King Glizzard & The Blizzard Wizard

Edit: didn’t see this was already commented, soz

Don’t you know? About the bird?

Amtrak currently runs trains on the freight tracks, but as Amtrak essentially leases the privilege of using the tracks at all from CSX and BNSF and Union Pacific and the like, their traffic gets heavily deprioritized to freight trains. You can totally catch a train from Fort Worth to Los Angeles, but it will take a few days longer than driving, will be almost as expensive as flying, and the train will be delayed many times for freight traffic.

If the federal government nationalized the rails, put them under the care of the FRA, properly funded Amtrak, and gave it a healthy advertising budget to let people know rail is the clear choice for medium length trips (like Chicago to St. Louis), there’s no reason we couldn’t send passengers on the same rails and with the same priority as freight trains. They’re perfectly safe, and the reason we’ve been hearing about so many train wrecks lately is the degradation of work conditions for rail workers. Longer trains and longer hours make for more dangerous operating conditions and more frequent wrecks.

And while the trains wouldn’t run 190 miles an hour, many long, straight stretches do exist, and it’s not unheard of for a train to be running 80-100 miles an hour on those stretches. That kind of speed is very doable for passenger rail. Hell, some Amtrak trains are capable of 150 miles an hour.

My point wasn’t to use 150 year old rails. It’s that the rails already exist so it doesn’t need to be a decades-long multi-trillion dollar project. It’s highly unlikely that any of the rails in use today are from the 19th century.

Don’t even need to lay down rails. The rails are already there. Built by Chinese slave labor 150 years ago. We need merely to seize them.

Or just cut a check to the freight companies.

Auto parts, YOW!

wait wrong song-

Seems like a good knight out.

Another reason EVs are NOT the way forward. They’re heavier than ICE cars and so they go through tires significantly faster. I wonder if anyone has done the math on how much of our world is filled with microplastics from car tire treadwear. I imagine it’s astonishing.

Adding: It’s also not surprising to me if car tires are made of plastic these days. The level of engineering it takes to make a tire sticky enough to bring a modern 5,000 pound SUV to a full stop like the 3,500 pound sedans of yore has to be insane.

Worth it. I’ve never even seen the falls, but I’ve seen lots of Jim Carrey movies. The man deserves it, and I’m sure he’d love to be honored in this ecologically non-invasive way.

And here’s the /s for those who need it.

Which is ironic, given that with the sea level rise happening, the last thing Venice needs is more water.

But hey, the fish will have some really valuable real estate in a few decades.

And then there are the teachers using memes specifically because they know it will make those memes uncool. And I salute them.

I gave my brother my Sandy Bridge laptop that got me through college. New battery and charger and it’s all set. The 1366x768 resolution doesn’t render pages very nicely anymore, though.

Jellyfish Jam of course.

What song is that?

My wife’s 2019 16" MPB is running pretty great. Probably got another 5 years of life left in it. She uses it to watch YouTube and play Sims 4.

My 2016 Acer Aspire V3-372T is hanging in there running Debian. 60 FPS YouTube videos are getting to be too much for it anymore. I may have to put the old girl to rest one of these days.

But hey, it does play Minetest pretty flawlessly.

Heat cycling is a huge stressor on any material. That’s part of why diesel freight trucks tend to last well past a million miles while it’s newsworthy if a passenger car makes it that long. How many times a week is your Toyota Corolla driving 10+ hours at a time? Most commonly, when you hear of a million mile vehicle, it was making long haul deliveries daily and was maintained at the correct intervals.

My kitchen sink is next to the water heater. It’s hot in 5 seconds. My shower is on the opposite end of the house. I’d reckon it’s a 2 minute wait. Sometimes, I turn the bathroom sink on and get undressed.

It’s the State tree of Oklahoma. When my neighbors’ redbud starts making pods, I’m gonna snag a bunch, refrigerate them over winter, then scarify and try to get a few to germinate the following spring. It takes probably 5 or so years to start getting flowers, but I really love everything about these trees, not just their awesome flowers. The heart shaped leaves they develop in summer are so cute.

Just gonna leave Brainrot Girlfriend here for you to read.

Can’t say I’ve ever been to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

What if shutting down and dissociating is relaxing to me?