Just watch, Brightline West will complete on time and people will bitch about how CAHSR is moving so slowly… as if CAHSR isn’t tied up with other vital projects like the CalTrain modernization/electrification, hundreds upon hundreds of grade separations, almost a dosen stations being built from scratch, infrastructure improvements all throughout the Central Valley, etc, etc, the list goes on for miles. Meanwhile, BWHSR has the task of eating up a mostly flat ROW that’s already cleared and build like three stations max. There’s no comparing them to one another and yet idiots will… same with Texas Central.

Yep. So too did the Interstate system. There needs to be a federal backed program, with dollar matching at the state and local level just like the interstate highway system.

This is accurate. On the private sector side it’s the same. One of the things driving up costs is that the private sector doesn’t have a company big enough to do this job, so Cali HSR is sub-contractors all the way down. Every private company contacted by the government has to be vetted and then there’s the paper work on contacts and those contacts need to be enforced by yet more people who need yet more contracts.

How China built so much so fast was that the PRC national government founded a handful of big companies (read: state-backed monopolies) to sort everything out and build it. Lots less overhead when one entity basically runs the whole show. China HSR is corporate vertical integration combined with centralized state planning on a scale that is only rivaled by other things the Chinese government has done before or that other nations have done however over longer periods of time (like the US’s Eisenhower Interstate Highway System… asperational national project on an immense scale and it took half a century because it was delegated to fifty states to plan and flesh out).

Same where I’m at. 😞

Yeah, us Americans never really moved away from SMS. I think probably BlackBerry messenger, back in the day, was probably the closest we came to having a messenger replace standard mobile texting along with Facebook Messenger and Insta DMs are pretty popular but never as used as plain old texting. Lately, I’ve seen Meta running ads stateside for WhatsApp. It’s weird because I’ve never seen them advertise anything before.

I like Android because I get more of a choice in phones than just the two or three on offer by Apple. I usually go with Samsung but I’ve had Motorola and LG before… just depends who’s got the best device in my price range.

Yeah, it could have been your instance having problems, not the third party app. That’s what I’ve been dealing with all week… it’s hard to judge apps when the platform itself is creaking under the weight of the influx of ten of thousands of new people literally overnight.

Been using Jerboa and Connect interchangeably for a couple of days to compare and contrast. Honestly Jerboa takes it, super stable and it’s been rolling with all the punches lemmy.world has been throwing it much better than Connect. I’d honestly recommend both, but Jerboa has been just slightly better in just overall UX. I’ll probably keep testing out the various apps for Android, but Jerboa will likely be my daily driver.

I’ve heard: “the customer is always right, until you get their money.”

That plus interest rates are going up. For twenty years VC’s has near limitless cheap loans, now they’ve got to be marginally more careful than before and the companies which grew large but only ever broke even (if that) now need to pivot to profitability to justify all the debt they took on. Would not be surprised if Uber and Lyft start really hiking rates soon.