3 ms·

Why do people keep trying to invent more expensive, less traffic dense railroads. Did they stop teaching arithmetic in school?

mynameisnoone 3y ago
Because a controversial centibillionaire didn't do the math on 0 atm tube transportation and proclaimed it to be so. Also, people hate people like Thunderf00t who tear down dumb ideas that people desperately want to believe in because feelings and tribal toxic positivity > logic.
- titanomachy 3y ago
  Hectobillionaire, “centi-“ means 1/100
  - eesmith 3y ago
    "Centi-" as a prefix can mean 100, though metric use is more common. For example, "centipede" nominally means 100 feet, though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede says "Despite the name, no centipede has exactly 100 pairs of legs; number of legs ranges from 15 pairs to 191 pairs, always an odd number." Centibillionaire is the obvious extension of centimillionaire, and "centimillionaire" has been around for a long time. https://archive.org/details/per_chicago-daily-tribune_the-chicago-daily-tribun_1883-01-19_42/page/n3/mode/2up?q=centimillionaire https://archive.org/details/per_chicago-daily-tribune_the-ch... shows a use in 1883, explicitly referencing $100,000,000 of Vanderbilt capital. (A Google Books search finds two other uses of centimillionaire in the 1800s.) Another old word using centi- to mean 100 is "centimillennium", for 100 thousand years. Here is an 1882 use: https://archive.org/details/loverinschartoft00love/page/36/mode/2up?q=centimillennium https://archive.org/details/loverinschartoft00love/page/36/m... and Wiktionary adds several more recent uses at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/centimillennium https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/centimillennium .
- withinboredom 3y ago
  > didn't do the math on 0 atm tube transportation I thought of this idea when I was 14 and immediately dismissed it- long before this guy came along and claimed it was such a "great idea." Why did I dismiss it? Terrorism. In the best case, all you'd need to do is punch a hole in the side of the tubes, and any train would hit a wall of air at supersonic speeds. In the worst case, it would derail catastrophically when it hit my hole if it were big enough. It's a terrible idea for so many reasons.
rewmie 3y ago
[dead]
hughesjj 3y ago
The more I see how shitty developers are about recognizing prior art the more I realize why so many planners are shitty about recognizing prior art Being intelligent yet humble isn't mutually exclusive, but I see a lot of elitism in that 'oh I have this concept which must be totally novel and I'm gonna implement it now' with engineering at large before we all start laughing at their inevitable failures from things they could have learned in the past. Crypto is cool, even cryptocurrency. 99.9% of people in the space though have no idea what they're doing with it. I still think it could be useful for voting and/or DNS for distributed consensus, the cryptocurrency aspect could be improved and already is a better backend imo than our batched out wire transfers with traditional banking (but it lags well behind credit cards or cash for point of sale transactions), and hell merkel trees are supremely useful already for supply chain or ex version control, but the hype and path of crypto currencies is an embarrassment in light of history. Recent examples: - mastodon and the fediverse in relation to the threads backlash - cryptocurrency markets and the desire for regulation for when things go wrong (someone stole my coinz! My smart contract was exploited! My exchange was hacked! Fraud!)... Like it was speed running what the Netherlands+UK+us faced over 400 years in a period of 4 years - any libertarian when they start to run their own government (sorry grandpa) -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project
akira2501 3y ago
> railroads Which, in the US, typically have been heavily monopolized and poorly regulated and existing regulations poorly enforced. The history here is pretty extensive, actually, and often forgotten, because rail has significantly lost it's power. So, we keep trying to make better roads, it frees up space for individual travel, it prioritizes commerce, and roads seem better fitted to a Democratic society than what rail ends up being here.

mynameisnoone 3y ago

Because a controversial centibillionaire didn't do the math on 0 atm tube transportation and proclaimed it to be so. Also, people hate people like Thunderf00t who tear down dumb ideas that people desperately want to believe in because feelings and tribal toxic positivity > logic.

titanomachy 3y ago
Hectobillionaire, “centi-“ means 1/100
- eesmith 3y ago
  "Centi-" as a prefix can mean 100, though metric use is more common. For example, "centipede" nominally means 100 feet, though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede says "Despite the name, no centipede has exactly 100 pairs of legs; number of legs ranges from 15 pairs to 191 pairs, always an odd number." Centibillionaire is the obvious extension of centimillionaire, and "centimillionaire" has been around for a long time. https://archive.org/details/per_chicago-daily-tribune_the-chicago-daily-tribun_1883-01-19_42/page/n3/mode/2up?q=centimillionaire https://archive.org/details/per_chicago-daily-tribune_the-ch... shows a use in 1883, explicitly referencing $100,000,000 of Vanderbilt capital. (A Google Books search finds two other uses of centimillionaire in the 1800s.) Another old word using centi- to mean 100 is "centimillennium", for 100 thousand years. Here is an 1882 use: https://archive.org/details/loverinschartoft00love/page/36/mode/2up?q=centimillennium https://archive.org/details/loverinschartoft00love/page/36/m... and Wiktionary adds several more recent uses at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/centimillennium https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/centimillennium .
withinboredom 3y ago
> didn't do the math on 0 atm tube transportation I thought of this idea when I was 14 and immediately dismissed it- long before this guy came along and claimed it was such a "great idea." Why did I dismiss it? Terrorism. In the best case, all you'd need to do is punch a hole in the side of the tubes, and any train would hit a wall of air at supersonic speeds. In the worst case, it would derail catastrophically when it hit my hole if it were big enough. It's a terrible idea for so many reasons.

rewmie 3y ago

[dead]

hughesjj 3y ago

The more I see how shitty developers are about recognizing prior art the more I realize why so many planners are shitty about recognizing prior art Being intelligent yet humble isn't mutually exclusive, but I see a lot of elitism in that 'oh I have this concept which must be totally novel and I'm gonna implement it now' with engineering at large before we all start laughing at their inevitable failures from things they could have learned in the past. Crypto is cool, even cryptocurrency. 99.9% of people in the space though have no idea what they're doing with it. I still think it could be useful for voting and/or DNS for distributed consensus, the cryptocurrency aspect could be improved and already is a better backend imo than our batched out wire transfers with traditional banking (but it lags well behind credit cards or cash for point of sale transactions), and hell merkel trees are supremely useful already for supply chain or ex version control, but the hype and path of crypto currencies is an embarrassment in light of history. Recent examples: - mastodon and the fediverse in relation to the threads backlash - cryptocurrency markets and the desire for regulation for when things go wrong (someone stole my coinz! My smart contract was exploited! My exchange was hacked! Fraud!)... Like it was speed running what the Netherlands+UK+us faced over 400 years in a period of 4 years - any libertarian when they start to run their own government (sorry grandpa) -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project

akira2501 3y ago

> railroads Which, in the US, typically have been heavily monopolized and poorly regulated and existing regulations poorly enforced. The history here is pretty extensive, actually, and often forgotten, because rail has significantly lost it's power. So, we keep trying to make better roads, it frees up space for individual travel, it prioritizes commerce, and roads seem better fitted to a Democratic society than what rail ends up being here.