Umm, cuz they don't like pressing '1 for English' when they call the cable company? Thought that was implied.

Someone ought to remind them that the whole reason they are in the middle of the country is that their goofy-language speaking ancestors weren't welcomed on the east coast.

I got that beat.

Not sure about the south i live in north east rural flyover land. Id look at college diversity numbers since the more diverse a town is the more tolerance they should show to diversity.

In addition to being completely circular, I don't think this is really true as a matter of historical fact. In small scale societies, the political leaders are usually older folks who are trusted in the community, are thought of as wise, and who are from the economic upper strata. Even in the pre-mass-politics era, most of the politically powerful people would have been chosen mostly for their ability and loyalty (from among the narrow caste of eligible people determined by birth). For example, a 17th century king is not going to choose his finance minister because he's the tallest candidate or for his fetching hairstyle, he's going to choose the finance minister he thinks can come up with money to fund the army.

It's mostly when you get into big democracies, and especially mass media democracies, where "charisma," which is basically a euphemism for the dark triad personality traits, becomes important over actual qualifications. It's not a coincidence that FDR, Mr. Charisma, was also a notorious schemer who played all of his advisors off against each other and, most famously, went to his grave not having told his successor Truman about the atomic bomb. Also not a coincidence that charismatic Bill Clinton was, at a minimum, an epic philanderer and has at least been accused of being a rapist. Charismatic Trump's only notable qualities are an epic level of narcissism and a freakish talent for flattering people's hatreds and insecurities.

Seems remiss not to mention the doube jaw when discussing alien. Was it in the original Alien?

Yep both good. My list was very drunkenly hastily compiled.

Yeah it pops out a couple times.

Right, it's very possible whatever we're calling charisma in political leaders became a much bigger deal in the newsreel era and later.

Saw this article about how the DC Metro has become a cautionary tale to transportation experts around the world and it reminded me of this discussion from last month's LC thread:

Topically, I visited Europe last month and was pretty blown away by the wonders of the Paris metro. Tickets are $1.65 (at current exchange rate), trains are fast and come often, and the network covers the city so densely that it felt anytime we were going somewhere, we were within a few blocks of a station and could get anywhere else in the city with between 0-2 transfers.

The idea of taking an Uber anywhere became stupid, because the metro is so good. Then I came home to the city that birthed Uber and realized how much different (and better) life could be here if we had a transportation system that actually felt like it could take you places, instead of a more expensive system ($2.25 tickets) of mostly slow buses where any trip involving a transfer is likely to be in the ~hour range. I'm fascinated by how some transit systems can be so good while others can be so dysfunctional; what are they doing differently? Why does the US in particular seem to suck at it (though I've never experienced NYC's which is supposed to be good?)?

One caveat: there is clearly not a French with Disabilities Act, because it is not possible to get around those stations in a wheelchair. (Stockholm had a good metro too though, with elevators at all stations that I saw)

San Francisco population density: 7,174/km
New York: 10,831/km
Paris: 21,000/km

Los Angeles has an extensive system of electric street cars if this map from the 1940s is accurate.

Is this liberal elite, or just city life?



https://twitter.com/jonathanchait/st...30030765146117

You can tell the people who live in this beautiful mansion are not elitists because of the overalls, tattoos and flamethrower.



And their Cadillac is a pick up truck.

This saddens me personally; I remember using the Metro waaay back in the day and thought it was decent and even ~4 years ago I was using it to commute and it kinda wasn't that bad, but these days the whole system is just FUBAR and a national embarrassment for the capital city of a 1st-world nation.

DC is kind of a special case in dysfunction in that it's subject to grossly incompetent federal oversight that can override local control plus it's got a huge black population so you know civil services get massively ****ed over at every opportunity.

Yeah, Parisians definitely get more bang for their buck than we would. This is what SF's train system looks like, fwiw (using my best mspaint skills on a map of population density):



Red = Muni trains (city), orange = BART (connects to east bay). BART is subway the whole way, but most of the Muni trains basically become street-level trams (so, much slower) as soon as you get out of the downtown Market Street corridor.

Most of the population north of Golden Gate Park (including me ) thus have buses as their only transit option. I get that less density means we don't deserve to have quite as nice things as Paris, but as you pointed out we aren't far off NYC in that category and our transit is not even a contest against theirs.

San Francisco assembling a collection of vintage streetcars from around the country (world even) is like the greatest thing ever.

The Richmond District? You might as well live in Walnut Creek bro.

That's kinda true. I live near the Marina though.

Random London-related thing that doesn't seem like it should go in the London thread since it's more about the American news media - dunno how many of you watched the NBA Finals game tonight but leading into it, ABC had a promo for Good Morning America tomorrow. It was set to slightly chilling music and had a voice recruited straight from horror movie trailers and said something like "Manchester - London - Britain has been attacked! Are you safe?" with photos of cops carrying rifles and **** like that. "Tune in to Good Morning America tomorrow to find out!"

We. Are. All. ****ed. Go **** yourself ABC, that **** is awful. They want us to be afraid, which incidentally is a goal of ISIS as well!

SF Metro's problem is most of the trains have to run above ground as well as underground - so they're subject to traffic and get backed up. NY Subway doesn't have to contend with that.

I think a factor in North America's generally ****ty transit is that most American cities had major population growth after cars where widely available. Places where the infrastructure was built specifically to allow cars to get around will have a very hard time unwinding all that to put in place a mass transit system based on efficient underground trains. In densely populated areas full of streets that are designed for cars, the timelines for building a subway line is going to be decades. Very few politicians have an appetite for projects that will introduce a ton of road closures and taxes now so that there will be a good subway system in 30 years. By contrast, a place like Paris opened their subway in 1900 when the population was in the millions. This is also true of NYs relatively good subway system, which opened in 1904, 4 years before the Model T went into production.

Other American cities that didn't have populations dense enough to support transit systems in the early 1900s ended up with buses because it's a lot easier to put buses on roads that already exist than it is to tear up roads and houses to build a subway line.

Yeah, the metro is great for Paris itself, which had a larger population in 1901 than it does today. Out in the banlieue, where the growth in the metropolitan area population took place (an extra 2m back then compared to an extra 10m today) the public transport is far worse and relies mostly on buses and overground trains with a few tram lines. There's plans to build new metro lines in the banlieue over the next decade, but we'll see.

As I understand it, though, the US actually got rid of public transport systems at times. Paris had a great head start, but it certainly had to continue to invest in the metro as a solution for most of its citizens a large proportion of the time over the last 100-odd years. The quality of service and price of a metro ticket (or monthly pass as most people who live here have) is always an issue in local politics.

Workplace shooting here in Orlando, multiple fatalities being reported

9 people were killed by WMATA back in 2009 due to faulty maintenance. Not ideal.

More generally, low urban density in the U.S. is definitely a problem, but paradoxically U.S. construction costs for new projects are also the highest in the world. U.S. subways had to be built out more recently, but somehow the infrastructure is more antiquated. U.S. subways are generally less automated than in other countries (very interesting list here) but also more dangerous. U.S. standards for rolling stock are backwards and out of touch with global best practice. Buses are second-class citizens to cars and are solely for poor people, not a part of the transit infrastructure.

Population density in the DC metro area: 419/km. DC isn't going to get decent metro until they say **** you to all the suburbanites and white flighters and just concentrate on getting the city transit in order, then working outwards from there. Instead they're building lines out to ****ing Loudoun County, which is further away from the city than Baltimore.