If I understand correctly, the proposal would:

• terminate the Southwest Chief and Pennsylvanian service
• add a train with mixed consist of passenger cars and flat cars that will transport whole 18-wheelers, cab plus trailer, or charter buses
• will aim to do NYC to LA in 72 hours, or an average speed of at least 40 MPH (64 kph)
• introduce renovated or new bilevel passenger cars
• does not propose where or what facilities would be needed to drive vehicles onto the flat cars
• and somehow this can all be done by May 2026

What planet has this company been inhabiting that they think this is a reasonable proposal?

Just from the freight perspective, surely it would be simpler and easier to send intermodal freight by rail and then have short-haul trucking at the bookends, rather than what seems to be a boneheaded plan to put long-haul trucking on rails.

The shrinking interest in working long-haul truck routes will not be alleviated by spending rest time on a train, since the root complaint about the job is how much time is spent away from home and family. And I can’t see why the host railroads would be fine with Amtrak – aka the National Railroad Passenger Corporation – carrying freight.

I sense something deeply amiss or even quite possibly scammy about this.

Once again, the editor fails to capture in the headline what nuance the author so painstakingly wrote into the article:

A two-wheel machine without pedals IS NOT an ebike. Those are motorcycles (aka motorbikes).

Even the police got it right, with both Irvine and Desert Hot Springs PD referring to the arrests as involving an electric dirt bike and a minibike, respectively, which are types of motorcycles. The author even goes through pains to describe how such electric motorbikes exist outside the three regulated classes of actual e-bikes.

To be abundantly clear, I’m not a fan of unfettered spying by police drones, nor am I a fan of disincentives to electric mobility. But here, the editor is pulling a stunt out of Orwell’s 1984 by diluting the meaning of commonly understood words. I am not having this.

Link to the blog post with the background on why this was made : https://ericwbailey.website/published/you-must-listen-to-rfc-2119/

I mean, amateur radio was illegal to encrypt

Was? I’m not familiar with a jurisdiction that presently allows licensed amateur radio operators to send encrypted or even obfuscated messages, with the unique exception of control-and-command instructions for amateur radio satellites. The whole exercise of ham radio is to openly communicate, with other frequencies and services available for encrypted comms and whatever else.

To be abundantly clear, I very much support encryption because it keeps good people honest and frustrates bad people. But it’s hard to see how, for ham radio, encryption could be reconciled with the open and inviting spirit that has steered the radio community for over a century. In a lot of ways, hams were doing FOSS well before the acronym came into existence.

I have great admiration for the radio operators, precisely because when all the major infrastructure falters, it takes only a battery and a wire up a tree to recover some semblance of connectivity.

(this is entirely tangential to the OP’s question, but I feel like hams deserve a good word every so often. Also, I understand that last weekend was ARRL Field Day in the USA)

When traveling in Japan, I do recall seeing TVs marked in inches. But in a world where globalization has made goods ever more accessible and affordable, this shouldn’t be too surprising.

Another example of ostensibly American or British Imperial units, lots of plumbing around the world is sized in inches or fractions of inches. But even in the USA, there might not be any dimension which actually measures the same as the trade designation. For example, 1/2-inch Schedule 40 PVC pipe has an inner and outer diameter that is larger than 0.5 inch (12.7 mm). In the UK, I understand that they might round off these trade designations to centimeters, but I have no idea if that would then reflect their true outside diameter or if it’s just a straight conversion of the trade destination.

Aviation also uses feet for altitude in most of the world, with even ardently metric countries like Russia changing in 2017-2020 from meters to feet. In all these cases, it’s ultimately a matter of harmonization to reduce confusion and increase compatibility, either technically, procedurally, or economically.

I’m no expert in New York City governance; I’m not even on the same coast as New York. West Coast, Best Coast.

With that said, NYC’s size and structure is not too dissimilar to that of a US State, save for a unicameral legislative body (New York City Council). Matching that, the Mayor of NYC is the head of the executive, with powers to appoint commissioners to various agencies and civil/criminal courts, as well as executive functions like administering city services like fire departments, police, and tax collection.

Meanwhile, the 51-member Council is headed by the Speaker, who presides over the body and controls the order that legislation is considered. So far as I can tell, the members are elected by district, every four years, so that each district has roughly the same population. So far, these procedures parallel those of US State governments.

As for the interplay between the Mayor and the Council, the defining criteria of any government is how it achieves its policy objectives, in passing the budget. Like with the California Governor, the Mayor’s office will propose – and later execute once duly-passed – the budget and the Council will consider and approve or reject it. The final budget is sent to the Mayor for ratification, but can also be vetoed. In this case, the Council can vote to override a mayoral veto.

So for the titular question, with regards to only the structure of the government of NYC, yes, the Council could very much block much of what a future Mayor Mamdani wants to achieve. The Council could do this by passing laws that mandate minimum fares for transit, forcing tax breaks for the wealthy, and anything else that directly counters his policies. But he could veto such laws, and the Council would have to muster some 2/3 of the votes to push it through.

In turn, though, a future Mayor Mamdani could potentially use his executive control to direct the transit system to vary (read: change) the tariff structure so that bus routes in less well-off neighborhoods become free. Within the parameters of existing law, the Mayor could also instruct the Police Chief to do (or not do) certain things, and this wouldn’t be within the Council’s direct control except that they could have a Council committee do an investigation and raise new legislation. But that goes back to what the Council can and can’t do.

Essentially, there’s a fair amount of ground for a progressive NYC Mayor to deliver campaign promises, except that the budget and existing laws will require working with the Council. But as a practical matter, if a future mayor wins a substantial fraction of the city-wide vote, it would be strange that 2/3 of the Council could be in staunch opposition.

And that budget vulnerability can actually be a negotiating tactic. Here in California, setting aside any broader opinions about the policies and wisdom of the currently second-term Governor of California, he managed to negotiate a bill to cut red-tape for housing (or roll-back environmental laws, depending on who you ask) and tie it to the state budget, due end of June. So when push comes to shove, when the budget is coming due, there would suddenly be room to negotiate, even with bitter enemies. No one respects a government that cannot pass a budget on-time.

I personally am of the opinion that when a legislative body wishes to obstruct, or when an executive wants to pursue a policy, then neither should half-arse it. A future Mayor Mamdani should force the Council to publicly reject what he wants to put forward, each and every time. Let the people of NYC see who is actually fighting for the citizenry, and who is kowtowing to monied interests. Commentators often talk about “spending political capital” when doggedly pursuing a policy, but that’s kinda the job: do it right, or step aside and let someone else do it. NYC deserves the best mayor they can get.

Although most Americans don’t tend to refer to Social Security as a “pension”, it does function very similarly to a “public pension”, insofar as providing income during old-age as well as disability and survivorship benefits. And outside the context of government workers (eg state employees or teachers) who still have actually public pensions, I don’t see it as confusing to refer to the publicly-administered Social Security system as the national pension system, even if not as extensive as other systems abroad.

This is especially true when comparing to “private pensions”, which in the past might have referred to pensions operated by a private company and with whom a worker might have been a lifelong employee. But with that model mostly disappearing except for maybe railroads and certain other industries, the term can now reasonably refer to 401(k) plans, which are managed by the individual, and is more common than actual pensions from a private company.

So yeah, it’s not colloquial American English, but I think personal finance circles would understand that “pension” can encompass a wide range of things.

Setting aside the cryptographic merits (and concerns) of designing your own encryption, can you explain how a URL redirector requiring a key would provide plausible deniability?

The very fact that a key is required – and that there’s an option for adding decoy targets – means that any adversary could guess with reasonable certainty that the sender or recipient of such an obfuscated link does in-fact have something to hide.

And this isn’t something like with encrypted messaging apps where the payload needs to be saved offline and brute-forced later. Rather, an adversary would simply start sniffing the recipient’s network immediately after seeing the obfuscated link pass by in plain text. What their traffic logs would show is the subsequent connection to the real link, and even if that’s something protected with HTTPS – perhaps https://ddosecrets.com/ – then the game is up because the adversary can correctly deduce the destination from only the IP address, without breaking TLS/SSL.

This is almost akin to why encrypted email doesn’t substantially protect the sender: all it takes is someone to do a non-encryted reply-all and the entire email thread is sent in plain text. Use PGP or GPG to encrypt attachments to email if you must, or just use Signal which Just Works ™ for messaging. We need not reinvent the wheel when it’s already been built. But for learning, that’s fine. Just don’t use it in production or ask others to trust it.

Riders are not permanently affixed to a bike, so I’m struggling to see how a tuned mass damper could actually be tuned in this case. The very act of lifting off the saddle would briefly change the required tuning, and it’s illogical to tune to just the bike’s resonant frequency when the rider would change that value.

If this were touted as a simple “mass damper”, that might be alright. Though static mass dampers – and tuned mass dampers that are improperly tuned – can exacerbate oscillations under the wrong circumstances.

For more about tuned mass dampers, Practical Engineering just released a video on Nebula available now (and free on YT soon) about liquid mass dampers, which is a type of tuned mass damper.

Based solely on this drawing – since I don’t have a datasheet for the PWM controller depicted – it looks like the potentiometer is there to provide a DC bias for the input Aux signal. I draw that conclusion based on the fact that the potentiometer has its extents connected to Vref and GND, meaning that turning the wiper would be selecting a voltage somewhere in-between those two voltage levels.

As for how this controls the duty cycle of the PWM, it would depend on the operating theory of the PWM controller. I can’t quite imagine how the controller might produce a PWM output, but I can imagine a PDM output, which tends to be sufficient for approximating coarse audio.

But the DC bias may also be necessary since the Aux signal might otherwise try to go below GND voltage. The DC bias would raise the Aux signal so that even its lowest valley would remain above GND.

So I think that’s two reasons for why the potentiometer cannot be removed: 1) the DC bias is needed for the frequency control, and 2) to prevent the Aux signal from sinking below GND.

If you did want to replace the potentiometer with something else, you could find a pair of fixed resistors that would still provide the DC bias. I don’t think you could directly connect the Aux directly into the controller.

Another example of 120: the California State Legislature is a bicameral body with 120 total members, with 80 in the Assembly (lower house) and 40 in the Senate (upper house).

And a related piece of trivia regarding fractional currencies: although the USD has been decimalized more-or-less since its inception, the USA stock markets continued to use fractional prices for shares up until 2001, down to 1/16 of a dollar.

are not audio drivers but PWM drivers

They can be both! A Class D audio amplifier can be constructed by rendering an audio signal into a PWM or PDM output signal, then passed through an RC filter to remove the switching noise, yielding only the intended audio.

That said, in this case, using the unfiltered PWM output would work for greeting cards, where audio fidelity is not exactly a high priority, but minimal parts count is.

This made me wonder if normal PWM controllers could be used to drive more power full LEDs.

What exactly did you have in mind as a “normal PWM controller”? There’s a great variety of drivers that produce a PWM signal, some in the single watt category and some in the tens of kilowatts.

Whether they can drive “more powerful” LEDs is predominantly a function of the voltage and current requirements to fully illuminate the LEDs, plus what switching frequency range the LEDs can tolerate. Some LED modules that have built-in capacitors cannot be driven effectively using PWM, as well as anything which accepts AC rather than DC power. You’d need a triac to dim AC LED modules, and yet still, some designs simply won’t dim properly.

My idea was to just remove the potentiometer and feed in music from Aux at that point.

You’ll have to provide a schematic, as I’m not entirely sure where this potentiometer is. But be aware that the output current needed to drive a small speaker is probably insufficient to light up a sizable LED, nevermind the possibility of not even having enough voltage to meet the required forward voltage drop of the LED.

Is there a chance of this working?

It might, but only if everything just happens to line up. But otherwise, it’s likely that it won’t work as-is, due to insufficient drive current.

A phone playing a video would not be sufficient to establish that you were at home, but merely that the phone was powered on somewhere. But if YouTube had records that indicated your phone was connecting using an IP address at your home, then the phone’s location could be ascertained.

But that still doesn’t say anything about where you are, since not everyone – even in 2025 – carries their phone every time they leave home.

But if YouTube also registered a Like on a video at a particular time, and it can separately be proved that no one else could be at your house and no one else connected to your home network, and that your phone was not modified in such a way to fake such an action (eg a VPN), then this would be enough circumstantial evidence to convince a jury that you were probably at home.

And if home is nowhere near the murder scene, then this could be a defense.

Maybe. As you can see, a lot of "if"s are needed to string together an alibi, let alone a good one.

In much of the USA, the county-level is the administrator for deed recording and for land parceling. Municipalities (eg cities, towns) within the county may have their own zoning rules, and so the question can be divided in two:

1-meter-squared chunks

Zoning laws can enforce minimum lot sizes. For example, an agricultural or business district might disallow plots smaller than 5 acre or 2000 sqft, respectively, because anything smaller would become economically infeasible for those purposes. A legitimate goal of zoning is to make land more economically productive, and plots that are oddly-shaped or impractically small would be counterproductive. The county and cities would also be concerned with tax revenue per area, which scales up with productivity of land (for whatever use is permitted in zoning). Note: I’m not a fan of American-style zoning, which has proven to be quite overburdening and frequently racist over the last 100 years.

But setting aside zoning, there’s also the matter of land administration. Subdividing a parcel into smaller lots is common, but since those small lots will take up ledger and deed records at the registrar’s office, that adds a non-insignificant cost per plot. Easily several hundred dollars per subdivision, as the process is normally meant for larger real estate transactions in preparation for development.

sell each of those sections to different people

Land transaction costs in the USA are not uniform throughout the country, but they often amount to several thousands just to verify title to land. Part of the problem is that most states don’t keep an authoritative land registry that shows exactly who owns what. Instead, title insurance companies make money by assuring the title after a process that investigates the land’s title history. Here in California, that history often has to be traced back to Mexican land grants in the 1800s, which is kinda nuts just to sell a small home.

Sure, for a 1 sq meter plot – which no one should ever buy using a mortgage – the buyer might not need/want title insurance. But the lack of title provenance inflates purchase prices, simply because people do want to know that they’re actually buying something real and it’s not a worthless deed.

(as an aside, it’s entirely possible in California and other states to sell a deed for land you might own, but which the seller makes no guarantee that they do in fact own. It’s kinda like a fork in cryptocurrency, where if the fork is later rejected, then that part of the ledger history is entirely dead and you’re SOL. Again, we could really use a central land registry, and not a process based wholly on easily-forged deeds…)

If I wanted to ensure that my land would never be used for a shopping mall or sports stadium

The simple answer is to donate your land to a conservation group, who often buy land to protect it from development. They can and do pay market rates, but if you did want the land to be something that isn’t a wildlife preserve, then alternatively, you can sell the land but retain the development rights. That way, you (and your heirs) would retain a choice in whatever future development happens, though how long this deed restriction lasts will depend on jurisdiction. Or you can sell the development rights to a conservation group, so that the party owning the land and the party owning the development rights are separate entities with different objectives.

I’m hoping to take my Tucktec with me by cycling to the nearby lake later this summer, once I finish building a suitable carrier. This is the only nearby body of water that doesn’t require me to drive out to, so I’m hoping it works out.

Here in California, we too know the dangers of wildfires and I’m sorry for your loss. I hope you do find something to fill the paddling void.

“running start” would be the closest thing I could think of in American English, but it’s not a perfect match. As it pertains to kayaking, a “running start” would be understood as some sort of momentum transfer while simultaneously hopping into the kayak.

But still, that definition is what a typical American would imagine if you said “kayak running start”. So perhaps not totally identical to what I think you’re describing.

You can’t just point your spacecraft into space, give it a boost and be flying off into the void forever.

To be clear, is the reason this is not sufficient for flying forever is due to orbital mechanics making “point and shoot” not feasible if aiming in a straight line for the void? Or because the boost isn’t sufficient to escape the planetary system’s influence and thus still predominantly subject to its gravitation pull? Or both?

shouting style betting

I don’t have the answer to your question at large, but your description reminded me of the old method of how stock trading floors used to work. My understanding is that it involved lots of yelling and hand signals, with video of the whole process likely available online.

This 100%. It behooves anyone that isn’t interested in the credit “rat race” to keep and use credit union accounts regularly, because credit unions can and do lend based solely on long-standing financial relationships, even if that means just having a 4-year old checking account that receives consistent direct deposits every other week. This sort of relationship-centric model is something the big-name banks have all but abdicated.

The best time to open a credit union account was years ago. The next best time is Right Now.

I’m not sure if there’s some detail I’m missing, but dealerships here in California and elsewhere that have in-house finance staff execute their work as loan agents for an affiliated-but-external lender (often a big-name bank). That is, the dealership themselves do not issue loans but if someone comes in without financing, the finance person can process a loan application with the dealership’s affiliated lender on-the-spot to complete the car deal.

Thus, the dealership is primarily concerned with selling cars and shouldn’t really care how they’re paid for, whether fully in cash, financed through the affiliated lender, or financed through your own lender (eg already getting pre-approval through your credit union). Any marketing promise by the dealership of “no application refused” is likely hollow, since it’s the lender that decides (with the rare exception of a dealership that genuinely lends on business credit).

Do people use outside financing for used cars? Absolutely! It’s almost the bread-and-butter for credit unions to extend credit to their members specifically to buy used cars, because used car financing at dealerships is notoriously predatorial, due to being unable to “shop around” for a better rate. And credit unions have few qualms with offering loans to long-time checking customers that don’t have a credit history. Credit unions in the USA are the closest thing we have today – despite the word “credit” in the name – to community banking, where “credit reports” are simply unnecessary and the needs of the members are paramount, tied together by preexisting, long-term social connections.