bryananderson

Yeah I am not taking a position on how the market will do in the future. Just saying that active investing will underperform passive unless you are one of the few market participants who actually has alpha.

You may wish it were not so, you may find it inelegant and infuriating and unfair, but it is a fact that retail investors nearly all underperform the market over a long enough time horizon. Maybe you are built different but for most of us it is very rational to take the market return for “free”.

It does not, but it has a sane scheduling agreement with the railroad which the railroad actually respects.

This is a common misconception because Brightline’s parent company Florida East Coast Industries shares heritage with Florida East Coast Railway, but the companies were split in 2007.

Italy has not exactly privatized high speed rail. The public rail operator Trenitalia is by far the largest high speed rail operator in the country. And it’s great.

What Italy has done is open the rails to access by private companies in addition to the public one, most notably high speed operator NTV/Italo.

Arguably this competition has helped spur on the public operator to greater heights. But it’s not the same at all as what Britain did (privatizing the public operator itself).

And personally, I'm for having English be the national language of America (as a bilingual American myself)

Why are you for this? What problem does this solve, and how?

Seems to me we have made it 250 years without an official language and that this has caused approximately 0 problems.

What about the principle of reciprocity?

China doesn’t allow US social media companies to operate there—why should the US unilaterally allow Chinese social media companies to operate here with no reciprocity?

Continuing to play cooperate over and over when the other player keeps playing defect is not smart.

Maoism-Bainism with Stanford characteristics

People with other options don’t take the train in (most of) the USA because the trains in (most of) the USA are bad.

Of course the US is far larger than any single EU country, but the cities aren’t evenly distributed. There are many clusters of decently-close cities, and vast areas with very few large cities at all. Salt Lake or Denver may never have much useful intercity rail, but lots of regions could have it if we chose to build it (and learn from those who build it well, unlike California HSR).

Attitudes are not the same thing as behaviors. Source: I’m from a really red state with a higher rate of overdose deaths than California

“Go to Vietnam” is maybe not the most practical suggestion for grabbing a cup of coffee, but that’s where I found the best Vietnamese coffee.

As others have said, Vietnamese coffee was traditionally cheaper robusta beans, tended to be lower-quality, and was dark-roasted as a result. More recently, as Vietnam has gotten wealthier, there has been a craft coffee scene developing. I had great coffee in growing regions like Da Lat and Khe Sanh, and in specialty coffee shops in Hanoi like Dream Beans.

Unlike every person born before me and every person born after me—all of whom insist their childhood was the zenith—my childhood was actually the zenith

In this case it’s not tokenization. I wrote the text preprocessing code that deals with spacing these numbers. This is good feedback. It’s optimized for US-style 10-digit phone numbers, and it should be more flexible than that. For example, if I was reading a US phone number such as (123) 456-7890 over the phone and wanted to make sure it was heard correctly, I’d say “123”, “456”, “78”, “90”. But a 9-digit phone number should be spaced as you said.

FWIW the issue is not mostly the builders—the issue is contracting practices and program management/oversight. California HSR hired (among other contractors) Dragados, which has a long history of building huge amounts of HSR in Spain at some of the world’s lowest costs. Look how that’s gone.

Nor is the problem “bureaucracy” as a sibling comment said—actually the opposite is true, we need more “bureaucrats” with technical expertise to oversee contractors so the taxpayers don’t get our lunch eaten. We have gutted all technical expertise from government and now we often outsource the oversight to even more contractors (sometimes the same ones doing the designing and building!). Results are predictable.

We also have a huge problem with litigation and “regulation by litigation” as a replacement for actual “bureaucratic” oversight. Agencies conduct insanely expensive years-long public feedback programs and environmental studies (never mind that electric rail is innately good for the environment) for fear of lawsuits, which happen anyway and delay things even more. Instead of regulation by litigation, the government should step up and provide a clear set of achievable regulations, and if agencies/companies meet them, they can start building.

The countries that do rail infrastructure really well and really cheaply are not always the ones you expect—some are stereotyped as lazy and bureaucratic (Italy, Spain) and some are thought to be places where everything is expensive (Switzerland, Norway). We have a lot to learn, but often we tell ourselves that it just can’t apply to us because we’re so exceptional.

For details on the specific problems and solutions: https://transitcosts.com/

Yes but as I understand it the very limited freight service on the peninsula just runs to a nearby UP yard. These are not big long-distance freight trains

Yes, unfortunately, but the freight traffic (which will needlessly stay diesel) is small, just a couple trains per day. It’s not the 1940s anymore when huge amounts of freight came ashore in San Francisco and propagated down the Southern Pacific line. There are only a couple freight customers left on the Peninsula. Caltrain actually owns the line and previously had the right to kick Union Pacific freight off, but at some point (the 90s?) this right was given up.

Regardless, there’s no excuse for the remaining freight (which operates in off-peak hours) to use diesel. Electric freight locomotives are perfectly common in countries where railroading isn’t still stuck in the 1800s.

This book is by Bent Flyvbjerg, the lead author of the paper being discussed here. He’s done a lot of great scholarship on how megaprojects go haywire, and uniqueness bias is definitely a big piece of it.

You especially see this bias with North American public transit. Most of our transit is greatly deficient compared to much of the rest of the world, and vastly more expensive to build (even controlling for wages). But most NA transit leadership is almost aggressively incurious about learning from other countries, because we are very unique and special and exceptional, so their far better engineering and project management solutions just wouldn’t work here and aren’t even worth considering.

I’m sorry to be negative because I agree with the general sentiment that society needs to stop treating “home value go up” as its primary retirement plan, and get rid of our allergy to social housing, but that first Guardian article about banning rental housing is just so bad on so many levels.

He says Britain doesn’t have a housing shortage because the ratio of homes to households hasn’t changed even as prices have gone up—but treating Britain as one big housing market is ridiculous, there have been massive shifts in economic geography over the last 5 decades. There is a housing shortage in the areas with well paying jobs and a housing surplus in the areas with no jobs. People should get to choose to move to a place where they can make a living!

He also says London’s population hasn’t changed in the last 50 years as prices have gone up without new housing being built—uhh no shit! If very little new housing was built in that period, how could the area’s population go up significantly? What happened instead is that, because demand rose and supply didn’t, the population stayed the same and the static supply went to the highest bidder. This is just mind-numbing economic illiteracy. Where does he think a population increase would go in London if London doesn’t increase housing supply?? The static supply is WHY the population didn’t grow! Literally exact same issue as NYC and the expensive parts of California.

He says developers would never build enough housing because it would drive down the price they can command—has this guy ever heard of the tragedy of the commons?? This is literally how markets work when there’s adequate competition. Econ 101. (And I’m not talking about fringy free-market-absolutist econ; Marx understood perfectly well that market competition drives down prices.) For a couple examples, Austin and Minneapolis have generated enough new supply to tank the price of rent. And imagine how ridiculous this argument sounds about anything but housing. “TV companies would never produce more TVs because that would bring down the price they can charge.” Oh wait…

It’s also totally left out (because there is no answer) how overall affordability would get better by getting rid of renting and only having owner-occupied housing. It’s the same amount of demand for the same amount of supply!

Finally, please just don’t take away my ability to rent! At my current place in life I don’t want to lock up a ton of money in real estate and be stuck in one place (much harder to move frequently due to transaction costs). Maybe later in life I’ll buy, but right now I want to rent (and invest my money in other things instead of a home). We need both kinds.

Ughhh. This author’s way of thinking is exactly why many of the most productive and ostensibly progressive cities (London, SF, NYC…) are prohibitively expensive, denying everyone but the rich the ability to live there. It’s easy to understand the right’s desire to send property values to the stratosphere (“fuck the poor, and fuck you too, I got mine”). But the left ties itself in these crazy knots to bring about the same result, hurting the working class we claim to care about, and it’s baffling.

Don’t overthink it, just build a fuckton of housing where there’s the most economic opportunity, both private sector (because central planning is notoriously not the best at creating enough supply) and social housing (because the market never works for literally everyone, and also because why not, more housing is good).

If you’re right, they did a stellar job of hiding it from the engineers working on the devices!

Or maybe I’m one of the deep state cutouts. One never knows for sure.

This is hysterical. I never owned one until I worked on the product because I worried it was always recording/transmitting. Turns out it’s not. Promise.

You don’t need a shadowy government cabal to explain Alexa persisting too long in the strategy described in the article. Just a powerful chief executive with an attachment to the product, the sunk cost fallacy, a company with too much revenue to know what to do with, some gameable downstream impact metrics, the inertia of large institutions, and empire building.

It still could’ve become an incredible product if they’d gotten on the LLM chat/agent train early enough, but alas. I mostly use mine to set timers when my hands are full in the kitchen.

Just what I remember from an internship. A quick google search just shows a few puff pieces.

Sometime in the early 2000s they generated all the flight code for the James Webb Space Telescope from UML diagrams with Rational Rose. Over a decade later they were still trying to unfuck all of it.

Yeah, great point, especially since points are often the next bottleneck after station dwells (I’m thinking especially of BART’s Oakland Wye here). Close following really does not solve what matters for throughput.

As others have pointed out, most of this is a good idea and already exists in the form of moving-block communications-based train control which is used all over the world.

The parts that don’t exist—traveling closer than the stopping distance and hitching/unhitching at speed—are not good ideas unfortunately.

You can’t travel closer than the stopping distance because you can’t guarantee that the train ahead will stop at its own achievable stopping distance. If you could, you could do as you describe, and have the next train start braking instantly when the one ahead brakes. But striking an unexpected obstacle and/or derailing can cause the train ahead to stop quite a bit more abruptly than that! If the train ahead suffers some kind of violent failure, it could leave sizable debris and/or track damage at the point of the event, even if most of the train continues along for some distance. So, even with moving-block CBTC, you must always be capable of stopping before reaching the current location of the train ahead of you.

Anyway it is not really necessary to travel so closely together, because the limiting factor of throughput is station dwell time. Sure you could have huge throughput on a line with no stations if you could theoretically travel at car-on-highway spacing, but if you have stations and they can only serve one train at a time, you won’t gain anything by doing this. You can improve this by having a platform with a track on each side so you can load two trains at once (and this is pretty common when dwell time is really long and throughput must be high, i.e. for intercity trains on a busy line), but that is the best you can do. You can’t really scale this to a bunch of platform tracks because you’ll start to have merging conflicts when rejoining the track.

The problem with unhitching at speed follows naturally from the problem with close following: the moment you unhitch, you are now following too closely behind another train, and you cannot stop in time if something bad happens to it.

Like it or not, the job of the NASA administrator is not to actually do science or engineering, it is to fight for the agency’s budget with the President and Congress—a job for which political schmoozer extraordinaire Bill Nelson is eminently qualified, much more so than “real astronaut” Charlie Bolden, who struggled in this role despite being the epitome of the hypercompetent NASA pilot. I know which one I want at the controls of my aircraft, and which one I want on the witness stand on behalf of my government agency.

The way the Buy America rules work, there’s a certain percentage of work that has to be done in the US, and the rest can be done overseas. My understanding is that Stadler does most of the higher-skill work in Switzerland with its existing workforce, ships the components to Utah, and does final assembly there. Basically they do the bare minimum in the US that’s required under the law, so I’m not sure that this transfers a huge amount of domain expertise to the US workforce.

My understanding (correct me if I’m wrong) is that the 2018 FRA reforms still set a higher crashworthiness standard for mainline stock than fully-separated metro (due to interactions with freight and road traffic), and that this is the case in Europe too. But yeah it’s a huge improvement from the old “rolling bank vault” era, and definitely maddening that many US agencies are still so incurious about improving things! At least Caltrain bought decent-enough modern trains.

The weird gauge is indeed weird, but is generally overstated as a problem for BART. There’s not much to be gained by changing it system-wide, and it would be at great cost.

It’s sometimes claimed to be a driver of costlier rolling-stock acquisition, but this is dubious. There are many track gauges around the world, and not a lot of evidence that nonstandard ones cost dramatically different amounts. And even if bespoke gauges did cost more for economies-of-scale reasons, BART’s gauge is hardly unique: it’s the same gauge used in India, and just a couple mm from the one used in Iberia and much of Latin America (in practice they are demonstrably interchangeable). So there is a huge amount of rolling stock being manufactured for this gauge. It doesn’t require reinventing the entire production process or something.

The other claimed benefit to standardizing BART’s gauge that I sometimes hear is interoperability with other systems, but this is very difficult for several larger reasons, and also not necessary or desirable. For one thing, BART also has a nonstandard wheel profile and corresponding rail profile, so you wouldn’t just need to move the rails closer together, you’d actually have to replace them all. Beyond that, mainline rail systems have tougher crash standards than fully-separated metro systems (even after recent reforms), so you couldn’t run BART trains onto mainline tracks unless you bought heavier (and more expensive) rolling stock than what BART and other metro systems normally buy. Another issue is that mainline rail systems use different signaling and electrification (if they even have electrification) systems, which would require either an incredibly expensive overhaul or the use of multi-current/multi-signaling trains, which again increases the cost. Also, mainline rail is generally not grade-separated like BART, which would need to be changed at great expense, or BART would have to accept reduced reliability due to grade-crossing conflicts (this matters less for infrequent regional rail, but is huge for BART which must timetable dozens of trains per peak hour through the Y-junction in Oakland). Stations would also need to be harmonized to the same platform height (BART’s is different from any other system in the area) and length (stations would need to match BART’s extremely long trains).

Interoperability also doesn’t offer much benefit. Usually I hear about this in the context of Caltrain: instead of having these fragmented systems, wouldn’t it be nice if BART served the peninsula? I agree! We can do this by merging the agencies and putting new logos on the trains, without worrying about replacing rails and redoing the electrification that Caltrain is just finishing up with. I’m only slightly oversimplifying. We should continue iteratively upgrading Caltrain into true rapid transit with things like BART-style level boarding, all-day high frequencies and regular intervals, and grade separation. And we should extend what is currently known as Caltrain downtown and then across to the East Bay[0], providing good transfer opportunities with current BART. If this is done well, it should all feel like one regional rapid-transit system to the rider[1], much like New York subway and Berlin U-bahn riders usually don't even realize that they’re actually using multiple incompatible systems. At the end of the day, good integration and high service quality are what matter to the rider, not the underlying technology.

I think eBART contributed a lot to the idea that BART’s gauge is a big problem, since this weird DMU thing was sold under the premise that “normal BART” was too expensive. Really the things that were (allegedly) too expensive for this low-ridership exurban tail were electrification and the huge stations necessitated by BART’s extremely long trains. Those factors would've still been there even if the rails matched up.

So was it pointless and dumb for BART to use a nonstandard track gauge? Yeah. It was part of the marketing for a “space age” system that wanted to be seen as different from ye olde train. But is it really a huge problem that’s worth correcting? Nah. It’s only worth changing part of it if you wanted to convert a segment of track from mainline to BART or vice versa—and the cost of the track stuff would pale in comparison to other factors (electrification, signaling, stations, grade separation).

[0] https://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/2021/09/down-tubes-with-dt... [1] https://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-false-choice-o...

The Caltrain KISSes are not really off the shelf, in many ways, good and bad and ugly.

The (arguably) good: 1) they have a boxier profile than the standard KISS, which some have complained about, but the reason the European version is less boxy is because Europe has a more restrictive loading gauge (the allowable cross-section of the vehicle), resulting in a more cramped upper level. Caltrain doesn’t have this issue, and so the upper level will not be cramped. 2) The Caltrain KISS is more powerful than the standard, which would allow for a faster top speed… if the corridor was upgraded to make use of it, which it is not. Maybe someday.

The bad/silly: two sets of doors… a higher set since HSR might allegedly someday come to this corridor and require changing the platform height, and a lower set because that ain’t happening for a long time, if ever. I think there are some other bad/silly things which I’ve willfully forgotten about (I think they fucked up the ADA lifts somehow?), which I’m sure are documented somewhere on Clem Tillier’s excellent blog.[0]

The ugly: “buy America” requirements forced Stadler to build an entire factory in the US, raising the cost by over 50% compared to the standard KISS. This is the bad kind of industrial policy which raises costs without actually building up US industrial capacity in this field (if Stadler closed the plant tomorrow, the US wouldn’t retain any expertise or capacity to build trains).

[0] https://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com

This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course. High-speed passenger trains do very well all over the world. Coast-to-coast distances are too long for them, but cities in the US tend to be clustered at distances that are absolutely viable if we cared to invest. And if we continue to treat passenger rail as an afterthought, of course it will remain one.

Sorry but I can’t stand when someone takes their own dissatisfaction (which is entirely valid, it’s your life after all) and generalizes it to a grand social theory in a way that is simultaneously immensely self-important (everyone who isn’t dissatisfied in the exact same way as me is fooling themselves, no one could have a different experience from me) and deeply self-pitying (oh noo I’m a literal criminal in this society because someone had a surprised reaction to my dissatisfaction).

But you can't even say that out loud anymore, because that means "questioning the whole western ideology" and suddenly someone feels threatened, and myself becomes a criminal.

What reality are you living in? The consensus in the west, online at least, seems to be that everything sucks and is getting worse. Personally I think that’s overwrought, but it’s certainly a sentiment that’s everywhere. It sounds like you are the one who’s struggling with the fact that some people disagree with you, which sounds like something you should be able to handle if you want to live a “wild, natural, and rough” life.

Western culture has become empty and fake - and I'm tired to explain the most obvious thing to so many people - and in the end, they don't believe you anyway. They really believe, they are part of something bigger, are very important and are going to be famous or something. Intellectual vanity and luxury and bragging.

This is the embodiment of the meme of the guy in the corner at the party (“they don’t know…”) while everyone else is dancing happily. The fact that you feel that life in Austria is empty and fake actually does not mean that everyone else must be feeling the exact same thing and are just deluding themselves! The ability to understand that other people have different internal experiences than yourself is a really basic emotional skill.

I’m sorry that you haven’t been happy in the west. I’m sure you’re far from the only one. But your unhappiness doesn’t mean that western culture is against “life itself”, whatever that even means.