What it’s really like to travel cross-country by rail.
This is a very plain blog with quotes from and links to articles I found interesting, thought-provoking, or relevant to the times. Linking is neither endorsement nor condemnation. Run by http://willslack.com
31 August, 2024
29 August, 2024
@michaelhobbes.bsky.social on social media
I wonder if this is a side effect of social media. When I post a bit of data or something I learned, I think of it as throwing a fact out into the ether.
People who read the post, however, experience it as someone they know telling them *as an individual* something that should be relevant to them.
So when someone like will points out technically the economy is "good", it feels like obliviousness to the overall shitty workings of the system as is at best, and rubbing salt in wounds at worst. It feels like he's gaslighting\bullshitting people, even if that wasn't the intent.
— Michael Hobbes (@michaelhobbes.bsky.social) Aug 27, 2024 at 11:47 AM— Space Man (@spaceds8008s.bsky.social) Aug 27, 2024 at 11:39 AM
The crank realignment is bad for everyone
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-crank-realignment-is-bad-for
For reasons that sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists are probably better-situation to explain, if you work in an environment where all your colleagues and peer reviewers and people you talk things over with in a seminar are left-wing, you are going to get biased results. Again, not necessarily because anyone is trying to bias the results, but because each individual person has their own biases and when almost all of those biases are mutually reenforcing, you get a bad outcome.
A related issue is that once an expert community obtains a sharp political skew, it’s easy to confuse the interests of the expert community with an ideological vision of the public interest. It’s important to make energy policy in a way that aligns with scientific facts about climate change and public health. But that’s not the same as saying that “the science” dictates specific policy measures. We saw this really clearly during Covid when “defer to public health academics” became constitutive of progressive politics, but public health academics also seemed to feel considerable pressure to align their recommendations with the progressive policy priorities of the moment. Ideally, we’d live in a world where empirical information “pulls sideways” in a way that’s orthogonal to values-based ideological conflict. But we’re not even close.
26 August, 2024
u/KhanTheGray on Cyprus's tragedy
https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1f1tewj/cyprus_an_island_divided/lk22hct/
The truth is that too much blood has been spilled for a peace to come. People are scared. There are still lot of people around who has seen the days where people would get rounded up and murdered just for belonging to wrong ethnic background.
Lot of people want peace but they don’t know how it’ll happen. Turks fear that if Turkey pulls back its army there will be none left to protect them. I mean, people talk about international law and all that which is all noble and all but look at what’s happening at Gaza in 2024. In this new millennium. Where we thought we’d leave the horrors of WW2 behind.
I have never seen the south side of my country in my life. I left before the borders were open.
To be honest I have a love-hate relationship with Cyprus.
I love the island of my childhood as part of nostalgia and what it had the potential to be one; a place of love and understanding.
But I have no hope for this ever happening. My best friends overseas are Greeks from Greece, my first girlfriend overseas was also a Greek Cypriot, her family were wonderful people, it was incredible how similar we are, yet extremists always played to our differences.
My grandparents used to tell me how they lived in mixed villages and slept with their doors open, and if they lost a wallet their Greek Cypriot neighbours would bring it home to them.
The respect they had for each other, their traditions and religions, was another level.
Turks would have a parade with drums and people would walk through the village road, dancing and singing before weddings, but when they approached the Greek church on their way, with people praying inside, they’d go quiet to avoid disturbing the church service.
Greeks would do the same when they had similar events and they walked past the village mosque.
When their harvest turnout was too much and Turkish farmers didn’t have enough manpower, my grandpa would ask his Greek neighbours if they could let their sons help them with harvest, as thank you, my family would organize a big feast for them in their house with roast lamb and baklavas.
Everyone talks about wars and our differences but I rarely see our similarities and good memories shared.
24 August, 2024
How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-rail-politics.html
A review of hundreds of pages of documents, engineering reports, meeting transcripts and interviews with dozens of key political leaders show that the detour through the Mojave Desert was part of a string of decisions that, in hindsight, have seriously impeded the state’s ability to deliver on its promise to create a new way of transporting people in an era of climate change.
Political compromises, the records show, produced difficult and costly routes through the state’s farm belt. They routed the train across a geologically complex mountain pass in the Bay Area. And they dictated that construction would begin in the center of the state, in the agricultural heartland, not at either of the urban ends where tens of millions of potential riders live.
The pros and cons of these routing choices have been debated for years. Only now, though, is it becoming apparent how costly the political choices have been. Collectively, they turned a project that might have been built more quickly and cheaply into a behemoth so expensive that, without a major new source of funding, there is little chance it can ever reach its original goal of connecting California’s two biggest metropolitan areas in two hours and 40 minutes.
17 August, 2024
Behind the Pageantry of Shen Yun, Untreated Injuries and Emotional Abuse
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/15/nyregion/shen-yun-dance-abuse.html
As the popular dance show grew into an international juggernaut, some of the group’s young performers paid a steep price.
07 August, 2024
Emily White was dragged for predicting the future of music streaming 12 years ago. Where is she now?
It seems harmless now, but at the time, the article meant war. “I Never Owned Any Music to Begin With,” read the headline of the 2012 NPR blog post, written by Emily White, then a 20-year-old intern at the public radio institution.
White, an obsessive music fan who had cultivated a substantial digital library through less-than-legal means, had started working on the essay before her internship started, and arrived at the NPR offices in Washington, D.C., with a draft in hand. Floating along in the unsteady musical landscape following the Napster era, White felt compelled to share the vision she saw in front of her: The future was streaming, and it was cheap. In other words, the writing was on the wall, and the CDs were piling up in the trash. For the vast majority of listeners, the days of purchasing individual albums were over, like it or not.
Parks and Degradation: The Mess at Yosemite
The excitement faded quickly. Within the first year, Aramark was laying off Yosemite staff, including many of the longtime managers whose knowledge kept the place running. The NPS provides basic infrastructure and law enforcement, and it manages trails, interpretation programs and the hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness within park boundaries. But Aramark is responsible for the majority of visitor services in the 7-mile-long, 1-mile-wide valley where tourists flock and most employees work. Its remit includes nine lodging options, 23 restaurants and cafes, 15 gift shops and grocery stores, a shuttle system, mule and horseback rides, a ski mountain and mountaineering school, four swimming pools, three gas stations, an on-call tow truck service and a golf course. “I don’t think they realized they were going to be managing a city,” says Bob Seddon, a retired California Highway Patrol supervisor who worked as a seasonal driver in Yosemite from 2011 to 2018.
05 August, 2024
How I Got My Laser Eye Injury
https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/07/how-i-got-my-laser-eye-injury/
It has been brought to my attention that I have never actually written this story down before, merely told it in person to many students for valuable lessons and also for laughs over cocktails. It is a litany of bad ideas from several people that all came together at once to reach out and zap me.
04 August, 2024
Bear Found in Central Park Was Killed by a Car, Officials Say
The initial details of the case were clear: A woman was walking her dog in Central Park when she noticed the dead bear cub, which was lying under some bushes, partially concealed by an abandoned bicycle. The Police Department’s Animal Cruelty Investigation Squad began looking into the bear’s death, and the cub was taken to Albany for analysis by the conservation department’s wildlife health unit.
But so many questions remain unanswered: How did the bear end up in Central Park? Was there foul play involved? Did she die in the park, or was she dumped there?
After revealing the results of the necropsy, Lori Severino, a spokeswoman for the state conservation department, said that the agency still did not know where the bear had come from, only that it was “likely not the park.”
A talk on professional services
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/slight-return
Why does infrastructure cost so much? Because the planning inquiry process takes a long time and generates tens of thousands of pages of documentation.
Why does it take so long and generate so many reports? Because of the need to avoid even slower and more expensive litigation.
Why is litigation such a risk? Among other reasons, because professional services firms market their services to take advantage of any imperfection in the consultation process to allow a do-over for anyone who lost the argument in the original inquiry.
Why is any small imperfection a potential basis for litigation? Because a standard has been allowed to develop which effectively makes it a de facto legal requirement for every possible impact of a project to be the subject of a professional report.
Why has this standard been allowed to develop? Well now, there’s an interesting question.
It’s not that anyone has necessarily set out to manipulate things to reach this way. It’s self-organising.
Passing the Buck
https://samf.substack.com/p/passing-the-buck
When this happens you’re encountering an “accountability sink” – a term coined by the writer Dan Davies and discussed in his excellent new book “The Unaccountability Machine” (he also has a substack). The crucial property of an accountability sink is a set of rules that mean no individual can be blamed for a decision. In the customer service example, the person on the helpdesk is genuinely blameless and the person who could theoretically help you is entirely inaccessible.
As Davies says:
“For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system….If somebody can override the accountability sink and overrule a policy that is in danger of generating a ridiculous or disgusting outcome, then that person is potentially accountable for that outcome.”
One you’ve understood the concept you start seeing them everywhere – a source of so many of the petty frustrations of modern life. The NHS is a sea of accountability sinks. Your MRI got randomly cancelled? “I’m afraid that’s our new booking system that no one here can override”. You can get an emergency same day appointment at your GP or one in four weeks but not one in two days when convenient? “I’m afraid that’s the way the system is set up”.
Who is Stephen Nedoroscik? The quirky stories of Team USA’s Olympic pommel horse hero
Worcester Technical High School doesn’t have a boys gymnastics team. It was here where Nedoroscik studied Electro-Mechanical Engineering. Michael Meagher, a robotics teacher at the school, taught Nedoroscik for four years.
Meagher laughed when thinking about the happy-go-lucky kid who grasped everything he taught. Those at Worcester Tech used to have no idea Nedoroscik, who was fairly muscular but maybe 5-foot-6, was an athlete.
“That quirky, nerdy guy, that’s Steve. … He’s a kid you remember that’s for sure,” Meagher said. “He was a solid student, was in school all the time and then there were a couple days where he was out. When he came back I said ‘Steve, where the hell have you been?’ He goes, ‘Oh, I was at the Junior Olympics.’ I go, ‘What? Doing what? He goes ‘Oh, I compete on pommel horse.’ We never knew this! I go, ‘Come on. How’d you do?’ He goes ‘Oh, I won.’ It was just as nonchalant and as unassuming as that. … He had his knowledge to do the school program, but extracurriculars, you’d have no idea!”
This 23-Floor Manhattan Office Building Just Sold at a 97.5% Discount
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/nyregion/manhattan-office-building-auction.html
The sale price of 135 West 50th Street in Midtown, which is only 35 percent full, was a sign of how much the pandemic upended the market for office buildings in New York City. [...]
The buyer faces an immediate financial challenge: The auction was for the building itself, not the land. That is owned by a publicly traded real estate firm, which collects a monthly lease. But the rent from the building’s current tenants is not enough to cover those monthly payments, which are set to increase every five years and do not expire until 2123.
01 August, 2024
Inside the Secret Negotiations to Free Evan Gershkovich
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/evan-gershkovich-prisoner-exchange-ccb39ad3?mod=e2tw
At the center of the struggle were the U.S. and Germany, two allies grappling with the moral and strategic calculus of freeing guilty prisoners to bring their innocent citizens home. If the U.S. once claimed a “no concessions” policy, that principle has been steadily eroded by one precedent after the next. To respond to Putin and other hostage-taking autocrats, the State Department staffed an entire office of roughly two dozen personnel, led by a former Green Beret who jetted around Europe and the Middle East to explore prisoner trades that might free Gershkovich and others.
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