The fact that you have to be there and know the tricks to getting care is part of the problem. We have people who paid a crap load for medical insurance and doctors taking care of their treatment: why does there also need to be someone to deal with getting paid?

Note also the new California High Speed Rail is being built with grade separations.

I don’t believe Acela is, but probably faster sections are. That’s not high speed rail though

On those tracks, people are used to very slow cargo trains. That also means that if you have to wait, it can be a very long time. Idiots may be tempted to go around because of the long wait, and there’s usually lots of time. Their whole lives, they e gotten away with this

Then a medium speed train comes through. They wouldn’t have had to wait. There’s no time to go through and still avoid. But the idiots don’t know that, despite the regular news for the last several years

Even before we go there …….

• amtrak required my town to build medians at all crossings, so idiots can’t go around the gates
• whoever owns those tracks probably didn’t want to spend more on infrastructure that doesn’t cause needless delays.p, making people impatient. They should be partly liable

Y’all are making a lot of assumptions about this person’s life, as if you yourself were on the death panel. Maybe it’s, true, maybe it’s not, but the doctor knows more about the case and the patients prognosis than any of us

I’ll go with the opinion of the patient’s doctor, rather than some internet rando, thank you very much

Thank you kindly! I browse Lemmy on my phone and never figured out how to do that on the tiny screen

Paywalled but from what little I can see, the only response is: DUH!

I imagine if I were able to read it, it’s just hand wringing and fan service to the military industrial complex, no real substance. Aside from the military, shipbuilding left this country decades ago and no one seems to want to do anything about it. We can’t even manage taking care of our own infrastructure, build an EV supply chain when there was no competition yet, or restore the microprocessor supply chain we still have some of. I don’t see how anything happens here, especially if we’re focusing on cutting government services for the next four years

It seems like we screwed them over when they got wrecked by a hurricane a few years back. Surely if they were a state, we’d have spent more on disaster relief and especially building a modern electrical grid after theirs was wrecked.

Maybe our new unelected “prime minister” can do something useful with all his conflicts of interest and build out PR with solar based microgrids and battery storage

It’s also retroactive. There’s a deadline but I can wait and if I get another job before I get sick, I’m good. If I get sick and haven’t found another job, I can decide to pay for COBRA and I’m covered

This is one of the many downsides of the current way of politics. Since apparently you can say anything without accountability, declaring a platform only creates a target. You’d be foolish to say more than you have to.

That’s BS. We believe too much of the muck-taking they do to each other, but most importantly residents do a lot of good. Even Trump did some good for people …. I think. Can’t name it but certainly there are a lot of people who believe he did

Right. Living in any major city makes it really obvious that car dependency just doesn’t scale, and easily reaches negative usefulness. I felt so much more free living in the city without a car. My city is very walkable, has a decent (for the US) transit system, and has long encouraged “transit oriented development “

I do love the freedom of a car when leaving the city, but there’s nothing quite like the freedom of the entire city available without dealing with the hassles of parking and traffic. There’s nothing like the freedom of walking out my door and hopping a train for a far away city. I can no longer deal with towns that don’t have at least a walkable center

At some restaurants people can really make a lot of money on tips

And at some restaurants the hot yet ditsy server in a miniskirt can really make a lot of money on tips while being slow and getting my order wrong. Meanwhile the person hustling with my food, the person redoing the order the server screwed up do a lot more work to provide good service yet get nothing

Tipping is …. a way to reward good work.

It hasn’t been this for most of my life. Tipping is an essentially mandated addition to a few specific job types to get basic service and to replace practically non-existent wages (and to overpay in relation to their peers)

I pay tips to get served at all, and to keep my food from being tampered with.

I willingly paid higher tips during pandemic to the people risking their health in customer facing jobs. However I object to the new normal of 20%+, I object to tips being added automatically, I object to required tips before any service, and I object to so many more jobs demanding tips. I especially object to being charged tips on self-service.

My personal vehicle gets the equivalent of 120mpg, is fueled at home while I sleep, and can get me to the train station in like 5 minutes. When I have to go places not on a train, it fits my family of four comfortably and carries everything I’ve tried to put in it. It also is very convenient for road trips to places not on Acela

US minimum wage and tipping culture is awful, but in this case I think they’re more referring to “the missing middle class”. We’ve lost a lot of decently paid middle class jobs, such as skilled manufacturing, and many of the replacements are much lower paid service and gig work.

It is exactly like today. What Carter did, just like what Biden has done more recently , was drowned out by hate fueled character assassination. Yes Carter was a genuine nice human being wanting the best for everyone but at the same time Reagan was genuinely likable, believable. He was “the great communicator”. So like today, only a much nicer person getting his character assassinated but by somberly influential rather than todays centrism, racism, hatred and spite.

Carter also told people things they didn’t want to hear but had to. He was the genuine “telling it like it is”.

I was alive at the time e and thought Carter was a great president. I may have been biased by even then preferring engineers. However I also got swept up in the wave of Reaganism along with everyone else. Yes, I believed cities were hellish gang ridden dystopias, the countryside filled with “welfare queens” collecting generational wealth by pumping out babies, and college elite using abortion at will as just casual contraception. I still believe Reagan hastened the fall of the Soviet Union by outspending them in an arms race. I was surely naive at the time but also Reagan was that good to make you believe anything

I can’t physically charge a car at home. … and I (usually) can’t charge at their office.

Certainly this is key. Your car is sitting unused for hours at these locations, so even a relatively slow charge would be convenient. We definitely have work to do deploying these everywhere.

My point is more that every workplace, almost every home already has sufficient electrical service to charge for most car uses. We have the technology and it’s naturally broken down into many smaller less expensive projects. It’s much easier to build this out than to create an entirely new infrastructure around disposable batteries, redefine all cars and then scale out. And the technology already exists. But we still have to do it

Maybe but so far:

• I usually charge overnight at home
• I’ve never waited in line at a supercharger.

The destination chargers at work do get a line but we coordinate over slack so you never have to actually wait.

The trick is to get those home chargers deployed everywhere. This is what actually decided me on the futilebess of swappable batteries. Almost everyone could use a level 1 charger, but even a full level 2 charger is the same as a stove circuit or an air condioner. It’s just not a big deal for most people’s electrical service and level 1 can be anywhere. Look at how difficult it’s been to get these deployed despite them being so much cheaper and simpler than what you’re proposing. How will we possibly spend tens to hundreds of billions and decades to build out swappable battery infrastructure if a few billion in charging circuits to mostly existing service is so difficult?

Who benefits from seappable battery infrastructure? Really it’s mostly the same companies that profit from gasoline infrastructure. I’m convinced many proponents are just these companies wanting to continue business as usual. However with plugins, they don’t need to exist