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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • If it makes it any easier, those hundreds of millions of people are going to die anyway, the only tragedy about it is that it’s from something we could technically prevent or mitigate, but most things are like that… Traffic, smoking, guns, unhealthy diet… The climate changing isnt really going to affect the earth, our short sightedness and ignorance will just make lots of areas we can comfortable live in now much less comfortable or unlivable entirely. It’s going to suck, but do what you can with what you have and just the fact that you know enough to care means you have something to offer.








  • The problem with that is that, being on the reasonable side, if we just assume the obvious and then are somehow ‘proven’ wrong on a specific topic (there are thousands of them, so it’s bound to happen sometime) we legitimately lose actual credibility in the eyes of people who matter.

    Like the ‘they’re eating the dogs!’ things. It’s perfectly reasonable to mock him for it being an issue, but insisting it has never happened and that even the idea is ridiculous, opens the entire side to being wrong if even one crazy or oblivious person of color has ever done it, which it almost certainly has. I mean if you look hard enough, you could probably find a crazy example of that from any cultural group. One example and pretty much all the mocking gets flipped around in the minds of anyone only half paying attention, and certainly from the other side next time we insist something doesn’t happen.



  • That’s not a good parallel, it’s the politically ‘motivated’ part he’s referring to. If someone is being prosecuted because they’re running for office, and you have a legitimate argument that if they had chosen not to run for office the charges would have been dropped, it’s legitimate to say it’s politically motivated.

    On the other hand, if your crime was literally campaign finance crimes and voter manipulation, there’s a reasonable argument that ‘politically motivated’ isn’t necessarily a bad thing here. If you did a political crime, and seem likely to continue to be politically motivated to commit more crimes, it kind of makes sense that prosecuting you with a tiny bit of political intent isn’t totally unreasonable.



  • It doesn’t require suspension of critical thought when you can look around the world and see that nowhere does anyone have high speed rail spanning distances and population densities equivalent to what the US would need to go from, say, New York to LA, it East to West Coast in general. There are plenty of examples similar locally to East or West Coast population centers, but nothing in between. High speed commercial routes? Maybe. High speed commuter rail? It’s not even close to being worth the cost: utilization.


  • Not sure what you are arguing with exactly, theres a huge difference between commercial and commuter ‘profitability’. Things that freely allow for commerce like a road can be justified from many different direction where a periodic service only makes sense based on demand. That isn’t to say that maintaining an underutilized route with the goal of it becoming utilized based on is availability is always a bad idea, but a road can be built and it’s cost can at least roughly be correlated to it’s use. If you had to periodically rebuild every road, at roughly the same cost whether it was used or not, they would end up with the same ‘profitability’ concern, but mostly you have to build all the roads for minimal usability and then spend the most money on the most used roads. Freeways are understood to improve commercial visibility and are funded by taxes for that reason. The entire country benefits by having clear routes for good to move. Commuter rail primarily benefits a local area and is funded heavily by fares and local taxes.




  • There is no way a US federal high speed rail would look anything nearly as successful as ones in europe or other highly populated locations. I think people fail to realize that for the most part the US is very sparsely populated. with the exception of maybe 2-3 ‘regions’ that might look close to the population density and public transportation feasibility of Europe, there just wouldn’t be enough people going between each individual point to make it profitable, even if subsidized. Imagine putting up 300 miles of high speed rail that cost many millions of dollars to build, millions of dollars a year to maintain, and thousands of dollars to run each round trip, and then finding out there are only a few dozen people that need to go between those particular terminals each hour. Trying to adjust by running less often just makes things worse because running less often means fewer people yet will find it convenient…running more often makes it less profitable…so you end up like the US and basically don’t bother making routes and stations without enough traffic.