Actual high speed rail around North America. Every major metropolitan area connected to minimum 150mph speeds.
All of the idiots who joke and make fun of CHSR and Brightline have never truly seen an actual rail system in practice. I read the Facebook comments, they’re all the same. “It would never work here”, “We’re too big”, “Flights would be faster”, “I just like to drive”, blah blah blah. The fact is that they’ve never been outside of the country (and most of them outside of their immediate state area) to ever see what it’s actually like, and have never seen what we’re desperately missing here in America.
Oh and the worst of the complaints, the absolute worst - “It’s a waste of money”. Says Darrel, the guy who has done zero research about rail beyond what conservative pundits have told him, and has absolutely zero idea how much we piss away on highways every year. How much is that new lane on the local freeway costing? No freaking idea do you. But California HSR, they know to the penny how much that’s costing. (You don’t even have to know which freeway I’m talking about, because I know there’s also a freeway near you who is getting yet another lane, everyone in the country has a freeway getting another lane.) Rail though? Oh no… the costs!
I firmly believe this would help ease a lot of the nation’s major problems. Probably not solve, but ease some of them.
- Climate Change (obviously)
- Some of the divide this nation is feeling (because it’d be easier to travel around and actually see)
- for example, I live in Seattle, there are a lot of conservatives living just 200 miles away who never come because it’s “too far” and we’re “constantly having violent protests”. Well come and see for yourself then. Take a day trip.
- Housing Crisis (immediately nearby cities and towns become commutable)
- This would also help with income inequality a bit, because all of a sudden you can again commute much farther
- We waste so much land due to parking and driving, relieving that a bit could revitalize downtowns as people would pick up and leave the train in urban centers, renewing development downtown.
This list goes on
How we move around is such a huge part of our daily lives. Most people spend hours a day in their car, burning gas, driving around getting to work, stores, errands, schools, etc. We have made it so damn difficult on ourselves just to move around, and I’m sick of hearing the regurgitated excuses why it “would never work” here.
A couple good videos if you’re curious.
Alan Fisher, the Armchair Urbanist explains how rail gets such scrutiny while roads get a pass
Okay, you do the high-speed rail. I was gonna say 15-minute cities, so I’ll do that. We’ll attack the same major problems from complementary angles.
Love it! I’ll work at a national scale, you work at the city scale.
You’re right, double headed problem there, I’d love to see my city really starting to tackle transit
If I were American this would be my absolute priority too. I don’t like driving too much but love being able to get everywhere I want to by train. I don’t even own a car.
I love driving. HSR is still super nice, because the worst part about driving is long distance trips. Day trip to the hills to drive fun windy roads? Hell yeah. Trip across the US where I spend 9 hours a day driving straight in Kansas/Oklahoma/Texas? Awful. That section of argument never makes any sense to me. “I love driving. Nothing better than sitting in the right lane for 7 hours on a perfectly flat, straight road”. Morons lol
This is amazing. I already love the train, this would be my dream mode of transportation.
Acela has proven that rail can work in the US. I don’t know the stats but it has made a significant difference in both highway traffic and air traffic, and is a lot more comfortable. It’s also in high demand - people want to use it.
Complaints hear are: not high speed, not frequent enough, too expensive. Victim of its own success (and lack of funding compared to highway and air travel), but never anyone saying it’s not a great choice
Find a way to live a productive life with more dignity despite my physical disability that will lead me to an ever darker future. I was hit riding a bicycle to work, by a political refugee that had the cognitive capabilities of a third grader. Surviving is so much worse than death in the USA. It is a terrible place to live like this; an inhumane and pathetic disgrace of a country.
I hear the UK makes an honest effort for accessibility
How extensive is this resulting disability? Is there any way for you to exercise? Sounds like you could use some positive neurotransmitters.
It’s complicated. I exercise regularly. I’m a former amateur bicycle racer, and still ride, just nothing like I did in the past. My thoracic portion of my back is neutralized on a bike because I know how to fit professionally.
I’m degrading over time. For instance cooking most of my food for 8-10 days within an hour of being on my feet is getting difficult but is still doable. Interacting with me in the later half of that experience is a no go. I’m too stressed to deal with other people. By the time I am done, I am nonfunctional mentally for the rest of the day due to the pain.
I’m familiar with that mental state. I can keep functioning long after I become too unpleasant for polite company.
I have a disease whose prognosis is that my pain levels will steadily increase for the rest of my life. Currently it’s just elevated pain response, but eventually it will become spontaneous, unconditioned pain throughout my body.
Really depressed the fuck out of me at first.
But then I realized that science is always evolving, and just because that’s the typical course of someone with central sensitization syndrome, doesn’t mean it’s the only possible course.
Heck thirty years ago we didn’t even know nerves grew back. Now everyone knows the term neurogenesis.
In my studies, I’ve had to learn a lot about physiology, neurology, stress response, etc. If you would ever be interested in talking strategies for managing this thing let me know.
Eliminate religion
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I doubt it’d go that far, humans like killing each other too much. But at least it would eliminate one source of control.
Welp, unpopular opinion time.
Honest question: all of it? Like including all the history and its influences on our modern society? Every opera, classical music and piece of art? Will we be forbidden to listen to its influences?
Tom Holland (who is a secular historian, not that actor guy) writes:
“Familiarity with the biblical narrative of the crucifixion has dulled our sense of just how completely novel a deity Christ was … [Christianity] is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us who live in post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value. In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.”
And again, he is not actually a christian believer, but his thesis is that all of our western society is drenched in christian values, and it would have looked absolutely different without it.
Even Richard Dawkins calls himself a “cultural christian”. Would you destroy that culture too? Our whole western society is built upon it. To destroy religion is to destroy way more than you might realize.
Do some religious people do bigoted things? Yes! Would I like that to be different? Yes! But “destroying religion” is throwing away the baby with the bathwater. The time of the new atheists movement has been over for a while. The sentiment of religion= bad is getting old and frankly, outdated. In the academic world they’ve moved on: more and more academics see atleast some value in religion, even if they don’t necessarily uphold a faith themselves.
Not trying to sway you to believe in anything religious. I don’t care. But not seeing any value in religion is… a depressing take on this world and it’s beauty.
Every bit of it, and I wouldn’t feel the slightest bit guilty.
First, I think Religion’s impact on the arts is over played. And they probably would have been better without the arbitrary religious restrictions placed on them.
And even areas where religion has some slight positive impact. It is miniscule compared to evil it has wrought on humans.
Thinking a lot smaller here… I’ve always wanted to build a custom pinball machine. I already possess most of the necessary skills, but the materials are expensive and I don’t really have the time or space to do it right
I absolutely love this.
I’d develop a pickup truck that would have only the bare essential features and would be built from the ground up with the intention to make it extremely durable and easy to fix. Instead of a body-on-frame I’d probably go with a stainless steel exoskeleton instead and plastic/fibre glass panels you could just swap out to a new ones if you damage them. Kind of like on side-by-sides. The newer models then would just be ones with certain parts that have been upgraded to a better ones and would be 100% compatible with older models. You wouldn’t ever need to buy a new truck again. Ideally there would be both diesel and electric versions - ideally so that you could convert one into another if you so desire.
Very interesting idea. If I could afford it, I’d buy one!
Would you consider a hybrid design too?
My list is quite different than the ones currently in the thread.
The boring ones:
Creating a vaccine or other cloaking to make humans invisible to ticks & mosquitoes. A separate project would be to do the same for parasites.
Enacting strict pollution/carbon limits and mandatory circular economy everywhere in the world.
Researching, trialing and Enacting a sustainable post-capitalist system everywhere in the world.
Developing solar energy until covering global energy demands, including a power network that can transport energy from the sunny side and/or orbit everywhere.
The slightly more ambitious:
Establish self-sustainable colonies living on off-earth resources, most probably also situated off-earth.
Create a Dyson swarm with enough energy output for in-system exploration, mining, colonisation, and terraforming.
Perfect matter replicators.
I have some other ideas as well, but those would be a start.
Mandatory circular economy sounds like it means basically mandating that each person break the second rule of thermodynamics. It’s assigning impossibility to people, like making it mandatory to draw a square circle before one can go to recess.
Lol, indoctrinated much?
We will still expend energy, thus satisfying the gods of thermodynamics.
In this economy, retirement.
Free EFI conversion for any carbureted vehicle still on the road.
Giant floating island to stay in temperate zone, of course everyone would suffer sea sickness and it is question how would we keep everything in place.
Duct tape and bailing wire, and the larger your structure with regard to the wavelength of the surface waves, the less rolling your structure will do.
Space mining.
The operation is proceeding as planned sir. We expect to be shipping 300 containers of vacuum per week, within six months
Making food and housing free.
I just wanna say when I was homeless a couple years ago, I got free food and housing.
Giant space laser to destroy military infrastructure and aircrafts. All of them. Bring peace on earth through terror.
I would buy the space next to the breakfast/lunch cafe in my neighborhood and make it a supper and drinks place that opened right when they close each day. Bribe whoever it is you have to to get a liquor license, hire a few people, pay really well, have no set menu but a supper service and then a few hours of drinks and small plates, close by midnight. Oh and a big cappuccino machine of course, coffee too.
I know this doesn’t sound impossible but it’s out of my reach and is what I’d do if we got a big windfall, like more than we need.
I’d start building O’Neill cylinders. Huge cylindrical lot extruded ring stations that simulate gravity for its occupants by rotating.
Becoming a spacefaring species is as good or better than becoming multiplanetary in terms of being able to survive impacts, and we can build these things close to Earth without transfer orbit scheduling constraints.
Obviously we should be pursuing both. But if I had the resources to do this, I’d start building the first human void city.
A matching pair of show cars, custom built from the ground up to cruise in and turn heads.
Also, build the modern equivalent of the Model T, the Volkswagen Beetle, something like that. The super practical, oddly attractive, easily repairable, energy sipping cheap-mobile. It would be hard to meet all these goals plus modern safety requirements, but that’s where the endless money comes in for R&D.
