the thing built is not the point - for example the new NASA Space Telescope is a pretty nifty engineering feat, but it wasn't built just to show that it can be done, rather than get cool pictures and spectrographs, and maybe let us figure out something new and cool about the universe.

    This is of course not clear-cut. See for example how many people want to have a certain phone with the socially valuable features, even if they never use them, but in many cases the value of a thing is what it can be used for. Nobody really wants to have for example plumbing or electricity just for the sake of it but how they make things better and easier. I work broadly in computer security and a long time ago I realized that nobody wants to pay for what I'm doing (various things over the years), but they need to (with certain values of need) pay to be able to do the things they want to do with their computer systems.

    Going back to that Doctorow piece, I think that jobs can broadly be divided into 'enabler' and 'disabler' jobs, looking at the big picture. This is of course a simplification, but building for example a painting software or a blog framework enables people to create stuff, whereas developing printers which just stop printing after a certain number of pages disables people's ability to create stuff. I know why those disabling jobs are done: the companies are optimizing their income without considering the society as a whole, and I don't have a workable solution for that here.

    What I'm getting at in this long post is that one could think that the 'unproductive' careers of humanities, arts, literature, history, general science, you name it, are the most important things to do. Everything else is just enabling those. Even billionaires probably do something for fun and perhaps even read books, watch AV series and enjoy art.

    Of course the borders are not strict here, 'art' can be many things and just building cool things is fun in itself. Still I think we as a whole place too much value on just doing things to collect money instead of thinking a bit farther ahead. Kind of reminds me of the Soviet economy of producing wholly unnecessary stuff and cooking the numbers in addition.

    180:

    I think the Atlantic may have a better culprit for climate inaction: the US Senate.

    Many countries who are not the USA do stuff all the time that isn't affected by whether or not the US Senate wants them to. Often global stuff. I mean, we have the ICC in complete defiance of not just the US Senate but the US government as a whole, accurately representing the will of most USAians when so doing. The whole idea of stringing up one of the Abu Ghraib offenders next to Saddam Hussein is repugnant to you, let alone even suggesting that perhaps Bush the Lesser should be substituted for whatever minion got appointed scapegoat.

    So there's every reason to expect that if even a little country actually wanted action on climate or environment more generally, they could do that. Aotearoa keeps trying to make its fisheries more sustainable (actively opposed by most of their fishing industry, admittedly) despite the problem being global.

    If a government wanted to they could just sign up to one of the climate conferences, come home and pass legislation making it so. That would have consequences ranging from international trade to local discontent, I'm sure. But Australia somehow managed to survive multiple millions of people marching in the streets to oppose the invasion of Iraq, so I'm guessing that even opposition of that scale to "zero net emissions by 2000" would have resulted in similar shoulder-shrugging and sighs of "but what can we do" from the government. But it would require the level of multipartisanship we saw with Iraq if it was going to stick.

    181:

    Moz
    "The Boss" has had to explain, several times, to US companies wanting to employ people here, &/or set up subsidiaries that the usual US exploitation of workers, regarding hours, holidays & pay levels - simply will not work. { Oh, & the anti-discrimination rules, too ... }
    Alternatively, have a "nice time" with UK government employment legislation, idiots!
    She has had to repeat it several times to one or two of those who STILL don't get the message that the USA is not the planet.

    • @ 180 - which specific "ICC" were you thinking of, here, please?
    182:

    The analysis holds for as long as part timers are paid the same (including benefits) as full-timers, even if you cut full-time benefits down to nothing and just pay everyone hourly.

    Indeed, from the employer's perspective, one person working 80 hours a week is cheaper than 2 people working 40 hours per week (since you only have one set of payroll, holiday etc to manage) - and for things like warehouse work, as long as they don't make mistakes, it's all win for the employer.

    The problem the employer faces is twofold:

  • People can't work more than a certain amount of time per week and sustain productivity. The limit varies by job, with an unbreakable hard limit of 168 hours per week, leaving no time to sleep.
  • There simply aren't enough people willing to devote their time to work at the expense of the rest of their lives.
  • The first is something they're used to - the second is recurring for this generation (it happened before, as we went from a standard 72 hour week to the current 40 hour standard) as the demographics shift and they're depending more on older workers who have the option to retire now (at a cost to their quality of life) rather than continue working. Employers now have to trade off their own costs against what employees will accept - and that means that approximations that used to be OK (like using overhead per unit income to assess whether you're employing efficient levels of workers) are no longer OK.

    183:

    Just FYI but in the UK it's not necessarily cheaper to employ one 40hr worker as opposed to 2 20hr workers due to the employer's NI and pension contributions which are payable on marginal pay above the relevant thresholds. Splitting the 40hr worker's pay across two employments doubles the benefit of those thresholds / allowances.

    e.g. paying £12/hr for 40hrs/wk gives a gross pay of £2,080/mth but costs the employer roughly £2,326/mth with those additional contributions.

    Paying £12//hr for 20hrs/wk twice still obviously gives a gross of £2,080/mth but now costs the employer a total of £2,196/mth, i.e. saving them £130/mth.

    Holiday would typically be the statutory 5.6wks but that 5.6wks of that employee's working week so the holiday pay cost to the employer is the same in both cases.

    Obviously this doesn't negate the other problems people have pointed out, but in many cases there is still a financial incentive for the employer to split the role across multiple employees.

    I actually run a payroll company advising clients on issues like this and also employ 20 staff. It's always been our preference to employ people for 20-30hrs/wk as this reduces our costs compared to fewer full-timers and gives us and the staff greater flexibility to vary hours during busy periods and around school holidays (most of our staff have kids).

    184:

    Paul said: In which case he's going to make a really bad teacher.

    I find it difficult to think of anyone I've ever met who would be worse.

    He wasn't a bad university lecturer. Though I suspect that his students found it to be like drinking from a firehose. He used to do things like lecturing in a rapid fire stream, while drawing a diagram with one hand and labelling the diagram with the other while facing away from the class for much of the lecture.

    185:

    I was thinking the criminal one, but the (building) code council no doubt also offends them, and the chamber of commerce is more plausible than the cricket council. I suspect the Invercargill City Council gets on their tits just because it's local and government but not properly subservient to the US Senate...

    186:

    He used to do things like lecturing in a rapid fire stream, while drawing a diagram with one hand and labelling the diagram with the other while facing away from the class for much of the lecture.

    I had a Calculus class (Calc IV, 2nd yr, 2nd semester) where we had a fellow from India or nearby. (It mattered.) He talked in a quiet voice with his accent. Always facing the board. So no real chance to ask questions. I was lucky that I had a study group where we could trade notes as to what he actually said as our notes were mostly just copies of what he was continuously writing on the board.

    187:

    Just did my morning quick skim of news headlines:

    -war -pandemics -droughts -fires -floods -food & mfg supply chain issues -medical staff burnout -global shortages of meds (epidurals is the latest), etc.

    I'm not sure whether or how any of the Western countries' current educational systems are addressing any of this systemic problem escalation. Yeah, I know we've got some learned/trained specialists in all these fields but as these headlines show - the problem is that everyone (not just specialists) is affected.

    My belief is that education should meet both personal and societal needs. I also believe that education is a life-long process - emphasis on 'process'. Because of these beliefs, I feel that education must be free, and accessible - physically, emotionally and cognitively as in different developmental/intellectual levels, and reflect/address ongoing social/environmental changes. I also believe that knowledge (stored education) is the single most transportable, durable and tradeable asset/commodity anyone can have.

    IMO, the best education teaches and provides tool kits on how to assess and adapt. And SF (part of 'The Arts') has been a major contributor in helping people spot and assess situations that might arise and give it some serious thinking and maybe even preventative planning/action.

    Basically - it's not just about jobs as in computers/programming languages, 'The Arts' or office/biz skills. If we keep the conversation focused exclusively on these areas, some people might think that everything else is okay. Well, everything else is NOT okay.

    188:

    Nobody really wants to have for example plumbing or electricity just for the sake of it but how they make things better and easier.

    If you think about it, that is also true of MONEY. Money is worthless by itself, its usefulness lies in what you can exchange it for. I tend to bring this up with people who ask me "Why would you want higher taxes?" (or some variation thereof). I point out that the primary use of my bank account at the end of a year is emergency funds for emergencies, and if my taxes make it possible for the government to prevent or mitigate such emergencies, then I do not actually need the money.

    This really messes with some people's heads.

    189:

    we have the ICC in complete defiance of not just the US Senate but the US government as a whole, accurately representing the will of most USAians when so doing. The whole idea of stringing up one of the Abu Ghraib offenders next to Saddam Hussein is repugnant to you, let alone even suggesting that perhaps Bush the Lesser should be substituted for whatever minion got appointed scapegoat.

    That's a pretty confusing sentence. Who is "you" here? I doubt it is addressed to Heteromeles; I am fairly sure "the whole idea of stringing up one of the Abu Ghraib offenders" is not repugnant to him. OTOH, if you are saying the idea if repugnant to USAians in general, then you contradict your previous sentence: it DOES NOT represent the will of American people.

    190:

    Aotearoa keeps trying to make its fisheries more sustainable (actively opposed by most of their fishing industry, admittedly)

    Heh. That's literally what I do for a living. I also live in a fishing town, and just tell my neighbors that I am a computer programmer. I don't want my car vandalized, or worse.

    191:

    If you think about it, that is also true of MONEY. Money is worthless by itself, its usefulness lies in what you can exchange it for.

    Oh, yes. Money is just a way of keeping track of debt.

    Somewhere years ago I read about the change from making stuff to making money which happened maybe 50-60 years ago. It's kind of embedded in companies in that their stated (and the legally mandatory!) purpose is making money instead of making whatever the company makes.

    Though on the other hand we basically just need to make less stuff, or rather, use up less resources, so just pivoting from making money to making Stuff is not going to save us. ;)

    192:

    David L said . I was lucky that I had a study group where we could trade notes as to what he actually said

    Yeah, the lectures were probably difficult to follow, but he'd then have an after lecture discussion with as many students as wanted to stay back. They all worshiped him. So, as I said, not a bad lecturer.

    I think he's got a slightly warped sense of high-school though. He worked as the, I guess you'd say "Sysadmin" or general computer dogs body, at a school set up to teach Chinese students in English. None of the students were allowed to speak anything but English, and none of the teachers could speak anything but English. So full immersion.

    So being the kind of guy he is, he taught himself to write legibly and speak pretty fluent Mandarin and spoke to all the kids in Mandarin. So again, they all worshiped him, and he didn't have to maintain control or punish anyone. Meanwhile he thought all the teachers were idiots, but they were all paid twice what he was paid.

    I suspect he wants to get his teaching degree to get back at them somehow. Which is unhinged, but, as I said, he's quite mad.

    193:

    SFR
    To add to the lunacy, thanks top fucking Andrew Wakefield & subsequent idiot panics We have Polio loose in London
    Words fail me.

    194:

    Greg said: a lot of people have given up on "employment" because they really CANNOT STAND, ANY LONGER ... being ordered around by incompetent arseholes

    I packed it in at 51. I literally thought to myself "I'm too old for this shit" as I was being ordered back to work during my break because they were busy due to not rostering on enough staff. I looked at my finances, decided it was a close run thing, but I could make it work if I gave up a few things, and put in for a redundancy.

    195:

    While I'm generally in agreement with Charlie, I have to completely disagree with "And today, a 1990 CS degree is about as useful in the CS workplace as a 1923 aerospace engineering degree (if such a thing existed)." I started my university education in Computer Science in 1976. I haven't (quite) retired yet, and there's nothing in the CS component of that degree program that hasn't been useful, and doesn't still remain useful (No, I don't still program in COBOL or FORTRAN [in fact, I've never professionally used FORTRAN], but the process of learning numerous languages has remained valuable). The things I learned about thinking and designing are still completely relevant. Now, that CS education was in the framework of a Mathematics degree, and while maths is unchanging, there's none of that that I ever used except Logic and, surprisingly, trigonometry.

    196:

    An economy’s productivity rises as the number of educated workers increases since skilled workers can perform tasks more efficiently. I don't necessarily think it is the case, however, that those workers needed a degree in their field of employment in order to experience that efficiency. I think that the larger social and economic benefits of a more educated workforce depend as much on the soft cognitive and social skills that are learned, as much as on the vocational ones. These skills are almost impossible to measure, however, and so they are very rarely directly compensated. Therefore, the most valuable benefits to society are those less directly connected to employment compensation, a fact that must confuse and confound conservative politicians.

    The idea, I would have to assume, is that taxpayer money is being used to subsidize higher education, and therefore the public has a right to expect a return on their investment. For various reasons, conservatives cannot point to collective benefits as a reason to justify taxes, and so the compensation that the student earns after graduation is being used as a rough metric for the value of the degree. Which is an odd argument to make, even on it's own merits, as it isn't the public that is earning the compensation, but the future employee.

    Regardless of that, limiting degrees to those that earn more than the money that went into subsidizing the education isn't necessarily entirely unreasonable, provided that you include all benefits, direct and indirect.

    197:

    Somewhere years ago I read about the change from making stuff to making money which happened maybe 50-60 years ago. It's kind of embedded in companies in that their stated (and the legally mandatory!) purpose is making money instead of making whatever the company makes. Though on the other hand we basically just need to make less stuff, or rather, use up less resources, so just pivoting from making money to making Stuff is not going to save us. ;)

    It's worth remembering that the prime example of how to be a corporation was....the Roman Empire. It started in Italy, absorbed its competitors, ran as a growth concern (grow, enslave, let the children and grandchildren of slaves become citizen, grow, massacre, repeat) until that didn't work any more, after about 600-700ish years, with a shift from a Board of Directors dominated management style to a CEO-driven style around 450 years in. Then they hit the limits of acquisition, and after trying to be steady-state for a century or two, that didn't work, because the world had changed. So what did they do? Relocated headquarters (from Rome to Constantinople), changed corporate culture (polytheism to Christianity), operating language (Latin to Greek), spun off all the corrupt and underperforming divisions (we know these as Rome and the western imperial provinces), changed the mergers and acquistions division (the Roman legions) to a dispersed security and property management system (their feudal system), and thereby kept going on a gradually diminishing scale for another thousand years, until they got bought up in a hostile takeover from one of their former subcontractors (Islam).

    IMHO, if capitalism is going to survive, it's going to do a Rome and become something that we'd have trouble recognizing, possibly within our lifetimes. To me, this is okay. If American churches can worship guns and Mammon and call them God's power and the Holy Spirit, anything is possible, no? Rome is an example, one that's either good or bad depending on your viewpoint

    A possible drastic change I see coming (wacko pontification warning) has to do with the fundamental problem of our economy running on alienation--stuff is worth nothing in our economy until it is taken from nature. Stuff has value only when someone exploits it, and someone else buys whatever got exploited, whether it's a picture of a koala in a nature reserve, or a ton of coal from a mine.

    We're now at a point where, to grow the economy, we'll have to alienate critical parts of the biosphere systems that make civilization possible. This is the Apocalypse of Mammon that we're struggling with right now, in a real sense. We're so entrapped in economic thinking, based as it is on alienation, that it's hard to create an alternative. Mostly I think we're hoping someone will survive the breakdown and go back to (NOT BARTER) but a "more natural way of living" (Barter seems to have emerged after money, and millennia after trading on credit without money). This is the standard apocalypse/dystopia thing.

    If you want my nominee for what follows alienation in Capitalism version next, it's renaturalization, where a functional biosphere has more value than anything alienated from it. One way to think of this is as "building natural capital." Natural capital is the fundamental systems we need to live (Stable atmospheric chemistry, clean water, productive farmland, ability to recycle urban crap into useful materials). If you're a good capitalist, you don't use up the capital that you have, you live off the surplus it generates.

    This is actually what most people did up until a few centuries ago. The problem always is, a system rich in natural capital often attracts expansionistic raiders who build their empires by looting the natural capital others have built up. Rome and western colonial empires are scarcely alone in doing this, it's a fundamental trait of imperialism. We can only hope that, if and as technology diffuses and surplus energy dwindles, the world becomes technologically flat, expansionistic raiding becomes difficult to impossible, and people build up natural capital in their own countries because, well, it's that, starve, or die of thirst. Trade will inevitably continue (shipping food can be cheaper than fighting off desperate migrants), but at a much lower scale.

    Anyway, it's not 300 yet, so I've got to add in the mandatory education component: how the heck do you education the best and brightest to deal with the kind of thing I just described? To what degree do you train them in post-apocalyptic survival skills, and to what degree do you give them LSD and business management and finance courses in equal measure? (/end wacko pontification)

    198:

    Thanks for adding that Charlie. I was ready to turn on the flamethrower. "Diversity consultants" and "health and wellbeing managers" are a vital part of what can make us truly egalitarian. There's absolutely no down-side to being labeled an SJW!

    199:

    Re: '.. if my taxes make it possible for the government to prevent or mitigate such emergencies, then I do not actually need the money.'

    Agree!

    Update on China's infrastructure and economy ...

    Oops! Spoke too soon about China's comparatively healthier infrastructure (thus economy)! Per below article, China's real estate took a massive hit (down over 40% vs. year ago) and because folks there don't revere financial institutions to the same extent as Westerners do, they're telling banks/builders to put up or eff off.

    Interesting - if Xi bails out the financiers/builders, he's telling the populace that they don't matter.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-62402961

    200:

    We have Polio loose in London

    It's here in New York City, too. Only a few cases so far, but most people have mild / no symptoms, so who knows? I hope our anti-vaxxers don't jump on this...

    201:

    An economy’s productivity rises as the number of educated workers increases since skilled workers can perform tasks more efficiently.

    This is only true if those educated workers can (1) find jobs, and (2) those jobs require skills. With increasing automation, neither of these can be guaranteed.

    Here in the U.S., the skilled workers we need most tend to be those like electricians, plumbers, and auto repairs - not skills that are typically taught in universities.

    202:

    ilya187 @ 189:

    The only complaint I have about them "stringing up the Abu Ghraib offenders" is THEY only went after the enlisted personnel who were stupid enough to obey illegal orders they were given (plus one Army Reserve FEMALE Brigadier General who was only nominally in charge of them got demoted) ...

    All the civilian contractors and the 2 star & 3 star generals and DoD/Homeland Security/CIA officials who were GIVING those illegal orders got off scot-free.

    203:

    DeMarquis @ 196:

    An economy’s productivity rises as the number of educated workers increases since skilled workers can perform tasks more efficiently. I don't necessarily think it is the case, however, that those workers needed a degree in their field of employment in order to experience that efficiency.

    Unfortunately, our society appears to have evolved in the direction where in many fields a minimum of a 4-year degree is required to get a foot in the door, whether it is needed or not to actually do the work.

    I too believe the purpose of education should be learning how to learn (for a lifetime), with a secondary (and maybe it should be primary) purpose of teaching how to reason; how to THINK CLEARLY.

    But that's not how it works any more (if it ever did). The purpose of "higher education" now appears to be enriching university administrators.

    204:

    AlanD2 @ 200:

    We have Polio loose in London

    It's here in New York City, too. Only a few cases so far, but most people have mild / no symptoms, so who knows? I hope our anti-vaxxers don't jump on this...

    I was vaccinated as a child - first the Salk vaccine injection. I don't remember how many shots I got; however many the Pediatrician told my parents I should get when it first became widely available in 1955.

    Then when the oral Sabin vaccine became available I got whatever dose was prescribed for "Sabin Sunday" (went across the street from church to the elementary school I attended and lined up with everyone else from all the other churches in the neighborhood) ... so 62 years ago?

    I've been wondering recently how long the immunity lasts, given that Covid immunity appears to fade fairly rapidly ... are those of us who were vaccinated so long ago going to need another dose?

    205:

    Where are we going, and how did we get into this hand-basket?

    206:

    Sorry, I disagree, in spite of all the trouble I had with language. Esp. in the US, as opposed to the EU, where I unde4rstand most people speak 4-5 languages, the people here are mind-bogglingly ignorant, and a language would push them to know something at least of the country who's language their speaking.

    But we could just go back to everyone learning Latin....

    207:

    Funny you should mention that... https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/aug/10/brexit-stage-left-how-touring-in-the-eu-became-a-nightmare-for-british-bands
    I remember when Tom Smith (filkertom), one of the big names in filk, told us that for medical reasons, he had to stop a regular job... and in the next year, put out something like 12 CDs....!

    208:

    I agree, and for other reasons. A term in English on writing seems to have come back useful. Since the mid-eighties, I can also speak intelligently about what's wrong and right with cities, rather than just feeling it, but not understanding it, the way that an "urban studies" course showed me. (Of course, by that time, I'd already read Jane Jacobs' "Death and Life of Great American Cities", which got me brownie points with the instructor.)

    209:

    Abu Ghraib, along with the needs-to-be-waterboarded lawyer who wrote a memo saying it wasn't torture. And the Shrub and Cheney both need to be in Den Hague, ahead of Putin.

    Sorry, not education-related. Maybe if Americans were forced to read about the war crimes trials after WWII before they got out of 12th grade (high school).

    210:

    Yep. Over 20 years ago, I joked about starting the ultimate American company: print up a limited, numbered set of stock certificates (with nice artwork as the background), then sell them, and require a percentage of any resales. The company would be pre-downsized (no employees, just me as president and CEO), fully amortized (I bought my printer), and there ya go. The only purpose is ROI.

    Come to think of it... can someone explain to me why this isn't like NFTs?

    211:

    That old degree was useful. For one, it got me that job. For another... in the course of working on it, I learned IBM mainframe assembler... and assembly languages vary little from system to system, as there's only a certain number of things you do.

    The upshot was, in '95 or '96, a couple of young consultants came to me, as sr. tech resource, complaining that their library kept crashing in a linked-in third party library. I started up the program, brought it into a debugger, and stepped into the linked-in library, something they didn't know could be done. Then I stepped through until I found the function it was crashing in. And then... I read the assembly. I didn't know Sun's assembler, and all comments, etc, had been stripped out by the compiler, but it didn't matter. They moved information from this variable to there, then made the call, and it crashed right after it did this

    Then I could call the third party, and have them ask the developers what this variable was, and what it was doing in that call. All because I had studied assembly language, which I gather isn't all that common any more.

    212:

    See for example how many people want to have a certain phone with the socially valuable features, even if they never use them, but in many cases the value of a thing is what it can be used for.

    Back when I worked as an engineer, managers always had way better workstations than the rest of us peons (and ergonomic desks), even though all they used them for was writing documents and checking email*.

    A better computer than the masses was a status symbol…


    *Those that didn't have their secretary print off the emails for them to read and dictate answers to…

    213:

    Ah, yes, back in the days when Managers didn't type, that was for secretaries.

    214:

    Sorry, not education-related. Maybe if Americans were forced to read about the war crimes trials after WWII before they got out of 12th grade (high school).

    Better include the Japanese ones, where war criminals were let free in exchange for helping the Americans. Eg. MacArthur granting immunity to the physicians and leaders of Unit 731 in exchange for exclusive access to their 'research'.

    215:

    195 - FortRan is still used, not just as a programming language but also as a design tool for code in more recent languages. Been there, done that, got the tee shirt.

    206 - Not fluently, or even that adequately, but I speak or at least have some listening comprehension and reading skill in Danish, Doric, Dutch, French, Gaelic, German and Scots. I also have very basic comprehension of Italian, Portugese and Spanish.

    211 - Afraid not. :-(

    216:

    Better include the Japanese ones, where war criminals were let free in exchange for helping the Americans. Eg. MacArthur granting immunity to the physicians and leaders of Unit 731 in exchange for exclusive access to their 'research'.

    Unit 731. And the Japanese royal family, among others. And let's not forget Operation Paperclip, shall we?

    The problem with this approach is, of course "what do we need to know for the test, teacher?" Just as church ministers rightly point out that in two hours on a Sunday they can't undo the damage done by right wing propaganda for 4-5 hours/day, I don't think a history unit on war crimes is going to convince the offspring of sheet-wearing coneheads that daddy's just wrong. Likely the abuse will do it instead, and learning history as part of forming a new identity might conceivably follow.

    217:

    Not just the united States, the Mig-15 bore a strong resemblance to a planned German jet, Dr. Porsche did design work for Renault after the war and Kurt Tank* designed a jet for the Indian Air Force. There's even an education connection, if education consists of only what the blessed of Mammon deem maximally profitable, the chances of the west being caught flat footed increase.

    *designer of the FW-190 and TA-152.

    218:

    Sorry Charlie/folks for going off-topic before the 300th comment.

    Re: ' ... how long the [polio] immunity lasts, given that Covid immunity appears to fade fairly rapidly ... are those of us who were vaccinated so long ago going to need another dose?'

    Here's the latest CDC recommendation:

    'Adults in these three groups who have never been vaccinated against polio should get 3 doses of IPV:

    The first dose at any time, The second dose 1 to 2 months later, The third dose 6 to 12 months after the second.

    Adults in these three groups who have had 1 or 2 doses of polio vaccine in the past should get the remaining 1 or 2 doses. It doesn’t matter how long it has been since the earlier dose(s).

    Adults who are at increased risk of exposure to poliovirus and who have previously completed a routine series of polio vaccine (IPV or OPV) can receive one lifetime booster dose of IPV.'

    https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/public/index.html#:~:text=Oral%20polio%20vaccine%20(OPV)%20is,4%20through%206%20years%20old.

    Folks:

    Please go to the site and read all of the info because there are exceptions.

    219:

    And another way the government are hitting the arts: Brexit.

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/aug/10/brexit-stage-left-how-touring-in-the-eu-became-a-nightmare-for-british-bands

    “The time the Beatles spent performing in Hamburg before their record contract was formative to their sound,”

    220:

    Before everyone goes off half-cocked, polio from live vaccinations has been detected in wastewater in London, that's all. A few countries still vaccinate against polio using live vaccine and it's pretty certain that's where the polio that's being detected is coming from, visitors and people travelling to or through London, especially in the summer tourist season.

    221:

    @173

    There's been an increasing trend for "democratic" leaders to put what they want into a treaty, sign it, then say "oh no, we have to do this, our hands are tied" specifically because there's no popular support.

    When I was involved in regulatory work at UK, EU, and G8 levels, we called that "Eurowashing" - float the idea to another member state or two, let it work through the Commission process until eventually we got a Directive, then say "Brussels are making us do it".

    222:

    Still haven't read past 100, but I thought I would post this anyway:

    Got my CS degree in 81 from the college of engineering. We covered a fair amount of theoretical stuff (abstract algebra related stuff, computer architecture, etc), and a good deal of applied stuff (spent the last year writing a compiler, previous year designing some simple (ish) digital circuits and implementing them in the lab. Now days you get intro to VHDL, takes all the fun out of it :) ). I supplemented my degree with classes in math (error correcting code, abstract algebra, numerical analysis) and EE (first 3 intro to EE classes, plus digital electronics).

    Over the years, I try to keep up with new developments, and I use a great deal of the stuff I learned in college in my job. In fact, it is amazing to me how much things haven't really changed in many ways. These days I can use C instead of assembly, C++ instead of Pascal or Cobol, Python/Perl instead of Snobol/Spitbol, Bash/Powershell instead of whatever scripting system I was using back then (there were several). There are more powerful libraries (thank gnu!), and they provide some very nice leverage for some things (and for other things they just provide this big learning cliff you have to climb to get anything done).

    As to job history: Worked as a student as a TA then as a "user consultant" to help the school's mainframe users use the thing. Lots of people interaction. From that job worked a "last line" fly and fix and support (there is no experience like having a VP of Bank literally breathing down your neck while trying to debug a live production system). After that I got to work in "engineering" and left customer interactions behind, I haven't missed it.

    223:

    if you are saying the idea if repugnant to USAians in general, then you contradict your previous sentence: it DOES NOT represent the will of American people.

    That's not what I meant. Let me try again.

    The US senate, the US government as a whole, and the US population in general, appear to believe that the US should be outside the purview of the International Criminal Court. They would all be offended, some of them violently, if a US citizen was prosecuted by the ICC for any reason. Especially if it was for obeying an order from the US high command. For example, to torture prisoners of war in Abu Ghraib. I vaguely recalls that the US government has said explicitly that they would take military action to rescue their troops from an ICC prosecution.

    I suspect they're react the same way if it was non-government terrorism or equivalent, but AFAIK no-one has been game to try prosecuting a US citizen for that, they just hand them over to the US and move on. It's not worth the risk.

    224:

    To pick one really obvious example, anyone with even a casual interest in British history can draw you some kind of evolutionary plan of castle designs, and you can certainly see massive differences between 1066 and 1096.

    To which I would point to the 30 year period of invasion and military pacification and occupation that your cherry-picked dates bracket: a period during which some parts of England were massacred (Yorkshire may have lost up to 90% of its population: overall there was a high single-digit death toll after the Norman conquest) and a complete change in the identity ofthe nobs building the castles and their motives for doing so.

    the idea that degrees should be relevant to jobs

    That's not my idea, that's the political orthodoxy in the UK ruling class: the idea that education is improving is met with gasps of horror (unless it's education for the aristocracy). Same as it ever was, in other words.

    We have a major problem where universities have every incentive to lie that their courses do lead to jobs, knowing that all their ex-graduates have failed to use their degrees to get jobs.

    Yes, and what part of my point that degree certificates are a Ponzi scheme marketed as a necessary piece of paper to get a job did you miss?

    self-taught people who didn't need tertiary arts education anyway

    Up the road from me is a building that used to be occupied by a local corporate success story -- Rock Star Games, makers of the Grand Theft Auto franchise. (They moved across town during the pandemic.) A point to note is that they're a way bigger generator of revenue than any rock band you can think of, and employ far more people -- not just programmers, but QA testers and artists, because all that stuff needs to be designed. Indeed AIUI the games industry is the biggest employer of artists in the UK right now, and it's kind of corporate: educational credentials do indeed get asked for.

    225:

    I guess the unasked question is - are universities still any good for any purpose?

    The core purposes of universities, going back to their origins in the middle ages, are (a) to preserve knowledge, and (b) to educate/train the next generation of academics as custodians of knowedge. A third purpose (c) is to add to that body of knowledge by research: a fourth purpose (d) is to disseminate that knowledge to the broader public: and finally we get the very recent bolt-on (e) which is to make a profit.

    Purposes (d) and (e) are peripheral, purpose (c) can be neglected for a while without doing permanent harm to the interprise, but without (a) and (b) we end up back in the dark ages eventually.

    226:

    limiting degrees to those that earn more than the money that went into subsidizing the education isn't necessarily entirely unreasonable, provided that you include all benefits, direct and indirect.

    You want to measure non-monetary values in dollars. Good luck.

    This is something that economists have struggled with since the discipline was invented. They've found ways to turn money into non-monetary value, for instance by buying the "Economics Prize in Memory of Nobel". But they haven't found a way to put a dollar value on "the right to breathe air as nature provided it" let alone "the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation" and no possible way to monetise "the right of future generations to a healthy existence".

    Pretending for a second that mathematics and economics have some relationship, one problem is the copious supply of 0 and ∞ in the equations. Which makes adding them in tricky. "market value now is zero, but replacement cost is infinite, so let's assume $1B and a discount rate of 5%" 🤯

    227:

    Before everyone goes off half-cocked, polio from live vaccinations has been detected in wastewater in London, that's all.

    If it's in London wastewater, some people in London have polio. In most cases, people sick with polio have few or no symptoms, so they're unlikely to take any kind of precautions. This means they're certainly capable of passing the polio virus to others.

    It's better to use the wastewater warning to get people vaccinated and take other precautions, Nojay. Hoping that nothing serious will happen is what got the world in trouble with Covid-19.

    228:

    From what I remember having read in passing, the strain of polio being detected in wastewater is the live virus vaccine strain, not an "in the wild" infectious strain.

    We, that is the scientific community of Really Schmott Pipple are very, VERY good at isolating and identifying really REALLY small amounts of Substances of Interest in pretty much any source. Live polio vaccine is what the reports say they're finding if I remember the press reports right, everyone else is seeing the word "POLIO!" and running around with their hair on fire. See also the big scare when 1-131 was detected in Boston Harbour wastewater streams just after the Great Tohoku earthquake and the Fukushima nuclear plant radiation releases back in 2011. This particular contaminant actually came from folks getting thyroid cancer treatments and then excreting leftover I-131 which ended up being processed and then flushed into the harbour. We're talking femtograms of I-131 per tonne of wastewater and it was still detectable.

    229:

    whitroth @ 206:

    But we could just go back to everyone learning Latin....

    I think that would be a mistake. Our education "system" should be starting language education in kindergarten or pre-schoool ... catch up with the rest of the civilized world.

    But it should be a language in common use in one of the other countries we need to engage with.

    230:

    Please don't speak for this American. I'd love to see Bush/Cheney/Yoo etc., get tried for war crimes. The bastards deserve it!

    231:

    "But it should be a language in common use in one of the other countries we need to engage with."

    I duuno. There's a fair amount of evidence that if you learn a second language, any second language, in childhood, then picking up other languages as the need arises is easy. It's the monoglots that struggle.

    So then, there's no point in trying to guess which language(s) will be in common use where by the time you're old enough to need them. Any language will do (although I would expect dialects don't count), and it could be Latin, for all that it matters.

    JHomes.

    232:

    Whether a citizen of a democratic country bears any responsibility for actions carried out by their government... I don't think that's a clear-cut no. Especially when it's the most democratic country in the world, a beacon of hope and glory to inspire everyone.

    You might not like it but you do quite literally own it.

    233:

    I think that would be a mistake. Our education "system" should be starting language education in kindergarten or pre-schoool ... catch up with the rest of the civilized world

    Oddly enough, I took Latin in high school, as did my wife. It proved to be quite useful, because much of the technical vocabulary for the life sciences is compounded gutter Latin. Having even a passing familiarity with it makes classes easier. For biology (especially systematics), you need to learn ca. 300 terms over a semester, so it is the vocabulary equivalent of a normal foreign language class.

    The thing that saddens me is that most kids now don't learn Latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes, so they can't break down a technical term into its component parts and get snowed by the vocabulary. An example from plant anatomy: microsporphyll and megasporophyll. My bet is a bunch of you would struggle even saying that? Anyway, most students now need to be taught that it's micro+sporo+phyll (small spore leaf) and mega+sporo+phyll (big spore leaf). Or, in flowering plants, stamens and carpels. We had to adapt lessons when it got to the point that few students knew how to deal with Latin compound words, just to include a lesson on how to read the vocabulary as assembled terms, rather than a forest of almost identical and very confusing words.

    234:

    Learning multiple languages when young may be easy (for certain values of the concept) but it is terribly easy to lose the facility. In early teens I could make a decent fist of Latin, Russian, Welsh (my first language, kinda) German, French and English. These days I can mostly only remember the feeling that I damn well know how to say that but buggrit I can’t get it as far as my tongue. I can still at least work out how to pronounce Welsh words most of the time. Fortunately I managed to hold onto enough German for the language requirements for that first engineering degree.

    As an almost related aside I’ve just a few minutes ago read the very-short story “Battle of the Linguist Mages” by Scotto Moore, about which Charlie blurbed “and now my head hurts”. I can only agree - if I didn’t know it was an SF short I might think it was an entry from Seanan Mcguire’s diary.

    235:

    I found myself the other day having to sing through King Kapisi's Screems's From the Old Plantation to get to "tasi lua tolu" before I could count in Samoan...

    I have some ability with languages other than English just because I love words. So I can throw together Latin-sounding words and come up with "homo ped plumbium" (lead footed ape, with the common name "motorist") but give me some random bit of German and you're more than likely going to get a blank look unless it's song lyrics (or, for reasons "achtung, ich bin ein zepplin" which is a social-group equivalent of "my hovercraft is full of eels")

    The tropes page is full of humorous examples: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MyHoverCraftIsFullOfEels

    236:

    I duuno. There's a fair amount of evidence that if you learn a second language, any second language, in childhood, then picking up other languages as the need arises is easy. It's the monoglots that struggle.

    i've probably mentioned it, but i heard once that this was a good reason for children to learn esperanto as a second language, as its complete regularity made it much easier to learn than the alternatives

    need to be a bit of a believer to start with tho i imagine

    237:

    I voted against Bush (both times) and argued long and hard against the Iraq war. It was obviously wrong from the very start, and it's ugly, horrible beginning, middle, and end were easily predictable.

    I may own it, but I tried long and hard to turn it in for a refund, or at least store credit!

    238:

    The core purposes of universities, going back to their origins in the middle ages, are (a) to preserve knowledge, and (b) to educate/train the next generation of academics as custodians of knowedge. A third purpose (c) is to add to that body of knowledge by research: a fourth purpose (d) is to disseminate that knowledge to the broader public: and finally we get the very recent bolt-on (e) which is to make a profit.

    I want to point out that (a) and (b) are basically the core goals of any organization: to keep going on. I think some of the (c) and (d) are part of what makes them worth keeping around, though obviously (a) and (b) are more important - if they don't get done soon nothing else will, either.

    (e), however... uh, I have personal experiences as I used to do some Active Galactic Nuclei astronomy, so somewhat remote from profits, and our small department was asked by the university higher-ups what we could do to sell something as industry connections were Very Important. We didn't find it funny.

    239:

    I duuno. There's a fair amount of evidence that if you learn a second language, any second language, in childhood, then picking up other languages as the need arises is easy. It's the monoglots that struggle.

    Well, people are different, but learning how to learn makes learning easier.

    In my youth the Finnish foreign language education was not perfect by any means, but I did get a working knowledge of multiple foreign languages. English is obviously the one I'm most fluent with, but that comes from the fact that I've basically used it all the time in some capacity since I was 11 years old. At the time much of speculative fiction didn't get translated, or not fast enough, and even though some tabletop rpgs did, not nearly enough of them did, and English had its status as a 'cooler' language.

    After that, much of my studies and work has been in English, so I use it basically every day.

    Still, I think one of the reasons why it's easier to learn languages as a child is that one can dedicate much more time to it. At school I had for years something like 2-4 hours of classroom teaching and then homework on top of that, and it's hard to find the time for that kind of hours for languages nowadays. I'm taking community college courses in Japanese now, and even now as a forty-something I feel like my progress there is quite well correlated on how much time I spend on it.

    An another thing is that I feel like the more languages you learn, the easier it becomes to learn new ones. Even though they are not very similar, like Japanese which is very much its own thing, or sign languages, which are of course quite different from vocal languages.

    240:

    without (a) and (b) we end up back in the dark ages eventually

    This entire comment is one of those brilliant summaries in that mode where it seems retrospectively obvious, but is nonetheless challenging to formulate. It could be a perfect example to explain what I like about reading this blog. It's not always Charlie, who comes out with such comments, but often is.

    I know I catch myself sometimes agreeing with something but having nothing to add so not commenting. When I disagree, I've become more inclined to let it go and if I struggle to say something nicely avoid saying it at all. Neither of these responses really help the discussion. I know I can probably do better, but we're all struggling at times, we're living in times where that's the norm rather than the exception. And that means sometimes we don't want to be Hanrahan so don't comment...

    241:

    Well, (e) is a modification of the actual purpose of an organisation, which is more accurately put as "to survive", which may then involve making a net profit for reinvestment rather than to disburse to investors.

    242:

    Nojay @ 220: Before everyone goes off half-cocked, polio from live vaccinations has been detected in wastewater in London, that's all.

    According to this BBC report the issue is that the live polio virus in the oral vaccine can mutate as it passes from person to person, eventually recovering its nasty side. That's the concern.

    If there is a widespread vaccination campaign then its not a problem because the virus runs out of hosts and fizzles before that can happen. But here it seems there are people shedding the vaccine virus in a population that isn't well protected (thanks, Andrew Wakefield).

    In other news, XKCD seems to be recruiting for The Laundry.

    243:

    I learned Latin at school (I went to a public school - UK sense). I actually found it useful because it taught me formal grammars and syntax in a way that we didn't learn in English lessons. Highly useful for a computer programmer who was developing an interest in compilers.

    244:

    Similarly I had to learn formal grammar for French (modern languages), and grammar was not taught in English, because it wasn't part of the silly bus (sic).

    245:

    We did have grammar teaching in Finnish, too, I think starting from quite early on. At least explicit teaching of grammar was familiar to me on about fourth or fifth grade when my German and English classes had proceeded to the stage where grammar was nice to learn explicitly. (Though, uh, the English one has quite a lot of exceptions...)

    Nowadays my way of learning new languages needs some grammar quite soon, so when learning a new language I usually get a grammar book early on. Then again, my problem is often vocabulary, it's annoying for me to learn new words (and ways to write *shakes a stick at Japanese*). At some point much of it becomes internalized, for example I have a hard time thinking about explicit English, German, or Swedish grammar, though I like to think I am somewhat fluent in all three.

    Of course there are descriptive and normative grammars, and while I like the descriptive ones (which just tell you how people use the language) generally more than the normative (which tell how people should use the language), when learning a language the normative ones are quite useful.

    246:

    "I learned Latin at school (I went to a public school - UK sense). I actually found it useful because it taught me formal grammars and syntax in a way that we didn't learn in English lessons."

    I had the same experience with Latin, which I studied for two years in US high school (9th and 10th grades). The most valuable part was that it introduced me to grammatical structure, which was a great help when I studied Russian.

    247:

    The point is that (a) and (b) ARE being neglected, badly, in areas that don't lead to (e) or at least (c) in at least the UK and USA. This has been UK government policy since the days of Thatcher.

    248:

    There's a fair amount of evidence that if you learn a second language, any second language, in childhood, then picking up other languages as the need arises is easy. It's the monoglots that struggle.

    I was enrolled in a French immersion kindergarten and grade 1. We moved partway through grade 1 to another city where I ended up in a regular class.

    All I remember is the teachers talking like grownups in Peanuts cartoons — "wawawawawawa" — and getting in trouble because I didn't follow instructions (that I couldn't understand).

    I took 12 years of French the regular way in school (outside the brief immersion experience) and can barely ask where the bathroom is. I suspect a combination of late start, insufficient practice, and bad pedagogy*.

    I love the idea of raising children to be multilingual. I think the best time to start is pre-school, though, when children are naturally learning language anyway.


    *For example, the first few years of formal French instruction were all oral, and as I couldn't remember things from one week to the next I invented by own way of writing French so I could take surreptitious notes — which set me back because I had to unlearn that when we were finally taught how to write.

    249:

    In the Tuesday, I think it was, edition of the NYT, the week after Nixon was re-elected (1972), at the head of the public and commercial notices column, the first one read, "We, the undersigned, did not vote for Richard M. Nixon, and will not be held accountable for crimes against humanity committed by him, as they were not done in our name, but against our will." followed by a dozen or 20 names, including, of course, me, who wrote and organized this, as well as my first wife, and my folks, and....

    250:

    Similarly I had to learn formal grammar for French (modern languages), and grammar was not taught in English

    For you too?

    Being a voracious reader my grammar was reasonably good even without formal instruction (past nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs). I couldn't articulate why something was wrong, but I knew it was and could correct it.

    When I was in high school English was a double-period compared to all other subjects. I later realized that it was originally two different courses: one in grammar and one in literature. Somewhere along the way they were combined into a single double-length course where grammar was taught intermingled with literature, except that most English teachers dropped the boring grammar instruction to get extra time for the more interesting literature.

    I've seen the same thing happen currently in junior science courses where a teacher will drastically shrink (or drop) a science they find uninteresting or unimportant to devote more time to preparing students for their favourite senior science course. When I arrived at my last school the grade ten science course was almost half chemistry; not entirely by coincidence the subject the department head taught at senior levels. Trying to get the biology and chemistry teachers to cover more than 1/4 of the physics unit was a battle…

    251:

    "In other news, XKCD seems to be recruiting for The Laundry."

    That was good advice, but you need to have the right number of mouths.

    252:

    Indeed yes, to the extent that the French (and indeed German and Latin) teachers moaned that they had to do all the grammar teaching because the English teachers ignored it.

    253:

    When I was in high school English was a double-period compared to all other subjects.

    My memory is of doing grammar during most of the 8th grade and a lot of the 10th? I think. I got very good at diagramming sentences. I think that fell out of favor. This would have been latter 60s, early 70s.

    Foreign languages were a disaster for me. I quickly learned to avoid them. I have a lot of issues with pronouncing something that doesn't follow the same general trend of what I grew up with. I suspect it's tied to my other issues with patterns and such.

    David

    254:

    Same here - at least I can’t remember ever being taught any English grammar outside of other-language classes pointing out ‘this is just like the English plonkative case’ etc. Weird. How comes we’s all speak so good like I does?

    255:

    "In other news, XKCD seems to be recruiting for The Laundry." That was good advice, but you need to have the right number of mouths.

    Actually, complex vowels already exist, but they're not cursed.*

    *Tibetan monks and Taoist priests also use them, as do didgeridoo players. Check out YouTube.

    256:

    I was taught English grammar and syntax, according to the pseudo-Latin rules the Victorian dogmatists invented but, when I grew more literate, I realised how misleading it was, often verging on nonsense. Yes, the rules apply more often than not, but few of them don't have commonly-used exceptions and variations (sometimes mandatory), scarcely apply at all to speech, and pre-Victorian literature didn't follow them. All languages are like that, but English is particularly inchoate and, bluntly, it's a hell of a lot easier to teach grammar and syntax for Latin or even French.

    257:

    JHomes @ 231:

    I'm pretty sure any child beginning foreign language today can be pretty sure Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Spanish ... Swahili will still be around when they become adults, but ...

    Latin is a dead language,
    as dead as it can be
    it killed off all the Romans ...

    The benefit in having learned more than one language as a child is the flexibility from actually SPEAKING the languages. Nobody speaks Latin today, not even the Roman Catholic church.

    258:

    If you're eligible to vote for the Hugo awards this year, voting closes in a few hours time. You may want to pay particular attention to the Best Series category, or you may not...

    259:

    To be blunt, the reason Latin is easy to teach (for vocabulary, anyway) is that few speak it and it has a tiny corpus of text. Its utility is that it's the junkyard that science has been scavenging for centuries to find the pieces to build new words from, so if you're going into the sciences, especially the life sciences, having that vocabulary is useful.

    French appears easier to learn because of the Académie Française, which tasks itself with keeping French "pure." I'm not sure what they do about things like Breton or them other dialects they got. Aside from not letting them be seen overseas, except in cultural performance contexts like Celtic music festivals.

    English doesn't bother with any of that, and since most English speakers learned English as a second language, they're the ones driving it at the moment. That drive is less to complexify it, and more to simplify it, so that someone who grew up speaking Cantonese and someone who grew up speaking Wolof can negotiate a deal over a shipment of tungsten. Monolingual English speakers are stuck in the minorities, all our multitude boxcar verbs (those that might have been used) and polysyllabic vocabulary notwithstanding. We might even struggle to negotiate for that shipment of tungsten, because we'd insist on using formal legal English and thereby exclude ourselves from an otherwise rapidly made deal.

    Anyway, English isn't a monolith, it's a complex landscape of linguistic ecosystems, some of which are currently growing, some of which are currently shrinking, most of which are mutating. If and when international trade falls apart, after a few centuries or less, it's almost certain that people who insist that they are each speaking proper English will be unable to understand each other. This will mark the official birth of the "Lish" language family, although truthfully it's already been happening for over a century.

    260:

    Robert Prior @ 248:

    I was enrolled in a French immersion kindergarten and grade 1.

    I got 8 weeks of "full immersion"** French at age 10. I remember doing fairly well with it because I had other people I could talk to & practice speaking French.

    Never experienced anything like it after that one time. All rote memorization. I wish I could have continued with the full immersion French. I might speak/write a second language today.

    **Full immersion during the school day anyway - 7:30 am to 3:15 pm five days a week.

    261:

    Heteromeles @ 259:

    It may be "easy to teach", but the reason Latin is so hard to learn is that NOBODY actually speaks it anymore.

    262:

    It may be "easy to teach", but the reason Latin is so hard to learn is that NOBODY actually speaks it anymore.

    I know you're trying to start an argument, but "learn" has two different meanings here.

    If you mean people speaking and writing Latin, you're right. That's mostly limited to a group of officials in the Vatican.

    If you mean have a few hundred word roots that are used in thousands of words in many languages, you're wrong. That's what I've been saying consistently, and that's what you're ignoring.

    263:

    @262

    I completely disagree. Latin was no harder to learn than French. On the contrary, by the time we started doing formal stuff in French like "third person", I already knew what they were from Latin. My only big problem was making sure I didn't mix up the vocabulary (I was and still am terrible at remembering words of other languages).

    264:

    English

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English

    Like Esperanto, Interlingua and other attempts to create a reasonably simple, usable and learnable utility language, Basic English mostly flopped, though shards and remnants remain.

    265:

    "I think. I got very good at diagramming sentences."

    Yes!

    Grammar school taught me how to diagram English sentences, which, like Latin grammar later, was really helpful in future years.

    266:

    But we could just go back to everyone learning Latin....

    it should be a language in common use in one of the other countries we need to engage with.*

    We do business with the Vatican,

    267:

    We do business with the Vatican

    That's less a country and more the headquarters of an international crime syndicate.

    If we were going to do this democratically I suspect we'd end up with Simplified Chinese using US/UK democracy, and Indian English using the Australian system (preferential voting generally gives you the least hated favourite fish). Of course any proportional system would end up replicating what we have now modulo any anti-democratic threshold effects.

    In terms of "best system" we might end up with French, but that setup is so similar to Simplified Chinese that I think the latter would win.

    And of course historically we'd prefer Latin or some other ancient language but that very quickly leads us to Australia and no-one wants to be using Yolŋu for international science collaboration. I found many terrible articles claiming that languages developed as recently as 1000BCE are the "oldest living language" so that discussion would no doubt become heated.

    268:

    Like Esperanto, Interlingua and other attempts to create a reasonably simple, usable and learnable utility language, Basic English mostly flopped, though shards and remnants remain.

    In one of Heinlein's juveniles, possibly Space Cadet, the characters are speaking "Basic" rather than their native languages.

    One of the things I tried to do as a teacher was simplify my vocabulary and grammar when writing instructions, because I had a lot of ESL students in my class. The Basic English vocabulary list was actually a reasonable place to start.

    269:

    H
    I noticed, last weekend, that formal spoken German is changing ...
    My spoken German is incredibly old-fashioned - so everyone can understnd me - but it now sounds stilted ...
    As for grammar: "Die Deutsche Grammatik ist sehr schwer"

    270:

    Re: '... the live polio virus in the oral vaccine can mutate as it passes from person to person, eventually recovering its nasty side. That's the concern.'

    The mutation can be very fast - see slide 'Reversion of P3/Sabin' at 17:02 mark.

    For folks interested in getting some background info on polio, recommend watching this special TWiV. The presenter is a PhD with 40 years' virus research specializing in polio. He's also a virology textbook co-author, respected science educator, YT presenter, etc. Because polio is his research specialty, he pulled together this 26 min. video that covers some history plus discussion of the different vaccines. (BTW - overall, I think that this is very similar to the history of polio, vaccine usage and experience, as well as the current polio situation in the UK.)

    'Polio in New York'

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-5KGHzHTsI&ab_channel=VincentRacaniello

    He also briefly (approx. 3 min.- starting at 8:51) discussed polio in this regular weekly TWiV clinical update video:

    'TWiV 924: Clinical update with Dr. Daniel Griffin'

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv18dxXv9Zs&t=622s&ab_channel=VincentRacaniello

    And, no, I'm not going to apologize for posting the above comment because this is a real-life example of the type, level of educational expertise and universal access that we need now and going forward across all subject areas.

    271:

    Heteromeles @ 262:

    I'm not ignoring it, and I'm sorry you think I'm trying to start an argument.

    Learning Latin as a language is not required to understand a few hundred loan words in English. By that standard everyone who speaks English is also already proficient at French, German & Spanish because of all the other loan words English has absorbed.

    I hated Latin and I'm still angry 59 years later at having it forced upon me and the lasting harm that did me.

    I'm angry about how the lack of foreign language proficiency has held me back so many times in my life and I blame those who thwarted my choice of the foreign language to study for their own, goddamn selfish reasons.

    I was eager to learn a foreign language and Latin is the reason I was never able to do so, because there was NO ONE TO TALK TO IN LATIN! ... no one to practice my language skills with.

    272:

    I don’t think Labour have anything to say to them either, because it’s not yet politic to blame Brexit

    That confuses me. A lot.

    What can Labour possibly have to lose by pointing out the problems? There are senior Labour figures who said Brexit would be a disaster, it's been a disaster... point to them and say "their plan for recovery is at least based on reality". Especially when it's increasingly obvious to everyone that there is a disaster.

    Also with the "austerity will cause economic growth" bullshit being spun by everyone in the Con party, plus their backers in the media. Sure, that's never happened before and there are solid reasons to think it can't happen, but that's the rock around the neck of the con artists, not Labour. If they had real guts they'd say "look, things are fucked, we're broke, so we have to keep laundering money for crooks because that's all the Conservatives have left us. It's what they've made the UK famous for".

    But even the Cons surely have to admit at least privately that the forecasts for economic damage caused by Brexit were hopelessly optimistic and other economic shocks since then have not helped. But the UK is doing significantly worse than formerly-comparable economies, so unless the current UK government is somehow peculiarly ill-equipped to deal with economic problems the explanation has to be Brexit. And I can't see even the most reactionary Conservative sticking their head above the parapet with that claim.

    273:

    Clive Feather @ 263:

    I didn't learn to speak English from a book. I already knew how to speak it before I started the first grade. I didn't think in a different language and try to translate everything into English before I learned to read & write.

    I couldn't learn language from a book. I needed a language I could speak, a language I could THINK.

    Some people's brains are wired differently. I needed other people who also spoke the language to speak with, to expand my vocabulary BEFORE I started to learn the grammar. For a while - a very short while - I had an opportunity to learn a language that way.

    And then that opportunity was shut down and taken away from me.

    274:

    I didn't learn to speak English from a book.

    There are a few comedy skits on that topic. It's almost impossible to do, unless that book is a linguistics text probably called something like "idiopathic pronunciations of English words around the world".

    We're not just talking about Worcestershire with its silent syllables, English has the full set of silent letters, unwritten letters and pronunciations that vary depending on both dialect and context. Less "no such thing as a fish" and more "27 ways to spell fish, all of which are wrong".

    There's still words that I mispronounce because I've only ever read them, and words that other so-called "English speakers" pronounce wrongly and somehow think I'm at fault. Like almost anything with the letter zed in it.

    275:

    I didn't learn to speak English from a book.

    Funny thing is, I did, mostly. From one specific book in particular, that book being 'The Dragonlance Chronicles' by Weis and Hickman. There was specfi in Finnish, both domestic and translated, but at that point I had mostly exhausted the local library's science and fantasy selection, and had started to play roleplaying games (in Finnish, with the Mentzer Red and Blue D&D boxes and Runequest), so going to AD&D books in English was a quite logical next step.

    That book wasn't very good, but it got me started, especially with those RPGs which were and still are much more abundant in English. I remember the German grammar lessons having been very useful here, especially the tenses and irregular verbs. In English (which started two years later than German, I had had it for a couple of months at this point) we only had had the present tense and no irregularities, really, so realizing that 'rose' was the past tense of 'rise' was quite the revelation.

    Of course this means I have a lot of vocabulary but often little idea of how the words are pronounced, especially when that depends on the accent. This means that my accent and dialect are both quite 'foreign' in the sense that nobody else speaks even closely like how I do. I've grown not to care about that.

    Later I did watch a lot of US media, so I think my accent gravitates towards a generic US TV-movie accent, but consciously I like many accents, so would like to use those. Never going to happen, though. (I did remember watching 'China Beach' with covered-up subtitles so I would need to listen to the language. Subtitling is good in some ways, and of course I've grown accustomed to it so I like it even now.)

    This means that I'm much more elonquent when writing. I speak a lot, and almost every day also in English (my workplace has a lot of people who don't speak Finnish and English is the company language), but still I find myself forgetting common words and expressions when speaking.

    276:

    Learning English.

    A few years ago we were in Madrid and walked into a restaurant one evening that looked nice and had some decent ratings on Google. Being only 7pm it was about 1/2 full. When our waiter showed up we asked if he spoke English. He held up a finger, left, and another fellow came back and spoke very decent English. A few stumbles but overall quite well.

    We asked him later about his English and his story was interesting. He was about 19 and had decided to learn English on his own. His path was to start participating in MMORPGs. At first just watching and listening then later participating.

    Worked for him.

    277:

    Later I did watch a lot of US media, so I think my accent gravitates towards a generic US TV-movie accent,

    One problem in the US is that how people, even well educated ones, speak in conversation is a babble. Little following of the rules of grammar. Or even complete sentences. The exception being lawyers, politicians, and such when on "display". And TV shows and movies. Most people can't believe what they read when reading a transcript of a conversation.

    I wonder at times how much this occurs in other countries/languages.

    278:

    EC said: I was taught English grammar and syntax, according to the pseudo-Latin rules the Victorian dogmatists invented but, when I grew more literate, I realised how misleading it was, often verging on nonsense.

    That's the special case of the more general rule. Which is of course

    $Student was taught $AnySubject , according to the $RND rules the Victorian dogmatists invented but, when I grew more literate, I realised how misleading it was, often verging on nonsense.

    279:

    my workplace has a lot of people who don't speak Finnish

    Same here :)

    280:

    Me: my workplace has a lot of people who don't speak Finnish

    Moz: Same here :)

    Oh! What a surprise!

    Still, I'm in kind of a special area: IT has a lot of companies where English is expected, not Finnish, but mostly companies in Finland require passable Finnish skills. Even if that wasn't really a necessity for their business. I have known people who had no problem getting a job in IT when they couldn't speak Finnish, but having their spouses have problems finding a job in a technical field with a similar degree, when the companies insisted on Finnish...

    281:

    "What can Labour possibly have to lose by pointing out the problems?"

    The next election for a start.

    The Tories only need to win 30-40% of the vote to stay in power and theres a lot of people out there who bought the Daily Mail/Telegraph/Express/Sun line that the evil europeans were ruining their lives/country and not Osborne or Cameron's moronic "austerity".

    So, if you are going to approach all those people who voted Brexit and tell them that they were suckered/duped/got it wrong, you will cause a lot of knee jerk anger - it being much easier to dig your heels in and hate those who tell you that you made a mistake, than to actually admit it.

    They have lots of their remaining self esteem invested in the fact they stuck it to the man/europe/the metropolitan elites. They have to come to the realisation they were duped in their own time rather than being banged over the head with it. It would have been pretty obvious by now, but has been obfuscated by COVID, the conflict in Ukraine and the fact a prpportion of the people involved are unlikely to give up a simple prejudice (immigrants/nameless bureaucrats/change = Evil!) that was pretty much a conspiracy theory anyway.

    When people are so pissed off, why attract some of the anger to yourself?

    282:

    Grant
    .... it being much easier to dig your heels in and hate those who tell you that you made a mistake, than to actually admit it.
    Quite, I have this problem on an almost-daily basis, though, as you point out, there are occasional cracks in the rigid structure - half-admissions that it "Could have been done a lot better" sort of thing.

    283:

    Well, yes, but English was extreme. They tried to actually change the language to make it more like Latin, and succeeded (insofar as it was taught, though not as it was used) for a while. The reluctance to teach English grammar and syntax could be argued to be a rebound.

    That being said, why? oh! why? do some writers of historical fantasy use 'thee' as the nominative. It really grates. That includes ones who definitely should know better, like Cherryh.

    284:

    That being said, why? oh! why? do some writers of historical fantasy use 'thee' as the nominative. It really grates. That includes ones who definitely should know better, like Cherryh.

    Thou art correct, I agree with thee!

    (Uh, the Ultima games had these mostly correct, I think. Of course speaking languages which use cases more than English helps here.)

    285:

    You have to admit that Finnish has a certain reputation when it comes to learning the language. We have a Finnish school in Sydney so apparently there are some of you over here torturing your locally born kids with it.

    But living in Australia is weird, the skips (British-ethnic Australians) do their usual "we speak English here" thing. (In)Famously someone was video'd screaming that at a punter speaking a local language.

    But half the country is either immigrant or second gen Australian, so there are a fuckton of "languages other than English" or whatever the current circumlocution is. More so than my memory of Aotearoa, albeit I lived in quite white bits of it (the further south you go the whiter it gets). So we get government stuff in as many languages as they can afford, and it's not too hard to find businesses that "also speak english, sort of" that cater to various migrants. Where I am Arabic is the second communal language because it's a Muslim centre, but you there are national/ethnic centres all over the place if you know where to look.

    And of course lots of formerly skip churches taken over by all sorts of people. I like the Lakemba Uniting Church ("Uniting" is a brand name rather than a description) which describes itself as "Lakemba Uniting Church. The Somang (Korean) Uniting Church, congregation and the Lakemba Seventh-Day Adventist Church also share the church building". Services in Chinese and Samoan are also available if it's the building I'm thinking of.

    286:

    (FWIW Australia doesn't officially have an official language, just a whole lot of English language requirements for immigrants and government business is conducted in English and so on. Other countries are more direct about it, when I was looking at Norway ever so briefly they were pretty "no Norwegian no immigration". Which is fair enough, but Australia has such an ugly reputation that it seems weird we don't just say "fuck you all, English is the one true language".

    I was thinking the other day about this, and specifically the person denied entry because they couldn't transcribe Gaelic. So I wondered whether we might get an MP with the guts to speak only Scots Gaelic in parliament and demand that everything be translated both for them and from them. It is, after all, a requirement of citizenship...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_exclusion_of_Egon_Kisch_from_Australia

    Aotearoa has Maori, English, and NZ Sign Language as official languages and Mojo Mathers used the latter when she was an MP (on account of being deaf). Conniptions were not had but there were non-trivial difficulties. Mostly treated as learning experiences by those needing to do so which was good to see.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojo_Mathers

    287:

    "Of course this means I have a lot of vocabulary but often little idea of how the words are pronounced, especially when that depends on the accent."

    It's the same for native speakers of English. Hence the popularity of howjsay.com/ and the like.

    I was pleased to find that Russian and Spanish are a lot easier in that respect -- spelling sticks considerably closer to pronunciation. With some exceptions, of course.

    288:

    and it's not too hard to find businesses that "also speak english, sort of" that cater to various migrants.

    Sounds like a larger version of New York City.

    All kinds of neighborhoods where English seems a remote thing. Mostly these days in Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. But all over Manhattan 100 years ago. And a lot of pockets of it now.

    Any any New Yorkers who want to correct me, please do.

    289:

    DavidL @253:

    I got very good at diagramming sentences. I think that fell out of favor. This would have been latter 60s, early 70s.

    They were still doing it when I was in grades 7 & 8 (Ontario) in the early 1980s.

    This was the first time I actively refused to learn something. I'd been reading so much that I knew the rules without being able to state them. Sure, it was important to know what adverbs, verbs, nouns, etc were, but I could not see the utility of single-underlining this, double-underlining that, putting brackets around the other. Seemed like an utterly pointless waste of my time.

    Learned enough so I didn't fail, but forgot it as soon as I could.

    Greg Tingey @269:

    I noticed, last weekend, that formal spoken German is changing

    Heck, I'm 54 and I'm noticing that English as it is spoken by the utes of today isn't quite the same as when I was a kid myself. Words changing their meaning (nauseous now means 'feeling sick' rather than 'causing nausea' as just one example). My dad, who was born in the late 1930s, saw even more words fall out of favour / be replaced by others / change their meaning. I imagine if I'm still going in the 2050s I'll be even more of a linguistic relic.

    290:

    Charlie:

    Congratulations on being nominated for a Dragon Award for Invisible Sun!

    291:

    Even literary English has changed, as it has for the past millennium. Some languages are more stable; others are similarly mutable. French has an official codification (for what it is worth), but the attempt to introduce one into English lasted only a century and was only partially successful then. Some of that is the massive changes caused by dialects, variants etc. affecting whatever you like to think of as the mainstream language. The OED states explicitly that its job is to describe the vocabulary, not define it.

    292:

    One example of L'Académie Française failing to hold back the tide:

    The 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac has people referring 'to kiss' as 'baiser'. 125 years later, it's meaning is apparently 'to f*ck'.

    Can't hold back the tide.

    293:

    253 - Remember what I said about "English grammar simply was not taught"? This includes diagramming sentences unless that means "subject predicater compliment adjunct".

    254 - Exactly; French teacher says "This is the perfect tense of $verb".
    Class respond "What's the 'perfect tense' Miss/Sir?"

    275 - There are really only 2 ways to pronounce "Z"; "zed" and the wrong way.

    276 - First paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on the Dragonlance chronicles: "The Dragonlance Chronicles is a trilogy of fantasy novels written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, which take place in the Dragonlance setting. This series is the first set of Dragonlance novels, and is followed by the Dragonlance Legends series." And none of the first trilogy titles contain the word "Dragonlance".

    294:

    Heck, I'm 54 and I'm noticing that English as it is spoken by the utes of today isn't quite the same as when I was a kid myself.

    When did "one tenth" become "ten times smaller". The later just doesn't make logical sense to me but has totally taken over.

    295:

    This was the first time I actively refused to learn something. I'd been reading so much that I knew the rules without being able to state them. Sure, it was important to know what adverbs, verbs, nouns, etc were, but I could not see the utility of single-underlining this, double-underlining that, putting brackets around the other. Seemed like an utterly pointless waste of my time.

    I remember enjoying diagramming sentences, but I haven't done it in many decades. The one thing I wonder is whether, as a conlang exercise, it would be possible to create a language where the function of a word is where it is in a sentence diagram.

    With written words, this is silly, as it's normal to use a line of text (reformatted for a page) to represent a line of spoken words. Adding a few extra letters or other symbols to the lines easily denotes what function each plays.

    Thing is, quipus are sort of two dimensional, so a sentence diagram might be an intermediate between our representation of spoken language as lines of text on flat surfaces, and the Andean technique of stringing together information with knotted lengths of cordage.

    Why does this matter? Worldbuilding.

    A lot depends on what you've got to record information on. Papyrus, parchment, and paper work very differently with things like how fast ink dries, how flat they lay (papyrus rolls into scrolls more easily), and which ones are suitable for mechanical printing (some, not all, papers). Or you can go to lontar palm leaflets, silk, bamboo splints threaded together, clay, birchbark, or wood. Or, if you've got a lot of cordage lying around, you can make quipus. And if you don't have any of these, you're stuck with weird-looking mnemonic devices and decorating stones. What you have to work with determines how you "write," more than many people realize.

    296:

    Changing the subject from language arts to political science and psychology...

    We've got a compare/contrast moment in USian politics.

    On the one hand, the democrats are finally, finally breaking the Manchin/Sinema impasse and getting the US somewhere on climate change, as well as trying to do stuff about inflation andd a bunch of other big problems.

    On the other hand, we've got an abusive Republican ex-president who quite possibly absconded with nuclear secrets and/or highest level SIGINT, didn't respond to subpoenas about it, and now has had it forcibly removed from his possession by the FBI.

    And guess where the media is going? Nothing like crawling back into that abusive relationship yet again, is there?

    Anyway, once we pass 300, we can speculate on how much good the climate legislation will do, or whether Agent Orange took that info to sell nuclear tech to the Saudis, as part of a protection racket (leave me alone or I give Faux the Football and a list of the foreign leaders we've hacked), or as the stupidest trophy an ex-president could possibly take with him when he leaves.

    ...

    Or actually, we could keep talking about languages. That's more fun actually.

    297:

    Not to say un picnic.

    298:

    Or actually, we could keep talking about languages. That's more fun actually.

    Over the last hour I'm in an email exchange with someone about some tech issues on system I support.

    She was born and grew up in China. Didn't get into the university program she wanted there so got into one in the US around 10 years ago and stayed to work.

    The email exchange is taking 3 times as long due to her English being not as precise in telling me what's wrong. I can almost see her thinking in a Chinese dialect and mentally translating to write out the emails to me. Just from the verb and pronoun (mis)usage.

    Of course I have similar issues at times with born and raised in the USA. No translation involved. Just a lack of precision. Or what I call the lack of the ability to realize the person they are talking to has not been reading their mind for the previous hour or day.

    Then there is my neighbor. Born in Scotland, raised in Hong Kong, spent years in the UK and the USA and now lives here but with grown children in both countries. I have to ask him to translate what he says at times.

    299:

    Different level of language, but there's code switching.

    Normally this is meant as Black people using white English when there are white people around, but switching into more comfortable modes of expression when there are not.

    Thing is, code switching happens in academia, too. One of the more interesting parties I went to was a bunch of botanists and friends. After a time the friends left, and we realized that it was only botany grad students, no one else. And so we joyously nerded out, because we didn't have to act normal for a change.

    It wasn't a BS session, but rather fully using the jargons we were learning, that we loved. I miss discussions like that, actually. It's fun when people joyously join in, and you don't have to worry about toning it down to avoid alienating anyone.

    300:

    It's worth mentioning John McWhorter's Power of Babel, a natural history of language (2003), for those who are interested in such things. AFAIK it's only available in paper versions, but it's worth getting or checking out.

    301:

    ... whether Agent Orange took that info [nuclear secrets and/or highest level SIGINT] to sell nuclear tech to the Saudis, as part of a protection racket (leave me alone or I give Faux the Football and a list of the foreign leaders we've hacked), or as the stupidest trophy an ex-president could possibly take with him when he leaves.

    I've seen speculation that IQ45 may have been planning to use this stuff as his ticket when absconding to Russia - thus avoiding a potential prison term. Not serious speculation, I suspect, but fun none the less.

    302:

    I learned a lot of my vocabulary from books. I'm still not sure whether semester is pronounced seMESter or semesTER.

    And about Finhish... I'd been saying since something like my early 20s that with all the books I'd read with quotes in Greek, Latin, and French, and the authors expect that of course all their readers would speak that, that if I ever wrote a book, I was going to have quotes in Welsh and Finnish to get even.

    If you're read my 11,000 Years... I did it. I did have translations in the back (unlike all the authors I'd read), but my editor forced me to add translations with the quotes....

    303:

    That, of course, isn't just a language problem. Hell, a good friend of mine, who is knowledgeable including with computers yelled for help the other day, as she said her OpenOffice wasn't working.... Of course, I had to ask her to define "not working".

    304:

    As we're past 300, I've just posted a short essay on codes of conduct that includes consideration of language usage by class on my blog. https://mrw.5-cent.us

    And hi, all those who logged on from here.

    305:

    The end of education, when idiots are in power ....
    Like Hyacinth Truss or IQ45 - what fun It looks as though Trump really will go to jail - Or so we hope.
    How quickly could the US DoJ do this, if they really have found ultra-classified documentation in Florida????

    306:

    On the general subject of "English" like what she is spoke. (sic)

    Guy posts a "technical query" on a car website I post on (under my real name).
    I respond "Would you post that again, in English this time"? Him "You f*cking understood me you bar steward!" Several other regular posters (edited version) "No Paws didn't, and neither do I!"

    307:

    ... what fun It looks as though Trump really will go to jail - Or so we hope.

    Yeah - we hope. But Trump has dodged so much stuff without having to pay any consequences, that I won't believe it until a jury comes back with a "guilty" verdict.

    308:

    JReynolds @ 290:

    Heck, I'm 54 and I'm noticing that English as it is spoken by the utes of today isn't quite the same as when I was a kid myself. Words changing their meaning (nauseous now means 'feeling sick' rather than 'causing nausea' as just one example).

    Words do shift their meaning, but as far as I can remember, "nauseous" already had both meanings when I was a child, with "feeling sick" predominating.

    309:

    They were still [diagramming sentences] when I was in grades 7 & 8 (Ontario) in the early 1980s.

    I never did that is Saskatchewan — graduated high school in 1981.

    310:

    It's worth mentioning John McWhorter's Power of Babel, a natural history of language (2003), for those who are interested in such things. AFAIK it's only available in paper versions, but it's worth getting or checking out.

    https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/the-power-of-babel

    Kobo has it available as digital.

    311:

    Trump has dodged so much stuff without having to pay any consequences, that I won't believe it until a jury comes back with a "guilty" verdict.

    Naw. Don't believe it until the door is closed and locked.

    312:

    I thought quipus were not a language, though they are a way to record information. Aren't they a kind of proto "written" language, the same kind of thing as the origins of linear a and cuneiform as state record keeping for taxes? As I understand it don't the origins of written language lie not in language but in something else that is then repurposed, in the previous cases tax recording, in the case of chinese it is believed to be oracles cast by throwing tortoise shells into a fire and interpreting the cracks.

    313:

    SFReader @ 218:

    Sorry Charlie/folks for going off-topic before the 300th comment.

    Yeah, sorry about that, but the threads already appeared to be drifting. I held this to come back to it after 300.

    https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/public/index.html#:~:text=Oral%20polio%20vaccine%20(OPV)%20is,4%20through%206%20years%20old.

    I did read all that before posting my question. The part I'm still trying to figure out is how to know if -I- am at "increased risk of exposure" given the ascendance of ANTI-VAXXERS in the current debate about vaccines. Is the immunity I got from being vaccinated as a child still good?

    314:

    AlanD2 @ 302:

    ... whether Agent Orange took that info [nuclear secrets and/or highest level SIGINT] to sell nuclear tech to the Saudis, as part of a protection racket (leave me alone or I give Faux the Football and a list of the foreign leaders we've hacked), or as the stupidest trophy an ex-president could possibly take with him when he leaves.

    I've seen speculation that IQ45 may have been planning to use this stuff as his ticket when absconding to Russia - thus avoiding a potential prison term. Not serious speculation, I suspect, but fun none the less.

    I made a joke on another forum the other day that "maybe he was going to sell them on eBay to raise money for his next run" ... doesn't seem quite as funny now.

    315:

    The original topic seems to be a case of government hoist by its own petard, with a certain inevitability about it.

    First we had the governmental ambition to increase the proportion of people who went to university from around 5% to 50% (I think the figure was, or something around that anyway). Which seemed to me to be a bloody stupid idea in the first place. The reason only 5% of people went to university was that not a lot more than that did well enough at school to get into a university, and not all of those wanted to. For the ambition to stand any chance of achieving some worthwhile result would require the plan to include some effective measures to improve school education to the point where nearly everyone finished school with good enough results to get into a university, and of course it did not in fact include anything of the bloody sort.

    What we did get was more of the same crap that was going on already - making school results look better by not requiring people to learn so much to get the same ranking in their results. This of course not only results in more people being inappropriately rated as up to university standard, but also in those people for whom that rating is appropriate still being less well actually equipped for university than previously.

    So for the latter cases we have universities complaining that their three-year courses need to become four years to teach people the degree material and the stuff they should have learned at school already, and for the former cases, inventing a profusion of mickey-mouse degree courses to absorb all the people who are essentially only at the equivalent of "left school at 16" level and not have them just fail. This then with utter predictability leads to lots of people wondering out loud who's going to pay for all this, and the government going "durrr, dunno, we thought it would pay for itself by magic".

    None of this was even new. People were already complaining about reduction in school standards (personal example: lots of things my dad learned in school physics which I, at the same school, did not), universities were complaining about the amount of stuff people missed at school that they were having to cram in before getting onto the proper degree material (tale: admissions tutor complaining that people could no longer answer "given two spheres of identical mass and size, one of lead encased in aluminium and one of aluminium encased in lead, and a thin external steel shell on both, how can you tell which is which without instruments?"), and governments were complaining about how much they were paying for people to go to university (we had already seen the grant reduced so that only tuition fees were guaranteed, and the rest of it, for the cost of living, depended on whether they thought your parents could pay for that instead).

    What had just happened was that all this was going to be made a whole lot worse, because the government had come up with this stupid idea of sending ten times as many people through university without caring about any consequences that weren't part of the definition of their fetish.

    The Thatcher government would not accept that the reason for high unemployment was that there were no bloody jobs because the government had fucked millions of them up. Instead they insisted that it was because the millions of unemployed weren't performing the right magical rituals. Norman Tebbit thought they should use cycling, which was easy for everyone to take the piss out of. It was much safer to rely on the standard lie about degrees necessarily resulting in jobs, because the only people who knew better were the small minority who did have degrees but didn't get them so long ago that it was more or less true then; every other bugger who had a degree, and all the much larger number of people who didn't, believed it without question, and by the time the consequences started to show up it would be some other government that had to deal with the mess.

    There was also a lot of guff going round about "Thatcher's education system leaving youth on the scrap heap" and some more guff of longer standing about "giving people low exam grades fossilises them as failures and this is bad"; part of the motivation, or at least the cover, was to appear to be addressing both of these. In neither case though is it appropriate; in the first one it wasn't Thatcher's education system at fault, it was that the scrap heap was where all the jobs had gone.

    The second one is related to the endlessly propagandised fallacy (which also formed part of the motivation for the ambition) that "everyone can "succeed"" (by which they mean, end up with lots of money), "all they have to do is work a lot" (for whichever value of "work" best fits the context). It would be more realistic and truthful to tell people "you almost certainly won't "succeed", but it's not important anyway, so don't worry about it, tell the people who think it is important to fuck off, and just do whatever makes you happy".

    There ought to be a name for this, like "pyramid denial" or something. The second one doesn't see the problem with having a pyramid with everyone on the upper layers; the first one is about stating or mis-stating the idea that you go on the upper layers or you have nowhere to go, because the bottom layers are now in China or wherever, and what do you mean that's silly.

    So where Sunak's at is sort of a reversion to type. It costs too much to use the universities to help people pretend they don't have nowhere to go, so let's go back to the "scrap heap" era and just say fuck 'em. Except this time the people who get to miss out are not those who don't do well at school, but those whose parents don't have a lot of money. It would achieve the same result more simply to just get rid of the grant/loan system entirely and go back to not having anything, rather than having a further iteration of piling kludge upon kludge, but I suppose they feel some kind of need to make a blundering attempt at being subtle about it.

    316:

    Robert Prior @ 310:

    They were still [diagramming sentences] when I was in grades 7 & 8 (Ontario) in the early 1980s.

    I never did that is Saskatchewan — graduated high school in 1981.

    We were taught that when I was in the 4th, 5th & 6th grades [grade school] back in the late 50s. I don't remember doing it in Junior High or High School. By then the emphasis was more on literature.

    317:

    The 'nauseous means sick' usage goes back at least more than a hundred years, and probably more like 400.

    318:

    Actually English isn’t an official language in NZ, only Maori and ESL. It’s obviously the main language but it’s never been put in law. Classic pub quiz question ;)

    319:

    "Trump has dodged so much stuff without having to pay any consequences, that I won't believe it until a jury comes back with a "guilty" verdict."

    Naw. Don't believe it until the door is closed and locked.

    Noted. I'm obviously too optimistic...

    320:

    I thought quipus were not a language, though they are a way to record information. Aren't they a kind of proto "written" language, the same kind of thing as the origins of linear a and cuneiform as state record keeping for taxes? As I understand it don't the origins of written language lie not in language but in something else that is then repurposed, in the previous cases tax recording, in the case of chinese it is believed to be oracles cast by throwing tortoise shells into a fire and interpreting the cracks.

    Let me back up a second to the previous point: if someone's creating a conlang that's to be "written" using knotted strings tied together in a tree-like pattern, then I think you can show it in a story, by diagramming the sentence and presenting the diagram as an image within the story. Wikipedia's got an article on sentence diagramming, and as many of us recall, it's not hard.

    Was this what quipus actually did? Well, maybe, maybe not.

    People all over the world from Hawai'i to Europe used knotted strings for tally counts, so that's the basic accounting idea. No one disputes that some quipus were used for tallies of stuff (we even have their abacus equivalents), but determining what string tallied what? That's harder. What's harder still is that it's quite obvious that some lines in some quipus were not tallies. One known alternate use was field production: if 60% of a field was to be planted in quinoa, and 40% in potatoes, that could be shown be tying a knot 60% of the way up the string. But we know Inkans did more with them.

    There are three other threads here. One is a great book, The Cord Keepers, that I tripped over years ago. It's a PhD anthropology thesis about how the student tripped over a rural Peruvian village that had been using quipus up until the 19th Century, before switching over to pen and paper. They had their old quipus in their last state, they knew what they had been used for, but no one knew how to read them any more.

    Those quipus were used to organize the work schedules of the village clans, aka ayllus. Andean life is hard, because the planting and harvest times are really compressed. If a family tried to plant their fields by themselves, they'd struggle to get it done. So what the ayllus do is that everyone plants every field in turn, rapidly, just to get all the work done on time. Ditto harvesting and everything else. The ayllus were used to organize who got which field, herd, etc., what was done with it, and also to organize multi-ayllu work (like building the village soccer stadium and keeping the canals repaired). Apparently be part of an ayllu is a lot like being in the army, but it was (and in some places still is) how rural life got organized in the Andes.

    But that's not all. There's a story from soon after the Conquest of an Inkan noblewoman sending the same message to a bunch of people by knotting a bunch of cords and sending them off. That argues for a writing-like use. American researchers, looking at existing quipu, think there was easily enough potential information (cord material, dye color, way string was wrapped, type and location of knots) to hold a written language, and there are some guesses that some colored cords are certain syllables.

    That said, if you're writing by knotting colored cords, you need a pretty big workstation to hold all the cordage and dye you'd need, and running short would kind of suck. So it's possible that the message ayllus were like African talking drums. The drums have a few dozen distinctive rhythms with known meanings, and those "words" are what they transmit, rather than the equivalent of Morse code. What can you say with a few dozen known signal knots? Depends on what you choose.

    Also on the maybe not a written language side, we know from the Conquest records that there were multiple types of quipus, so it's likely that some were ledgers and some were other things. Whether those other things are written-language equivalent? No one knows.

    There's also Lynne Kelly's work. She's got a whole career looking at all the different memorization techniques people have used around the world, and she's published a book that includes quite a lot of mnemonic devices (Memory Craft). One of the things she made was a quipu. Her take on it was that making and using it was the most like writing of any of the many, many things she'd made, and also it was one of the hardest things to use as a mnemonic device, because good memory devices have a lot of brain-catching uniqueness to them, while a big old bundle of colored, knotted strings is less memorable on a per-string basis. That kind of argues that quipus were more writing equivalent, but that's also just one woman's experience, not anything like a controlled study.

    So long answer, but I hope it clarifies my ignorance, if not yours.

    321:

    Is the immunity I got from being vaccinated as a child still good?

    I have the same concerns, as my vaccinations are in the distant past ('50s and later). I hope you checked out the 'Polio in New York' link in SFReader's post #270. I didn't realize that the two kinds of polio vaccines worked in different (and complimentary, to some degree) ways. From CDC's web site:

    Duration of Protection

    It is not known how long people who received IPV will be protected against polio, but they are most likely protected for many years after a complete series of IPV. However, adults who completed their polio vaccination series as children and are at higher risk for polio exposure can receive one lifetime IPV booster.

    https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/effectiveness-duration-protection.html

    I'm guessing that a polio booster is a much lower priority right now than Covid and perhaps monkeypox (for those people without smallpox vaccinations). But - like most things in life - this is subject to change without notice...

    322:

    "Older students, even older by one year, tended to do better in classes and didn't go off the rails dealing with campus life."

    I'm going to go against the stream here. "Thick sandwich" and "thin sandwich" were (?are) sponsorship deals; what I had was a "half-arsed sandwich" where there was no sponsorship involved, but there was a requirement of the course to spend a year doing an actual relevant job. You had the choice of that interruption to the course of your education coming either between the 2nd and 3rd years of the course, or between school and the 1st year. I chose the latter because I figured it would be less disruptive.

    Apart from the first few years of school, my "social life" pretty much entirely consisted of hanging around with my friends during break times. Most of the lads lived in the same town the school was in, and there was no intersection between the set I fell into hanging around with at school and the single-digit handful spread over several years who came in from the next town 7 miles away, so I had none of the hanging around with each other outside school and wandering round to each other's houses all the time that the schoolkids round here seem to be constantly doing; nor did I know anyone in the town not through school; so I never socialised outside the restrictive school environment. I never even got drunk - I didn't understand why people wanted to or how it was supposed to be enjoyable, and I'd never encountered any alcoholic drink that tasted pleasant enough to be worth drinking for the pleasure of tasting it, so I had neither personal nor social motivation to try it.

    The year doing the actual relevant job was even less social - sitting in a lab all day and sitting in a garret all evening, then going back to my parents' at weekends partly because the rent was cheaper by more than the cost of the journey but mainly because it would have been just too fucking boring to sit in the garret for two whole days. And being paid just enough to cover this plus food but no more than that, so even if there had been any opportunity to vary the routine the means would have been lacking.

    Being at university was an absolute revelation - loads of people to hang around with living in the same actual building, and a much higher proportion with enough common interest for me to want to hang around with them than at school. And a bar in the building too, whose delights I discovered on about my second night. I'd never known anything like it, and basically I quickly ended up fucking around (in the metaphorical sense) all the time and as much as I could, while learning little beyond that I wanted to do it some more.

    On top of that, the year spent doing the actual relevant job - relevant, perhaps, but still naturally at dogsbody level with other people doing the thinking - turned out to have been a year spent forgetting much of what I'd learned in my last year or two of school. I had done well enough in maths to meet the entrance requirements by somehow managing to "get on a roll" and then sitting the A-levels with it all still hot and boiling; I got through the various school holidays without losing too much of the heat to get it going again when school restarted, but the year spent doing the ARJ was a very different matter, and it just went. (In the same way nowadays I find that programs I write in that state tend to be the ones I find most baffling to come back to six months later.)

    If I'd had to do the A-levels again at that point, I would have been fucked. Similarly when I came to bits where I needed that knowledge in the course material, I was also fucked. I'd keep finding that the pointer to something basic and simple like how to handle complex numbers, which I'd thought were pretty neat at school, was now pointing to uninitialised memory and causing me to crash. Which was shit. (It didn't help having lecturers not only scribbling stuff on the board too fast to keep up with but explaining it in the opposite direction to the direction I come to understand things in, and expecting it to become meaningful immediately, so they could then start making use of it in stuff on the next board without having to bother explaining how the connection between those two stages works.)

    I found the year doing the ARJ utterly useless for any of the purposes claimed in favour of such hiatuses. It didn't give me any cause to reconsider what I might want to do, since it was pretty much exactly what I expected; I enjoyed the work I was given, and I assumed that the shit money was merely a function of it being before and not after the university bit, so I'd be OK later. It didn't give me any knowledge that was of any help with or relevance to the university course, nor did it add anything useful to my ideas of what I expected the course to be useful for. It gave me absolutely fuck all useful life experience to help me deal with university life - it was (and indeed still is) about the most opposite and unrelated thing I'd ever experienced. And as far as doing better on my coursework goes, it was an absolute fucking disaster of counterproductivity, and I'd have been much better off not doing it.

    Since it would never have crossed my mind to "take a year out" if I'd hadn't had to, I rate submitting to the compulsion to do it (instead of choosing some other course or university) as having been a really fucking bad idea. (I'm not that impressed with the university's idea of making it compulsory either.) Probably the one thing I did get right was choosing to do it before the 1st year rather than between the 2nd and 3rd, otherwise I'd have fucked up my education and fucked up the job.

    This isn't to say it was entirely useless - I did learn one or two (technical) things that I have found useful in later life, and I also picked up some stuff which is of interest from a historical, "this is what that technology was like at the time" point of view. But I would have learned, probably not the same things, but equivalent things, in a year of any kind of relevant job. It would have been a negligible loss to have missed it. The loss of university knowledge consequent on not missing it is a lot more serious. And what I miss most of all is the knowledge from school being lost, instead of consolidated as would have been the case if I'd had to carry on using it without interruption. That's where the education-type stuff I use all the time is, and although it's not "lost" to the extent of not being able to do it at all, it is a pain in the arse having to look stupid things up all the time, and I've never got back the level of understanding (as opposed to performance) I had at school or the ability to "get on a roll" with it (though I can do that with other things).

    323:

    "nauseous now means 'feeling sick' rather than 'causing nausea' as just one example"

    I'd consider "causing nausea" a misuse. Nausea, the feeling of sickness; nauseous, having the feeling; nauseate, to cause the feeling; nauseating, causing the feeling. Imagine if Daleks were weedy and could only make people sick; they would go around saying "NAUSEATE! NAUSEATE!" and nauseating people.

    324:

    "This includes diagramming sentences unless that means "subject predicater compliment adjunct"."

    I remember this from when I was 6. Or half of it. They never mentioned the other two words. Nor did they mention "object", which I was expecting some time.

    We had the Verb, which went at the top, in a little balloon. Then we had the Subject, which was the word before the Verb, in its own balloon, hanging down from the Verb's balloon diagonally on the left. And then we had the Predicate, which was all the other words, with each word in its own balloon, hanging down in a little chain diagonally on the right from the Verb balloon. They could have called them "car" and "cdr" without affecting the pointlessness of the exercise.

    325:

    "Like Hyacinth Truss or IQ45 - what fun It looks as though Trump really will go to jail - Or so we hope."

    "How quickly could the US DoJ do this, if they really have found ultra-classified documentation in Florida????"

    Not quickly at all. At least years, given IQ45's access to lawyers.

    A jury will need to be seated (voir dire will be interesting), various pre- and inter-trial motions will be filed, the trial will be conducted, appeals will then be filed to higher courts, etc., etc., etc.

    I guess it's possible if unlikely that he'll be indicted, tried and convicted before the first Tuesday in November 2024. But if the appeals for criminal conviction were ongoing during his second term as POTUS...? Interesting question.

    Criminal conviction being disqualifying for Federal office seems to be of undetermined significance. Maybe yes, maybe no.

    326:

    I'll be optimistic for a change and disagree. If IQ45 is charged under the Espionage Act, it's pretty much equivalent to possession of stolen goods. Everyone agrees he had the documents (subject to the inevitable RQP shitstorm to try to confuse it, starting by Monday).

    The Espionage Act starts "Whoever, for the purpose of obtaining information respecting the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation..." and goes on from there. Basically, if the FBI is using this and finding "nuclear information," I think we can take it as a given that this is about the military use of nuclear power, not selling reactors to Saudi Arabia. I'm pretty sure they can make the case that IQ45 having these documents is to the detriment of the US and/or foreign advantage, or they wouldn't have bothered.

    The other acts they're investigating are also pretty easy to prove ("Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.").

    So basically, we're looking at an unlawful possession scenario, and it's pretty clear he had the documents. His own lawyer signed off on the receipt the FBI gave her, and she really shouldn't have done that if the FBI was planting documents now, should she? We're also apparently looking at a situation where the National Archives tried everything up to and including a subpoena to get the documents back, and IQ45 blew them all off. That procedural paper trail is already in the public.

    This isn't a month-long fraud case, this appears open and shut and could be presented in a day or two. Of course, IQ45's lawyers will do everything they can to slow the roll, but there's really not a lot for them to do but pound the table and yell like hell.

    I strongly suspect that the US Justice system will do everything they can to expedite the trial and appeals, given who IQ45 is and the inevitability that he's going to run for President again. No reason to have this overshadowing his campaign, after all. Either he's a legitimate candidate, or legally disqualified from holding office. We need to get that settled ASAP. Were I talking to MAGAts about this, I'd make precisely this case.

    327:

    Unrelated to anything: apparently the Tumblr Kids have dubbed the genre of books like Ancillary Justice and The Traitor Baru Cormorant "Lesbian Space Atrocities".

    https://st-just.tumblr.com/tagged/lesbian%20space%20atrocities

    328: 304: I find it a relief that I can nearly always say "sorry, I haven't the foggiest, I don't use that program" (and, not that infrequently, add "...for exactly that reason"). That way I only have to explain what "I don't use that program" means. 303: Dorothy L Sayers complained about people complaining about her habit of including chunks of French, in some cases up to several pages long. You can't just skip them or look up an English translation of the source because they're not quotations, they are the source, and they're part of the story. It has to be said I can't avoid being glad it was French she chose to write them in.

    The trouble with the Latin quotations is they are usually grossly incomplete, three or four words out of some much longer original sentence. If you do that with English or Welsh, say, where it's mostly the order of words that defines how they're interrelated, the snippet still retains a tolerable amount of meaning in its own right, which you can assimilate even if you don't know where it comes from.

    But with the way Latin works, what it leaves you with is something like the remnants of a tree after you randomly delete most of the pointers - a handful of arbitrary nodes with no indication of their relationship. It doesn't help you much knowing what the words mean, because the meanings aren't related; each word incorporates a pointer linking it back to some conceptual grammatical parent node to which some other words are also linked, and all you can tell from what you're given is that none of those other words are in it. You can translate the words but all you get is nonsense, and I think there are even a few cases of what it looks like it ought to mean if you parse it as English being quite the opposite of what it actually does mean when you have the complete text to translate - and the original meaning is the intended one, so knowing what the words mean actually leaves you worse off than not knowing them.

    This is reasonably true for quotations from Latin prose, if not always since prose allows words to be grouped by meaning to a certain extent, but a lot more true for quotations from Latin poetry, where they tend to chuck the words in in any old order to satisfy the complex and specific rules of the metre, and rely absolutely on the pointer structure to keep the meaning hanging together. Indeed some words are chosen or even semi-made-up because they can carry a strong enough reference that you can put them in a silly place to meet the metre without losing track of what they're associated with through ambiguity, whereas a less frantically obscure word for the same thing couldn't.

    The point is that you're not supposed to be able to translate Latin quotations. They're not parser input, they're associated-search keys to look up the English translation of the translatably-complete original Latin sentence, along with memories of sitting there while Mr King eviscerated one chap after another for various howlers until the meaning could be derived piecewise by divination on the welter of guts. That bit's probably more the point than the actual meaning is.

    Seems a bit silly, but then so is my own feeling that if instead of straightforwardly selecting and ordering words to mean some thing that comes at that part of the story, you can pick some other sequence which does just as well at meaning that thing, but as well as that it links to at least five other meanings, all of which also relate to that point in the story, through some tenuous chain of obscure associations, then it's a good idea to do it, even knowing perfectly well that the chance of anyone else following the same set of connections is extremely small and even if they do they'll never know if you meant it.

    329:

    "Thick sandwich" and "thin sandwich" were (?are) sponsorship deals; what I had was a "half-arsed sandwich" where there was no sponsorship involved, but there was a requirement of the course to spend a year doing an actual relevant job.

    I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

    We have coop programs here, where students have to do a number of work terms. These are paid positions, and companies often use them as a means of vetting potential employees. When I worked at BNR we often hired former coop students (if they'd done a decent job) and at a higher salary than someone without the same experience.

    We don't have entrance exams for university. The decision is made based on high school marks and other factors. Officially every high school is treated identically, but many universities apply a weighting factor based on past experience with students from each school. Many private schools are notorious for giving marks for money and some programs don't want to 'waste' a spot on someone who bought their 98%. (Others are happy to take the money and let the kids fail when it turns out they can't hack the material.)

    In any case, Waterloo had statistical evidence that students applying after a gap year tended to do better than their high school mark would predict*, so they factored that in.


    *The single greatest predictor of success at university in Ontario is a student's high school mark. Despite all the failings and inconsistencies of marks, the opinion of a dozen-plus teachers who've known a kid for a year (or more) turns out to be a better predictor than a single high-stakes test such as the SAT. (Which is mainly a predictor of the parents' socio-economic status.)

    330:

    "We're not just talking about Worcestershire with its silent syllables, English has the full set of silent letters, unwritten letters and pronunciations that vary depending on both dialect and context."

    There are still some people around who call it 'Oostershire, but it's a lot less common than it used to be.

    331:

    "I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about."

    I was being pedantic about my year between school and university being not quite the same kind as the kinds that had been mentioned already.

    "We don't have entrance exams for university. The decision is made based on high school marks and other factors."

    Nor do we. It was down to just Oxford and Cambridge doing it as an option but not a requirement decades ago (an option which few people were interested in because it was kind of pointless), and I'm not even sure if they still do that now.

    332:

    “Thin sandwich” and “thick sandwich” were common names for two forms of university course in the UK of the 80s. Thin sandwich generally meant the students would do six months at an industry placement and six months at college in each year. Thick sandwich - which I sort-of did - was a year at co. with day-a-week college courses , 3 years at uni, and a final year with the co. Remember, UK degrees were/are 3 year courses with generally rather more specialisation than 4 year US courses. In my time in the code-mines of Silicon Valley a UK degree was generally treated as at least as good as a US 4 year from a top college. A UK masters would normally get you on the same pay scale as a US PhD. May well have changed by now, 30 years later.

    The sandwich was not, by the way, a way for students to earn money to pay for their degree. Back then the UK had a decently civilised system that paid us to get edumacated- course and living expenses were provided. If you didn’t (literally) piss it all away it was tolerable financially. The year working for Rolls-Royce didn’t make me any money anyway, because the rent on a shared box room in a tatty part of Derby was slightly more than I got paid. Eating just made it more difficult. I never did the end year of my sandwich because I asked about doing a masters and they fired me without any explanation... worked out ok in the end.

    333:

    321 - Knotted strings (and notched sticks) are both historically documented forms of "writing" and/or "counting".

    330 - "Thick sandwich" and "thin sandwich" are both forms of "doing real work" and university/college courses as required parts of the same qualification; the difference in in how long the real work sections of the qualification last.

    334:

    From fading memory Cambridge only uses entrance exams for overseas students whose local A-Level equivalents can't easily be translated, althought there have been mutterings about bringing them back more generally because of grade inflation.

    Along the same lines though, all applicants are interviewed and some subjects will have the student read something while waiting and then effectively give an oral exam as part of the interview process.

    335:

    H & Kardashev
    Quote from elsewhere: It's like kiddie-porn - if it's on your computer/in your files - you go to jail

    { AND: It's trivially easy to prove. }

    336:

    Heteromoles @ 327: Either [Trump]'s a legitimate candidate, or legally disqualified from holding office.

    I assume you're referring to the bit in the laws about conviction disqualifying the convict from public office.

    Unfortunately those laws don't apply to the offices of POTUS and VPOTUS, because the qualifications for those jobs are in the Constitution, so mere laws don't apply.

    The only crime that disqualifies a POTUS is insurrection or rebellion. Which he's probably guilty of too, but that's a lot more arguable.

    337:

    "Unfortunately those laws don't apply to the offices of POTUS and VPOTUS, because the qualifications for those jobs are in the Constitution, so mere laws don't apply." Not that you could hope to tell this from the reporting on the English Broadcasting Corporation "olds".

    338:

    Not that you could hope to tell this from the reporting on the English Broadcasting Corporation "olds".

    They do tackle the question here.

    I first saw a legal analysis of this on the Volokh Conspiracy: Josh Blackman pointed out the constitutional issues, in response to:

    Several progressive commentators gleefully pointed to 18 U.S.C. § 2071.

    That was on the 8th. The BBC story covering the same ground is dated the 10th.

    I suspect that one reporter looked at the law and quoted it at face value without first running it past a lawyer (because that would cost money and hours in a newsroom where both are in short supply), and then lots of other news organisations, including the BBC, picked it up, checked that the legal quote was accurate, and ran with it. We might wish for newsrooms to be a bit more thoughtful and considered, but I can't really blame anyone for thinking that the law in question meant what it said, especially from outside the USA.

    339:

    I think question lurking behind all of the debate on the original topic of this thread needs to be brought out front-and-centre:

    What is education for?

    A partial list: teaching young people the following:

    • Things they will need to know in later life.

    • How to behave as members of a large and complex technological society. (Which often means "obey the guy in charge" because that's what it takes to make and operate large complex technological artefacts).

    • A body of cultural knowledge that isn't directly useful but is widely considered to be valuable in some way, like long division, Shakespeare, and the history of Europe.

    • That their culture is a good and wise culture, and they are fortunate to be members of it. (Is there any culture now or in the past that doesn't teach that to its children?)

    • How to learn new things, including methods of sorting, analysing and integrating new information, including information that contains contradictions.

    And there are doubtless other things too. Feel free to add your own.

    All those goals have to be maximised within a strictly limited budget of hours, and some of them conflict. So its not surprising that education is problematic. And of course even in the most generous possible government (which ours is not), there is going to be a finite budget for it.

    On top of that, the cultural goals are politically contentious because they have the potential to influence how the students will vote in later life. Teach them about the glories of empire, the White Man's Burden, the white male geniuses of the Industrial Revolution, and how post-colonial Africa unversally sank into abject misery, and you produce a generation of right-wing extremists (by modern standards). Teach those same children about the evils of empire, black history, struggles of trades unions and working people, and you get a generation who will reliably vote for much more socially and economically inclusive governments (or "left wing loonies" by the standards of the UK in 1950).

    So: what is education for? Or to put it another way, if the "education system" is to live up to the second part of its name, what requirements should it meet? Answers on a postcard please.

    340:

    That raises the interesting possibility of an imprisoned felon being elected president.

    341:

    Quote from elsewhere: It's like kiddie-porn - if it's on your computer/in your files - you go to jail

    If it turns out to be there, Trump will loudly announce (and Trumpworld will believe) that it's a plant.

    342:

    That raises the interesting possibility of an imprisoned felon being elected president.

    At which point he could pardon himself so he'd no longer be a felon…

    343:

    "At which point he could pardon himself so he'd no longer be a felon…"

    Of course, but it's amusing to imagine the circumstances under which Chief Justice Roberts would administer the oath of office. Would the CJ go to the prision? Would Trump be in handcuffs when placing his hand(s) on the bible? If the latter, who would have the honor of unlocking the cuffs?

    344:

    What is education for?

    I agree with all except your fourth point (cultural goals).

    Nothing against learning about one's own culture, but students should be able to learn the flaws and warts as well as the benefits. How else can a culture improve, except by acknowledging it's flaws?

    345:

    Unfortunately those laws don't apply to the offices of POTUS and VPOTUS, because the qualifications for those jobs are in the Constitution, so mere laws don't apply.

    Nope. The Constitution is mere law. It's already been amply demonstrated, with members of Congress, that convicted felons can't be elected. If convicted of a felony while in office, they may or may not be stripped of their jobs depending on the will of their colleagues, but they can't be elected, even though their jobs are also defined in the Constitution.

    Here's that pesky little second law that the DOJ is working on, again: ""Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States." [Emphasis added]

    Note again:

    --It's any officeholder, including the President.

    --By principle (not law), the President can only be impeached while holding office, not tried and convicted for their actions while serving. But there's no reason they cannot be held legally responsible for the laws they break while in office. Otherwise, why pardon Nixon after he left?

    --Officers of the United States swear to uphold the Constitution. They do not swear loyalty to the President or any other "Crown" substitute. A king is above the law. A President is not.

    Why buy into Trump's rhetoric that he's above the law? This is an important case, because billionaires have been trying to create a legal principle that great wealth grants legal immunity. That's not written anywhere, nor should it be.

    346:

    In the eyes of TPTB, the culture they are trying to promote doesn't HAVE any flaws and shouldn't be changed :-(

    347:

    "Who would have the honor of unlocking the cuffs?"
    The original arresting officer?

    348:

    On the subject of whether 18 U.S.C. § 2071 applies to a presidential race, it's a little more complex than "the requirements to be president are in the Constitution and trump (yeah, I know) everything else." The general expectation is that the President is an ordinary citizen who happens to hold high office, and that whoever holds the office will both obey the law and be subject to it's penalties. For the Extreme Court* to find that this is not the case essentially frees the president of any legal restraints, so it's a lot more complicated than one lawyer's interpretation of "what the Constitution says."

    * The current Extreme Court is stupid and fascistic-enough to rule quite wrongly in such as case.

    349:

    For the Extreme Court to find that this is not the case essentially frees the president of any legal restraints*

    I don't think so. This merely says that Trump could still become or remain POTUS after a conviction. It doesn't mean he can't be arrested, tried or imprisoned. In theory we might even see him winning the election while in prison. But he won't (at least in theory) be allowed out early because of that. He (probably) can't pardon himself. And of course he can always be impeached.

    I'm just waiting for the chants of "Lock him up" at Democrat rallies.

    350:

    Pigeon@316 wrote: "Except this time the people who get to miss out are not those who don't do well at school, but those whose parents don't have a lot of money. It would achieve the same result more simply to just get rid of the grant/loan system entirely and go back to not having anything, rather than having a further iteration of piling kludge upon kludge, but I suppose they feel some kind of need to make a blundering attempt at being subtle about it."

    Well, sure. If they came right out and admitted publicly what they wanted it would cost votes, maybe enough to lose an election and push them out of power. Do it slow and quiet and there's a chance voters won't understand their true goal until too late, like the proverbial method for cooking crabs or maybe it was frogs, gradually increase heat until they just go inert.

    351:

    Robert Prior @330:

    but many universities apply a weighting factor based on past experience with students from each school.

    A friend of mine who worked in admissions at UWO (A university in Southwestern Ontario) said that this was absolutely the case: they had databases of high schools with 'normalizing' functions built in.

    So an 80% mark from Joe Clark High School would be the equivalent of a 90% mark from Stephen Harper High School for the purposes of admission, etc.

    352:

    H
    A king is above the law - NOPE - Charles I.

    353:

    In the eyes of TPTB, the culture they are trying to promote doesn't HAVE any flaws and shouldn't be changed :-(

    Welcome to DeSantis' Florida…

    354:

    "He (probably) can't pardon himself."

    This too seems to be a subject of disagreement among relatively respectable legal scholars:

    https://www.npr.org/2021/01/09/955087860/can-trump-pardon-himself

    https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/podcast/can-the-president-pardon-himself

    IMO there's little doubt that he would issue a self-pardon immediately after the inauguration and the question is "What then?". I assume he'd fire the previous Administration's AG and nominate someone like Ken Paxton immediately.

    355:

    There's no point in say "can" or "can't" in regards to the President in the law - the rules are very literally whatever the Supreme Court says they are.

    Their only boundaries are 'will this get me impeached' or 'will this get the court packed'. There's no real limits on how they can rule.

    356:

    "That raises the interesting possibility of an imprisoned felon being elected president."

    At which point he could pardon himself so he'd no longer be a felon…

    It's my understanding that accepting a pardon is an admission of guilt. So his infamy of being a felon would live on...

    357:

    There's no point in say "can" or "can't" in regards to the President in the law - the rules are very literally whatever the Supreme Court says they are.

    Only until people get fed up and stop listening to the Supreme Court...

    358:

    It's my understanding that accepting a pardon is an admission of guilt. So his infamy of being a felon would live on...

    Neither Trump nor his followers would lose any sleep over that. Heck, they would see it as a badge of honor.

    359:

    It's my understanding that accepting a pardon is an admission of guilt
    A lot of people do seem to think, incorrectly, that this is equivalent to having the conviction quashed.

    360:

    Only until people get fed up and stop listening to the Supreme Court...

    At which point we will have an actual, shooting, civil war

    361:

    At which point we will have an actual, shooting, civil war

    Not necessarily. Already there are District Attorneys who have said they will not enforce certain laws. Do you think the Supreme Court is going to prosecute every one of them?

    362:

    Jury selection in a Donald Trump trial seems like a nightmare. I wonder if the Manhattan District Attorney pulled back on investigating Trump because he didn't have the budget for a trial.

    363:

    Do you think the Supreme Court is going to prosecute every one of them?

    That's not what I meant by "shooting war". I am talking about this kind of shit:

    https://www.abc15.com/news/national/growing-calls-for-civil-war-in-far-right-groups-after-fbi-search

    Even if politicians like Wendy Rogers and Mark Finchem are merely shooting off their mouths, there are enough armed nutcases who will take them seriously.

    364:

    That's not what I meant by "shooting war".

    I know. But a real shooting war - serious enough to overthrow the government of the U.S. - is just an extreme right-wing fantasy. A few individuals - sure. But tens of millions of dedicated MAGA and QAnon followers, organized into military units? Give me a break...

    365:

    Oh, I have no doubt these individuals will fail. But I think they will try, and states refusing to go along with SCOTUS decisions may be the trigger.

    366:

    I'd think an education is for a) giving you enough knowledge to start a job that is useful to society, and b) be a part of the society. If I say Hamlet, and you ask if that's a small ham, you're not part of society.

    367:

    During the vote counting, one big name idiot was pushing them to "surround and intimidate Philadelphia". Let's see, Philly is greater than 20 mi sw to ne, and a good number of miles wide. How many would it take, hundreds of thousands?

    And then there's the case of these idiots playing militia in the woods, who think they're going to intimidate, um, armed inner city gangs, who do "urban warfare", something the actual military hates and fears, and does extensive training for.

    And then, of course, the National Guard is called out, and then the Army and Air Force, and the last thing these idiots see is an A-10.

    But all of that assumes that they could organize. These are the people who will look at each other, and say "I ain't gonna do that, you ain't the boss of me."

    368:

    In the eyes of TPTB, the culture they are trying to promote doesn't HAVE any flaws and shouldn't be changed

    I think this is the main flaw with Paul's list: just by looking at it I'm not sure whether he's talking about what we think education should be for, or is for, or what TPTB think it should be for, or is for. That is, I'm not sure where it sits in terms of an is/ought distinction, and I'm not sure whether Paul is saying his own views, or projecting some other viewpoint (TPTB, "society", some sort of moral guardianship cabal, Alliance française, the Oklahoma School Board, the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee, etc). To me, it's missing the obvious "12 years of free-to-use child-minding", something that recent events have shown up as a required feature, not merely a happy side-effect. But that relates to the question about whose point of view the list represents.

    I have my own thoughts about how our present conceptualisation of education as a distinct activity is structured. Tolkien's conceit that Hobbits achieve majority at 30 is fun. If I ever manage to start writing speculative fiction, my world-building idea is one where compulsory education, as we consider K-12 now, extends until much later in life, at least to the individual's early 30s. The K-12 premise is very much a 20th century high industrial, modernist concept, and serves a particular set of assumptions about what eduction is for. But as we have discussed previously here, new breakthrough discoveries and inventions are more likely to emerge in areas that are not the sole focus of specific specialties, but will rather depend on researchers and inventors "with two PhDs". I think there's a lot to play with there and have quite a few ideas already, but that's an aside.

    369:

    Jury selection in a Donald Trump trial seems like a nightmare. I wonder if the Manhattan District Attorney pulled back on investigating Trump because he didn't have the budget for a trial.

    Wouldn't know, but there are other trials moving ahead. Voir dire's not an infinite process, and I suspect they'll be forced to seat a jury regardless. Give IQ45 a choice of being tried in New York City, Washington DC, or Palm Beach, Fla. He gets a lot of love in all three places.

    My guess is that, assuming DOJ goes ahead with prosecuting Trump on the documents violations, one of the things they may do is consider a plea deal: he pleads guilty to enough charges that he's disqualified from running for President again, and then he serves no jail time.

    Would he go for this? He's been in 3500-odd lawsuits, and he's settled quite a few of them. Looking at the rest of his life behind bars or not running for President again? The latter offers him more running room. Which he'll need, if he still has hundreds of millions in payments coming due in 2024....

    370:

    That kind of shooting war with military disciplined armies of soldiers is not going to happen here in the USA.

    Lookee, those damned trucker warriors moaned, whined and cried coz there was nowhere to buy lunch, or somebody to make it for them, or -- so they resorted, in Ottawa anyway, to doing what hungry armies do historically, they foraged and stole the food from the pantry for the homeless. But in D.C. they couldn't even handle the traffic they were there for, to expressly, >ahem< eff up. In California they cried because adolescents threw eggs at them.

    Imagine them camping out for weeks and months in bivouac in the mountains in winter, sieging cities in the summer, without a/c. O lordessa, as Somebody Said, we USians aren't tough enough to have a military fighting civil war.

    What we are good at though is randomly killing innocent peaceful kids and Others. Or having the cops break down doors in illegal warrantless raids, and so on and so forth. This eventually does get to all of us.

    I know -- hey the weekend our neighborhood was pillaged by professional criminals coming in and the cops not even bothering to turn on a siren -- random shootings, stabbings, shovings, beatings, all the time anywhere -- it gets to you. That we can manage, but an actual disciplined military action, no.

    371:

    Exactly. It will be a "sneak out at night and shoot your liberal/conservative neighbor" style civil war. The kind where someone kills an ice-cream vendor, complete with mis-spelled press release, because they let a brown kid get in line ahead of the white kids.

    372:

    367 - In all too many cases, an amatuer production of "A Prince of Denmark" actually is a small ham.

    368 - Typical Warthog catchphrase "Don't bother running; you'll just die tired!"

    369 - ISTR that Halflings are longer-lived than humans are now, never mind in, say, 1930 to '50 when JRRT wrote the 4 central books.

    373:

    That kind of shooting war with military disciplined armies of soldiers is not going to happen here in the USA.

    Not for awhile yet anyway. I agree with your points.

    374:

    Apropos of today's discussion, the other thing that's missing here is that this is the point in the movie where the monster's appeared again, and a bunch of people are panicking, mongering stories that make the monster more invincible than it is, and talking themselves into caving in to the monster. See The Mummy, for instance.

    Meanwhile everyone else is figuring out how to neutralize the damned thing. And its thralls. Again.

    So if you remember that movie, you want to be on the side of the final girl, not one of the extra mooks, right?

    So why, when a conman is trying to make people think the law can't touch him, why are you making up stories that support his claim? He's an effing nuisance, not a god-king. Treat him as a lesson learned, not someone to crawl back to for more.

    375:

    Exactly -- the same sort of warfare conducted by Stasi and vigilante -- the warfare of cowards.

    And women are on the front lines, as usual, due to the corrupt opus dei scotus.

    376:

    I get the impression that the US already has gangs of marauding militias using military weaponry against that part of the civilian population they think of as the enemy. They have their own alternative government that is slowly pushing the existing one out, and while that's not being done primarily or only by force of arms, force of arms is very definitely part of the process.

    377:

    I get the impression that the US already has gangs of marauding militias using military weaponry against that part of the civilian population they think of as the enemy. They have their own alternative government that is slowly pushing the existing one out...

    Groups like the Proud Boys get a lot of headlines and time on the news, but in no way are they (or any other militia) displacing our government - except perhaps some local governments in very limited areas. These militias cannot - and never will - replace state or federal governments.

    378:

    I was thinking about the cops. Who have way more influence over the judiciary and politicians than seems healthy.

    I'll believe they can't/haven't replaced your governments when I see them subject to the same laws as everyone else, at least the criminal ones. Less "qualified immunity" and more "go directly to jail". Plus "civil forfeiture" sounds remarkably like when countries used to license pirates, it functions as judicially approved brigandage.

    379:

    " when countries used to license pirates,"

    On the contrary, my dear: we are a privateer.

    Charles Stross - Neptune's Brood

    Of course, in some cases the distinction may be rather fine.

    JHomes

    380:

    I'll believe they can't/haven't replaced your governments when I see them subject to the same laws as everyone else, at least the criminal ones.

    Police get special treatment everywhere, Moz. This doesn't mean that cops are gangs out to overthrow governments - at least usually...

    381:

    whitroth said: and b) be a part of the society. If I say Hamlet, and you ask if that's a small ham, you're not part of society.

    I have no idea how you get from one to the other.

    I knew about hamlet before I started school. So education wasn't involved.

    Yet were I to say "hasta la vista baby" you'd know that it should be said in a bad Austrian accent, and why. And that makes you part of the shared experience that creates a society. Nothing to do with education.

    In fact it's education that separates me from society and makes me an outcast.

    382:

    foxessa
    So: Your "police" services are failing in their basic duty - protecting the people.
    Mind you, with the tory cuts & right-wing rhetoric, we are going down the same road. Vast amounts of snooping & surveillance & "Frightening" people but not dealing with actual threats.
    - @ 376: Precisely.

    383:

    Police get special treatment everywhere

    I haven't seen a lot of armoured vehicles used by police outside civil wars. And the US police kill a lot more people than in most countries that aren't at war.

    There's a big difference between the inevitable minor corruption that comes with power, and the extremes you get in places like India, Russia and the USA. Sure, Australian cops kill a disturbing number of people, mostly black people. But here people seem to get a lot more upset about it and push the police to stop. And that's with the USA police shooting about 3/million/year while Australia is on ~0.3. Meanwhile there's a bunch of smaller countries where the question is "did the police shoot anyone this year?" or "how many years since".

    https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/us-police-shootings-compared-to-australia-the-uk-and-germany/q3n5pvzmu

    https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-killings-by-country

    But that stuff is largely a matter of degree. What I was pointing at is the difference in kind - the US is almost alone in partly funding their police by letting individual officers take money from civilians.

    In other countries cops are expected to know the law, and also to obey it. Again, the US qualified immunity stuff just isn't done in other countries. Problems like that seem to be getting worse not better.

    The goal really does seem to be a military force outside the official chain of command.

    384:

    Tosh, and provably so. The correct term is a Letter of Marque as linked.

    385:

    »The goal really does seem to be a military force outside the official chain of command.«

    There is no "goal" as such, USA's police forces are merely the formal instantiation of USA's founding myth of "A Good Man With A Gun".

    As long as that myth, prevail, including sanitizations such as "The Little house ...", police in USA will shoot people, because that is literally what the population expects from them.

    386:

    Yet were I to say "hasta la vista baby" you'd know that it should be said in a bad Austrian accent, and why. And that makes you part of the shared experience that creates a society. Nothing to do with education.

    And yet even on this blog we have very well educated and worldly people (well at least one person) saying they have no idea what is meant by references to "Vito Corleone".

    Exposed experience varies a lot.

    PS: The real catch phrase is "I'll be back". With the accent.

    387:

    And now...

    Evidence that the US isn't the only crazy place on the planet.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/pseudo-science-and-fascism-the-dark-side-of-sperm-donation-5zgtrbb2s

    A bizarre mix of Cro-Magno ethos, Breix, Facism, health care rules, etc...

    388:

    A Good Man With A Gun

    It's hard to imagine an occupation more attractive to a Bad Man without a criminal record than one that gives him a gun and officially labels him as Good Man.

    Of course, that's silly... few people start out good or bad, everyone develops to a point where they can, perhaps, make choices. Usually they just adapt or conform to choices that have already been made for them by others, and need to keep the joke going lest things suddenly become not very funny at all. Calling out the joke, or doubling down on it, are both exceptional though I guess no-one is laughing anymore when either happens.

    389:

    You called? Actually, I have heard of Corleone, though not about the Vito, and have no idea why the bad Austrian accent is needed. As you indicate, I could provide plenty of shibboleths that would baffle most posters, but am almost totally unfamiliar with film.

    390:

    I think you mean "Com vith me, if you vant to livv!"

    391:

    Only until people get fed up and stop listening to the Supreme Court...

    When has that happened?

    Only time I recall was when Andrew Jackson ignored the court to seize Cherokee lands that had gold on them. But then, not American so not my history. (I only know that bit because of the Indigenous connection.)

    392:

    a real shooting war - serious enough to overthrow the government of the U.S. - is just an extreme right-wing fantasy. A few individuals - sure. But tens of millions of dedicated MAGA and QAnon followers, organized into military units? Give me a break...,/i>

    Enough violent nutcases can drive the opposition away from political engagement. Look at the number of lower-level elected officials no longer standing for re-election, because of threats to themselves and their families (not to mention the extreme abuse directed at them). This is particularly the case with women and visible minorities (who were often targets just for not being white men, no matter what their politics, anyway).

    So maybe not the fantasy troops-in-the-field conflict, but a measurable political effect especially in swing districts.

    It's happening here in Canada too. Enough right-wing supporters are credibly threatening violence that good, dedicated people are leaving the public sphere to protect their families.

    393:

    One major purpose for education AT ALL LEVELS should be Critical Thinking. At present it is only implicit if present at all. But everybody needs the ability to decide:

    "What does this [person/advert/political statement/media item] really mean?" "What is my strategy to decide whether it is true or not?"

    Of course one of the reasons this is not emphasised in school is that teaching is hard enough already, without having your every statement deconstructed and questioned.

    394:

    and have no idea why the bad Austrian accent is needed

    Arnold has used the "I'll be back." line in multiple movies. Not all a part of the Terminator series. So the phrase has gotten to be a thing people say using a very bad Austrian accent.

    I understand you have hearing issues which could exclude this bit of culture from your experiences.

    395:

    Well, it's a very convenient excuse, especially since it's the sort of reaction teachers themselves are likely to come out with of their own accord. (Though I would argue that if they're not expecting it to happen as an essential part of normal practice anyway, then the value of the teaching tends towards the level of "Today, class, we are going to memorise the 1300th to 1400th digits of π" regardless of the actual subject matter.)

    Really, though, it's an expression of the larger problem that hacking other people's brain states is considered perfectly normal and acceptable, even desirable, at all scales from personal to global (possible cultural taboos against extremely specific subcategories of it notwithstanding), and consequently any proposal to better equip the population to be resistant to it is inevitably doomed before it's fully out of your mouth. Indeed, we've just had a thread about the problems that might be expected should it become possible to add all the methods for hacking computers to the toolset for it.

    396:

    I'd be very surprised if it meant anything to my parents either, and their ears are OK.

    On the other hand they would know fine why "An error? What error?" should be exclaimed in histrionically exaggerated tones, and probably quite a lot of people on here would also, but an awful lot more people would not.

    397:

    I had to look it up. Pirates of Penzance was the reference I found.

    398:

    Your "police" services are failing in their basic duty - protecting the people.

    The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that our police have no duty to protect the people. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

    399:

    As long as that myth, prevail, including sanitizations such as "The Little house ...", police in USA will shoot people, because that is literally what the population expects from them.

    It has long been obvious that the function of police is to protect wealthy white people from those people. Pretty sad...

    400:

    I knew about that, but assumed the context was the other quotation. On this lunacy, I have just tried the UK citizenship test - and failed! Curiously, on a question I might well have known (who 'invented' radar), but the questions I saw would have been beyond almost all British citizens, and precisely ONE related to citizenship as such.

    401:

    "Only until people get fed up and stop listening to the Supreme Court..."

    When has that happened?

    Beside Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Rosevelt announced a plan to expand the Supreme Court to as many as 15 judges in 1937 (the Supreme Court had previously struck down several key pieces of his New Deal legislation). This intimidated the Supreme Court justices enough that they backed off, and Rosevelt's subsequent New Deal legislation had smooth(er) sailing.

    402:

    Enough right-wing supporters are credibly threatening violence that good, dedicated people are leaving the public sphere to protect their families.

    Agreed. This is pretty sad, and it's happening in the U.S. too - especially with election workers. But it's still not the same as an all-out shooting war.

    403:

    AlanD2 @ 378:

    FWIW, marauding anti-government criminal gangs are NOT the militia, even if they are dressed up in camouflage uniforms.

    404:

    That's the one. Charlie slips in the occasional Gilbert & Sullivan reference here and there, and he seems to know his audience; some commenters on here do it too. It's one of those wee extras that isn't actually important but does add a spot more entertainment value if you notice it.

    405:

    WTF? Expected response from stopping any random person in the street and asking them who invented radar is surely "ain't got a fucking clue, mate", or words to that effect. I only know the answer because there happens to be a connection with my dad's employment. I suppose the idea is to be able to immediately exclude anyone who names the German chap or the Russian chap. I wonder what they'll do with questions like that if Scotland leaves the UK - if they've got many of them they'll be in a bit of a pickle.

    406:

    It looks like both of Harry Turtledove's twitter accounts got suspended.

    The only reason I can come up with is that he called Republicans Nazis too many times.

    407:

    And others. Equoid is solid with some toungue-in-cheek references, though the only ones that are critical to enjoying it are from Cold Comfort Farm (worth reading in its own right).

    408:

    I've caught a few of them. I'm sure there were lots I missed.
    (Kim Newman is infamous for this, at least for me; there's a reference to someone - often to clasic film, which is really not my turf- on pretty much every page. And that's the ones I noticed...)

    409:

    AlanD2
    That was a very recent decision, IIRC.
    NEXT question - then w. t. f. are the police actually FOR, then?

    Pigeon & EC
    Watson-Watt? Randall & Boot? A.n. other?

    410:

    "on a question I might well have known (who 'invented' radar")

    (Merkin here) Watson-Watts?

    I think I remember that from R.V. Jones' "Wizard War". Which everyone should read, Watson-Watts or no.

    411:

    "On this lunacy, I have just tried the UK citizenship test - and failed! Curiously, on a question I might well have known (who 'invented' radar), but the questions I saw would have been beyond almost all British citizens, and precisely ONE related to citizenship as such."

    That's a traditional means to keep Those People from immigrating/voting.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test

    412:

    410 - 411 .Robert Watson-Watt (no suffixed 's') and about a dozen others of various nationalities. Watson-Watt did hold a British patent for the systems underlying "Chain Home" in the 1930. You'll get a headache trying to unscramble the acronym soup underlying the Royal Radar Establishment, but there were about a thousand people working on Radio Direction Finding (later radar) in the UK alone by 1937 or so.

    412 - I am a UK national, and I have failed the UK "citizenship test", largely on stuff you don't normally need to know like how to get a divorce.

    413:

    Without wading through the 400+ comments, I apologize if this has been said before.

    When I was at uni, in the early to mid-1970s, the grants that were provided previously were cut back. I think it was Thatcher's admin that questioned the value of degrees that did not have direct employment potential (the irony of all those in Parliament with classics degrees..) and the threat of defunding them.

    I decamped to the US by the end of the 1980s, and was appalled by the UK following the US model of self-financing qualifications with loans. The hit to whole swathes of study was obvious. But as Charlie notes, a degree is no longer a route to a job. The US student debt level is horrendous, with many graduates unable to find decent work. The UK is following suit.

    When I graduated in the mid-1970s, the UK was in a recession, and I recall that graduates desperately looking for work were leaving their qualifications off resumes because it made them over-qualified. This was even worse in the recession at the start of the 1980s as the US treasury hammered inflation with a huge rate rise, and taking down other economies. (Britain was showing "Boys from the Blackstuff. I recall that one saying was that the only growth industry was building unemployment offices.)

    Until recently, academic and "trade" educational institutions were pushing school leavers to get a degree as the best way to "get ahead". But as Charlie notes, the skillset needed/wanted by employers is changing so fast, a degree is just proof that the student has navigated the coursework.

    There was a brief period when MOOCs were being touted as the alternative way to get qualifications. On another blog, Berkeley Economics professor Brad DeLong (https://braddelong.substack.com/p/do-i-now-have-a-problem-assigning - subscription paywall) wonders fs AI can now deliver seemingly good essays on subjects. I think the ramifications are huge in that such capabilities could undermine education in a number of ways, from ending the ability of teachers to assess student thoughts as essays, to the potential to package up knowledge far more effectively than coursework designers with ridiculously pricey textbooks. I suspect it will rapidly enter the workplace too - who needs to sweat over a project report when the AI will take your data and write it for you? DeLong can see the quality problems today but in another 20 years? This seems clearly an "Innovator's Dilemma" issue for education institutions.

    While others like Vonnegut have written about such scenarios, I like Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" and "The Little Blag Bag" as a possible future. "Professionals" won't have low IQs, but will be completely dependent on technology to do their jobs. [I use spelling and grammar checkers, spreadsheets, etc. to save effort.] We will still need truly creative people to extend the cutting edge of their fields, but the demand for the more mediocre tier will likely decline (although it hasn't yet for writers of fiction).

    To get back to the main point of the OP, I wish that increasingly conservative governments could understand that education is not just a private good (but becoming less so) but a public good. As such it should be fully subsidized. There should be no restrictions on academic study as long as it is of quality. [In the US the right-wing wants to cripple the public school K thru 12 education. Invoking Godwin's Law - this is what the Nazis did to education - little academic work and mostly physical education for boys. But it didn't win them a war.]

    414:

    On an unrelated note: Today water temperature at 45' depth was 62 F; that's 17 C. In the freaking Gulf of Maine.

    I am not complaining about being comfortable under water... but this is alarming.

    415:

    Randall and Boot were the cavity magnetron guys. (Though AIUI Boot didn't actually have that much to do with it, and was basically lucky about having his name included.)

    416:

    Re: '... cops are expected to know the law, and also to obey it.'

    Probably most do but there are enough bad cops who've figured out how to mine the current system that it's likely things will get worse.

    Cops fired in one state can easily* get a job as a cop in another state. The states are supposed to do full background checks on all their hires but if the cop's superiors don't file accurate reports or let the about-to-be-fired-cop quit (therefore no report), background checks are useless.

    https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/ny-florida-cop-police-officer-fired-again-20210529-q7iiah7nkjestfrfrvc5dcxzs4-story.html

    *'Easily' because they've been trained which means much faster and less expensive to get them on patrol.

    Not sure how strong or influential police unions are in this.

    417:

    Re: 'The part I'm still trying to figure out is how to know if -I- am at "increased risk of exposure" ...'

    Sorry about the delay in responding.

    As AlanD2 @322 said it's not known how long the polio vax is good for.

    I think you mentioned that you got both versions at some point - the oral and the shots? Your best bet is to speak with a doctor and lay out the details: which shots, when, underlying conditions, age, overall health, etc.

    No idea how 'increased risk of exposure' can be figured out given that the vast majority of people infected with polio are asymptomatic. (But they can still spread the virus.)

    Personally, I'd get the polio booster if it were available in my area. I'm in the boonies and so far no cases reported but that can change once uni starts. (Quite a few students from other parts of the country and other countries/continents - so if you live in a college/uni town, get your booster now.)

    Also - it's recommended that you space your COVID and polio boosters 2 weeks apart.

    I feel as though I'm plugging TWiV non-stop these days, but what the hell - the most recent episode is on monkeypox the latest 'global health emergency' per WHO. Really interesting guest.

    418:

    Main uses of the cavity magnetron being radar and microwave ovens.

    419:

    Also worth referring to the Patrick O'Brian authored novel "The Letter of Marque", one of the volumes in the "Aubrey-Maturin" series British Navy seafaring novels set during the Napoleonic era.

    In particular, from the third paragraph of the first chapter "...and Stephen Maturin had bought her as a private ship of war, a letter of marque, to cruise upon the enemy; and Jack Aubrey was in command."

    420:

    Alex Tolley said: While others like Vonnegut have written about such scenarios, I like Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" and "The Little Blag Bag" as a possible future.

    You may not have to wait generations to see it as described in the story. The delightfully named "brain fog" seems to follow a not inconsiderable number of covid infections (including at least 2nd and 3rd infections).

    One sufferer on twitter described it thusly: I am a doctor of 22 years. Neurocognitive assessment is shit. Many domains fallen to low average or impaired. Been referred for I’ll health retirement as deemed unsafe for medical practice & no hope recovery to level needed. The OPs tweet is very accurate. I can’t count money too

    Oh joy.

    On the bright side, it's not as bad as glowing green worms in the eyes. So there's that.

    421:

    I love the idea that privateers were scrupulously law-abiding and never ever stole at sea (what never? Well, hardly ever)

    422:

    who 'invented' radar

    On a citizenship test?

    Well I guess the Italians have "Who invented radio?" on theirs.

    423:

    largely on stuff you don't normally need to know like how to get a divorce.

    Just who in the UK government thinks this is an important thing to know?

    424:

    I wish that increasingly conservative governments could understand that education is not just a private good (but becoming less so) but a public good.

    I'm beginning to wonder. The R'/conservatives in the US are splitting into two camps. One way of looking at them is:

    The smaller group seems to be those who practice critical thinking. And are public about it.

    The larger group seems to be those who pander no matter how absurd the "will of the people".

    More critical thinkers will endanger the power of the second group.

    I don't know enough about the details of politics in the UK or Oz to know if the above applies there or not.

    425:

    Randall and Boot were the cavity magnetron guys.

    My weak understanding of Radar history was that it was crude and hard to use at the frequencies that equipment could handle in the early days. And that the cavity magnetron made it possible to be small enough to go on ships then planes. And be much more accurate.

    426:

    Cops fired in one state can easily* get a job as a cop in another state. The states are supposed to do full background checks on all their hires but if the cop's superiors don't file accurate reports or let the about-to-be-fired-cop quit (therefore no report), background checks are useless.

    It's not so much an issue of moving to a new state and just moving to a new jurisdiction. The US likely has way more the 10K police groups. Maybe 5 or 10 times that. And many are independent. So you can get a city like mine with an academy, 6 months of full time training/class work, background checks, and a year or so of probation. Then you get smaller towns who either:

    Contract with a city like ours and use our training and hiring process.

    Or with only 4 or 5 police on the payroll they just tell the city manager to "make decent hires" with minimal training and background checking.

    427:

    Greg Tingey @353: A king is above the law - NOPE - Charles I.

    Oh? So Thomas Harrison, John Okey, John Carew and bunch of others were hanged, drawn and quartered without a cause? Corpses of Oliver Cromwell and John Bradshaw were disinterred, hanged and beheaded just for lulz? Oliver Cromwell's rotten head put on spike facing direction where Charles I was beheaded for no reason?

    428:

    Boris Johnson?

    I give it 2 years before his next divorce.

    Living in a smaller home, no staff running around after him, 2 young children, diminishing fame. Yep, he will be out looking for the next girlfriend as an ego boost/instant gratification.

    The current Mrs may decide that, as his income is peaking, its the best time to get divorced and live comfortably for the next 18 years. Also, encouraged by a book deal and serialisation in The Telegraph or The Express, she may write her own account of the "Downing Street years" and spill the beans on her ex.

    429:

    Not sure where you got the idea "idea that privateers were scrupulously law-abiding and never ever stole at sea" from. (And yes, I noted the hint of sarcasm in your comment.)

    The privateers were essentially pirates who preyed on/plundered the other sides merchant shipping under the dubious legality of a "letter of marque".

    And as I understand it, each "letter of marque" was essentially sold/arranged by politicians for an appropriate backhander from the recipient or even a share of any plunder.

    And I am sure I read somewhere that there was a suspicion that at least one privateer who had a "letter of marque" from both sides in one conflict.

    430:

    420 - Well, this sort of thing actually happened during the Napoleonic Wars, and it was not just Britain who issued letters of marque.

    424 - Amazingly enough, I don't know. Why don't you take one of the free sample tests, which is what I actually did.

    431:

    It is in the US Constitution.

    To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

    Article I Section 8, powers of Congress.

    My poor memory is that it most famous use was to go after the Barbary Pirates. Modern Libya. This was before we had much of a Navy.

    432:

    Yes, that's pretty much correct in broad terms, just needs a bit of expansion.

    Radar was already on planes, but the best they could do to generate the signal was a conventional oscillator circuit with conventional valves (tubes). This put severe limits on both the maximum achievable output power and the maximum achievable frequency; conventional valves start running out of steam at UHF frequencies because you can't make them small enough in relation to the wavelength. The range of a radar varies as the fourth root of the transmitter power, so you need lots of power to get the range up; the size of the antenna required for a given beam width goes inversely as the frequency, so increasing the frequency directly increases the directional accuracy you can get from a given size and clumsiness of the apparatus.

    So radar on planes was limited to low-power UHF sets with fixed antennas, and basically told you how far it was to something more or less in front as long as it was fairly close already. It was a big improvement over not being able to see anything at all, but it was still pretty rubbish. The low power and poor directionality also made it easy to jam with a ground-based transmitter.

    The cavity magnetron made it easy to generate lots of power at frequencies an order or two of magnitude greater, so you could make an apparatus with a usefully larger range and considerably better directionality, small enough to go on a plane and with an antenna small enough to make it steerable and still go on a plane. Instead of just indicating the distance to a target, the display could now also indicate what direction the antenna was pointing at the time, and so draw you a map of where all the targets within range were in relation to your plane. The system was called "H2S", which doesn't mean hydrogen sulphide but I can't remember what it does mean. This was basically the point at which radar became the kind of thing the popular imagination supposes it is.

    The advantage it gave was huge, and it confused the crap out of the Luftwaffe, because the much higher frequency was way out of the range of any detection apparatus they had, so they thought the RAF had changed to using something that wasn't radar at all. On the other hand the RAF now had to worry about planes with magnetrons on board getting shot down over enemy territory, particularly since a magnetron is basically a hefty chunk of solid copper with some holes drilled in it and can be expected to come through a plane crash with little damage. Of course this had to happen eventually, but it still took the Nazis a while to catch up; they didn't realise that the various irregularities in shape and extra bits of metal were what tuning tweaks and similar for those sort of frequencies naturally look like, and thought they were just the result of messy British engineers bodging things up, instead of doing it neatly and properly in German fashion. So for their prototypes they "tidied it up" and got rid of the "messy" features, with the result that it didn't work and the British advantage lasted a while longer until they figured out what they'd cocked up.

    433:

    432 - I think that would be correct, at least for the USA. Great Britain also used the power against the French and Spanish, and it at least sometimes backfired when licenced privateers either decided to become full-time pirates, or whilst still at sea discovered that their letter of marque had been repealed by a truce or peace treaty, with the result that their most recent capture was actually an act of piracy since it post-dated the relevant treaty.

    433 - There is no actual stated meaning for H2S, just several conjectures and anecdotes.

    434:

    [ 432: It is in the US Constitution.

    To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

    Article I Section 8, powers of Congress.

    My poor memory is that it most famous use was to go after the Barbary Pirates. Modern Libya. This was before we had much of a Navy.]

    Adams's presidency built a very nice navy, thank you, which he and Washington planned together back during Washington's administrations.

    The first thing Jefferson did was get rid of it, because the US didn't need armies or navies. He replaced the naval vessels with his 'gunboats'. Which is how we, starting with the Barbary pirates, got the term, "gunboat diplomacy."

    435:

    I think you are on the right track, but you don't have the full picture. Heavy student debt is a problem only if you are from a middle income family. The upper 10% aren't bothered by this, because they have means, and aren't expected to pay their debts anyway.

    What they are really aiming at is a population of well educated workers who will do what they are told, so hopelessly indebting them is a feature, not a but, at least from that point of view. Large swaths of useless unskilled laborers doesn't help them, and might possibly hurt them, because at some point they become numerous enough to be dangerous. So the "Marching Morons" scenario is unlikely, (esp. the part where the tireless self sacrificing elite are doing all the labor). Employers are going to start promising to help pay off student debt as a condition of employment (if someone hasn't already) and then you have actual corporate peonage (again). But this system requires that college education continue to be available in some form to the middle class, and that it acts as a gatekeeper to a standard of living above poverty.

    This is, by the way, a conservative conspiracy theory, which is where I got it. If you found yourself largely in agreement with it (before reading this paragraph), well...

    The conservatives would like to do away with public education altogether, which is a somewhat different conspiracy.

    AI is a problem, because while it saves production costs, it doesn't buy anything. Eliminating your consumer class isn't a very good strategy for ensuring that your family gives rise to a perpetual business dynasty, so, for now, I think they won't touch it. They want human slaves, not robots.

    Oh, and conservatives are rather infamous for not believing that any such thing as a public good can exist.

    436:

    "The R'/conservatives in the US are splitting into two camps. One way of looking at them is:

    The smaller group seems to be those who practice critical thinking. And are public about it.

    The larger group seems to be those who pander no matter how absurd the "will of the people"."

    Hmm, almost, not quite. Those who are still capable of exercising critical though have used it to conclude, correctly, that the libs are trying to take their traditional privileges away. That meant political war, declared back during the Nixon administration and fought without quarter ever since. These conservatives are the ones voting for Trump, because they believe they need an Alpha Male to protect them from the Other.

    It's the other camp, the ones who just adopt an ideology and parrot it for the rest of their lives, who went all in on Libertarian Prosperity Bible Imperialism, and now, God help us, constitute the "Sane" wing of the Republican party, the ones who don't trust Trump, but hold their nose and vote for him anyway. Note that I am talking about the voters, not the puppets who get elected. Those are low level expert systems wired to public opinion polls.

    As with David, my perspective is US-centric, because that's what I know.

    437:

    Correction: "Bug", not "But", but feel free to interpret as a Freudian slip of some kind.

    438:

    How we advise the kids on what to do with 'Higher Education' is a low-level dispute in our household.

    Spouse has a degree in Anthropology that opened some doors for her a long time ago. Her very successful career has nothing whatsoever to do with Anthropology, aside from that initial door opening.

    I have a graduate degree in PoliSci. Said degree opened a door for me not long after graduation where I began work in planning and policy. At no point has any employed, even once, asked for the content of my degree nor any proof of that degree whatsoever. I spend half a decade and a lot of money to be able to type 'MA' on my CV without being a liar, and if I had lied it would never have been discovered.

    While I found political science very interesting (and it was a direct pipeline into SF), all the 'skills' I used in those degrees I learned from my father in his 8th grade social studies class (how to write an essay, how to write coherently). I refined the skills at higher levels, but the core was in the 8th grade.

    I know very few non-STEM people whose work is related much or at all with the content of their education, aside from a few schoolteachers. That DOES NOT mean the education was not useful, but it is perhaps not well applied.

    439:

    Meant to say: Our kids are now trying to decide what they want to do after they finish their grade schooling.

    Son #1 is very ambitious and wants to leverage sports to get him into a high level post secondary situation, probably in the US. I have told him that school is useful if you have a goal, but not required if you have a different goal. Spouse strongly disagrees, school is a relatively safe place to spend the first few years of adulthood, and outcomes are still better with a degree than without.

    Son#2 stated at age 8 he wants to be an engineer. 5 years later that has evolved into getting a Master's Degree as a mechanical engineer at UBC (my alma mater). He is laser focused on the grades and other requirements for that goal. I am astounded, but hardly going to stand in the way. The cost of that has grown dramatically in the past 3 decades.

    440:

    You're listening to wrong-wing media, I guess. They claim that inner-city gangs are marauding and shooting, and so Good People (i.e, those who don't live in cities or, these days, suburbs) need an assault rifle.

    The self-proclaimed militias, on the other hand... no. I literally cannot see any of them taking orders from anyone else, FreeDumb, y'know.

    441:

    Technically speaking, ships with Letters of Marque and Reprisal were only supposed to attack the issuing nations enemies.

    Bucconeers didn't have the Letters, but generally did the same.

    Pirates attacked anyone they thought they could take.

    I would assume ships of other nations than the two fighting (or their allies) were fair game, depending on the captain and crew's feelings that day.

    442:

    "Employers are going to start promising to help pay off student debt as a condition of employment". Let me note that I got my associate's and B.Sc paid for - many, pretty much all large companies - offer tuition remission (you pay up front, and if you get at least ... was it a C or a B? I forget), they gave you the money back.

    443:

    Son #1 is very ambitious and wants to leverage sports to get him into a high level post secondary situation, probably in the US.

    The college sports "world" in the US is undergoing a crazy dramatic change just now. A lawsuit settled at SCOTUS and the pandemic sort of started an avalanche.

    NIL is creating a sort of wage system for un-paid college athletes. Then you get to layer on the transfer portal.

    And football money has become the total driver organizing things. It was basketball but that is now a secondary consideration. League TV networks are generating small mountains of cash based on football games. The point being that the US college system seems to be headed to a two league semi-pro arrangement based on football with everything else just along for the ride. The Big 10 and SEC are slowing becoming national leagues (they sort of are now) with the ACC caught in the middle between them and the smaller leagues.

    If this doesn't make much sense outside of the US, well it is a bit jarring to those of us here also. But $10 to $30 million per year per school creates an impetus for change. And so change we get.

    Anyway, make sure your son knows what he is getting into. US College sports life is no where near what it was just 3 or 4 years ago. In any aspect.

    444:

    I'll also note that it's well-known for decades that people in sports in college tend to take the easy classes, since a bad grade takes you off the team. They expect cheating, etc, for sports, esp. kids who have star quality.

    And if this is in the US, he should look at the national robot competition teams. My stepson was on one, and starting from "new magnet program, new team" when he entered HS, the fourth year they made the regionals.

    445:

    Buccaneers preferred to attack coastal towns and cities and avoid conflict with other ships at sea, unless they knew the cargo was seriously high value. Spain started to run in to financial problems when the annual treasure fleet was attacked repeatedly, they weren't necessarily captured but often had to divert, several ships were lost in storms and others were delayed for years waiting for naval escorts which Spain couldn't afford to refit becasue the treasure fleet was delayed...

    Alexandre Exquemelin's book The Buccaneers of America and Dudley Pope's biography of Henry Morgan "Harry Morgan's Way" make interesting reading as do Pope's tetrology "Buccaneer", "Admiral", "Galleon" and "Corsair" which are fiction but based around actual characters and incidents.

    446:

    "Anyway, make sure your son knows what he is getting into. US College sports life is no where near what it was just 3 or 4 years ago. In any aspect."

    Ice hockey for him, a slightly different animal. I find the whole US sports scholarship system bizarre in the extreme, but that won't make me stop my son from taking advantage if he chooses.

    We've been very clear with him that if he does not get a full scholarship then he is going to a Canadian university. The price of post-secondary education in the US is purest insanity.

    447:

    Damian @ 369:

    I think this is the main flaw with Paul's list: just by looking at it I'm not sure whether he's talking about what we think education should be for, or is for, or what TPTB think it should be for, or is for. That is, I'm not sure where it sits in terms of an is/ought distinction, and I'm not sure whether Paul is saying his own views, or projecting some other viewpoint

    (Sorry not to have responded sooner: currently on holiday and typing this in a tent)

    Excellent question. To be honest I'm not sure either. I tried to think about the purposes I've seen ascribed to education and then generalised. But you are quite right: these are what I (a middle class English straight white guy) think are the general purposes of education.

    System engineers and managers have a concept called wicked problems. These are problems with vague, conflicting socially-defined requirements, where the attempt to solve one element tends to reveal new unforseen issues elsewhere. They lack any kind of end-state, so there is no hope of declaring the problem "solved".

    When I asked about the requirements for the education system I was trying to take a system engineering approach: first identify your requirements, then design a system that will meet those requirements. However with a wicked problem this approach is doomed. I had not taken this into account.

    Various approaches have been suggested to wicked problems, but none look very promising. It seems that we are stuck with the status quo of random interventions from politicians who don't understand the whole problem (because nobody can really lay claim to understanding the whole problem) and a slowly shifting consensus in the education industry about best practices.

    448:

    I think Moz was talking about the police.

    449:

    Sorry, different gangs...

    450:

    If anyone else wants a go - https://britishcitizenshiptests.co.uk/

    I passed the first sample test. Not prepared to try more of them. They've definitely toned down the difficulty somewhat since I last looked.

    451:

    Link to the Times article avoiding Murdoch's paywall. Article title - Pseudo-science and fascism: the dark side of sperm donation

    452:

    In response to SFreader's post of August 15, 2022 00:36:

    Cops fired in one state can easily* get a job as a cop in another state. The states are supposed to do full background checks on all their hires but if the cop's superiors don't file accurate reports or let the about-to-be-fired-cop quit (therefore no report), background checks are useless.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-signs-police-reform-executive-order-anniversary-george-floyds-de-rcna30548 indicates Biden may, someday, have a functioning register of bad cops. However, we don't have it now, and Portland's alternative media is having great fun with the discovery of a local register of cops whose testimony is 'suspect'. https://www.wweek.com/news/2022/08/10/the-list-no-portland-police-officer-wants-to-be-on/

    453:

    The privateers were essentially pirates

    That was my impression but paws4thot has proof to the contrary and will no doubt chime in shortly with further evidence:

    385: "Tosh, and provably so. The correct term is a Letter of Marque as linked."

    454:

    I find the whole US sports scholarship system bizarre in the extreme

    It was bizarre 30+ years ago. Then it got crazy. And sort of drove me away from most any enjoyment. Now it is headed into crazy nuts bat shit crazy insane.

    I wish your son well. But the current crazy of football is dragging the minor sports along for the ride. Tread carefully.

    455:

    Pirates & Privateers - note the name: "Woodes Rogers", too.

    456:

    I'll also note that it's well-known for decades that people in sports in college tend to take the easy classes, since a bad grade takes you off the team. They expect cheating, etc, for sports, esp. kids who have star quality.

    Like all situations involving money and power it's complicated. I have very successful friends who are big sport fans and some who think it is all corrupt and needs to be outlawed. And both make some valid points and are utterly convinced of their arguments.

    And yes there are some not very bright or very lazy young folks who are very receptive to skating by. And there are also those who get hard degrees in 3 years. And NIL will make it easier for the former to skate. But the former make better headlines/exposes.

    Bill Bradley, Russel Wilson, David Robinson, and Roger Staubach come to mind. Not typical but definitely not all that rare.

    457:

    David L @ 427:

    In North Carolina you have to complete Basic Law Enforcement Training and become LE Certified

    Out-of-state transferees will be evaluated to determine the amount and quality of their training and experience. At a minimum, out-of-state candidates must have two years of full-time, sworn law enforcement experience and have successfully completed a basic law enforcement training course accredited by the state from which they are transferring in order to be considered for transfer to a North Carolina law enforcement agency. Out-of-state transferees cannot have a break in service exceeding three years.

    Also requires the following documentation:

    • A letter from your previous law enforcement agency detailing your dates of FULL-TIME, sworn service; and you are in good standing;
    • A copy of your Basic Law Enforcement Training (BLET) course certificate of successful completion;
    • A topical breakdown/syllabus of the courses that you completed in BLET.

    The BLET is taught at the North Carolina Justice Academy down in Salemburg; included in Raleigh PD's Basic Recruit Academy and is taught at a number of Community Colleges around NC.

    I think the only Law Enforcement position in North Carolina that does not require BLET & LE Certification is County Sheriff, which is an elected official. But all the deputies in the Sheriff's Department DO have to complete the training and be certified.

    Sometimes rats will squeeze through the cracks in the system, but the NC DoJ is doing their best to weed them out.

    458:

    Re: 'Biden may, someday, have a functioning register of bad cops.'

    Thanks for posting that link - it hadn't shown up on my news.

    A few years back Charlie mentioned the huge difference in training cops in the US vs. UK. It'd be really interesting to see a point-by-point comparison of training regimens across various countries starting with the G7/G8 along with public perception polls re: intelligence*, trustworthiness and helpfulness of their various police forces.

    Same with educators - cuz it's looking like teachers in the US are on the same trajectory as municipal/county level police forces.

    *Back in 1999 there was a story on TV where some guy was told that he wouldn't be accepted into the local police force because his IQ was too high (125). Hence the prevailing PTB strategy: arm them to the teeth 'cause they're too dumb to figure out a peaceful resolution.

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/too-smart-to-be-a-cop/

    459:

    Ice hockey for him

    Of course that means he might get into Yale or Harvard. :)

    460:

    In The Star Fox by Poul Anderson, The world government refuses to stand up to belligerent aliens, so the wealthy protagonist gets the French government to issue him letters of Marque and Reprisal.

    461:

    DeMarquis @ 436:

    I think you are on the right track, but you don't have the full picture. Heavy student debt is a problem only if you are from a middle income family. The upper 10% aren't bothered by this, because they have means, and aren't expected to pay their debts anyway.

    Heavy student debt is a problem if you come from a family BELOW the middle class. It is only NOT a problem for those in the upper economic classes (the 10%) who can afford the cost of higher education without taking on massive debt.

    462:

    Rocketpjs @ 440:

    Meant to say: Our kids are now trying to decide what they want to do after they finish their grade schooling.

    Son #1 is very ambitious and wants to leverage sports to get him into a high level post secondary situation, probably in the US.

    Depends on the sport. In the U.S. he's more likely to find a "full ride" scholarship if he plays Football than if he plays football, with the drawback that the risk of career ending (and scholarship ending) injury is much higher with the former.

    Plus the percentage of college athletes who go on to professional careers is pretty damn low, so he needs to get a degree that's going to serve him after college ... a fallback plan.

    https://www.ncaa.org/sports/2015/3/6/estimated-probability-of-competing-in-professional-athletics.aspx

    463:

    Today I was playing an MMORPG and saw this line of dialog:

    Pirates? I can't stand pirates. Now freelance, for-profit justice entrepreneurs, like myself -- that's totally different.

    464:

    It'd be really interesting to see a point-by-point comparison of training regimens across various countries starting with the G7/G8

    As some of us has indicated, for the US you'd need at least 50+ columns plus a few 1000 footnotes.

    465:

    Not that I disagree with your overall point (I don't), but the top 10% don't relate to debt the same way as normal people do. Debt is a way of life for them, they use it as leverage (the old saw about owing a million dollars to the bank).

    They have it worked out to the point where they can borrow against their debts.

    466:

    But the flip side is that as citizens you greatly benefit by having a different legal system in every local government administrative area. And they compete with each other to serve different areas, so you have a market in policing as well! And some of them are even elected, so you have the holy trinity: freedom of choice, democratic, and capitalist!

    Grateful that Australia has at least some democratic control over some of our cops, but mostly that we only have one police force per state plus a national one. Plus the various secret police forces and secret police units, but they're secret so they don't count.

    It does bother me that we in Australia are going ever further down the authoritarian path, with a steady ratcheting up of restrictions, secrecy, and laws where all we know is "everything after the introduction is secret" with rumors of legislation so secret that we're not even allowed to know that it exists (but obviously "ignorance of the law is no excuse" still applies). Sadly the new Labor government shows no inclination to reverse course, let alone abolish even the most objectionable legislation. About all we can hope for is that some of the most awful bits will be removed from some proposals (because government departments put forward proposed legislation to ministers, and obviously the fascist departments put forward fascist legislation).

    467:

    And on that note, OHSA have shut down the Australian Capital City parliament:

    A workplace inspector placed a prohibition notice on the Legislative Assembly after finding it lacked social distancing and adequate plans to prevent the spread of COVID-19. ... Assembly Speaker Joy Burch said the decision had "deep constitutional significance", and threatened to take the matter to the ACT Supreme Court.

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-16/act-work-safety-ban-sparks-parliamentary-crisis/101335292

    It's both hilarious and troubling, but I'm currently on the side of hilarious.

    468:

    Professional sports is not a 'plan' in any sense for the vast majority of athletes. He knows this, as do I. However, he happens to love a sport, and is really quite good at it, for a given value.

    He aspires to getting a scholarship. I'm sure there is some small voice in his heart that thinks 'maybe...' but he knows the odds. More to the point, he knows precisely how good he is compared to the people he plays against. Every time he jumps up a level he is amazed at the skill of the players already there, and somehow catches up. It is very obvious that there will be a level where that isn't possible, and it is vanishingly unlikely that will be the highest level.

    No reason not to try. I spent my teen years smoking cigarettes and playing games at the arcade while cultivating my cynicism. He is doing teenage much better than I did.

    469:

    ilya187
    It's those irregular verbs, again .....
    I am a licensed marine debt collector, you are a Privateer & he is a Pirate, eh?

    470:

    New one to me; nice. :-)

    472:

    A side thought - one of the points of moving school leaving age from 14 to 16 to 18, and of encouraging more people to go to university is simply to delay their entry to the workforce.

    If you're looking at education as a place to park people until there's jobs available for them, then encouraging people to go for "higher earnings" makes sense - you're just trying to minimise the time they spend parked and underproductive.

    This is a horribly cynical view of education for the masses, but I have a nasty feeling it's not cynical enough.

    473:

    He is doing teenage much better than I did.

    Parenting for the win!

    474:

    Well over 30 - read Thurber. "While he was not dumber than an ox, he was not any smarter."

    475:

    Not quite my point.

    There have always been dumb as ox athletes. Always will be. My issues are with the business of US college sports.

    I got a front row seat in how US COLLEGE sports changed in basketball and football. Which is where the money was/is. Mainly the business of the sports. I grew up in Kentucky and attended the Uni of Ky plus had season tickets to basketball there for 4 years. So attended games for about 7 years in a row. And this was/is in the SEC conference. And if you don't know (or care) UK basketball has been an elite top 10 program for most of the last 100 years.

    So yes periodically they'd have their issues with going the extra mile or 100 to keep star players in school. An expose would be written and promises made to change. But on those teams also graduated some engineers, pre-med, and business grads. Some decent folks who got a chance due to sports. But as I said those folks don't make the headlines as much as "dufuss can't add 2+2 but is now a senior in college".

    Anyway, starting in the 80s in the US cable TV (well ESPN) showed up. And folks discovered there was "gold in them thar hills". And it seemed to be an endless supply. Things would get to a new crazy and mortals thought this was it and then they'd discover a bigger vein of the metal.

    Now the best paid college coaches make over $10mil all in and until 2 years ago the students were not allowed to even have a job. Only get paid for meals at the student center plus tuition and books. Which led to a LOT of under the table things. Now they have NIL. (Go research it if you want the gory details.) Basically student athletes get to be walking ads for businesses. They can get free use of a $100K car and the dealer gets to say XYZ drives our cars. And the bigger schools now have NIL coordinators. They can't pay but they can help the athletes find the deals.

    And that pile of gold they keep digging out of the hills[1] now has the bigger conferences (American football) poaching teams and starting to look like coast to coast pro leagues. (Basketball was the money driver in the 80s but now it's football and basketball is along for the ride.)

    Football has become so big it wiped out the conference that the gold first produced. The Big East was a basketball only conference basically funded by the a fore mentioned ESPN that went away a few years ago as it wasn't football oriented.

    Anyway, I liked attending basketball and watching great teams play each other. It WAS and IS a game of skill. Ditto Merican football.[2] But the business behind it has made me almost completely loose interest.

    [1] That pile of gold was TV advertising. ESPN, and later others, have discovered that advertisers will pay insane money to be on TV football and basketball. To the extend that ESPN got college sports to change the rules to allow them to sell more commercials and pass some of it on to the schools.

    [2] Merican football has a head injury problem that may cause the sport to die off. But it will likely take decades. There is a LOT of inertia there.

    476:

    Another depressing attempt - getting the US "supreme" to effectively kill all anti-trust legislation

    Anti-trust has always been used more against workers than corporations, anyway.

    It's possible that overturning Roe was a distraction to leave the way clear for more maneuvers like this…

    477:

    I know very few non-STEM people whose work is related much or at all with the content of their education, aside from a few schoolteachers. That DOES NOT mean the education was not useful, but it is perhaps not well applied.

    The content of non-STEM degree isn't as valuable as the skills and values in confers. I completed a bachelor of arts in history and I've worked unrelated jobs since; for a while I worked in histology and these days I work with histograms. The content of my degree rarely serves me in my career but the skills and values have been invaluable.

    It's obvious what I mean by skills: the ability to perform original research, integrate varied and conflicting into a cohesive narrative, develop a line of argument and write it to style, etc. All of these skills have helped me to stand out from the pack compared to some of my more technically-minded colleagues.

    But the values are just as crucial. Not just in learning to spot a social justice issue at a thousand yards, but in applying academic integrity to your daily work: sharing credit, referencing sources, emphasis on quality checking etc. Values you apply without really thinking about it.

    In that sense, university degrees instill a lot of 'invisible' skills and values in graduates that we don't think about and never talk about, and so the myth prevails that these degrees are 'useless'. But that's far from the truth.

    478:

    And that wasn't my point, which was that USA college sports have been beyond bizarre, and even crazy (as the rest of the world sees it) for a VERY long time. I can remember it being a standing joke in the early 1970s.

    479:

    DeMarquis @ 466:

    I don't really care about how they do it, for the top 10% obscene college debt is NOT A PROBLEM.

    For the other 90% it is, and it's not just the "middle class" who suffer.

    480:

    Newbery Award winning children's writer Jack Gantos graduated high school in 1969. In an interview I listened about a year ago he said "I decided to smuggle drugs [true story] instead of going to college because I arrived at the college which accepted me and saw it was just like my high school -- a giant football facility with a small education shack attached."

    He did go to college eventually, as a condition of early release from prison. I doubt such deal is possible today.

    481:

    I can remember it being a standing joke in the early 1970s.

    If you think the 70s were crazy, well "hold my beer".

    Yes. From the point of view of Europe and other places, college sports in the US made no sense. But in so many ways that was cultural.

    We in the US think of those times as the normal age of college sport. Today many of us here who used to be college sports fans have decided crazy was 40 years ago. Now we are in time beyond description.

    482:

    Getting back to the point of this post.

    So we're into the Conservative Party leadership run-off campaign, and the two candidates are throwing policies at the base that, to outsider ears, sound increasingly bizarre.

    Asking as someone who sees the UK political system dimly from a great distance.

    Is it true that the people voting in this run off for the person who will basically be in charge of the UK is a group of under 300K Tories and the list of who is voting is secret? Out of a population of 67 million or so?

    483:

    Rocketpjs @ 469:

    No reason not to try.

    I wasn't disparaging his chances and it sounds like he knows what he's doing better than I did at his age.

    484:

    Yes, except that there is no requirement for voters actually to be British, and the actual size of the electorate is probably 175K. Turnout is anyone's guess, IMO.

    485:

    "The content of my degree rarely serves me in my career but the skills and values have been invaluable."

    I agree with this completely. While I really enjoyed getting my MA in Polisci, I very rarely have a work related reason to analyze the political psychology of opinion formation through media exposure. Outside of work I do it all the time - it is one reason I stopped watching television news altogether over 20 years ago.

    I use all the skills I honed in school, every day. I am continually astounded at the near incoherence in language shown by many of the people who are otherwise very intelligent.

    In my years working for a 'left leaning think tank' I became known as a rainmaker with grant writing. My golden touch with getting proposals and projects funded was largely a result of my ability to write clearly, and my ability not to leave the writing to the last possible minute (and therefore have it full of mistakes). The ability to conceptualize a problem and then consider ways to begin defining practical solutions is not a common skill, apparently.

    Said golden touch also meant that I was ruthlessly exploited by my employer to help quadruple the workload in our office (with no additional staff), to the point that I burned out completely and haven't worked in an office since 2008, and never will again.

    486:

    Is it true that the people voting in this run off for the person who will basically be in charge of the UK is a group of under 300K Tories and the list of who is voting is secret? Out of a population of 67 million or so?
    Yes and Yes. Yes.

    487:

    There have always been dumb as ox athletes. Always will be.

    And then again you get people like Rosi Sexton. Currently she's an (England and Wales) Green Party Councillor (she came second by a whisper in their last leadership election, so she very nearly ended up running the Green party): used to play with a youth orchestra, has retired from her side-hustle as a mixed martial arts fighter -- she was the first British woman to get into UFC -- has a family and qualified as an osteopath (probably got interested because of the MMA), oh, and she has a PhD in theoretical computer science.

    I mean, I write fiction. Nobody would believe me if I came up with a character like that, right?

    488:

    If, as predicted in some quarters, there is a major sociopolitical crisis in Britain this winter, then the government will (probably need to) take emergency powers. They did make the plans during the early months of 2020, after all. I can't see them divesting themselves of those powers afterwards. Much more subtle than Trump's attempt, but it would probably work.

    489:

    It's even worse than that.

    Apparently you can register as a Conservative Party member online with no proof of identity or nationality from anywhere in the world for a fee I've heard quoted as £5, or about US $6.

    (Too late to buy a vote in this run-off, I'm afraid -- you had to be a member before BoJo flounced.)

    I am Concerned that some troll farm in Moscow might hold the balance of power over the process that selects the UK's next Prime Minister.

    Otherwise the Tory party members are overwhelmingly affluent white males of below-average educational attainment aged over 60 who live in the Home Counties. So, totally representative of modern Britain.

    490:

    Robert Prior @ 477:

    Another depressing attempt - getting the US "supreme" to effectively kill all anti-trust legislation

    Anti-trust has always been used more against workers than corporations, anyway.

    It's possible that overturning Roe was a distraction to leave the way clear for more maneuvers like this…

    Not a distraction, it's a separate track; a first step to overturning ALL of the Warren Court's decisions.

    The attack on anti-trust is aimed at the Regulatory State. The ultimate goal is to go beyond the Lochner era. It's not just an attack on anti-trust legislation, it's an attack on ANY "regulation" of corporations.

    No environmental regulations; no banking regulations; no food & drug regulations; no minimum wages; ... NO REGULATIONS OF BUSINESS OF ANY SORT.

    The goal is absolute, dog-eat-dog & Devil take the hindmost Laissez-faire unrestricted warfare capitalism.

    491:

    Nobody would believe me if I came up with a character like that, right?

    She is a real-life Heinlein character. With adjustments for "real-life" part.

    492:

    The goal is absolute, dog-eat-dog & Devil take the hindmost Laissez-faire unrestricted warfare capitalism.

    So what Adam Smith warned about…

    493:

    https://www.conservativesabroad.org/join-us

    "Anyone living anywhere in the world is welcome to join Conservatives Abroad from just £25 per year."

    Which Moscow? Frankly, given the levels of dubious investment (both economic and political), and the fact that most of the Brexit money came from the USA, not Russia, I would bet on it being Idaho.

    494:

    I am Concerned that some troll farm in Moscow might hold the balance of power over the process that selects the UK's next Prime Minister.

    My immediate thought is that the demographics influencing the Conservative Party will be, in order of importance:

    1) whichever billionaires have bought themselves candidates

    2) a troll farm in Moscow

    3) a troll farm in Beijing

    4) white male old farts from the Home Counties

    I can see no reason why the Conservative Party would concern itself with anyone not in one of those categories.

    (Why yes, I was in Spokane for the soul-sucking WSFS business meeting where we had to address the Sad Puppy attack on the Hugo Awards. Can you imagine Putin not having as much organization or discretionary money as the Sad Puppies?)

    495:

    And Morgan the pirate, later Gov of Jamaica.

    496:

    Not sure if I should mention her name, but there's a local author, good writer, also physics degree... and also thinks she's rock-star quality filker. Sorry, Buckaroo Banzai she ain't.

    497:

    Don't forget that the people in those categories are only being offered a preselected choice of two candidates, who are chosen by an electorate consisting of just a few hundred MPs. So in principle a cabal of Tory MPs could force their choice on the party members before it ever gets to the final vote.

    498:

    I mean, I write fiction. Nobody would believe me if I came up with a character like that, right?

    I know. Of the 4 folks I mentioned up thread all have been stars in the pros.

    One was an Air Force Academy graduate who grew too tall so they let him out of his required service. One championship.

    One did his 4 years in the Navy after graduating from the academy. Two championships.

    One graduated with a non trivial degree in 3 years while playing football in college and minor league baseball in the summers. Then got a graduate degree playing football at another school. Got a championship ring in the pros.

    Last one graduated then got a Rhodes scholarship which he made use of before returning to play in the pros and get 2 titles. Then 18 years as a Senator.

    None of these guys were "dumb as an ox". But they likely played with some who were.

    Then there is the "Round Mound of Rebound". The word is he left school after 2 years because his coach couldn't find any more finger painting classes for him to skip. The RMR doesn't deny it. He may not be Mensa but lazy when not playing ball, well, ...

    499:

    True, except that some of us are members (not in good standing in my case) of other parties and therefore not eligible to join the Con Party.

    500:

    That'a not what I saw when I filled in most of their Web form - there were no conditions, Of course, the other parties might not be happy.

    501:

    All y'all are missing the point. It's not that there are some dumb sportsmen, but that colleges took entrants (and gave scholarships) purely on the basis of ability at playing sport. And, according to scuttlebutt, fiddled the academic entrance and pass requirements to keep them on.

    502:

    I said so. Why are you saying I didn't.

    This has been true for 100+ years. And will be true for 100+ more years.

    503:

    Rbt Prior
    It's possible that overturning Roe was a distraction to leave the way clear for more maneuvers like this… - unlikely, since they are known ( open statements ) to want to go for all the othe old judgements that "protected privacy", yes?
    - as JBS says: * a first step to overturning ALL of the Warren Court's decisions.* - all too likely.
    And, the end is an open return to the US "Gilded Age", yes?

    David L
    Yes .... To make it worse, most of these peple would fit right in with most of the Trumpian wing of the US Rethuglican party.
    i.e. By UK standards, bordering on fascism, & in some cases, already there.

    waldo
    IF ... they do - & it's all too likely ...
    THEN ... being this lot, they will utterly fuck it up by the numbers ... ... which leads us to: ELSE ... don't know what will happen then, but it won't be good.

    504:

    Ok then, other parties have rules which, if followed correctly, make some us ineligible to join the Con Party ever if the Cons don't.

    505:

    Re: '... some troll farm in Moscow might hold the balance of power over the process that selects the UK's next Prime Minister.'

    Please elaborate on the 'troll farm' bit because I was of the impression that Russia/Moscow was severed from the Internet/the rest of the world shortly after its invasion of Ukraine.

    Troll farm special offer for authoritarian despots: we'll keep trolling even if you're dead or deposed just as long there are funds in your account!

    506:

    It's over-simplifying. That's not how things work, as those of us who remember the halcyon days of Taiwan being the Internet scam centre of the world can witness.

    Dodgy organisation A (whether it be the CIA, Kremlin, or anyone else) pays a dodgy agent in a dodgy country they are allowed to deal with (think Turkey or worse), who employs an even dodgier troll-farm owner in some even dodgier country to do the job.

    That is why it was a bare-faced lie when TPTB in the UK claimed that the fact the social media spamming over Brexit (which was largely ineffectual) had Russian addresses proved that it was a Kremlin plot. Russia is as corrupt as hell, and arranging that for the odd couple of million would be trivial. 100K pay-off for the authorities to turn a blind eye? No problem. It could have been anyone with that sort of money and little oversight, in the USA, Russia or even UK.

    507:

    It was just explained to me last week that a team is required to maintain a certain average GPA across all the players. I suspect this is somewhat newish, but it is currently the rule in NCAA Ice Hockey at the least.

    What this means is that they are looking for athletes with good grades, in order to allow them to also have a few superstars with poor grades. Superstars with excellent grades exist and are in high demand.

    508:

    This goes back 10 or 20 years. And is evolving. Team GPAs. Team graduation rates. (The later being hard to deal with as 1/2 of all people in college never graduate in the US so come up with a standard that deals with athletes.) Advancements towards graduation per year at school/on the team.

    The more rules they come up with the harder some work to game the system so to speak.

    509:

    There were a succession of scandals in the 1970s and 1980s, with forged marks and all, and incoming presidents swearing to clean things up. My impression is that they did, and nobody is allowed to actually break the entrance and pass rules any longer (at least in major colleges).

    510:

    Re: '... could have been anyone with that sort of money and little oversight, in the USA, Russia or even UK.'

    And a lot of (free) fake FB accounts. (Thanks - appreciate the explanation!)

    What really puzzles me is how many of the Western democratic gov'ts seem to be in a continual state of stalemate - no clear majority. That doesn't make sense at all even with a generous side of jerrymandering. Very convenient if you want to destroy a country - have various factions fight among themselves.

    https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-blowout-presidential-elections-a-thing-of-the-past/

    'The 2016 contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was the eighth consecutive presidential race in which the national popular vote margin was smaller than 10 percentage points. That is, in every presidential election from 1988 to 2016, the difference between the vote shares of the Democratic and Republican nominees was in the single digits. That’s the longest stretch of such elections since the Civil War, surpassing a run of seven straight single-digit margins from 1876 to 1900.'

    511:

    Western democratic gov'ts seem to be in a continual state of stalemate - no clear majority... [SNIP] in every presidential election from 1988 to 2016, the difference between the vote shares of the Democratic and Republican nominees was in the single digits.

    Boosters for the two-party concept would say this is evidence that the two-party system is working. If one party's policies are "too extreme" in one direction, voters "punish" them by voting for the other party and they respond by moderating their policy toward an acceptable medium. In fact this is exactly the mechanism by which such an Aristotelean medium is supposed to be attained in such a system. A small margin between the two parties, in such an interpretation, shows the parties have moderated their policies to appeal to the middle.

    As we're painfully aware, you don't have to dig deep to find counterexamples and worrying failure modes for this sort of balance. To start with, there really isn't a single binary continuum in which such a medium can be found. Misunderstanding and deliberate misrepresentation of the meanings and effects of policies turns out to be something powerful interests can nurture and manage to their advantage. Tolerance for extreme viewpoints is asymmetrical: moderate conservatives are clearly far more prepared to tolerate outright Nazis (otherwise why would they vote for them?) than moderate liberals are to tolerate authoritarian nominally left-wing regimes, possibly as an outcome of another kind of mis-conceptualisation and mis-categorisation (how is it actually meaningful to put someone who wants to implement universal healthcare in the same category as Stalin and Pol Pot, for instance?). Voting systems, especially first-past-the-post single member electorates with non-compulsory (and potentially suppressed) voting leads to structural biases in electoral outcomes, so the medium achieved is one that already strongly favours the interests with greater representation. And there's just a basic set of concepts that the idea of a medium doesn't take into account, in fact probably pre-dates to some extent: do we actually mean "mean", in which case we're not reaching a middle at all, just a balance of extremes? And whose interest does that serve?

    I'm not saying that multi-party systems prevent any of these things or are automatically better, just that you automatically get increased diversity of interests and where a "medium" needs to be reached, it's far more intersectional. I suppose my experience is with the system in Oz which has one foot (literally one House of Parliament) in the two-party camp, and the other in the multi-party camp. Or did: suddenly, since the last federal election, there are many, many fresh faces and it's a Brave New World in the "two-party House". And... that doesn't necessarily mean we're out from the shadow of the mining interests that have had our two parties in their pockets since forever.

    512:

    in applying academic integrity to your daily work

    I'm regularly boggled at "academics" who post survey links to antisocial media with no useful information attached. The worst just post images, often laid out to defeat OCR. Even when it's genuine it looks like a scam, not helped by most of them using data brokers to host the actual survey.

    I find myself struggling to discover the actual researcher let alone sponsoring institution and bob help us all if there's ever a privacy policy or ethical approval. Then I disable all my privacy and ad-blocking plug-ins, turn off PiHole, and discover that I need to log in with my facebook or google account to do the survey.

    So I find myself replying "what's your real name, @Robot_Giraffe?" or "what will you do with this information, u/personal-jesus-273".

    I suppose that explains why the results always look as though they were written by morons. A survey of morons, by morons, for morons...

    513:

    I think all systems of government are clunky and hackable. A heterarchy (a system that emphasizes checks and balances) works better for keeping one faction from taking over, but it's typically crap for dealing with rapidly evolving crises, because coalitions take time to assemble. The US is a good example of this. When we've been more checked and balanced, we've also done things like let lots of people die from disease, flooding, and genocide. With an imperial president (especially one empowered with nuclear deference), we're responding more rapidly, but also getting authoritarians trying to grab the ultimate power.

    Authoritarian systems can respond rapidly, but get to epic levels of corruption, and seldom take very good care of their people either. Also, transfer of power in authoritarian systems can be really bloody (to civil war levels of throne gaming). Democratic transfer is typically a bit less violent.

    Personally I like democracy, but as we're realizing, democracy sucks, not because it's clunky, but because it works when all of us citizens (the demos) are actively involved in governance, especially at lower levels. And that sucks because it's really tedious and annoying for most of us, which is why, given half a choice, we'd let some authority do the job and slope off to do something more emotionally rewarding instead.

    Ah well.

    514:

    Are you suggesting that a group of science fiction fans from around the world could grow to be the dominant faction in a UK political party?

    It would make the sad puppies look even more pathetic, by comparison.

    But just to clarify: the Conservative Party can elect a leader who's not a member, resides in Scotland, and doesn't want the job?

    515:

    A small margin between the two parties, in such an interpretation, shows the parties have moderated their policies to appeal to the middle.

    In a normal universe, this might be true. But in today's GQP, moderation is not in their vocabulary. Moderate Republicans who voted to impeach Trump are gone - retired, or primaried out (like Liz Cheney) - leaving the more extreme candidates there for the November elections. Gerrymandering and voter suppression have replaced moderating their policies in the GOP's playbook.

    516:

    But just to clarify: the Conservative Party can elect a leader who's not a member, resides in Scotland, and doesn't want the job?

    Are you suggesting OGH may be in danger here? :-)

    517:

    No environmental regulations; no banking regulations; no food & drug regulations; no minimum wages; ... NO REGULATIONS OF BUSINESS OF ANY SORT.

    Not true. There will be plenty of regulations, specifically those designed to guard the wealth, privilege and control of the super-rich.

    What we're seeing is just aristocrats trying to reassert the divine right of lords (sexism explicit). After all, look at the chaos that happens when someone like Trump isn't in power? Remember that old propaganda about the king being the embodiment of law, with the country devolving into (carefully fomented) chaos if his ever-loving boot wasn't on our necks?

    I mean, you'd have to be as cynical as I am to see the divine right of kings as the literal enthronement of The Big Lie.

    Anyway, our ancestor threw off the kings, and our job, apparently, is to keep the bloodsuckers off our necks this time around.

    518:

    Impertinent note to SFF authors who aren't right-wing authoritarians: most kings in books need to act like they have an IQ of 45 and suffer cringeworthy fates going forward. Fewer prophecies and orphans with royal magic, more Elvisian megacolons maybe?

    That whole good king/heroic billionaire meme complex got a bit too thoroughly embedded in the psyches of too many men, other genders too. They're now acting as if it's real, and that politics is supposed to be a game of thrones.

    This idea needs to be played with until it breaks, for everyone's good.

    Perhaps it's time for the doorkeepers of the literature of ideas to let a few more different stories in over the transom?

    Perhaps, instead of buying more monomythical heroes moving fast, breaking things, and becoming the good rich guy, maybe we need to identify with the clever people who tangle the powers of the antagonists together so thoroughly that, like the Chinese and American economies, they can't defeat each other or harm good people like us without destroying themselves. Different kind of feat, but no less heroic. That last example, incidentally, is checked and balanced heterarchy in a nutshell.

    519:

    Rocketpjs said: I use all the skills I honed in school, every day. I am continually astounded at the near incoherence in language shown by many of the people who are otherwise very intelligent.

    I've personally learnt far more about composing readable text here in this blog than I ever did at uni. The commentariat will flay you alive if you get anything wrong, or phrase it in such a way that it can be misinterpreted.

    520:

    Are you suggesting OGH may be in danger here? :-)

    Only as future minister for information.

    I, for one, would cheer if Scottish Independence not only happens, but is expanded to take in all the refugees going north over the wall to freedom. Maybe the Free Scots could even do some US-style, old-school filibustering and raise St. Andrews' cross throughout Britain.

    521:

    " if Scottish Independence not only happens, but is expanded"

    I am led to understand that at its furthest historical extent, Scotland stretched down well into Yorkshire. Perhaps, if Scotland recovers its lost territories, OGH could return to his birthplace without leaving Scotland.

    JHomes

    522:

    at its furthest historical extent

    I suspect there are constitutional difficulties, but perhaps a reverse buyout could be done so that the Queen of England and also Scotland becomes the Queen of Scotland and also England.

    What I'd like to see is a more general setup loosely like Infomocracy where citizens of a given area can hold a referendum to change which nation they're part of. Like the bigger case of a boundary adjustment where selling small amount of land to your neighbour is often straightforward.

    I suspect where Malka Older and microdemocracy in general start is looking at various unhappy regions of countries and going "surely there has to be a better way".

    523:

    Oh, specifically so that when the norf decide they'd rather be part of Scotland they can vote with their votes rather than with their feet.

    524:

    H
    Fun, but grow up.
    A "free & independant Scotland" would take at least 10 years to join the EU, by which time it will be utterly bankrupt - even worse off than those of us S of the Cheviots.
    HINT: Sturgeon's economic policies are not quite as bonkers as the Truss & in a totally different direction, but they are bonkers.

    JHomes
    NO
    You are confusing "Scotland" with Northumbria
    PLEASE NOTE that the rest of modern "Scotland" was subdivided into: Strathclyde
    Pictland/Caledonia - And various other subdivisions, including the Scots { Who lived in Ireland & came over to be Scottis, etc } - see "1066 & all that" for a fuller account. Um, maybe not?

    525:

    "But just to clarify: the Conservative Party can elect a leader who's not a member, resides in Scotland, and doesn't want the job?"

    I don't think so, unfortunately(?) I get the impression that candidates have to:

    • be an MP taking the Conservative whip.
    • nominate themselves for the leadership election.

    But as I'm not a member of the 1922 Committee and have never read their rules, I could be wrong.

    526:

    Are you suggesting that a group of science fiction fans from around the world could grow to be the dominant faction in a UK political party?

    Yes.

    Now for the really bad news:

    Elon Musk is clearly an SF fan.

    527:

    I think you're a bit pessimistic there.

    Assuming the SNP get their referendum next October and win it decisively, then a fast track for independence would take probably two years (slow track: a lot longer). So independence by January 1st, 2026.

    EU membership: the EU is generally much more receptive to Scotland than to UK/England, and indeed indicate that if an independent Scotland asked for membership it'd be nearly automatic. Remember the UK was part of the EU until two years ago and Scotland's laws and regulatory regime are already converged with EU norms, and the devolved parliament has been fighting a rearguard action to prevent those norms being diluted by Tory misrule down south.

    Obviously Scotland wouldn't get the UK's sweet deal over the various opt-outs. And Scotland would need a currency. But sterling is currently close to Euro parity anyway: the real question is how a Eurozone Scotland would handle government debt/borrowing, and that's a matter for negotiation with the EU. I note the Tories systematically refused to apply for EU regional development grants that would have to be spent in Scotland and Wales: it's likely that some formula would be arranged by which the sort of "leveling up" subsidies that dragged Ireland into the 21st century could be applied. Especially as the EU could use it as a way to stick their collective thumb in England's eye ("look at all the good stuff you're willfully missing out on because of Brexit!").

    Finally, stop personalizing it. It's not about Sturgeon. There's an entire ruling party here, she's just it's leader for the past 8 years. She's already talking about what she'll be doing after she steps down in interviews: I don't expect her to stay long after the referendum, even in event of a victory. Frankly, your attitude to her looks a lot like misogyny ...

    528:

    Continuing from the next thread as it's not for general discussion and there is no new entry yet:

    Charlie Wrote on general UK crisis:

    Yeah, feel free to discuss that on the previous thread (now past comment 500). Or I may end up putting up a new topic specifically for the gathering crisis.

    (All my worst fears about the economic consequences of Brexit appear to be coming true, just initially far more slowly than I expected -- but now gathering speed like an avalanche. With a war-induced oil shock on top, and a climate emergency that is also going nonlinear!)

    Hey, don't forget the Covid thing! It's also not the only pandemic we might get soonish, and more of those will make things even more fun.

    Also, like a friend said the other day, maybe it's time to consider long-distance travel (from Europe to Japan or Australia, for example) a once-in-a-lifetime event from now on.

    529:

    "I mean, I write fiction. Nobody would believe me if I came up with a character like that, right?"

    Isaac Asimov said that he liked writing non-fiction so much because he could never get away with things like that in fiction.

    530:

    Charlie
    As per your # 12 on the next thread: Or I may end up putting up a new topic specifically for the gathering crisis. PLEASE
    It's going to be bad.

    531:

    Charlie
    If it comes to it, I liked Salmond even less ...

    532:

    Just to add emphasis to that - the EU's only significant concerns about the UK joining the EU is that we'd try to insist on being able to pick-and-choose again, and that FPTP doesn't meet the Copenhagen Criteria as they relate to democracry.

    Scotland doesn't use FPTP, and if it attempted to join the EU, it would be doing so to get away from England's influence; with any luck, that means it'd be able to demonstrate that it would prefer to reform the EU for the benefit of everyone, rather than opting-out when it doesn't think it's going to get things its own way.

    533:

    And our infrastructure is falling apart, both in material and personnel, from decades of neglect. I can't think of any significant exception, though some areas (e.g. roads) have had more investment than others (e.g. sewage or the NHS). We can expect serious failures, soon, and won't get action without serious political change (no, I don't mean New Labour). we shall stagger from emergency to emergency.

    There is still no sign that the English sheeple are waking up, so we can't expect any political change until at least 2030. Of course, political change could easily make things worse, too.

    534:

    If I don't do it sooner, I shall do it right before I jet off to worldcon (during which I won't be participating much here).

    535:

    The NHS was systematically neglected from 1979 to 1993, then Labour were elected and the funding taps were opened. Alas, it takes a decade to train up a new doctor or nurse, but only years to build new hospitals, so guess what happened first? Then the Tories were elected in 2010 and funding and wages were frozen (a de facto gradual cut due to inflation) until 2020 ... at which point the pandemic hit and Brexit caused almost all the EU staff to leave because they weren't paid enough to qualify for UK settlement and they didn't feel wanted and there were plenty of jobs back home (see: pandemic).

    Now inflation's shot up over 10%, and without a 10% funding rise the NHS is, again, being cut -- despite epic levels of staff burnout -- while the Tories try to privatize it (which will cost more, because the shareholders' dividends have to come from somewhere and the NHS institutions already ran very lean, with no easy targets for cost savings).

    Note: the NHS is a fully devolved issue, so outside England the privatization agenda isn't being applied. NHS Scotland in particular is in somewhat better shape. However, funding is in lockstep with England because Westminster ultimately controls the purse strings, so NHS Scotland is facing the same crises, only at a slightly lower level.

    536:

    Mikko Parviainen said: Hey, don't forget the Covid thing!

    Forgetting might be the new in thing.

    537:

    Charlie Stross said in the next thread: the air pollution is horrifying and I'm borderline-asthmatic.

    Me too. I'm pretty good since I moved out of Sydney, but now I'm perfectly fine.

    I have 4 air purifiers running full time on medium. Gets me about 3 air changes per hour. I also wear a large 3M 6000 series half mask with N100 filters (thinking about changing to the HF-800 that has a speaking diagram).

    No more asthma symptoms at all.

    538:

    Mask when I leave the house, not at home obviously.

    539:

    I would dissent that the New Labour years were much better, though they gave the appearance of being so (Blairism all over). Many (most?) of the new hospitals were built on the never-never (*), and a large proportion of the NHS's current financial woes are due to that.

    (*) For youngsters, originally hire-purchase. But, in this context, PPP (so-called Public-Private Partnership), which is just the same thing on an institutional scale.

    540:

    Scotland, again, is Different: thanks to the SNP, over a few years NHS Scotland bought out the private stakeholders in all the hospital contracts and the hospital estate is entirely nationalized. (Sorry, Greg, this is why some of us like the SNP -- it's the quiet stuff that doesn't make headlines in the unionist press down south.)

    541:

    Quite. Scotland's governance has at least SOME positive points. England's is almost uniformly beyond redemption, which is why we need a revolution, and not just a change of political party.

    542:

    From the Uk side of the pond I was going to ask if Liz Cheney could do the same as Bernie Saunders (Independent but votes with the Democrats) but in her case vote with the Republicans. But I've just read a piece in the Guardian that she may try standing for President which seems a much bigger and less likely to win prize to go for.

    543:

    I suspect Cheney almost certainly can't get the Republican nomination if Trump runs, and even if she does, she'll split the party (because she's not a MAGAt), so she'd lose the election.

    A Liz Cheney presidency (if it did happen) would be ... odd. Not remotely liberal, but likely far more competent than George W. Bush (never mind Trump). Depending how the internal party bloodletting went, it might presage a step back from the brink, towards the pre-Trump balance of power in US politics.

    But as I said, I don't see it happening. And with the evil genie of far right populism out of the bottle, I don't see it getting shoved back inside any time soon.

    So President DeSantis it is. Ugh.

    544:

    512 - Not convinced by claims for a bipartite system as "fairer". Here in Scotland we have a variation of the additional member system. This was selected specifically to prevent any one party from winning an absolute majority in the House. It happened anyway.
    It was also selected to try and cause a change of ruling party at every election, but the ruling party has only changed once since 1998.

    515 - Only if you can find someone who is a sitting Con MP, Scottish, an sf fan. and has no ambition to lead the Con Party or be PM.

    528 and 541 - I'd agree Charlie's analysis here almost to the word.

    On "using sequence numbers to multi-quote" - Perhaps those who dissent would like to tell me how to say "agreed" to 2 or more comments with a single reply?

    545:

    EC
    AIUI, our only hope is a "Labour-the-largest party" BUT "Needs the Lem-0-Crats to form a guvmint"

    ONE CONDITION: Electoral Reform.

    546:

    There were a succession of scandals in the 1970s and 1980s, with forged marks and all, and incoming presidents swearing to clean things up. My impression is that they did, and nobody is allowed to actually break the entrance and pass rules any longer (at least in major colleges).

    Assuming you're talking about US college sports, you're right. Sort of. But it wasn't a one time thing. This type of thing is continuous, ongoing, and a constant headache for schools. (At least some of the people in the schools.) You might have seen a big expose of such back then. But there have been many such before and since. Big egos and money funding a sport needing lots of young folks of whom many are lower income or down to what we call dirt poor leads to this. And always will.

    Sounds like you might be referring to the SMU football program. They went so far off the rails their football program got shut down totally for a year. Payoffs for players with boosters and big Texas politicians in the mix.

    But scandals in college football and basketball in terms of money, grades, eligibility, and such will always be with us until we just get rid of college sport. But that just ain't gonna happen.

    547:

    I would argue that your "the mining interests that have had our two parties in their pockets since forever" is pointing at the biggest failure of a bipartite system: it makes regulatory capture by special interests easier.

    In the USA, as the biggest bipartite country around, once you've captured the Republicans and the Democrats, that's it - there is no option that can get anywhere near power and threaten your control.

    In New Zealand (as a country that's still close to bipartite but has more parties in Parliament), you also need to make sure that having captured the National and Labour parties, they don't agree coalitions that threaten you with the Green or Maori Parties or with ACT New Zealand, and you need to ensure that none of the parties that currently don't seats in Parliament grow to the point where they could be a threat.

    And from what you're saying, Australia's tendency towards multi-partite politics has meant that once the vested interests who'd captured your two main parties didn't do enough to keep the populous happy, Australians are able to break the power of the captured parties by voting for smaller parties that haven't been captured.

    548:

    No chance. Clegg blew it.

    549:

    The Republican Party primary is certainly going to be interesting. I'm not sure whether Cheney will be running in 2024 - A better strategy might be to swoop in and "save" the party in 2028, but ultimately even that won't play - nobody likes the person who got it right while everyone else was being stupid. One way or another, I think she's done. My hope is that she'll step into some kind of "chief staff person" role with the Jan 6th committee.

    I also doubt we'll see Trump running, at least not seriously - I think his hijinks with the classified information will prove his undoing, and there are more Jan 6th hearings ahead, not to mention the Justice Dept's efforts on Jan 6th, and the State of Georgia's investigation, and so on... I forget all the people who are after him, but at this point nobody likes the guy.

    As to whether De Santis can win, that depends on how the Republicans do in this year's elections - a Republican majority in 2023-24 might well pave the way for his election, but Biden will be a difficult target, particularly if the Republicans do badly this November, which is starting to look likely - if you believe the polls. (I'm a little skeptical of the polls.) I also think DeSantis has enough negatives that he might lose to an aggressively-run campaign in any circumstance.

    550:

    I'm not sure that would be enough - Labour discarded the Jenkins Report, and past form (the AV referendum) suggests that LD won't press hard enough on getting reform out of a coalition partner. Adding the SNP to the mix would force the issue, though - neither Labour nor the Conservatives would grant an Indyref (so no SNP coalition), but the SNP might be willing to abstain on or even vote in favour of switching Parliament to MMP and dissolving it for a new election under MMP rules.

    551:

    Greg, you missed the real barb, which was about US-style filibustering.

    If you want to see how that "worked", look at the history of a mercenary by the name of William Walker, who, backed by Cornelius Vanderbilt among others, was briefly president of Nicaragua in 1856.

    The fight there was about US control of a way across Central America, to connect the US East Coast with the California gold fields. Vanderbilt was a shipping magnate, and he wanted control of the railroad from the Caribbean to Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific. When that gambit got, erm, hung up by a regional coalition against it, IIRC he got control of the trans-Panama railroad, which is where the Panama Canal is now.

    Now imagine if a free Scotland, in concert with the EU, wants to insure free passage through the English Channel and the Irish Sea, and whoever is in control in Westminster doesn't want that for Reasons. Cue the mercenary adventurers, and watch the bloodbath ensue. That's the barb in my twee little fable.

    552:

    Labour (new and old) were and are utterly opposed to anything that might help the Liberals (and now, Liberal Democrats). They would a thousand times rather the Conservatives got in than even enter into an electoral pact. Inter alia, that means they are as fanatical about FPTP as the Conservatives.

    553:

    I also doubt we'll see Trump running, at least not seriously - I think his hijinks with the classified information will prove his undoing, and there are more Jan 6th hearings ahead, not to mention the Justice Dept's efforts on Jan 6th, and the State of Georgia's investigation, and so on... I forget all the people who are after him, but at this point nobody likes the guy.

    1/3 or more of the US voters are still true believers of Trump. And they are a majority of the R primary voters. To them people like Lindsey Graham are politicians to be tolerated as they are not true Rs.

    I'm related to some of these and they will show up and vote for him until he's dead or ... well I can't think of anything else.

    As a commentator that many here don't like said. Our political systems and legal systems are running in opposite directions just now. We might have a convicted felon on the November ballot for President. And THAT will get ugly.

    554:

    Sounds like the current stand offs in US politics.

    555:

    "On "using sequence numbers to multi-quote" - Perhaps those who dissent would like to tell me how to say "agreed" to 2 or more comments with a single reply?"

    Quick and dirty fix for dissenters: bookmarklet.

    Code:

    javascript:var a,c;if(c=document.getElementsByClassName('comment')[parseInt(window.getSelection())-1]){a=document.createElement('a');a.href='#'+c.id;a.click()}

    Highlight the sequence number in the text, click the bookmarklet, and it goes to that comment. (Assuming the sequence numbers haven't been mangled by deleted comments etc.)

    556:

    Para 4 - La Manche runs between Ingurlandshire and France, and the Irish sea (clue in the name folks) between Ireland and Wales. The Irish sea also contains the "island in the middle" (aka the Isle of Man) which is a self-governing British crown dependency. If Ingurlundshire is stupid and arrogant enough to even think about closing those channels, prepare for much strife involving not just the EU but NATO and the UN as their opponents.

    557:

    I can certainly imagine Trump running for office from jail, but I'm not sure that counts as "serious" - DeSantis is as much a fascist and smarter than Trump, so I suspect he's acceptable to the nutcase right. On the other hand, you can only double down on crazy so many times before something breaks, so I'm not sure Trump's hold on the electorate is as strong as everyone imagines. I guess we'll have to see.

    What I imagine, not long from now, is that we'll see one Republican candidate with tertiary Syphilis and the other with rabies, (they both claim to be JFK) and they'll be arguing over who can wield their brainworms best on behalf of the wingnuts!

    558:

    "I'm related to some of these and they will show up and vote for him until he's dead or ... well I can't think of anything else."

    "It's all a hoax. He's not dead, he's just resting."

    559:

    As a commentator that many here don't like said. Our political systems and legal systems are running in opposite directions just now. We might have a convicted felon on the November ballot for President. And THAT will get ugly.

    I for one, think that splitting the Republican vote in 2024 will be a very good thing indeed. So yes, we need Trump running, ideally Eugene Debs-style from prison after being convicted of sedition (that was Debs in 1920, not Trump). Then we need DeSantis doing his thing to try to capture the GQP Florida Man-style from outside prison walls, while Liz Cheney does the Ralph Nader-in-2000 thing of shearing off the conservative independents who'd otherwise vote Republican.

    Then, whoever the democratic nominee is wins outright.

    The nice thing about this scenario is that Nader took just enough Florida voters in 2000 to hand Bush and Cheney Sr. the win (with SCOTUS interference, naturally). I'm quite sure Rep. Cheney knows this. In a weird way, she might even want to balance the karmic scales by robbing the GQP of a victory, in pursuit of setting up a government that corporations can control "the right way" (or at least one that gives more contracts to Halliburton).

    560:

    The chunk of seas to the west of the island of Great Britain are known as the Western Approaches, and are of critical strategic importance to NATO in event of a land war in Europe (at least, fought on a 1940s-80s scale: the Ukraine mess barely signifies).

    If the Little Englanders were to block it -- which is pretty much unthinkable -- they'd get a swift sharp shock.

    561:

    "Frankly, your attitude to her looks a lot like misogyny ..."

    After years of him calling her 'the wee fishwife', what could not be more literally a diminutive misogynist descriptor (small, unimportant, identifiable only by her owner/husband's trade), you are only noticing this now? It's been bugging me forever, but not my blog so...

    562:

    It's been bugging me, too, but you try schooling Greg ...

    563:

    It's been bugging me, too, but you try schooling Greg ...

    Baroness ThatCon?

    564:

    Nothing like blocking the world's busiest shipping channel .... Actually, I don't think that the Irish Sea as such IS of much strategic consequence, except to the countries that border it, but your point stands even so.

    Anyway, blocking only Scottish shipping wouldn't be anything like the same problem - it would merely be an act of war if Scotland were independent and, er, a police action if not. However, given the Navy's current shortage of small vessels, it's unclear HOW they could do that.

    That situation can be left for the more inane SF plots. For now.

    565:

    Re: '... we actually mean "mean", in which case we're not reaching a middle at all, just a balance of extremes? And whose interest does that serve?'

    Agree re: balance of extremes!

    Whose interest?

    1-Domestically: People/orgs that fear change mostly becuz they'd lose money, influence, and prestige.

    2-Internationally: People/orgs/gov'ts that want to effect change for their own benefit/agenda with minimal outsider interference.

    Quite a bit of the (Western) media share the blame for escalating this divide.

    From my perspective, the US version of a two-party system is showing that such a simple binary approach is easily weaponized. Would be interested in learning what the major binary (pro vs. con) divides are among/between parties in other Western [multi-party] democracies.

    566:

    The real problem in the US was the 1978 SCOTUS decision that money== free speech. Then allowing PACs in the last bunch of years. The ultrawealthy are buying all the eyeballs.

    567:

    Of course. How did you think the SMOFs were planning to (dare I say it?) Rule The World, using fandom as their power base?

    568:

    I've got all of that covered in my next novel. The first section, originally written as a novelette, I had the one friend I have who has real money read (gafiated fan), and he called it very dark. Ah, but the novel goes past there... Now, finding an agent us what I've been trying all year....

    569:

    COVID

    Thought some folks here would be interested.

    The Nature article below is about a research article currently in the pre-print stage - includes some background info that adds perspective on comparing COVID across infectees and vs. flu.

    'How much virus does a person with COVID exhale? New research has answers

    One ‘superspreader’ with Omicron shed three times as much viral RNA as those with Alpha or Delta.'

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02202-z

    570:

    "identifiable only by her owner/husband's trade"

    Eh... that's not what it means.

    A fishwife was a female worker in the shoreside catch-processing industry, not necessarily married. They had the stereotypical reputation of being extremely ready to fly off the handle and having a WMD-grade mouth on them, hence the term's application as a pejorative.

    571:

    The additional member system in Scotland has resulted in a strange back-to-front approach to getting elected to the Scottish Parliament if you're a Scottish Tory. The no-hopers and low people on the party's greasy pole get nominated to stand in the elections because there's not a chance they'll actually come first and gain a seat that way. The real insiders have themselves put on the regional lists because there will be enough second and third-place votes especially in the rural areas that they are likely to get seated in Parliament even though no-one actually voted for them. It's Democracy in Action!

    572:

    I will note that the meaning of "wife" has shifted over the centuries and in Scottish usage, and historically in English usage (it's an archaism now) it could mean any woman, especially an older one (or, disparagingly, an uneducated one).

    573:

    "until he's dead"

    He was born June 14, 1946 and will be over 78.5 years old on Inauguration Day 2025. He's overweight, sedentary, likes cheeseburgers and steaks.

    We can hope the years and cheeseburgers will catch up with him.

    574:

    "I will note that the meaning of "wife" has shifted over the centuries and in Scottish usage"

    I currently like "partner" as a general term for a person in a somewhat committed relationship. SO is OK, but seems slightly contrived.

    575:

    You mean like DRoss MP, MSP for example. See Greg, you don't have to actively insult politicians; this guy signs himself "D.Ross" so just say it without the period character.

    576:

    "Wee Fishwife" - I was quoting a rival female Scottish politican - see also the comments about WMD-scale verbal insults, generally! The whole idea of the remnants of the RN even attempting to block off the Irish Sea is bonkers .... ( So - please stop it, eh? )

    EC @ 553
    They MIGHT have learnt, especially if it keeps the tories out, eh?
    Whereas you ( again) have not - you want a "socialist paradise" & would rather see the tories in power ... me, I simply want them OUT - ok?
    BUT - I'm certain we need Electoral Reform.

    577:

    The whole idea of the remnants of the RN even attempting to block off the Irish Sea is bonkers ....

    At first glance it might sound that way, but a single Astute-class submarine would be able to effectively interdict that sea. Home waters for an ultra-modern SSN to play in -- if necessary standing off a few hundred km out to sea with RAF aircraft calling the shots for the Tomahawks and Storm Shadows.

    The real problem would be keeping enough small boat and helicopter assets in the area to stop and inspect everything. If you want to get to "blowing shit up in a confined space" the RN are quite capable.

    578:

    "Wife" may well have shifted, and I never spoke up because I knew it was possible that usage in the UK may be subtly different than here in Canada.

    I do know that if someone were to refer to a Canadian politician, like Chrystia Freeland as a wee $anythingwife they would be quite rightly torn to pieces for being a patriarchal jerk.

    It may be a Britishism, but we are an international commentariat. I'm sure there exist ways to disapprove of someone's policies or actions without resorting to what very much appears to be diminutive sexist language.

    579:

    Sturgeon gets called "the wee fish-wife" because of her name.

    580:

    Yes. Agreed. This decisions is pure scumminess.

    581:

    According to Wikipedia, there are 8 suitable 'large' vessels (750 tons) and 18 small ones (50 tons). I haven't checked on the number of helicopters. But RN people have repeatedly said that we don't have enough of those to protect our borders (with or without a subtext of 'how many patrol vessels can you buy for one aircraft carrier?')

    At a wild guess, inspecting all traffic through the Irish would be a problem - and, as for the Channel, don't be silly!

    582:

    Sturgeon gets called "the wee fish-wife" because of her name.

    I think the part that's weird about this is that sturgeon are not small fish. Left alone, they can get to 6 meters in length and 400 kg.

    Given how intellectual and linguistically inventive people in the UK are, I would have thought that y'all'd emphasize the fact that sturgeons are benthic fish that are toothless and feed by suction. Bottom-feeding suckers, in other words, the politicians of the fish world.

    583:

    'how many patrol vessels can you buy for one aircraft carrier?'

    It's not the wee boaties, it's the crew.

    A QE class carrier has a complement of just 680 crew -- one per 100 tons of warship. (It also carries about 1000 aircrew and maintenance staff and up to 900 soldiers, but the ship itself is heavily automated by naval standards and runs very lean.)

    A 600-ton minehunter, in contrast, takes 34 crew (with berths for six extras); a Batch 2 River Class offshore patrol boat (2000 tons) has 58 crew and up to 50 infantry. So roughly one body per 15 tons to 20 tons of ship.

    The RN is down to 34,000 active personnel and about 12,000 reservists, and is stretched maintaining its existing ships -- you can reliably bet on only a third of the active personnel, at best, being deployable at any time (a chunk will be permanently running shore facilities, another chunk will be training, and if you expect your navy to be at sea 24x365 in this day and age I have no idea where you expect to press-gang your next batch of highly unwilling sailors but it won't be in the UK!).

    So realistically, any kind of serious effort to patrol the Channel would require either roping in the Coast Guard or a massive recruitment drive (and the latter would take years to start delivering trained personnel).

    PS: currently trainees earn around £16,800 pa, but that shoots up after training and ratings are on £21-31K; the highest non-commissioned rank can pull in £56K, and realistically the average across all ranks is probably somewhere in the range £25-35K.

    Multiply by 34 for your minehunter and the crew wages alone will set you back a million a year: you can reasonably triple that to account for overheads (on-shore offices and barracks maintenance, travel and training expenses). A full River class complement, including marines, is probably going to be on the order of £5-10M a year, just for the crew -- never mind fuel, maintenance, and ammunition. For a patrol boat!

    584:

    "Wife" did just mean "woman". The meaning has shifted to mean "my woman", but you can see the old meaning in terms like midwife.

    It's not unique to English to simply refer to the partner as "woman" or "man". To introduce my partner in te reo Māori I'd say Ko Lynne tāku wahine. Ko is the emphasis particle, Lynne her name, tāku is ownership with responsibility and wahine one female adult. Literally Lynne my woman.

    585:

    Re 2024 US election.

    Long covid seems to be just as common in vaccinated people, at 20%+-10% with each bout and both sides of politics seem to be full boar for a many infections as possible. November 2024 is over 2 years away, and that means 6+ infections for most voters.

    So by then we're looking at maybe half the population seriously disabled and maybe 10% immunodeficient on par with HIV having converted to early AIDS.

    How does that change the shape of US politics? I have no idea, but surely it has to have some effect.

    586:

    SFReader @ 506:

    Please elaborate on the 'troll farm' bit because I was of the impression that Russia/Moscow was severed from the Internet/the rest of the world shortly after its invasion of Ukraine.

    They're banned from some social media platforms, but they're not cut off from the internet itself. How would you shut off a whole country from the internet?

    587:

    "With Backhoes". Or, more politely, by going to the correct buildings and unplugging a cable in each. The international connections are not all that numerous.

    588:

    They're banned from some social media platforms, but they're not cut off from the internet itself. How would you shut off a whole country from the internet?

    I spend most of my day controlling computers at least a few miles from me.

    Multiple hops can be a pain but are doable if the boss says do it.

    And there are a few zillion compromised computers that various bad guys / state agencies use to hop around.

    If you're serious you can pretend to be from most anywhere.

    589:

    Interesting, I'd put it the other way round. I'd think it more appropriate to describe "partner" as contrived, in that I see it as a term selected by people to make a statement as much about the language they're using as about the relationship itself, whereas "SO" I see as a more genuine kind of term, one which people settle on because while it may be kind of crap, it's still the only one they can think of that does not carry a meaning which is overloaded in one way or another.

    590:

    Or when reading out a table of election results, read the rows about the Tories in French. It works with your posts too.

    591:

    Re: 'And there are a few zillion compromised computers that various bad guys / state agencies use to hop around.'

    That was at the back of my mind - that they'd use some indirect or round-about access. I'm guessing that Internet traffic is monitored to the extent that increases/decreases in amount and timing of data being moved about can be measured. If so, then my non-techie guess is that any such changes could identify access points.

    Are there any built-in physical bottle-necks through which large chunks of Internet data flow? (I vaguely recall that back when PCs had to be directly plugged into phone lines for Internet access that a cut cable somewhere around the Mediterranean buggered up international Internet traffic for a while.)

    592:

    > Partner and SO.

    I'd never given it much thought, but it might a matter of degree.

    SO is more general and looser, like US bicostal friends who care about each other and spend some time together every few months(*). Partner is closer, like living together or in continuing close interaction. And all sorts of arrangements in between.

    Partners are SOs but not necessarily vice versa. A Venn diagram is needed.

    (*) We had a good friend who worked and lived in DC, her SO(**) lived in San Francisco and they got together every two or three months. It seemed to work well.

    (**) Actually, her legally married husband, but those were earlier times.

    593:

    Charlie Stross @ 563:

    It's been bugging me, too, but you try schooling Greg ...

    It's just gonna take a whole lotta' love

    594:

    David L @ 589:

    That was my point. The internet is a global web, and cutting a single country out of that web is beyond our capabilities.

    595:

    So by then we're looking at maybe half the population seriously disabled and maybe 10% immunodeficient on par with HIV having converted to early AIDS.

    i think that's as near to an end-of-civilization scenario as makes no difference to most people, and they're probably resigned to crossing that bridge if they come to it

    course the qanonites think it's part of the plan

    596:

    SO is more general and looser, Partner is closer, like living together

    Back in the day SO was an explicit declaration, "partner" could refer to a business partner and discussions left ambiguous so was safer for those in the closet. I once offended someone by asking, violating their carefully constructed ambiguity.

    But I use partner just to avoid explaining what SO means, because apparently the non-internet people I know just don't use the term. Some of them struggle with "partner", asking "so girlfriend, then" and we can have a fun discussion about the relevance of gender identity if I'm in the mood.

    I quite like "bedwarmer" as a term, but I've only had one friend who thought that was funny so I don't get to use it as often as I'd like.

    Also, roommate is another weird US-ism, in Australia and Aotearoa that term is used for people who literally share a bedroom rather than have separate bedrooms in a larger home. But I often see it used by US residents in ways that aren't really compatible with "we share a bedroom", most obviously when someone says "my roommate's bedroom is a pigsty so I shut their door and pretend it doesn't exist" or similar. That's your bedroom too, they're your room mate. Are they perhaps your housemate (Australia) or flatmate (Aotearoa) instead?

    597:

    Moz said Are they perhaps your housemate (Australia) or flatmate (Aotearoa) instead?

    I'd probably say flatmate even in a house, as an Australian. Flatting is the verb I'd use. Or sharing. The building is a share house.

    Renting out a couple of rooms, as I gather you were doing, I'd call "taking in some boarders" and the people would be "the boarder(s)" with no "sharing"

    I think US "College" housing they actually share rooms, and that's where the word comes from, but I don't know where I got that idea. (sounds horrible). Based on watching Harry Potter I'm guessing UK boarding school is also shared rooms.

    598:

    "I'm guessing UK boarding school is also shared rooms."

    I'd say dormitories. At least for the younger attendees.

    There have been examples here in Aotearoa.

    JHomes.

    599:

    Adrian Smith said: that's as near to an end-of-civilization scenario as makes no difference

    Hoping I'm wrong, but that's how it's looking as far as I can tell. All the studies seem to indicate Long Covid is a thing, hits ~20% in each infection, and with a raft of symptoms that are incompatible with holding down a job. (dysphasia, chronic fatigue, immune suppression, migraines, exercise intolerance)

    The most disease suppressing US position seems to be that schools should "consider" not punishing students for wearing a mask. So it's full steam ahead for full infection. Australia is following the US lead like a puppy. (as usual) Both sides of politics. Though Labor is wearing novelty masks (I kid you not) they're just as firmly committed to let 'er rip policies.

    600:

    The best case scenario for Democrats is actually for Trump to lose the nomination and the running as indipendent, splitting the Republican vote. If he dies before the election, it would be an advantage for the Republican candidate (IMHO), they could present him as a sort of martyr to the MAGA crowd, meanwhile distancing themselves from his illegal behaviour for the "moderate" vote.

    601:

    Hoping I'm wrong, but that's how it's looking as far as I can tell. All the studies seem to indicate Long Covid is a thing, hits ~20% in each infection, and with a raft of symptoms that are incompatible with holding down a job. (dysphasia, chronic fatigue, immune suppression, migraines, exercise intolerance)

    Thing is, Long Covid isn't truly random. It looks like researchers keep finding correlates with those who get it, including indices of the severity of the initial infection, presence of autoantibodies (meaning the virus triggers an autoimmune response), pre-infection with Epstein-Barr Virus, and other pre-existing conditions like diabetes.

    If it was truly random, with 20% taken with each new variant, I'd agree that we're screwed. If there are more and less susceptible people, then we've got a different problem, which is a burgeoning need for long-term care and a large surplus of burned-out caregivers who can't keep giving it.

    Seems like we're stuck with that stupid compassion deficit again. I only wish more nihilists would experience sick-bed conversions and help out a bit more.

    602:

    I only speak modern French, not medieval! :-)

    603:

    Renting out a couple of rooms, as I gather you were doing,

    Yeah, it ended up a weird hybrid where I was providing cooking utensils etc, as well as furnished rooms, and the male tenants were not doing housework as far as I could tell. But the female ones would clean at least the kitchen and bathroom, and vacuum their rooms etc. But that seemed to be a very Lakemba-subcontinent thing, where people from India-ish seemed to want that way of doing things. Australian-born people of whatever ethnicity and the random non-Indian-ish tenants seemed more comfortable sharing housework, chatting and even exchanging food. The Kenyan nurses maybe no but they had a whole lot going on with culture shock and I suspect mostly just "older man scary".

    We ran as a more typical share house for a while but it was a lot of work to find people who wanted that and were willing to live in Lakemba. Any ad up locally or on Gumtree etc gave us hordes of young Muslim men who were shocked that we didn't look after them the way mummy did. Including the dude who I had to bag the bed in his room then pay to have it dumped because he'd never washed his sheets in two years and liked to eat in bed. So it was a cockroach hotel. No wonder he didn't want us going into his room.

    I've lived in share houses all my life before covid, mostly just paperwork-free subletting but towards the end mostly on the lease having paperwork-free subletters. Sure, legally I pay 4 weeks bond to the bond board, then each subletter pays another 4 weeks to the bond board, but yeah nah, they pay me and I offset that against the bond I paid/illegally don't forward the money to the bond board. Which also simplifies the common "come home from work and someone has moved out" situation because I'm not chasing people who've gone overseas to sign bond paperwork / forging signatures to get bond back. Tenancy law in Australia is a mess, is what I'm saying.

    There is a big learning exercise for a lot of ... I feel uncomfortable calling it anything "east" because from here the "middle east" is Pitcairn Island and the "far east" is Chile or Argentina. Anyway, the idea of bond and especially that they will get it back is foreign to them (literally foreign). But for many of them so is the idea that if they put a lot of effort into convincing me that they can't afford the rent I'm not going to let them move in. Apparently they expect I will lower the rent or not force them to pay it. So we have a chat that goes "the rent is too much. What's your best price. That's too much, I pay $100/week. I not pay bond, I give you one week now, then every week. All bill included, yes? You buy heater for this room too. I bring my friends to live here too, $100/week for the room with four of us. Later five". Aaands that's a goodbye from me.

    604:

    @Heteromeles at 560:

    I read somewhere earlier today that Liz Cheney's goal is simply to stop Trump from being elected again. If she runs for president, she doesn't expect to win, she only wants to divert enough R votes to ensure that he doesn't.

    605:

    "Schooling Greg" - look, the SNP are a Nationalist party - which are supposed to always be "evil" - with this one, odd exception, um.
    And, the only ones I've met are entirely full of hate & spite for the "English" even though I've done nothing to hurt them - I trust them about as much as I trust the tories. OK?

    Talking of trusting the tories, there's this - but there's another 2 years of this ongoing disaster to survive, first.

    606:

    Here in Finland when I studied, a long, long time ago, student apartments near here were mostly private rooms with a common kitchen, living room and bathroom for maybe 4-10 rooms. Some of the rooms were doubles, so you'd have two students sharing a room and then the common areas.

    I never lived in those, first I rented a single room flat from a friend of a friend, and later moved to a "family flat" with my spouse. Those are meant for couples or families, we had two rooms, a kitchen on one wall and a bathroom. There are also bigger ones - we didn't have any kids at the time so were only accepted for that small flat.

    Nowadays, I have no real recent information, but I think even the students don't want to live in the single rooms with common areas, and even less sharing a room, so mostly the student accommodations have been modified to single-room flats.

    The rents in the student flats are cheaper than on the open market, obviously, but I think not every student can live in one.

    After our permission to live in a student flat expired (it used to be seven years) we moved with an another couple to a commune, rented a big apartment and paid half of it, so it was cheaper. I know multiple people who do that even now that we are middle-aged, and apparently it's a good solution for many.

    607:

    Sounds like a real life "He Died with a Felafel in His Hand".

    I'm quite glad I haven't found myself in that situation. I'm struggling enough sharing with my partner/so/bedwarmer/girlfriend.

    608:

    Thanks for the more thorough analysis. When inspecting ships, you NEED those people to do it in a reasonable length of time. Yes, you can just inspect papers for less. Anyway, we are agreed that the whole matter is inane.

    609:

    1) The Scottish National (no "ist") Party you mean.
    2) I strongly resent that remark on a person relationships level. I do have a dislike for the sort of person who insists on "being English at me". Examples might include Liz 2x4, the Iron Maiden, the ex-boss who complained that "you talk too fast", my God-mother's second husband who makes no secret of disliking all Scots...
    This list might be contrasted with a list including OGH, Alan B, various gamers...
    You don't make either of those lists because you're neither famous nor someone I recall meets in person.

    610:

    I don't have Birmy's writing talent or his willingness to live with nutcases. But 30+ years of sharing houses have given me a few fun times. But mostly it's just boring living-with-others stuff. I have learned to treasure people who clean and loathe people who leave messes.

    But mostly... my last LTR was the bed cooler... otherwise known as the reptilian overlord, the icy pause, and other horrible things. Nothing like the shock of your partner getting home late at night, crawling into bed then demanding cuddles because they're so cold, so terribly terribly cold.

    Solution was got a king size bed with an electric blanket and separate elements for each side. Beats waking up screaming with a block of ice pressed up against my belly.

    611:

    Re Terminiology for who you share your life with, I have a fondness for the Scots "Bidey in" for a lover who lives with you but is not a marriage partner.

    612:

    I don't have Birmy's writing talent or his willingness to live with nutcases.

    i see his axis of time trilogy has a carrier called the uss hillary clinton sent back in time to wreak condign punishment upon the japanese, somewhat in the fashion of sm stirling's nantucket books but apparently more socially conscious

    i may have little choice but to compare and contrast

    613:

    paws
    I've been told that "England has no culture - it was all stolen from the Celts & Romans" & that the Scottish border should be that of Northumbria & white-wing tory attributes lumbered on top. How nice.
    OTOH, I think Edinburgh is a wonderful city & I don't go around claiming "superiority" whilst there.
    There is no doubt that BoZo has wrecked the Union, for which he should be jailed for life ...
    The SNP have "merely" taken advantage of the greasy liar's personal grab for power & influence.

    614:

    And, the only ones I've met are entirely full of hate & spite for the "English" even though I've done nothing to hurt them

    You've met Feorag, right?

    She's an SNP member.

    (I'm a Scottish Green Party member, which is also pro-independence, and in coalition with the SNP.)

    You probably know other Scottish Nationalists, you just don't know they're Scottish Nationalists because they're not obnoxious about it.

    615:

    Scots Law had the wonderfully-named term, "Notorious Cohabitation" which covered the case of a couple who weren't married in the eyes of the Kirk but were known to be living together by their neighbours. After (I think) seven years of this the couple were considered legally married even if they hadn't actually signed the register.

    616:

    I have lived in England since leaving Africa in 1957, and have been unimpressed by the small-mindedness, pettiness, blinkeredness (even bigotry) and arrogance of many of the English, especially Londoners. It hasn't got any better in that time, but the details have changed. I have no doubt that it exists in other countries, too, but my sympathies are with the SNP.

    617:

    "Marriage by habit and repute" was a similar concept. Back in the 90s when I was administering benefits it was not unusual to get claims from long established couples who had acquired legal rights in that way. The fact that until relatively recently it was not customary for a woman to change her name on marriage also complicated matters, which was why it was often the testimony of friends and neighbours that a couple was known as an established couple that matttered.

    618:

    This conjures an emerging post-UK vision where Scotland (re)joins the EU, closely followed by Wales but not before Irish unification, just as England starts the process to join the Union as the third non-contiguous state and the second state not located the North American mainland. The (much later) campaign by a septuagenarian Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson in Republican primaries fails, an outcome which at that stage in history is usually as fatal as standing against Caesar might have been in the 50s BCE.

    619:

    In my 20s when a friend and I were looking for a new place to live I suggested we room together. His reply was he'd rather have a friend than a roommate.

    So true.

    620:

    I use partner just to avoid explaining what SO means, because apparently the non-internet people I know just don't use the term.

    I first encountered the term "Significant Other" in the novel Dream Park, which was written before the Internet (or VR — the graphics were holograms!).

    621:

    I use partner just to avoid explaining what SO means, because apparently the non-internet people I know just don't use the term.

    One bedroom, two beds was typical in campus housing in the 80s and earlier. At conferences we usually stay in res (cheaper) and newer ones are built so you get your own room with shared common areas (so more like sharing a flat), but older ones are definitely shared bedrooms.

    Which was amusing once when I was paired with a woman who had a 'masculine' name. We were never actually awake and in the room at the same time so didn't realize until the next day.

    622:

    614 - Well, I have suggested that the true border between Civilisation and Ingurlund should be that of Hadrian's Wall, but most people have had more sense than take the suggestion entirely seriously.
    Edinburgh is a nice place to visit, but like most from the West of Scotland I wouldn't want to live there. ;-)

    615 - I didn't know that about Feorag, but I've had no occasion to ask her and she's seen no reason to tell me, which is pretty much our shared point Greg.

    617 - I didn't know that; the main reason I've not named you above is that I'm not certain we've ever met.

    623:

    sm stirling's nantucket books

    That was an excellent novel, stretched into a trilogy by lots of gratuitous fighting scenes :-)

    624:

    Oops, the quote on that one was supposed to be "I think US "College" housing they actually share rooms, and that's where the word comes from, but I don't know where I got that idea. (sounds horrible). "

    I blame lack of tea. Time to make another cup.

    625:

    richard77 @ 601:

    My preferred scenario is Trumpolini gets the nomination, picks some even worse scumbag as running mate and then croaks right after said secondary scumbag gets indicted as a pedophile (before he can be pardoned).

    I know it makes me a bad person to wish ill fortune on someone like that, but he deserves it, so I'll just have to live with the shame.

    626:

    AJ (He/Him) @ 612:

    Roses are Red
    Violets are Blue
    Won't you be my POSSLQ?

    Rhymes with "Fossil-Queue"

    627:

    That was an excellent novel

    thought having that fool environmentalist woman gang-raped into a coma by olmecs (and a jaguar) was a bit on the nose tho

    628:

    What sort of name did she think Robert was?

    629:

    Robert Prior @ 625:

    Oops, the quote on that one was supposed to be "I think US "College" housing they actually share rooms, and that's where the word comes from, but I don't know where I got that idea. (sounds horrible). "

    It wasn't always horrible. I think I had 11 roommates while I was at NC State and only 3 that I can remember were actually assholes (and I don't think I was the asshole more than once).

    OFF CAMPUS housing was structured around cheap, flimsy 2 bed-room (2 BR, LR, Kitchen, 1 Bath) apartments, with sometimes as many as 8 students sharing. When I say CHEAP, I'm referring to build quality, rather than rent.

    Those situations WERE often horrible (almost always for whoever signed the lease).

    This would have been in the late 60s & very early 70s.

    630:

    "I think US "College" housing they actually share rooms, and that's where the word comes from, but I don't know where I got that idea. (sounds horrible). Based on watching Harry Potter I'm guessing UK boarding school is also shared rooms."

    I remember some halls of residence which were mostly single rooms (somewhere under 10 per set of kitchens/baths/bogs) but with a few doubles. So yeah, people who got landed with doubles would turn up for the first time and find themselves compelled to share a room with some random total stranger. I had a mate who got stuck in one and he basically only spent time there to sleep.

    Fuck only knows why they didn't see what a terrible idea it was before they signed off on the plans. Most of the doubles had already been converted into pairs of singles by partitioning them down the middle, but there were still a few left. There were also some single rooms which were amazingly large, which I suspect had been converted from doubles simply by taking one of the beds out.

    Boarding school, yes, dormitories, bleurgh.

    631:

    In Canada a 'roommate' is someone you share a house or apartment (flat) with, no cuddling or other things.

    Partner seems to be fairly common usage here in BC, but that might be my bubble. Married folk are generally husband/wife and husband/wife, depending on their configurtions. Partner is generally for unmarried/unengaged or ambiguous relationships - it was used by us before marriage, and it is often used by LGBTQ folk that I know.

    632:

    “sharing with my partner/so/bedwarmer/girlfriend.” - well, I’m not surprised you’re struggling to share with 4 people. It’s difficult enough with just the one mistress...

    633:

    Scottish independence is a civic issue, not an ethnic one - i.e. it is for the people who live in Scotland, irrespective of their birthplace or family history.

    It is not an exclusively SNP cause; apart from the Greens there is also a sizeable "Yes" campaign group which last time was excluded from all the media coverage/debates because it isn't a political party ( unlike similar groups for the brexit vote, iirc ).

    634:

    SO came out, so far as I remember, in the US in the nineties, an immense improvement over the late 80's, I think it was, from the US Post Office, "POSLQ" (persons of the opposite sex sharing living quarters - no, I kid you not). My SO and I do use that (why we're not married is something I may not discuss in public, for legal/monetary reasons). Once in a while I'll use partner, because kids born in this millenium seem to have missed SO, and I tire of explaining.

    635:

    Sharing living quarters. I spend most of the seventies, and into the eighties, sharing houses. In University City, part of west Philly, there were a lot of late Victorians. So five or six people would rent a house, sign the lease (sometimes all would), and we each had our own bedroom, sharing baths, kitchens, living rooms, basements... a lot of space.

    Everyone was expected to do some of the chores, and clean up after themselves. If someone moved out, a new person looking to move in would be interviewed by everyone, and we'd have to agree. Made things far easier.

    636:

    When I was an undergrad in the dorms, we shared rooms. Led to some interesting times*, and students were packed 2-3/room, with only the RA having a room to themselves.

    For universities in high cost cities (UCLA, for instance), two per room is apparently a luxury, and the norm is more. With split/blended families being the norm, I heard once of a bunch of UCLA seniors (I think six sharing two bedrooms) with 24 immediate family members at their graduation (mom, dad, siblings, parents' new spouses, half siblings...).

    *Interesting times: I had a roommate who was a poli sci major. One night he woke me up talking in his sleep. He was trying to recite the quadratic equation, something he hadn't seen since junior high. After flubbing it, and flubbing it, and flubbing some more, he fell silent. Then he said, quite clearly, "wait, you can't fire me, I have tenure!" Sadly he didn't remember what he'd been dreaming when I told him the next morning.

    637:

    I'd wager a modest sum on a fairly early general election. With the amount of bad news coming from all quarters the Truss bounce, if there even is one, will be vanishingly tiny and short-lived. Constant reminders via extortionate power bills tend to concentrate the voters minds.

    638:

    You really think London is worse than other UK locations?

    I lived there 32 years and, after moving way, cannot say I have noticed any improvement in any of the 4 counties I have lived in.

    639:

    When I was an undergrad in the dorms, we shared rooms. Led to some interesting times*, and students were packed 2-3/room, with only the RA having a room to themselves.

    Back in the mid 70s their were two newish towers for students. And lots of older from the 50s, 40s, 30s, and maybe earlier 2 to 4 story dorms.

    The newish towers had 2 students to a room. Two twin beds (a US size) I think but they might have been narrower. A slab/desk at the foot of each. A sort of pantry closet for each person and a sink. Beds likely had drawers under them. Plus a "shared with the next room over" toilet. Showers and more toilets down the hall please. And the aisle between the beds was about the same width as a bed.

    You had to apply for these towers as they were so much better than the older buildings. Freshmen need not bother.

    Towers are still there. I have no idea what the room layouts are now.

    Me. I lived at home for the first year and half going to the lowly community college to save $$$. Then I shared apartments/houses when I went to the full uni.

    640:

    The very best shared accommodation I had was my first year at college. Unlike most students, I had spent a couple of years working in the oilfields, so had little interest in 'student housing'. I found a house nearby that was owned by a couple of brothers who were renting out the other bedrooms.

    One roommate/flatmate worked at the local brewery, and brought home endless free beer. Another had parents who were farmers, so the freezers were full of 'help yourself' food. One of the brothers was an IT guy, and had set up a couple of computers for shared use in the living areas - this was a big deal being 1990. The other brother was a wedding and bar DJ, so had a truly impressive collection of music of all types, combined with a very good stereo.

    Other than the IT guy all the residents worked evenings and nights. While we did cross paths, I mostly had a big comfortable house full of free food, music and beer to myself. For a 20 year old this was excellent. Needless to say my friends often came over to my place. I knew I was onto a good thing.

    641:

    UK usage: "roommate" would be someone you're sharing a bedroom, if not a bed, with. So it's very seldom used because it'd be more normal to say "girlfriend/boyfriend" or "partner".

    If sharing an apartment, they'd be a "flatmate"; if sharing a house, they'd be a "housemate".

    642:

    All youse in dorms... probably would have been good for me, to be in one, surrounded by people actually studying, as opposed to cruising through high school, as I did. But... commuted the first year and a half, moved away from home, worked full time, went part time, then married, kid, worked full time, finally went back part time nine years later.

    Never went full time school again.

    643:

    I'd wager a modest sum on a fairly early general election.

    I think the "Truss bounce" will be so tiny that they'll switch to Plan B and run down the clock like John Major in 1997, not bothering to fix anything but ramming through as many irrevocable asset-stripping measures (and other actions intended to make Brexit irreversible) as they can cram into two years.

    It's going to cause absolute havoc.

    644:

    probably would have been good for me, to be in one, surrounded by people actually studying

    You mean smuggling in booze (and partners of the appropriate sex) then fucking loudly, throwing drunken parties, doing drugs, and (one memorable night) practicing on the drum kit right above my room until 5am the day before my hardest finals?

    For my second degree I didn't even think about halls -- rented a house with a couple of (sane, adult) friends with jobs, any parties were ones I was involved in.

    645:

    That's my bet, too. What I can't guess is how many leaders they will run through in that time ....

    646:

    638 et seq. - In which we discover that Liz 2x4 is not just made of wood, but of teak (which has a slightly higher density than water).

    647:

    Charlie { @ 615 } EXACTLY
    But, especially under Salmond, less so with Sturgeon - every single thing was all the fault of the English, even when it was irrelevant.

    EC
    Utter bollocks - well as applied to Londoners, anyway.
    Pre the '19 election, French, Italian, Portugeses & several other were common round here - almost no German, unfortunately.
    Mind you, I'm familiar with the mind-set of the fen-men { Think Boston or Spalding } & they really are stuck in the 17/18th Century.

    paws
    STOP IT - you are getting like EC!
    What about those of us - like a large majority in London & the other cities who voted "Remain" & are having to put up with all the Brexshit wished on us?
    Incidentally: Grease-Smaug is aiming, as a "Brexit benefit" for a Minarchist state, with drawing from some functions - we can easily guess which, of course.
    Shudder.

    JBS
    It is reported that Alex Jones { Euwww } has openly backed De Santis over Trump?

    Uncle Stinky
    WE SHOULD BE SO LUCKY
    No, they will circle the wagons, hope "something will turn up", attempt to blame evul left-wing "Commonist" unions on everything , use the Civil Contingencies Act, until it all implodes ...
    What then, is anyone's guess.
    Hence my & many others' polite requests for a fresh thread for when Charlie goes to ChiCon.

    • As Charlie says in # 644 - it is NOT going to be pretty.
    648:

    Depends on the school When I graduated HS, that year was the first year of a new commonweath scholarship, which I got (more later). As far as my very experienced college counselor and I could figure, it was only good for in-state schools.

    About six years later, I found out I could have gone out of state. Had I gotten it... well, they were so unprepared that I didn't get the notice that I'd gotten it until mid-AUGUST, three weeks before I had to register. I gave the school I wanted to go to - Cal Polytech, in California, a pass (and I've never heard of that being a party school), and Drexel a pass, because all my folks could afford was Temple, a commonwealth school (Pennsylvania's a commonwealth, not a state....).

    649:

    Oh... and that was the height of the Moon race, and I was looking at aerospace engineering....

    650:

    richard77 on August 18, 2022 05:04 noted:

    The best case scenario for Democrats is actually for Trump to lose the nomination and the running as indipendent, splitting the Republican vote. If he dies before the election, it would be an advantage for the Republican candidate (IMHO), they could present him as a sort of martyr to the MAGA crowd, meanwhile distancing themselves from his illegal behaviour for the "moderate" vote.

    Ah, following in the grand tradition of the Bull Moose Party. Or, perhaps, some other kind of Bull...

    But, His Orangeness is not eligible to run again, as per the 22nd Amendment. Thank goodness.

    651:

    But, His Orangeness is not eligible to run again, as per the 22nd Amendment. Thank goodness.

    Is that supposed to be a joke on his claim that he won 2020 election?

    652:

    Liz 2x4

    Yeah, I guess. Personally, I was thinking more of The Rusty Lizard, in the fine tradition of the Iron Lady.

    Similarly, if more of y'all knew what a reishi "mushroom" is, perhaps you'd be okay calling the other one the Sunny Conk.

    Biology humor. It's funny in the right context.

    653:

    Apropos of nothing. If you're tired of US/UK politics, here's a set of opinions to chew on:

    Silicon Valley's Push Into Transportation Has Been a Miserable Failure.

    I find the comments about His Muskiness to be quite interesting...

    654:

    Queer community online used to use MOTSS "member of the same sex" etc, and there was a fuckbuddy version which eludes me right now. And for some reason Willing Recipient of Sexual Favours springs to mind as well but that acronym doesn't bear thinking about (probably only Mikko could pronounce it).

    https://slang.net/meaning/motss

    655:

    Re: 'His Muskiness'

    Yeah - the double-speak CEO. Looking forward to what happens next with Twitter. Worst case, we learn something about ad bots.

    https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-targets-ad-tech-firms-twitter-suit-over-takeover-deal-2022-08-18/

    656:

    Back to US politics -

    Randy Rainbow's got a new song about DT ('Yesterday' - The Beatles).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdSZRkeQfnk&ab_channel=RandyRainbow

    No idea whether there's anything similar about UK politics.

    657:

    Gizmodo is notoriously anti-Musk, and anti-everything connected with him. Far beyond reason, IMO, and so is this article. If anything, what this Paris Marx says about Tesla sounds like typical fossil-fuel propaganda points.

    658:

    Gizmodo is notoriously anti-Musk, and anti-everything connected with him. Far beyond reason, IMO, and so is this article. If anything, what this Paris Marx says about Tesla sounds like typical fossil-fuel propaganda points.

    I think this criticism is from the other end of the political spectrum. This is a presser for a new book, and the publisher is Verso Books. You can look them up yourself, if you like.

    659:

    SO came out, so far as I remember, in the US in the nineties

    Earlier. It was used in Dream Park, which was published in 1981.

    660:

    It isn't an op-ed piece; it's an interview with the author of a book who's making the case you describe.

    (I'm going to suggest that American automobile culture is fundamentally toxic and aggressively hegemonizing and evangelical towards other cultures, and needs to be heavily regulated and rolled back.)

    661:

    (I'm going to suggest that American automobile culture is fundamentally toxic and aggressively hegemonizing and evangelical towards other cultures, and needs to be heavily regulated and rolled back.)

    No disagreement there. Problem is, it's literally concretized in a way that's going to be literally messy to rebuild.

    Crossing streams for a minute, getting from car to post-car city in a strapped-for-resources world is one of those interesting SFF challenges you could unload on a panel to toss around.

    The basic pattern is: system breaks. Survivors mourn the loss (critical step! Americans prefer denial), pick up the pieces, and create something new with them. With car-centric, petrochemical cities like, oh, Chicago, how's that all supposed to work?

    662:

    The basic pattern is...

    Sorry for the second message, hit return too fast. That pattern is from Terry Tempest William's Finding Beauty in a Broken World. She's an artist and poet, and she's used it in refugee camps to help women whose previous lives have been destroyed deal with the loss and start to make something new for themselves and their families.

    I may be unduly egotistical, but I think we kind of need to do that on a global scale. Instead, we seem to be minimizing the mourning process with things like aggressive avoidance, massive hypocrisy, and militant nihilism. Given how much bullshit is flying around, it probably would be better to declare a decade of mourning for the end of petrochemical civilization while we figure out what we can make out of all the stuff we've piled up. This will, of course, never happen. Be simpler if it did maybe.

    663:

    Problem is, it's literally concretized in a way that's going to be literally messy to rebuild.

    Repurposing is cheaper and easier, and it's more likely. As you see whenever some problem takes cars off the roads streets are really useful for a whole lot of things other than storing cars.

    https://theconversation.com/10-images-show-just-how-attractive-australian-shopping-strips-can-be-without-cars-186460

    One highlight of the article is how much work they put in to CGI a shot like this one:

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/ffmendo/4005215697/

    Because the Addison Road Community Centre just isn't shiny and new and futuristic enough for academics to pontificate about. And existing pedestrian malls are just boring and, well, existing. Can't do fantastic urban regeneration projects if the end goal is what you already have...

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-12-09/people-make-their-way-along-the-hay-street-mall-in/3723492

    There's also a whole lot of bike paths and shared paths in the world that are built out of old roads and railways. Often "built" grossly overstates the effort that goes into putting up some signs and painting a few lines.

    664:

    "how's that all supposed to work?"

    Arcologies?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology

    IIRC, HB Piper had a model of those in "The Last Enemy" published in 1950. Vast structures where the people lived surrounded by expanses of farmland and parks.

    665:

    Good grief, that was crap even by gizmodo standards.

    666:

    Rocketpjs @ 632:

    In the U.S., "Partner" is someone with whom you share some kind of relationship, usually it denotes an EQUAL share.

    It could be an intimate relationship or it could be an economic relationship (business partners). Some partners might be roommates. Others might not.

    "Roommate" is someone with whom you share one or more rooms. Doesn't tell you anything about the intimacy of that sharing. Among young people, roommates may be simply an economic relationship. TWO (or more) people going in together to split the expense of housing.

    In U.S. terms, Sherlock Holmes & Doctor Watson were roommates. They were also partners.

    667:

    timrowledge @ 633:

    I wonder ... is it too many mistresses or not enough matresses that creates the problem?

    668:

    653 - Biology "jokes" have a tendency to go over my head.

    661 - I'm going to suggest that, given the fashion for over-bodied, overweight, and over-tall "Suburban Useless Vehicles" (SUV), USian (and European) automobile culture no longer exists.

    669:

    Moz @ 655:

    I look forward to seeing that as one of the official responses on the 2030 U.S. Census. Hell, I hope I'm still around for the 2030 Census ... 2040 would be even better.

    2050 would be out-fuckin-standing!

    670:

    Heteromeles said: If it was truly random, with 20% taken with each new variant, I'd agree that we're screwed.

    Certainly appears randomish so far. If not random, then close enough for government work. Looks like your first infection presents the highness chance of adverse outcomes, but the lower chance on second and third are about the same. Implying a combination of susceptibility and random chance both at work. Figure 5 sums it up.

    assessment of the cumulative risks of repeated infection showed that the risk and burden increased in a graded fashion according to the number of infections. The constellation of findings show that reinfection adds non-trivial risks of all-cause mortality, hospitalization, and adverse health outcomes in the acute and post-acute phase of the reinfection.

    https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1749502/v1

    671:

    SFReader @ 657:

    Bravo! Just hope he doesn't run out of show tunes.

    672:

    They were also partners.

    mary watson was a beard tho

    673:

    Heteromeles @ 662:

    Without a car I starve to death. We literally are set in concrete here, and I can't break out by myself.

    But I'd be willing to give up the car if only I had realistic options for getting to the grocery store & back (... also to the VA hospital over in Durham).

    I've said before I think the Boring Company would be better used to tunnel under cities to install mass transit. Tunnels for cars are really stupid, but tunnels for subways ... think of it as the return of the railroads with no grade crossings.

    Add in city to city links. Put in networks of tunnels under every highway with stations wherever needed. Some kind of computer controlled pod cars to give flexibility ... every station has its own QR code so you get in the pod at your station and scan the code for the station you want to go to; sit back & relax until it's time to get out at your destination.

    Sort of like a internet for people to travel on.

    674:

    JBS @ 667: - Addendum

    In the U.S. "roommate" is kind of interchangeable with what Charlie (@ 642) says U.K. calls "flatmates" or "housemates" ... it's just the number of rooms that varies, and there's no implication roommates are sharing a bed.

    Also in the U.S.: Partner may be part of a couple (1b), but is more often associated with someone in an activity (1a, 1c, 1d or 2)

    Context is everything in "partners".

    675:

    Adrian Smith @ 673:

    That's asinine.

    676:

    That's asinine.

    ur just conventional

    677:

    Here we go Hyacinth is at it already.

    JBS
    The sainted Elon simply DOES NOT GET "Public Transport - or rejects it out-of-hand, even though it works really well in large cities.

    678:

    Roll on Minister of Transport Stross.

    679:

    I didn't say racist, and your posts are good examples of what I am referring to.

    680:

    Roll on Minister of Transport Stross

    Haha.

    And as opposed to spray on Transport Minister Stross?

    681:

    I've said before I think the Boring Company would be better used to tunnel under cities to install mass transit.

    Musk has apparently said that hyperloop, and the Boring Company, was a play (by him) to sabotage support for high speed rail in California.

    682:

    Elon Musk is a rich white South African who was into his teens when Apartheid ended.

    For him, public transport is something poor, racially-othered (ie. threatening-to-him) people use.

    It's also for cityscapes where everything is compact and close together -- ideally a 15-minute city. In contrast, his ideal is to be as far away as possible from "those people", kept out of his mansion by high walls and security fences, himself whisked past them by a car with sophisticated sensors and alarms.

    (I note that despite recent interest the 15-minute city isn't new: I live in one, in a 200 year old apartment, and while it has some drawbacks it also has many benefits: most of the drawbacks emerge from it being partially adapted to accommodate automobiles.)

    Anyway:

    As Karl Schroeder noted, all technologies come with an implied political agenda.

    For SpaceX (reusable space launch systems: cheap low latency satellite broadband) the agenda is apparently "colonize Mars", which is extremely silly on the face of it, and even more so when Musk's dimly-articulated vision for how his colony would run seems to be Apartheid 2.0 (with a tax haven for billionaires on the side).

    For Tesla, the agenda is ... well, it shares an agenda with the automobile industry, the agenda is and always has been toxic (at least since Henry Ford began churning out cars for the masses and then Ford and GM began buying up and closing down streetcar networks).

    I will note that there is room for wheeled personal transport in a 15-minute city. But because all distances are so short, there's no need for speed, so there's no need for protective affordances like bumpers and air bags and crumple zones, which all add to vehicle weight and make them more dangerous to everyone else. Mobility scooters, electric-assist cargo bikes/trikes, maybe electric-assist recumbent quadricycles or rickshaws. All subject to local constraints imposed by weather and geography, but it should be possible for personal vehicles in a 15-minute city to be limited to: zero emissions, top speed 20km/h (about 14mph), and no morethan 50kg of weight per occupant.

    683:
    no more than 50kg of weight per occupant.

    This might be difficult to attach a hard number to. I see a lot of people who are morbidly obese having to use scooters to get around. So how much cargo they should be rated for, when the occupant themself has great mass?

    684:

    Well yes, but it's a target; I see figures bandied around of roughly 20-30Kg for power-assisted bicycles, so it's a starting point.

    685:

    Charlie
    So Musk DOES get "public transport" & he's against it?
    "15-minute City" - well I still have a car, for very occasional use, to go to places where there is zero public transport &/or I want to carry/drag/move loads that the Electric bike { Wiley e. bicycle } won't shift.
    Can I put in an puff for electro-bikes here? They are amazingly useful & effective.

    686:

    The book of words for my mobility scooter says "suggested maximum weight of user 159kg on level road" (although they then stuck a strip of blank paper over that row in the table, so you have to hold it up to the light to read it). I interpret that as meaning "me plus up to ~110kg of cargo", although the most I've ever had on board was 40kg and that was only feasible because it was bagged stone that could go in the footwell under my feet; in general as a cargo carrier it starts to fail badly for anything more than a couple of bags of shopping.

    The thing itself is about 100kg plus or minus a few depending on what size batteries you've got in it, so that's still up to a quarter of a ton trundling about with only rudimentary braking on only one axle.

    687:

    Moz at 655: "Willing Recipient of Sexual Favours springs to mind as well but that acronym doesn't bear thinking about"

    Not too bad...

    worseoff

    Which is quite entertaining.

    688:

    With car-centric, petrochemical cities like, oh, Chicago, how's that all supposed to work?

    Chicago is easy compared to Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, Wash DC area, etc...

    Chicago has lots of fairly dense areas.

    Around here (see JBS's comment) were are in a mud wrestling match where local politicians are trying to deal with growth in a somewhat rational fashion and move to the future. But they are opposed by the "planned" growth crowd (read "no growth" in my neighborhood). And it's getting ugly. All those new bike lanes are obviously a waste of money since they were not full the day after the paint dried. And what do you mean more bus routes. We HAVE CARS.

    So our government is flipping between NIMBY/BANANA politicians and those to what to deal rationally (if not all that well at time) with the crowds moving to an area rated consistently in the top 10 places to live in the US. FYI - Google and Apple are part way through staffing up 1K and 3K people in new setups. Plus there are a lot of others. And many of these are moving here with a pocket full of money and making well north of $150K per year (think DINCs) and are out bidding the locals who want the politicians to stop the rise in housing costs. While building no new housing.

    FYI-JBS. Walmart now has free grocery delivery. Not an endorsement. Just a data point.

    689:

    Quick test with my bathroom scales and picking each one up, folding electric bike 20kg, road bike with electric conversion kit fitted 22kg.

    Seemed to be plenty of electric bikes weaving in and out of Festival goers when I was there a couple of weeks ago, although mostly with Deliveroo or similar carriers slung on the back.

    690:

    683 Para the last - It took me about 2 minutes in Google to find a mobility scooter with a tare weight of 50kg and a payload of 120kg.

    686 - I think it's more "Elon is against public transport that he might have to use".

    691:

    In general any American city that began build-out before 1910 has at least a downtown core that was designed to be walkable/public transport habitable.

    Suburban sprawl couldn't start before mass automobile ownership, so, early 1930s at the earliest?

    Admittedly many of those downtown cores have been razed and rebuilt as central business districts/skyscraper farms or freeway overpasses/junctions, but the land still exists -- and cities were usually built where they were because of logistics constraints imposed by the needs of shipping, industry, or agriculture.

    Also, those sprawling freeway junctions? Not only do they not need to be that big (there are more compact junction types, used in other parts of the world -- eg. the UK use of grade-separated gyratories instead of cloverleaf intersections), but modern highways cover an enormous amount of land for the passenger numbers they convey: a move to public mass transit doesn't just make living in close proximity desirable (if you want to live within easy walking distance of a transit stop), it shrinks the land area devoted to transport, so making denser living easier.

    692:

    This is something I've been thinking about for a long time. If you can get some kind of computerized driving, combined with the ability to route people like packets, then you can kill at least 75% of the cars on the road, possibly more. Something minivan-sized would hold six people easily, and remote work/staggering shifts and office start times... you might be able to kill as many as 80-90 percent of all existing cars and still take people door-to-door.

    693:

    Could be; As some of you may know I'm on haemodialysis, and in the UK you are legally entitled to transport provided by the local Health Board to attend sessions. The vehicles used are minibuses fitted out to carry the driver, an optional attendant, 5 seated patients and a 6th on a stretcher.

    694:

    you might be able to kill as many as 80-90 percent of all existing cars and still take people door-to-door

    Sounds like a bit like the buurtbus they have in the Netherlands.

    One thing you are ignoring is the use a vehicle has to store stuff. When I go shopping I try to cram as many shops in as I can, so I visit the first shop, but purchases in car, and repeat multiple times. With your system I need to carry all the shopping around with me*, or make multiple trips.

    I did this just yesterday when I visited the art gallery and bought the exhibit catalogue, then went for a multi-hour hike along the trails at the same location. I left the purchase in my car before starting the hike, so I didn't have to carry a shopping bag in 30+ C heat.

    I also have inclement weather clothing stored in my car, so if I'm out somewhere and it starts raining etc I have an umbrella/raincoat handy (not to mention a dry change of clothes). Chargers for various electronics. Emergency cell phone. Spare pair of glasses. Mostly not needed, but when needed very much appreciated!


    *Which can get tricky because some shops don't like people coming in with items they have purchased elsewhere, especially if they sell the same items.

    695:

    In general any American city that began build-out before 1910 has at least a downtown core that was designed to be walkable/public transport habitable...Suburban sprawl couldn't start before mass automobile ownership, so, early 1930s at the earliest?

    At least in California, the second sentence doesn't follow from the first. Here, land speculation drove sprawl. Street car and rail systems like the LA Red Line enabled it to start to be built well before cars took over.

    Here land speculation started early. There's a little town near the Sacramento River Delta named Benicia. It's rather cute and quaint, up on a bluff overlooking the river. It would have been a perfect place for a state capital, and it was indeed the California state capital between 1853 and 1854. Unfortunately, land speculators drove up real estate prices so high that the state moved the capital to the much less desirable (hot and flood-prone) confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers, where Sacramento sits today, while Benicia has a population of 27,000 or so.

    San Diego was even worse. The first land speculation boom happened here in 1887, when 4,00 realtors and 24,000 land speculators camped out in shanty towns and subdivided and "sold" enough plots to house a million people by the time the Santa Fe railroad got here. The railroad instead went to National City, and a bunch of people lost their shirts in the crash. One speculator supposedly told a newspaper "I had a million dollars wiped out in the crash, and what's worse, $500 of it was in cash."

    The wealthy people who got richer off these booms (Huntington, Spreckels, etc.) built streetcar and railroad lines to service these booms. As with the gold rush, they made money on goods, services, and infrastructure, not get-rich-quick schemes.

    San Diego has a long history of housing shortages being met with sprawl and inadequate infrastructure. We're still dealing with the problems in Linda Vista caused by the US military throwing up great swaths of cheap houses for workers and military families during WW2. They forgot about little things like sufficient water lines and adequate sewers. The houses are still there, even more desirable now because they're small and affordable, unlike what was built from the 1980s on. And the dearth of infrastructure there is still a problem, 80 years on.

    Now I'll freely grant the California's one of the heartlands of the What the Frack Were They Thinking school of modernist planning, but that spirit is alive and well elsewhere (Florida, Texas, and Arizona for example.). Basically none of those 1887 land speculators who descended on San Diego were local boys. They came from all over the US and went home broke. The locals were somewhat more into agriculture, gold mining, and supporting the Confederacy.

    Making this...folly...sustainable is going to take a lot of work and a lot of luck. And a lot of not just enriching the wealthy people who are invested in building companies, rather than in long term survivability, which may be even harder...

    696:

    Liz Cheney is thinking of running for US Pres, knowing she can't win, specifically to pull the rationaal/semi-rational GOP votes from TFG.

    697:

    The classic example of that is downtown Austin, TX. They destroyed the downtown, to the point that as of the early nineties, pretty much NO BUSES went downtown on weekends, because the only thing that was open, other than historical stuff, was Sixth St, with the clubs. Period.

    698:

    Liz Cheney is thinking of running for US Pres, knowing she can't win, specifically to pull the rationaal/semi-rational GOP votes from TFG.

    How do you know? I mean, I would be ecstatic if she did, but all I had read on this matter were speculations.

    699:

    On the "room mate" question:

    I'm learning German with Duolingo (mainly). One of the words it taught early on was "mitbewohner", literally "with-liver" ("liver" from live/life, not the organ). This is translated by Duolingo as "room mate", but according to other dictionaries it can also mean "flat mate" or "house mate".

    700:

    "FYI-JBS. Walmart now has free grocery delivery. Not an endorsement. Just a data point."

    As another Walmart data point, we were in a couple of Walmarts in coastal South Carolina recently and they both had help-wanted signs prominently displayed at the entrance. The sign in Beaufort was in Spanish only (Se Necesita Personal), and the one just outside Charleston was in both English and Spanish. Both stores had zero staffed checkout lines, where previously there would be one or two.

    701:

    That's true of most of the US just now. People have cut back their standard of living to have more time for their families. (In a very over generalized statement but ...) So the work force has shrunk relative to the total population count.

    PBS Newshour (USA) did a segment this week on local governments having trouble hiring people. The example was a municipal sewage system. Would you rather work over these pools of "interesting" water for $15/hr or pick shipments for Amazon at $18/hr. And with Amazon you're allowed to listen with your earbuds in.

    At my son in law's small factory (where he works) they are pissed (not him) that they are competing now with McDonalds across the street.

    702:

    Street car and rail systems like the LA Red Line enabled it to start to be built well before cars took over.

    Yeah, commuter villages are a thing: see also Ratho Station (outside Edinburgh, it has a brief wiki page).

    But the communities around the transit stations were initially built to be within walking/cycling range of the stations, right?

    The real problem exists where the tracks were torn up and not replaced with roads, but built on.

    703:

    Se Necesita Personal

    Speaking of which, this from Colombia where the employment gap in the US is being noticed with interest. Google translate will do an adequate job on it if you need it.

    https://www.semana.com/finanzas/trabajo-y-educacion/articulo/se-necesita-personal-en-ee-uu-buscan-con-urgencia-gente-para-trabajar-hay-ofertas-para-colombianos/202254/

    The United States is one of the most desired destinations by Colombian citizens in recent times, because it is a country that constantly offers job opportunities.

    According to the most recent data, the North American nation would be in need of new labor and last June there were more than 10 million job offers for less than 6 million applicants, leaving millions of vacancies free.

    704:

    Crypto - energy & privacy concerns

    Just read these two articles and thought folks here might also enjoy them.

    Question:

    How pro-crypto is the UK (your country) - and its various parties?

    'Blockchain’s Forever Memory Confounds EU ‘Right to Be Forgotten’'

    https://news.bloomberglaw.com/privacy-and-data-security/businesses-adopting-blockchain-question-eus-strict-privacy-law

    'Cryptocurrency's Dirty Secret: Energy Consumption'

    https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/05/04/cryptocurrency-energy/

    JBS @672:

    '... hope he doesn't run out of show tunes'

    Loads of show-tunes around, esp. if Randy also looks beyond Broadway. Most of the SKorean musicals that I'm still regularly watching/listening to were composed by USians and Europeans. I think that Randy could easily do a great job adapting this particular song to current events. It's from 'The Man Who Laughs' (based on the Victor Hugo novel of the same name), composer is USian Frank Wildhorn.

    Korean musical ‘The man who laughs’ - Open your eyes [English subtitle]

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZvcXMj6hsk&ab_channel=HR

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Laughs

    705:

    The real problem exists where the tracks were torn up and not replaced with roads, but built on.

    Actually, that's not what happened, at least in LA. The Red Line system was kind of clunky all along, and it was taken apart and replaced by roads and freeways, not built over with housing. *

    The problem with urban design here is that, until recently, zoning was single use: housing, retail, commercial, industrial, agricultural. People would live in residential areas, hop in their cars to shop in retail areas (like malls), drive to work in commercial or industrial zones, and agriculture was left as a holding category for older farms and ranches that were bought out and developed.

    This is what's powering sprawl. While single-use zoning provides some really handy safety and infrastructure benefits (no houses near high energy industrial companies like General Atomics), it relies on cars going further than people can walk. Currently, GHG emissions from cars and trucks are over half our local emissions.

    Mixed use land zoning is so old it's new here, with gentrification and rebuilding of old commercial centers into mixed residential/retail. It's taking off, because it cuts car use. However, it also requires a fair amount of infrastructural retconning, especially if everything needs to be electrified.

    The other problem is Southern California invented NIMBYism, so rezoning a bunch of houses in a 1980s housing development for local shopping is inevitably going to collect a shit-storm from the neighbors who will inevitably complain about it ruining the character of the neighborhood and attracting those people who will cause problems. Heck, subdividing a single mcmansion into flats, something that routinely happens around colleges, will attract the same shit-storm from the same people using the same reasoning. That's part of the cost of change here, unfortunately.

    *LA, incidentally, now has a subway and train system, but it doesn't reach most of the burbs for good reasons having to do with residual oil fields and the earthquake fault system that emplaced the oil there (google Dominguez Hills if you're bored). They'll get there eventually, it's just effing expensive. And, unlike Japan, we didn't get our cities flattened by a warm, so rebuilding them is piecemeal, controversial, and expensive, not an act of healing after a great catastrophe.

    706:

    Please note I said "thinking of", which is what all the news stories say.

    707:

    It's quite common in the UK.

    708:

    ilya187 replied to this comment from kiloseven | August 18, 2022 22:22 | Reply 652:

    But, His Orangeness is not eligible to run again, as per the 22nd Amendment. Thank goodness.

    Is that supposed to be a joke on his claim that he won 2020 election?

    No. Win or lose, you get two shots at the 'prize'.

    And, he lost.

    709:

    Not everyone can use those. My trike would come in at 25-30 Kg, and a velomobile more like 50. The latter are closer to a usable car replqcement.

    710:

    This is absolutely incorrect. The limit is two terms, not two runs for office. Trump definitely plans to run in 2024, unless he has to run to Russia first and maybe even then.

    711:

    Err, no. You only get to serve two terms in the post (actually 2.4999 if you started as VP andthe main guy didn't finish but did get over halfway). You can stand as many times as it takes to get the two wins.

    712:

    I find myself wondering how much of the current shortage of workers (and various knock-on inflationary effects) are directly a result of:

  • Pandemic border closures resulting in a near total stoppage of immigration in a lot of 'western' countries. Local 'flavour' like Brexit madness and Trumpian xenophobia also contribute.

  • In the US in particular, the outright hostility and demonization of migrant/illegal immigrants causing them to leave or go to ground, thereby also removing themselves from the workforce.

  • In effect, the stoking of 'nationalist' and xenophobic fires for electoral advantage combine with pandemic border closures to blowback on the oligarchs by suddenly depriving them of a sufficiently immiserated pool of potential workers, leading to wage increases and ultimately inflation.

    You can see in that context why the central banks are so very worried, and doing their best to create a recession that makes workers desperate again.

    713:

    Yes, but you didn't mention long COVID, which has probably thrown several million otherwise-healthy workers on the scrap heap for the indefinite future (in the USA alone: probably 2 million plus in the UK, pop. 67M).

    714:

    Charlie Stross @ 682:

    I've said before I think the Boring Company would be better used to tunnel under cities to install mass transit.

    Musk has apparently said that hyperloop, and the Boring Company, was a play (by him) to sabotage support for high speed rail in California.

    Well, anyone who has halfway been paying attention knows Musk is a selfish piece of shit, but how does he benefit from sabotaging high speed rail in California or anywhere else?

    715:

    Well, anyone who has halfway been paying attention knows Musk is a selfish piece of shit, but how does he benefit from sabotaging high speed rail in California or anywhere else?

    He's in the business of selling cars. His actual idea of mass transit seems to be caravans of self-driving EVs. These aren't as space or energy-efficient as trains or buses.

    716:

    No. Win or lose, you get two shots at the 'prize'. And, he lost.

    Not true. You can only be elected twice, but you can run as often as you like.

    Reagan, for example, ran in 1968 and 1976 before he won in 1980 and 1984.

    717:

    Charlie Stross @ 683:

    Thinking back to when I moved in here, this area was a 15-minute city within the city and looks to maybe becoming one again (with the exception there's no grocery store I can safely walk to).

    718:

    Troutwaxer @ 693:

    I'm visualizing something like a combination of city bus sized vehicles that run regular routes (and can run them 24x7) and various size pods - 4, 6, 12 people & cargo pods all controlled by computer. With tunnels, you wouldn't need "driving".

    The network could be built out from the cities, so there would be a station at the entrance to national parks ... where there would be low cost rental vehicles for those who wanted to go somewhere in the park beyond general walking distance. I guess with somewhere like Yellowstone, those vehicles would need to be bear & bison proof, but somewhere like Great Smokey Mountain National Park, they'd just need to be able to climb the mountain from park headquarters up to Klingman's Dome & back.

    But you'd still be able to drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

    719:

    long COVID, which has probably thrown several million otherwise-healthy workers on the scrap heap

    Not sure how true that is in countries with a "work or starve" system. Which even civilised countries tend to have for non-citizen immigrants and guest workers. Plus a lot more people who are still working to the best of their ability, and fearing that they're inevitably going to be found out and pushed down the stack until they find their new level.

    This is also where the every-increasing surveillance and ai-management stuff will be helping or hurting depending on which side of it you're on. Although if the stories from Amazon etc are any guide, it's only helping the shareholders because even management is being overseen by the all-seeing eye of encouragement.

    720:

    various size pods - 4, 6, 12 people & cargo pods all controlled by computer.

    In Australia we call those vehicles "vans" or "minibuses" and don't allow computer-controlled ones anywhere. We have a tiny number of automated trains but those obvious operate in tightly constrained circumstances. I think we're waiting for countries that have more disposable people to work through the bugs before we let computers start killing people on and adjacent to our roads.

    It's interesting that the strands of anti-vaxx and anti-medicine folk who go on about the safety of medicines don't have the same worries about other experimental ideas. Whether those be economic or government experiments "will fewer people die if we cut the minimum wage?" let alone corporate ones "can we make more money by killing more workers" or "more money by experimenting with novel AI in public". They don't even seem to be pushing to find out the death rates so they can compare them and decide which is the larger risk.

    721:

    Robert Prior @ 695:

    It would probably require some work arounds ... take your two hour hike BEFORE you do your shopping. It would also require the shops to accommodate customers who need to visit multiple stores.

    722:

    Kardashev @ 701:

    Thing is, I was speculating on a way to reduce dependence on automobiles society wide, but the Walmart grocery delivery would invariably require someone with a car to deliver my groceries.

    It might reduce my personal dependence on an automobile, but it wouldn't do much for society as a whole.

    723:

    SFReader @ 705:

    '... hope he doesn't run out of show tunes'

    Loads of show-tunes around, esp. if Randy also looks beyond Broadway.

    In the video Randy Rainbow tells Garland to "Step on it sis ... I'm running out of show tunes". (2:30) It's more a point of how many more parodies of Trumpolini is he going to have to come up with.

    I hope there are not TOO MANY more before Trumpolini goes to jail; and I especially hope Randy Rainbow isn't still doing them Jan 21, 2025.

    724:

    kiloseven @ 709:

    Anyone who serves two terms (1½ terms if it's a Vice President taking over) can't run again. But UNTIL that point they can run as many times as they want.

    725:

    As mentioned above, you can serve at most 2191 days (2.5 terms less a day) as president, so long as the first 730 days is from when you succeed the serving president.

    You can run as often as you want. Harold Stassen sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1948, 1952, 1964, 1968, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, and 1992. He only had a realistic shot at it the first two times (at least according to Wikipedia).

    For those of you who have read Bored of the Rings there's a throwaway line about the parody equivalent of the Mirror of Galadriel showing Harold Stassen's Inaugural parade, the triumphant entry of the RMS Titanic into New York Harbour, etc. When I first read BotR, I didn't know who HS was, but I did get the Titanic reference.

    726:

    "Thing is, I was speculating on a way to reduce dependence on automobiles society wide, but the Walmart grocery delivery would invariably require someone with a car to deliver my groceries."

    When we've used supermarket deliveries in the US and Central America, it's almost always been by a van driving a route and making several deliveries at a time. That, obviously, needs a fairly dense (spatially) set of customers with several ordering at the same time +- a few hours. But in an urban setting, it lets one route substitute for several individual trips.

    I suppose a variant of that could be the store posting a schedule of routes and letting the customer sign up for delivery on the appropriate route.

    727:

    Re: 'I hope there are not TOO MANY more before Trumpolini goes to jail; '

    Understood & agree! Then he can move on to some of the other similarly in human pols.

    728:

    It's interesting that the strands of anti-vaxx and anti-medicine folk who go on about the safety of medicines don't have the same worries about other experimental ideas.

    Don't know how it plays out in Australia, but in US there is a strong overlap between anti-vaxxers and anti self-driving.

    729:

    "it's almost always been by a van driving a route and making several deliveries at a time."

    In these here parts (suburban Wellington, Aotearoa) when you put in an order for home delivery, you also book a delivery slot, usually the next available slot, which is quite likely to be the following day, but you can book a later slot if that one doesn't suit. There are three or four slots per day for a given area, and I would expect that there are other slots for other areas served by the same place.

    During the hard lockdown, you would be lucky to get a slot in the following week.

    Then yes, a van or light truck delivers everything ordered for a given slot in one run.

    JHomes

    730:

    It would probably require some work arounds ... take your two hour hike BEFORE you do your shopping.

    Well, that would mean going to the art gallery dripping with sweat – not very nice for the other visitors!

    731:

    The prophecies and orhans aren't incompatible with 45 IQ trainwrecks. After all, if they propecitze the people of the kingdom doing well who says that isn't due to the Prophecized King being an utter idiot and breaking the ruling class's power with his ineptness...

    732:

    I hope there are not TOO MANY more before Trumpolini goes to jail; and I especially hope Randy Rainbow isn't still doing them Jan 21, 2025.

    One for IQ45

    --He plea-bargains on the documents charges, gets to plead guilty and register as a felon, while staying out of jail, if $CONDITIONS are met ($CONDITIONS may involve house arrest, giving up passports, not running for office again, etc).

    --He violates CONDITIONS

    --Hello Leavenworth.

    Problem with this story is that any lawyer worth his license knows that IQ45 is likely to break whatever he promises. It's what he's done for decades. So the AGs have to be trying to figure out a low risk method for defanging him, letting his cheating get him in worse trouble, but not turning him into a martyr.

    The basic point is that jailing even a convicted POTUS is a bit of a nightmare. For his own security, he should be in solitary, but given his stature, this will be seen as cruel and unusual by his followers, even if deserved. If jail is a bad idea, keep him in the warming oven of house arrest to spend the rest of his life being served lawsuits seems like another way to deal with him.

    733:

    Or you can put whatever you just bought in the trunk of the car and let the vehicle network route your package back to your house. None of this is particularly difficult.

    734:

    There are probably a lot of ways to do it. Individual cars feeding a hub-and-spoke type arrangement, cars of various sizes, vans of various sizes, etc. The important thing is the intelligence of the system, and the idea that like the Internet, the system can accommodate multiple people using it to sell services.

    735:

    All automated cars need to do in the U.S. is kill less than 45,000 people a year (the number which die every year as a consequence of people driving.) The state of the art isn't there yet, but I don't think it will be more than 10 years. Even with human drivers, the intelligence in the system is the really important part!

    736:

    "It might reduce my personal dependence on an automobile, but it wouldn't do much for society as a whole."

    Remember that there's a carbon cost to build each automobile, so having less cars which run more frequently still requires less manufacturing.

    737:

    721 and 729 - UK data point. I'm fully vaxed, to the extent that I had flu' 21-22 at the same time as Covid 3. I am also anti-self-driving because I don't trust the software. For example, it can mistake a crisp packet for a toddler, and a white over the road truck for an empty road.

    733 - Additional clarity needed as to the meaning of Leavenworth; see the linked Wikipedia disambiguation page.

    738:

    Don't know how it plays out in Australia, but in US there is a strong overlap between anti-vaxxers and anti self-driving.

    Also anti-science, anti-foreigner, anti-liberal, anti-poor, and anti-black/hispanic. I'm sure there's more that I've forgotten...

    739:

    Ilya187
    As you will understand, I'm strongly pro-vax, but I am extremely suspicious of "self-driving" vehicles.
    Anyone who has made even the most cursory study of railway accidents & the multiple steps taken to prevent them, can see the problems of autonomous vehicles, that steer themselves - on top of all the autonomous-but-guided "simpler" problems that trains have!
    We have thought of everything - NO, you bloody have not!

    740:

    I am also anti-self-driving because I don't trust the software. For example, it can mistake a crisp packet for a toddler, and a white over the road truck for an empty road.

    I am anti-people-driving because I don't trust people to not drive while drunk or to not make similar kinds of disastrous mistakes... :-(

    The accidents I have while riding a bicycle (like my stupid fall during an 80-mile bike ride last Sunday) have a much smaller likelihood of leading to serious consequences for others or for me (as Monday's visit to the VA Emergency Department proved). Luckily I was only doing a few mph at the time - almost all of my biking accidents have been at slow speeds. A fall at 45 mph (my fastest-ever downhill speed) would likely be pretty grim, especially at my age!

    741:

    Re hyperloop vs train.

    From what I can remember Musk is being taken out of context. He did hope that Hyperloop would be taken up by someone and it would kill the high speed rail project by being better. It's the "by being better" bit that everyone leaves out.

    If I remember his objections to HSR correctly, first was cost. Because the rails are on the ground, you have to buy up and secure hundreds of miles of land in one of the more expensive places. 100 billion on that side of things. The hyperloop goes underground or in an elevated tube. So there's far less land resumption.

    Then they have to be secured. Because there's a 350 km/h train, you can't let anyone or anything on the track. So it slices through the landscape dividing everything. Again, hyperloop is in a tube, so you don't have to secure it and it doesn't cut counties and towns in half. You can walk or drive over or under it. It doesn't impose extra travel on the locals. No one needs to drive miles to a crossing and then miles back to get to their neighbour's house. Hyperloop doesn't cut migration routes for wildlife.

    Then there's the sound. It's 350 km/h at sea level. Next to people's houses. Hyperloop is silent outside the tube.

    Then there's the cost of the HST ticket. Because of the huge energy used, the wear on 350 km/h wheels and the maintenance needed for track, and security, projected ticket price is the same as the airfare.

    Speaking of airfares, it's projected to be about the same as the plane, but it's twice the travel time. No one will want to use it. Hyperloop is half the time of the plane, and probably cheaper.

    It's half the time of driving, which is nice, but both cities are car oriented, so you'll need to hire a car at the other end.

    742:
    • there's the cost of the HST ticket. Because of the huge energy used, the wear on 350 km/h wheels and the maintenance needed for track, and security, projected ticket price is the same as the airfare.*
      OK, explain to me where/how hyperloop makes savings here.
    743:

    If I remember his objections to HSR correctly, first was cost.

    And tunnels were supposed to be an answer to that? Does the man not have access to the internet, or know anyone who does? If there's one thing tunnels are famous for it's being bloody expensive.

    Making them out of expensive materials and elevated doesn't make them orders of magnitude cheaper. I suspect they wouldn't be cheaper at all, in most places. The one real advantage in California might be that a big, carefully designed, elevated, evacuated tube might survive earthquakes better than a tunnel would.

    And I dunno about you, but to me keeping people out of a railway line seems much easier than keeping air molecules out of it. I did wonder briefly whether his hyperloop was going to be sealed well enough to selectively admit smaller gas molecules, then sweep them up with the train so they might get a useful amount of ... hydrogen? Oxygen? out of the terminus points.

    744:

    On the self-driving car thing:

    A safety engineer of my acquaintance put it this way. When you introduce a new safety system, you may find that your safety incidents drop to 50% of what they were before. BUT of the remaining 50%, 30% (i.e. 60% of the residual) will be directly caused by a failure in the new system.

    Troutwaxer @ 736: All automated cars need to do in the U.S. is kill less than 45,000 people a year (the number which die every year as a consequence of people driving.

    That's the common sense position. Unfortunately common sense may not be the decider here. Oddly, it might well wind up being a purely financial matter with insurance: if you injure or kill someone from behind the wheel (or even just rear-end someone's car) then your insurer pays the third party damages. If automated cars do this less then logically insurance premiums for automated driving should be less than for manual driving, in a weird case of capitalism actually doing the Right Thing when confronted with invaluable commodities like health and safety.

    The actual rules for designing auto-drive to be sufficiently safe are going to be highly technical, which means they get written by the industry they are supposed to be regulating. This isn't actually too bad: ISO 26262 is the current industry standard for automotive safety systems and reflects the consensus within the industry (but doesn't yet address self-drive). For individual manufacturers its a bar of uniform height that everyone has to clear; if you follow it you have a strong defence against any claim of liability due to negligence and a cast iron defence against criminal liability. From the industry point of view a safety scandal is in nobody's interests, so it makes sense to have the rules strict enough to be effective. Also the rules are public, the authors' names are public, and the process for deriving the rules is discoverable (in the legal sense). All this makes finangling the rules for commercial advantage an iffy proposition at best. Plus the companies in question actually have an interest in strong regulation: its an effective barrier to entry.

    So far so technocratic. But of course politics is going to get involved, at which point the outcome becomes pretty arbitrary. On one hand you have big companies, often with big unions, putting their thumb$ on the scales. On the other side you have media panics over individual cases, with heart-rending interviews with the victims and their families. In the middle you have Joe Voter.

    745:

    Back @ 340 I wrote:

    [Partial list of goals of education:]

    • How to behave as members of a large and complex technological society. (Which often means "obey the guy in charge" because that's what it takes to make and operate large complex technological artefacts).

    This article on Motherboard puts an unpleasant twist on it:

    e-HallPass, a digital system that students have to use to request to leave their classroom and which takes note of how long they’ve been away, including to visit the bathroom, has spread into at least a thousand schools around the United States.

    The system has some resemblance to the sort of worker monitoring carried out by Amazon, which tracks how long its staff go to the toilet for, and is used to penalize workers for “time off task.” It also highlights how automated tools have led to increased surveillance of students in schools, and employees in places of work.

    This in addition to the metal detectors and armed police already in many schools. It would seem that one purpose of education, at least in the USA, is to teach children how to behave in a totalitarian dystopia.

    746:

    the Walmart grocery delivery would invariably require someone with a car to deliver my groceries.

    Supermarket deliveries round here use custom-built vans with box bodies and refrigerated sections for the produce, full-time employed delivery drivers making multiple drop-offs per loop. I assume WalMart isn't that far behind the curve? (Although their attempt to expand into the UK market resulted in them being spanked out of it by Tesco, who it turns out are far more voracious.)

    747:

    Paws said: OK, explain to me where/how hyperloop makes savings here.

    Noting that I haven't seen the details of either system and one is a napkin sketch.

    350 km/h at sea level is moving a lot of air very fast. That takes a lot of energy. Probably about the same as an aircraft per passenger. Energy costs money. Hyperloop runs in a vacuum.

    Wear on the wheels, Train wheels wear out, maglev doesn't wear out.

    Wear on the track, as above.

    Security for hundreds of miles of track costs money. Evacuated tunnels 100 ft underground aren't much bothered by Mikey dancing with the trains.

    748:

    Something I'm continuing to have no luck finding evidence of online is a utopian children's book I first discovered in the school library in the early 1980s. It was actually called "2010", and it predicted all the things we needed to have by 2010. Electric cars, electronic libraries and goods delivery via oil-filled pipes are the things that I remember, but there was more. Does anyone have any idea?

    749:

    Speaking of which: I just ordered an at-home delivery from Morrisons (rather shit chain, in particular their fresh fruit and veg is crap quality -- but we're going away in a week, so I was mostly ordering storable stuff for when we get home). Order placed at 12:20; delivery window is 3-5pm this afternoon.

    The orders are despatched from a large supermarket on the city bypass (half an orbital ringroad -- it's not a complete ring road because the other side would be under the Firth of Forth or have to ram through densely built-up coastal urban housing) and generally take about 40 minutes to drive this far into town: I'm usually stop #1 or #2 on their route, going by the updates and the tracking map.

    750:

    Sorry, it's Tommy who likes dancing with trains.

    751:

    Yeah, all those objections are bogus.

    We have 350km/h high speed rail. It's been built out fast and efficiently in places like China and Spain. Egypt is getting high speed rail these days. Grade separation isn't a big deal: you can build track on raised structures like highway overpasses (which also helps with the noise).

    One problem the USA has is ridiculous railway safety standards -- passenger trains have to be built to withstand impacts with heavy railfreight using the same tracks, so US specs result in the world's most overweight high speed trains. (And are therefore slower and more expensive to propel.) It's like they've never heard of Japan's Shinkansen network, which was deliberately built using a different track gauge so it wouldn't share tracks with other traffic. Thereby avoiding the "oops, I just derailed in front of a 24,000 ton freight string" problem and the "I want to be as fast as a turboprop but I have to be as impact-resistant as a tank" issue.

    It's a mature technology, we've had it in one form or another since roughly 1962 -- the original Shinkansen and TGV sets are long since replaced by newer generations, you can tour the surviving ones in museums -- and these objections just don't hold water.

    I mean, the real problems with HSR in the USA are local culture, a whole lot of NIMBYism, and the lack of any clue about an integrated transport policy (you need big car parking lots by stations, downtown termini in dense urban areas, additional termini at airports serving hub-to-hub routes because the HSR trains are replacing commuter turboprops), and so on.

    Oh, and the same in Australia. You guys REALLY need a new high speed link between Sydney and Melbourne. Maybe Canberra, too. (It's a bit of a reach to replace the Perth to east coast route, or the east coast north to south route, though: distances are too great for the passengers, might as well stick to airliners.)

    752:

    Moz said: And tunnels were supposed to be an answer to that? Does the man not have access to the internet, or know anyone who does? If there's one thing tunnels are famous for it's being bloody expensive.

    That's true, they do have that reputation.

    8 years ago the world bank estimated the California HSR cost 56 million per km. 11 million for track, and the balance for land acquisition. I'm guessing the value of land in California would have close to doubled. For the Vegas loop the Boring Company built 2 stations, and 2 km of tunnel for 47 million.

    753:

    Something I've seen around Edinburgh over the past few weeks is FedEx delivery trikes, pedal cycles with an electrical assist motor and a storage box about a metre on each side on the back. They may be a clement-weather-only option or a trial deployment. I am waiting for the inevitable complaints by regular cyclists who find these large vehicles parked up in cycle lanes blocking their way while the "driver" makes a doorstop delivery or pickup.

    https://news.stv.tv/west-central/fedex-introduces-e-cargo-delivery-bikes-to-glasgow-and-edinburgh

    754:

    "The basic point is that jailing even a convicted POTUS is a bit of a nightmare."

    I wonder how the Secret Service protective detail would deal with the situation. Probably be easiest and cheapest to build a special-purpose compound.

    755:

    Charlie Stross said: Yeah, all those objections are bogus.

    They probably are. But that's not what I'm saying. The attractive story is that evil billionaire wants to ruin nice things because evil. The reality is evil billionaire thinks HSR in California is completely bonkers, and gave those reasons (as best I can remember) and you've provided more reasons why HSR makes no sense in California. Evil billionaire actually wants better, cheaper, faster, more energy efficient public transport that can be built faster and has thrown some of his own money into trying to make it happen.

    It's not as much fun to think that the evil billionaire has a thing for great public transport, but that's where we're actually at.

    756:

    You've forgotten one little detail (which Musk also never mentions): the glorious Las Vegas Mini Loop has to a first approximation about 1% of the carrying capacity of High Speed Rail. So in order to not compare apples with oranges we need to adjust for this. In order to transport the same number of people the Boring Company will have to bore roughly 100 km of Loops in parallel for every km of (admittedly expensive) HSR. Which—even if I assume that the stations cost more than half of the total 47 million and the kilometer of tunnel came in at only 10 million—adds up to a nice round one billion dollars per km.

    And suddenly HSR is beginning to look like a bargain compared to the Hyperloop.

    Here's an informative video on the Las Vegas Loop from Adam Something who does take carrying capacity into consideration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvK2i9Jxy5c

    And here's his critique of the Hyperloop in general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQJgFh_e01g

    757:

    Cars are not more energy-efficient than trains. They can't be, simply because of the much higher rolling resistance of deformable (rubber) tires on roads, compared to the much lower rolling resistance of steel wheels on steel rails. (Also, electric trains don't have the parasitic weight penalty of carrying their own battery packs around.)

    Grade separated track is a known thing -- well, not in Australia or the USA as far as I can tell -- which solves most of the other problems.

    Now, hyperloop does have one good idea: lower diameter tunnels are much cheaper to dig because the cost of excavation scales as the square of the radius of the tunnel. Trains are huge, about as big as they can be for the track gauge they run on. Tunnels to accommodate American rail freight are unfeasible (they run 40 foot freight containers stacked two high, so the payload alone is four and a quarter metres high -- you'd need a tunnel at least five metres in diameter for single track running without overhead lines). A TGV trainset is 4.05 metres tall, so that's a bloody big tunnel if you include overhead lines. I'm guessing nobody bothered to think whether they could use a narrower gauge/lower vehicle height for passenger-only services.

    But turning hyperloop tunnels into a road for self-driving automobiles seems like a waste of a good idea.

    758:

    Well, Charlie's already provided a lot of possible answers. Other points he hasn't mentioned include things like how you sustain a vacuum in the tunnels/tubes, the whole thing about California being potentially an earthquake zone...

    759:

    The other problem is Southern California invented NIMBYism, so rezoning a bunch of houses in a 1980s housing development for local shopping is inevitably going to collect a shit-storm from the neighbors who will inevitably complain about it ruining the character of the neighborhood and attracting those people who will cause problems.

    May I return it to you? The shit-storm is here in spades. Everyone likes the new jobs but the amount of wailing about the results based on fear mongering and a total lack of facts is unreal.

    760:

    but it wouldn't do much for society as a whole.

    One van trip delivery groceries for 4 to 10 homes. Or more.

    761:

    Amongst other things, Fort Leavenworth, KS has a maximum security Federal prison. For the mental health of the other inmates, house arrest for the "Drumph!" might be preferable.

    762:

    A TGV trainset is 4.05 metres tall
    From ground plane to where? I'm sure that's taller than a trailer car, and I think it's taller than the aerodynamics fairings on the power cars so I suspect that figure is ground plane to catenary.

    763:

    Also anti-science, anti-foreigner, anti-liberal, anti-poor, and anti-black/hispanic. I'm sure there's more that I've forgotten...

    Based on my relatives and others I know it is basically anti anything.

    764:

    Supermarket deliveries round here use custom-built vans with box bodies and refrigerated sections for the produce, full-time employed delivery drivers making multiple drop-offs per loop. I assume WalMart isn't that far behind the curve?

    They tend to lead the curve in such situations. They are large enough to do things like pay for 10 each of 5 different van designs and see which works best. Then buy 100. Then 1000. Then 10000 if things keep working out as planned. If not they drop an idea and move on.

    Being a fan of "not invented here" will get you fired.

    765:

    I mean, the real problems with HSR in the USA are local culture, a whole lot of NIMBYism,

    Sort of. The entire thing of sharing rail lines you mentioned is that east of the Mississippi and on the West coast you have to destroy 10,000 homes or maybe a million of them to create a new right of way or even widen an existing one. Which is a non starter.

    Which is why the high speed thing in California was going to be so far inland. Which made the stops no where near where people would use it.

    Over the last 15 years my area has dumped something like $300 million into multiple commuter rail systems and each time they have died over what comes down to right of way issues.

    766:

    Additional clarity needed as to the meaning of Leavenworth;

    Leavenworth as a US federal prison has been around since the later parts of the 1800s. It is a slang stand in in conversations about sending someone to a federal prison

    767:

    Speaking of which: order scheduled for 3-5pm delivery was on a van as of 2:50pm. I am stop number 3, and it's about six miles away by road ... but with Maps estimating 25-30 minutes driving time, which is absolute insanity because that's driving through central Edinburgh, it's summer, and the city is heaving with tourists: more realistically, it's 40-50 minutes. So bang on schedule for a 4pm delivery.

    768:

    California HSR going inland to avoid people? Puhleeze. The San Joaquin Valley might conceivably be the next place for sprawl cities. So long as the people pushing this crap don't look at the fact that it's a salty, hot desert that works as farmland temporarily when you can import more water than you need to keep the plants happy and flush the salts into Kesterson "wildlife refuge" (check Wikipedia for that horror show). Sarcasm aside, the coast between the metropolises has slow roads, slow trains, small towns, big ranches (Santa Barbara), USSF major launch facilities, and not much use for HSR. The Central Valley's easier to build in (it's seriously flat land) and growing faster at the moment. That's where HSR belongs.

    Anyway, the technical problem with California's HSR (or Muskrat hyperloops) is that a train from LA to north of the Transverse Range has to cross the San Andreas, so adult engineers (not Muskrats) need to get involved in designing something that can break cleanly, be rebuilt quickly, and take heavy abuse the rest of the time. Japan's got strike-slip faults all over the archipelago, so this is doable. If HSR goes into the Bay Area, it also has to cross multiple faults. Again, doable but non-trivial.

    Moz is right about the land speculators, which have bedeviled California since 1853 (see my previous posts about Benicia and San Diego). When they announced the HSR route, land prices jumped in response. AFAIK most of that land is owned by big farmers, super-rich (pomegranates are Wonderful! and so is exporting alalfa for Arabian horses living in the Gulf), and industry (apparently corporate farms are owned by insurance companies, your retirement funds, etc.). None of them benefit personally from HSR, so why not try for vast gobs of government buyout?

    Another problem may also occur in politically conservative and GQP districts across the US. For example, the California HSR would have to cross Kevin McCarthy's congressional district. I'd wager a few coins this might matter? I also suspect that's it's difficult to run a new rail line across the US without dealing with Red politics.

    In cities and towns, buying people out of the rights-of-way does also get expensive. I completely agree on that.

    Sometimes undergrounding a line makes sense, as we're finding out here. The existing coast rail line runs along the edge of an ocean cliff, and it's crumbling into the sea (google Del Mar bluffs and settle in with a bag of popcorn). Amtrak's going to underground the tracks under a bunch of mansions because that's the only choice, and a bunch of rich people are getting twitchy in response. But since the alternative is to cut the rail link between LA and SD, it will happen, and the major discussions are where the exit holes are and how deep it has to be to avoid messing up the mansions above the track. The Boring Company, incidentally, is nowhere to be seen in all of this, which tells you how serious the Muskrats are about actually helping solve these problems.

    You may have noticed I'm unimpressed by hyperloops and Borers? It's because I actually read the proposals. They run on a big ol' helping of "I'm a genius billionaire, and your stupid rules don't apply to me." When you do apply such sensible rules as "don't go digging holes through earthquake faults, oil fields, and under highrises without finding out what you're going to dig through," the ideas don't work so well. So either Muskrats aren't that intelligent, or these ideas were publicized for other reasons. Take your pick.

    769:

    "The reality is evil billionaire thinks HSR in California is completely bonkers, and..."

    ...comes up with something to make it look sane by providing a point of comparison which is fucking batshit?

    Start with a railway. Add a requirement for high speed, thereby bringing in the square-law restrictions on curvature which go with it.

    Observe that building such a railway through any vaguely populous area is going to be difficult and expensive. Decide that the best way to make it easier and cheaper is to completely reverse the criteria for choosing forms of construction to meet that end: building a line on the surface is easier and cheaper than building it on a viaduct, which in turn is easier and cheaper than building it in a tunnel, so obviously (if you're Mr I've-Never-Met-A-Nice-South-African) the best way to make the whole thing easier and cheaper overall is to build as much of it in a tunnel as you can, and where you can't, you build a viaduct and then put a tunnel on top of it.

    That such a form of construction should be especially suitable for an area which has faults all over the place and keeps having earthquakes is not bloody surprising, mun.

    Then, you create an environment inside the tunnels which is incapable of supporting life. You commit yourself to a constant drain of energy to maintain that environment, you make any form of maintenance work inside the tunnels a complete and utter pain in the arse, you make all the stations (which are notoriously expensive things even for a conventional system) a whole lot more complicated and expensive with all the spaceship-airlock interface crap they need, and you ensure that when anything goes wrong with a train in motion, everyone on board will die even quicker than people falling out of a plane.

    You build a 2km toy version and claim that proves it'll be practical in any size you want. Yeah, right. You can build a 2km toy version that proves it's practical to put bristles round the train and blow it down the tunnel with big fans, or to put the train on huge spherical wheels and run it in a semicircular concrete trough, or to have one rail on a gantry underneath the train and the other on a bigger gantry over the top of it and stick a propeller on the end to move it along, too.

    Maglev. I used to think this was a great idea until I saw that it appears to be impossible for actual humans to build it without fucking it up by being stupid and doing it the wrong way round. Funny how people can loudly decry third rail for being lossy and wasteful but not have a problem with making a gigantic traction motor on the same scale. (Note that I don't actually know if Mr Ignorant-Loudmouth-With-No-Sense-Of-Humour is indeed proposing yet another backwards implementation, but it does seem to have become standard practice for some incomprehensible reason.)

    It seems to me that all the idea's good for is getting people all starry-eyed over the prospect of actually implementing something out of 1940s hack SF, and thereby distract them from attempting something more practical that might get in the way of him selling electric cars. And not even very good for that, because not that many people have their enthusiasm aligned in that particular direction.

    Note re insulting references: I freely admit that I don't like Elon Musk, and I keep thinking of this song whenever he comes up: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2z39tr

    770:

    "they run 40 foot freight containers stacked two high, so the payload alone is four and a quarter metres high - you'd need a tunnel at least five metres in diameter for single track running without overhead lines"

    If only you actually could get away with a tunnel that small. That's about the size for a single track tunnel for a British train - 16.5 feet for the Great Northern & City "main line sized tube" from Finsbury Park to Moorgate, to pick an example with a circular cross section.

    771:

    Security for hundreds of miles of track costs money. Evacuated tunnels 100 ft underground aren't much bothered by Mikey dancing with the trains.

    (Heavy sarcasm warning, and please understand it's not aimed at you. I'm still drinking my coffee)

    I think the best use for a hyperloop, other than being the tram for that Saudi Arabian Line (120 miles in 20 minutes!) is as the prop for a disaster movie.

    I mean, seriously? An evacuated tunnel 400 miles long? Even US politics doesn't suck that hard. Or even that consistently.

    But let's assume we can keep such a line sealed, even though it does cross a couple of earthquake faults that creep sideways. Even though they have open parts of it every few minutes to let people into and out of the trains. Let's assume this is all feasible, and once created, this vacuum will last with minimal work. What are we lining this tube with again? How often does someone have to go in and patch it? Sorry, I forgot. The tech works. Never mind.

    So anyway, a maglev is running through this at high speed (who maintains the rails? Never mind. It works). Since it's tight-fitting, not much weight moves around inside the train for the trip, because wobbles would be bad. So of course everyone stays strapped in for the entire trip, and there are no toilets, because they'd have to be serviced regularly, like the trains, for which we've got a whole train yard in a vacuum, and...Never mind. I forgot. The tech works.

    But say something does go wrong. A seal breaks, air goes flooding into a section, and a train plows into it at mach one. Minor oopsy? Probably. I'm sure the trains will be designed for this eventuality. That's an easy fix, isn't it? Maybe they could shape the fronts of the trains like pistons, and put a shaped incendiary on the front so that the train, dieseling into the air, ignites the solid fuel rocket engine and gets 30 seconds of rapid deceleration? Nice passive safety system, and the rocket motors double as a bumper between cars. Or something. It's all good.

    IIUC, when the tube breaks and vacuum is lost, every other train in the segment has to scream to a halt (literally. This is why everyone wears harnesses, and no one gets out of their seats. It's in case of emergency 1.5 gee forward stops. Small children and cats will not be allowed in for everyone's safety). So over the course of about an hour, a broken hyperloop turns into a linear disaster 400 miles long with nothing usable until they repair the track, reseal the system, evacuate it, and check for leaks. That won't take very long, will it? Never mind. I forgot. The tech works.

    Great movie scenario. For HSR? I'd be a little nervous riding it. But I have anxiety issues, and I forget. The tech works. I'm just being silly about it. Never mind.

    (/sarcasm. This is why I should drink more coffee before posting).

    772:

    ... And supermarket drop delivered at 4:19pm, almost exactly four hours after the order was placed.

    773:

    Speaking of airfares, it's [high speed rail's] projected to be about the same as the plane, but it's twice the travel time.

    The claim about travel time may be a bit misleading. First, no security - so you're not going to get to the railroad station two hours ahead of time. Second, the station is going to be in the heart of the city (like current railroad stations), so no long drives out to the airport. So I'd guess HSR travel times would pretty much the same for a lot of people.

    And - of course - HSR would almost certainly be electric instead of hydrocarbon. Much better for reducing global warming...

    774:

    I think the best use for a hyperloop, other than being the tram for that Saudi Arabian Line (120 miles in 20 minutes!) is as the prop for a disaster movie.

    No, there is one valid use case for hyperloop.

    If and only if Musk gets to build his Mars colony it will require hyperloops to connect outlying settlements.

    Consider:

    Martian atmospheric pressure maxes out at about 1% of Earth sea level, so no pumping is needed for a good-as-vacuum tunnel.

    Mars has no plate tectonics so, vulcanism aside (they all seem to be dormant or extinct right now) you don't need to worry about crossing fault lines.

    Running underground is good because you need that radiation shielding.

    Mars settlements are likely to be buried or domed and very centralized to make optimum use of pressurized and heated habitat volume. But there will be outlying installations for stuff like manufacturing fuel or launching/landing space vehicles, at a minimum. (You do not want to be launching Starship vehicles, even without the Superheavy booster, from anywhere near a habitat dome.)

    Hyperloop is a perfect fit for an early-years Mars colony, and it's fairly obvious it's one of the ideas Musk was noodling around with for that purpose. Obviously, if he could find a way to sell it to people on Earth it'd be useful to bootstrap the technology base here rather than on Mars. Unfortunately it's a terrible fit for use on Earth, unless you need a big-ass replacement for those old department store pneumatic tubes for moving vacuum-safe goods around. Hmm, maybe internally in some of Amazon's larger warehouses ...?

    775:

    But say something does go wrong. A seal breaks, air goes flooding into a section, and a train plows into it at mach one. Minor oopsy? Probably. I'm sure the trains will be designed for this eventuality. That's an easy fix, isn't it?

    Oddly, yes.

    We run into this problem whenever we pull the trigger on a rifle, or a howitzer, or other piece of artillery that fires a projectile at > Mach 1; a bullet in a gun barrel can be approximated to a train in a tunnel, after all.

    What happens is, the air ahead of the bullet get compressed (a lot) very fast and heats up. And the bullet slows down, correspondingly, but not too much because gun barrels are relatively short.

    Now, trains: actual existing high speed trains in places like Japan, China, and Europe tunnel through mountains at speeds on the order of 200-300km/h. Even the ancient and creaking Eurostar trains exceed 120 of your old school miles per hour under the English Channel.

    Trains deal with the compression/shockwave thing by a variety of means. They have a long, pointy nose like the Shinkansen N700S Series (which is apparently planned for service on the Texas Central Railway linking Dallas and Houston some time this century at up to 205mph). The tunnels have overhead ducts venting into a smaller bore tunnel to diffuse the overpressure pulse. And so on.

    Anyway: we can do it at lower speeds. And I don't think it'll happen at transsonic speeds because I don't think an abrupt pressurization event in a hyperloop is likely to occur without some other really catastrophic accident, like a tunnel-collapsing quake. More likely the 400km long tube would repressurize gradually, over multiple seconds to hours, at which point everything is going to slow down gradually, rather than hit a brick wall.

    It'd still be a dreadful mess and you might end up strapped upside down in a bucket seat without a toilet for eight hours until they winch you out, but it wouldn't be as dramatic as you seem to think.

    (I still think it's a really dumb idea on Earth, though.)

    776:

    What are we lining this tube with again? How often does someone have to go in and patch it?

    Simple.

    You build a tunnel inside of a tunnel. And then apply the patches to the outside of the inner tunnel as it will be drawn to it by the vacuum.

    Problem solved.

    Next?

    777:

    I think we can solve two problems at once. The first is creating a useful hyperloop. The second is how to imprison Trump. My proposal is that we dig a five-hundred mile tunnel between San Francisco and San Diego. Put Trump's cell at the San Francisco end of the tunnel. When it's time for a hyperloop train to leave LA, open the door to Trump's cell, and his personal suck will evacuate all the air from the tunnel and the hyperloop train will run to San Francisco on the pressure differential provided by Trump's constant suckiness.

    Not sure how we'd handle the trip to back to San Diego. Maybe we could put Jared Kushner's cell in San Diego? I have no doubt that Jared can generate a lot of vacuum... has anyone seen the reviews of his book?

    778:

    There's little point in running a hyperloop to San Diego, because the Santa Ana mountains mess up the topography and force train tracks either well inland or to the coast.

    That said, if the Republican candidate for LA mayor wins this fall, there will be enough suck coming out of LA City Hall to make your system work. For a few years, anyway.

    779:

    If and only if Musk gets to build his Mars colony it will require hyperloops to connect outlying settlements.

    I suspect simple tunnels with Aussie-style road trains (EV tractor pulling a bunch of trailers, at least one of which is a battery pack) would probably be more useful and versatile. Trailers can haul people, freight, energy, water, or whatever, and all they need is a few hundred meters of regolith overhead to keep the nasties out. While rail would be more efficient, you'd need to smelt and forge the metal, and that's a lot of embodied energy in the rails. One thing I think we forget about Mars is that it's a pretty low-energy environment to live in. Solar irradiance on Mars is 43% of Earth, wind energy is weak (thin atmosphere), wave energy is non-existent, petroleum is non-existent, uranium remains to be found... So while yes, I agree that humans on Mars will be living in tunnels (probably lava tubes to start), I'd suggest that minimum energy transit solutions are probably going to be the ones that get widespread use in a colony there. Giant two-person wheelbarrows instead of lorries, that sort of thing.

    As for HSR, I agree with you, and I wish we could just import the damned technology and build it. Alas, the politics of wealth get in the way. As usual.

    If you want a counterfactual to play with, imagine that the British Empire had invented automobiles to replace canals and carriages, and British rail had died on the vine. How would you folk go about building railways in the UK now, with current politics and a car-centered culture? That's essentially where the US is.

    780:

    I like your counterfactual.

    Here's another one: what if, in the UK during the British gauge war of the 1840s, GWR's broad gauge had won (7' track gauge) instead of what became standard gauge (only 4'8.5")? Wider rights of way would have been needed, and wider turning radii, but broad gauge would have been high speed rail ready more than a century early, after the build-out of the 1830s-1850s.

    With broad gauge the centripetal acceleration on curves is less objectionable and tilting trains wouldn't really have been seen as desirable for passengers.

    Isambard Kingdom Brunel (GWR's chief engineer) was also an early proponent of containerized freight, with transshipping onto steamers ...

    781:

    I have always felt that Canada would be a great spot to build some HSR. The route from Edmonton to Calgary (~300 km) happens to have a wide, separated highway (6 lanes). The median between them would be a great place to build HSR.

    In my childhood there was the CPR run 'Dayliner', a single car train that raced back and forth between Edmonton and Calgary. Apparently said cars also served a lot of other routes, but they all faded away in the late 70s - outcompeted by air travel and automobiles.

    782:

    Or you can put whatever you just bought in the trunk of the car and let the vehicle network route your package back to your house. None of this is particularly difficult.

    So you are proposing I visit the art gallery, spend time touring around, buy the books, put them in the trunk of a common-use self-driving car, got for a two hour hike, take another common-use car home, then ask the first car to deliver my packages and hope no one has removed them (or melted ice cream onto them) in the meantime?

    783:

    Powering a martian reactor is easy - you buy the fuel from Earth, and land it by litho-breaking the ingots. Just like all the other specialty metals.

    Parachutes do not work very well on Mars, but they will slow down a cargo enough that it will not actually vaporize on impact, which makes shipping bulk metals there pretty straightforward. Get, your aim right, areo-break, then crash into the correct spot of ground for later pickup.

    Paying for said metals, now... uhm... Not really having much luck coming up with a money maker a moon-base or "We hauled some asteroids into near-earth orbit" facility would not do far better

    784:

    Speaking of airfares, it's projected to be about the same as the plane, but it's twice the travel time.

    Does that include time at the station/airport, as well has having to actually get to the station/airport?

    Airport recommendations here are to arrive two hours before your scheduled departure for domestic flights (pre-pandemic, not they recommend 2.5 hours). This effectively doubles the travel time for many short-haul routes.

    Ignoring, of course, the tendency of airlines to cancel undersold flight to merge them with the next one, even before the pandemic. It was always officially 'mechanical issues' or 'adverse weather' so passengers weren't owed compensation. (There was a story in yesterday's local paper about a couple who had that happen to them: he got an email saying it was inclement weather and a $20 voucher offer, she got an email saying it was a staffing issue and a $100 voucher — for neighbouring seats on the same flight, booked at the same time.)

    785:

    This could work; as a aside to this, you can still see some of the "broad gauge" trackbeds in Bristol Temple Meads station.

    786:

    You build a tunnel inside of a tunnel. And then apply the patches to the outside of the inner tunnel as it will be drawn to it by the vacuum.

    Which means you need to dig a larger tunnel to accommodate the repair access, which negates one of the supposed savings of a hyperloop requiring smaller tunnels…

    787:

    Yep. There have been studies of relative travel time.

    It turns out that once you take into account check-in, boarding, disembarkation, and luggage claim times, you've got a fixed overhead of roughly 3 hours for any flight -- plus time to/from the airport.

    Trains do not need those things. Well, Amtrak kind of do a brain-dead imitation of airliner boarding by forcing passengers to queue in front of closed doors in front of the platform then rush for the train five minutes before the departure, but that is stupid and unnecessary and other railway networks run just fine without doing that.

    The travel times therefore cross over. If two cities are less than a thousand kilometers (700-odd miles) apart, then a high speed train can bridge them in less than six hours (in some cases in as little as three hours). A commuter turboprop would take 3 hours to fly that distance but once you add the ground side tap-dance it's a wash with catching a train. Jet airliners are of course faster, but it's still a tie with high speed rail at 800km or so.

    I used to have to commute to/from London weekly for some work contracts. It's a 400 mile trip each way.

    Train: 4h15m from a station 15 minutes from home at this end (on foot) to another station 15-60 minutes from the destination by public transport.

    Plane: the only airport that could whisk me to and fro faster than the train was LCY, which is smack in the middle of London and handles turboprops and small commuter jets, and flying in and out of it costs more: including ground time I could do a hand-luggage-only trip in just 3h30m, because there was a regional jet service. (90 minutes in the air, and at least 30 minutes to get on and off the plane at each end, plus 30m to get home by taxi instead of 15m walking).

    The other airports -- LHR, LGY, LTN, and STN -- were equidistant in the air but took a lot longer to get to (or cost a lot more) and had much worse queues. So they all took at least 4 and sometimes 5 hours for the trip.

    TLDR: even the LNER trains -- maxing out at 125mph, and stopping along the way -- could consistently beat the point to point journey time of a turboprop across a realistic 400 miles trip.

    788:

    Interesting article in this week's Big Issue (charity magazine sold by/for homeless people) about Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia. It went car free starting around 2007. Pedestrian streets, events held in the now walkable streets, lots of cycle ways, and electric buggies for those who can't ride bikes. Clean air, out of city parking, bike hire. They've apparently got it sorted.

    789:

    Here's another one: what if, in the UK during the British gauge war of the 1840s, GWR's broad gauge had won (7' track gauge) instead of what became standard gauge (only 4'8.5")? Wider rights of way would have been needed, and wider turning radii, but broad gauge would have been high speed rail ready more than a century early, after the build-out of the 1830s-1850s.

    Okay, so my grumpy ecologist brain goes, why would anyone pay for wider rights of way and 50% more per railway sleeper with broad gauge versus narrow?

    Cue random mumbling from my AltHistory persona. They came up with two scenarios, one goofy, one batshit. You figure out which is which.

    Ignoring the cost of rights of way, the main expense appears to be railway sleepers. So what if the development of Portland cement accelerated a few decades so that concrete sleepers could take the place of wood, eliminating the problem of sourcing enough oak for the sleepers. And you get Victorian England cast in concrete instead of brick as a side effect.

    The other scenario starts with the Younger Dryas not happening, and the Pleistocene megafauna, notably woolly mammoths, not going extinct. Mammoths domesticated themselves with humans (or vice versa), and became helpmates and draft animals earlier than aurochs did.

    So you know the old story of standard gauge being the width of cart wheels to accommodate a horse's ass? Well, the Brunel gauge was designed to accommodate a mammoth ass, because mammoths hauled trains for quite some time. Railway sleepers aren't beams, but rather stone blocks with holes, so the mammoths wouldn't pick up splinters from the beams.

    Brunel loved him some mammoths, and when he managed to get a bunch of mammoths trained to haul cargo containers off trains and load them onto steamers, and vice versa his fortune was made.

    Other historical changes probably happened in this scenario, but whatever, it's still August.

    Cheers.

    790:

    Yes. When I went from Cambridge to Montgenevre, it would have been one hour faster by aeroplane (c. 12 hours, 943 km straight line). If I hadn't had to have pre-booked seats and Eurostar check-in, the times would have been the same.

    791:

    "broad gauge would have been high speed rail ready more than a century early, after the build-out of the 1830s-1850s."

    Sorry, no, it wouldn't. Standard gauge does just fine - after all, it's what they use... High speed trackwork is all about the difference between real track and the ideal: how much it differs, what scale the differences manifest over, how do you minimise them and how much effort do you put into keeping them minimised, and so on. Also about how resilient it is and how much it moves under the weight of a passing train, which involves the ballast as well as the track itself (what thickness, what size stones, what kind of stones, tamping, cleaning, replacement...) The actual distance between the rails doesn't have a lot to do with it.

    Brunel wasn't actually very good at this. His success with big static structures obscures his rather lesser ability with dynamic things. Trackwork is funny stuff, because it's sort of on the border between static and dynamic, and it seems to have confused him, because his idea for keeping the track more stable actually made it rapidly become lethal.

    The first stretch of track in Britain to see scheduled 125mph running was in fact Brunel's, but not because of the broad gauge, because that wasn't there any more. It was because he'd laid it out with minimal curvature and gradient to facilitate high speed, and did so more stringently than other route builders with similar ideas did.

    A hundred years earlier, though, it would not have been possible for lack of the locomotive technology. Conventional reciprocating steam engines are becoming quadratically sillier at that kind of speed (getting away with belting the crap out of one to break a record does not of course mean you can do that all the time and expect it to be a good idea), and you'd have had to wait for Charlie Parsons to come along before you had a power plant that was up to the job.

    You'd also still have been in the dogshit brakes era, when railway companies didn't see why they should fit decent brakes to their trains just to stop them crashing, and the law saying they had to whether they wanted to or not hadn't happened yet...

    "With broad gauge the centripetal acceleration on curves is less objectionable and tilting trains wouldn't really have been seen as desirable for passengers."

    No, it's just as bad. Passenger tolerance is what sets the limit on cornering force; the stability limit is much greater, at somewhere around 1g of lateral acceleration with standard gauge and the usual kind of stock. The comparatively small increment you'd get from going to broad gauge is already well into the region where there are other reasons you can't use it. The reason tilting trains can work at all is that there is such a big margin between what passengers can tolerate and what the actual thing itself can, so you can increase the cornering force by however much you've reduced the passengers feeling it and still not come anywhere near the danger point. The first actual measurements which suggested this could be the case weren't done until 100 years after Brunel did the broad gauge.

    "Isambard Kingdom Brunel (GWR's chief engineer) was also an early proponent of containerized freight, with transshipping onto steamers ..."

    Hehe, yeah, he proposed containerised freight as a means of overcoming the transshipment problems from the break of gauge...

    792:

    It turns out that once you take into account check-in, boarding, disembarkation, and luggage claim times, you've got a fixed overhead of roughly 3 hours for any flight -- plus time to/from the airport.

    For me I can drive door to door 250 miles and fly door to door with 20-30 miles at each end of driving plus rental car pick in about the same time. 5 hours. And in MY CAR I have my snacks and whatever else I want to bring. My wife would still rather fly. Sigh.

    793:

    MSB said: You've forgotten one little detail (which Musk also never mentions): the glorious Las Vegas Mini Loop has to a first approximation about 1%

    1) no I didn't 2) hyperloop and the Boring Company Vegas Loop are different things 3) if you read the thread you'll see I was refuting the claim that buying surface land is cheaper boring a tunnel in California. What you put in the tunnel or on the land is a separate question.

    794:

    "Ignoring the cost of rights of way, the main expense appears to be railway sleepers. So what if the development of Portland cement accelerated a few decades so that concrete sleepers could take the place of wood, eliminating the problem of sourcing enough oak for the sleepers."

    ...and the additional CO2 meant global warming had hit a while ago already, is that the idea?

    (Sleepers grow by themselves, and you can use things like pine if you want, plus enough creosote. (sniff) Mmm. Rails were a bigger problem; in the early decades they didn't even have steel for them, and when it did come out it cost a packet.)

    "And you get Victorian England cast in concrete instead of brick as a side effect."

    Blech.

    "Railway sleepers aren't beams, but rather stone blocks with holes, so the mammoths wouldn't pick up splinters from the beams."

    Brunel's track didn't have sleepers. It had continuous longitudinal baulks underneath the rails, and transverse iron tie-bars conspicuously widely spaced to hold it in gauge, with big gaps in between.

    So yeah, that makes sense. It also makes more sense that he thought it would be a good idea to nail all the joints down, with mammoths rather than locomotives. I thought they were slow lumbering things though. Was there a racing version for passenger services?

    795:

    Sorry, it's Tommy who likes dancing with trains

    Right. Mikey took a knife while arguing in traffic. Not the same Mikey who had a facial scar, or the Marky who got with Sharon, though.

    Speaking of Texas, I found the HSR project between Houston and DFW Charlie mentioned above. Helpfully it's called The Project, because that isn't confusing at all. It would certainly never be confused with the Australian current affairs TV programme of the same name, which I hardly ever watch, anyway.

    796:

    As indicated upthread, the most interesting thing about Western Region and the "Goes to Wales Railway" (GWR) is that there are stretches where the Brunel Broad Gauge trackbed are still visible. This should not be confused with the track alignment between London Paddington and Bristol Temple Meads which makes it possible to run a double Valenta powered rake at speeds up to a record for UK conventional tracks of 148 mph without causing passenger discomfort.

    Also, I think Charlie has the right of it about a direct relationship between gauge and peak cornering speed. A wider track vehicle rolls less in a given corner at a set speed given a set vehicle mass and spring rates. Even if you're Australian, you should still be able to find the relevant formulae and prove this to yourself using variables that you chose yourself.

    797:

    hyperloop and the Boring Company Vegas Loop are different ... buying surface land is {not} cheaper boring a tunnel in California

    My loose understanding of US geography makes me think that the geology of the Las Vegas bit of California is quite different to the HSR bit, with the latter have more fault lines, bigger fault lines, and more active fault lines. Unless Musk deliberately chose to tunnel through a major fault in Las Vegas they would not have had 99% of the challenges.

    But I do agree that the cost of boring three or four hyperloop-sized tunnels from San Francisco to Los Angeles would be much less than the cost of boring two HSR sized ones. You'd need more hyperloop tunnels for reliability, because even with separable sections and switching between them you're still going to need to shut down a tunnel to fix it up, then tediously pump it out again. Which I suspect will take longer than a weekend. But "SF to LA in an hour, services run 4x an hour except for the occasional month or two when they don't" isn't going to be a viable proposition. It doesn't work for Amtrack...

    My expectation is that at least initially they'll cross fault lines on the surface. That will save them digging a big slot where the fault is. The slot means that after a slip they don't have to build another tunnel from scratch, they can "just" bend the track to take account of the new transition. Sure, the slot will be 20-50km long, and probably 10m minor diameter, 20m major at the fault but at least the tunnel won't get utterly destroyed by the first P wave that wanders by.

    I'm sure it could all be done, I'm just not sure what the point is. The most obvious use I can see is building up up the side of a mountain and putting a door on the end so the trains can reach orbit more easily. Like the big spinny thing, but without the (forces may exceed 10,000G) caveat.

    798:

    Train tunnels

    My impression from the discussion so far is that it's assumed that such train tunnels would run vast distances without stopping. No regional, semi-local deliveries. Curious what the current 'miles/kilometers shipped' is for current typical shipping in the US vs. UK vs. Japan vs. Australia. Also, trucking companies* are a big part of the US economy even if you don't factor in their huge fossil fuel usage. (Guessing that there'd be a lot of political resistance to such tunnel networks from at least these two industries.)

    OOC - if most goods shipments were switched from on land (trucks) to tunnel (trains) I'm guessing that it would probably add up to a lot weight, pressure and vibration on a much more frequent basis. And more so on every dimension than for passenger transport. Is this (wt, pressure & vib) something that gets reviewed/checked before such a plan gets approved? Has the entire US/UK/Australia been mapped for soil composition and compaction to identify problem areas?

    *Trucking companies are also currently having problems retaining and hiring drivers. But just like the Pennsylvania mining CEOs that probably won't stop them from complaining and asking for gov't hand-outs/bail-outs.

    799:

    You guys REALLY need a new high speed link between Sydney and Melbourne. Maybe Canberra, too.

    Well yes. To start with, SYD-MEL is the third busiest air route in the world by passenger numbers and the second by the number of scheduled flights. Sure that's a funnel effect, but it still means there are significant passenger volumes. SYD-BNE isn't that far down the list, but is obviously further with less population in between.

    We periodically hear tell of reports from studies that were apparently specifically commissioned to show why HSR is unviable here, usually to do with population density and passenger volumes. Meanwhile the towns along the Hume Highway have bypasses built around them and slowly bleed population to the capitals. We did have a project in the 80s called the Very Fast Train, and it's possible there's a bit of reverse whimsy at play, rail projects have an inevitable large volume of twee that just makes them culturally very easy to shoot down.

    Including Canberra, even as a spur line, would be a significant value add, because commuting to Canberra is something a lot of people do. From Sydney it's not so bad as you can get a regular commuter train to the domestic terminal at SYD, although it's a taxi ride through appalling traffic from CBR to Canberra. People who commute to Canberra from Melbourne mostly drive, the other options are just that cumbersome.

    I'm starting to find I lack the patience for arguments about cost. For large government infrastructure projects, finding ways to do it cheaper is not necessarily a good thing and maybe defeats some of the point of doing it. Similarly public transport doesn't need to break even to deliver net benefits.

    800:

    Paws
    For those of us not blinded by the self-serving hype: "GWR" stands for: "Gas Works Railway" cough

    LOADING gauge is what matters, track-gauge, not so much

    801:

    Although much smaller than Wal-Mart, Tesco make them look like a quite a homely Mom&Pop operation in terms of their attitude to competition. Tesco in the UK bought up huge tracts of land, not because they wanted to expand, but to stop their competition from being able to expand (this wouldn't work in the US with your wide open spaces, but is a workable anti-competitive option for UK retailers). They are also well known for taking advantage of government schemes which forced the unemployed into jobs whether they wanted them or not and where the government basically paid the wage of the employee rather than the company (and I suspect whether he would admit or or not, they were probably who OGH had in mind for the grocery store company in Quantum of Nightmares).

    Wal-Mart until recently owned about the 4th largest grocer in the UK (Asda). They exited the market because they couldn't make the sorts of profits they were used to in the US. The UK grocery trade is extremely cutthroat. (Not though you'd know it as a consumer or a supplier.)

    802:

    you'd need a tunnel at least five metres in diameter for single track running without overhead lines

    We're digging 12-15m diameter tunnels around Brisbane these days and have managed to build three, all for road, in the 15 years since they started putting tungsten-carbide heads on boring machines and it became practical to bore through Brisbane Tuff. The current project is for rail.

    Sure that's not for long distances, but still... the large fixed costs are around getting the machine into place in the first place, then getting it out, if the latter is even cost effective to do. Sometimes it's practical for the machine to bore its way from the end of one project to the start of the next one. So increasing distance has lower marginal cost than you'd think.

    803:

    But TBMs are slow! That's why longer tunnels often have multiple droppers in the middle to allow multiple TBMs.

    Fast rail between Sydney and Melbourne is one of the favourite plans for governments to talk about during elections (The Utopia TV series was a fan). But it's a lot of money and Australian politicians are notoriously bad at "tax cuts or infrastructure?" questions. And since it takes more than one electoral cycle to go from "me want" to "the plan is in progress" it's been very easy for stupid governments to cancel things before they develop momentum.

    I expect that much of the necessary land is owned by ... people who are well used to defamation law in Australia.

    Look at the Nearly Broadband Network as an example. Despite being much, much quicker than HSR it was still possible for a newly elected government to make it much more profitable for their mates (obviously at the expense of making it much worse and more expensive for the taxpayers). The idea of HSR being underway and that happening doesn't bear thinking about - it could turn a 10 year, $100B project into 30 years and $500B.

    NSW has a recent/currently being litigated example of someone buying land for $5M or so then the state government purchasing it for $30M not long after. Basically insider trading but with land, with bonus corruption/above market price paid. Do that times 900km between Sydney and Melbourne and the hyperloop might turn out to be cheaper.

    804:

    Sydney also has a lot of experience with tunnelling under houses, and a lot of it is the bad sort. Old, poorly built stone or brick houses don't like vibration, especially not prolonged vibration. And people don't like it much either. TBMs go even slower if they only operate between 7am and 7pm... which is what they have to do if whoever is running them doesn't own the land above but instead there are people living there. Or they have to go deep, and in Sydney/Melbourne that means a long way below the water table. Doing construction under 10 bar of water is no fun{tm}

    What Sydney at least could probably do is cut and cover existing quad track, ideally be buying land to realign it and cutting into that. Friend of mine has some "rail fantasy" planning stuff for commuter rail because current trains struggle to go fast on the old steam train goat tracks that make up a fair bit of the Sydney network. It's not that they can't go fast, it's just expensive and loud. So smoothing out the Campbelltown to Central line would mean you could HSR on the same path and use the land above to run commuters and freight.

    Because the other big problem in Australia is shitty, poorly maintained, never improved freight rail. It shouldn't be faster to truck boxes between the cities than rail freight them, between the same damn depots. Dropping freight lines next to the passenger ones would mean you could run freight trains at 100kph or so and cover the 900km faster than a truck while still being able to deal with branch lines and other shenanigans.

    805:

    Do you mean that there are (or were; I think they've all gone now) odd bits of Brunel-esque baulk road (in standard gauge, and with modern-type rather than bridge rails) still kicking around here and there? These are interesting for at least giving an idea of what it used to look like, even if they're not accurate. The Didcot crowd have laid a bit of the "real thing" in replica form, but I can't remember whether you can see that from the main line anywhere.

    If you mean there are stretches where the bit of shaped ground is still the same as when it had broad gauge on top of it, well yeah, there's plenty of that, but it's not a lot wider than if the ground had been shaped for standard gauge, and much of it you can barely tell the difference any more, so I don't see your point.

    You are of course correct about the relation of the gauge to the amount the carriage can sway sideways on its suspension and thereby augment the apparent cant deficiency as experienced by the passenger, but it's not the only component and it's not a very large one, and "all else being equal" doesn't apply in practice, so for real trains it still turns out that there's no noticeable advantage from going to a wider than standard gauge for high speed operation.

    "Better stability for high speed" is the part of the broad gauge idea that everyone remembers, but part of the original idea was also to sling the carriages in between the wheels instead of having them perched on top, making it possible to have larger wheels which ride better over rail joints etc. That would of course have meant the distance between axleboxes ended up much the same as for a standard gauge carriage of ordinary construction, so the improved sway resistance bit wouldn't happen.

    806:

    You'd put them in the car's trunk, and they'd be shipped back to your house using the same routing algorithms that move people around. Understanding how this works makes a lot more sense if you simply understand that every physical object on this network is a packet, including you, your groceries, your recently-purchased artwork, etc. Each "packet" has a starting point, and ending point, a unique id, a desired time of arrival and a security status (and probably some other stuff.)

    807:

    On another topic, my 17 year old excitedly told me about watching yesterday's SpaceX passing over our region last night, with a string of satellites being released. A shame he didn't call me as I'd like to have seen it.

    The launch was from Florida and we are West Coast Canada, so it must have orbited at least once to show up in our skies here.

    808:

    Question for Charlie (hope it is not too personal):

    When you decided not to proceed with "Singularity Sky" / "Iron Sunrise" series, did this decision have anything to do with the fact that S.M. Stirling had acquired a rather creepy "Draka fandom"? That is, fans who read Draka books because they wish they were Draka?

    809:

    "I'm starting to find I lack the patience for arguments about cost. For large government infrastructure projects, finding ways to do it cheaper is not necessarily a good thing and maybe defeats some of the point of doing it. Similarly public transport doesn't need to break even to deliver net benefits."

    I lost patience with it ages ago. Some project comes up which initially seems like a great idea because while most of the possibilities it creates are pretty minor, the list is as long as your arm and multiplying the two together it comes out that it would be jolly useful. Then it goes through endless rounds of having bits cut off to make it cheaper, precluding those possibilities one by one and justifying it with stupid excuses, like "there's no demand" which being translated means that nobody wants to do it now because you can't, therefore nobody will ever want to do it even if you can. What finally emerges is something that is usable for exactly one thing and one thing only, is not designed to do that thing actually well enough to be properly useful, and has resources so barely adequate to doing that thing even as well as it does do it when everything is going well, that as soon as any normal everyday problem crops up the whole thing falls in a heap. It's crippled before it starts; even if it does turn out to get so much use for that one thing that it starts to struggle for capacity, it can't have extra capacity added without tearing half of it down again and rebuilding it better from scratch, at several times what it would have cost to build it with the extra capacity in the first place.

    It also takes forever before anything happens at all, because they spend so much time giving so much money to endless iterations of parasitic "consultants" to pull another set of figures out of their arses and then changing the idea slightly and going round the loop again, etc, that if they'd just got on with it and done it in the first place we'd have had it up and running long ago for less money than they've spent on heating the air and achieving no result. And it would be more useful because it wouldn't have had all that effort devoted to seeing how many things they think they can get away with making it not useful for.

    The obsession with "breaking even" would be a joke if it was funny. It's almost certain that it won't "break even" or anything close to it, so one of the main components of the endless iterations of expensive hot air production is piles of bollocks along the lines of "it might indirectly contribute to such-and-such an effect which doesn't involve any change in how much money anybody pays to anyone for anything but is nevertheless a good thing, so we'll say that it will cause that effect and pretend that means someone's giving us money" until they've collected enough pretend money to make up the total they want. And subsequent governments still end up moaning about how much they have to spend to keep it going because they can't manage to pretend well enough.

    810:

    Well, the Brunel gauge was designed to accommodate a mammoth ass, because mammoths hauled trains for quite some time.

    That one's been written. "The Iron Elephant" by Harry Turtledove.

    811:

    You'd put them in the car's trunk, and they'd be shipped back to your house using the same routing algorithms that move people around.

    While I'm on my two-hour hike? What happens when I'm not home to receive the delivery? What happens when someone else using the car wants to use the trunk?

    812:

    To get this you have to change your thinking around a little. The trunk does not belong to you. It belongs to the car. The trunk doesn't just belong to the car, it belongs to the network. The idea is that just like the regular Internet gets your packets to a particular place at a particular time - something called Quality of Service - the car network will get your package to a particular place at a particular time. Hauling your stuff around for you is one of the things the network is there for, and you pay for x-amount of haulage with each ticket, probably expressed in "miles" or "kilometers," which would be stored in some kind of bank, complete with deposit insurance.

    This might mean each car has a set of robot arms, or maybe certain users of the system with high reputation scores do small jobs, like carry a box from trunk 143.12.234.1 to truck 15.211.86.194 in exchanges for discounts.

    This ain't your momma's taxi service.

    813:

    Then it goes through endless rounds of having bits cut off to make it cheaper

    Not just cheaper: you see descoping coming up where a project falls a long way behind schedule, although there are contexts where time and money are treated as interchangeable. Possibly it's because no-one ever did exactly that before and there is unanticipated extra work - a concept that is itself anathema in some disciplines, where maintaining a plausible fiction of hyper competence is always more convincing than any honest appraisal of risks and the need to adapt one's plans as things proceed (cf Moltke "No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces", usually translated as "No plan survives contact with the enemy"). Sometimes it is because the project plan deliberately under pitched to gain funding approval in the first place.

    Anyhow, the pattern with descoping is that it's easy to reach a point where it's no longer possible to achieve the anticipated benefits of the project. Recognising that point is the whole reason you use project frameworks where it's easy to cancel the project as early as possible rather than follow the spent cost fallacy into a deep, deep hole. Of course no-one ever wants to be responsible for getting a project cancelled...

    814:

    The trunk does not belong to you.

    I can just see this with the TSA, in a slightly different context:

    "What's in the trunk?"

    "Don't know."

    "You don't?"

    "No, the trunk showed up at the door. Said it needed a lift with Chicago, and could I take it as checked luggage."

    "How'd it know you were going to Chicago?"

    "Amazon. I get 10% off for being a courier. Saves on GHG emissions."

    "So you didn't pack it?"

    "No."

    "And you have no idea who packed it."

    "I think it packed itself. They do that these days."

    "Right. Come with us. No, don't pick up the trunk. We'll handle it." Long pause. "You're sure it was Amazon?"

    "Well, that's what the email said..."

    "Uh-hunh. Hope you still have that email."

    I know you mean a different trunk, of course, but my twisted brain insisted on expressing itself thusly.

    815:

    no-one ever wants to be responsible for getting a project cancelled

    Too often no-one wants to be responsible for getting it started either, because "you spent $50B on WHAT??!?!?" never looks good in the far right media. Unless it's guns or tax cuts.

    The whole "return on investment" stuff is generally farcical with a great deal of "keep fudging until you get the answer you've been told to". Especially with roads where they love to talk about "time saved per journey" while ignoring induced demand. Of course with trains you have the opposite problem, where dwell times have to be extended to get everyone off and on the train (because cutting extra doors into the sides is frowned upon, despite the coolness of the London "whole side opens" concept carriage).

    The inner west line in Sydney used to be notorious for trains that filled up by about 5-10 stations out from Central, so if you lived in Newtown it was often quicker to walk than wait for a train that you could thrust yourself into. The new timetable fixed that by doubling trains per hour at those stations! If only roads could do that...

    I sometimes wonder if we have it backwards: we should start fast rail in Australia with the Turnbull Memorial Line from Bondi Junction to Canberra because that way all the smug Liberal fucks would have a 90 minute train ride from the places that matter (the eastern suburbs) to the place that's important (federal parliament). Afterwards we could just keep going all the way to Melbourne...

    816:

    Suburban sprawl couldn't start before mass automobile ownership, so, early 1930s at the earliest?

    Depends on definitions for sprawl I suppose. To me it starts in London with the first commuter and dormitory suburbs emerging along rail corridors. I remember at least one Sherlock Holmes is set in such a suburb, though I've no idea which, most likely from the 1890s though. If you consider the impact of railways along with the fact that people were just used to walking much longer distances than is common now, it gets you a lot of the way there.

    Before trains, horse drawn trams. Even Brisbane established a tram network in 1880s and had electrified it by 1900. Also: a tonne of places that we'd think of as suburbs now, but which began as villages and small towns that emerged around industrial establishments, either as company towns or more likely just because when you get a bunch of people in one place working at the mill, you get a bunch of other businesses springing up to cater to the people, gradual growth and then when the railway comes through it all starts to join up.

    817:

    It sounds to me as if you are looking at a trip that you have planned making decisions that are perfectly reasonable if you are making the trip in a private car that you own, but are utterly stupid if you are relying on other forms of transport.

    Then you insist that you have to use the same trip plan using those other forms of transport, even though it is based on decisions that are now utterly stupid (they were reasonable before when you had the car).

    The solution everyone else is advocating is "Rethink the trip plan."

    JHomes

    818:

    801 - How does "Goes to Wales Railway" (A clear description of the Paddington - Cardiff main line, yes?) qualify as self-serving hype?

    As an exercise in the relationship between loading and track gauges, take a UK standard loading gauge, fix your car mass and spring and damper rates, and compare roll rates at a fixed speed on a set curvature using a standard gauge and a ~2'4" track gauge, then tell me track gauge doesn't matter in terms of achieving train speed on curved track!

    806 - Er, I didn't say that track gauge was the only factor, just that it was a factor.

    As to the visibility of broad gauge trackbeds, this is of interest mostly to industrial archaeologists, amateur as well as professional.

    814 - You mean like finding old 1960s (or earlier) tramway trackbeds under currentish tarmac on roads (multiple occurrences, not just Edinburgh).

    816 - This is how the Con Party and Liebour UK justify starting HS2 in Larddarn to "go to Glasgow" and then actually stopping it at Barmyhum or Personchester.

    819:

    paws
    NOT any specific route, but the entire GWR was built on "We are wonderful rah rah!" even when they were not.
    To the point that, more than once, they came up with a useful engineering solution - which was ignored by everyone else ... because it was assumed to be more GWR hype. { Reminder: The S Wales main line was never, ever "broad" guage - the Severn Tunnel was always 1435mm. } That & their insistence on retaining out-dated practices that other people had given up as expensive or counterproductive - up to their electrification project of recent years, where everyone else had carefully laid their signalling cables in troughing, but the ex-GW hadn't & then got them dug up & broken, repeatedly, oops.

    820:

    Addendum:
    Really worrying sign for 2022/2024 US elections - how likely are they to take over & totally subvert elections?

    821:

    One thing you are ignoring is the use a vehicle has to store stuff.

    I think that in the 50-to-100 years between the emergence of various forms of public transport in the 19th century and the shift toward private car ownership (taking that as roughly 1930 per Charlie's remarks above), left luggage offices and single-use-per-hire-lockers were a much bigger deal than today. After all: "In a handbag?"

    Even in your particular example it's possible the gallery itself has a bag check desk, which could be re-used in a pinch for left luggage. So if you'd got there by bus, you could leave your bag there before your hike, and collect it before getting a bus home, assuming they are still open at that time. It doesn't enable you to skip returning to that location, but that's no less utility than storing it in your car. Though I agree none of this helps with things you might like to carry around just in case, but not on your person.

    Street-side temporary storage is actually very amenable to a world of apps and location services. There's demand for e-lockers at train and bus stations for items up to and including bicycles. Much more so than for distributed crowd-sourced cargo-space-sharing, cute as that idea might be.

    822:

    820 - At the risk of belabouring the obvious "Goes to Wales Railway" is a description of their main line, and an expansion of GWR that doesn't include either "God's Wonderful or "Great Western".

    Also I never mentioned the gauge of the Severn Tunnel, and am still awaiting an alternative explanation of how Bristol Temple Meads came to have some trackbeds that would accommodate 2 x 7' trackbeds but not be wide enough for 3 x 4'8" ones. The most you've done is propose a possible explanation of why st least some of those trackbeds are at terminating platforms and not through platforms.

    822 - At least some major stations (and not just in Larndarn) still have (or had within the last 25 years) an actual left luggage office with attendant(s), tickets and shelves for left items (yes, like implied though not a scene in The Importance of Being Earnest).

    823:

    "Reminder: The S Wales main line was never, ever "broad" guage - the Severn Tunnel was always 1435mm."

    That's a bit misleading through ambiguity. The tunnel and the later Badminton cut-off were only ever standard gauge, but the route round via Gloucester and the main line in South Wales - not even the same company to begin with - were definitely broad gauge, as were one or two of the mining branches. But nearly all the mining lines weren't, and the SWR must have spent most of the time thinking "fuckin' incompatible bollocks, why the fuck did we ever sign up for this shit".

    824:

    "...Bristol Temple Meads came to have some trackbeds that would accommodate 2 x 7' trackbeds but not be wide enough for 3 x 4'8" ones."

    AH! THAT'S what you're on about. I see what kind of traces you're getting at now. Few of them are as clear and unambiguous as that.

    825:

    Which led to a thought; BTM is also Grade 1 Listed, so the trackbeds are staying however they are.

    826:

    No - OGH is right, and Pigeon has it wrong. In terms of the static effects, track width is largely irrelevant - but, in terms of the dynamic ones, wider tracks provide much smoother running, much greater resistance to overturning, and higher ability to to corner. All of those problem become non-linearly more serious with speed. You can easily tell that if you have had to pull narrow and wide trolleys over rough going. Oh yes, you can achieve the same smoothness and safety with narrow tracks, but you have to work to much tighter tolerances; those used to be impossible, but now are expensive and need more maintenance. It doesn't just affect rail, but other vehicles as well.

    I am sure that there are some analyses on this somewhere, but almost certainly way pre-Internet, as this issue was 'closed' a long time ago (except perhaps in Japan), even for motor vehicles.

    827:

    Not only do you need the width of the track gauge itself, you also need room for the "overhang" on each side - which is much wider on standard gauge, compared to the old broad gauge. There was very little "extra" overhang on broad guage, which explains the impossibility of getting an extra line in. SEE ALSO the difference between Brit loading gauge(s), the UIC gauge in Europe, slightly-bigger-than-UIC in other parts of Europe & US loading gauges, which are effing enormous.
    Wiki on "Berne" gauge%20loading%20gauge,820%20ft%203%20in)%20radius.)

    828:

    "much greater resistance to overturning, and higher ability to to corner"

    Yes, that's true as far as the physical limits are concerned, but my point is that those limits are already long past irrelevance at the width of standard gauge, because the psychological limits of passenger tolerance to lateral forces are so much more stringent that you never get remotely near the physical ones. So the additional increment in stability from going to broad gauge doesn't do you any good because other limits prevent you taking advantage of it.

    There's also the aspect of the stability of the track itself - track walking sideways under repeated high-speed cornering loads is already becoming significant at passenger-limited cornering speeds - and wear on the outside rail and fatigue-type effects on the contact area, the outside rail having to take the whole of the lateral cornering force, and this horizontal component being unaffected by track gauge; again this is becoming significant even at passenger-limited levels of lateral force.

    Serious research on the matter began with the APT project, the whole tilting idea being based on the premise that you've got buckets of room to increase cornering forces without compromising safety margins, you just need to make the passengers feel it less. I suppose it's possible that some of the material may have made it into the NRM archives or somewhere like that, and there's a reasonable chance that at least bits of it appear on the internet here and there, though no doubt infuriatingly incomplete.

    829:

    The static issues are not the problem, and cornering as such is a relatively minor one. I was not primarily talking about those.

    The ride smoothness and risk of overturning (other than for extreme cornering) are due to repeated irregularities building up (i.e. causing a short oscillation); it doesn't require more than a few to build a minor jolt into quite an extreme movement. That also has a major effect on track wear; you may have observed that uneven road surfaces lead to the tarmac or concrete breaking up much faster than on smoother ones.

    Even the naive static analysis means that standard gauge needs to be 50% more precise than broad gauge, and I am pretty certain that the previous effects are non-linear with both width and speed.

    830:

    We periodically hear tell of reports from studies that were apparently specifically commissioned to show why HSR is unviable here

    Yeah, that's bullshit: an LGV or Shinkansen N700 ought to be able to cover downtown Sydney to downtown Melbourne in about three hours, allowing time for a couple of stops along the way, or four hours as a stopping service. Not quite day return commuter range, but certainly competitive with short-haul jet airliners, and some of those intermediate towns might suddenly experience a population boom as they came back into fashion as commuter suburbs.

    831:

    When you decided not to proceed with "Singularity Sky" / "Iron Sunrise" series, did this decision have anything to do with

    Nope, my fans (or lack of them) have never had anything to do with influencing my writing. Except, ahem, for the ones I've gotten into deep conversations with over a beer or three, resulting in a story line turning up some time later (you know who you are).

    832:

    This ain't your momma's taxi service.

    What you're looking for resembles a crew-cab pickup truck or a panel van with seating for 4-5 people up front, and a big box on the back that is subdivided into per-customer storage lockers.

    If you want to go to IKEA to buy furniture, you hire a different vehicle from the regular shopping-trip/about-town one.

    But really, the optimal solution is to rebuild your cities around pedestrians and make this nonsense obsolete. Given the cost of modern vehicles, if you subtract the entirely artificially inflated price of housing zoned land, it probably ends up cheaper to build apartment blocks/condos with direct covered pedestrian access to streetcar stops. You could even have a vehicle hire centre at the out-of-town line terminus for those folks who want to go for a hike in the countryside or drive long distance to visit someone who lives off-grid.

    833:

    Greg: I think the verdict of history on this stage of the Decline and Fall of the North American Empire will be that while everyone was focussed on the attempted reactionary takeover of the legislature and executive, they ignored the successful reactionary takeover of the judiciary. (See also: Federalist Society judges, the current Supreme Court, etc.)

    If you've got the top judges on your side -- not just sympathetic but actually willing to pervert the course of justice from the bench -- then your side can pretty much ignore the letter of the law.

    834:

    I suppose it's possible that some of the material may have made it into the NRM archives or somewhere like that

    Ask the Italians and Japanese?

    Tilting trains didn't begin and end with APT, the Pendolinos tilt (as bought by CrossCountry, who promptly disabled the tilting mechanism because maintaining it was an unnecessary drain on profits), and the latest Shinkansens tilt, too.

    Basically everybody except British Rail profited from BR's research into tilting trains, but BR went back to whips and buggies because, I dunno, Thatcher or something.

    835:

    Damian @ 822: [...] left luggage offices and single-use-per-hire-lockers were a much bigger deal than today.

    In the UK it was the PIRA that did for left luggage lockers. They made bombing too easy. I can remember in the 70s going to London with my Mum on the way to relatives oop north, and leaving our luggage in a coin-operated locker at a mainline station. Of course there was nothing to stop terrorists doing the same thing with some clockwork explosives. (Although interestingly the only left-luggage explosions listed in London were from the 1939-40 timeframe).

    Leaving luggage after inspection was possible for a bit longer, but I'm guessing that the cost of the staff and the time required to inspect a suitcase made this uneconomic.

    The opening scene of Friday by Heinlein has the eponymous protagonist killing the agent tailing her and stashing the body in a "bonded bomb-proof locker". I do sort of wonder if reasonably bomb-proof lockers could be built these days. Aim to direct the explosion upwards, and use kevlar to limit excursions into the space in front of the locker. Trouble is, you would need to cope with a locker stuffed full of C4, and that is probably not feasible. But it would be an interesting design exercise.

    836:

    They exited the market because they couldn't make the sorts of profits they were used to in the US. The UK grocery trade is extremely cutthroat.

    Ditto the US. US grocery margins for the mass market stores are slim. Given this the UK market must be even slimmer.

    The mass market US grocery stores of the past are moving into niches as Walmart and Costco and such are squeezing margins down and making it up via sales of other things you get to walk by as you go in for your food.

    837:

    Brisbane established a tram network in 1880s and had electrified it by 1900.

    My city started as a village, but as early as 1900 had a regular tram/streetcar to Toronto which some residents used for commuting.

    838:

    Depends on definitions for sprawl I suppose.

    Most of the commuter towns around Boston started due to trolley tracks being extended out from Boston to the hinterlands. Long before autos showed up in any numbers.

    839:

    There is a left luggage service at Edinburgh Waverly but it's quite expensive and your bag has to go through an airport X-ray belt (and, optionally, a hand search -- it's attended drop-off only) before they'll accept it.

    840:

    It sounds to me as if you are looking at a trip that you have planned making decisions that are perfectly reasonable if you are making the trip in a private car that you own, but are utterly stupid if you are relying on other forms of transport.

    The trip plan was "go to the art gallery, maybe shop on the way home". What happened is that I visited the art gallery, decided to buy the exhibit catalogue, then decided to enjoy the nice day and hike along the trails that start beside the gallery. Ended up not doing the shopping (too tired).

    I could have done the original trip using some form of shared car. I could have done it by current public transit, at the cost of an extra 3-4 hours travel time (on a 1 hour round trip). What I don't see the magical shared car/trunk thing doing is let me spontaneously decide to have the hike on a nice day. (Among other things, I wouldn't have taken the canteen I always have in my car, or my hiking boots, on a trip just to the art gallery and shopping.)

    841:

    My impression from the discussion so far is that it's assumed that such train tunnels would run vast distances without stopping. No regional, semi-local deliveries. Curious what the current 'miles/kilometers shipped' is for current typical shipping in the US vs. UK vs. Japan vs. Australia. Also, trucking companies* are a big part of the US economy even if you don't factor in their huge fossil fuel usage.

    Containers have radically changed the shipping industry in the US. Gone are the days when you shipped a boxes on pallets that got loaded and unloaded one or more times at terminals to move goods across the country. Both for trains and trucks. Plus those goods were "missing" for days at a time. At times forever.

    Now shippers order 1/2 or all of a container (half and full sized) or multiples of them. And they get put on rail or trucks and send almost end to end. Fuel usage is way down from the "good old days" per items shipped.

    As to rail or truck it depends on how fast you want it delivered.

    And for smaller things you use UPS, FedEx, or similar. With contract pricing so you're paying way less than the person walking in off the street.

    Hiring and keeping drivers is a problem. But so is hiring and keeping employees in any position in the US just now.

    842:

    Street-side temporary storage is actually very amenable to a world of apps and location services. There's demand for e-lockers at train and bus stations for items up to and including bicycles.

    My experience with public lockers in France wasn't very encouraging. Someone had managed to piss or shit in almost all of them. We used to have bike storage lockers at my local library, which were unavailable for storing bikes because homeless people were using them to store stuff. Who pays to clean them? Enforce time limits? (Or if magically self-cleaning, maintain the magical machine?)

    There's also the security aspect. I remember when lockers and garbage cans were removed from the TTC after 9/11. Garbage cans are back (well, actually clear garbage bags so you can see what's inside) but not lockers.

    843:

    how likely are they to take over & totally subvert elections?

    Depends. These crazies the article is talking about have won primaries. But the real test is in Nov 2022. Will the D's show up in enough numbers plus the disgusted R's to keep them out of office. Maybe. Maybe not.

    Many of the disgusted R's will never vote for an "evil" D and so will vote in disgust or just stay home.

    Plus some noise around the edge like here in North Carolina. The Green Party got on the ballot this fall. As a believer in democracy I like that. As someone who doesn't want the nut case R to win our Senate race, it is a set back. The D running for Senate here lost her state wide race in 2020 by 401 votes out of 5,456,526 votes cast. So a group that would never vote R gathering a few 1000 votes could give the election to the crazy R dude.

    844:

    836 - OK, you'd need to locate the lockers differently, but do the same sort of thing that companies like Nobel do with explosives research labs and storage magazines. Top floor of building, storage locker gets ~blastproof walls and floor and a frangible ceiling which is ducted to vent gases outside the building.

    838 - Similar story with Glasgow, with the note that the trams ran out as far Airdrie (15 m east), Balloch via Dumbarton (20m West), Motherwell (15m south of east) and Paisley (9m South of West).

    842 - In the UK (across Europe pre WrecksIt) an individual or a company could do this with a single Euro or ISO pallet of goods. You'd use vans down to 2 pallets max volume to do the first and last mile, and group pallets up into over the road truck loads for the long bits. As long as everything makes hub to hub in 1 day tops, who really cares?

    845:

    "how likely are they to take over & totally subvert elections?"

    It could have an effect, but is unlikely to extend very far beyond US states that vote Republican already. I live in Michigan, and despite the Republicans having a majority in both houses of the state legislature, this doesn't seem to be happening here (the Governor is a Democrat).

    Also, the Trumpists winning Rep primaries isn't necessarily a sign of how thing will go in the general elections. Several state level democratic organizations were caught spending money supporting Trump aligned candidates in Republican primaries, because they don't think the extremists can win in November.

    It depends on the state of the economy, I think. If employment remains good and inflation comes down, it's the Democrats to lose (which they are perfectly capable of doing).

    Still, I can't help but quote from the article you linked to:

    “The constitution is hanging by a thread,” he told me. “The funny thing is, I always thought it would be the other guys. And it’s my side. That just rips at my heart: that we would be the people who would surrender the constitution in order to win an election. That just blows my mind.”

    Reminds of something about 'if fascism ever returns to America...'

    846:

    As long as everything makes hub to hub in 1 day tops, who really cares?

    I was addressing the fuel issues implied in the previous comment. Things are much more efficient today than the past.

    847:

    Reminds of something about 'if fascism ever returns to America...'

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDuHXTG3uyY

    Great movie. But almost no one I knew when it came out thought of it was a social commentary.

    848:

    The N700S Shinkansens tilt by a maximum of one degree for inline stability rather than cornering at speed. There are tilting trains in Japan but they're regular trains running on legacy track, almost all of it the standard 3 foot 6 inch narrow gauge.

    The Shinkansen network is designed with a lot of very straight segments for the trains to reach their maximum service speed with them slowing down to only 200km/h or so in noticeably curved sections. The tracks do bend a lot in cities near stations but the trains are running a lot slower in those locations as they approach or leave the platforms.

    Another feature of proper high-speed rail that doesn't get a lot of notice is that the tracks are very level with tunneling, cuts and viaducts rather than significant slopes up and down following the contours of the land. It's more expensive to do this but at high speeds it prevents passengers and crew suffering from noticeable up-and-down motions. The new 550km/h maglev link between Tokyo and Nagoya/Osaka under construction at the moment is about 50 percent tunnels to keep the track as straight and level as much as possible.

    849:

    *"The solution everyone else is advocating is 'Rethink the trip plan.'"

    Exactly. Or at least take advantage of what the system provides.

    850:

    Here is another link about the original topic.

    Xi’s Great Leap Backward

    TL;DR: China has more graduates than it has graduate-level jobs. This presents a problem for Xi Jinping because unemployed or under-employed graduates are yet another source of social tension and unharmonious behaviour. Options include sending young graduates to get some calluses as farm labour (like Xi did in his youth) or ordering companies to hire unnecessary graduates at graduate-level pay.

    This reminds me of the UK's old system of the "Eleven-Plus" exam. Back before about 1976 the UK had a two-tier secondary education system. At the end of "primary school" (age 7 - 11) you were given a standardised national exam in English, Maths and logical problem solving (basically a rough-and-ready IQ test). Based on the results you either went to "Grammar School" or "Secondary Modern School". The idea was that the Grammar schools would produce white-collar knowledge workers and managers, while the secondary modern schools would produce the next generation of blue-collar factory workers, builders and similar tradesmen (girls, of course, were only expected to be housewives). The system lives on in some parts of the UK, but in most areas secondary schools are "Comprehensive", meaning that they take all abilities apart those whose needs are sufficiently special that they can't cope in any classroom.

    The Eleven-plus exam of course represents a very definite answer to the question Charlie posed in the original post: what is education for? The grammar schools groomed you for at least a high-end clerical job, and quite possibly a university degree (at a time when ~10% of the population went to University) and a suitably professional career thereafter. The education you got at a Secondary Modern was much more "practical", aiming to teach the future bricklayers and factory machine operators enough that they could get into an apprenticeship when they left school at 14 or 16.

    Somewhere there is an old film explaining the system. It shows a headmaster explaining to a mother in the most patronising way possible that her daughter hasn't really "failed" the Eleven-Plus, because the purpose of the exam is to determine what educational path she is best suited for. The real failure would have been if she had been sent to a grammar school that she was not intellectually equipped to cope with. And therefore the mother should be grateful that the wise educational system has correctly determined that her daughter is best suited to marry some factory worker and settle down as a working-class housewife.

    The problem with this, as a system, is that everyone knew that getting sent to a secondary modern school was a real failure, one that doomed you to a poor working-class existence. It was also a lot more inequitable than it sounds on paper, because of course middle-class and upper-class parents could hire tutors and get into primary schools that would effectively prepare their children for the exam, while a lot of primary schools in working-class areas saw themselves as a conduit to the local secondary modern, although of course they were very happy if a few percent of their pupils made the jump up to middle class in the grammar school.

    The tensions in this system built up to the point where the Eleven-Plus was largely abandoned and most schools became comprehensive, at least in theory. However its noticeable how the good comprehensive schools seem to be the ex-grammar schools, and of course middle class parents still find ways to send their children to those schools instead of the bog-standard comprehensives that used to be secondary moderns.

    (Aside: Terry Pratchett tells how his primary school headmaster thought he could identify the Eleven Plus pass material at age 7, and would then focus resources on coaching just those individuals. Of course his predictions were remarkably accurate, except that he thought Pratchett was going to be one of the failures. I had a similar experience: at age 8 my headmaster told my parents that I was mentally subnormal and needed to go to a special school. I've always wondered what would have happened if he had succeeded in sending me there.)

    Back to China:

    China is effectively dividing its youth in the same basic way as the Eleven-Plus, but at age 18 with university entrance. If you get a degree then it entitles you (in theory) to a nice middle-class knowledge-work job, with options on further advancement into the ruling elite and/or plutocracy. If you don't get into university then you are factory fodder. Just like in the UK, this leads to a substantial part of the population who feel short-changed. People think, if only I had scored a bit better, or if only there were a few more places, I too could have been on the golden train to success. Hence there is pressure to increase the university places, leading to the problem of having too many people with degrees and not enough without. The problem isn't that they have degrees as such, the problem is that they have been told that a degree is the ticket to that golden train of middle class wages and status. When it turns out that the degree isn't getting them that, they feel even more aggrieved than the ones who didn't get to university at all.

    Part of the problem here is that education isn't just a personal good and a social good, its also a "positional" good, meaning that part of the value of having e.g. a degree comes from the fact that someone else doesn't have one. This is a fundamental conflict. Friday by Heinlein has an aside about the nation of California awarding bachelors degrees to everyone at age 21, regardless of actual education. (I've cited Friday two posts in a row here: entirely coincidentally). Obviously, Californian employers would be looking at how a candidate's degree came to be awarded, and everyone would know which ones were actually worth something, and there would be a lot of pushing and shoving to get onto the right courses.

    I guess I should wind up with a conclusion here, but I haven't really got one, except perhaps for my earlier observation that education is a Wicked Problem.

    851:

    Hi Greg. I'm not entirely sure how likely it is. There are far too many variables, and you need to remember that the U.S. is a large place. But ultimately it comes down to two things. First, how hard/smart do Democrats fight. Second, how many of the current crop of nutcases does the Justice Dept. successfully prosecute.

    852:

    Yeah, there's room in the scheme for any number of vehicle types, ranging from compacts to big trucks or vans with a ton of storage for major shopping expeditions or a work-person's tools.

    But your point about rebuilding cities for pedestrians/bicyclists is a very good one. My question for you is "Why not do both?" I think a city with a computer-controlled point-to-point traffic system which was also well-designed to encourage pedestrians would be a wonderful place to live. Better still if someone designed a country's transport system to work that way.

    853:

    *"The solution everyone else is advocating is 'Rethink the trip plan.'"

    Exactly. Or at least take advantage of what the system provides.

    Having been involved in several tech rollouts, I'm less sanguine than many that envisioned tech solutions are actually as revolutionary and effective as their boosters insist.

    Most tech solutions make a lot of assumptions about who will use a system, for what purposes, and often large segments of the population are invisible. Such people are often female, as shown in Perez's book:

    https://carolinecriadoperez.com/book/invisible-women/

    Older people, or indeed people who aren't working, are another frequently-ignored group.


    Consider so-called ride-sharing service, for example. They were once touted as a way of reducing congestion by taking cars off the road. Which might have been true if they were, indeed, ride-sharing services — a kind of computer-mediated carpool — but instead as simple gig-work unlicensed taxis they actually increased congestion.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0660-0

    854:

    It's still a complex play since the judiciary has no enforcement power. It takes an executive who is willing to enforce judicial orders and a legislature who won't immediately pass laws to negate those decisions. It's still likely that the judiciary will be the nexus of bullshittery since a liberal democratic administration committed to the rule of law will go along with some awful stuff, but there are still some potential checks. What we're seeing in the hasty patching together of policy stop-gaps and crass fundraising post-Roe, it all might be screwed, but the mechanisms exist to unfuck things

    855:

    Lots of interesting comments here.

    Doesn't Germany (officially) and Japan (unofficially) have such a 2 tiered system as you describe once existing, well officially, in the UK? My daughter spent her last year of non university education in the German Gymnasium system and was working hard to get the younger daughter of her host family to try harder. Her point was the folks who didn't get to the upper tiered system tend to be 16 and pregnant way too often. As to Japan I saw a report on Japan's system where officially they no longer had a 2 tier system. But if you were attending a pre university school that had NEVER had anyone go to university you knew the system was still in existence at a reality level.

    As to China. Someone at a client of mine came from there. She didn't get into an architecture university program slot in China so she started applying to US universities. She got into one of our local ones with a well known school of design and now practices here. (If she got into the program here she was no middle of the road academically.) She's been here about 10 years or a bit less. But her family is all still in China and she's close to them. I want to discuss politics with her but that could get way too complicated way to fast so I just defer my thoughts. About as controversial our conversation gets is explaining idiom use to each other so our conversations make sense.

    As to me I continually got bounced out of the top tiered groups due to my touch of Asperger plus ADHD. And I was 99th percentile in math and mostly bored. Which allowed me to read a lot of books in first year algebra plus have teachers get upset with me when I did problems in my head.... But being put into the easy classes also meant my study habits were crap. As most of the time I didn't need to study to get a B. If I kept up with the home work I could usually get an A in any STEM class. A few years later in uni when classes got hard I had a lot of trouble.

    856:

    Charlie, you may rest assured that we've understood the Supreme Court issue very well indeed. I tried explaining the issue to a female pro Bush I voter back in the late 1980s and got absolutely nowhere - she was in her early twenties and simply couldn't imagine that a Supreme Court decision would actually affect her in some way. But most of us, both Democrat and Rethuglican understand that problem super-clearly. Unfortunately, getting the Democratic Powers That Be to fight hard/smart on that issue 24/7 is another matter.

    I suspect the judgement of history will be that the Democrats did a terrible job of fighting against fascism during the period from Newt Gingrich's election as Speaker of the House until at least the present day - we'll see how many people Merrick Garland arrests by late 2023 - maybe that will solve a few problems.

    857:

    Charlie @ 834
    Indeed - what can be done about that?
    One presumes that, in the unlikely event of the D's getting a majority in both houses, they could then impeach, since it's clear that several of the current incumbents lied like rugs in their hearings. But I don't think we are going to get that lucky.
    See also David L @ 844.

    858:

    Now you've identified the real problems. First, that you need a certain number of users or the system doesn't work. Second that without really intelligent dispatching you can't give multiple people a shared ride while going door-to-door.

    The stupid fucking thing about the whole mess is that we've had the solutions to ALL the problems of Climate-Change for at least forty years, yet here we are because nobody has screwed up their courage to confront the oil companies.

    859:

    they could then impeach

    This is just a bill of indictment which leads to a trial in the Senate. A conviction requires 2/3s of the Senate. And it will be a decade or more before either party could get there. If ever.

    Impeachments of Clinton and Trump seem to have helped their careers more than hurt them.

    860:

    Another problem with shared-ride systems is the "I'm not going to share with those people" issue.

    Sometimes it's for good reason. (Young woman, alone at night, not wanting to share a vehicle with a random strange male.) And sometimes it's for terrible reasons (white racist refuses to share with someone whose skin is too dark, or someone who's disabled, or, or ...)

    Problem is, figuring out which of these is reasonable or not is an AI-hard problem.

    (You could do it with a dating-app-style UI -- "swipe right if this person is unacceptable to you as a ride-share: note that it may take longer to match you if you reject frequently" -- but then you run into catfishing problems, or neo-nazis cruising at random looking for an victim to queer-bash, or whatever.)

    861:

    The thing is that you don't have to impeach to let the Supremes know they're getting out of hand. I suspect there's enough stuff with Thomas's wife to cause him to resign. All it takes is for someone to be willing to lean on that button hard-enough. Call Gini Thomas into the January 6th hearings, ask the hard questions about about her and to her, then call a Judiciary Committee hearing and find out why her husband didn't recuse himself from cases where she was involved? They're both big-time culture warriors, and if the only thing you do is convince them to operate more discretely it's at least a minor victory.

    Or take Alito. In his decision on abortion he quoted a genuine witch burner positively. There's lots of room to make the guy's life hard. The issue isn't that there aren't ways to change things, but that nobody in power wants to take that road.

    And it's always good to make the other guy sweat, and these days the Rethuglicans have a lot more to sweat about than the Democrats.

    862:

    Another problem with shared-ride systems is the "I'm not going to share with those people" issue.

    I keep thinking back to my father's car pools in the 60s/70s. Big plant nearby but deep in the woods with all kinds of workers in the area. Carpools would shift over time as people decided they just didn't want to be in a car with THAT person for 20-30 minutes twice a day.

    863:

    Or just put cameras in the car, maybe with a voice-command to start sound recording. It might also be possible to create a reputation system or program cars to head for the nearest police station if commanded to do so. Making all this work while still respecting liberties would be difficult, though not impossible - nobody expects their actions to be anything but public on a city bus, for example.

    864:

    As to Japan I saw a report on Japan's system where officially they no longer had a 2 tier system. But if you were attending a pre university school that had NEVER had anyone go to university you knew the system was still in existence at a reality level.

    I recall passing through an area of Hiroshima that had a number of educational establishments, from a kindergarden to a university which all had the same name. It was an education escalator, get your kodomo into the right kindergarden and they'd go to the associated elementary school enabling them to get into the right middle school and thence into the appropriate high school that would make qualifying for the local university easier. I was sort-of thinking there should really have been a maternity hospital and maybe even an artificial-insemination clinic in the group.

    My own thinking on education is that the concept of universities and colleges providing "further education" in the modern day is broken. They are no longer repositories of knowledge and their academic standards do not meet the needs of the modern world. They are valuable mostly for their ability to nurture the oddballs and crazies who can occasionally leap out of the bathtub shouting "Eureka!" but as paper-mills and certifiers of competency in various subjects they are probably redundant. Replacing them is Someone Else's Problem though, I have no pocket-sized solution other than maybe requiring graduates to have taken at least one or two "practical" minor courses like plumbing, welding or domestic electrical installation work during their Classics Tripos or PPE studies.

    865:

    TOTALLY off topic, but I was in a physical bookstore just now & saw OGH's books on the shelf. This made me think: now that both the ~USA and Commonwealth are in diplomatic contact, will there be tourism between them? Kids going to university in the other timeline?

    I imagine an aerospace engineer of the Commonwealth would want to go the the ~USA (or some other country in that timeline) to get a degree, while a person with a history degree from one world might get a lot of insight by getting another history degree in the other world.

    Who knows? Maybe the Commonwealth has some music genre that will be as popular as K-Pop in TL2's world. Or vice-versa.

    866:

    TOTALLY off topic for me also.

    A few years ago (5 to 10?) there was a very well done documentary on the WWI "peace process". Basically how the war ended and the world re-divided after the fighting stopped. Two segments of 1 hour each. I think. In the US.

    I can no longer find it.

    Anyone else know of this?

    867:

    You could do it with a dating-app-style UI -- "swipe right if this person is unacceptable to you as a ride-share: note that it may take longer to match you if you reject frequently"

    Runs up against human rights legislation too. Is a woman refusing to share with a man sexism or concern for her safety? What about a man refusing to share with a woman? Could be sexism, could be religious concerns, could be fear of false accusations, could be someone with a traumatic experience…

    868:

    "I imagine an aerospace engineer of the Commonwealth would want to go the the ~USA (or some other country in that timeline) to get a degree, while a person with a history degree from one world might get a lot of insight by getting another history degree in the other world."

    I generally agree, even in our world where the separations are geographical and cultural rather than paratemporal and cultural.

    But I've encountered a huge amount of NIHism in the US technical world and have the impression that provincialism is rampant in the humanities.

    Diversifying experience is a good idea, but proceed with caution and an eye to how it will be received back home.

    869:

    While ride sharing can work, it is very much less useful than it is made out to be. In my environment, it was largely a waste of time because working hours were erratic. Yes, an app-based approach would work better, but would still have left a lot of people needing to call (expensive, delayed and sometimes unavailable) taxis. The cases where it works and a 'public transport' system doesn't work better are not all that common. Note that I am including dolmus systems as 'public transport'.

    A system that doesn't seem to been mentioned is the one that is fairly common in Europe (excluding UK, of course), where the main, longer distance public transport facilities can transport bicycles, wheelchairs etc. In the UK, trains and the underground can take folding bicycles, but not everyone who rides a cycle can use those.

    And, while 15 minute neighbourhoods are idea, the average commuting time in the UK is 45 minutes. You can cycle a long distance in that time, with electric assistance as needed.

    870:

    868 - Could be personality based. I know some women I would cheerfully share with, and others I would strongly want to avoid.

    870 - Well, Saturday there (yesterday at time of writing) I got stuckish on a local trading estate by a shortage of taxis; literally one taxi who was doing his best, but he could only take one or 2 passengers at a time, and it would be 15 minutes round trip from rank to house and back.

    871:

    The thing is that you don't have to impeach to let the Supremes know they're getting out of hand.

    Agreed. IANAL, but here's what the Constitution has to say about the formation and term limits Supreme Court (other than that the President appoints them with advice and consent of Congress): Article 3, Section 1: "The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behaviour, and shall, at stated times, receive for their services, a compensation, which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office."

    So for example, Congress could reform the Supreme Court to have one justice per circuit (there are nine circuits across the US) with, say, a 9 year term as justice, with a new justice chosen each year and the seniormost justice exiting office (that would be Thomas first off the court, incidentally). They could add in language that justices could not be tried for crimes committed while they were serving, but once off the court, they could be. This would eliminate the problem of impeachment being impractical, due to the two-thirds majority requirement.

    This wouldn't require a constitutional amendment to implement, and I think something similar has been discussed in Congress for years.

    872:

    A brilliant scene from a brilliant movie. To someone who didn't know what they were watching, it could almost be the opener to an episode of Glee. Then you see the swastika.

    873:

    Yes, and this is inherent in any rating system with objective cutoffs. I remember the outcry over China's supposed online citizen behavior rating system (that turned out to be well over-hyped, but that doesn't affect my overall point here). For any scoring system which is used to assign important social goods (like access to college degrees or jobs) there is going to be a certain number of people who almost, but didn't quite, make that cutoff, and they are going to be pissed.

    In China, that would amount to several million people. People with enough means and opportunities to aspire to the better sort of careers. Quite a cadre to alienate.

    This result is independent of the technology used, but digital technology can make this a more tempting policy option, at least in the short term.

    874:

    "Hi Greg. I'm not entirely sure how likely it is. There are far too many variables, and you need to remember that the U.S. is a large place. But ultimately it comes down to two things. First, how hard/smart do Democrats fight. Second, how many of the current crop of nutcases does the Justice Dept. successfully prosecute."

    The Supreme Court isn't going to affect the outcome of 2022 very much, or even 2024. It's the long term we have to worry about with them. They can't initiate anything at all, and can only react to court cases that are brought to them through the Federal courts. The conservatives are going to try to bring as many as they possibly can, but that takes time. A majority Democrat Congress can forestall almost all of that with carefully thought out legislation. What the odds are that the Democrats would formulate legislation that well formulated ahead of time may be a matter of opinion.

    875:

    "I suspect the judgement of history will be that the Democrats did a terrible job of fighting against fascism during the period from Newt Gingrich's election as Speaker of the House until at least the present day"

    Well, authoritarianism anyway, "fascism" is too ambiguous a word for serious historians to apply anymore. But yes, the Dems did a piss poor job of defending the interests of their lower class constituents--my use of the phrase "lower class" tells you everything you need to know regarding why they did that. The didn't get off their asses until the BLM movement came along and galvanized the American Left. The US Left (aka "Progressives") is all about the rights of people of color, which is perfectly fair, if somewhat incomplete, and comes with certain issues of it's own. But as someone once said of the Resistance in France, "You go with the people who have the best organization, if you want to win".

    A real race war in America is sub-optimal, and my guess is that any number of well-heeled Democratic elected officials are revising their platforms as a way of avoiding one.

    "I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it."

    876:

    "Call Gini Thomas into the January 6th hearings, ask the hard questions about about her and to her, then call a Judiciary Committee hearing and find out why her husband didn't recuse himself from cases where she was involved? They're both big-time culture warriors, and if the only thing you do is convince them to operate more discretely it's at least a minor victory."

    I'm afraid that you don't quite understand how the current political war in the US works right now. Both individuals would take such prosecution and hit the social media claiming it as a badge of honor. "The other tribe is attacking me." The fact that they are well known for their extreme hyperbole would protect them from any serious consequences. Indeed it might help them.

    We aren't going to win this thing one nut-case at a time. We need solutions that ''scale'', and scale big.

    877:

    Reforming the Supreme Court has been discussed for many generations. There are a lot of good ideas out there, any one of which would undoubtedly improve it's performance as an institution. But I also can't think of anything more fraught with political and ideological conflict and defensiveness, except perhaps messing with the electoral college (ain't gunna' happen, sorry).

    878:

    I have three arguments against your position. First, we don't know how deep the Gini Thomas rabbithole goes. What's already public knowledge is pretty awful - she apparently coordinated the arrival of a large contingent of people at the January 6th riot, and may have handled or provided some of the funds to do so. How tightly she coordinated with issues such as the false electors and the White House's attempt to mount a coup is unknown. It's entirely possible she's guilty of one or more crimes, some of them extremely serious. One of the reasons for deposing her and deposing others about her actions is to determine how much blame she should be apportioned for what happened that day.

    There's a gradation here, right? "Failing to recuse yourself in a matter which involves your wife" is the lightest shade of gray we'll see in this matter, and lesser judges have lost their jobs for less. But the shades of gray only get darker from there. But how about "Failing to recuse yourself in a matter in which your wife was a witness to crimes committed by others," followed by "Failing to recuse yourself in a matter for which your wife's actions were referred to the Department of Justice" or "...a matter in which your wife was arrested/convicted..." and "of sedition." ...each one of those gets a little worse, and the pressure on Thomas to resign gets a little harsher. And who knows? We might convict Gini of a crime!

    Second, the idea of holding hearings is NOT to convert the Magats. It's to spread information to independents/moderate Republicans and convince them to lean away from the crazy Republicans during the next election. (We can't win this "one nutcase at a time," but we can win this one Independent at a time.)

    Third, making sure that anyone who wants to get involved in similar shenanigans knows the DOJ/Congress can/will dig deeply-enough to learn all the nasty bits is a good way to make sure something similar doesn't happen again. In short, it will demonstrate the Democratic willingness to fight back, which I think would be invaluable (if the Democrats actually did it.)

    Note a couple things. First, I'm not a terribly enthusiastic Democrat. They get a lot of important stuff wrong, but they're better by far than the crazies.

    Second, I agree that we need larger, better solutions. I just read "A Half-Built Garden" by Ruthanna Emrys and it was very inspiring in that regard, and I have some similar unpublished pieces.

    879:

    gasdive (he, him, ia) replied to this comment from Moz on August 20, 2022 12:52 in #753:

    Moz said: And tunnels were supposed to be an answer to that? Does the man not have access to the internet, or know anyone who does? If there's one thing tunnels are famous for it's being bloody expensive.

    That's true, they do have that reputation.

    8 years ago the world bank estimated the California HSR cost 56 million per km. 11 million for track, and the balance for land acquisition. I'm guessing the value of land in California would have close to doubled. For the Vegas loop the Boring Company built 2 stations, and 2 km of tunnel for 47 million.

    Apples and oranges.

    The 'Vegas loop' was sized for automobiles at 35mph and had no rails. Here's a video showing that: https://youtu.be/djfYafWFWtk?t=1

    880:

    Heteromeles was spot on, but one teeny tiny detail got left out:

    Clothing By DuPont™.

    When a martyr from the Judean People's Liberation Front decides it's time to Strike Back Against The Eeevil Oppressors, likely they will choose the least guarded, most vulnerable and crowded venue to Make Their Statement.

    Result: The Transportation Security Agency (notice it wasn't named the Airport Security Agency?) will dust off their plans for railway security, and arrive in hobnailed footwear. Rail transit becomes just as time-wasting as air transit.

    It's already in the works: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/tsa-confirms-controversial-amtrak-passenger-screening-program-underway/ar-AAW0Tg4

    881:

    Not from the US, but highly recommended:

    A 2008 National Film Board (of Canada) documentary, about an hour and a half long, based on Margaret MacMillan's book Paris 1919: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjmpMY22lqg.

    A BBC (British Broadcasting Corp.) documentary, one hour in length, from about 2016, called The Treaty of Versailles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74-HkCRozls.

    882:

    Should have added: Before I watched these documentaries, I had no idea that the peace conference left Japan feeling seriously shortchanged.

    883:

    Most tech solutions make a lot of assumptions about who will use a system

    One frustrating aspect is that often the bad assumptions are correct. A system built to cater for white male racists will often not be used by {others} even if they theoretically could.

    There's a little bit of fascination for me in the small number of Aboriginal Australians who voted in South Australia before federation, and the much larger number who chose not to vote, or their owners didn't tell them they could (owner in the "protector of aborigines" sense that you own your pets, not the slave-owner sense that you own your phone).

    Viz, black technically-Australians could legally vote, but of those who knew that only a tiny number actually did. AFAIK the work that was done to allow this was by one or two people inside a system that did not want that outcome - and in most states no black people could vote full stop. And of course no silly women were allowed to vote, also no dogs, chinamen, children, statues or or other things. "The good old days" {cough}.

    884:

    swipe right if this person is unacceptable

    It's worth noting that any match system for shared transport would need to be two-way. Just because us older males here would love to share a ride with an attractive young lady does not mean said person would love to share a ride with us. There's a social cost problem here as well, where I recognise an AYL as someone in my friendship circle, she declines to share a ride, then next time we meet I ask her why not. Fun times.

    One aspect of the match algorithms is that it would probably work better using classes, with a degree of deep inspection based on social credit score (China) or your data broker categories (US). That way someone can just say "no homophobes, no racists, no men" etc, with those terms defined very broadly (viz, 'men' means 'male-identified or male-appearing or male-genticially AND older than 12' say) but also semi-anonymously. Plus optionally "but allow anyone I'm friends with on Facebook or follow on Twitter".

    I think this would be right outside the purview of anti-discrimination legislation, for the same reason you can't be prosecuted that way for who you marry, live with or have children with. Saying "you seem unreasonably prejudiced against male spouses" to a lesbian is a pretty wild proposition.

    885:

    My specialty here is on OGH's shit list, so I'll be brief: cycle infrastructure is increasingly being designed for women and children, and interestingly one of the major problems with it traditionally has been that it's not designed for commuting (and is often designed to make commuting impossible). By that I mean the "recreational shared path" model where it' is assumed that cyclists travel slowly, for short distances, and are happy to dismount frequently and walk their bike for as long as necessary.

    So there's been a complex focus for cycling advocates of simultaneously asking for more direct routes with better paving, better sight lines, and continuous path; but also more web-like bike routes with better access to micro-destinations like individual schools, shops and housing agglomerations. When mapped it often makes sense to use car-style techniques with major routes made distinct from minor ones.

    At the same time the rise of ebikes means there are now a lot more mothers-with-kids on bikes, and also the politically important retired folk out for joy rides. This means that even government bodies made up of middle aged white men serving the interests of MAWM are often being forced to allow for the interests of cyclists even when they very much want not to do that. But increasingly those people are in your government doing the things, and in large enough numbers that they can't be ignored (as the Liberal Party discovered in Australia recently).

    I have greatly enjoyed my local council employing a young "transport engineer" of a not straight-white-man variety who is willing to discuss things other than more cars more fast more often. This is a dramatic change. For the better. We are more or less counting the days until two people senior to them retire, because right now there is a very strong car-based filter on approvable projects.

    886:

    The US Left (aka "Progressives") is all about the rights of people of color, which is perfectly fair, if somewhat incomplete

    As Billy Bragg sang in his version of the Internationale, "freedom is merely privilege extended, unless enjoyed by one and all".

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAw0Ri4FSdM

    887:

    If you've got the top judges on your side -- not just sympathetic but actually willing to pervert the course of justice from the bench -- then your side can pretty much ignore the letter of the law.

    At some point thought, the people are just going to ignore court decisions that they don't agree with. See for example Tampa prosecutor Andrew Warren, who pledged not to use his office to go after people who seek and provide abortions or doctors who provide gender affirming care to transgender people. (Warren was subsequently fired by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.)

    888:

    kiloseven said: Apples and oranges.

    Apples to apples.

    I must not have been clear. 56 million per km. 11 million for the track. That leaves 45 million dollars per km for the ground that you put the track on. Not the track. the ground. Ground in an unimproved state that needs to be flattened out. The flattening out being part of the 11 million for laying track.

    Vegas loop was 47 million for the 2+ km of tunnel, 2 stations, ticketing system, training program, operations manual charging system and dozens of 100 thousand dollar cars. They didn't break out the costs, but that sounds like the tunnels were in the region of 25 million for 2 km. So about 12 million dollars per km for a flat bit of ground that you could drive a car on, or build a track on. Noting that starting and stopping tunneling is the expensive bit, so the marginal cost of adding more km of tunnel is probably much less. While the marginal cost of resuming land is not less.

    So 45 million per km to buy ground that you then have to improve to the point that you can actually lay track, vs ~12 million per km for underground ground that's already in a perfect state to just drop sleepers and rails onto.

    889:

    Should have added: Before I watched these documentaries, I had no idea that the peace conference left Japan feeling seriously shortchanged.

    China too.

    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/surprisingly-important-role-china-played-world-war-i-180964532/

    890:

    Should have added: Before I watched these documentaries, I had no idea that the peace conference left Japan feeling seriously shortchanged.

    It's great that they mentioned that. It's worth expanding that what Japan got or kept (kept Korea, obtained colonies in China and Oceania) provided the other part of the basis for many of the deaths the Japanese Empire caused in the 1930s and 1940s. While I agree that they were treated shamefully, they did unfortunately act as shamefully as the European powers and US did towards them.

    With the Sykes-Picot Agreement (butchering the Ottoman Empire), I think it's fair to say that most humans who were not white, male, and of European descent didn't benefit from the Treaty of Versailles and associated actions. And millions died in WW2 as a result.

    Not our proudest hour as a species.

    891:

    Apples to apples.

    If it was really apples to apples Musk has ways of making it obvious. As he did in Australia when he took over RedFlow's project, he'd just pick a number and say "we'll deliver it on time for this much or you pay nothing".

    But strangely he's too busy buying Twitter or launching cars into space or whatever to bother with fast rail.

    I think someone had the guts to tell him, or maybe he realised all by himself, that hundreds of kilometres of California is a whole different thing than 3km of Las Vegas. Starting with the toy one being in the middle of a big flat geologically stable area in Nevada. You could probably scale that up to an underground link between Broken Hill and Newman (~3000km across the middle of Australia), but I suspect that there would be enough ugliness in California that even the pure technical stuff would break Musk. The longest project they have approved appears to be 6.4km but they have cancelled some longer ones. I just can't see anything over 100km even in the "Musk tweeted about it" level of sheer fantasy.

    892:

    China has more graduates than it has graduate-level jobs.

    Sounds just like the U.S. :-(

    893:

    My personal fantasy, from the moment I saw images of the Vegas Loop is to get rid of the cars and have bicycles.

    Above I made some wild guesses about the cost of making a couple of km of Boring Company tunnel. I think that with a bit of optimisation, and considering that the costs of tunneling are concentrated at the beginning and end, we might see 10 million AUD per km. The current NSW annual road creation budget is over 700 billion. If you sliced off 10 billion for underground dedicated cycleways that would add 1000 km of underground cycleway every year. Starting in Sydney that would mean very direct routes from almost anywhere to almost anywhere else.

    The house I grew up in is in Bondi. Very very well served for public transport. Almost certainly the best in Australia (it was the Prime Minister's electorate after all). Google maps tells me that the public transport takes 41 minutes to get me the 5.5 km from that house to where I used to work on Elizabeth Street in the city. That's not some sort of round the houses milk run. With the hub and spoke transit system centred on the city, that's a very direct path and assumes perfect connections. When I did it for real, I always allowed 90 minutes and occasionally I was late for work. (which meant that I generally walked as that took an hour)

    A 25 km/h speed limited e-bike would do that in 13 minutes, 15 if you add some walking at each end.

    894:

    I agree with all those points, but none of them make it cheaper to buy land than to tunnel under it. Which is the only thing that I'm disagreeing with.

    895:

    One presumes that, in the unlikely event of the D's getting a majority in both houses, they could then impeach, since it's clear that several of the current incumbents lied like rugs in their hearings.

    Impeachment in the House is easy, taking a simple majority. But convicting in the Senate takes a two-thirds majority of those Senators present and voting, which is simply impossible in the foreseeable future... :-(

    896:

    "Second, the idea of holding hearings is NOT to convert the Magats. It's to spread information to independents/moderate Republicans and convince them to lean away from the crazy Republicans during the next election. (We can't win this "one nutcase at a time," but we can win this one Independent at a time.)"

    I thought the purpose was to force the SC to change the ideological direction it's case findings are heading in. You would have to shoot half of them to do that.

    If the purpose instead is to appeal to independent voters, then there are more effective ways to do that. But, ok, putting GT's crimes into the public record would help, a little. I mean, if Jan 6 didn't do it, then I doubt Mrs. Thomas shenanigans would, but every little bit helps the rule of law.

    Bear in mind that anything which could or would convince independents to lean left will inevitably harden core-conservative resistance. Put her in jail for the rest of her life, and watch them weaponize that. Remember that Jan 6 means something completely different for the Right Wing: they think that Biden stole the election, so rushing the Congress wasn't an attempt to overthrow the government, it was an attempt to save the Constitution. You would make the Thomas's into martyrs. You can be sure that all this will happen again, regardless of what anyone does. They may succeed, they may fail, but they won't stop trying.

    I'm not saying this is a reason not to do it, merely that this is a factor to keep in mind. It depends on whether the goal is victory for our side at any cost, or re-uniting the country somehow. And remember that the system of checks and balances exists to ensure that these two things are tightly bound to one another.

    897:

    considering that the costs of tunneling are concentrated at the beginning and end

    My understanding is that faults and transitions are also expensive. Going through an active fault means cutting the tunnel then making sure you're set up to tweak your tunnel every time the fault moves. Which is less of a problem in Australia than Aotearoa, say.

    I'm also only vaguely aware of how TBMs work under water, but I expect it's very much "seal and pump out as you go" which has got to be tricky when you're under the swamplands of Sydney let alone if you're digging under a porous-rock harbour. Going under the Bosporus Strait would presumably be exciting in all the ways (there are bridges but AFAIK no tunnels there).

    I am not entirely convinced by underground bicycle facilities. The whole lifts/escalators/ramps thing strikes me as tedious. For special events like crossing water I can kind of get it, but bikes don't carry momentum very well so any ramp down is going to be followed by a grind up for 99% of bikes. Stopping and using a lift replaces the grind with a wait. There are a few elevated cyclepaths that have similar problems, and the standout is the limited access/rape trap problem: once you're on the thing you can't get off easily. Normal bike paths you can stop every 5m or more accurately any 5m that you want. Elevated/underground ones are very point-to-point.

    Speaking of insanity, I saw a little e-scooter barrelling down the Centenary Drive near Rookwood the other day. 80km/hr, 3 lanes each way divided highway doesn't seem like the ideal route even if the scooter can do 50km/hr or more.

    898:

    none of them make it cheaper to buy land than to tunnel under it. Which is the only thing that I'm disagreeing with.

    Great, Musk can make a narrow, very short tunnel through predictable, stable geology quickly and cheaply. That's genuinely awesome.

    When the current world record longest ever tunnel is only 57km (Gotthard Rail Tunnel) and Musk is blase about more than ten times that length there is a great deal of "fucking show me" to be said. Especially when it comes to a chancer like Musk. The fact that he's regularly bailed on much, much shorter tunnels seems like a bit of a give-away to me.

    I dunno if you noticed but he sort of started to express interest in the Blue Mountains tunnel project in Sydney. The PTB did not believe his claimed prices, and then everything went very quiet. It's hard to know whether that's because the primitive fools in NSW don't know how to sign major infrastructure agreements over twitter, or whether Musk was just shitting and running away as he so often does.

    899:

    The Supreme Court isn't going to affect the outcome of 2022 very much, or even 2024.

    I have to disagree a bit. By refusing to address the issue of gerrymandering, the Supreme Court has already tilted the playing field toward Republican candidates in these and any future elections for the foreseeable future.

    900:

    The point is not to impeach. It's to throw a warning shot over the Supreme's bow, reminding them that a sufficiently pissed of Congress can fuck them up, and that a sufficiently pissed-off electorate can bring in a much rougher Congress.

    901:

    There are multiple objectives, as I noted above.

    I think, depending on what Gini actually did, the right inquiry might force a resignation out of Thomas, but you'd only do that if you knew for sure your party owned the Senate. (Look up Abe Fortas if you don't know about him already.)

    I don't think anyone else is that vulnerable, though properly investigating Kavanaugh might yield some interesting results. (IMHO the Democrats should have set up their own hot-line for Kavanaugh tips.)

    I suppose that a sufficiently pissed-off Congress could refuse to fund the Supremes, but that's very much a nuclear option. Forcing some professional rules on the court might be constitutional.

    902:

    I agree with all those points, but none of them make it cheaper to buy land than to tunnel under it. Which is the only thing that I'm disagreeing with.

    That's actually incorrect. You're just switching from whoever owns the surface to whoever owns the mineral rights. IANAL, but with the surface you can buy a right of way, but with the mineral rights, since you're making a hole and not just mining gravel, I think you're stuck buying rather than leasing.

    One bigger problem is that, in urban areas, a lot of stuff is undergrounded already under major streets, so sewer, gas, electric, and water lines all run right next to each other under the tarmac. You can bore under it, but connecting surface to tunnel gets messy, because you've got to find ways past all the stuff that's already buried. This is doable with people (that's what subway stairs are for), but a bit trickier with bigger things.

    As for Nevada, a couple of points:

    --It's not geologically inert, just less active than California (look up Basin and Range). If you want Australia-level tectonic inertness, you've got to go to the Texas Permian Basin, northern Wisconsin, or ideally, the Canadian Shield. Montreal has more underground than Vancouver does for a good reason.

    --Putting more tunnels under Vegas may not be the brightest idea, because Vegas already has tunnels. They're for flood control, and people live and occasionally die in them. As with many desert cities, Las Vegas can flood rather spectacularly (that was ten days ago).

    --That hasn't stopped people from building under Vegas, though, and not just for flood control. There was even a History Channel episode on that awhile back. (Sigh. I miss Cities of the Underworld.)

    903:

    I'm not saying this is a reason not to do it, merely that this is a factor to keep in mind. It depends on whether the goal is victory for our side at any cost, or re-uniting the country somehow. And remember that the system of checks and balances exists to ensure that these two things are tightly bound to one another.

    Sorry, I should probably have addressed this above. I've been thinking about the issues about the Right for awhile, and they seem very much like the protagonists of a Lovecraft story to me. They've seen hideous and terrible things, like two women getting married and people who aren't interested in Jebus and Black folks with college degrees, and these terrible, squamous and rugose sights have driven them mad! "Ia, Ia Cthulhu, grandma went to a Jewish deli and they put cream cheese and smoked salmon on donuts. She still hasn't stopped screaming! Y'vann Yog Sothoth! Asian people are writing books! Why don't they know their place? Everything is upside-down and crazy!"

    And so forth. I'd settle for convincing the scared, future-shocked rightwing freaks to simply calm the fuck down and be pleasant to the Gay couple next door! Yes, there are humans who don't think or feel like you. Calm the fuck down!

    904:

    an LGV or Shinkansen N700 ought to be able to cover downtown Sydney to downtown Melbourne in about three hours

    Indeed. But usually when they discuss unviability it is about cost versus passenger numbers, and they get to choose their own assumptions. The worst examples will assume that no-one who currently flies would take the train instead, and many would only allow a small changeover. Of course, currently there are only 2 trains per day for the 10h trip, and it costs from A$102 to A$177, versus up to 6 flights an hour costing A$150 to A$438 (although there are limited time discounts for A$58 that I can see without even looking for them). So you're preaching to the choir, here... the volume is definitely there, it's mostly politics and business interests resolving their differences at the moment. There seems to be an alignment between organisations that want to bid for high speed rail and property development along the line, with whole new cities and other fanciful things. It will happen one day, not sure it will happen in my lifetime though.

    There have been more favourable business cases put up for high-speed rail on longer-haul sections of commuter networks, such as Sydney to Wollongong, Brisbane to the Sunshine Coast and in Melbourne from Geelong to Frankston. And there are rail projects being built, despite longstanding opposition in the political layer.

    905:

    Blue Mountains tunnel project

    That reminds me, in one of the interminable discussions about commute distances and how Australians don't understand geology, or maybe it's geography, I mentioned a classmate in Sydney who had a daily commute down from the Blue Mountains. I caught up for a meal with another old classmate the other day, and compared recollections/notes... that kid is now a senior actuary with Berkshire Hathaway. So I guess all that extra study time on the train paid off in the end.

    I've heard of that tunnel project, and I guess it's borderline whether it will put Bathurst in commuter reach of Sydney? Drove through that way in April and might do again in November.

    906:

    There have been more favourable business cases put up for high-speed rail on longer-haul sections of commuter networks

    Better still, they often involve tunnels :)

    Victoria has seen a plethora of promises in the last decade and some progress on stuff like buying rolling stock that is at least capable of going faster, followed by incremental improvements to track that allows speed limits to be raised here and there. If nothing else it entertains the train drivers who get to constantly fiddle with the knobs and levers that make the train go.

    But the real improvement is low-speed and brutally expensive... separating the regional trains from the inner city ones so the regional ones are less likely to spend 10 minutes sitting in a siding somewhere while they wait for access to the terminating station in the city. That is, a(nother) tunnel under Melbourne. Ideally to Flinders St but hahaha yeah nah they go to Southern Cross now and it shall be ever so.

    https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/regions-unite-on-fast-train-strategy-20190608-p51vsd.html

    Meanwhile Sydney has similar issues on a much more sprawling city, so if our mate Elon really could dig a 100km tunnel for $20M/km or whatever that would be awesome.

    Also, the commuter tickets between Syd and Melb very rarely drop in price because they almost always have excess demand. People already travel early or late to avoid the rush, and if you want a $50 ticket you're normally looking at arriving lunchtime Monday and leaving lunchtime Friday if you can travel on those days at all. Not that I've even done that, I always made a point of making my annual flight whenever it was cheapest rather than on a particular day (I had a job interview in Canberra on a Tuesday, for example. Tuesday evening in Canberra is a ghost town. or the rural "you could fire a shot down the middle of the main street and no-one would know")

    907:

    “from the moment I saw images of the Vegas Loop is to get rid of the cars and have bicycles.” Let’s not be foolish here - that much concentration of neon Lycra would cause some form of singularity event. Bad idea.

    My objections to trains and planes - and to a smaller extent buses - as transport is the inflexibility. And bear in mind pace some older threads I’ve done more miles on rail than some photons from the Big Bang have travelled. The very thing that makes them nominally more efficient- the rails - makes it outrageously expensive to build track. Once the track is there you can’t do anything except go along it without more expense; even a switch-around costs a fortune and as for providing double tracks for bidirectional travel... if the focus of residence moves -and it does , frequently- then you either move the station at ruinous expense or have to find some way to get people from homes now several miles away and provide parking etc. Efficiency dramatically reduced. Time wasted.

    You can only go where the track can go, which is rarely where you need. So you end up with the aforementioned in-feeder issue and now an out-feeder problem. The underground! Whoopee, more train stuff going from not quite where you are to not quite where you want to go. And of course, run by different people that want paying in a different manner.

    And all of this crowded in crappy carriages with foul air, surrounded by .. people. Yuck. And if you need to transport something bigger than Sir Poncey Johnsonbury’s briefcase then you’re screwed.

    That sort of concentrated industrial transport is about as reasonable as the outdated concentrated industrial office slavery that distorts society right now.

    908:

    "I have to disagree a bit. By refusing to address the issue of gerrymandering, the Supreme Court has already tilted the playing field toward Republican candidates in these and any future elections for the foreseeable future."

    The SC has addressed this: On June 27, 2019 the U.S. Supreme Court, in Rucho v. Common Cause, announced a momentous decision: Federal courts have no power to police partisan gerrymandering. This basically turned it into a local issue. In other words, gerrymandering does the most damage in districts that generally vote Republican anyway.

    IIRC, there is another case coming up soon where the SC is expected to double down on this trend.

    909:

    I don't see how anyone could "force" Thomas to resign, regardless of anything brought against him or his wife. They are both true believers, and would probably rather die than surrender in the face of what they would see as political oppression. Remember, from their point of view, Jan 6 was a patriotic act. I know of no reason not to believe that they both possess the courage of their convictions, crazy though they may be.

    And of course the Dems do not own the Senate, thanks to Manchin and Sinema.

    910:

    Let's imagine the worst, that Gini is in fact guilty of something awful, and that she's convicted and sent to jail. That leaves Thomas the choice of going down fighting, and leaving exactly the same impression as Trump is currently leaving... I suspect he'd resign at that point. But you're right. If he chose to be stubborn I doubt there would ever be votes to impeach him.

    911:

    "Sorry, I should probably have addressed this above. I've been thinking about the issues about the Right for awhile, and they seem very much like the protagonists of a Lovecraft story to me."

    Bigotry is a big part of it, but not all of it, esp if you mean the explicit kind. Job security is another part, and what they think of as traditional American life choices, including loyalty to one's local community, and deference to authority (employers, mostly). Fear of crime is in there, and the opiod crisis. Perhaps the biggest part is that the costs and benefits of globalization have not been distributed evenly, and one of the communities that bore a disproportionate share of the costs where semi-rural white suburbs (the other one was inner city neighborhoods of color).

    Basically, they don't recognize the country they live in anymore, and they want it back. If you haven't read "Strangers In Their Own Land" by Arlie Russell Hochschild, I highly recommend it.

    Less Lovecraft and more Mirror Universe (Star Trek).

    912:

    "Let's imagine the worst, that Gini is in fact guilty of something awful, and that she's convicted and sent to jail. That leaves Thomas the choice of going down fighting, and leaving exactly the same impression as Trump is currently leaving... I suspect he'd resign at that point. But you're right. If he chose to be stubborn I doubt there would ever be votes to impeach him."

    Well, time may prove it, one way or another. I suspect that his wife being convicted of trying to take the election back from that fraud Biden would motivate him to become more extreme, but I could be wrong.

    913:

    As for the 15-minute city, I almost live in one. Most services are within 15 minutes walking distance, and if not, there's the metro station (and buses). For more specialty shops it's either ordering online or a 15-20 minutes on the metro. The only regular exception to this is my workplace, I like working in an office and it takes me about 35 minutes by metro or by bike to work (don't have a car, that'd be maybe 15-20 minutes but more costly).

    Groceries shopping varies much by person, we do it mostly so that I pick up the daily groceries on the way back from work, and I go to the library and pick up most packages which didn't get delivered home at the same time. It takes me maybe 15 minutes extra time each day to shop, the other things take a bit more but not much as they are close by.

    This of course wouldn't work for everybody. I've been thinking of buying a cargo bike, but for now just hauling everything in bags and backpacks works for us. There's also home delivery, but we have mostly used it when sick or too busy. We also have robot deliveries for groceries for certain stores, so it's not all vans delivering the stuff.

    One of our constraints is storage space - we maybe could get all the groceries for a week in one go, but that'd mean more effort arranging storage for all that. Of course that's also partly attitude, but this works for us.

    914:

    Moz
    All horribly true - I've been cycling since 1957 - I've been told "You aren't a proper cyclist!" by so-called "advocacy groups" The number of badly/un/stupidly-"designed" supposed cycle farcilities & in places where you really need them, their total absence ... right.

    915:

    ""fascism" is too ambiguous a word for serious historians to apply anymore"

    Robert Paxton, who literally wrote the book on the subject, seems to have come around to accepting Trump's fascism. I don't see it as being entirely illegitimate to extend that to what the Republicans are doing.

    916:

    I've been told "You aren't a proper cyclist!"

    I can't speak to what advocacy groups may have been involved, but having cycled in the UK, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the UK suffers from the problem captured excellently by Humon in SATW.

    The UK has a problem of treating cycling as primarily a sport that a small number of people engage in to the detriment of Everyone Else (tm). More sane countries (and even smaller cities in the UK, Cambridge being the obvious example) overcome by virtue of everyone being a cyclist, because "cyclist" comes to mean "person on a bike". In the UK, in my experience, "cyclist" conjures up images of middle aged men, naturally in lycra, on bikes that have the same appearance, weight, and structural rigidity of advanced lingerie.

    917:

    Perhaps the biggest part is that the costs and benefits of globalization have not been distributed evenly, and one of the communities that bore a disproportionate share of the costs were semi-rural white suburbs

    the very insight trump rode to the white house

    918:

    Atropos
    Precisely

    On a n other subject, mentioned by Charlie, several threads back ...
    It would seem there are very murky, murderous dealings in Moscow - my money is on either an RU false-flag { They will do it, repeatedly } or, possibly more likely, an internal faction-fight.

    919:

    Dugina was apparently driving her father's car -- he was almost certainly the real target.

    (He decided to stay and talk to someone else, so departed later.)

    920:

    Part of the problem here is that education isn't just a personal good and a social good, its also a "positional" good, meaning that part of the value of having e.g. a degree comes from the fact that someone else doesn't have one. This is a fundamental conflict

    It is entirely solvable in a society which can set salaries by fiat. That's exactly what Soviet Union did in 1970's when it began paying factory worker significantly more than to doctors, engineers and other professionals. University education was free (students were actually paid to attend university), but once you graduated, you were poorer than someone without a degree, until and unless you got promoted to management.

    This was done explicitly to reduce competition for degrees, and also had another benefit (from Soviet government's viewpoint): it prevented continuity of intellectual tradition. Soviet leaders knew that revolutions are usually led by educated people from educated background -- both Lenin and Castro came from intellectual families. So best to prevent such dangerous element from taking root in USSR. The above salary imbalance served this function -- a child of say a doctor and a teacher would say "Why should I spend four years in college and then struggle all life like Mom and Dad?" Whereas a factory couple would take pride in their child being exceptionally smart, and tell him "Go to college and live without getting your hands dirty -- we'll help you with money"

    921:

    It depends on whether the goal is victory for our side at any cost, or re-uniting the country somehow. And remember that the system of checks and balances exists to ensure that these two things are tightly bound to one another.

    I may be wrong, but I have come to conclusion that the second goal is at this point a lost cause. It won't happen. Which leaves the first goal.

    922:

    That's true for the UK, too - see the latest thread.

    923:

    That's true for the UK, too - see the latest thread.

    What do you mean? The latest thread is about Chalies's Chicon 8 schedule, what does it have to do with anything here?

    924:

    my money is on either an RU false-flag { They will do it, repeatedly } or, possibly more likely, an internal faction-fight.

    Dima Vorobiev is a former Soviet professional propagandist, and one of the most popular writers on Quora; I find him both knowledgeable and honest. He agrees with your assessment:

    https://www.quora.com/Who-is-behind-the-attempt-at-executing-Putins-ideologue-Aleksandr-Dugin-Ukrainians-Chechens-FSB-or-GRU-Was-killing-just-his-daughter-a-hard-warning/answer/Dima-Vorobiev

    925:

    889 - If, and only if, you don't have to acquire any form of rights or easements to allow you to tunnel. Now, I suspect you don't know any more about Arizona land rights than I do. What I do know about is Scottish land rights, and here you would have to purchase a right to tunnel under any improved land (such as farms, structures) that you wish to run your route under.
    (agrees with Heteromeles 903)

    894 - My personal fantasy is to get rid of the cars and have bicycles.
    At which point I suspect it becomes cheaper and faster to just ban cars from using existing roads.

    898 - From what I know of the Alpine tunnels (I read lots of histories on the subject when I was younger), the answer to hitting an underground river is to either stop and re-route the TBM or to stop it whilst you plug the (sometimes literal) flooding of the tunnel. Neither of these will be cheap just because there do not appear to be any underground rivers in Las Vegas.

    926:

    Neither of these will be cheap just because there do not appear to be any underground rivers in Las Vegas.

    The trick is to get the underground 3D maps the oil companies have been making for a few decades now. In places they have fairly accurate maps going down 5 miles. With ancient river bedss and mountain ranges obviously buried. (Which led some Christian YECs to change their minds about a lot of things.)

    But they likely haven't been looking in Alps or similar places very much.

    927:

    To quote from your article: "Trump's incitement of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2020 removes my objection to the fascist label. His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line."

    The problem, of course, is that other ideologies have attempted to overthrow governments. Another problem is that Fascism claims to be a coherent political ideology. Trump and his supporters don't make that claim.

    He's a populist authoritarian, and strong-man, and an incipient tyrant.

    928:

    Well, "insight" may be too strong a word, but yes, he did sense the opportunity and grasp it.

    929:

    [Me] It depends on whether the goal is victory for our side at any cost, or re-uniting the country somehow. And remember that the system of checks and balances exists to ensure that these two things are tightly bound to one another.

    [You] I may be wrong, but I have come to conclusion that the second goal is at this point a lost cause. It won't happen. Which leaves the first goal.

    Well, the issue is whether or not there would be a country to have a victory over, if we can't at least live and work together. After all, things are polarized, but no more so than they were in the 1960's (though the lines are very different now), and we seem to overcome that (if mostly by waiting for the Greatest Generation to die).

    Here's an interesting speculation: Could the marketing companies figure out how to safely brand the new progressive movement? If you could turn it into a line of clothes, say, the traditionalists would have a lot less hostility to that.

    930:

    The latest thread is "The Gathering Crisis".

    931:

    In tribute to the first volume of Churchill's major WWII history: The Gathering Storm I presume?

    932:

    Interesting thread on Dugin's weird beliefs that make the idea of him sacrificing his own daughter quite credible.

    933:

    Kardashev @ 326:

    Criminal conviction being disqualifying for Federal office seems to be of undetermined significance. Maybe yes, maybe no.

    I believe the way the courts have read it in the past it applies to UN-ELECTED "officers" - cabinet members, appointed advisors, staff members in the three branches and such like. How ELECTED officers of the government (i.e. Congress & the President & Vice President are barred from office is laid out in the Constitution.

    IE Impeached in the House and tried & convicted in the Senate.

    OTOH, if he's a convicted felon serving time, he's NOT going to be let out for campaigning. There's no requirement to give him any more accommodation than any other prisoner gets.

    He could run for President, but he couldn't hold campaign rallies or make campaign appearances from inside prison.

    He wouldn't even be able to meet with campaign staff - other than his lawyers and they'd be restricted in what they could bring in and take out.

    He wouldn't have access to Twitter or Truth Social (no more so than other prisoners) or other outside media.

    934:

    Kardashev @ 727:

    "Thing is, I was speculating on a way to reduce dependence on automobiles society wide, but the Walmart grocery delivery would invariably require someone with a car to deliver my groceries."

    When we've used supermarket deliveries in the US and Central America, it's almost always been by a van driving a route and making several deliveries at a time. That, obviously, needs a fairly dense (spatially) set of customers with several ordering at the same time +- a few hours. But in an urban setting, it lets one route substitute for several individual trips.

    Well, I'll give it a look & TRY to give it fair consideration, even if it IS Walmart.

    935:

    paws4thot @ 738:

    721 and 729 - UK data point. I'm fully vaxed, to the extent that I had flu' 21-22 at the same time as Covid 3. I am also anti-self-driving because I don't trust the software. For example, it can mistake a crisp packet for a toddler, and a white over the road truck for an empty road.

    The doctor suggested that I NOT get flu & covid vaccinations at the same time ... which wasn't really difficult because I wasn't yet eligible for the covid vaccine when I got my flu shot, but he did suggest I have a slight separation, several days at least, between them.

    936:

    Charlie Stross @ 750:

    Speaking of which: I just ordered an at-home delivery from Morrisons (rather shit chain, in particular their fresh fruit and veg is crap quality -- but we're going away in a week, so I was mostly ordering storable stuff for when we get home). Order placed at 12:20; delivery window is 3-5pm this afternoon.

    The orders are despatched from a large supermarket on the city bypass (half an orbital ringroad -- it's not a complete ring road because the other side would be under the Firth of Forth or have to ram through densely built-up coastal urban housing) and generally take about 40 minutes to drive this far into town: I'm usually stop #1 or #2 on their route, going by the updates and the tracking map.

    I'm trying to figure out how to best reduce my carbon footprint for food while maintaining a varied & interesting diet.

    I've looked into those "meal" delivery plans that send you ingredients that you cook for yourself. But so far the drawbacks outweigh the benefits.

    Seems like they only send meals for four people and they want you to get them two or three times per week. Meals for 1 or 2 would suit my needs better, but I could do meals for 4 knowing I coulde keep the leftovers in the refrigerator and have them later in the week ... but not if I had to do them two or three times a week. I'd have too many leftovers in the refrigerator and I'd never get around to using them all up and I HATE to waste food.

    If there was a plan that either sent only meals for 1 or 2 every week or a plan that sent meals for 4 every couple of weeks I think I could make it work.

    The other problem I have with grocery shopping is none of the stores around here have ALL of the products I want or need at prices I can afford.

    I have to spread my shopping between 3 or 4 stores both to find enough of the foods I want & stay within budget.

    Often times, I may not know everything I'm going to buy on a shopping trip because I only have a base list of "must get" items.

    I don't know what the stores are going to have on special when I get there, but when I find "specials" on items that I know I'll want repeatedly I try to stock up, and I don't usually list what I consider staples on my shopping list.

    937:

    Charlie Stross @ 752:

    One problem the USA has is ridiculous railway safety standards -- passenger trains have to be built to withstand impacts with heavy railfreight using the same tracks, so US specs result in the world's most overweight high speed trains. (And are therefore slower and more expensive to propel.) It's like they've never heard of Japan's Shinkansen network, which was deliberately built using a different track gauge so it wouldn't share tracks with other traffic. Thereby avoiding the "oops, I just derailed in front of a 24,000 ton freight string" problem and the "I want to be as fast as a turboprop but I have to be as impact-resistant as a tank" issue.

    I think the real problems with high speed rail in the U.S. are twofold
    • The rails are privately owned and the Railroad Companies will not spend one penny more than they're forced to on track maintenance or upgrades.
    • Grade crossings - the trains have to slow down to avoid traffic crossing the rails.

    We NEED a high speed rail system nationwide, not just in California. In order to get that, we need to eliminate all of the grade level crossings where it is going to interact with vehicle traffic. But the Railroad operating companies are NOT going to pay for it and will actively fight against it EVEN IF THE GOVERNMENT WAS PAYING FOR IT.

    That's what I think the Boring Company SHOULD be doing. Putting trains in tunnels would eliminate grade crossings, AND the new rails would be owned by the government (similar to the way the government owns the Interstate Highway System). Even if the tunnels have to be larger to accommodate railroad cars, it would still be worth doing.

    I don't think the diameter of the required tunnels would be that big of a problem. Seems like Musk built his boring machine to the diameter that would accommodate his Teslas (no ventilation to prevent anyone driving an IC engine vehicle through them).

    It should be just as easy to build a boring machine to accommodate the size required for U.S. railroad cars.

    938:

    Kardashev @ 755:

    "The basic point is that jailing even a convicted POTUS is a bit of a nightmare."

    I have bad dreams EVERY time I go to sleep. DJT rotting in jail ain't one of 'em.

    I wonder how the Secret Service protective detail would deal with the situation. Probably be easiest and cheapest to build a special-purpose compound.

    Just keep him in solitary confinement for the duration of his sentence.

    939:

    Robert Prior @ 783:

    Or you can put whatever you just bought in the trunk of the car and let the vehicle network route your package back to your house. None of this is particularly difficult.

    So you are proposing I visit the art gallery, spend time touring around, buy the books, put them in the trunk of a common-use self-driving car, got for a two hour hike, take another common-use car home, then ask the first car to deliver my packages and hope no one has removed them (or melted ice cream onto them) in the meantime?

    If you're going to use another "common-use self-driving car" to get home, you could always send the self-driving car home with your shopping as soon as you've finished loading them.

    You'd still need someone at home to unload, but how about a delivery vehicle that carries a standardized secure cold container which gets dropped in your driveway (or some other designated place) where you could unload it when you got home?

    Maybe some "common-use self-driving cars" could be designed specifically as delivery vehicles?

    Understand I'm not saying this is a solution to your objections. But it IS something whoever is designing a "common-use self-driving car" should be considering in their designs.

    940:

    Fair enough. but Scottish medics were pretty anonymous (sic) that you could get both at the same time, and if you had to go to a GP or clinic you only had to queue once getting both together.

    941:

    David L @ 793:

    It turns out that once you take into account check-in, boarding, disembarkation, and luggage claim times, you've got a fixed overhead of roughly 3 hours for any flight -- plus time to/from the airport.

    For me I can drive door to door 250 miles and fly door to door with 20-30 miles at each end of driving plus rental car pick in about the same time. 5 hours. And in MY CAR I have my snacks and whatever else I want to bring. My wife would still rather fly. Sigh.

    I'm thinking that if the railroad is essentially city center to city center you might be able to eliminate (or reduce) that 20-30 miles on each end. You'll still need a rental car at the other end if your hotel or business isn't within walking distance of the train station, but getting the rail connections between the city is a start on that other problem.

    The easier it is to get from city center to city center by rail, the more likely the center city will be rebuilt for walk-ability.

    I'm also thinking a rational transportation network would make it easier to visit the country outside the city without requiring an automobile.

    Case in point: How would you get to Umstead Park or Lake Crabtree if you don't have an automobile?

    Given their setting and distance central to the urban centers in the Triangle Region (Chapel Hill-Durham-Raleigh) they SHOULD be accessible by transit.

    942:

    SFReader @ 799:

    Train tunnels

    My impression from the discussion so far is that it's assumed that such train tunnels would run vast distances without stopping. No regional, semi-local deliveries. Curious what the current 'miles/kilometers shipped' is for current typical shipping in the US vs. UK vs. Japan vs. Australia. Also, trucking companies* are a big part of the US economy even if you don't factor in their huge fossil fuel usage. (Guessing that there'd be a lot of political resistance to such tunnel networks from at least these two industries.)

    I was thinking some kind of flexible multi-mode system with a variety of specialized vehicle units & a network similar to the Interstate Highway system + state & federal highways; so that it serves transportation needs for the entire nation. There would be through passenger trains on regular schedules similar to today's scheduled trains & buses, but routed underground.

    There would also be individual "travel units" of various sizes to accommodate other needs.

    Using the computer, you schedule the kind of "travel unit" you need to your nearby station and program it to take you to a station near your destination. It may be that your individual "travel unit" gets added into one of those scheduled through trains for part of your journey.

    It just occurs to me there might be "travel units" for long distance (500+ miles) where you could drive your car in & sit (with the engine off for legacy IC motor vehicles) while it covers the major part of the distance and then drive your car out once you reach your destination so you wouldn't be dependent on rental cars or baggage limits for planes & trains.

    943:

    Heteromeles @ 815:

    The trunk does not belong to you.

    I can just see this with the TSA, in a slightly different context:

    Presuming you wanted to waste your carry-on baggage allowance for someone else's STUFF, the trunk would have to have a TSA approved shipper's seal & manifest on the outside showing that it has undergone pre-inspection. As long as YOU didn't tamper with the seal, the onus is on the shipper.

    But why would you be carrying it in the first place? Easier for the shipper to send it DHL, FedEx or UPS.

    944:

    Greg Tingey @ 821:

    Addendum:
    Really worrying sign for 2022/2024 US elections - how likely are they to take over & totally subvert elections?

    Not really as worrisome as some other developments. In this case it's the GQP engaging in self-harm. It doesn't bode well for their long term future electoral prospects.

    Replacing the few honorable people left in the GQP with Nuckin Futsers is a way to lose more general elections.

    In the long run the GQP is doomed by the cannibals within.

    In the short run, I think their plans to disenfranchise the electorate is of more pressing concern.

    The "independent state legislature theory" in Harper is also the basis for GQP arguments that State Legislatures can throw out election results they don't agree with and substitute their own slates of electors. If that argument has prevailed in 2020, the GQP would have proclaimed Trumpolini Führer on Jan 6, 2021!

    Trumpolini (or some other RepubliQan LOSER) would lose the popular vote in a given state and if the GQP controlled that state's legislature, they could nullify the vote and declare their candidate the winner of the state's Electoral vote.

    ... and FUCK the 22nd Amendment in 2024.

    Can you say President for Life boys 'n girls?

    945:

    He looks like Rasputin...

    946:

    But the Railroad operating companies are NOT going to pay for it and will actively fight against it EVEN IF THE GOVERNMENT WAS PAYING FOR IT.

    When this came up last around here I did some digging. Here's a report on just Minnesota. here are more than 4,000 public rail grade crossings in Minnesota,

    https://www.dot.state.mn.us/ofrw/railroad/action-plan/index.html

    There are well over 100K of them in the US.

    And a report I can't find now estimated the average cost to just install warning lights at over $150K per crossing.

    There is a reason no one wants to pay.

    Also It should be just as easy to build a boring machine to accommodate the size required for U.S. railroad cars.

    The size of the tunnel isn't so much the issue as that high speed rail needs 1% or so grade at a max. So you can't just dip down and go under or up and over. You have to dig a very long slope or build a very long viaduct. The French have done this for their system. There are pictures floating around of some very impressive valley crossings. But they also have a very top down government. Unlike the US.

    947:

    How would you get to Umstead Park or Lake Crabtree if you don't have an automobile?

    Well for Lake Crabtree there are likely no politicians wanting to build a way to it as it is a super fund site due to all the PCBs in the mud. Remember no fishing or swimming. Just picnicking and paddle boating.

    The most direct route to my son's new house takes me next to it. The road going south out of the airport is being upgraded to 3 and 5 lanes for miles. But where it runs over the levie across that jut out from the lake, it looks like nothing will be done to expand it past 2 lanes. I suspect widening that section of the road would require the super fund cleanup to start and so far no one has volunteered the $5bil to $10bil or more to make it happen.

    948:

    Charlie Stross @ 833:

    But really, the optimal solution is to rebuild your cities around pedestrians and make this nonsense obsolete. Given the cost of modern vehicles, if you subtract the entirely artificially inflated price of housing zoned land, it probably ends up cheaper to build apartment blocks/condos with direct covered pedestrian access to streetcar stops. You could even have a vehicle hire centre at the out-of-town line terminus for those folks who want to go for a hike in the countryside or drive long distance to visit someone who lives off-grid.

    Rome wasn't built in a day. The automobile-centric nature of U.S. urban planning took 40 years to lock itself in. By my reckoning from the 1908 Ford Model T to 1947's Levittown, New York ...

    I hope it won't take that long to revamp our cities and make them more pedestrian/commuter friendly. I hope we can come up with workable interim solutions that don't require us to wait 40 years.

    I don't think climate change is going to give us that 40 years. I probably won't be around to see it, but I have family members & neighbors who are going to have to live with the consequences of what we do today.

    949:

    On the geeral point of "long distance" travel, one recentish Eastercon was at the Hanover Island Gardens Hotel, Hinckley (just off the M69 - A6(T) junction). My car was OTR with a broken wiper linkage. Getting there was therefore easiest by 15 miles commuter train, 327 miles Intercity, and 7 by taxi. Car would have been a bit cheaper, but not much in it for time door to door.

    950:

    Charlie Stross @ 840:

    There is a left luggage service at Edinburgh Waverly but it's quite expensive and your bag has to go through an airport X-ray belt (and, optionally, a hand search -- it's attended drop-off only) before they'll accept it.

    I wonder if it would be possible for some for-profit company to do this (and make a profit)? Even with the restrictions of attended drop-off, X-ray & inspection it could be a useful service.

    I could have used it in 2004 when I visited Edinburgh. I had to check out of my bed 'n breakfast early in the day, but my bus back to Glasgow didn't leave until late afternoon. I had to carry my ruck, camera bag, computer case & tripod around with me all day, which put a bit of a crimp into my touring.

    I think American Express used to provide such a service for American expats back in pre-WW2 Europe.

    Maybe start out in major tourist destinations around the world. Members or card holders could take advantage?

    951:

    "It just occurs to me there might be "travel units" for long distance (500+ miles) where you could drive your car in & sit (with the engine off for legacy IC motor vehicles) while it covers the major part of the distance and then drive your car out once you reach your destination so you wouldn't be dependent on rental cars or baggage limits for planes & trains."

    We used to have that: trains you could put your car on and then drive it off again at the other end. Bloody good idea if you ask me, because driving from the south of England up to Scotland is a hideous experience whichever route you take. But they stopped doing it something around 30 years ago because too many people would rather pay for the petrol and put up with the hideousness.

    952:

    The French system has gradients up to about 1 in 40, which sounds outrageous, but they reckoned they were better off doing that and just giving the trains enough power to blast up and down them regardless, so they could concentrate more on minimising the lateral curvature.

    953:

    Troutwaxer @ 857:

    Charlie, you may rest assured that we've understood the Supreme Court issue very well indeed. I tried explaining the issue to a female pro Bush I voter back in the late 1980s and got absolutely nowhere - she was in her early twenties and simply couldn't imagine that a Supreme Court decision would actually affect her in some way. But most of us, both Democrat and Rethuglican understand that problem super-clearly. Unfortunately, getting the Democratic Powers That Be to fight hard/smart on that issue 24/7 is another matter.

    The Democrats DID fight. Leftist purists preferred to let the GQP steal power to teach the Democrats a lesson for not being far enough to the left. They preferred to have nothing and whine about it instead of compromising with Democrats and maybe getting some of their wants fulfilled. Uncompromising ALL OR NOTHING! ... so nothing is what they (and the rest of us) got.

    I suspect the judgement of history will be that the Democrats did a terrible job of fighting against fascism during the period from Newt Gingrich's election as Speaker of the House until at least the present day - we'll see how many people Merrick Garland arrests by late 2023 - maybe that will solve a few problems.

    Why blame the Democrats for not fighting fascism hard enough when you won't blame the GQP for going fascist?

    Democrats can't do it alone. The purists on the left are going to have to condescend to join WITH Democrats to defeat fascism of the GQP.

    But they'd prefer to let the GQP pillage the country while they whine about the Democrats not fighting hard enough to actually joining with the Democrats to fight it.

    954:

    Troutwaxer @ 862:

    After all, shaming works so well with people who have no shame.

    955:

    We used to have that: trains you could put your car on and then drive it off again at the other end.

    Without checking the US Amtrak has this on the east coast. Mainly for folks north of Washington DC to get to Florida with their car. In the winter a car rental in Florida can be eye water expensive so the economics can work.

    15 years ago when we were looking at a week in Florida from North Carolina my wife wanted to fly standby and rent a car. So only the car was a direct cost. Turned out it was cheaper to rent a nicer car in NC and drive it to Florida with unlimited mileage than fly free and rent a crappy car with a mileage rate. 9 hour drive with only a few slow downs for bridge repairs in Georgia. We picked the right time to go south on I-95. (Which can be hard to do.)

    Supply, demand, etc...

    956:

    Troutwaxer @ 864:

    Or just put cameras in the car, maybe with a voice-command to start sound recording. It might also be possible to create a reputation system or program cars to head for the nearest police station if commanded to do so. Making all this work while still respecting liberties would be difficult, though not impossible - nobody expects their actions to be anything but public on a city bus, for example.

    A lot of UBER drivers already have cameras installed by now. The way it works is the cameras record video & audio continuously, and a command will make the camera store the preceding however many minutes ...

    If you use a command to START recording, it would miss whatever preceding events made you think you needed video for your own protection.

    957:

    paws4thot @ 871:

    868 - Could be personality based. I know some women I would cheerfully share with, and others I would strongly want to avoid.

    But how likely would you be able to prove in court it was because the PERSON was intolerable, and NOT a case of sexism or gender discrimination?

    958:

    Heteromeles @ 872:

    It would require a Constitutional Amendment to institute a 9 year term for Justices (and judges). That "shall hold their offices during good behaviour" means LIFETIME until they decide to retire; are impeached, tried & convicted in the Senate or die.

    If Congress tried to do it without the amendment, how long do you think it would take the Supreme Court to issue a unanimous opinion the law was unconstitutional?

    959:

    I definitely blame the GOP. That's so obvious I thought it could go unsaid. They're crazy, grifting scum who wouldn't know a moral thought it it hit them with a club.

    As to whether the Democrats could do a better job of fighting... if a Democrat-nominated Supreme Court Justice failed to recuse him/herself from a case which involved their spouse, how long would it take a GOP-controlled House or Senate to hold hearings? It would be "but her husband" and they'd hold as many hearings as they did on Benghazi!

    960:

    AlanD2 @ 900:

    The Supreme Court isn't going to affect the outcome of 2022 very much, or even 2024.

    I have to disagree a bit. By refusing to address the issue of gerrymandering, the Supreme Court has already tilted the playing field toward Republican candidates in these and any future elections for the foreseeable future.

    Doesn't seem likely past decisions will affect the 2022 election, but how the Xtreme court decides Moore v. Harper could very well affect 2024 and beyond.

    And not just with regard to Gerrymandering. It would give Constitutional imprimatur to the GQP's election stealing "theory" that State Legislatures can award Electoral Votes to whoever they want without regard to the popular vote.

    The reason the GQP majority in the North Carolina Legislature drew the maps to award 10 of 14 Congressional Seats to the GQP, was they couldn't figure away to make it 14-0.

    Moore v. Harper would give them the means to make it so.

    961:

    They idea that it records video but not audio is deliberate - the point is to NOT survey people, but be able to know who should be charged a clean-up fee because they spilled their soda.

    962:

    but be able to know who should be charged a clean-up fee because they spilled their soda.

    Via their mouth.

    963:

    Mikko Parviainen (he/him) @ 914:

    Groceries shopping varies much by person, we do it mostly so that I pick up the daily groceries on the way back from work, and I go to the library and pick up most packages which didn't get delivered home at the same time. It takes me maybe 15 minutes extra time each day to shop, the other things take a bit more but not much as they are close by.

    That's pretty much the way I did when I had a job and was still able to work**. PRE-Covid, I tried to combine grocery shopping with other activities - stopping at the store to do my shopping on the way home from a weekly event I attended.

    But I could stop by the grocery store any day on the way home from work if I needed to pick up something.

    **Failing health due to my cancer treatment & its after effects forced me into early retirement. Otherwise, I might STILL be working.

    964:

    I think that would be a shorted time interval than the delay between a traffic signal going green and the taxi driver behind you sounding his horn.

    965:

    Greg Tingey @ 919: & Charlie Stross @ 920:

    Also concerning is the FSB's oddly specific accusations so quickly after the incident:

    The FSB told Russian media that a Ukrainian woman had moved to Russia in July alongside her young daughter - but that she was in fact a Ukrainian special services contractor.
    The woman, it said, rented an apartment in the same building as Ms Dugina for a month, preparing for the attack. In that time, she allegedly followed Ms Dugina through Moscow in a Mini Cooper - for which she used three different licence plates.
    The suspect then escaped to Estonia after the explosion, the FSB said.

    Putin may plan on targeting Estonia (NATO membership not withstanding) next after the Russians finish gobbling up Ukraine.

    966:

    ilya187 @ 922:

    It depends on whether the goal is victory for our side at any cost, or re-uniting the country somehow. And remember that the system of checks and balances exists to ensure that these two things are tightly bound to one another.

    I may be wrong, but I have come to conclusion that the second goal is at this point a lost cause. It won't happen. Which leaves the first goal.

    Win at all costs to achieve authoritian minority rule is the GQP's goal.

    Maintaining & expanding democracy should be the Democratic Party's goal. To do that requires thwarting the GQP's fascist coup attempts, but I hope we can do that without becoming as extremist as the GQP.

    967:

    I'll just post this here, but many of you may have already seen the whistleblower complaint from Twitter's former head of security, alleging shoddy practices throughout:

    https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/23/tech/twitter-whistleblower-peiter-zatko-security/index.html

    968:

    All caught up again.

    I received a SCAM/phishing text message yesterday (Visa card is locked, call this number to unlock it ... yeah, right!) and can't figure out how to forward it to the FTC/FCC.

    Looked up how to do it on-line (FTC/FCC dot GOV websites), and my iPhone doesn't have the icon to forward the message & I couldn't figure out how to get it on there.

    I sure miss the good old days when I could call an 800 number and actually talk to someone to report people trying to defraud me.

    969:

    A TGV trainset is 4.05 metres tall From ground plane to where? I'm sure that's taller than a trailer car, and I think it's taller than the aerodynamics fairings on the power cars so I suspect that figure is ground plane to catenary.

    If you want people to be able to stand up straight both downstairs and upstairs, you probably want the best part of 2 metres on each. Add in floor thickness, inter deck thickness and roof thickness, and 4.05 metres is eminently reasonable.

    Of course that's the TGV Duplex, but that's the way the TGV fleet is going

    970:

    JBS posted on August 23, 2022 12:01 in #934:

    OTOH, if he's a convicted felon serving time, he's NOT going to be let out for campaigning. There's no requirement to give him any more accommodation than any other prisoner gets. He could run for President, but he couldn't hold campaign rallies or make campaign appearances from inside prison. He wouldn't even be able to meet with campaign staff - other than his lawyers and they'd be restricted in what they could bring in and take out. He wouldn't have access to Twitter or Truth Social (no more so than other prisoners) or other outside media.

    That's what stare decisis would lead you to believe:
    https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/622489/eugene-debs-socialist-who-ran-for-president-from-prison

    971:

    Maintaining & expanding democracy should be the Democratic Party's goal. To do that requires thwarting the GQP's fascist coup attempts, but I hope we can do that without becoming as extremist as the GQP.

    I hope so too, but realistically I expect one of two things to happen:

    1: US separates into several distinct nations.

    2: Federal government retains control in major (and not so major) cities, and essentially gives up on the "red" counties. The latter descend into Christian Sharia, with police enforcing whatever the local preacher says to enforce. Every city is encircled by what amounts to an armed border.

    Out of the two outcomes, I prefer the first one. My wife REALLY wishes for the first one. But I think the second one is more likely. It may also end in resurrection of the US as we know it, when enough crazies die of old age and enough young people escape into cities, but I will not live to see it.

    My pessimism stems from the fact that large majority of the law enforcement personnel in these red counties are convinced that Biden Administration is illegitimate, and so will be the next Administration if it has "D" in it. Laws are only as good as the people who enforce them.

    972:

    2: Federal government retains control in major (and not so major) cities, and essentially gives up on the "red" counties. The latter descend into Christian Sharia, with police enforcing whatever the local preacher says to enforce. Every city is encircled by what amounts to an armed border.

    Read Lovecraft Country? Basically, this is simply white men experiencing the fear that non-white and/or non-cis-male people, especially those from city neighborhoods, have lived with in the US since its founding.

    This contrasts with real silliness. For instance, silly environmentalists worry about five more years of drought in the Southwest leading to the Colorado going dry, with up to 40 million people having to relocate within the US and elsewhere. Obviously this won't happen, if only because a major storm drops a decade worth of rain on California, busts a few major dams (hopefully not Shasta), and causes a trillion dollars in damage, give or take. I mean, those are silly, and the latter might even force Congress to decrease DoD spending for a year in response.

    973:

    Since it's late August and this is a SF website, here's an article from Vice and the US Congress: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3adadb/congress-admits-ufos-not-man-made-says-threats-increasing-exponentially

    Apparently Senator Blondie* is involved with the Pentagon opening a "All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office." IIUC, this Florida Man wants to rename Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (nee UFOs) as "Unidentified Aerial-Undersea Phenomena." The budget bill with his fingerprints on it states “Temporary nonattributed objects, or those that are positively identified as man-made after analysis, will be passed to appropriate offices and should not be considered under the definition as unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena.”

    Cool congri.

    Just passing this along with a few thoughts.

    --One is that, for those writing for the discerning crowd, UFO is passe, and "transmedium UAUPs" are the new hotness. I think UAUP might be pronounced "whoops?" Some help with that?

    --Remember, it's transmedium. It's all about things that penetrate things. I guess UFOs that suddenly appear and vanish no longer matter?

    --A third is that I'd be shocked, shocked if some politically connected, patriotic donor won't be contracting his services to the US government to help this new operation. After all, innovative thinking from the private sector is something the GQP rewards. How much of this language they wrote? Well, modesty forbids an answer...

    --A fifth is that it would be cool if the SMOFs could get in with their favorite Congressional representatives to study this kind of thing properly. After all, UAUP is just the clunkiest acronym. Surely there's a more creative way to describe such research. And to do it right.

    *Google translating to Espanol might help...

    974:

    Case in point: How would you get to Umstead Park or Lake Crabtree if you don't have an automobile

    In NSW there are train stations close to a lot of national parks, and the Blue Mountains line is regularly piled with tourists of various sorts despite the line itself being not scenic in any meaningful way. There are kids with mountain bikes going up to ride in the MTB playgrounds, often taking the train back up a couple of stations rather than ride uphill (back in my day...). But also walkers of grades from "we walked all the way from the station to the lookout and back" to "we can do Katoomba to Richmond in 6 days, I reckon".

    Other parks require bus use, and buses are also the common way parks in Aotearoa are accessed. When there's lot of tourists the busy track ends see 20,000 people/year or more so it's very easy to justify a bus service. But a lot of the less popular tracks are at least in the vicinity of a main road that has a bus service, and those will generally drop you in the middle of nowhere if you ask, and can be flagged down (especially if you pre-book a ticket or at least warn the company/driver). On those tracks it's kind of "a week walking, including 5km on minor roads at each end".

    For day trips with camera gear and whotnot you really want to be in Australia where the parks are more driveable. Often you can drive into them! The likes of Craig Potton spend a lot of time carrying camera gear along walking tracks in Aotearoa.

    975:

    To me it suggests a pronunciation resembling the kind of howly yelpy noise a cat makes when an ordinary meow just doesn't have the required volume. uaup, uaup.

    976:

    I was thinking some kind of flexible multi-mode system with a variety of specialized vehicle units & a network similar to the Interstate Highway system + state & federal highways;

    But you have that now, and it already doesn't work very well. Upgrading it by removing the dependence on drivers (the peasants are revolting) might help, but it's a patch for one part of a multi-broken system.

    One advantage of HSR is that outside big cities it's often relatively easy to put a new freight line next to the new HSR line, and that also helps discourage things from wandering onto the HSR/helps justify fences, tunnels and bridges. Either way you have a strip 200m wide that only contains rails. Rails and vegetation.

    Inside many cities there's a move (back) to micromobility, with the 1980's style bicycle couriers on fixies being enhanced by the addition of load-carrying ebikes right up to four wheel boxes on wheels. Sydney CBD has an ongoing war between retailers who want to use big trucks as mobile warehouses close to the CBD, and almost everyone else who hate big trucks parking on inner city streets. But trucks+parking tickets is cheaper than renting a building (either a bigger retail outlet $$$$$$! or a warehouse $$$). So there's ongoing discussions around who pays for a transfer station or five, and whether anyone can be forced to use such a thing if it was built.

    Back in the olden days they used to have a lot of small rail sidings and those were very popular. Even though it meant shunting small sets of wagons about the place, or stopping a whole freight train to add or remove those few wagons.

    I suspect that the only real use case for the various techbro "self powered electric rail freight" toys is exactly that - a freight train goes past, an electric shunter hurls itself at the back of the train, a few wagons detach, the shunter drops them into the siding. Or reverse, the shunter hurls the wagons at the back of a passing train. In rail terms that's either futuristic or very, very old school.

    977:

    We used to have that: trains you could put your car on and then drive it off again at the other end.

    You can still do that in Australia. I have seen people do it :) Sure, one or two cars on each twice daily train if you're lucky, but the facilities are there.

    When I was looking at buying a toy electric van the train option was fairly price competitive at least for Brisbane-Sydney. Mate in Melbourne said it wasn't even close for him, the kei van was so small that trucking it was cheap but the rail ticket was per leg because they have to manually load and unload it each time (Brisbane, trans-train it in Sydney, then Melbourne... plus he's about 3 full charges distance from Melbourne. Kei van only has a 8kWh battery).

    978:

    To me it suggests a pronunciation resembling the kind of howly yelpy noise a cat makes when an ordinary meow just doesn't have the required volume. uaup, uaup.

    You're right. One of my cats makes that call to tell me she's about to throw up. Personally, I think this is very considerate of her. She doesn't do it when she's cross with me about something.

    979:

    "Back in the olden days they used to have a lot of small rail sidings and those were very popular. Even though it meant shunting small sets of wagons about the place, or stopping a whole freight train to add or remove those few wagons."

    It had the same problem with people hanging on to the wagons to use them as temporary storage rather than unloading them and putting them back into circulation. Local coal merchants getting a couple of wagons and not sending them back until they'd sold all the coal one barrow at a time. Repeat for anything else that didn't go off, and you got lots of sidings choked with half-empty wagons and people wondering where all the wagons were, etc.

    "I suspect that the only real use case for the various techbro "self powered electric rail freight" toys is exactly that - a freight train goes past, an electric shunter hurls itself at the back of the train, a few wagons detach, the shunter drops them into the siding. Or reverse, the shunter hurls the wagons at the back of a passing train. In rail terms that's either futuristic or very, very old school."

    Slip freight! I like it. They used to do that with coaches - train sets off from major terminus with a great long string of coaches, then sheds them in ones and twos as it passes junctions for branch lines, with another engine waiting to pick them up and take them down the branch. It meant having independent control of the brakes for each chunk of coaches and a slip guard for each set to operate the controls, which was OK, but there was no way to reverse the process, so the trains going back towards the major terminus had to stop at all the junctions to have the extra bits stuck back on.

    So my idea is to have a few hundred metres of steel cable wound on a conical drum (attached at the wide end), geared to a big flywheel, and also geared (with a one-way clutch) to the wheels. As the main train passes, a hook catches the end of the cable and begins to pull it off the drum, accelerating the flywheel and also accelerating the vehicle without an enormous jerk. Eventually you have the vehicle moving at the same speed as the main train, on the end of the fully-unwound cable. But the flywheel is still rotating, and now it drives the drum, winding the cable back onto it the other way until the vehicle is hauled right up to the back of the main train, at which point the automatic coupler engages and hooks up the brakes the same as normal. Add a few extra springs and things to compensate for the narrow end of the conical drum not having an infinitely small radius, and Bob's your uncle (which may or may not be desirable given what the name means around here).

    980:

    If people could be persuaded into short electric vehicles with a reasonable amount of self driving...

    Short cars to fit across rather than along the wagon, electric because if the rail electrification could be done properly it can charge during the journey, and enough self driving so when you get out at the ticket office the car takes itself to the appropriate end of the platform and loads itself onto the train, and can also change trains on its own should it be required.

    Problems with the old MotoRail included it being difficult to serve intermediate stations, the wagon had to be detached and shunted to a special platform to load and unload vehicles, so routes were mostly terminus to terminus and the vehicles needed to be at the station well before departure time.

    981:

    Manageably short, I'd say; you're looking at a maximum length around 2.5m. A Mini is around 3m long with a 2m wheelbase, so you don't have to do much more than the equivalent of getting rid of the overhangs, which ought to be possible given the additional freedom you get to decide where all the various bits go.

    The "self driving" ought to be manageable, too, since it's only operating in a controlled environment at low speed. You'd hardly need much more than a simple follow-the-line-on-the-floor system, or follow-the-buried-wire so you can easily switch the routing around by turning the wire on and off. You might even be able to use electromagnetic ABS wheel rotation sensors as the sensors for a follow-the-wire system, so if you had electric power steering already you might be able to do it without any extra components.

    The bit about "electrification done properly" is a bit dubious, though. One of the things they're yattering about these days is the idea of not doing it properly and having batteries on the train to cover the improper bits. I can see someone who likes that idea imagining this train full of car batteries hooked up to its electrification system, and then in due course a whole lot of pissed off people whose cars have conked out just down the road from the station.

    982:

    981 and 982 - I think the trouble here is that you're looking at something like the Citroen Ami), and adding a self-driving capability without offering a main holiday luggage capability for 2 people.

    983:

    I am reminded of the phrase a friend once used to describe the idea of a K100-engined Invacar: "all the panache of a pregnant yogurt carton". I was thinking in terms of starting from a Mini, because everyone loves Minis, and shortening it a bit, so it would probably look like a Mini that had driven into a wall, but that's a comparatively minor disadvantage. Not being designed to fit in with a French regulation that has no British equivalent would also allow for improvement.

    I don't see why it has to not have enough luggage capacity for 2 people. A 2-seater Minioid, with all the space behind the front seats available (and accessible) for luggage, ought to have plenty of space.

    The self-driving thing really isn't a big deal. It's not the fancy-arsed go-anywhere version that doesn't actually exist, it's just the same version that is in well established use for robot forklifts in automated warehouses.

    984:

    Agree. My little Skoda is quite adequate for two. And I usually take a bass guitar and a practice amp.

    985:

    Re: '... the right inquiry might force a resignation out of Thomas,'

    Personally, I'd like the American Bar Association and the various unis offering law degrees to conduct a review - sit as full participants on any inquiry. After all, these orgs are the bodies whose purpose is to attest/verify that an individual is aware of 'the law' including various historical and contemporary interpretations.

    Re: China - too many uni grads (degrees)

    Okay - and whichever country decides to prevent/dissuade their citizens from obtaining higher ed/degrees is going to lose the economics war. Although several billionaires started their businesses in garages, that's not a particularly useful or reliable long term economic strategy because these billionaires came out with weird products/services during boom times - when enough people had enough discretionary income to buy their new/cutting edge products/services.

    Re: Transportation

    A lot of discussion is about already existing infrastructure which would hike up the cost of changing over to any new system - whether it's because of removing, changing existing structures or buying more adjoining land. Maybe if folks looked at transportation planning from the POV of establishing colonies on the Moon or Mars, it'd be easier to assess what (and how many different) types of transport would be needed, where and why.

    986:

    For publishers to rebut (the government's case against the publishing giants' merger), they in turn had to present themselves as essentially incompetent gamblers, risking the company’s money in an industry no one could predict, all for the sheer love of literature.

    “Everything is random in publishing,” Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle told the court during his testimony. “Success is random. Bestsellers are random. That is why we are the Random House!” He went on to describe the editors and publishers of PRH as “angel investors in our authors and their dreams, their stories.”

    Throughout the trial, publishers depicted the industry as one of chaos and romance in equal measure, a hazy and lovely space in which publishers routinely hand out large sums of money for great works of literature, unable to either predict or care whether they would ever make their money back. Within this space, publishers argued, the narrow slice of publishing that the government was focused on — books with an advance of $250,000 and above — was meaningless. There was no true correlation, they said, between the books that they paid high advances for and the actual sales figures of those books. And so one by one, highly paid CEOs took the stand to argue that they had no idea what they were doing with all their money.

    https://www.vox.com/culture/23316541/publishing-antitrust-lawsuit-merger-department-justice-penguin-random-house-simon-schuster

    987:

    kiloseven @ 971:

    JBS posted on August 23, 2022 12:01 in #934:

    OTOH, if he's a convicted felon serving time, he's NOT going to be let out for campaigning. There's no requirement to give him any more accommodation than any other prisoner gets. He could run for President, but he couldn't hold campaign rallies or make campaign appearances from inside prison. He wouldn't even be able to meet with campaign staff - other than his lawyers and they'd be restricted in what they could bring in and take out. He wouldn't have access to Twitter or Truth Social (no more so than other prisoners) or other outside media.

    That's what stare decisis would lead you to believe:
    https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/622489/eugene-debs-socialist-who-ran-for-president-from-prison

    And I'm pretty sure the Federal & State prison systems would allow Trumpolini to do the same, but once a week letters to his followers would probably put him at a disadvantage in the age of Twitter, Facebook and 24 hour cable newz networks. Not to mention, I think he's functionally illiterate, so how is he going to write those letters coherently?

    988:

    ilya187 @ 972:

    My pessimism stems from the fact that large majority of the law enforcement personnel in these red counties are convinced that Biden Administration is illegitimate, and so will be the next Administration if it has "D" in it. Laws are only as good as the people who enforce them.

    I'm sure those who refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of a federal government that they do not control wish to make you believe they are a large majority ... but they ain't. They're a large (shrinking**) minority, NOT a majority.

    **It's that shrinkage that leads them to act out. They know as well as anyone that long term demographic trends are against them.

    989:

    Moz @ 975:

    Case in point: How would you get to Umstead Park or Lake Crabtree if you don't have an automobile

    In NSW there are train stations close to a lot of national parks, and the Blue Mountains line is regularly piled with tourists of various sorts ...

    Yeah, that's really my point. We don't have that in the U.S. and I think we need it.

    For day trips with camera gear and whotnot you really want to be in Australia where the parks are more driveable. Often you can drive into them! The likes of Craig Potton spend a lot of time carrying camera gear along walking tracks in Aotearoa.

    That's the reason I bought my Jeep. I was planning a grand tour of the U.S. National Park System for photography (including my 4x5 "large format" & medium format film cameras). There are places out west where 4WD is a legal requirement to enter some parks & scenic lands where I hoped to go.

    But Cancer, Covid & Climate Change (plus increasing frailty with age) are probably going to put paid to the idea.

    990:

    Pigeon @ 976:

    To me it suggests a pronunciation resembling the kind of howly yelpy noise a cat makes when an ordinary meow just doesn't have the required volume. uaup, uaup.

    uaup, uaup.

    Expressed that way, it sounds like the beat of a UH-1 rotor to me. Can you say "black helicopters" boys 'n girls?

    991:

    Moz @ 977:

    I was thinking some kind of flexible multi-mode system with a variety of specialized vehicle units & a network similar to the Interstate Highway system + state & federal highways;

    But you have that now, and it already doesn't work very well.

    I probably have not expressed myself very well. I was thinking of an integrated network with tracks and/or monorails (running in underground tunnels). The NETWORK would be similar to the Interstate Highway system PLUS state & federal highways in that it would be accessible from everywhere in the country.

    Movement on this network would be under computer control. Using the network would be similar to filing a flight plan with the FAA. You enter your vehicle ID, starting point & destination into the program along with your desired departure time and the "computer" slots you into the network and tells you when to be at which gate to get into your transport on the network.

    You drive in and the network transports you to where you're going to drive out.

    If you didn't want to be under control by an equivalent of ATC, you could always still drive your personal vehicle on the surface roads the old fashion way.

    Back in the olden days they used to have a lot of small rail sidings and those were very popular. Even though it meant shunting small sets of wagons about the place, or stopping a whole freight train to add or remove those few wagons.

    I suspect that the only real use case for the various techbro "self powered electric rail freight" toys is exactly that - a freight train goes past, an electric shunter hurls itself at the back of the train, a few wagons detach, the shunter drops them into the siding. Or reverse, the shunter hurls the wagons at the back of a passing train. In rail terms that's either futuristic or very, very old school.

    I'm thinking with a network under computer control you wouldn't really need the "shunter". You could link up any number of "wagons" into a chain for whatever efficiency it would be provide over long distances, but each of the "wagons" would be "self powered" (drawing electricity from a third rail or what ??? I dunno. I don't think it would require OVERHEAD power because you wouldn't be getting out of the "wagons" between destinations.

    If you want to take your private automobile for a long distance journey it would fit INSIDE one of the network's "wagons" ... I don't see all IC engine automobiles being eliminated in the short run ... and even if we do eventually achieve all electric transportation you'd probably want to encapsulate individual automobiles while they were moving through the network I'm envisioning.

    992:

    Did you notice the part "in these red counties" in my post you were responding to?

    Of course the people (law enforcement or otherwise) who think 2020 election was stolen are a minority within United States as a whole. They are however a majority within rather large (if sparsely populated) geographic areas.

    993:

    Of course the people (law enforcement or otherwise) who think 2020 election was stolen are a minority within United States as a whole.

    Are they a minority within law enforcement?

    I get the feeling they are less a minority there than in the general population, and may even be a minority especially at the lower ranks.

    994:

    may even be a minority especially at the lower ranks.

    That should be "may even be a majority especially at the lower ranks."

    Should have posted after a cup of tea, not before.

    995:

    Tunnels aren't a solution, at least not any time soon. I mentioned in 899 above that the current longest tunnel in the world is only 57km. Until there's at least one on the scale you're thinking about I wouldn't get too excited about a network of them.

    Evacuated tubes are very cool, but the scale factors mean that while a ~100km loop can be built and maintained, that loop is very much one of a kind. Also, not cheap.

    Self-powered freight wagons are one of those kind of cool in theory things. It's less about the powered wagon part and more about where the power comes from - you really do not want a 100 wagon train having 100 pantographs, if only because of the maintenance nightmare. Shinkansen are famously all wheel drive, but they have one or two pantographs per train. So dropping a wagon or two off is a maintenance depot operation rather than something they do in the field let alone while moving.

    RORO wagons exist, but are a bit of a PITA. The people who load and unload trains full of cars are disturbingly skilled but even so a single car that won't start gums up their whole process. It's an area that could perhaps be the topic of major R&D innovation, but I suspect the real switch would be from end loading to parallel parking off an adjacent platform. Which might mostly be about standardising things, or perhaps having 100m+ lengths of platform that can be raised and lowered as well as slid sideways.

    https://nxautotransport.com/ship-car-train You can put your car on a train in the USA right now, just not quickly.

    996:

    I'm not clear what you mean by "switch from end loading to parallel parking off an adjacent platform." I do know that a parallel parking methodology off an adjacent platform is used by Eurotunnel and, based on "The Italian Job" (2004 film, end scenes). by AMTrak. Your NX Transport photo reminds me of the method used by BR Motorail until 1995 (aside from loading gauge).

    997:

    I meant the eurotunnel style loading.

    I couldn't find pics online of double stacked parallel parking car carriers, just single layer/flatbed ones. But I did find pictures of triple stack car carriers from the US where the loading gauge is taller than almost anywhere else. So while most places would only halve the capacity by going to flatbeds, at least some companies in the US would lose 2/3rds of their capacity.

    One advantage of self-driving in that situation is being able to load passengers and their cars at the same time, so if the whole train had to stop it wouldn't be for as long.

    998:

    ilya187 @ 993:

    Did you notice the part "in these red counties" in my post you were responding to?

    I did. I think you're allowing the volume of shouting by a miserable minority convince you they're a majority.

    999:

    Moz @ 996:

    Tunnels aren't a solution, at least not any time soon. ...

    So we should just forget thinking about any possible solution that can't be completed yesterday?

    And where did I say anything about "evacuated tubes"? Those are your hangups.

    Self-powered freight wagons are one of those kind of cool in theory things. It's less about the powered wagon part and more about where the power comes from - you really do not want a 100 wagon train having 100 pantographs, if only because of the maintenance nightmare. ...

    Why do you want pantographs in a TUNNEL SYSTEM? Why do you insist on "a 100 wagon train" when I'm proposing a "packet switching" network using rail tunnels?

    Consider how the internet sends information in packets and apply those techniques to physical travel in a NETWORK that is not constrained by having only two terminals where you can enter and exit the system.

    Subways don't use pantographs ... at least not here in the U.S. A third rail system would be more suitable. And give the transport carriages a battery to power them while they go into a station. The idea is the tunnels are closed (not evacuated) so that travelers don't come into contact with the tunnel itself; they stay inside the transport carriages.

    Why do you presume RORO transport carriages have to be a PITA?

    Even today they're not ALL that way. I'm not proposing a new way for shipping automobiles, we've already got plenty of those.

    I'm proposing a way to take your automobile along with you so you don't have to rent a car at your destination; the same way people can now take their cars along on the EuroTunnel - a way to travel a long way without having to drive the intervening distance.

    The U.S. has several problems with our existing transportation system:
    •We're overly dependent on individual automobiles and those who PROFIT from that are going to resist ANY CHANGE to the status quo (but it can be changed incrementally if we can make it MORE convenient for the individual and with enough incremental changes ...)
    •Our transportation system is overly dependent on fossil fuels. How do we go about changing that to where we have a system based on renewable energy (Solar, Wind, what have you). Electric cars still have a drawback with limited range and I don't see any real breakthroughs on that front coming soon. People won't switch to electric cars in massive numbers until those range limitations are addressed.
    •The problem with High Speed Trains in the U.S. is the number of grade crossings that have to be dealt with one way or another. Plus the existing rail network in the U.S. is owned by private corporations who won't spend to upgrade the rails to where they could support High Speed trains ...

    I'm suggesting one possible way of approaching those problems is to build a public network of government owned long distance rail tunnels spanning the nation, eliminating the grade crossings, electrically powered by "renewable" energy, using "packet switching" to route traffic from origin to destination.

    Commercial/corporate interests could use the rails the same way they now use the national highways (Interstate & Numbered) supported by taxes (usage charges). But there would also be provisions for PRIVATE use the way the highways & airways in the U.S. currently operate.

    Won't happen soon and it won't happen all at once everywhere ... no more so than did the internet or the Interstate Highways or the railroads. It could be done and if it were to be done, it would have to start somewhere and be built out over time.

    It won't happen at all if naysayers like you have their way.

    1000:

    paws4thot @ 997:

    Your NX Transport photo reminds me of the method used by BR Motorail until 1995 (aside from loading gauge).

    To me it looked like a way to make bulk delivery of new automobiles from manufacturing plants to regional distributions centers. It's not designed for individuals to use the way the EuroTunnel is.

    I looked into shipping my Jeep out to Arizona, thinking I might somehow reduct the carbon footprint of such a trip. I have a good friend in Phoenix and I would use his location as a hub for excursions to various National Parks in the region (wouldn't be the first time I slept on the couch in his basement).

    The cost was THREE TIMES the cost of just driving (even before adding in the cost of airfare or Amtrak) AND I'd be without a vehicle for at least TWICE THE TIME of driving out there myself.

    I'm thinking more of a EuroTunnel experience adapted into a packet switching network based on an underground network of rail tunnels. I wouldn't drive in the tunnels, I'd drive my car into a transport carriage at some terminal and the network would take me to another terminal near my destination where I would drive out.

    What if you could drive into a EuroTunnel style rail carriage in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, London, Liverpool ... Dublin and drive out in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Oslo. That's the scale of the network I'm thinking about. Actually I'm thinking of a scale where you could drive in at Falkirk or Grangemouth and drive out in Château-Thierry or Bad Mergentheim or Montevarchi - you wouldn't have to drive to a major city to get in or only be able to get out at other major cities.

    In the U.S. I wouldn't have to drive to Atlanta or Washington DC to get into the system and I could get out of the system at Williams, AZ instead of having to drive back from LA to get to the Grand Canyon.

    I UNDERSTAND the network I'm proposing probably won't be available in my lifetime (if ever) and probably wouldn't even start building in my lifetime even if we started working on it today.

    But if we don't start looking at possible solutions to our problems soon, we are never going to find any.

    1001:

    https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-12-28/poll-a-third-of-americans-question-legitimacy-of-biden-victory-nearly-a-year-since-jan-6

    A new University of Massachusetts Amherst poll released Tuesday highlights how partisanship has hardened in the year since the deadly Jan. 6 attack and the stark breakdown on how Democrats and Republicans view that day and the results of last November’s presidential race.

    Fifty-eight percent of respondents surveyed across the country believe Biden’s victory was legitimate, while 33% contend it was illegitimate – numbers that have held steady since the university’s last poll on the subject in April. Of Republicans polled, an overwhelming majority of them – 71% – still contest the 2020 election results. Only 21% believe Biden’s win was legitimate.

    And I assure you these 33% are not evenly distributed throughout the country

    1002:

    998 - We are in agreement then, at least other than issues of loading gauge, which we may as well ignore unless we're prepared to enlarge it and accept that whilst $line is being upgauged it will effectively still be the smaller gauge.

    1000 - Nor in the UK. In fact the old Southern Railway (Grouping era company) used 3rd rail to electrify heavy rail lines from London to the South coast. That said, the rest of the UK does use pantograph + catenary electrification through tunnels, and so does most of Western Europe.

    1003:

    So we should just forget thinking about any possible solution that can't be completed yesterday?

    No, but we should build one before we commit to building a thousand of them. Doesn't matter whether that's fidget spinners or mars bases.

    You might think 25kV third rail systems are a good idea, but I don't have enough information to say. I am certain, though, that 500V DC third rail systems will not work for dozens of wagons per segment running short hops with the consequent high accelerations (acceleration = power). I'm not aware of a high speed rail system using third rail for power.

    Rail systems are much easier to manage with fewer, larger trains. While it might be possible to operate one with thousands of single-car trains that's another one of those things that I think we should scale up to.

    Again, Musk building 3km of car tunnel is cool, no question there. But it's not a high volume, long distance solution or even prototype. He's not pretending it is, or at least he's not treating it that way. There's no sign that they're running thousands of cars a day through it to find out whether their traffic management systems are capable of dealing with that, for example.

    1004:

    Sure, but, a lot depends on how strongly they believe it. Most of that 38% do not believe that Biden stole the election very strongly--it's mostly a way to vent anger at the loss of employment security, and cultural privilege. Most of them would forget about it if they thought that their circumstances were changing for the better.

    The problem being that the Democrats know these people would never vote for them, and the Trump Republicans want to keep them angry. The only people who can push this back are Establishment Republicans, and for that to happen the Trumpists have to lose some general elections, badly.

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