Nobody who says we can get 'improved rail' for the cost of HS2 had ever explained how we get that in the vicinity of London without something which looks extremely similar to HS2. We have solid proposals for 'improving rail' from the rail industry, and HS2 is the bedrock of it all. Where's the silver bullet hiding?
Comparing the two is exactly the role of governments (and by extension, us as their supervisors) as there are only finite resources to allocate.
I don't think it's quite true to say that after 20 years we would be left with nothing. If it encourages more people to take the bus instead of driving then it would decrease traffic and pollution. Although in cases where buses are already in demand, adding new routes or increasing bus frequency on existing routes would be a better use of money.
But it would only decrease traffic and pollution for the duration of the spend. Once it's over, those benefits stop and there is nothing left beyond the lingering effects of the intervention.
It's actually worse than that, because you've essentially taken out an unsecured loan of £100bn and spent it on something which neither increases ongoing tax revenue or asset value, so you now have to cut other spending to pay it off. Which is why governments and businesses separate capital expenditure (building things) from current expenditure (doing things) very carefully.
But it would only decrease traffic and pollution for the duration of the spend. Once it's over, those benefits stop and there is nothing left beyond the lingering effects of the intervention.
The lingering impact of millions of people realising that bus travel is actually a good idea and that cars aren't necessary in a lot of cases. How terrible!
You're misunderstanding my point. Transport subsidy funded from current income is a good idea. Spending your entire capital infrastructure budget on making it free for a few years is not. The 'lingering benefits' don't linger long if you then have to hike fares massively because you've got a big loan to repay as a result with no new assets you can exploit to service it.
It's for this reason that saying 'we could spend the money on making buses free for a N years' is meaningless. It would be more sensible to say 'we should spend the £Nbn we spend on maintaining the motorway network on free buses' because those types of spending are equivalent.
This was the first thing I thought of when I read this question. So often I find myself and people around me basically assuming that the folks on the other side of the phone are idiots. Well, chances are they're thinking the same. You only need 15 minutes to disagree, but it takes much more time and effort to humbly understand a stranger's worldview and motivations. However, once you do, you're much more likely to deliver something you're both happy with at the end.
I think this is a significant part of the value of face-to-face meetings - it's much easier to 'get' someone when you observe and speak to them and their colleagues. At the very least, the connection you get makes it harder to subconsciously write them off as an idiot!
Of course, occasionally you come across people who really are very unsuited for the task at hand and end up talking total rubbish. But it's still worth taking the time to be sure - it's probably not as obvious to you as it is to other people, and you'll find yourself having to justify your assessment more often than you expect, particularly to decision-makers.
The grammar of the English language does not forbid one to write in Greek, but if you choose to write in Greek only, you will compromise on a lot of people being able to understand you.
The same with standards, and you are misunderstanding on purpose.
If Google chooses to not support simple HTML, then they are choosing to not support countless accessibility tools, and they know it. Some blind people will have a more miserable life because Google attained a de facto monopoly, but does not recognize some of the moral obligations that people like me feel should come with such a position. "With great power comes great responsibility", or maybe not.
Is lynx up to spec on HTML5 ARIA attributes? My understanding is that that's how accessibility is "supposed" to be done now, but if lynx hasn't been updated in a while, it might not support those HTML5 features, and thus not be standards compliant.
(edit: Someone below notes that lynx appears to incorrectly parse valid HTML5 on the google homepage, so it sounds like Lynx's lack of updates are hurting here).
> Is lynx up to spec on HTML5 ARIA attributes? My understanding is that that's how accessibility is "supposed" to be done now
No, that's not true at all and is unfortunately a common anti-pattern. Accessibility is supposed to be done by using standard HTML elements and attributes. ARIA is there to extend / fill in the blanks and to fix things when people deviate from the norm. For instance, if you have a button, you should almost always use the standard HTML <button> and only use some other element type with an ARIA role=button if it's unavoidable. And <button role=button> is redundant. Best practice is still to use the semantics defined by HTML, as it always was.
>The same with standards, and you are misunderstanding on purpose.
While I get what you mean, the use of the term "standards" just conflates an orthogonal issue.
You can be 100% standards compliant and not readable on Lynx, or 100% standards compliant and readable on Lynx.
Relying on JS is not some niche obscure corner or some bypass of the standards as per the English/Greek analogy. It's basically the norm for most SPAs today.
The problem is that the standards are not compliant with Lynx (or rather that Lynx is not compliant with the standards).
What you want is not Google to use the standards, but to use the part of the standard that is about simple, not JS dependent, HTML.
Google shouldn't be restricted to a subset of the available technology because a niche browser isn't updating to available technology. Yes, a side-effect of this is that the blind community using Lynx can't use Google. While unfortunate, it's also a tiny, tiny, TINY community.
If you want to be upset, be upset with Lynx for falling behind. Or don't be upset and switch to JAWS, BRLTTY, Orca, etc. But the idea that anyone is supposed to support every possible browser is just silly.
I don't understand how the situation above is a 'quirk' and not a straightforward example of deflation. The price of a typical TV - now represented in the basket of goods as a 32in TV - has fallen.
The fact that lower prices might lead people to buy larger TVs is no more surprising than a fall in the price of meat leading people to buy more steak.
You get a bigger TV for the same price but this is not the same thing as a lower price for the same TV, which is what most people would recognise as lower inflation.
The price of a 32in TV has presumably gone down though right? And the same would surely be true of a 29in TV if you could find one. The fact that the market has moved on and you have to tweak your basket of goods is a measurement quirk, not a definition issue.
It's not very different to finding out you can buy a 12-pack for as much as a 6-pack used to cost. Also deflation.
Some animals are better than others for eating and spreading seeds. If a plant could choose it might prefer birds eat its fruit, especially over animals with molars that crack the seeds. Not coincidentally, the active ingredient in hot peppers, capsaicin, impacts mammals but not birds.
It might very well be coincidental, because the hot compound also has anti-fungal properties. So the primary evolutionary benefit might have been that, not selection of animals eating the seeds.
Saying it's not coincidental does not mean it's planned. The whole point is that random variations that are advantageous are the ones that survive; that's not coincidence, it's consequence.
Evolution does not plan, but it does react. Capsicum seeds eaten by birds have a reproductive advantage over seeds eaten by mammals, so a defense chemical in the fruit that discourages consumption by mammals without affecting birds is not a coincidence.
This is why it is necessary to stretch bird nets over research-breeding beds for strawberries, to get varieties more attractive to paying human customers. Otherwise, the evolutionary pressure to be attractive to birds still heavily affects the results.
There's different ways to look at it. Evolution doesn't plan, and the development of this or that compound is driven by random mutation- but it reliably exhibits all kinds of emergent behaviors, like evolutionary arms races, convergent evolution, and so forth. Like many other systems with feedback, given a set of constraints it reliably trends towards a local optima.
It's not coincidental that the adaptation wasn't lost. Mutation and genetic drift may be thought of as a random process, but natural selection is much less so.
Evolution doesn't plan, no, but when you're looking at survivorship, can you still call it a coincidence?
Co-evolution uses happy accidents all the time, but then some of those accidents get baked in, and what's left over is the result of that accident.
Peppers became more likely to be spread by birds because they became unsavory to mammals. Then what happened? And then what happened? And now we had pre-agricultural peppers, and now we have ... something else.
"Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2),"
and it is backed up by a WHO factsheet https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...