cogman

High gas prices are a pittance if we can bring Jesus back! (I wish this were a joke).

Yup. In basically all terms, rail is more efficient than airplanes.

The only thing that makes Amtrak less efficient in the US is the fact that it's unused. And the reason it's unused is because it's an afterthought in government spending.

1. Amtrak isn't funded by the US government. They have to extract all their funding from operations.

2. Amtrak's service is bad mainly because the line operators have found ways to make it impossible to effectively operate. That means late and long delayed trains with unpredictable arrival/departure times.

3. Amtrak is slow, mainly because it has almost no dedicated lines. It has to share them with line operators.

4. Very few people use amtrak.

The end result is a high price. Few people using amtrak means it has to hike ticket prices up.

The only way for Amtrak to get better is extensive investment by the feds and regulation of rail lines in general. Without that, as you've correctly observed it will always be disadvantaged compared to other modes of transport.

But hey, the war in Iran might make it cheaper than driving so that's something.

My suggestion for anyone voting in the US. Vote early in person if possible. If you are going to vote by mail, do it ASAP.

That's the best way to get your ballot counted, which is the most important thing right now.

Oh, and check your registration, like today. And tomorrow. And like once a week.

The worst time to vote is election day. Avoid that at all costs.

I looked at the lawsuit details. Steam basically did what everyone else does. Apple, google, EA, everyone.

They charge 30% of the sale. They require that the steam price be the same as an external price.

It's the most nothing of nothings.

To compare, what MS did when they got smacked with their monopoly lawsuit is bundle IE with the OS and they both made it hard to switch the default and they'd constantly try to switch you back to IE.

Gross.

This is the same sort of ruling that would argue you can't ban false advertising. How long before some homeopath sues the FTC and FDA for stopping them from claiming health benefits? Won't be long now till we get new fabulous snake oil cancer cures because the first amendment protects quacks from lying (so long as they "sincerely believe" the lie).

It's satire. But damning that it's pretty indistinguishable from real reps.

Red green color blindness is the most common form of color blindness.

To someone with that form of color blindness these shirts would be different shades of the same color (think, dark red vs light red).

I have one coworker with red green color blindness that said that peanut butter and zucchinis were roughly the same color to him (Oh, it's also more common in men than women).

Palm oil is much better than any alternative

Palm oil does what palm oil does. And it's useful in food manufacturing because you can create the same products without using butter or transfats. That's pretty much the only reason it gets so heavily used.

But the actual alternative to palm oils is to stop consuming or manufacturing products using palm oil. That means some products should just be pulled from the market. Oreos, for example.

My point being that knowledge of where something comes from doesn't tell you if it's a good thing or a bad thing.

I could have rephrased "what it's used for" to be "laxative". A true statement which doesn't expose the fact that ricin is a pretty powerful poison.

People are biased to think "chemical name bad, common name good" and that's the problem I'm exposing. You can pull out a lot of toxic stuff from things that sound harmless.

The problem is a lot of nasty things come from less scary sounding things. For example:

Ingredient: Ricin, Where it comes from: Castor beans, What it's used for: Poison.

Well you see the kids are peeing in liter-boxes, so obviously we need to bomb Iran.