Chinese man 'with 17 girlfriends' arrested for fraud - BBC News

Chinese man 'with 17 girlfriends' arrested for fraud - BBC News: The man from Hunan province made headlines last month when all 17 women discovered each other when they rushed to his hospital bedside.

The allegation of fraud relates to sums of money which he regularly took from the deceived women, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

The women set up an online chat group called "revenge alliance", SCMP said.

It was on this chat group that they discovered he would ask some of his girlfriends for money every month, the paper said.

Doctors' Secret Language for Assisted Suicide - The Atlantic

Doctors' Secret Language for Assisted Suicide - The Atlantic:

Arnold says she handed the bottle back. She told the doctor the
hospice was going to bring a machine that would administer Falk’s pain
medication automatically.





“And he looked at me,” she says, “and he held my gaze for a second. And he put it back in my hand and he said, ‘You might need it.’”





She slipped the vial into her purse.

The Perfectly Preserved World War I Trench | Atlas Obscura

The Perfectly Preserved World War I Trench | Atlas Obscura: The fields of Northern France and Belgium still bear many of the scars of last century’s Great War, but they are a faint reminder of battle carnage on the Western Front. After the Armistice, farmers returned to find their fields and villages totally destroyed by four years of trench warfare. Craters mark spots where artillery shells exploded but much of the area is now covered over with grass, hedgerows and forests.



 Except for one place.

I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here's How.

I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here's How.: Other than those fibs, the study was 100 percent authentic. My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.

FIFA Rocked as U.S. Charges 14 in Corruption Investigation - WSJ

FIFA Rocked as U.S. Charges 14 in Corruption Investigation - WSJ: The U.S. and Swiss probes detail by far the most far-reaching accusations against the group, formally known as the International Federation of Association Football. The 47-count indictment released by the Justice Department accuses two generations of soccer officials of working with sports marketing executives to shut out competitors and keep lucrative contracts for themselves. Prosecutors allege U.S. and South American sports marketing executives paid more than $150 million in bribes and kickbacks to FIFA officials to obtain media and marketing rights to international soccer tournaments.

Woman sparks 51,000 acre wildfire to help bored firefighters

Woman sparks 51,000 acre wildfire to help bored firefighters: Johnson told investigators she set the fire because her firefighter friends were bored and needed two day's work and did not expect the fire to grow so quickly and affect a large land area.

▶ John Marek - Back of My Head (Guitar Drums @ the Same Time) - YouTube

▶ John Marek - Back of My Head (Guitar Drums @ the Same Time) - YouTube

This Is What It's Like To Fall In Love With A Woman Who Doesn't Exist - BuzzFeed News

This Is What It's Like To Fall In Love With A Woman Who Doesn't Exist - BuzzFeed News: Leah Palmer was a high-flying fashionista with a jet-setting lifestyle and a host of admirers on social media. But her entire existence was a fraud – a multi-year hoax that depended on stealing someone else’s life. BuzzFeed News tells the extraordinary story.

'Game of Thrones' star Maisie Williams speaks: The ultimate Arya interview | EW.com

'Game of Thrones' star Maisie Williams speaks: The ultimate Arya interview | EW.com: If Arya had gone through what Sansa has, she’d be dead. If Sansa had gone through what Arya has, she’d be dead. They’re both just good at handling what they’ve been put under.

Can the Islamic State Survive? - NYTimes.com

Can the Islamic State Survive? - NYTimes.com: But the Soviet example is still a useful reminder that the “inevitable” fall of fanatical upstarts is not always actually inevitable. And it offers a few lessons in how, against all odds, the Islamic State might actually survive.

First, because great powers get war-weary and distracted. As different as our situation is from the aftermath of World War I, it’s clear that the United States would be more involved militarily against ISIS if we didn’t have the recent disillusioning experience of a bloody occupation in Iraq. And it’s easy to imagine events intruding — another economic crisis, a hotter war in Ukraine, brinkmanship with China — that could make Ramadi look as remote to our interests as Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok seemed to the average Westerner in 1919.

IRS Seized $107,000 From Him. He’s Fighting to Get It Back.

IRS Seized $107,000 From Him. He’s Fighting to Get It Back.:

Then, the agents told the small business owner something that shook
him to his core: The Internal Revenue Service had seized all of the
money in L&M’s bank account: $107,702.66.


“‘Are you telling me you took my money?’” McLellan recalled asking
the agents. “I didn’t understand what was going on. They dropped a bomb
on me. I was lost for five to 10 minutes. I can’t believe that y’all
guys can walk in here and tell me y’all took every bit of my money out
of the bank.”


After law enforcement cleared McLellan’s store, he drove to Lumbee
Guaranty Bank. The agents had been there hours earlier and emptied his
account, McLellan recalled, walking out of the building with a cashier’s
check.


McLellan walked out of the bank with nothing.

'Late Shift' Author Bill Carter Pens David Letterman Tribute: Laughs, Legacy and Leno - Hollywood Reporter

'Late Shift' Author Bill Carter Pens David Letterman Tribute: Laughs, Legacy and Leno - Hollywood Reporter: The bulk of Dave's life was defined by a daily routine of scripted laughs and formalized conversations. That is about to change. Associates wonder what it will mean for someone who, at numerous points in his life, conceded he was happy only during the one hour a day when he was taping his show. The birth of son Harry, now 11, clearly added much joy and seemed to mellow Letterman in ways that surprised people.

The real story behind ‘Flashlight’ (the new ‘Cups’?) from Pitch Perfect 2 | EW.com

The real story behind ‘Flashlight’ (the new ‘Cups’?) from Pitch Perfect 2 | EW.com: Thus, “Flashlight” was born from a very specific songwriting brief that Moore and company put out to potential writer-musicians. “We knew it needed to have an emotional component about friendship; we wanted it to sound great in a big, gospel-type arrangement; and since we needed the audience to invest quickly, it had to create a hook that very instantly got inside your ear,” Moore explains.



“Sia was the one who nailed it.”

Sia’s song “Titanium” got such good play in the first Pitch that she developed a friendship with Moore in the ensuing years. “Chandelier” hadn’t happened yet, but the singer was in the studio working on her 2014 album when Moore contacted her personally to gauge her interest in the songwriting challenge. With assistance from Sam Smith (who was still under-the-radar at this point) and Christian Guzman, she submitted “Flashlight”—and the filmmakers loved it.

Poor Little Rich Women - NYTimes.com

Poor Little Rich Women - NYTimes.com:

But as my inner anthropologist quickly realized,
there was the undeniable fact of their cloistering from men. There were
alcohol-fueled girls’ nights out, and women-only luncheons and trunk
shows and “shopping for a cause” events. There were mommy coffees, and
women-only dinners in lavish homes. There were even some girlfriend-only
flyaway parties on private planes, where everyone packed and wore
outfits the same color.

“It’s easier and more fun,” the women insisted when I asked about the sex segregation that defined their lives. 

“We
prefer it,” the men told me at a dinner party where husbands and wives
sat at entirely different tables in entirely different rooms.

Sex
segregation, I was told, was a “choice.” But like “choosing” not to
work, or a Dogon woman in Mali’s “choosing” to go into a menstrual hut,
it struck me as a state of affairs possibly giving clue to some deeper,
meaningful reality while masquerading, like a reveler at the Save Venice
ball the women attended every spring, as a simple preference.

And then there were the wife bonuses.

It Is, in Fact, Rocket Science - NYTimes.com

It Is, in Fact, Rocket Science - NYTimes.com: The myth of the finches obscures the qualities that were really responsible for Darwin’s success: the grit to formulate his theory and gather evidence for it; the creativity to seek signs of evolution in existing animals, rather than, as others did, in the fossil record; and the open-mindedness to drop his belief in creationism when the evidence against it piled up.

The mythical stories we tell about our heroes are always more romantic and often more palatable than the truth. But in science, at least, they are destructive, in that they promote false conceptions of the evolution of scientific thought.

The Last Day of Her Life - NYTimes.com

The Last Day of Her Life - NYTimes.com: Mapstone showed Sandy a line drawing and asked her to copy it, and then to draw it from memory 10 minutes later. He read her a list of words and had her recall as many as she could. He gave her two numbers and two letters and asked her to rearrange them in a particular order: low letter, high letter, low number, high number. Thank goodness that last one wasn’t timed, she thought to herself, as she focused all her mental energy on the task. She felt as gleeful as a kid who had earned a gold star when Mapstone said, “Yes, that’s right.”



After three hours, Mapstone gave a preliminary diagnosis: amnestic mild cognitive impairment. At first Sandy was relieved — he had said mild, hadn’t he? — but then she caught the look on his face. This is not a good thing, Mapstone told her gently; most cases of amnestic M.C.I. progress to full-�blown Alzheimer’s disease within 10 years.

kleinbl00 comments on The Epic Losing Streak of M. Night Shyamalan, Explained

kleinbl00 comments on The Epic Losing Streak of M. Night Shyamalan, Explained: So now Shyamalan is a magical X-Factor that nobody understands - a magic black box that turns mystery into money. Hell - he managed to turn Bruce "Mercury Rising" Willis back into a movie star. Whatever that kid's next project is, give him money.

And M Night Shyamalan never had to write seven drafts of anything ever again.

The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall | WIRED

The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall | WIRED: But it didn’t take long for Ross’ programmed utopia to resort to programmatic violence. It’s an age-old story, the bloom and wilt of revolution. After tearing down the establishment’s walls, the new regime soon realizes the rubble would make a fine set of gallows. Just as Tarbell thought, all systems are the same. At the beginning of Silk Road, what Ross created was just a system. Then, at a certain point, it became his system—at which moment the system was doomed.

The Wedding Sting - The Atlantic

The Wedding Sting - The Atlantic: After months of undercover work, Williams and Moon had information on more than 40 suspects, but the department realized it didn’t have the funds or the manpower to round them all up. So it had to come up with clever ideas. “Cops used to offer parolees free tickets to the Detroit Lions, then arrest them,” recalls Peggy Lawrence, a Flint historian. On one occasion, Moon quietly arrested and locked up stolen property dealer, announced his death in the newspaper, and arrested gang members who showed up at his fake funeral. “Sometimes you gotta do things that are simply funny,” Moon later told a television reporter. “People gotta go to jail, but it don’t always have to be sad.” In 1990, the department planned a particularly elaborate operation: Officers would throw a fake wedding, invite all the suspects, and arrest them.

Scenes From a Life in Negroland by Margo Jefferson - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

Scenes From a Life in Negroland by Margo Jefferson - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics: We knew what was expected of us. Negro privilege had to be circumspect: impeccable but not arrogant; confident yet obliging; dignified, not intrusive.

I was an undercover Uber driver :: Cover :: Philadelphia City Paper

I was an undercover Uber driver :: Cover :: Philadelphia City Paper:

Until the week this article published, the only numbers Uber would
discuss were gross fares — that's the total amount drivers bring in, not
the lower amount they end up with after expenses and Uber takes its
percentage. On top of that, Uber employs different rates in different
areas. Taking an UberX in the Hamptons is vastly more expensive than in
the lowest-rate areas like Nashville, Providence and L.A. Philly started
out on the higher end of the rates spectrum in October. But as the PPA
stings died off and more drivers felt safe picking up passengers within
the city limits, fares were cut in January to somewhere in the middle of
the pack.




Uber spokeswoman Kaitlin Durkosh declined to discuss how the Philly
rate cuts affected driver take-home pay — well, she didn't decline,
exactly, she just answered a different question: "What we've seen from
lower UberX prices in Philly, is that there is greater demand for rides.
In the four weeks since the price cut, weekly request [sic] are up 47
percent."




I talked to lots of drivers. But few kept a meticulous enough log of
hours worked, miles driven and expenses paid that I felt comfortable
using their data alone. Many drivers worried about getting in trouble,
too — Uber can "deactivate" a driver for any reason. I needed someone on
the record, someone whose data I knew I could trust.




So, in January, I applied to be an UberX driver myself.

Labour would do better if it learned to like the English | Nick Cohen | Comment is free | The Guardian

Labour would do better if it learned to like the English | Nick Cohen | Comment is free | The Guardian: The universities, left press, and the arts characterise the English middle-class as Mail-reading misers, who are sexist, racist and homophobic to boot. Meanwhile, they characterise the white working class as lardy Sun-reading slobs, who are, since you asked, also sexist, racist and homophobic. The national history is reduced to one long imperial crime, and the notion that the English are not such a bad bunch with many strong radical traditions worth preserving is rejected as risibly complacent. So tainted and untrustworthy are they that they must be told what they can say and how they should behave.



What truth there is in the caricature is lost amid the accompanying hypocrisy. The intellectual left deplores racism but uses “white” as an insult. It lambasts the sexism of the right, but stays silent as Labour candidates run meetings where Muslim women’s inferiority is confirmed by stewards who usher them into segregated seating .

What gambling can drive us to

The rise and fall of the Bombshell Bandit - BBC News: Bank robbers are becoming an extinct species. The rise of electronic payments is creating a cashless society, and since 2003, bank robberies have fallen 47%. The crime is also an overwhelmingly male activity. According to the latest FBI figures, just 8% of America's 4,347 bank robberies last year were committed by a woman. "Traditionally women have been involved in bank robberies only as getaway drivers, or accomplices to male robbers," says Dr Richard Schmitt, a US criminal psychologist who has evaluated more than 50 bank robbers. Schmitt says that a robber who is an educated professional female, and a Sikh, is, "a highly unusual case… in the history of the United States you will not find another bank robber with this profile."

Age of Robots: How Marvel Is Killing the Popcorn Movie — Medium

Age of Robots: How Marvel Is Killing the Popcorn Movie — Medium: Avengers: Age of Ultron wasn’t just bad. It was, to me, proof that Marvel movies, even at their best, can only be bad. And that they are going to get worse. The human mission has been lost: these are faceless Stormtrooper movies, unleashed in waves upon the presumed-to-be-faceless Stormtrooper audience. Stories are an affirmation of our human value; they teach us what life means, make and keep us human. Marvel, by removing the human from its storytelling, may be bringing about the end of story altogether.

UK elections: 20-year-old Scottish student becomes youngest member of British Parliament - IBNLive

UK elections: 20-year-old Scottish student becomes youngest member of British Parliament - IBNLive: Black is the youngest lawmaker elected to the House of Commons since 1667, when 13-year-old Christopher Monck took his seat, the BBC reported.

Butchery is in the blood even of the meat-free – Amanda Giracca – Aeon

Butchery is in the blood even of the meat-free – Amanda Giracca – Aeon: If the first step was removing animal slaughter from the backyards and barns of civilians, out of the public eye, the second was the rise of factory-style meat processing. Fitzgerald draws on Upton Sinclair’s famous novel The Jungle (1906), which portrays lives of immigrant meat packers in Chicago’s infamous Stock Yard. With the industrial revolution came assembly-line style employment. Animal slaughtering is said to be the first ‘mass-production industry’ in the US – Henry Ford partially adopted the mechanisms in his factories from meatpacking factories. With that came expendable employees and a culture of meat-factory ghettos on the city’s edges where immigrants lived in destitution, as Sinclair details. It was a public health and human rights disaster.

British Election: What Republicans Can Learn From David Cameron - The Atlantic

British Election: What Republicans Can Learn From David Cameron - The Atlantic

A article defending Russia?s

The New York Times does its government’s bidding: Here’s what you’re not being told about U.S. troops in Ukraine - Salon.com: At this point, I do not see how anyone can stand against the argument—mine for some time—that Putin has shown exemplary restraint in this crisis. In a reversal of roles and hemispheres, Washington would have a lot more than air defense systems and troops of whatever number on the border in question.

A history of lock-picking, from 99 Percent Invisible and Roman Mars.

A history of lock-picking, from 99 Percent Invisible and Roman Mars.:

In 1851, London was hosting the Great Exhibition—the first
international exhibition of manufactured products. One of the attendees
was A.C. Hobbs, an American locksmith. Back in the States, Hobbs had
made a name for himself by showing bank managers that their locks could
be easily picked and convincing them to buy one of his. Hobbs was
selling lots of locks this way. On the first day of the exhibition,
Hobbs publicly announced that he would pick the Chubb detector lock—the
one that stops working if you pick it incorrectly.

A witness wrote that it took Hobbs about 25 minutes. And the
way Hobbs did it was to use the lock against itself. He would pick it
until he tripped the detector mechanism, causing the lock to seize up.
That would give Hobbs information about how it worked, and then he would
pick the lock in the opposite direction to reset the detector. He’d go
back and forth firing and resetting the detector until the lock told him
everything he needed to know about how to get it open.

‘Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us’ - NYTimes.com

‘Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us’ - NYTimes.com: If you ask Mckesson and Elzie why there is no central figure in today’s movement, they will again insist on the advantages of leaderlessness. If you bring up legislative reform, they will point out that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been all but rolled back and that their aims go well beyond small changes to the criminal-justice system. If you bring up nonviolence as the only civilized way to effect change, they will recite King’s words: “A riot is the language of the unheard,” or they will say they don’t condone rioting, but they understand it. Their resistance to confining the civil rights movement to a museum made Mckesson and Elzie an awkward fit for Selma, which was filled with people doing just that.

(1) James Gunn - Imagine being a guy, like Joss Whedon, who has...

(1) James Gunn - Imagine being a guy, like Joss Whedon, who has...: My plea to all of you - and this is nothing new - is that we all try to be a little kinder, on the Internet and elsewhere. And, honestly, that includes being kind to the people who are tweeting this nonsense. I don't believe you can tweet about wanting to find a movie director and "curbstomp" him and be a happy person. That person's statement might make you a little angry - that makes me angry too. But thank God the circumstances of my life and your life didn't lead us to being the person that has the need to anonymously tweet that to someone on the Internet. And, as much as we may want to respond with vitriol to these tweets, I think that just creates more insanity.

Climate change alarmist: Optimistic, realistic, not na�ve assessment of global warming.

Climate change alarmist: Optimistic, realistic, not na�ve assessment of global warming.

As a scientist and journalist, I’m not supposed to have
emotions. I’m supposed to calmly report researchers’ findings as if my
family and I weren’t also being affected. But looking at the data in as
much detail as I have, it’s impossible not to be alarmed. On an average
day, I’m also disgusted, terrified, and angry.

So why aren’t more people outraged?

Few things are more important to human life than the
environment, but hundreds of generations of experience have baked in a
reasonable assurance that the future will be approximately like the
past.

For the first time in human history, it won’t.

everything that you need to know about pop culture and adulthood | Fredrik deBoer

everything that you need to know about pop culture and adulthood | Fredrik deBoer: those who like any kind of art or media that has not been blessed to receive the bullshit, self-serving mantel of “pop culture” are subject to a never-ending stream of disdain, dismissal, and abuse. To believe that different types of cultural products should exist, and that some of these should create artistic pleasures based on work, ambiguity, or difficulty, is to be immediately and permanently labeled a snob, an empty signifier that exists simply to provide people with a convenient label to apply to those whose artistic tastes are different than their own. If you like any kind of artwork that does not leave its pleasures totally and utterly accessible at all times and to all people with no expectation that consuming art should involve effort, you will be lectured to by the aggrieved.

The Death of Adulthood in American Culture - NYTimes.com

The Death of Adulthood in American Culture - NYTimes.com: We Americans have never been all that comfortable with patriarchy in the strict sense of the word. The men who established our political independence — guys who, for the most part, would be considered late adolescents by today’s standards (including Benjamin Franklin (fig. 3), in some ways the most boyish of the bunch) — did so partly in revolt against the authority of King George III, a corrupt, unreasonable and abusive father figure. It was not until more than a century later that those rebellious sons became paternal symbols in their own right. They weren’t widely referred to as Founding Fathers until Warren Harding, then a senator, used the phrase around the time of World War I.

Pope Francisco writes to La Repubblica: "An open dialogue with non-believers" - Repubblica.it

Pope Francisco writes to La Repubblica: "An open dialogue with non-believers" - Repubblica.it: The first circumstance - that refers to the initial pages of the Encyclical - derives from the fact that, down in the centuries of modern life, we have seen a paradox: Christian faith, whose novelty and importance in the life of mankind since the beginning has been expressed through the symbol of light, has often been branded as the darkness of superstition which is opposed to the light of reason. Therefore a lack of communication has arisen between the Church and the culture inspired by Christianity on one hand and the modern culture of Enlightenment on the other. The time has come and the Second Vatican has inaugurated the season, for an open dialogue without preconceptions that opens the door to a serious and fruitful meeting.

The Trader In the Wild | Bloomberg Business

The Trader In the Wild | Bloomberg Business: They said goodbye. Matrosova switched on her headlamp and walked into the woods. Farhoodi had been planning to go skiing, but he found himself lingering in the parking lot, unable to drive away. Many times he’d watched his wife head out on some adventure. She was fearless; he loved her for that—from the beginning, he’d loved her for all the ways she wasn’t like him. And she had always come back.

'Batman' brings in suspect to Bradford police - BBC News

'Batman' brings in suspect to Bradford police - BBC News:

A man dressed as the caped crusader
Batman has handed over a wanted man at a Bradford police station before
disappearing into the night.

Police said the costumed
crime-fighter marched the 27-year-old man into Trafalgar House Police
Station, in the early hours of 25 February.

The man was charged with handling stolen goods and fraud offences.

Police said: "The person who brought the man in was dressed in a full Batman outfit. His identity remains unknown."

Inside the Kremlin’s hall of mirrors | Peter Pomerantsev | News | The Guardian

Inside the Kremlin’s hall of mirrors | Peter Pomerantsev | News | The Guardian:



As Shaun Walker recently reported in this newspaper,
at one “troll factory” in St Petersburg, employees are paid about £500 a
month to pose as regular internet users defending Putin, posting
insulting pictures of foreign leaders, and spreading conspiracy theories
– for instance, that Ukrainian protestors on the Maidan were fed tea
laced with drugs, which led them to overthrow the (pro-Moscow)
government.



Taken together, all these efforts constitute a kind of linguistic
sabotage of the infrastructure of reason: if the very possibility of
rational argument is submerged in a fog of uncertainty, there are no
grounds for debate – and the public can be expected to decide that there
is no point in trying to decide the winner, or even bothering to
listen.

Texas Governor Deploys State Guard To Stave Off Obama Takeover : It's All Politics : NPR

Texas Governor Deploys State Guard To Stave Off Obama Takeover : It's All Politics : NPR:








Since General Sam Houston executed his famous retreat to glory to
defeat the superior forces of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, Texas
has been ground zero for military training. We have so many military
bases in the Lone Star State we could practically attack Russia.



So
when rookie Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced he was ordering the Texas
State Guard to monitor a Navy SEAL/Green Beret joint training exercise,
which was taking place in Texas and several other states, everybody here
looked up from their iPhones. What?

Quartz’s Kevin Delaney: Time to kill the 800-word article - Digiday

Quartz’s Kevin Delaney: Time to kill the 800-word article - Digiday:





The homepage isn’t dead, but it’s just a brand statement.

Quartz launched without a homepage. Instead, visitors were taken
directly to a feed of stories. Last year, it added in a twist on the
homepage. Rather than a list of stories published, Quartz has a
constantly updated stream version of its daily newsletter with the most
important things happening at that moment.


“The homepage communicates what a brand is. The basic idea is if
we’re going to make a homepage without a legacy, could you provide a
service to readers besides being an index of everything the site has
published in the last 24 hours.”

A good piece on engineering vs image/PR

How Do We Build a Safer Car? - The New Yorker: There is an old joke about an engineer, a priest, and a doctor enjoying a round of golf. Ahead of them is a group playing so slowly and inexpertly that in frustration the three ask the greenkeeper for an explanation. “That’s a group of blind firefighters,” they are told. “They lost their sight saving our clubhouse last year, so we let them play for free.”

The priest says, “I will say a prayer for them tonight.”

The doctor says, “Let me ask my ophthalmologist colleagues if anything can be done for them.”

And the engineer says, “Why can’t they play at night?”

The greenkeeper explains the behavior of the firefighters. The priest empathizes; the doctor offers care. All three address the social context of the situation: the fact that the firefighters’ disability has inadvertently created conflict on the golf course. Only the engineer tries to solve the problem.

How Washington Derailed Amtrak - NationalJournal.com

How Washington Derailed Amtrak - NationalJournal.com: Dove's plan might be more realistic if we conceived of Amtrak as a piece of infrastructure—like a bridge or a tunnel—rather than as a for-profit corporation that can't quite turn a profit. "This is a public service," argues Andy Kunz, president of USHSR. "Our highways don't make a profit. Our airports don't make a profit. It's all paid for by the government." (Together, the Highway Trust Fund and the Federal Aviation Administration receive about 45 times what Amtrak does, through subsidies and gas taxes.)