hcknwscommenter

Not really. Tokyo has an entirely publicly owned subway system. And a separate subway system that was govt owned and then, after buildout, sold some shares to the public via IPO.

Citations please? Seriously, you are making up numbers for the cost of cars and the govt subsidies provided. Did you account for the DMV? Did you account for traffic police? Did you account for the installation and maintenance of traffic light systems? Of course you didn't.

huh? Public transportation is fully paid for by everyone too.

The error is completely ignoring the negative economic externalities of NOT having public transportation and the positive economic and environmental externalities of having public transportation.

Dude. Public transit can carry hundreds of thousands (millions even). How many helicopters you planning on having? How many landing pads? Where are they going to go? You going to spin up a municipal ATC? This is silly.

You are completely ignoring the MASSIVE benefit the transit provides to the city. It allows densification. It allows people to get places without driving (and thus without parking). It frees up roads/traffic for those who do decide to drive.

Funding for basic research is being slashed by the current administration. Our society is underinvesting in basic scientific research. And, AI will not fill the gap.

tech writers disrupted by AI a couple of years ago? Seems very dubious. A couple of years ago, AI was terrible at writing anything.

AI writing is soooo annoying. It's always way too long and way too "serious" for what ultimately is almost always a really dumb point. There is no calibration to the seriousness of the topic or thesis against the actual length of the writing. It's insufferably pompous. Will it get better? Probably.

ever since the discovery of amyloid plaques, it's been an open question. Are they causative or a symptom? Would reducing or eliminating them help treat the disease? There is lots of data that supports amyloid as a disease treatment target, particularly in animal models. Of course the abject failure to actually develop a good anti-amyloid treatment that actually provable and significantly mitigates the disease weighs against the idea that amyloid is a good target. And the high profile frauds that have been discovered haven't helped. But, the biomedical community are not a bunch of morons. All these drug companies wouldn't have spent these billions of dollars on anti-amyloid and anti-tau if they were such obviously terrible ideas.

not really. your comment is a vast oversimplification of a very complicated topic.

I think that's an incorrect way of looking at it. A small unforeseen factor is almost always going to be a negative factor, not an unforeseen benefit. Space is a hostile and unforgiving environment without an easy way to bring things back, fix stuff, and/or re-deploy. A small mistake on the engineering, planning and/or implementation is likely to sink the whole thing worse than the napkin math suggests is almost certain failure anyway. Similarly, there are few ways to "get it right" and many ways to fail.

Will be interesting to see if, in hindsight, there are clues to this in the preexisting literature that we just hadn't quite recognized.

There are so many counterexamples proving that your statement is just not true. I'll give you just one example, the Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller that took funding from the Koch foundation to attempt to "prove" that the satellite temperature data was "miscalibrated" and estimates of actual warming were overblown. Started the project in 2010. First published in 2011 showing that in fact the warming was real and using more advanced calibration techniques actually showed the warming was worse than we thought.