95%+ of North American intercity trains run on freight tracks, which are not designed to be as "smooth". On top of this, freight having priority means passenger schedules get messed up all the time.
Freight trains carry heavy loads and have cars that are not inspected to have perfectly maintained wheels to the same level as trains that run on tracks for only passenger traffic, especially high speed rail (which runs on dedicated , highly engineered tracks).
The big reason that passenger rail, even overnight, isn't as economical in north america is because rather than sleeping on a train, it's cheaper and more reliable to just fly in a few hours across the country.
HSR makes sense in the dense US northeast or between Windsor and Quebec city in Canada (and probably California if it wasn't politically ruined with it's meandering lines), but sleeper trains for further distances would have to be dirt cheap to compete with flying. It'd essentially be for college kids or poorer people.
Most people who do long distance trains in North America are doing it as a cruise-like vacation/adventure.
> 95%+ of North American intercity trains run on freight tracks, which are not designed to be as "smooth".
All over the US, the tracks are being upgraded to 110mph standards. It just a slow process: 5 miles here, 20 miles there. Whenever they can find the money they do a new section. Every single grade crossing must be upgraded, every single curve regraded, etc. Amtrak can run at 90mph on those sections with the locomotives they currently have.
Sometimes they string together enough upgraded rail. Essentially everything in Michigan has been running 110mph for 10+ years, with the newer Siemens locomotives that can handle it. Also, the Texas Eagle and Lincoln Service - the entire time they are in Illinois they are running 110mph.
Upgrading 5 miles of rail doesn't make the news. That doesn't mean it didn't happen :)
Historically US passenger service was secondary to express mail service. Without express mail service provided by the same trains, passenger service became unprofitable.
>95%+ of North American intercity trains run on freight tracks, which are not designed to be as "smooth". On top of this, freight having priority means passenger schedules get messed up all the time.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that Ive probably had to compromise a lot with Steve at the helm. It is generally regarded that (laptops especially) Apple hardware went to form over function when Ive got total control and when Apple finally reverted his vision was sidelined.
If he has an ego, he probably really wants to have something is a Magnus Opus he can claim. It'll be interesting because good design is always a dance with other stakeholders. You see this with architects and other "designers" who sometimes go to far into art and forget that buildings do need to be used.
Apple laptops were good before and after his reign of mediocrity. The butterfly keyboard and the Touch Bar were both terrible and I'm glad they're gone.
The worst part about the butterfly keyboard was that keys would stop working and fixing it would cost the same as a new laptop. I guess that's what you sacrifice when you design the laptop as thin as Ive envisioned.
You can trace the BTC or Ethereal transaction of coins, but you cannot trace the criminals after it's converted to Monero or some other "privacy" chain on an exchange run on the dark web. After that you're just tracing other owners, possibly who have no idea where that it was stolen. It literally takes a few hours to wash it all out.
It obviously depends on how you use your data, but it really is surprising how far one can go with large tables when you implement sharding, caching, and read replicas.
For tables with a lot of updates, Postgres used to fall over with data fragmentation, but that's mostly been moot since SSDs became standard.
It's also easier than ever to stream data to separate "big data" DBs for those separate use cases.
Hilariously, I had the opposite experience; the Airbnb host was the one that partied when it wasn't booked.
Either way our condo started enforcing a rule that was long on the books that owners couldn't rent out their unites for less than 3 months. It was the bedbugs that did it.
Over the years I’ve met several people that worked in the cartoon industry because where I live (Toronto) used to be an outsourcing market for many 1980s/1990s cartoons.
The vast majority of the people that commissioned them, including very successful series, wanted it done as fast as possible to get it to TV ASAP. Often they had toys lines up for Xmas that needed to be synced up with schedules. I know people that had worked on some very famous cartoons, including the 1980s Ninja Turtles, Care Bears, etc and the studios commissioning them were very willing to take errors, substandard, and otherwise less than ideal work to get it to market on time (much to the frustration of the artists who were being treated like factory line workers). They did say the creators of Ren and Stimpy were fantastic to work for and they had all sorts of fun Easter eggs added.
Anyways, it does not surprise me that a lot of the work from this era was not taken care of, especially some of the more forgettable episodes of popular shows. A lot of the early licensed work on Netflix was obviously copied from DVD/Blue Rays at the time, too. It can be a lot of work to properly deal with aspect ratios, colour correction, de-interlacing, as well as upscaling the very low analog resolutions.
Maybe AI can get good enough to fix it now, though.
Because children watched them on 13"-25" tube TV's that were designed to make those imperfections look acceptable (for the time), that a modern display blows up to proportions never seen during production even with the best studio displays of the era.
semi-related: I'm visiting my parents with a Sony OLED, and the frame interpolation made parts of Monty Python and the Holy Grail look like it was shot on an HD video camera.
Reagan benefited from the hard choices Carter made, including deregulation of the transport industries (especially trucking, but also airlines) that made it expensive and hard for companies to get their goods shipped to market.
It was also Carter that appointed Volcker to jack up interest rates to end stagflation (that Carter gets blamed for, but inherited from Nixon). There's a (probably apocryphal) story that Carter asked Volcker if he could end the whole inflationary mess and Volcker said he could, but that it'd likely cost him election. Carter said do it.
Carter's deregulations (including many other industries, like allowing home brewing and therefore the entire microbrewery market) have mostly stood the test of time because they were market-oriented. Most of the deregulation that has happened since (especially under Reagan and Clinton) was more "business friendly" and has led to lots of financial crisis (savings and loan, long term capital, 2008 crisis, etc).
It didn't help that for all his character and long term thinking, Carter was a terrible public speaker. Even though I admire him, I never feel inspired when I see any video of him speaking as president. He felt unpresidential for the opposite reasons that Trump is - he feels too meek.
> Genuine question: how much credibility should then people give to Trump's "I inherited this mess from Biden..."?
Pretty much none..except maybe the deficit, but republicans don't exactly deserve a pass on that, either. I mean, just listen to Trump talk. Any "good" news is because of him; any "bad" news is because of Biden. He's a grifter.
The tragedy is that of all the developed countries, the USA had the most growth and lowest inflation under Biden - if anything his administration did pretty darn well, but they just couldn't communicate it or it wasn't good enough to voters. Because monetary inflation tends to take time to work its way through the economy, the COVID pumping and cheques sent out under Trump could arguably be more to blame than anything Biden did (this is arguable either way at this point, though - it takes a lot of time to sift through and understand all the economic data).
Trump has no basic understanding of economics. Unless you want to hoard dollars to sit and do nothing with, you cannot have a trade surplus with every country in the world - and the deficit is only in goods. The USA has service surpluses with most of the world and investment dollars are still coming back into the USA. Trade deficits in durable goods are actually a symptom of wealth.
None - because it wasn't a mess. We had a strong and growing economy and a legit plan to boost American manufacturing. Everything we are experiencing right now is a Trump foot-gun.
It seems most things in tech (OS's, databases, languages, etc) eventually become a race to zero unless you can provide some long-term service-level support for it the way most cloud computing vendors have.
Sun should have probably bought Joyent and gotten their rather huge corporate client base (financial institutions, etc) onto it, but even then it was probably too little too late.
I'm getting into the history of Palm who seemed to be the pass around project for 20 years before hp burnt it to the ground. Are there any good books or something about the full history? Feels like all of these companies are woven together like a bowl of spaghetti...sun, oracle, google, apple, etc
Free and open source software commoditised almost every sliver of the market. A lot of the investment in cloud and AI is to recapture some margins by using access to training materials and high capital investments as entry barriers.
> Yes, definitely. It being a 2 seater is kind of a deal breaker for families.
What you need is not a pickup truck. Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc.
> Back in the day, we'd stuff 3 kids between two adults, but these days the Safety People would have a heart attack just thinking about that.
Rightfully so. Back in the day we did so many things we shouldn't have, and survivorship bias makes us default to thinking it was ok. As kids, we used to go barrelling down dirt roads in the back of pickups or played in the backs of station wagons. There's a reason automobile deaths have gone down.
> Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc.
It absolutely does NOT mean those things.
Cars didn't have entertainment systems for nearly a century and families did just fine.
<Get off my lawn>
My entertainment system was the window. Observe the world, not just whatever AI-generated garbage some algorithm pushes to a small screen 8-10 inches away from your eyes.
And aside from a window, you know what's better than a car infotainment system?
A physical holder for a personal pad device.
The amount of not-invented-here, duplicate functionality that car companies execute poorly, when buyers already have devices that do that well, is ridiculous.
The biggest benefit of aligning manufacturing costs for profit should be jettisoning the "post-sale" revenue streams that drive complicated built-in tech for current cars.
And also, you-know, 100% A+ on getting back to "customize your own car, because it's cheap and supported"!
Owners being afraid of doing what they want with their devices/vehicles has to stop.
> The amount of not-invented-here, duplicate functionality that car companies execute poorly, when buyers already have devices that do that well, is ridiculous.
Like when GM invented their own computer to put into their cars instead of just buying one off the shelf decades ago
I mean, probably many assume that we drive around our kids everyday (which we dont) cause they can walk or bike to school. Then that on every small trip they get a phone or tablet (neither true). It is just for 1 hour or more trips which are once a month or less.
Yes! By far the biggest feature here is "no infotainment" which leads directly to "hard controls for HVAC," that alone is a killer feature! They should double down on that concept and make the truck work perfectly with no apps at all and no OtA updates too.
OTA updates on my truck have vastly improved suspension response and cruise-control/ lane-assist features. My wife's car has had OTA updates that improve her cars charging curve, and have implemented recalls for stuff like brake light response when regen braking.
Sure one could say these things should have worked perfectly from the factory, but that's not realistic: not with my cars, not with your cars, and not with this new brand either.
The only alternative I see here is the old fashioned way of having to bring it to a dealership. I would rather have an entire foot of ingrown toenails over dealing with dealership service centers of any brand.
Patches and OTA updates just scream "We know ahead of time our product is defective." Arguably OK for software (but I'd argue not), but not even remotely OK for cars.
>"We know ahead of time our product is defective."
All products are defective. Full stop.
Cars are necessarily complex and have a lot of software to get the safety, comfortable, and reliability we expect today.
Most vehicles get some sort of recall; usually minor. I just checked the NHTSA recall website and every car I could think of owned by people I know (~30 vehicles) had some had some recall.
Cars should have an easy way to update. I’m generally against always connected cars (which are the norm today), but there must be some way to patch them.
I don’t like the idea of cars having cellular modems in them (my mind goes to nefarious implications), but having a way to securely update it without having to bring to a mechanic would be nice.
Nothing can be made to work over an infinite temperature range, or for an infinite period of time, but a product that can meet its specifications, for its design life, is in no way defective. That happens all the time, for example with electronics:
Every component in your computer or phone, down to the smallest resistor and capacitor, has multiple pages of documentation characterizing it's performance, and is individually tested to ensure it meets the stated capabilities. Each trace on the circuit board is tested to make sure it is complete and not shorted to any other trace, and once assembled every component is verified to be correctly installed. This means designs can be proven to always operate within the specifications of every component.
This isn't some fancy military-spec process; it's standard operating procedure for petty much every electronics component or assemblies manufacturer. At the volume manufacturing equipment handles, it's much cheaper and easier to automate qualifying and testing everything, at every step, than dealing with the ramifications of manufacturing a bad batch.
There are occasional bad parts that do get into the mix, but it's usually a pretty big scandal. From botched industrial espionage leading to a plague of defective electrolytic capacitors in the early 2000's to management pressure at Samsung leading to the release of a defective battery design on Note7 phones, there are occasionally products that should be recalled for defective hardware, but with a design consisting of hundreds to thousands of parts, on almost every phone or laptop ever produced, every component has lasted past the useful life of the product and, except for ware items like batteries and displays, would continue working past the useful life of the human using it.
If kept simple, as is doable with an electric drive train, and especially if devoid of non-embedded software (a field which seems to have no interest in error-free designs: https://xkcd.com/2030/) a recall-free and provably capable vehicle is completely doable.
I’m not exactly sure what point you are trying to make. The specs to which you refer are also specs which the component are _rated_ at. But that’s still only a (very high) % of components. Issues do arise with individual components. Unless it is wide spread, it is not a scandal. I have worked in the industry as well as do it as a hobby. You have a very rose colored view of it.
Lemon phones make it into the hands of consumers. I had one myself a few years ago where it overheated and shut down. One offs don’t make the news because you bring it in and it’s swapped out.
What is the need for OTA updates for an EV, once you remove the autopilot and touch screen? Genuinely interested, I would guess there is none, right?
Yes, and no.
I've only started following this recently, but a lot of OTA updates aren't just bug fixes, they're additional features.
My wife's car recently got a free OTA update which upgraded her radio to get HD stations. A previous update allowed her car to start recognizing more types of School Zone and Night Speed signs.
I've read that every year (February, I think) Tesla pushes out a big update that adds features. However, the last two Tesla pushes included a bunch of features that came standard with my wife's (much cheaper) car years ago.
You could certainly argue that her car should have come with HD Radio enabled from the start, and ditto for the Tesla features. But to suppose that all OTA car updates are nothing more than more invasive tracking and bug fixes is not strictly correct.
HD Radio tuning is built into the FM tuner, but was disabled in software. It's patents are still in effect, until 2030, so your wife's car manufacturer likely recently obtained a patent license to tune into HD Radio stations. Why they didn't negotiate a license from the get go may be a mystery, but there's no development reason it wasn't capable on day one.
Tesla, on the other hand, has promised capabilities that haven't been developed yet, something they wouldn't be able to do without OTA updates, which is a sensible reason to feel animosity toward their reliance on them.
I don't personally disagree with you, but today it pretty much does.
Anyways, my point is that this is designed as a utilitarian, cheap truck that covers the use case that most pickup trucks are actually utilitarian for, like local farm or light duty construction work. It's got a short range, no entertainment for long drives, etc. The article doesn't even say if it has AC (Slate's site seems to have images that allude to it having it).
The OP wants something for families, which exists and costs more because most families want more. They want good, cheap, and available when you can only have two. Even with gas/diesel powered trucks, there's a huge difference between the utilitarian ones construction workers and farmers buy and beat up and the expensive "luxury" quad-cabs that families now buy because minivans are too uncool.
I want something much more utilitarian than what is being pitched to today's families. If you want a Quad Cab, Infotainment systems, and yadda, yadda, yadda - the market already has options. Lots of them.
If you want a cheap, light duty truck similar to what a Chevy S10 or a Ford Ranger used to be, then you're pretty much SOL.
> My entertainment system was the window. Observe the world...
The world is pretty freaking boring when it's just pavement and the 5,000th time you've passed the same strip mall, gas station, and McDonald's. The same dirty snowbanks on either side of the same gray asphalt under the interminably gray winter sky.
Maybe you lived in a place of wonderful natural beauty, or a vibrant urban street culture. A lot of people don't.
I concede that the way much of the US looks from car windows might be bad for people's mental health, but I doubt any of the badness is prevented by
playing music or listening to podcasts in the car.
The world is pretty freaking boring when it's just pavement and the 5,000th time you've passed the same strip mall, gas station, and McDonald's. The same dirty snowbanks on either side of the same gray asphalt under the interminably gray winter sky.
And yet, somehow the children survived and thrived.
They learned to make up games, to entertain themselves, and to -- perish the thought -- talk to other human beings in their own family! /shudder/
I hate to tell you, but a lot of them didn't thrive. Some of them didn't even survive. Some of them didn't have families that particularly want to talk to them. Or when they were spoken to, it wasn't exactly healthy.
Just because maybe you had a great childhood, doesn't mean everybody did.
I hate to tell you, but a lot of them didn't thrive. Some of them didn't even survive.
Citation needed.
Maybe we shouldn't pretend that a small number of exceptions are the norm. Nobody is saying that every child had a completely happy childhood. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with not being entertained 100% of the time. Being bored is a good thing.
Just because maybe you had a great childhood, doesn't mean everybody did. Let's not look at the past through rose-tinted glasses.
Boredom is so essential to human mental health, that after we automated it away with the industrial revolution, we had to reinvent it (we call it "meditation" now) to stay sane.
Being alone with your thoughts for a few minutes is not in the same class as being unable to afford food or medicine. Get out, troll, this isn't Reddit.
I respect the “old person yelling at clouds” disclaimer lmao.
Honestly, I got bummed when I found out this was an electric vehicle, I wish there wasn’t a chance for my vehicle to get bricked through an over-the-air update, and I personally would like to have a basic stereo with an aux input just so I can listen to FM stations or Spotify while I haul a bunch of DIY materials around without having to install my own speakers.
My friend keeps telling me to get a truck for my next vehicle, and while this truck doesn’t make the cut for me, hopefully future trucks made either by Slate Auto or other manufacturers inspired by them will add juuuust the right amount of creature comforts to win me over.
> Yes, definitely. It being a 2 seater is kind of a deal breaker for families
I believe I saw there are plans for some sort of SUV conversion.
> Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc.
IF it could just get a bluetooth signal from an iDevice or some Android thing, that would probably suffice for a basic option. If the owner needs more than than, let them install (or have installed) some sort of third-party infotainment head of some sort.
Back in the old days, cars sometimes had a single speaker and that was plenty sufficient for listening to music.
Freight trains carry heavy loads and have cars that are not inspected to have perfectly maintained wheels to the same level as trains that run on tracks for only passenger traffic, especially high speed rail (which runs on dedicated , highly engineered tracks).
The big reason that passenger rail, even overnight, isn't as economical in north america is because rather than sleeping on a train, it's cheaper and more reliable to just fly in a few hours across the country.
HSR makes sense in the dense US northeast or between Windsor and Quebec city in Canada (and probably California if it wasn't politically ruined with it's meandering lines), but sleeper trains for further distances would have to be dirt cheap to compete with flying. It'd essentially be for college kids or poorer people.
Most people who do long distance trains in North America are doing it as a cruise-like vacation/adventure.
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