It would be one thing if they were just going to Fresno. There are three major cities in the Central Valley: Bakersfield, Fresno and Sacramento. You get Bakersfield for free; Sacramento is north of SF and has existing commuter rail. Fresno is big enough to justify a stop; it has room to grow, too. You could put a stop that's ten miles outside of Fresno, and you don't have to cut through the city too much. That's what they do with airports. Throw in a LRT while you're at it.
But the plan also calls for Tulare and Madera to have stops. Now you're doing three times the work for a 20-40% increase in the population served. Then they want a line to Sacramento that goes through Merced and Visalia At this point it looks silly. Fresno is larger than Tulare, Madera, Merced and Visalia combined. Stockton already has the Altamont Commuter Express line to San Jose.
Having HSR stops inside cities is one of the things that make it far better than flying for certain distances. Put the station outside the city and you're killing a lot of your benefits...
Ten miles from Fresno might be too far. I just picked a distance out of thin air.
But when you have a minor stop, it's less important to build the perfect configuration. Even if you have to go outside of Fresno to get on the train, you're still in downtown SF or LA when you get off. And the traffic in Fresno is not as bad as the traffic in SF. And the flights from Fresno airport are probably not as cheap, since it's a lower-volume airport (capex per flight is larger), so you have more of a cost advantage.
So I'm pointing out a false dilemma. You don't have to choose between downtown Fresno and no Fresno. You can have a worse-is-better Fresno without sacrificing the goals of HSR for the really big cities.
>One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.
I couldn't help but keep thinking about this Wittgenstein quote as I read this. I find it harder to say exactly why. Obviously, we felt differently in the past. Not my past, of course: I was a child, barely able to integrate by parts or fold a shirt correctly.
There is another possibility. The usual complaint is that oversensitivity has constrained humor. The usual retort is that what we did before was harmful and we're better off not doing it. But the problem with logical-seeming dilemmas is that existential propositions can only seem logical. The world, unlike logic, is malleable. Perhaps the jokes really are worse today than they were in the past?
Twenty years ago, our crap towns were something we experienced with the other townsfolk first and foremost, and only to a lesser degree did we bear the weight of the outside world's eyes upon us. Today it is not like this. Communication across great distances has gone from difficult to convenient to pervasive and unavoidable.
Locality has frayed in more domains than the spatial. Recently /r/MedicalPhysics had a spat with /r/sysadmin about hospital IT policies. Such a civil war would have been unthinkable in the 2000s. Humans used to spend much more time socializing with their friends or at least comrades-in-something than with almost complete strangers. Our egos are exposed to the elements in a new and phase-changing way.
I think that the social fabric has already begun to fight this trend from the bottom up. At the risk of sounding like an advertisement, Discord has made non-discoverability its greatest feature. The gladiatorial aspect of modern discourse has never sat well with me. I don't want to have a conversation for the audience. But here I am. Please clap.
I'm not endorsing it, but it's roughly consistent with Trump's underlying philosophy that the international systems that USG manages are a subsidy from the US taxpayer to the rest of the world, and one which goes unappreciated. Under this premise, the USG would save money at little cost if they were replaced by industry consortiums or other countries' state initiatives. If my extrapolation is correct, even GPS might eventually be in the line of fire.
I need to be clear that I do not endorse this view. The role of the United States in facilitating global cybersecurity, not to mention navigation, trade among much else, almost surely pays dividends far beyond what it costs us. The amount of international goodwill that the United States enjoys is remarkable particularly in light of our various foreign policy "mistakes", and I think we have these systems to thank.
I didn't endorse anything. In fact, I presented arguments opposing the administration's view. I think it's unreasonable to argue that trying to understand people's actions is tantamount to endorsing them. We should never be reluctant to understand others' perspectives.
id agree with cybersecurity, but maybe not navigation? Even accounting for secondary effects, Currently supporting free navigation, especially in the Indian ocean and red sea mostly benefits other country, as the us is ~energy independent.
US oil and gas is not constrained to being sold solely within the US, nor is it publicly owned by the government.
It has never mattered that the US is technically energy independent, because it's not independent of a number of other resources, and it cannot sustain the sort of cost increases which reductions in global oil and gas supply would lead to: because again, threesome resources aren't publicly owned - the higher revenues flow to the oil companies, not the tax payer.
That’s not how economics works. Local energy price surges will also drive global prices up. The US is part of the global energy market. I guess you could ban export of energy and institute price controls, though.
The most elegant proof IMHO is the one that avoids the original problem entirely.
Int[csc(x) dx] = 2 Int[csc(2u) du]
= 2 Int[du / (2 cos(u) sin(u))]
= Int[sec^2(u) du / tan(u)]
= log(tan(u)) + C
= log(tan(x/2)) + C
Then Int[sec(x)] = Int[csc(u)] = log(tan(u/2)) + C = log(tan(pi/4 - x/2)) + C.
Of course, this was no use to Mercator, because the logarithm hadn't been invented yet. But you aren't just pulling a magic factor out of nowhere. There is definitely a bit of cleverness in rearranging the fraction — you have to be used to trying to find instances of the power rule when dealing with integrals of fractions.
This was the one I was taught in my high school. It has some cleverness (e.g., some trig. transformations) but looks less like coming out of nowhere than the original.
>While they may be identical in form, a Spanish canal isn’t a Moche canal.
>Spanish canals operated in a temperate climate and were managed by individual farmers who could maintain or increase their water flow. The Moche and Chimu canal was tied to a complex labor system that synchronized cleaning and maintenance and prioritized the efficient use of water. What’s more, Moche canals functioned in tandem with floodwater diversion canals, which activated during El Niño events to create niches of agricultural productivity amid disasters.
The second paragraph belies the previous: Spanish canals obviously were not "identical in form" when you can point out so many differences.
But it would also be pretty unreasonable to equate the early Spanish colonists, who were a few pirates and scoundrels that used iron and horses to conquer and control an empire where they were outnumbered by a thousand to one, to the modern Peruvians. Many lessons have been learned since then and modern Peru's political problems pale in comparison to the brutality of the sixteenth century.
The more likely reason that the situation is different today is just that Peru's population density (34 million in the country) and agricultural production vastly exceeds anything that existed under the Inca (maximum about 12 million across an empire that included parts of modern Ecuador and Bolivia). The Peruvians themselves are no stranger to attempting to copy the pre-colonial infrastructure practices, with mixed results. Of course if you grow less, you can better avoid running out of water. But this is no solace.
But the plan also calls for Tulare and Madera to have stops. Now you're doing three times the work for a 20-40% increase in the population served. Then they want a line to Sacramento that goes through Merced and Visalia At this point it looks silly. Fresno is larger than Tulare, Madera, Merced and Visalia combined. Stockton already has the Altamont Commuter Express line to San Jose.
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