I am glad there is some viable disruption in the auto space here, but I am also really disappointed.
A new 4wd kei style truck is ~10k, with a bigger bed. I know its apples to oranges, but damn do I hate the ridiculous regulatory capture around small vehicles and trucks we have in the US.
That's a fallacious argument because roads are the universal, basic transportation infrastructure. You cannot have no roads. Your point has some relevance regarding motorways, which are not free in every countries and may be considered part of the universal road network, too. So mentioning the cost of roads is trying to deflect via "whataboutism" without addressing the point.
One can have a roadnetwork as primary means of transport .. or a railnetwork. With roads mainly for the last mile.
Where society here and now should invest, what direction to go from from here, is totally up to us. What makes the most sense - preferably in the long run.
Cars are pretty shitty for long distances. Rubber tyres wear down the road and create unhealthy dust, way more friction and noise than metalwheel on rail. And they can be directly powered with electricity.
Not carry a heavy battery around and waste energy with charging and discharging.
Or well, have the noise and dirt of combustion engines.
Those are all pretty strong arguments to invest at least equally into a well functioning train network.
Every car that can be replaced with a train (in the simple often case of a person riding the train not moving his vehicel for himself) is a net profit for society. Cleaner air. Less or allmost no pollution.
(The electric trains here next to my home are really silent and still fast)
Note that I did not claim that we shouldn't invest in train networks. I questioned the use of taxpayers' money to make train tickets extremely cheap or free when there is no affordability issue to begin with, both in itself and when compared to everything else that public money could be spent on, and the overall situation in many European countries.
Personally I think this is having our priorities very wrong.
(I also think that rail as a primary mean of transport over roads is totally unrealistic and impractical, but that another issue)
The whole idea of making train tickets extremly cheap is to make it "competitive" to cars. Trains are already cheaper to use than cars for a lot of people. But many people already own a car and have to pay the fixed costs per month anyway. Insurance, taxes, depreciation
If they plan a trip, the don't calculate the whole cost of ownershipt, they calculate the distance and how much fuel they need (a.k.a. flexible costs).
An extremely cheap ticket makes the car owners stop using their cars so much. This is not just a benefit for the abstact idea of "environment", but also a direct benefit for the population. Less cars means less noise pollution, less air pollution and more space on the roads. That way people, who actually need a car, van or truck to get around and do their work, benefit.
You can definitely have no publicly owned or maintained roads though. There are none in my area of town and $0 tax/public funding. It's private property all the way down. The only reason why public roads look like barely competed against monopolies is that you can't compete with "free" (at the point of use), which creates the illusion that the public element of roads are more crucial than they are. But if you just shit-can all the public transport private transport will emerge organically.
Have you been defining them directly in your flake.nix file? I too am on nixos but I keep all my configurations in their native format and symlink them with nix, that way I can take and reuse that config on a non nixos system easily.
The problem I have found is that nixos doesn't seem to pickup and run systemd timers and services placed into the ~/.config/systems/user folder and additionally things like WantedBy=default.target have no effect.
So after I restart all my services manually on reboot I agree, systems timers are cool.
"Today, the most striking institutional feature of Japanese rail is that it is privately owned by a throng of competing companies." ...
"Core rail operations are profitable for every Japanese private railway company, but they usually only account for a plurality or a small majority of revenue. The rest is contributed by their portfolio of side businesses."
It's like a textbook good application of capitalism that unsurprisingly the US can't seem to get right.
But by companies that care about running railways, not by vultures that want to rip the companies apart and load them up with debt for their own short-term profits.
JR was only privatized in 1987 after the previous state owned railway company borrowed too much to fund its infrastructure projects like high speed rails.
That’s not really fair. That first week prototype was proof of concept, not the Git we use today. It would easily have taken $17 million for a private team to put in equivalent work to all of the open source effort that has made Git into the tool we have today.
Is it all speculation still at this point for what happens next? Like are they immediately void, does the govt have to repay importers the now illegal loss?
Or is this just another "trump did illegal thing but nothing will happen" kind of scenario?
A typical pattern is the appeals court (of which scotus is one) clarifies the legal issues and send the case back to the trial court to clean up and issue specific orders.
Any further action to end-around the Supreme Court decision and re-impose the tariffs will almost certainly require broad Congressional approval. And this is a very bad time to try to do that since nearly half of those seats are up for re-election this year.
I think this issue is effectively dead at least until we see how the new majority shakes out in November.
You can't get around the Supreme Court. Full stop. They can try, fail, and declare victory but they cannot find another way. They would literally be right back in the courts fighting their own consequences and punishment.
Afaik there's no consequences for the president ignoring the supreme court. Presidents have done so before. They mostly seem to get their way in the end.
A new 4wd kei style truck is ~10k, with a bigger bed. I know its apples to oranges, but damn do I hate the ridiculous regulatory capture around small vehicles and trucks we have in the US.
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