Quotulatiousness

September 3, 2018

Planes, Trains, and… Actually, just Trains

Filed under: History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Knowing Better
Published on 18 Sep 2016

The railroad has affected your life more than you may have realized. From starting the mail order business to creating some of America’s greatest landmarks, see how this simple transportation system shaped the country we live in today.

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Why Trains Suck in America – Wendover Productions – https://youtu.be/mbEfzuCLoAQ

Photo Credits –
American Waterways/Canals are edits of images I used to teach in 2011 – The originals were from Wikicommons and have long since been removed or updated. No Copyright Information can be found.
The Three Proposed Railroad Routes are edits of images I used to teach in 2013 – The originals were from Wikicommons and have long since been removed or updated. No Copyright Information can be found.

I don’t normally add comments about the daily 2:00am videos, but there are a couple of things in this video that I think needed to be addressed. First, he rather casually skips over the vast increase in American railway building even before the enabling legislation for the transcontinental lines, and misses a great opportunity to explain how important they were in determining the outcome of the American Civil War. Second, and rather more irritatingly, he blithely asserts the common myth about the “Big Oil” conspiracy to buy up and shut down municipal light rail (streetcars, interurban railways, and radials). The various streetcar systems had almost all been economically shaky since the Great Depression (many had to be taken over by the municipalities involved to keep them out of bankruptcy), and the huge increase in private car ownership after World War 2 was the coup de grâce that finished off most of the rest. During the same time, bus routes were encroaching on the streetcar’s territory and had the huge advantage of not being tied to rails (allowing relatively easy re-routing without huge construction costs).

I’ve posted about High Speed Railways a few times before.

QotD: “Market failure”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Humour, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that markets are considered to fail if and whenever they fail at achieving some ideal, while governments are considered to succeed if and whenever they succeed at achieving anything other than utter chaos and calamity.

Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2016-11-04.

September 2, 2018

Adrian Carton de Wiart – WW1 Paratroopers? I OUT OF THE TRENCHES

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Italy, Military, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Great War
Published on 1 Sep 2018

Chair of Wisdom Time!

World of Warships – Public Test 0.7.9 – The Queen, God Bless Her!

Filed under: Britain, Gaming — Tags: — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Mighty Jingles
Published on 31 Aug 2018

The Public Test Server is currently experiencing large doses of tea, Union Jacks and digestive biscuits that don’t look like much but are in fact strangely tasty. I hear the song of my people, I came as fast as I could.

Amtrak service and the “takings” clause

Filed under: Business, Economics, Law, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Back in August, Fred Frailey reluctantly came to the conclusion that at some point American freight railways are going to have to challenge in court Amtrak’s legislated ability to pre-empt freight traffic on their networks:

Amtrak’s
Eastbound Empire Builder crossing Two Medicine Trestle at East Glacier MT on 20 July 2011.
Photo by Steve Wilson via Wikimedia Commons.

We all know about “taking the Fifth.” It’s our right under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution not to be compelled to testify against ourselves. In other words, a court cannot force us to admit to driving 60 mph in a 45-mph zone (or something worse). That amendment has another, less-well-known clause, which says government cannot take away our property without just compensation. Lawyers know this as the “Takings Clause.” The Fifth came to mind the other day as I rode Amtrak’s Empire Builder from Seattle to Chicago. I’ll get to my point, but first the experience.

[…]

All of this did terrible things to our schedule-keeping. By the third morning, as the train approached Devils Lake, N.D., we were more than eight hours late (the next day’s eastbound Builder was even later). But imagine what the Empire Builder does to BNSF’s freights every day. The Amtrak Improvement Act of 1973 reads: “Except in an emergency, intercity passenger trains operated by or on behalf of [Amtrak] shall be accorded preference over freight trains in the use of any given line of track, junction, or crossing.”

BNSF appears totally committed to obedience of this law but doing so devours the capacity of this route. It’s not just that freights give way; whizzing along at a 79 mph versus 55 or 60 for the freights, the Empire Builder eats capacity as if it were two or three freights, Six high-priority Z trains prowl the northern Transcon every day, and I don’t think a single one of them that I observed was moving as we went by. One Z train was sandwiched between two stopped manifest trains, all making way for our Builder.

Obviously, Amtrak pays BNSF for the right to run trains over the freight railroad. But whatever it pays is but a fraction of the cost in delays to its own trains incurred by BNSF. Were the northern Transcon double-tracked all the way, these delays would obviously be minimized. But at $3 million or more a mile, double tracking consumes capital like a dry sponge, and it’s not Amtrak’s capital, either.

So now to my point: Isn’t it fair to say that Amtrak, which the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015 decreed to be an arm of government, is confiscating the property (track capacity) of host railroads? And if it is, shouldn’t the freight railroads be fairly compensated for the delays to their freights caused by the loss of this capacity? Try as I might to say otherwise, I am forced to answer “yes” to both questions.

HMS Eagle: Royal Aircraft Carrier (1969) | Extra! | British Pathé

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

British Pathé
Published on 13 Apr 2014

This Pathé ‘Extra!’ segment depicts the carrier HMS Eagle in 1969, which was the 15th in a long line of Royal Navy ships to carry that name. This particular ship was an Audacious-class aircraft carrier that hosted all manner of planes from the de Havilland Sea Vixen to the McDonnell Douglas Phantom.

#BritishPathé #RoyalNavy #RAF #Ships #Navy #Military

(FILM ID:2221.15)
Extra ! HMS Eagle.

Aerial shot of the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle of the Royal Navy. M/S of radar tower. Several shots of jet aircraft on the deck of the ship including Sea Vixens, Gannets and Phantoms. Shots of jet plane taxiing on runway. M/S to L/S of Sea Vixen taking off from the deck. M/Ss of three men working in the control tower. M/Ss of pilot sitting in cockpit of jet on the deck. Good shot of deck crew at work preparing jet plane for takeoff. L/Ss of Phantom aircraft taking-off. L/S and M/S of the aircraft in-flight. L/S of deck of ship. An aircraft lands on the deck of the ship. M/S of arrester wire. Another shot of plane landing. M/S of Westland Wessex helicopter hovering nearby. Air to air shot of phantom in-flight. M/S shots of plane landing. L/Ss of the aircraft carrier.

QotD: Coyote’s first rule of government authority

Filed under: Government, Politics, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

Never support any government power you would not want your ideological enemy wielding.

Warren Meyer, “Regulatory Deception”, Coyote Blog, 2014-11-12.

September 1, 2018

Cribs – Introducing the WW2 set and our producer Astrid

Filed under: History, WW2 — Tags: — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published on 29 Aug 2018

Indy and Astrid chat about the WW2 and The Great War sets, and we take a brief look at the nation of Tannu Tuva!

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson

A TimeGhost public announcement produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH

The legal tangle around the Trans-Mountain pipeline approval process

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Environment, Government, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jay Currie suspects the process has been intentionally complicated to the point that there may not be a way out for this government:

What the Court essentially asked was, “Did the Federal Government consult enough?” and then concluded, “No, not enough.”

How much is “enough”? That is a question which this decision really does not answer. And I suspect it does not answer it because there is actually no answer which is even close to true.

In a normal process a reasonable level of public consultation would be reached when the public has been given an opportunity to comment on the matter at hand. Which is a bit vague but there is case law which fleshes out what such an opportunity might look like.

However, once environmentalists and First Nations are engaged it is not at all obvious that merely having the opportunity to comment is sufficient. Unlike a rezoning application, an application to build a pipeline (or, realistically, virtually any other large undertaking) creates the opportunity for First Nations to talk about everything from ancient hunting rights, to sacred grounds, to former village sites, to disruptions to present First Nation culture and so on. Having the environmentalists involved ensures that the relatively easy solution of simply paying the First Nations’ people for their consent, is off the table. That solution will be denounced by the enviros as cultural genocide and worse.

All of which creates, and might arguably have been intended to create, a Gordian knot when it comes to considering major projects. Consultation becomes an endless task and one which has no defined parameters. The decision today indicates that an extensive consultation process is not enough but it does not indicate what might be enough.

Delightfully, the shareholders of Kinder Morgan – which owns TransMountain – voted today to sell the project to Canada’s feckless Federal Government for several billion dollars.

I suspect the CEO danced a little jig relieved that he no longer had to guess at how far consultations have to go. But Canada is stuck with a completely dysfunctional system which is being exploited by environmentalists and First Nations to prevent infrastructure from being built. That will have to be fixed.

The Tartan Myth | Stuff That I Find Interesting

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Jabzy
Published on 22 Jun 2017

https://www.patreon.com/Jabzy

https://twitter.com/JabzyJoe

QotD: Raising “taking offence” to be the highest moral ground

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The rule used to be, “If you lose your shit, you’ve lost the game.”

Now it’s the exact opposite: “If you lose your shit and throw a tantrum, you win. Always. Because obviously the person who takes offense and flies into rage over nothing must have moral superiority over people who are calm and rational.”

The old rules are gone now, thanks to the juvenilizing effect of social media — where all 55 year old men pretend to be 13 year old girls. And not just for some perverted sexual goal, but because acting like a 13 year old mean girl is now just sort of how 55 year old men, who should know a damn lot better, have decided it’s appropriate to present themselves.

It’s also due, of course, to relentless conditioning by the left that there is no such thing as an immature emotional outburst that should be restrained, or a minor psychic boo-boo that should be ignored and toughed out.

The left has taught society that internal emotional restraint is not to be valorized any longer; not to be treated as a personal characteristic to be valued and further trained.

The left teaches exactly the opposite — that to restrain one’s pettier, immediate emotional outbursts is to counterfeit one’s True Self, a true self which is apparently a 10 year old with developmental disorders, and that what everyone must do to be #Woke is not merely permit oneself to descend into hysterics but to actively seek out reasons to descend into hysterics as frequently and as derangedly as possible.

This is all just to repeat the central insight of this still-bracing piece from Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, “The Coddling of the American Mind”. In this article — sorry that I’ve repeated its premise so many times — Lukianoff discusses a previous phobia he had, and how he went through the process of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to no longer be phobic about it. Basically, CBT taught him to deliberately expose him to small doses of the thing he feared and keep telling himself There’s nothing to fear here, get over it until his sensitivity to that trigger went away.

Lukianoff realized that what is going on on college campuses now — and I would say, in society generally — is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, but one pointed in the precise opposite direction. Rather than teaching people to not sweat minor things that might “trigger” them, to desensitize them to those triggers, this malignant version of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy teaches people to panic, throw conniptions, fly into hysterics, and descend into lower-animal rage over minor things.

Rather than training people to de-sensitize them to petty bothers, this malignant version of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy trains them to be hyper-sensitive to trivial things.

It’s not merely that we are no longer valorizing — promoting; holding up as an ideal to aspire to — the age-old and well-proven ethic of emotional restraint and mastery of self.

We’re now actively valorizing, promoting, and inculcating the exact opposite — emotional promiscuity and performative hysteria.

Ace, “An Observance of the Decay of Learned Restraint”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2018-08-09.

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