09:51 – I saw the headline in this morning’s paper, and told Barbara that San Francisco had beaten Boston. She looked at the article later, and said that it was New York that had beaten New England (or vice versa; I don’t put useless information like that into anything but nano-term memory). I figured the Giants had moved from San Francisco to New York and the Patriots from Boston to New England (somewhere else in New England, I guess), but Barbara said she was pretty sure the Giants had been in New York for a long, long time. I told her I was almost sure I remembered them being in San Francisco. So we checked Wikipedia and found that we were both right. There was and still is a team in San Francisco named the Giants. Barbara explained to me that they play with a different-shaped ball. It still seems to me to be a strange thing for adults to concern themselves with.
Brian Jepson sent me a new batch of lab chapters with his comments, so that’s first on the to-do list this morning. Next up is generating purchase orders for components for the biology kits and for more chemistry kits. Once I finish those, it’s back to re-writing the forensics book.
Chuck scribed: I agree that — unless there is a real revolution — mass transit on even the smallest scale is a pipe dream for the US.
You will get no disagreement from me on that one. It is still cheaper in the US to own and operate a vehicle. The fuel costs in the US are about a third to a fourth of what the fuel costs are in Germany. Our insurance is cheaper. We don’t generally have to pay to park and if we do it is really not that much. Except for the large metropolitan areas.
In Germany the population density and the cost of operating a vehicle makes mass transit very much a viable, and necessary option.
Our friends in Kronberg, a suburb of sorts of Frankfurt, have two vehicles. They have to park one in a limited size common area. They only really have space for one car allocated. I can park six vehicles in my driveway with ease and overflow parking for about eight vehicles if they want to park on the grass. You don’t see a whole lot of that in Germany.
In the US the freight companies own most of the tracks, especially anywhere outside of the DC – Baltimore – New York corridor. On those tracks freight trains have priority because the owners of the track control the tracks. When I took a passenger train from Los Angeles to Klamath Falls Oregon (why the hell did the train not go to Medford, a larger city?) and we waited two hours in Oakland for a slow freight to use the track. We got into Klamath Falls fours late on what was supposed to be a 15 hour train ride.
To put in tracks for commercial purposes would require a lot of land to be taken. Everyone who had a home close to a proposed route would not want the train. Who can blame them?
The expense of running these long distance (1,000+ miles) of track from say Los Angeles to Portland Oregon would be enormous. There are many hills and rivers to cross, land to be acquired, grade crossings. That distance for one track is almost as much as two cross country rail lines across Germany.
You just cannot compare the two countries and say if Germany can do it, so can the US. The demands and requirements are quite different. We have different states that have to be crossed and all want a share of the riderships funds in the form of taxes. Local counties would want some of that tax. Local cities would want some of the tax.
Then when you get to where you are going you are still without transportation. It is more than just dropping rail lines.
I would like to see high speed rail in the US. But how do you choose between what cities. Texas could use a rail system between Houston, San Antonio and Dallas. That is how Southwest Airlines got started by offering quick trips between those cities, You still had to rent a car when you got there. People from California would complain mightily if Texas got a rail system and California did not.
If such a rail system existed it would take 2.5 hours to get from San Antonio to Dallas if the train could average 100 miles per hour. Southwest Airlines can get you there in 45 minutes. Driving takes 5 hours.
Even with Germany’s mass transit system the Autobahn was almost always crowded, more so than many interstates in the US. If Germany did not have a rail system the Autobahn in most of Germany for 20 hours a day would look like I-405 in Los Angeles from 4:00P to 7:00P.
Oddly I was just reading in the SF newspaper that Mr. Brady’s girlfriend was upset that the receivers made him lose.
http://blog.sfgate.com/sportsevents/2012/02/06/gisele-rips-bradys-teammates-after-super-bowl-loss/#2912-1
Of course they can just go home and ignore the rest of the world.
http://priceypads.com/51647/tom-brady-gisele-bundchen-move-into-20-million-mansion/
More on this topic here from Saturday’s Salon, ya know, before The Big Game, where the Patriots looked worse than Pop Warner League wannabes and the Giants did not exactly cover themselves with gridiron glory, either. Waste of four hours, including the execrable aging slut Madonna at half-time. Not to mention a slew of shitty commercials, not one of them smart, or amusing or funny, despite the weeks of hoopla and hysterical hype. Now I remember why we haven’t had broadcast or cable TV here for six years and haven’t missed it at all.
Never again.
Back to books, radio, recorded movies and the handful of halfway decent television shows that this mighty Western kultur has managed to come up with. Centuries hence, homo sapiens sapiens will look back and wonder what all the goddam fuss was about over this country. Endless wars for endless profits and in the end, Happy Motoring, SpaceBook, cinema and jazz.
Oh, and then the brilliant and witty raconteur and boulevardier OFD forgets to include the damn link, thusly:
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/04/should_it_take_decades_to_build_a_subway/?source=newsletter
OFD, if you’d written your second comment differently it would have looked intentional rather than oopsarific.
Thanks for sticking with us through the commercial break, folks. Now here’s the link you’ve been waiting patiently for …
Just not witty or brilliant enuff, that’s the trouble here.
Hey, 43 here today in northern VT, this must be the awful global climate warming thang everybody’s wetting their pants over, right? Will someone please tell me the down side of all this?
Longer growing seasons, more hot chicks in thongs and nothing else, and all the major coastal metro areas inundated.
OFD wrote:
“Longer growing seasons, more hot chicks in thongs and nothing else, and all the major coastal metro areas inundated.”
Are you using the word “thongs” in the Australian or the British/US sense of the word? Since you’re a Yank I have to assume the chicks you’re dreaming about are wearing two pairs of micro knickers, which seems strange.
Despite Global Warming ™ females here are covering up more and wearing more concealing clothing. Perhaps to protect sensitive bits from UV rays?
Not having a TV, I listened to the radio broadcast of the
Super Bowl. The announcing pair were definitely not unbiased during the last 5 minutes, getting SO excited about a potential Pats win, and repeatedly putting down the Giants as incompetent and unlikely winners. And THEN they blamed the outcome on the Pat decision to stand by, allow, and watch the Giants final score. Even Eli Manning is rumored to have told his receiver NOT to score. What is the matter with these stupid multi-millionaire lazy bastards? When did NOT scoring become the best way to win the game?If the game had not been in Indy, I would not have listened — which is what I usually do on
Super BowlSundays.Raymond Thompson sagt:
You just cannot compare the two countries and say if Germany can do it, so can the US. The demands and requirements are quite different. We have different states that have to be crossed and all want a share of the riderships funds in the form of taxes. Local counties would want some of that tax. Local cities would want some of the tax.
Then when you get to where you are going you are still without transportation. It is more than just dropping rail lines.
No, I really cannot agree with that, especially the bit that demands and requirements are different — they are not: the need and objective to move people is the same, no matter the continent. The only difference is that Germany/Europe has a head-start and did not tear down their original mass transit structure while smoking something that made Americans believe that personal transportation for each and every individual could possibly be cheaper, more productive, fairer, and viable into the far-distant future than well-designed mass transit.
And I have to take exception with your friends in Kronberg. Nobody there needs 2 cars. Anybody who chooses that alternative is asking for the parking trouble they have. (Of course, no red-blooded American steeped in the hazy stupor the Big 3 fogged everybody with since WWII, would even suggest such a thing, but the US system is the worst on the planet, and is draining resources and stealing time from people who are not only blind to that, but have drunk the kool-aid that it is actually somehow superior to what the rest of the world has.)
Parking at home problems are not limited to Germany. There are most definitely parts of the Indianapolis ‘near north’, where buildings have no parking facilities at all! If your friends need more space for cars, then move a little farther out, like one does in Indianapolis, where there are driveways between houses (same in Germany). Even then, having 2 cars is a hassle, because whoever drives in first, cannot get out first if that need later arises. Even in the rich leafy neighborhood of Chicago’s Winnetka, where we almost bought our first house, that was a problem.
We already presented figures here showing that Europe’s cities are not significantly denser populated than central parts of larger cities of the US. Yes, whole countries might be, but the overall sparser density in the US is caused by the much, much larger unoccupied spaces bringing down the overall US average, not by having substantially less densely populated cities. The idea that there is some choking congestion in Europe is just false. The fact is that since Americans do not walk ANYWHERE, US sidewalks seldom have but one or two users during an entire day (nobody but the mailman walks down the sidewalk in front of my house). When Americans see the broad sidewalks of Europe filled with people getting the exercise Americans SHOULD be getting, they think the place is overrun with rats or something. Take a trip up to Pennemunde in Germany, to see von Braun’s playground, and it is as deserted there as the backwoods of Vermont. Only a train’s arrival brings people out of the surrounding forest.
There is a complete and total disconnect here on the part of Americans, IMO. My US citizen friends who have lived in Europe agree. Americans just cannot, CANNOT imagine — and especially cannot accept — that having a clean, comfortable, punctual system of busses, trams, and trains could possibly be better than having to shovel snow off a car, scrape ice off windshields, freeze until the car gets warm, then spend a total of an hour a day or more, literally strapped into a seat twisting a wheel and pushing pedals, while forced to scan the horizon for trouble that often calls for evasive action or be killed. It ain’t the Europeans that have it wrong here. And the fact that the kind of mass transit the US currently has, costs more than does individual personal transportation, is not reflective of the fact that a well-designed system would not be cheaper; it is reflective of the scambag systems of mass transit the US currently limits itself to.
It is not that the US cannot build a system actually superior to what Europe has (or that it would not work here — it already HAS worked here; ask anybody old enough to remember Los Angeles before WWII); it is that the US will refuse to construct one — while continuing to chase the already vaporized untruth that personal transportation is somehow affordable when you no longer have a lock on all the world’s oil supplies as you once did, and refuse to drill for your own and refuse to build a pipeline from your northern neighbor to your own refineries. Kind of like Eli Manning telling his receiver not to score during the last 5 minutes of the game.
Meanwhile, the woman working to clean tables at the cafeteria where I had lunch today, was just handed a pay cut after 18 years with that chain of restaurants. They took advantage of a law that has been in place for some time, and reclassified her job (and all others in it) to a group that is not subject to minimum wage provisions. The future is clear, and it ain’t gonna be pretty. But by god WE WILL HAVE OUR CARS!!
“…as deserted there as the backwoods of Vermont.”
And we aim to keep ’em that way, too.
As for the woman cleaning tables, she should just be grateful she is paid anything at all and probably able to scarf the scraps from the garbage bins on her way home at night. And also for not being flogged for bitching about it. Ungrateful damn wench. No bennies, no O.T., but by God we WILL have Happy Motoring forever, and rabid dog-eat-dog doctrinaire free-market capitalism for the masses with cushy socialism for the one percent, whose members don’t even know this woman exists and would be blithely indifferent if they did.
It will be fun watching the show when this woman’s children show up in some one-percenter’s front yard with pitchforks and torches, maybe within our lifetimes. Sadly, they probably won’t hang the most deserving bastards, who will have long since fled to their offshore enclaves, which they are doing in droves now, by the way, or to their gated fortresses, like some fucking banana republic of old.
Chuck wrote:
“The fact is that since Americans do not walk ANYWHERE, US sidewalks seldom have but one or two users during an entire day (nobody but the mailman walks down the sidewalk in front of my house).”
When I visited the US in 2003 I stayed with friends who were then living in the Northern Va suburbs of Washington, and I took the Metro into DC every day to sightseeing. My friend Alison dropped me at Dunn-Loring Metro station for the trip in, but as she had a four year old child and her husband often wasn’t home from work then I often walked from the station to their house. It was very pleasant, took about 30 minutes. One evening, as I was about 300m from their home, I had to cross a very minor back street. A car was approaching (the rate was about one per minute at that time of day) so I stopped by the kerb for it to pass. The car also stopped, to allow me to cross the road in front of it, something I’m normally quite reluctant to do. I told my hosts about this, and Alison, ever the cynic, said that the driver had probably never seen a pedestrian before and wanted to stop and get a closer look.
Australian friends who live in Virginia Beach, Virginia say that it’s practically impossible to walk anywhere in urban areas, by design. Cars are so ubiquitous, and travel so quickly , it can be life threatening just to cross the road. the same couple had a clothes line in their back yard, which was illegal, and people would peek over their back fence to see this strange contraption. (They had a lane-way at the side of their block.)
Chuck, about the waitress. I thought you were a libertarian. I’m starting to think that our host may be right and that you’re really a crypto-populist. Have you seen the new book by Charles Murray? From what I’ve read I think I’ll like it and agree with him (surprise surprise) and our host won’t (surprise surprise).
I am no straight Libertarian. Cincinnati talk show host Bill Cunningham calls himself a cross between a Libertarian and a Conservative. Me, I throw in a couple more — at times I may be considered a Liberal (but I would not consider the issue a Liberal one, although Liberals may embrace it — for instance, gay legal rights to a partnership that completely duplicates marriage is one I support), a Socialist, a Marxist, maybe even on rare occasion a Facist, — but a Populist, I doubt it.
As far as minimum wage, either have it or don’t have it. We have it, and no job should be exempted except kids’ chores at home. Permitting wait staff and other people employed in the restaurant industry to be exempted from paying minimum wage is grotesque, IMO.
Well, I’m sympathetic to libertarianism, but I don’t consider myself to be one. I’ve taken several political quizzes that purport to show where the test taker lies on the political landscape and I usually come out as moderately left, moderately libertarian, but closer to the centre of the graph than any of the four vertices.
In the Seventies I was well to the conservative right but I’ve drifted away from the right and authoritarianism over the years. I still think there’s a role for government in human society, but I now think it should be much smaller. As to minimum wages, I don’t see why they need to exist. If this waitress’s labour is valuable she should leave her current situation and get a better job, or the same one at a higher rate and/or better conditions. I remember having an argument with a friend in 1985 about nurses’ salaries. My friend thought the government should mandate higher pay for them and I said that it shouldn’t: the market should set the rate. I agreed with him that nurses were poorly compensated but disagreed with his solution. I thought the nurses and/or their union should negotiate better pay, and if they couldn’t they should get another job, or the same elsewhere. This actually happens with teachers and nurses moving between the UK and Australia, although I can’t remember the direction of flow. In 1979 I contemplated applying for a position in England as a programmer but didn’t because the pay was pathetic compared with what I could get here (and the weather is pathetic for nine months of the year.)
One place where I would like to interfere with the system is to get rid of tipping, which should be only for excellent service, not routine or poor service. That would mean paying better wages to staff in various industries and charging more for meals and so on, for no nett change.
I’m with you 115% on the tipping. Or is that 120% nowadays?
So… the waitress got her pay cut because of our cars? Nonsense.
Chuck, you don’t like cars very much. That much is clear. But you’re beginning to sound an awful lot like a Liberal. Socialism has it’s own problems, and Canada has quite a number of them. With more and more people expecting the “system” to support them no-one will have anything soon enough.
The “system” needs to make things fair. And by fair in this case, I mean implementing the lowest-cost alternative when there is a significant difference. I really rebel at this view that the word “socialism” equates with the devil or robbing people as if it were theft. Every penny of tax in the US is some form of socialism–a transfer of wealth from the individual to some collective use. Same goes for the word “communism”. These are essentially religious-like views that claim nothing about those systems is anything but evil. The fact is that the people of the US overwhelmingly approve of a “Social Security” system in statistically accurate polls–over and over. AND we can afford it. It is a politically-motivated lie that we cannot. But such crap is what Republicans are all about these days, and people here readily buy into that. This hypocrisy is why I abandoned them after the Goldwater dog bite.
No, I certainly did not intend to make any connection whatever between cars and pay cuts, but I guess “meanwhile” did not make that separation. Two completely independent issues, but both need changing. My point about the pay cut is that I do not believe in laws that are selective; most often they amount to nothing more than subsidies–which are a plague on the political landscape, IMO. Subsidies are a major cause of societal problems across the world. The US restaurant industry has been very effective in getting subsidies in the form of exemptions from things like minimum wage. Then they tell us that paying that poor person with the wage cut is now the customer’s direct responsibility through tips that should be increased to compensate for the restaurant’s refusal to pay them. If they cannot pay their staff in the same manner as other businesses, then they should go out of business.
Actually, in this particular case, the family has known this woman for years. She is–like me–within a few years of Social Security retirement. She is currently raising her 3 grandkids because of the death of the parents. The youngest is 14. She has worked for this company for nearly 20 years. They are prospering without question, but now choose to reclassify her work as minimum wage exempt, and cut her pay. It is unlikely that she will find similar work at her age, which pays as much as her former wage. She is not even high-school educated. But that is the way the US is going: no more jobs for willing, motivated but lesser-educated workers, ‘cause we have got to make those stock options soar for the CEO’s.
Separately from the minimum wage and pay cut issue, unless you know me well, it is probably hard to decide which pigeon-hole I fit in. Because I look at them all. Like I say, I may support some issues liberals do. But my touchstone is not political, it is a matter of what alternative will accomplish the goal–realistically, rationally, fairly (according to MY views of fairness), and efficiently. Several of my friends have told me it took them years to figure me out. And some still do not know where I will come down on a particular matter, even though I instantly know, the moment I understand an issue.
My dislike for DRIVING (not cars) is reinforced by having lived for nearly a decade in a place where I did not have to do any driving, nor even own a car. Getting around there was FAR easier (and quicker to boot) than here in the US. I don’t need to do any math to know that for society in general, the cost of providing access to transportation is going to be far, FAR cheaper for everyone with a good system of mass transit. Furthermore, society then does not suffer the loss of productivity due to people being belted into a seat for many, many hours a week, accomplishing absolutely nothing productive while their entire body and mind is held hostage to driving.
This stuff about transportation being a ‘privilege’ is utter bullshit. We don’t live in the 1700’s anymore, and modern society requires things that did not even exist when this country was founded. Communication and transportation are 2. Those countries that do not have either, are in the third world. Being able to move about is necessary for everyone who is not handicapped. Earning income and spending it,–both still require being transported, and I doubt that will ever change, but even if it does, it does not change the requirements needed in the present. During a discussion the other day, somebody thought they had me in the argument when they proposed that in the future, employers and sellers would come to the individual, who would never need to go anywhere. Yeah, but then THEY have to be transported. It is not conceivable that the need for transportation for everyone will not exist noch far into the future. Transportation is a necessity, not a privilege. And lots of older people are being disenfranchised from transportation by governments first putting in place a system that requires all transport to be by driving a device for personal movement, then ruling that the oldsters can no longer drive, because they are TOO old and decrepit. Those people need transportation worse than others more physically capable. But in the US, it ain’t there. Meals on wheels is some way for people to live in–reputedly–the most advanced country in the world.
In a rational country, you don’t get to satisfy your craving for speeding around in a motorized vehicle, at the expense of everyone having to pay radically more for transport in general. That’s irrational. Go rent time and vehicles on a road course (or build your own), but don’t make ME pay for your irrational and excessive love of the super high-cost personal transport motor vehicle as the option everybody must use. This issue is not going to go away in the US; it is going to get worse, as it becomes obvious to everyone that personal transportation–barring some revolutionary advance in energy conversion–is positively not affordable anymore. The roads around me are now such a danger that personal injury accidents are being blamed on them. I cannot drive on either city streets or Interstate highways without frequently dodging DEEP potholes–and that includes the northside of Indianapolis (downtown having been perfectly repaired for
Super Bowl).IMO, Libertarian freedoms end when a particular method of transportation imposes quantum costs on everybody in excess of that necessary, just so car lovers can get their rocks off racing engines, shifting gears, cutting in front of other people, and honking horns at those who have driving methods of which the honkers disapprove, and generally pretending they are driving the Indy 500.
I could go into health care, but that is destined to change, too. An elderly cousin just had the battery in her pacemaker changed. Four hour outpatient operation; eight hours in the hospital total. The cost? $137,000. That is going to change, regardless of the cries of socialism that occur here. My money is on the outcome that there will be no rollback of Obama-care after the election.
$137,000 for that? That’s crazy even by US standards. I’d be interested to know how that total was arrived at and how the money was divvied up.
Back in about 1996 I read the case of two Perth men who had serious heart related operations. One was in the public Medicare scheme, the other *also* had private insurance. They had the same operation in the same week at the same hospital performed by the same surgeon. The public patient ended up $10-20 out of pocket. The guy who also had private insurance ended up about $12,000 out of pocket. Australians who are sane do not admit to having private insurance when having major surgery.
$137,000 for a pacemaker battery change? That seems very high. Also, at that price I’d suspect they change the battery by changing the pacemaker. My first guess is that a five day stay at Riley Hospital with six hours in the OR would cost that much.
I’m not going to dispute that the current US Healthcare system is broken. I think the most likely effect of Obamacare is going to make it more badly broken. I think Obamacare is going to result in a trifecta: higher commercial insurance premiums, more government spending and lower quality healthcare.
Well, insurance is broken, too, thanks to Sears’ Allstate, who were the first allowed to take poor risks out of the pool and cream the crop, resulting in higher costs for everyone, and Allstate’s instant cancellation if you submitted a claim. Higher rates for poor risks was never a part of the original concept of insurance. ‘Punishing’ poor risks with higher rates does not change the mathematical distribution of risk.
Obama-care WILL change the system. It will put incredible pressure on things like $137,000 to change a pacemaker battery. Costs of healthcare will go down when the government gets involved. Already, the doctors in my family shake in their boots at the thought of increased government involvement, because they get about 1/3 or less the price from Medicare for a procedure than they get from private or insured billings.
Real change will not come until industry self-regulation of doctor and lawyer licensing is ended, and the shortage of doctors and lawyers is aided by letting trained foreigners in and making it easy for them to get a license, and by letting Americans have the option of getting healthcare from almost any other country in the world, as nearly all but the third world ones deliver superior care and longer lives for significantly less cost. As long as doctors and lawyers are protected by Congress with a walled garden and citizens are prohibited from seeking less expensive healthcare abroad, healthcare in the US will not change substantially.
I’m not sure what the laws and ethics of insurance are here in Australia but I expect to be allowed to keep my car, house and contents, and medical insurance until I die, so long as I don’t try to commit fraud against my insurer. I’ve never claimed on my home and contents insurance (first taken out in 1985) and haven’t claimed on my car insurance since about 2002 (vandalism, not an at fault accident.) I’m guessing I’m not really a profitable customer for my health insurance company, but have made no major claims.
I still don’t have the faintest idea how the US system works and how it got that way. Medical insurance for travelers to the US is significantly more expensive than elsewhere, and although I had the best travel insurance available when I was in the US in 2003 I’m glad I didn’t have to go near a hospital.