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DnD Central / Re: Why trains don't catch on here in the "ex-colonies".
The speed limit in Nebraska, once outside city limits, is 75 mph. Actual speeds probably faster.
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Messages - mjmsprt40
The speed limit in Nebraska, once outside city limits, is 75 mph. Actual speeds probably faster.
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DnD Central / Re: Why trains don't catch on here in the "ex-colonies".
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DnD Central / Re: Why trains don't catch on here in the "ex-colonies".
The US train system is basically a freight transport network. Not that efficient, but very extensive and can ship large amounts of goods long distance for low cost. Amtrack shifts a few people very slowly for high cost, and there's not a big market for that. The US has grown to European densities along many corridors, wirh its consequences, a generation ago Europeans became like the Americans and the European left-wing hated that. Now you look set to become like us and I imagine the US right wing will hate that.
Therein the rub..First you need to solve the last mile problem, a practical cost-effective means to get from where you are to the station and from the station to where you want to go. That's not particularly hard, public transport, taxi, car rentals, parking. Then you should have several routes that make sense from an engineering and economic view, but they are not going to happen successfully due to culture wars, tribal politics, and special interest. They will conspire to make any project massively delayed, massively over budget, and no longer along a route and under conditions that would make sense or money.
500 miles should be around a 3 1/2 to 4 hours train ride at price-optimal speed. The crate can be shipped separately at slower speed, though the cost may be too high.
Taking the bolded--- I sometimes wonder about things like this. Not that I'm complaining, mind--- 525 miles at $1.03 a mile isn't to be turned down. Still--- this crate comes from Japan, by air, to O'Hare airport in Chicago. I pick it up from cargo on the South side of the field, and drive it to the factory it's going to in Lincoln, Nebraska. One wonders why they didn't transfer the thing to a puddle-jumper plane at O'Hare for the final miles. Coulda had it in less than half the time it's gonna take me to do it, even at the best time I can make.
But, hey--- lack of planning on their part is why I have a job, so I ain't complaining. Just wondering about it.
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DnD Central / Why trains don't catch on here in the "ex-colonies".
By airplane--- not counting the nonsense at each terminal where minutes become hours-- it's about an hour and a half flying time.
By car--- it's a little over 7.5 hours not counting stopping for fuel, eating, using the facilities and whatnot. Add another 2 hours just to be safe, so let's say 9.5 hours.
By Amtrak passenger train-- it's almost 15 hours. I kid you not. Only riding a bicycle would be slower. (But, after riding a bike for more than 500 miles you'd sure be buff.)
I really don't expect trains to catch on unless they can do something about that time.
Sorry, RJH--- maybe someday they'll come up with high-speed rail here. Until then, planes for any distance over 400 miles, cars for any distance under that except in the cities, where commuter rail has definite advantages over the car.
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DnD Central / Re: Jumping over the Rubicon
Must be raining or something outside, eh?
No. It's raining inside.
81
DnD Central / Re: The American 2016 Presidential Elections & The Ongoing American Saga
Who are they? Why, they're the Republican clown show, and, at the moment, Carson is chief clown. Democrats are praying that Carson becomes the candidate because he's batshit crazy.
"Dear God, please make Dr. Carson the Republican presidential candidate and I promise to store my grain in a pyramid!"
http://www.salon.com/2015/09/30/the_7_most_impressively_stupid_things_ben_carson_has_said_partner/
Let me add an eighth stupid statement.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/05/politics/ben-carson-pyramids-grain/index.html
This sort of thing just makes me shake my head in sadness. Where do they get these goofy ideas?
I'm a Christian, and a Creationist to boot. Having to listen to the strange ideas spouted by people who claim to believe as I do is--something else.
Here's a clue: According to Genesis, Joseph was given the task of storing the excess grain from the 7 good years so that there would be food through the 7 bad years. They had barns, and likely as not grain silos of some sort. Barns and silos are NOT new inventions by any means. Further, it's far easier and quicker to build storage barns than it is to build pyramids. You can put up a barn in a matter of days, and it doesn't even take that much labor. Pyramids took decades of slave labor to erect, and they only had 7 good years-- remember?
Pyramids were the burial chambers of the ruling class. They never would have been used for storing grain.
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DnD Central / Re: Ex-President to criticise ex_Presdident son's senior staff?
What I remember most about GHW Bush was him saying "Read my lips!" Which subsequently came to mean either "I'm lying" or "I'm incompetent"… (What he did to one of the western states, mine, with his screwing with the CVP still rankles.) He remains irrelevant.
(Except that W. likely went to war against Iraq's Saddam Husein after and because of Saddam's attempted assassination of his dad; such things aren't easily forgotten. Heck of a "legacy," huh?)
We mis-heard him on that "Read my lips" thing. What he actually meant was "Read my lips, no nude Texans".
They're still trying to explain the birth rates in Texas during those years.
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DnD Central / Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming
Sang, Belfrager, ersi…?
I'm out.
I hope that I can continue to read your nice collaboration the moment you realize the ridiculous of pretending to be the D. Quixote of anti-climate changing. Oh, I forgot that you don't even understand D. Quixote.
Maybe a nice carbon factory can move right next to you and illuminate and inspire you with what you desire to others.
Stay well under a tonne of coal.
It's the strangest thing. We've been moving Heaven and Earth to try to make what coal we do burn cleaner. The output isn't anywhere near what it was a few decades ago, as we try to find cleaner coal and cleaner ways to burn it. It's never good enough for you though.
We've also been searching for long-term replacement for coal. Nuclear power has advantages (but also, to be fair, a few glaring problems). A major portion of the electric power that feeds Northern Illinois is nuclear powered.
Oil and natural gas play their parts too. When I worked at a hammer-shop, the boilers that made steam for the hammers were gas-fired. Hardly any visible smoke from the chimneys unless it was cold, then you saw water vapor up there.
Windfarms are around too. I pass by a big wind operation near Remington, Indiana any number of times, there's another large outfit near DeKalb, Illinois-- covers probably five and a half miles of farmland.
In the meantime, I'm trying to remember the last time I saw a photo of Beijing where the air wasn't so thick you could cut it with a knife, and where walking out of doors didn't require you to wear some sort of mask so you didn't breathe in all that soot. Rumor has it that parts of India are nearly as bad.
What do I hear out of Belfrager about these places?
(Crickets.) Gotta beat up on America some more.
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Hobbies & Entertainment / Re: Football (Soccer)
[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naGgaqkJnnc[/video]
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DnD Central / Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming
That's really the problem with this whole discussion. Reality has nothing to do with it--- it's all about politics and position papers and getting funding from various sources. Right now---- choose your sources. One side says ice in the arctic and antarctic regions is disappearing at a frightening pace--- the other side says there's MORE ice rather than less. My problem is the same as yours--- unable to go there and measure it for myself, I have to take "experts" word for it. Both sides have reason and to spare to fudge things to get the results they want, and you and I can only take their word for it.
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DnD Central / Re: Jumping over the Rubicon
Why is it called Great?
Just a guess, but-- it's called "Great" because it's the biggest island in that group. All of the other islands that make up the British Isles are smaller.
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DnD Central / Re: Jumping over the Rubicon
So--- maybe the language IS British.
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DnD Central / Re: What's going on in Scandinavia, North Atlantic, Baltic States and Scotland?
I take it, RJ, that Scots democracy is not -despite much longer practice- much better than what you accuse us ex-colonists of…
I sometimes suspect that RJ wants to go back to pre-Magna Carta days, when the King's word was law and none dare question it. Dispense with Parliament and America's Congress and let the monarch rule as monarchs should.
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DnD Central / Re: The Department of Urban Affairs
Keeping cars apart from city center is nothing but an hypocrisy, aimed to satisfy the sense of guilty of the bourgeois populace that owns two or three cars by family.
Ban cars everywhere. It's false that the world economy needs desperately to move at car velocity in such a way that it justifies all the consequences cars cause.
Everybody has an idea that won't work. Banning cars everywhere is yours. Congratulations, I think....
90
DnD Central / Re: Majority Syndrom / Majority Complex
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DnD Central / Re: The Department of Urban Affairs
92
DnD Central / Re: What's going on in Scandinavia, North Atlantic, Baltic States and Scotland?
Soooooo----- the question: Do modern Jacobites just want Scottish independence, or are they also trying to take back the throne of--- now-- the entire UK? What about religious sympathies? Are modern Jacobites largely RC, or are they Protestant? That could be important---- a Roman Catholic Jacobite faction with designs on the throne could be major trouble. It was last time.
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DnD Central / Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming
I've seen some newer cars in the ads, and I wonder if the flat-lander who designed the things ever drove a car in mountains. They look to be poorly designed for hilly driving.
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DnD Central / Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming
Might as well just pour gas out on the highway trying to use cruise control on hilly roads.
I'd be more concerned about going by all of those precipices at breakneck CC speed than about gas mileage.But really, you go uphill in the same gear as you go downhill — everybody knows that.
(Except, perhaps, cruise control? I've never driven an automatic in the mountains, so I haven't been able to try out such odd ideas.)
I have driven an automatic in the mountains. It's one time when manually shifting an automatic is a really good idea. The machinery doesn't do well doing it itself---- the engine labors in too high a gear while climbing, and the car is out of control because the transmission doesn't automatically downshift when on a down-grade. So--- manually shift it, and that takes care of the problem of an automatic in mountain country.
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DnD Central / Re: The Department of Urban Affairs
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DnD Central / Re: The Department of Urban Affairs
Consider the problem of thousands of horses in a fairly close urban area. Horses aren't exactly discreet in where they do their business, so most city streets were something of a minefield. Worse--- for the longest time streets weren't even paved, so you had all of that mess in the mud of the streets. Fun.
By the time the automobile came on the scene, almost anything had to be better than the quagmire left by several thousand horses in a city like London or New York.
Today you think horses are cleaner than cars. They are--- because they're not so congested. They live on farms with open fields, and the few that do pull buggies do it in Amish communities that tend to be small and agrarian in the way they're set up. A farm with half a dozen horses is quite a different thing from a city with several hundred horses in the same area.
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Forum Administration / Re: Bye.
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DnD Central / Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming
For example, car users have been questioning gas consumption figures for decades.
That may relate more to the fuel. They put up to 10% ethanol in gasoline nowadays. I've gotten around a hundred extra miles out of a tank using non-ethanol gas on trips.
Diesel engines tend to get way higher MPG.
Up to a point, anyway. Believe it or not, that's one of the issues with the VW diesel problems. The engines in question are small. 2.0 liter engines. They get great mileage, and since they're turbocharged they have decent power for such a small engine. Problem: There's not much left-over power for the particulate filters and the DEF system. So-- VW didn't install DEF on the 2.0 engines, hoping they were small enough not to have to worry about it. DEF as it just so happens does wonders to control N0x emissions, but at the cost of power. Also--- the DEF systems have been something of a maintenance nightmare, breaking and requiring expensive fixes to keep it going. I know guys right now who won't touch Sprinters just because of the DEF nightmares.
Oh, yeah---- while I'm thinking of it: Diesel isn't as straight as one might hope either: Here in Illinois and I hear also in Indiana, the fuel is up to 15% "biodiesel" mix. That's soybean oil, for you out-of-towners. Works OK sort of, but there IS a hit on the mileage, and biodiesel gels at higher temperatures than straight #2 diesel does--- so you have to add more (expensive) anti-gelling fluid to the fuel in winter.
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DnD Central / Re: FIFA World Cups
I have a suspicion VW thought that because they have small engines they could get away with not hanging DEF systems on their cars. But that's just a theory.
100
DnD Central / Re: Gun Control - Should Ordinary Citizens Own, Carry, & Use Firearms?
It's predicted that this trend will continue even amidst the actions of the occasional mad man, or the rancorous protest from RJ & his ignorant cohorts on the gun-hating left.
It's been suggested that there's a strong correlation between taking lead out of gasoline and crime rates going down (including murder).
There could be something to that. They started taking tetraethyl lead out of gasoline in the 1970s. By 1980 or thereabouts, it was impossible to buy leaded fuel anywhere except for certain marine uses and small aircraft. By the turn of the century--- leaded fuel wasn't available, period.
Lead is a poison that affects the mind in negative ways, so there could be quite a bit to the idea that getting lead out of gasoline decreased the murder rate--- among other things.