bryananderson

Yeah I am not taking a position on how the market will do in the future. Just saying that active investing will underperform passive unless you are one of the few market participants who actually has alpha.

You may wish it were not so, you may find it inelegant and infuriating and unfair, but it is a fact that retail investors nearly all underperform the market over a long enough time horizon. Maybe you are built different but for most of us it is very rational to take the market return for “free”.

It does not, but it has a sane scheduling agreement with the railroad which the railroad actually respects.

This is a common misconception because Brightline’s parent company Florida East Coast Industries shares heritage with Florida East Coast Railway, but the companies were split in 2007.

Italy has not exactly privatized high speed rail. The public rail operator Trenitalia is by far the largest high speed rail operator in the country. And it’s great.

What Italy has done is open the rails to access by private companies in addition to the public one, most notably high speed operator NTV/Italo.

Arguably this competition has helped spur on the public operator to greater heights. But it’s not the same at all as what Britain did (privatizing the public operator itself).

> And personally, I'm for having English be the national language of America (as a bilingual American myself)

Why are you for this? What problem does this solve, and how?

Seems to me we have made it 250 years without an official language and that this has caused approximately 0 problems.

What about the principle of reciprocity?

China doesn’t allow US social media companies to operate there—why should the US unilaterally allow Chinese social media companies to operate here with no reciprocity?

Continuing to play cooperate over and over when the other player keeps playing defect is not smart.

Maoism-Bainism with Stanford characteristics

People with other options don’t take the train in (most of) the USA because the trains in (most of) the USA are bad.

Of course the US is far larger than any single EU country, but the cities aren’t evenly distributed. There are many clusters of decently-close cities, and vast areas with very few large cities at all. Salt Lake or Denver may never have much useful intercity rail, but lots of regions could have it if we chose to build it (and learn from those who build it well, unlike California HSR).

Attitudes are not the same thing as behaviors. Source: I’m from a really red state with a higher rate of overdose deaths than California

“Go to Vietnam” is maybe not the most practical suggestion for grabbing a cup of coffee, but that’s where I found the best Vietnamese coffee.

As others have said, Vietnamese coffee was traditionally cheaper robusta beans, tended to be lower-quality, and was dark-roasted as a result. More recently, as Vietnam has gotten wealthier, there has been a craft coffee scene developing. I had great coffee in growing regions like Da Lat and Khe Sanh, and in specialty coffee shops in Hanoi like Dream Beans.

Unlike every person born before me and every person born after me—all of whom insist their childhood was the zenith—my childhood was actually the zenith

In this case it’s not tokenization. I wrote the text preprocessing code that deals with spacing these numbers. This is good feedback. It’s optimized for US-style 10-digit phone numbers, and it should be more flexible than that. For example, if I was reading a US phone number such as (123) 456-7890 over the phone and wanted to make sure it was heard correctly, I’d say “123”, “456”, “78”, “90”. But a 9-digit phone number should be spaced as you said.

Yes but as I understand it the very limited freight service on the peninsula just runs to a nearby UP yard. These are not big long-distance freight trains

Yes, unfortunately, but the freight traffic (which will needlessly stay diesel) is small, just a couple trains per day. It’s not the 1940s anymore when huge amounts of freight came ashore in San Francisco and propagated down the Southern Pacific line. There are only a couple freight customers left on the Peninsula. Caltrain actually owns the line and previously had the right to kick Union Pacific freight off, but at some point (the 90s?) this right was given up.

Regardless, there’s no excuse for the remaining freight (which operates in off-peak hours) to use diesel. Electric freight locomotives are perfectly common in countries where railroading isn’t still stuck in the 1800s.