Anecdotally, either and both could be true: what "normal" person actually cares very much about the logo of a chain restaurant? Most people care about whether they can afford fun things, who they're sleeping with, and what they're having for dinner.
Yes, that's exactly what the poster above was saying, just not in those words. The idea that we are one and all on a high-minded journey of self-actualisation is hopelessly naive; most people are indeed flailing around at the bottom of the Maslow's pyramid, and that's how we got to where we are today politically.
I mean, I kinda? When I'm not working, I mostly think about tabletop rpgs, wingfoil/windsurf, my SO/family, and what I will do for dinner. Pegged me down to the T here.
That is a fascinating article and definitely something to bear in mind.
To some extent we all have fragile egos. Speaking personally, if I upset someone then I will be devastated for days, even if it was just a misunderstanding rather than me deliberately trying to hurt. Yet in social media world, it is a world of pain, with people getting brutal comments every day, for them still to post the next day and the day after that.
To some extent, negative attention is still attention, and, presumably for some, if you can't get positive attention, any attention will do. Cue 'rage-baiting', where the goal is to incite lots of negative comments.
Anyway, I am of the opinion that in the last century 'the camera never lied' but in today's world, the camera is always lying. On social media everything needs to be considered a lie first until proven otherwise. Add to that, the posters are likely to have psychiatric disorders, and I think I am now outta there!
It might be easier to change today than it was in 1886. Back then, trains were really the only means of travel between cities. Today, there are less passenger trains than back then, though more freight (even with trucks and planes). But freight diversions/delays could be scheduled well in advance and have alternative means. Not to mention, since then we've developed variable gauge train tech. A subset of trains could run during the cutover.
It's likely more costly today, but less disruptive.
Passenger travel is easy mode. The economic consequences of disrupted freight dwarf anything you could imagine from disrupted passenger travel of equal duration. That's why the US has always strived to do a really, really good job with their freight rail system, and US freight is still to this day generally considered the best freight rail system in the world, even as passenger rail lags well behind.
Remember that freight is more than just moving pallets of finished goods to Amazon warehouses. It doesn't matter if you've given the cows a month's advance notice, if they don't have feed they're still going to starve; and no matter how many KPIs you dangle at the silos, they're only going to hold x amount of reserve grain.
Any competent shipper facing a train issue will just put the load on semis instead for 3-10x the price. Freight rail mainly exists as an low cost bulk carrier of convenience these days. Ships outcompete rail for bulk goods along inland waterways, and semis outcompete rail for network volume, ease of delivery, and adaptability to constraints.
> Any competent shipper facing a train issue will just put the load on semis instead for 3-10x the price.
Did you not see how the markets recently reacted to certain components merely doubling in cost due to tariffs? In what world do you live in where the agricultural margins are high enough that the cattle ranchers can just casually absorb a threefold cost increase? Clearly they're eating the loss, because if they passed those costs onwards in the chain there'd certainly be huge economic consequences, as I said, and you wouldn't have felt the need to try and correct my premise. Anyway, I'd like to visit this world of yours, though only if you'd be buying the meals.
> Freight rail mainly exists as an low cost bulk carrier of convenience these days.
This is what happens when one tries to create a narrative from DoT statistics.
The reason why rail freight tonnage is less than truck tonnage is long-haul vs short-haul. You deliver lumber from the timber yard to the finishing facility once. That's rail. You don't load up trucks with semi-finished logs on an industrial scale, you don't load them with coal, you don't load them with industrial quantities of gravel or sand or steel either.
Once you have the logs processed into boards, then you use trucks to carry those boards to various short-haul destinations, where some of the boards are further processed into fence pickets and bird houses and old-timey sign posts that Roadrunner can inadvertently spin around so Wile E ends up taking a completely wrong turn. All of that stuff then goes to storefronts and warehouses (also short-haul) and as a result, the short-haul tonnage can count twice, three times, or even more, depending on just how many steps are being taken between "tree" and "birdhouse".
> Ships outcompete rail for bulk goods along inland waterways
Which is great along inland waterways, but if you're not located along them, you're probably using rail to get the bulk goods to the shipyard.
Feel free to look up the ton-mile by distance numbers. Rail exceeds trucks by fairly narrow margins only for hauls between 1,000-2,000 miles. Below that distance, trucks dominate. Above that distance, trucks also dominate. Even in that band, it's like a narrow difference of like 35% vs 40%.
Note that the inverse situation is common at west coast ports, with short haul rail lines running to intermodal facilities so things can be loaded onto trucks for long haul. The cost of transloading to domestic containers often dominates keeping it on rails.
> The reason why rail freight tonnage is less than truck tonnage is long-haul vs short-haul. You deliver lumber from the timber yard to the finishing facility once. That's rail. You don't load up trucks with semi-finished logs on an industrial scale, you don't load them with coal, you don't load them with industrial quantities of gravel or sand or steel either.
Around here the timber arrives at the railyard by truck and aggregates are usually mined and transported locally, which is truck heavy. Grain is also majority truck these days from the BTS stats I can see, but basic materials isn't my industry.
Regardless, ton-miles aren't doubled counted. It's one ton, transported one mile. If rail took freight that extra distance, it'd get the same share (subject to all the usual caveats of industry numbers).
Assuming an unlimited supply of semis and drivers to fit the demand. With limited supply big companies will be able to a compete for the available trucks at really high prices but small-mid businesses will be left out.
Small-mid businesses generally are not shipping on rail to begin with, unless they've been bundled as part of a larger shipment by an intermodal carrier. If you've ever tried to talk to a rail carrier, they really don't want to deal with companies under a certain size.
>Assuming an unlimited supply of semis and drivers to fit the demand.
If the US really wanted to get it done, they could involve the army and various state national guards. They have tons of trained semi and heavy truck drivers, way more than most people would assume. Most states also have tons of trained drivers for their massive snow plows and highway repair trucks and stuff. The only thing stopping these massive projects is money and lack of imagination.
I see several trains go by per day on my pretty sleepy tracks. You have no clue the amount of semis that would need to be built to accommodate your proposal, they just do not wait in the wings. Do you think all the bulk shipments are being done for fun and someone isn't waiting for 5000 gallons of HCL and 2000 tons of coal?
I'm well aware that it's a couple hundred trucks to replace a single train. I'm not sure you understand that this is what already happens. Rail carries around a quarter of freight ton-miles in the US. Trucks carry much more than that. All of the stuff that isn't bulk, time insensitive freight, or anything that surges in excess of the carefully scheduled rail capacity already has to spill over onto trucks. That includes things like disaster recovery shipments, unusual seasonal demand, and so on. There's also a population of truckers that work these temporary jobs, as well as a certain level of excess vehicle capacity in the fleet carriers to service it, plus whatever truckers can be pulled from other work to meet the demand.
Anyone looking at massive losses will pay the sticker shock to put it on trucks. Anyone who can afford to shut down instead will wait. That's the system working as intended.
Thanks for the response. I'm curious what percent of stuff that would normally end up on train ends up as spillover onto trucks. Any idea? I think stuff is quite finetuned already and there may only be an extra few percent of capacity in trucks. I agree, in a lot of cases it might work to just bite the bullet and wait or try a different apparatus. However the stuff on the trains typically is not slackable. That is, you aren't transporting computers and sofas via rail.
I was told a while ago "trains are great if you want to move a trainload of stuff, trucks are great if you want to move a few truckloads of stuff". I guess trains also need loading/unloading facilities and stations close to your origin and destination, and perhaps a hump yard somewhere.
Cargo ships beat everything hands down if there's a port close to your origin and destination, and lots of water in between.
> "Today, there are less passenger trains than back then"
I don't think this is true in Europe. Certainly in the UK, passenger rail volume since the 2010s has set records higher than in any previous years, exceeding numbers that were last seen before WW2. Today there are fewer miles of track than there were in that era, but modern signalling technology allows more trains to operate safely on the same tracks, and modern trains run much faster on average.
As for freight, the US actually moves a significantly greater portion of its freight by rail than Europe does. Rail has around 40% modal share for freight in the US vs only 17% in Europe. One reason for this is that in Europe many lines are congested with passenger traffic, leaving few slots for freight trains to operate - except late at night.
> As for freight, the US actually moves a significantly greater portion of its freight by rail than Europe does. Rail has around 40% modal share for freight in the US vs only 17% in Europe. One reason for this is that in Europe many lines are congested with passenger traffic, leaving few slots for freight trains to operate - except late at night.
It's also that rail tends to be more competitive for long haul traffic, and the US operators have big trans-continental freight networks well suited to that. In Europe there's a sharp drop off in modal share as freight crosses borders. Each national railway operator is in practice fiercely protective of its own turf, and there are a lot of hurdles to overcome. So in practice cross-border freight is largely done with trucks instead.
Despite the EU commission wanting to get some competition going on the rails and better interoperability requirements etc etc. for at least the past 30 years, the operators are still in the "discussion about preparing to setup a committee to discuss interoperability" phase.
> As for freight, the US actually moves a significantly greater portion of its freight by rail than Europe does. Rail has around 40% modal share for freight in the US vs only 17% in Europe.
Europe also has far more freight-friendly waterways. US rail is designed for dirt-cheap bulk transport for things like coal and grain. In most of Europe that's done by barge - but US geography doesn't really allow for that.
We can agree to disagree without name-calling, but the impact of compounding growth vs intentional stagnation is going to continue to widen the gap that's already opened up over a few generations.
You'll discover that compounding growth is useless to YOU, when Trump and Musk are taking 99.9% of it. Wages are stagnant. The US is #24 on the world’s happiest countries list, and has been dropping for a long while. At the top of the list, we find socialist countries with access to world-class public services like healthcare and education -- which the US is currently trying very hard to gut. The last time something like this happened, it took a Great Depression and intense widespread economic pain for Americans to snap out of it. Inequality is destabilizing and Americans are clueless (see inflation leading to Trump), so I think Europe is likely to do better in the long run.
These socialist countries that are so happy because of the money they pour into healthcare and education, do so at the expense of their future growth and their own self defense.
This seems unsustainable.
The US is also a much larger and heterogenous society compared to the countries above us on most lists, such as the scandinavian countries or Lichtenstein.
Anecdotally, when the homeless have smart phones to accept donations and obesity is an epidemic of the poor, we're not suffering for material wealth. A poverty of virtue, maybe so.
This comment is sadly wrong, like saying "the sky is green". I recommend you talk to chatGPT (4o+) and learn something. Nordic countries combine high taxes and spending with competitive, open economies. Denmark and Sweden have high labor productivity and GDP per capita, etc. These societies are no longer homogeneous.
Talk to the bot. Ask open-ended questions, ask for sources, read those sources. I don't have the patience to work with blind ideological bias. Like I said before, usually the only thing that helps Americans snap out of it is intense economic pain, which should happen between 2025-2035 with high cost of living, social safety net collapse, climate disasters, and maybe even AI job displacement at scale.
In a hypothetical hacker news guide for how to win friends and influence people, I'm pretty sure "you're so wrong you should go talk to a chat bot" is not a recommended approach.
I hope you're right, for what it's worth. It's a better world than "the only thing that helps Europeans snap out of it is intense economic pain combined with a Russian invasion of the Baltics"
Go debate creationists for a while then come tell me I'm being abrasive. Believe me this is the easiest way when we disagree on basic facts.
US culture (especially among white men) has a lot of internalized individualist, anti-union, and anti-government views, despite the incredible success of the New Deal (combined socialism+capitalism) in creating their entire world. The bot is really the best way to counter these attitudes. It beats spending hours on google.
A few luxury brands and a well preserved history and culture that is nice for tourism. Lots of high value human capital if only they could truly unlock it and allow it to thrive.
Today's Europe is just milking what it can as it continues its decades long crisis of identity and pessimism. Demographics are destiny and it's extremely problematic for Europe's future. There's no real leadership and it's one large admin state that can only agree to fund people's lives today at the cost of tomorrows lives using whatever assets it has left from its golden age before the wars. It's no wonder no one is having kids as they know the future is bleak. Just let the admin state manage my life and take it easy and not worry too much and fade away into the future until it's all gone...slowly and then all at once.
The jungle produces strong creatures and much of the leading world is much more full of jungle animals than the zoo animals the people of the European continent have become generation over generation.
You don't see why Firefox refusing to connect would be annoying? I don't care whether the blog about curl is encrypted in transit or not and I do care about a forced change to chrome to see the content.
I can visit it in Firefox 123 just fine. Tests like [1] say the site works on everything from Firefox 31 to Firefox 73.
You're probably the target of a MITM attack. Or you've done something weird, like taking a job with an employer that MITMs your web traffic then refusing to install their MITM certificates.
I once was talking to somebody who was a brother in law staying on the couch sort of deal.
They were complaining that their battery life on their phone just got decimated recently and kept dying over and over. I believe I was helping to troubleshoot, so I had them turn on airplane mode, he flipped it and complaining of something else annoying happening and saying oh yeah my phone airplane mode doesn't work, I still get internet. I was totally baffled, it was all very weird to me.
A little bit of time later that person got busted as a part of a big local drug bust. I'm assuming that's how they tap phones.
I'm definitely the victim of Vodafone screwing with the connection. They want me to prove my identity by giving them a card number, despite already having that because I pay for the SIM connection, but both their website and their mobile app are so poorly implemented that it's not actually possible to meet that inherently meaningless request.
It seems Firefox notices this and refuses to contact the site, and Chrome notices this and lets me override, but generally I don't see this failure mode. I wonder what is significant about this particular website.
I unsportingly separate work hardware from personal, no idea if my employer's likely MITM nonsense would have the same behaviour.
Learned something today, albeit with details missing. Oh and Vodafone employee if you're reading this? None of your tech works for shit.
But it's working just fine in my Firefox, so it sounds more like there's something wrong on your end by either security software or on the network level.
Bingo. Primarily because I don't really mind if reading this post is compromised, but at least partly because I hadn't thought through the implications of vodafone intercepting traffic.
If demand for ownership is such that prices make |cost paying mortgage| + |cost maintenance, insurance, etc| < |income renting| then there's a clear profit from buying and renting as much property as possible. This will continue, increasing demand, until an equilibrium is met.
It works the other way as well to dampen demand for investment properties.
All these commits are so strange. They are all useless "clean up" commits yet they are not done by a bot, there's someone manually making these changes every few days, almost every day actually.
Don't know if he's really trying to make the project seem active, or trying to score a certain number of commits, or if he's just really passionate about cleaning up that codebase all by himself.
Mostly to me, it shows the importance of a sane lint/format step in the pre-commit hook, it prevents engineers spending an near-infinite amount of time on this type of cleanup.
I don't see anything particularly strange about them. This recent commit, for example, fixes some typos and changes some formatting a bit. HN seems to be taking a very conspiratorial turn in its thinking recently.
Are there so few bugs and issues in OpenOffice that, for months, the most pressing matter is to fix the incorrect use of "its" in comments?
I mean this person is German (their Github bio). Even if they're not a programmer, why don't they instead take the time to translate some of the many german source files to english, like Libreoffice did back in 2013[1]?
Everyone knows that Apache's OpenOffice is barely maintained. That's not a reason to attribute nefarious motives to the person making these commits. This whole thread is going a bit bonkers making unfounded accusations about this particular individual.
Yeah I don't think anyone is doing anything nefarious here, and I definitely don't want to accuse anyone of acting in that way. I have my own weird hobbies.
I still don't think it's in the project's interest to have these changes merged in, they just confuse the history & make it harder to track down relevant context.
The trend is is to downplay the issue in status messages to obscure the real problem. That message could mean anything from an extra 1% of rejections to 99% of transactions are failing.
The vagueness is the point, because they want to avoid admitting serious problems.
We had this problem with some devops hires who came from a big company. They’d delay updating the status page as long as possible, then update with the weakest language that was technically correct. “Some customers might experience degraded performance” was their go-to message for nearly complete outages. They’d argue that it was technically correct because some requests were getting through in some logs somewhere.
It was a side effect of working in an environment where their bonuses depended on downtime and the severity of outages. The game was to admit as little as possible to keep those bonus numbers high. We didn’t calculate bonuses that way but they had ingrained the behavior from years of BigCo performance reviews.
>We had this problem with some devops hires who came from a big company.
Amazon.
All you have to do is look at their status page of green lights when us-east goes down completely to lose complete faith in their status page reflecting anything but wishful thinking.
Seems unlikely, bonuses are not an Amazon thing, and iiuc status pages aren’t a decision such people would be making anyway. A dedicated “devops” person at Amazon (to the extent that’s even a thing, mostly engineering teams own their own ops) would be unlikely to benefit from minimizing issues. The status page issue you’re discussing is real but I don’t think it’s the fault of lower level engineers.
Updating the status page in the middle of the incident is always an art. Sometimes you can truly define impact and update the status page without weak language but other times you can't.
You still want to notify customers they may be seeing issues even if you aren't confident on the percentage of impacted customers yet.
For merchants it is, I worked on a marketplace before and having checkout flows with higher than usual declines will eat on your sales. People don't tolerate it so well and will either drop the purchase completely if it's a "want" and not a "need", or will go to the competition to finish the purchase.
If a site is being DDoSed and only 10% of legitimate traffic is going through, is it "up"? I think you'd be hard pressed to call that "not down". So if the proximate cause is fraud instead of network requests, how is it any different?
I absolutely despise this kind of language that is becoming so commonplace now and is obvious BS. I wish I could pay my bills to these same companies using language like this. "It's not that I didn't pay my bill, it's just that some dollars may experience longer-than-usual time to get to your bank."
on the Ethereum blockchain, where, yes, the service is not technically down but unavailable to anyone who isn't paying a hundred bucks for a simple transaction.
Actually, free markets do lead to better products. But they cost more than the worse products.
Look at coffee. The gradual shift from Arabica to more Robusta beans over a generation. Each year, an imperceptible shift was taken that, over decades, lead to coffee that tastes terrible. Opening the door for companies like Starbucks and a ton of gourmet roasters to compete.
But properly roasted, single origin coffee costs more than Chock-full-o'nuts. So you have options.
I react poorly to some coffees and not others. I've been told by people who claim to know that some people can't stomach Robusta as well as they can Arabica. And I'll be damned if I know how to track which one I'm actually getting.
Are you talking about their black coffee? Or their other sorts of drinks that are often less than 50% actual coffee? Because if anything, the usual complaint about literal coffee at Starbucks from people who like coffee is it tastes too much like coffee, in the sense of being over-roasted and uninteresting. Even their blonde roast is still at best a medium roast at any other modern roaster.
The thing that surprised me about burnt coffee beans is that people assume that the heavier the taste the more caffeine is there and that’s not true of over-roasting. It’s less available caffeine, not more. So it tastes terrible for no practical reason.
Today’s Starbucks is well removed from its origins. Starbucks was never great coffee, but I’ve heard it started out pretty decent.
Much like how McDonalds, KFC, etc started by making decent food so did Starbucks. Add 40+ years of optimizing for the bottom line and the average person’s pallet and you get a very different product.
This. And I'll also add that until I was required to try each variation of a certain coffee for a job prior bring it to stores, I was convinced there was no such thing as coffee that's not bitter. All coffee I'd had before tasted like chewing on aspirin[1].
For the job, there were five "espresso style" variants[2]. Although the "black no sugar" was too intense or me, none of them were bitter. I could make them bitter if I left one open too long or by heating one and letting it cool. There are only three variants now, and I miss the the discontinued "black lightly sweet" and "mochachino".
I've since experimented with making cold brew, servedhot or cold, with a little potassium bicarbonate. I've also tried some ready-made cold brews and lighter roasts. Darker roasts taste more burnt to me. Robusto is unsuitable. Arabica is better, especially if it has a good proportion of Kona in it. If it doesn't specifiy how much Kona, assume it's not enough to make a difference. I haven't tried pure Kona, even while in Hawai'i, because price.
[1] This was not planned. I was mistakenly given regular tablets instead of children's chewable…more than once, by different people. Not a recommended experience.
[2] I'm told Italy made them stop calling it that, because of some legal definition of what constitutes espresso.
The only time people who are more than a few years into their career are asked about degrees (and grades) in an interview is at very bureaucratic organizations or when being interviewed by someone themselves barely out of school who lacks awareness.
Seeing as this career is a golden ticket with a guaranteed job for life if you’re half competent, I’d spin the complaints from some about these practices around: if an organisation is so detached from the realities of commercial software delivery and what makes a good hire that they’re asking about high school or your degree (and you do have experience), you’ve just received a boon of you all the information you needed. They’re not worth your time and don’t have their eyes on the ball. I’d just be thankful to have dodged a bullet!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10129173/
Anecdotally, either and both could be true: what "normal" person actually cares very much about the logo of a chain restaurant? Most people care about whether they can afford fun things, who they're sleeping with, and what they're having for dinner.