BubbleMonkey

I made a similar comment to this several days ago.

It takes 46 hours to go from Chicago to Seattle by train, and only 30 by car, for a difference of a whopping 16 hours. Even stopping to sleep for the night, you can get there faster driving. If you don’t get a sleeper, it’s decently cheap at like $120. But still, double the time isn’t appealing to most anyone, especially when actually comfortable accommodations for 2 days are wildly more expensive.

I’d love to travel by train, but it’s just too slow to be practical, even if you really don’t have much going on (if you have pets, for example, that extra week for travel can really get cumbersome). If it was equivalent time to driving (or faster would be great) I think you’d see a lot more people adopting it. Even if it doesn’t replace all the air travel, to just have it cut down cross-country driving would be great. Unfortunately that means a huge investment in rail infrastructure, and a lot of time, to bring the network up to speed.

At your recommendation (with your post being 9 hours old - the thing is really long) I read the whole thing start to finish, and just finished. It’s been a hard (emotionally) read and I’ve had a headache since I started it, but it was worth it, and I’m glad the dude is doing at least passably well in life, all things considered.

And at the end when he mentions he was sent in 98 at just past 16.. I was sent to a military boarding school at almost 14 in 00, essentially for having adhd, mild autism, and a single parent who swung between negligence and authoritarianism, and I’m just really lucky my mom found one of the less bad places. A legitimate school that was only a bit abusive (but really not a super appropriate environment for most children either way). Because I could have met that person in hell if things had played out a bit differently. And that’s a really sobering thought. I’m glad I didn’t have it until the end.

To be fair, they are still around in a heck of a lot of places.

As old abandoned building husks slowly deteriorating in a very late-stage-dystopia sort of way.

Eye contact aversion isn’t necessarily poor body control, it’s been studied quite a bit from various angles and found that people with autism who avoid eye contact do so because they feel actual discomfort, which can be found with fmri in combination with eye tracking software. In milder cases, the aversion is like an inversion of normal social sensations (that is, NT people feel similarly uncomfortable avoiding gaze as ASD with mild aversion do meeting it). In worse cases, it appears to be an over activation of a facial recognition system that produces intense distress.

https://www.sciencealert.com/for-those-with-autism-eye-contact-isn-t-just-weird-it-s-distressing

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5645367/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71547-0

Personally I also hate driving, so I’m sort of with you on that (tho for me, unless it was a trip where stops are the point, I couldn’t see adding almost an entire day to a trip that’s barely over a day to begin with, but I also wouldn’t be doing that sort of trip solo, and driver swapping helps a ton), but I find people have 2 modes typically and neither one of them does all that well with the current rail infrastructure.

First mode is “get there as fast as we can so we can enjoy the accommodations/ locations we are traveling for”, which most people fly for, but many will drive for if they need to move a lot of people or equipment. You can do that on a train, assuming one stops anywhere near where you intend to go, but when you have multiple people to switch off driving and don’t stop, that extra time matters.

The other mode is the “journey is the destination” with frequent stops to get out of the car and do stuff… but then we typically just call those road trips. I’ve done several of those where most of the trip is traveling between stops. Trains don’t do well for that currently since they have so few stops and run so infrequently, so the journey isn’t particularly exciting. Busses are better for this sort of travel, with the present infrastructure, but not a very comfortable trip. Busses would also very likely take about the same time as a train, since they make a lot of extended stops.

Very few people seem to fall into the grey area between these two things, where they both don’t care to stop anywhere, and don’t care how fast they get there. And I think this is largely because most people don’t have time for leisurely travel. Most people get extended-weekend trips and maybe one week-long vacation a year, so 4 days round trip of just traveling but not being able to stop anywhere would ruin most plans for people, unless they just want to ride the train.

But if we invested in high-speed rail, you could both get there faster than driving -and- have a better experience than driving, which would get many people to switch right quick. It shouldn’t have to be a “pick one or the other” situation, when literally the only barrier is infrastructure spending which would be great for the economy, and it would be better for literally everyone to have it. Amtrak is a private entity, technically, but the US government is the majority shareholder, the board of directors is appointed mostly by the president of the US, they get a lot of funding from state and fed government, and thus govt has considerable power to make that happen.

It just really sucks that the only significant passenger rail options we have now are designed to be slow scenic trips, a gimmick where the whole point of them is the leisurely trip. They aren’t really meant for actual commute use, and that’s just super short-sighted and wasteful. And I think until they get faster, with more routes and stops along the routes, we aren’t going to see people adopting them in the numbers we need them to.

If we had high speed rail, I’d absolutely love to take a train to just go places, but cross country trains in the US take absolutely forever. If you aren’t in a hurry, sure, great option, cheap, but doesn’t really work well for vacations or emergencies or whatever when you have very limited time.

For example, Chicago to Seattle takes 46 hours by train but 30 hours by car. Even with stops for food, gas, and bathroom, even staying somewhere for the night, you aren’t adding 16 hours on.

https://www.amtrak.com/empire-builder-train

We really need to invest more in high speed rail.. like everywhere here. Until then, unfortunately, I doubt people will shift that way overall.

if you haven’t seen it, I think you might like the animated series Pantheon.

Your comment made me think of it, very much.

I think a better option might be to leave the meat industry alone entirely, and subsidize or otherwise drive down the prices of the plant based alternatives. Then it doesn’t hurt poor people, they can still buy it, and may even help them if they choose to switch.

If I could buy plant stuff for the same price as or less than meat, I absolutely would. But I simply can’t afford to pay the premium for plant products.

(I still don’t eat much meat, don’t get me wrong, maybe once a week on average. My stomach doesn’t like it. If I could replace it entirely I would, but sometimes you just need something that fits the meat texture/flavor profile)

It is definitely difficult to get rid of when it’s generated in the middle of intricate detail, which it often is.

I’m not saying it’s the same thing as actually poisoning, but it does negatively impact the resulting generations.

Right, what I mean is the Texas model of pre-surveying for places they would be a good fit with minor pushback, and then having the projects paid by everyone, rather than some investor who can just flake out.

Their grid is an absolute disaster, so I’m certainly not idolizing most of what they are doing, but the method they follow to get them at least done.. that part is good.

I’m aware. She chose not to go that route, and I can’t say I blame her really. She cared for both of her parents when they died of cancer, and having done that as well, yeah. I still wouldn’t go for highly toxic treatment either, even if it does have a better chance caught early. Screw that; I’m already full of medical issues, don’t need to feel worse.

I’ve already undergone genetic testing due to family cancer history. I’m clean for maladaptive genes, as far as they know for now (I have several unknown mutations, I get letters in the mail every few years when they figure one of them out). But the world is a lot more polluted than it used to be, and I haven’t always made the healthiest choices in life, so.. meh.

Like I said, if treatments change maybe, but I’m not injecting a toxic cocktail. And a lot of early-detection cancers they find and treat aren't ever going to kill a persons anyway because they are too slow growing. So even that early screening isn’t without risk.

I really hope we can figure out how to fix that issue quickly, but I don’t really see that happening.

The Texas model seems pretty good, like I’m willing to pay more for renewables. I actually already have elected to do so; when my utility was looking to add another hydro generator, I paid for “extra blocks of power” which were $15/mth. I got 2 for 2 years, so my electric is cleaner now than otherwise, not cheaper but cleaner. It was opt-in, but I’d be happy to have it as just a standard cost of upgrading, as well.

We are all in this together, let’s act like it.