Looks like they received $1 billion in private + government grants, so upper end would be 15%?
> The University ended fiscal year 2024 with an operating surplus of $45 million compared to $186 million in fiscal year 2023, on an operating revenue base of $6.5 billion.
"The first scientists to succeed, in 1995, were Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl Wieman at JILA (formerly known as the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics), a research institute in Colorado." incredible underhanded dig from the NYT (against the rest of the Boulder physics dept)
I think it’s just lazy reporting as JILA google search comes up with those exact words but the insult is that you would ordinarily just say The University of Colorado, or say JILA at The.. Leaving it out completely is quite a diss but probably not intentional.
JILA is the golden child of the physics dept for reasons no one quite knows. Better facilities, higher stipends, separate events programming, same department!
muni has "relatively level routes" because the routes that were preserved were ones with tunnels that buses couldn't fit through (or narrow ROW in the case of the J), and given sf geography those tunnels invariably go through hills. muni, and especially the J, is one of the steeper adhesion railways in the world
nuclear war is a lot more survivable than people make it out to be. if you can get your hands on enough clean water to hide in a basement for a week you'll basically be ok
> China appears to be working hard to deal with this problem, and it’s very possible that they can locate the carriers reasonably effectively, but they have dozens of satellites and large, expensive over-the-horizon radar systems, which any other power is unlikely to be able to match.
Seven years after this article's writing, "dozens of satellites" doesn't seem like that high a bar given Starlink's many thousands. (And we've seen huge bandwidth increases, too, which makes real-time imaging and analysis looking for ship wakes etc. far more doable.)
Since we haven’t had a war against a peer in like 80 years, we have basically no idea what it’d look like, right? I mean, everybody has a bunch of satellites up there right now, and nobody wants to kick off Kessler syndrome. But if two sides with serious navies started fighting and everybody’s carriers were getting spotted by satellite, is it obvious that nobody would start running that calculation?
In any major near peer conflict the satellites will obviously be among the first casualties. The USA and China have been quietly engaging in an ASAT arms race for several years.
Nuclear war may happen. I am giving more than a 50% chance that some form of nuclear weapon use in war will happen in my lifetime. But there are so many ways this could happen, from just a resumption of underground testing, to atmospheric testing, to dropping a bomb on an uninhabited island of the adversary, to detonating a bomb in space, to detonating a bomb inside your own territory while it's being overrun by the adversary, to detonating a bomb undersea with plausible deniability, and all the way to wiping out one city, or lots of cities. Nuclear war does not mean automatically end of civilization. Russia would like you to believe so, so they can prepare for all contingencies, but we don't.
This adds a sort of weird bit because, of course, it isn’t really clear why we’d care about carrier performance against China, if we assume it would be an ICBM war anyway.
Maybe a proxy war or some sort of limited thing could be envisioned… but it seems really risky. I hope we don’t do it obviously.
This starts with the false premise that the adversary needs to search the entire ocean.
In reality, the comings and goings of our ships are as public as it gets, and our peers quite easily track and maintain awareness of the locations of all our battle groups.
There's a huge difference between knowing the general location of a ship and generating a track good enough for weapons guidance. And much of the searching is done by reconnaissance satellites, which are highly vulnerable and likely to be destroyed in the opening moves of any major conflict.
Well they don't just know the "general location" of a ship. The article addresses the problem of terminal guidance (using out of date information) but it seems to treat targeting issues as fatal flaws, rather than acceptable risks. It doesn't matter if it the hit rate is 25%, they're going to fire ten of them. There might be collateral damage due to misidentification? Boo hoo, you're in an all out war.
I get it, you're convinced ASAT warfare is inevitable. The reality is it's akin to MAD. No one's going to start that war because it's lose-lose.
The problem is that to saturate the defences of a carrier's escorts you need hundreds of missiles not dozens. The Chinese have lots of missiles but not an infinite amount; especially not of the modern, purpose-built weapons that can pose a real threat to the carriers.
In reality they're going to have just a few tries before they run out of ammo. Just shooting at everything that might be a carrier is a great way to lose the war.
To actually pull this off you need to be able to rapidly locate and identify the target, communicate it's location to all your various launchers, then coordinate a complex time-on-target attack between all of them.
Any mistakes or disruptions in the chain can ruin your whole attack; misidentify the target and your attack misses, fail to communicate and a portion of your launchers never fire, fail to coordinate and your missiles arrive too spread out and are shot down, take too long to do all of this and the carrier will clear datum and you're stuck waiting for the next pass of a recon satellite that may never come.
This is all extremely difficult even under ideal conditions let alone when Uncle Sam is jamming your comms and blowing up your servers.
Not to say it's impossible, just that it's not as easy as you may think and that accurate targeting is a major factor.
Nah. The whole "Kessler Syndrome" thing is overblown. No one is going to refrain from shooting down satellites if it will gain them a temporary military advantage in a hot conflict. This is not even remotely close to MAD.
They are running multiple trains. SF to LA non-stop trains won't even stop at stations like Gilroy or Madeira. The all-stop trains will preference commute hours. The seats are non-rivalrous: Central Valley commuters aren't even going to be on the same train as a SF to LA business traveler. It seems reasonable that fares would differ, and that traveling just 1-2 stops from SJ to the Central Valley will be a lot cheaper than going from SF to LA.
This really depends on how it ends up being priced.
In Germany, you can pay for a year-long high-speed rail all-you-can-ride pass. It costs just under 5000 Euros, which is very reasonable if you're using it every workday.
This is a bit like AWS pricing. If you book an entire year of usage up-front, you get a much lower price. Casual users pay much more per use.
HSR is perfectly viable for the east. decades of steady investment could have built a massive network out through chicago by now, and with a few more we could be closing in on the last gap in the network between kansas city and las vegas.
this statement has little bearing on how this project is actually playing out, but if it were true - why would we want to manage massive infrastructure projects in the same way bad software projects are managed? via a method regarded by everyone except middle managers with a massive eye roll and a sigh
ok? my point was that you have projected your notions of project management on to the actions of CAHSR. there was nothing intentional or "agile" about the way the project was executed so far. that caltrain electrification has already been completed (at an exorbitant cost relative to the developed world) is more a consequence of how poorly things are going in the valley than anything
