In my entire life, I've never paid for something by check and been told I couldn't take my purchase until the check cleared. Not once. That isn't how the real world works.

Wrong. I saved the car dealer $800. The price for me is the same, unless they have a lower price when paying by check. Which some merchants do, because they can't afford to absorb the credit card fees.

ACH transfer fees cost an average of about 40 cents.

Credit card processing fees average about 2% (plus a fixed amount, usually around 10 to 25 cents).

If you buy a car for $40,000 and pay by check, the average fee is 40 cents. If you pay by credit card, the average fee is $800.

The crazy thing is that a check is basically just a direct transfer between bank accounts done inconveniently. If you do the transfer by typing the information into a computer, you get charged a fee. But if you do it by writing the information on a piece of paper and then taking a photo of it, then it's free. This makes no sense, but that's how it works.

Except that they aren't.

Here's the data on violent crime. The five worst states are Alaska, New Mexico, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana, a predominantly conservative bunch. The five best states are Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Wyoming, a predominantly liberal bunch.

The economic data is even more striking. Whether you look at per-capita GDP, poverty, financial distress, median household income, or just about anything else, you find a lot of liberal states clustered at the top and a lot of conservative states clustered at the bottom.

Let me fix that:

Creating the new by swallowing and regurgitating the old is how nearly all art has been created for as long as anyone can remember. You don't create in a vacuum. You take existing ideas and existing styles, remix them, and create something new out of them. If you do it well, the result is original and artistic. If you do it badly, the result is conventional and formulaic. Most art ends up being conventional, but that's ok. Not everything needs to be a work of genius.

According to https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F..., the total length of that project was only 26 miles. The final cost was £18.8 billion, or about $24.6 billion USD.

The distance from San Francisco to Los Angeles is about 350 miles. Assume about half that distance is densely populated and has a similar cost per mile as the London project. That leads to a total estimated cost of about $165 billion, not counting the other half of the distance that should be much less expensive.

In fact the most recent estimate for the cost of the actual project is $128 billion.

The interstate highway system was built a long time ago when population density was a lot lower. Highways mostly went through countryside between cities. With time cities grew up around them, but the highways remained barriers with only infrequent places to cross from one side to the other.

Building a new highway through the middle of a city would be just as fantastically expensive as building a new high speed rail line through the middle of a city. Boston's Big Dig was a famous instance of trying to do that. It took 15 years to build and cost $14.6 billion for just a few miles of road.

A single grade separation costs tens of millions at a minimum, and can easily go into the hundreds of millions. Optimistically assume you need ten grade separations per mile at an average cost of $50 million. That's half a billion dollars per mile just for grade separations.

California tried it and it hasn't gone well. It turns out that building high speed rail lines is really hard and expensive. Not building the line itself, but everything else around it.

First you need to acquire the land. It's not too hard when building lines through the middle of nowhere, but in a place that's already densely populated, that can be fantastically expensive. It likely means demolishing a lot of existing houses and businesses to make room for the train. Grade crossings don't play well with high speed rail, so every single street that crosses your proposed route needs a grade separation, which also is fantastically expensive. Or you can just close it off, but it turns out communities really don't like you closing off their streets and cutting the community in half. Then there's the communities that don't want the noise of trains going through all day and night. And don't dismiss that as nimbyism. I've lived near a train line, and it really kind of sucks.

The big expansion of rail in the US and Europe was a long time ago, when population density was a lot lower and these problems were easier to deal with. Rail lines were built through the countryside to connect cities. Today they have to run right through the middles of cities for much of their length.

The author of this article is confused about what they're saying and makes some incorrect claims about it.

No, it's still accelerating. They aren't disputing that. They're saying that it's not accelerating as quickly as it used to. It's a higher derivative. There's the size of the universe. Its first derivative is the rate of expansion. That's positive: the universe is expanding. Its second derivative is the rate of acceleration. That's also positive: the rate of expansion is increasing. People have mostly assumed the rate of acceleration was constant (third derivative is zero). These people claim the acceleration is decreasing with time (third derivative is negative).

If there's any moisture on it, that might actually happen. Evaporative cooling is very efficient, including in space. Not much good for a data center that would need a constant supply of water, though.

Because of course there's no such thing as space law that governs what you do in space and allows countries to regulate it.

Attributing California's high prices to wildfires is misleading. Following deregulation in the 1990s, the utilities realized they could boost profits if they didn't "waste" money on routine maintenance. They cut back spending and let the grid decay. Eventually it started igniting fires and killing people. By that point, the money they had siphoned off to give to investors was long gone. The people were stuck paying to rebuild the grid after years of mismanagement.

So yes, there's a connection to wildfires, but they're more an effect than a cause. Paying for all the deferred maintenance is a one time cost. As the grid gets back into shape (and it has improved a lot over the last five years), the cost should go down, or at least not rise as fast as other places.

More generally, the pessimists are doing a lot better than the optimists. We now have the pervasive surveillance of 1984, the media obsession of Max Headroom, the huge gap between rich and poor of most cyberpunk. We're well on our way to the environmental collapse and mass extinctions of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the social isolation and over-dependence on technology of The Machine Stops, the hypercapitalism of Snow Crash.

On the other side, the optimistic predictions are doing really badly. Do you see any sign of a Star Trek economy? Asimov's provably benevolent robots? The open frontiers of most space opera?

Neither do I.

I'm against online devices that have no reason to be online. My oven can connect to the internet. Why would anyone think I want my oven to connect to the internet? My dishwasher can connect to the internet. Why would anyone think I want my dishwasher to connect to the internet? I just can't figure out any scenario where an internet connection helps these appliances to do their job better.

Even the justifications from the manufacturer hardly make sense. If I installed their app on my phone, I could scan the barcode on a frozen dinner and it would automatically set the oven to the correct temperature. Is that actually supposed to be easier than entering the temperature myself? It's obvious the only reason the online feature exists at all is to get me to install an app on my phone, which they can use to spy on me.