Almost every single industry in america is oligopoly and defending oligopolies with the free market capitalism argument is completely illogical and unfair.
If companies (private or state owned) are making huge profits at the cost of tax-payers money, then capitalism or socialism doesn't make any differences...
i guess gold and silver are the best bet.. though i dont know its a right time to buy right now as prices has shot in last couple of years... dollar crash may also result in to stock-crash and someone who can predict this can also buy 'short' ETFs. Dollar crash will also create demand in Oil which in-turn will increase the oil price. all these factors can help anyone to shield from now. Also one can start investing in forex, many smart immigrants have started investing in their home countries so that there is some risk mitigation.
Interested readers can also read "10 Bubbles in the making" @
i wont be surprised if 80 is "few" for China as they might be planning to have 800 trains in next 10 or 20 years (its a huge country - geographically ) ... who knows?
Loved it when you said "Ambitious people are rare, ... When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bloom like dying plants given water. Probably most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they'd get from ambitious peers, whatever their age."
IMO, Ambitious people are like power engine or say running water - its a old saying that running water never stops at any hurdles, no mater what - they pass thru huge mountains and forests - if a ambitious person loves what he/she is doing then nothing can stop him/her - you can see the fire in their eyes to succeed, the ambition and love for their work itself becomes determination ...
I just can't wait for my browser to becomes my OS - it would be a game changing scenario - it won't matter what is pre-installed, you'll be able to switch your OS in a second ... it won't even matter what h/w you are using (PC on intel, MAC on intel, Linux on whatever) ....
i wonder how much a h/w platform or pre-installed s/w would matter in one's life when a browser is your new OS and almost all your apps are on the cloud !!!
Who wrote the browser? The window manager? The compiler, assembler, and linker? What about computer games? I don't see us doing Crysis in Javascript any time soon.
The web is great for some things, but some things aren't everything.
I bet most computer users have never used a bash shell. I still prefer the world with it to a hypothetical one without it. Same goes for high end computer games.
whatever i said is from common endusers perspective and not from YC news reader's(who are mostly techies) point of view - just like the way we switch our browser right now ... we will be able to do the same with the OS!! or even better, there will be multiple browser OS preinstalled, you pick what you want....
as far as h/w platform is concern it would be too early to make a call, we may think right now that intel will lead the market/platform as they now support both (PC & MAC) but i wont be surprised if there are new players... especially from taiwan and china!!!
And even if intel dominates the microprocessor market, I really wonder how would a common man will differentiate a MAC laptop with Lenovo's thinkpad because all they have installed is the same Browser-OS (chrome, safari etc.) on the same platform (intel), with the same specs(say 4GB RAM, 5 USB ports, 2HDMI, same display card.... etc.) and almost everything else is on the cloud .... i guess then it would be all about speed, power and exterior look/design of the laptop??!!!
Please, exactly, tell me what a browser-OS is. Are we talking about something like Chrome OS, which looks like it will be an OS whose primary (edit: or even sole?) purpose is to run a browser? Then it's basically just a crippled version of what we already have. Or would we actually be talking browser-as-an-OS-properly, where some hypothetical browser decides to take up the mantle of process management, drivers, etc?
I don't doubt that lots of interesting things will pop up on the web. But "browser-as-that-thing-I-spend-a-lot-of-time-in" is very, very different from any sane definition of "browser-as-an-OS".
1. It's safer than car, very few or no accidents compare to highway accidents - so you can't put value to human life.
2. Compare to air and car drive, weather conditions doesn't impact HSR.
3. Peace of mind: Compare to driving car, its a peace of mind as you may relax rather than stressing out due to driving itself or weather or traffic jams etc.
4. Compare to air travel, there is no hijack like situation possible. i.e. peace of mind to government.
5. No matter how fast you drive a car or bus, you just can't beat HSR's speed and time saved due to speed. Plus no speeding ticket :)
I'm not a huge support of HSR, but I am a huge supporter of rail.
The main problem with rail is not necessarily speed. Current Amtrak trains are slow and painful because:
- They stop everywhere. There are hardly any express trains that run between major cities. This punishes the majority of inter-city travelers by forcing them to stop at every little village along the way, making the whole trip unbearably long compared to air, or even car.
- They share track with freight. I cannot count the number of times the train would stop just to wait for some 100-car freight train to pass. Passenger rail needs its own capacity, not piggy-backing on top of industrial rail.
You fix these two problems and instantly the majority of inter-city rail travel will suddenly already be competitive with air travel - and completely destroy car travel in terms of convenience and cost, for short to mid haul routes anyway. All of this without laying a single mile of special-gauge track, ludicrously expensive trains, and all using off-the-shelf, mature technologies that don't cost a quarter as much.
The solution to America's transportation woes IMHO is not sci-fi level technology. Yes, HSR may be justified in a few places, but for everywhere else, I think good old fashioned overhauling the existing rail system would do wonders.
i second with you - upgrading existing infrastructure or implementing small creative fixes will solve most of the problems and will also create huge amount of direct and indirect jobs ... huge benefit of infrastructure spending is you require people right at the site so no outsourcing (not that i'm aginst but still it helps local economy)
And imagine if I can get on a train in Seattle, and travel consistently at the train's top speed of, say, 80mph (pretty conservative), with no freight train stops along the way, and definitely no stops along every little town along the way...
I will be there in Portland in about 2 hours. This beats the pants off driving, and if you include the hassle of checking in early, security time, etc, will also beat the time for air travel.
And all of this with existing trains, no bullet trains, no mag lev, nothing fancy.
For this you get to enjoy:
- not having to drive
- HUUUUUGE comfortable seats (take that, regional jets!)
- relaxed security, no draconian rules
- 1/4 to 1/3 the cost of flying, can probably beat the cost of driving if you were traveling alone
- board at train station which is neatly downtown in most American cities
- takes you right downtown at your destination in most American cities
What's not to love? Trains are by far my favorite way to travel, and IMHO the majority of problems preventing trains from being the choice for mid-range routes is purely systematic and organizational, and has relatively little to do with technology.
For Eurostar (Paris<->London) there's a security checkpoint with x-ray and metal detector too. No shoes-off, but you don't have to do that for air travel in Europe either. I guess they're paranoid about the Chunnel...
The legroom on a standard Eurostar seat isn't any better than a plane either.
The Shinkansen, however, really is the gold standard for train travel in the world still: fast, convenient (no security), and frequent.
The fear of a terrorist attack isn't really a reason not to do things. And it's not like it hasn't happened before, remember the madrid (commuter train) and london (subway) bombings?
I voted for California's HSR once, but never again, since it's just so terribly expensive for what we get, despite my love of rail in general.
I do have some responses to your reasons:
1. Where's the data? I didn't think anything was safer than air, if one uses passenger-miles as the denominator (and fatalities in the numerator), nor that conventional rail has a particularly stellar record in this country.
2. I would imagine exactly the opposite is true, since rail is, by definition, limited to a fixed route. Assuming an extensive highway system (such as exists in the US), cars can drive around bad weather. Air travel, though perhaps more sensitive to lesser severity of weather, has even greater avoidance flexibility.
3. As someone who enjoys driving, the flip side to this is that relaxation begets boredom. Still, your point is well take, but it also could apply to air travel.
4. Although one can't steer a train into the Pentagon, I don't see how HSR would be immune to terrorism, especially considering that rail stations tend to be located in population centers, whereas airports tend to be remote.
5. This, again, is probably more applicable to air travel, given that a jet's speed is 2-3 times that of HSR. The trouble is that, unlike my car, a train doesn't pick me up at my origin, nor drop me off at my destination. Then, there's the issue of added latency, which, for a car, is close to zero. For a scheduled service, it's the amount of time until the next scheduled departure, plus a certain buffer time for checkin, baggage handling, and "security" procedures. This stretches out the door-to-door time to something much more competitive to driving, even without risking a speeding ticket.
Driving the 345 miles from my home near San Jose's airport to downtown LA could be done in 5.5 hours, with no stops and no speeding ticket risk. A flight takes about 45 minutes in the air, and the HSR trip is supposed to take 2.5 hours (presumably including stops).
Door-to-door, driving is still 5.5 hours. Air travel adds at least half an hour to get to and from the airport, another half hour to get on and off the plane, and at least another quarter hour for getting to the gate early enough, assuming no check in, checkpoint pantomime, baggage, or other delays, for a grand total of 2 hours (well, 3 hours if I'm trying to get into downtown LA at the wrong time). Even if the train is a quarter hour faster to get on and off, that's 3.5 hours.
If I'm going to Pasadena, driving is still 5.5 hours, but air and rail are 2.5-3.5 and 4. Add Threat Level Burnt-Umber to the equation, and air jumps to 3.5-4.5. I imagine that, until the first terrorist incident, HSR will remain at 3.5.
If I can't leave until noon, when flights (and, presumably, trains) are only once every couple-three hours, driving is 5.5 hours, air 4.5-5.5, and HSR 5.5.
Suddenly, I'm wondering where all my saved time went :)
A worse air travel scenario actually occurred in recent memory, where a combination of my travel companion's schedule restrictions, excessive waits at the checkpoint, and mechanical trouble, caused flying to take longer door-to-door than driving would have, with only a net break-even for the round trip.
i know i'll be downgraded for saying this and i'm ok with that because most of the hackers are apple lovers and this is hackers community and not marketing forum :) but anyway if you think that apple charges reasonably for their products then you've no clue how apple is doing in other parts of the world - marketing research says that companies like apple had made money from westerners ONLY !!!
yes, apple offers quality products
yes, apple charges for premium
yes, apple has all the innovation working for them ....
But
Apple is a hit in western world only where people spend blindly .... look at the success rate of apple in 3rd world countries (where population is huge) - you will know that they are nowhere in top 10 --- surprised? let me give you an example:
ipod: a music player that is a huge hit in north-america is a super-flop product amongst south-asians!!! WHY? Why people who are known as a smartest consumers in the world don't buy ipods? the reason is not only the price of an ipod but also the lack of features in ipods ... the other mp3 player offer way more features than ipods ... and sound quality is as good as ipods .... So why one would pay more price for less features and get a same quality of output???????????? this is not me who is saying it, its a huge market research for all the premium products that has a good following in western countries but no takers in other parts of the world.
So the same product that we call "premium" in america (or western world) is labeled as a "rip-off" in other parts of the world where a person is called as a foolish for paying more price and getting same quality output but way less features...
yes, a lot of us here are partial to apple's products. but we still like to hear opposing viewpoints, so long as it's done respectfully. telling us that we 'have no clue' is not respectful. that's why you're getting downmodded, not because you're taking an opposing view.
There's a way of saying what I think you're trying to say. Unfortunately I think you failed in the method of delivery. Personally I see that (part of) the success is the fashion element of the iPod etc and I feel this has a stronger pull in the west than elsewhere, partly because of the sophistication of the marketing machine.
If companies (private or state owned) are making huge profits at the cost of tax-payers money, then capitalism or socialism doesn't make any differences...