Trains and roads in Europe and America

This was in reply to a comment in YouTube about trains.

The reason that European high-speed train routes from London to Athens and Paris to Athens are not there, is, because they have not been built yet. A lot of it had, and still has plenty to do with world history.

Romania and Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007, and this formally connected Greece with the rest of the Union on contiguous land. Romania and Bulgaria have yet to join the Schengen Area.

Italy's problems have more to do with mismanagement of their money, and Greece is only slowly emerging from its debt crisis (due also to then-really-bad finances).

Now that there's Brexit, the UK's position with regard to future rail connections to the rest of the EU is uncertain.

In the U.S., the Insterstate Highway System was built, because Dwight D. Eisenhower and other leading politicians noticed, that existing roads were below standard to support a modern state; the historic Route 66 was particularly overused. While the congestion of Route 66 supported all manner of roadside businesses and livelihoods, then it was also an infrastructure bottleneck.

On the other hand, the flipside to having built the Interstate Highway System is, that a large number of private traffic and short-haul business moved to the asphalt, with rail infrastructure displaced — "thanks" in no small part to then-the Big Five automakers greasing the wheels of politicians. Perhaps less intentionally, but with greater disruptive effect, rail got sidelined by airplanes and jumbo jets. The latter reduced travel times so much, that the jets and the Interstate in combination substantially decreased demand for passenger rail services, reducing the status of rail in America the even further.

To the best of my knowledge, California's problems with high-speed rail have been related to the politics almost anywhere in the U.S. of habitually not wanting to dish out enough taxpayer money for any large project, while at the same time, nursing pipe dreams of federal funding, when the state (any state) is legislated and governed by one party, and the federal government by another.

Miks Eestis perearsti juurde ei saa, ning miks perearsti juures ei käida

Perearstide kättesaadavus on kehv, kuna nad ei ole motiveeritud haigeid visiiditasuta vastu võtma, ning seetõttu on kõik tasuta ajad umbes.

Tasulised ajad on seevastu kohe järgmine päev saadaval, ning vähem kannatlikud, kui ka vähem maksuvõimelised patsiendid on selle ahne skeemi lihtsalt läbi näinud ja lähevad otse EMOsse, kus visiiditasu on väiksem kui visiiditasu ahne perearsti juurde, ning patsient võib suhteliselt kindel olla selle peale, et ta tõsisema häda puhul samal päeval läbi vaadatakse.

Eraldi vajab äramärkimist ka see, et EMOsse pöörduvad pigem ravikindlustuseta inimesed, kellele perearsti visiiditasu nagunii üle jõu käib. Kui see grupp inimesi saaks automaatselt ja igasugu lisatingimusteta^* teistega võrdse ravikindlustuse ja igasugustest visiiditasudest vabastuse, väheneks EMOsse pöördumine tunduvalt. (Loodame, et nii läheb, kui näiteks seadusandja kunagi selle reegli vastu võtab.)

Teine probleem on nõue saada saatekiri eriarsti juurde, mis osaliselt ajabki umbe perearstide vabad ajad.

Kolmas probleem on see, et tasuta vabad ajad ajavad umbe pensionärid. Nii neid kui ka noori ja tööealisi patsiente silmas pidades tuleks teha kõikide EMOde läheduses olevad eraldi 24/7 tervisekeskused, kuhu pöördudes saaks inimene (vanusest sõltumata) kohe läbi vaadatud ja hinnatud, et millist ravi on tarvis, ning et kas on tarvis viia haiglasse. Niimoodi lahendataks ära EMO-arstide ülekoormatus.

Neljas probleem on tõenäoliselt pearaha. Õigem on mistahes Haigekassast tulev raha siduda patsiendi visiidiga, et arst oleks motiveeritud võtma vastu patsiente, kes tasulisel visiidil käia ei saa.

^* lisatingimused — nagu praegu kehtiv töö otsimise nõue registreerimata töötutele. Võeh. Kuidas nad siis tööle saavad minna, kui nad haiged on, aga abi ei saa, sest nad on töötud, ning ei saa "aktiivselt tööd otsida", kuna nad on haiged??

Reduced tourism to the United States

This was written in reply to a comment post in Slashdot, but then I'd worked on the reply so much, that it merited its own blog post.

Disclaimer: This post is an opinion piece, and does not rely on hard data.

It's called the Trump Slump. Travel from quality origin countries has slumped, especially from friendly places like the European Union and Canada. Well, there's lots of anecdotal evidence, too. I can't say much about OZ and NZ, because I haven't seen the articles of topic mention them. Other origin countries are those under the Muslim Ban, but a reduction of trips from these falls within the statistical margin of error.

LatAm is strange. Wealthy Latin Americans are unlikely to traverse the U.S. border anyway, unless absolutely necessary — be it a major health-related procedure, friends/family dying, custody, possible inheritance, and better safety. Not-wealthy ones fleeing violence and persecution are more likely to arrive the "old-fashioned way".

The Trump Slump is mitigated by moves from China and Russia, where the rich of those states seek to park a share of their assets in America, should the two regimes' economies ever tank, or other conditions worsen. Both are also pregnant with the "anchor baby" practice.

Do keep in mind, that official travel data about the States are susceptible to being massaged by D.C. tourism lobbies in order to look politically appeasing; such, that visits 'to North America' are mentioned, and then with data involving increased arrivals to Mexico and Canada to offset the actual slump in the U.S.

Countries with large amounts of poor people cannot afford to issue travel warnings on America, because they find it expedient, when some people leave, in order to off-load some of the real or perceived weight on society that could otherwise not be eased.

A free country relying on historically good relations with the U.S. lets the news about things being terrible stateside do their own work. Because reasons.

Suggestions for basic screencasting on YouTube

This was initially written as a reply to an uploader who created a video about the NoScript web extension for Firefox Quantum. The text has been edited for further clarity.

Before uploading:

Audio is important. Do a soundcheck with headphones, since badly-recorded narration can have issues both with volume and treble. Is the microphone close to your mouth, and is the recording volume high enough?

Use the headphones to compare with a normal non-Vevo music video, for which you have to keep the system volume low to avoid loudness, and then with your own video. For this, make sure the YouTube video volume is up, and system volume is low — start at 5–10% for "Volume" / "Wave" in Windows, and then gradually go up. The volume of a popular non-Vevo music video is the baseline, and the volume of your video should be similar.

Before screencasting, consider setting the monitor resolution to something lower than your current one. This would allow people with smaller displays (on smartphones), and/or slower connections to better see what's going on. (I do not know what your screen's actual resolution is, so I'm assuming Full HD.)

For example, I have a display with a 1360x768 resolution, and to keep the 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio, I have in Windows the option to reduce the resolution to 1280x720 pixels — 720p is the lowest HD rating; also the earliest. Based on a screenshot scaled down to 640x360 pixels, the text there was more-or-less visible.

If your screen recorder allows capturing a single program window, you can reduce its size even further. Yet another option is to temporarily increase the software user interface text, or create a separate operating system profile for screen recording, where the display resolution is lower (such as 1280x720, or less, if available), and where the UI text is bigger.

Advanced screen recording programs may allow zooming in and out, or you can use the features offered by your video editing software.

Why did Kirk's Bird-of-Prey fly slow at Warp 9 for time travel in Star Trek IV?

This was meant to be a reply to someone on YouTube. The question is interesting, because it posits, that at high warp, the ship would have overshot the Sun very quickly.

The warp bubble is typically static, and the ships inside of it do not move, while the bubble is at warp. So, I surmised, that the movement could have been slower, because of the following hypotheses thayt I pullled right out of my head:

(1) They had to move the ship inside the warp bubble, and/or

(2) that high warp was used not just to maintain the warp bubble and still move it at quite high speed relative to the rest of the space, but also to keep it stronger to protect the ship from the Sun's heat and massive gravity, and to extend the bubble's length or depth across the trajectory and through the Sun's Corona in order to make the jump.

Therefore, the expended energy was Warp 9+, while the actual velocity was slower, as the distance inside / depth of the bubble was greater than the pre-Warp-speed distance between the ship and the Sun. This was probably the crux of Spock's computations.

John Williams and his less famous scores

This was in reply to a comment on YouTube.

The Star Wars themes composed by John Williams have been played so often, that people are desensitised to them.

Here's a list of mostly non-sci-fi films that I highly recommend for watching and listening to their soundtracks:

• The Sugarland Express (1974)
· Earthquake (1974)
· Home Alone (1990)
• JFK (1991)
· Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992)
• Schindler's List (1993)
• Nixon (1995) — stars Anthony Hopkins
• Seven Years in Tibet (1997)
· Saving Private Ryan (1998)
• Angela's Ashes (1999) — Robert Carlyle in a supporting role
• A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) — special mention for use of the piano
· Minority Report (2002)
· War of the Worlds (2005)
• Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)
• War Horse (2011) — haven't seen it myself, but highly recommend anyway.

In figures: Brexit and its most famous ad viz the European Union.

This was initially writen as a reply in a forum.

Damage report

If and when the UK officially leaves, its farmers and other fields will be bereft of all the EU subsidies, though the UK government has promised to continue (some of) those into 2020, though Brexit, if not stopped, might come into force in 2019.

Paint no evil

Every political ad is implicitly a promise.

The "£350-million-a-week" payments into the EU, an infamous and false claim that was painted on the "battle bus" of the Brexit supporters' "Leave" campaign, calculates to £18.2 billion for an entire year, and this is not the kind of money that the UK has ever annually paid into the EU budget.

Figure it out

The very generous estimate of a £50 billion divorce bill is more than five times greater than the UK's £9.4 bn net payment into the EU in 2016, despite the £18.9 bn gross contribution. (Source: UK Office for National Statistics, 31 October 2017)

The gross divorce bill could be as high as £89bn, which is 9.4 times greater than the net payment. (The Guardian, 29 Nov 2017)

While the UK budget presented on 11/2017 is £769 billion + £40 bn deficit (the deficit is 1.9% of the UK GDP).

The 2016 net payment of £9.4B into the EU is only 0.44% of the £2.131 trillion UK GDP in that same year. (The UK GDP calculated from the dollar amount of U.S. $2.629 trillion at the rate of U.S. $1.23321 for one pound sterling on 31 December 2016.)

All this means, that the UK practically gets half its money back — into projects, subsidies, and investments that Britain itself really hasn't had the thought to finance.

A New Hope

What I hope for, is a turn-around to cancel Brexit through a possible second referendum, which was alluded to by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and European Council President Donald Tusk on 16 January 2018.

The Next Best Thing (or least worst)

The next-best option would be a soft Brexit, which would give the UK the same status as Norway: stay in the European Economic Area (EEA), and follow those same EU rules anyway — without the benefit of having any say in the decision-making on EU policy and external relations, and on those "pesky" regulations, current and future.

If the UK wants to sell (export) any stuff to the EU, then that stuff would still have to be designed according to EU standards, and there's no escaping that.

The digital divide in the Alien franchise

I wrote this first as a reply to a YouTube video that comments about why the tech in "Alien" is so outdated compare to "Prometheus", which canonically took place many years previous to the events in "Alien".

I think, that there's a digital and class divide of sorts: the miners get CRTs on the ships they run, which is just enough to get the job done, and the scientists get all the fancy stuff. — But not always, if the company knows, that any such mission with the xenomorphs is doomed from the outset. And anyway, the most advanced thing onboard Nostromo was Ash. The most advanced thing in Aliens was the atmospheric processor.

I can guess, that at some point, Weyand-Yutani might have thought it cheaper to recycle old technology than to mine and make new stuff, because they came to be short on resources back on Earth and any colonies. The Nostromo was sent out to bring back the very necessary readymade ore to manufacture new things, but its mission failed.

A good explanation is, indeed, that for certain objectives, obsolete[-looking] tech is used.