Viewing profile — bryananderson

Yeah I am not taking a position on how the market will do in the future. Just saying that active investing will underperform passive unless you are one of the few market participan…

You may wish it were not so, you may find it inelegant and infuriating and unfair, but it is a fact that retail investors nearly all underperform the market over a long enough time…

It does not, but it has a sane scheduling agreement with the railroad which the railroad actually respects. This is a common misconception because Brightline’s parent company Flori…

Italy has not exactly privatized high speed rail. The public rail operator Trenitalia is by far the largest high speed rail operator in the country. And it’s great. What Italy has …

> And personally, I'm for having English be the national language of America (as a bilingual American myself) Why are you for this? What problem does this solve, and how? Seems to …

What about the principle of reciprocity? China doesn’t allow US social media companies to operate there—why should the US unilaterally allow Chinese social media companies to opera…

Maoism-Bainism with Stanford characteristics

People with other options don’t take the train in (most of) the USA because the trains in (most of) the USA are bad. Of course the US is far larger than any single EU country, but …

Attitudes are not the same thing as behaviors. Source: I’m from a really red state with a higher rate of overdose deaths than California

“Go to Vietnam” is maybe not the most practical suggestion for grabbing a cup of coffee, but that’s where I found the best Vietnamese coffee. As others have said, Vietnamese coffee…

Unlike every person born before me and every person born after me—all of whom insist their childhood was the zenith—my childhood was actually the zenith

In this case it’s not tokenization. I wrote the text preprocessing code that deals with spacing these numbers. This is good feedback. It’s optimized for US-style 10-digit phone num…

FWIW the issue is not mostly the builders—the issue is contracting practices and program management/oversight. California HSR hired (among other contractors) Dragados, which has a …

Yes but as I understand it the very limited freight service on the peninsula just runs to a nearby UP yard. These are not big long-distance freight trains

Yes, unfortunately, but the freight traffic (which will needlessly stay diesel) is small, just a couple trains per day. It’s not the 1940s anymore when huge amounts of freight came…

This book is by Bent Flyvbjerg, the lead author of the paper being discussed here. He’s done a lot of great scholarship on how megaprojects go haywire, and uniqueness bias is defin…

I’m sorry to be negative because I agree with the general sentiment that society needs to stop treating “home value go up” as its primary retirement plan, and get rid of our allerg…

If you’re right, they did a stellar job of hiding it from the engineers working on the devices! Or maybe I’m one of the deep state cutouts. One never knows for sure.

This is hysterical. I never owned one until I worked on the product because I worried it was always recording/transmitting. Turns out it’s not. Promise. You don’t need a shadowy go…

Just what I remember from an internship. A quick google search just shows a few puff pieces.

Sometime in the early 2000s they generated all the flight code for the James Webb Space Telescope from UML diagrams with Rational Rose. Over a decade later they were still trying t…

Yeah, great point, especially since points are often the next bottleneck after station dwells (I’m thinking especially of BART’s Oakland Wye here). Close following really does not …

As others have pointed out, most of this is a good idea and already exists in the form of moving-block communications-based train control which is used all over the world. The part…

Like it or not, the job of the NASA administrator is not to actually do science or engineering, it is to fight for the agency’s budget with the President and Congress—a job for whi…

The way the Buy America rules work, there’s a certain percentage of work that has to be done in the US, and the rest can be done overseas. My understanding is that Stadler does mos…