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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • Public transportation in cities varies. But inter-city transportation? In most of the USA you simply cannot travel between towns or cities on public transportation. There are a few inter-city bus options (Greyhound, Flix, Megabus), but those don’t go everywhere.

    The rail options outside of the NE corridor (Boston to Washington DC, basically) are very sparse. Here’s the map: https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/Maps/Amtrak-System-Map-020923.pdf

    That’s it. Most of those routes are at most once per day in each direction. So if you city even has a stop (which it probably doesn’t) the train may only come through in the middle of the night. Some routes are only 3x/week. And because of the massive distances involved and old equipment, it takes at least 70h+ to travel from coast to coast (more really, since connection times are long) and costs twice the price of a 6h flight ($250+ vs $80-120).

    Trains are often on schedule, but can be many hours late. Once they are off schedule they are at the mercy of the freight train lines (who own the tracks) for passing. You can get stuck behind a slow moving cargo train for many hours.

    Why is it like this? It’s complicated. But it starts with very low population density, large areas/distances, and a very different relationship between the individual and the state in the US vs most of Europe. Add the rise of suburbs in the automobile right when many US cities were growing. Another factor is public attitudes. People think that public transportation is for poor people. I know people who have never ridden a city bus, and I live in a city that probably has above average public transportation for the region.

    Anyway, as a public transportation rider-by-choice I feel your pain. Having spent a few weeks in Germany recently (with a DT for travel), and having ridden extensively on US train and bus networks, yous is definitely much, much better. Resist the politics of privatization and decay.







  • After you know the wattage of your load, use the Runtime tab on the product page to see how much runtime you get at a given wattage. https://www.cyberpowersystems.com/product/ups/smart-app-lcd/or1500lcdrm1u/
    The one you have selected will have 2 minutes of runtime ~900w on a fresh battery. If all you want to do is clean shutdown, that’s probably fine (as long as you don’t have brief power drops that you want your shutdown procedure to ignore). If you need more time then you’ll need a different UPS.

    Note that some UPS models will do better for a given task than others with similar specs. For example I have a ~100w homelab, and wanted maximum runtime for 50w during a power outage (servers off, router+switch+aps active). Some similar spec Cyberpower models were ~120 minute runtime at 50w while others were 200+ for the same load.