Interesting Links for 21-01-2024

[andrewducker]

1. Covid Inquiry has my informal messages, says Sturgeon

(tags:Scotland communication pandemic )

2. Turns out that when you run the Hugo awards in a non-democratic country the voting results may look... questionable.

(tags:Hugo voting convention scifi )

3. The UK desperately needs to build massive amounts of housing

(tags:UK housing Scotland )

4. US to get first dedicated high-speed railway - helped by Network Rail

(tags:UK USA trains California )

Comments

[cmcmck]

Sigh :o(

They can build one in the US but fail abysmally to build one here.

Levelling up, anyone?.........

[rhythmaning]

The post on the Hugo voting was really interesting (surprising since I read little science fiction, and no non-mainstream SFF). As is often the case, the lack of explanation and the apparent attempts to obscure make things worse rather than better!

[andrewducker]

Alas, that's the Chinese government way!

[rhythmaning]

genuine lol!!!

[greenwoodside]

Re: Hugos. One of the blogs referred to in the linked article suggested that the very obvious data butchery could be a quiet protest from the compilers. I think that could be true, and hope they don't have to suffer for it.

[movingfinger]

4. Oh, this isn't going to go well. Never contract transit construction to a firm from a primarily English-speaking country (paraphrase) is a byword for a reason. The US doesn't want this project to succeed.

[drplokta]

The numbers in the article on high-speed rail don’t add up.

“Brightline West, which the government claims will serve more than 11 million passengers annually, will comprise a 218-mile line connecting Las Vegas and the outskirts of Los Angeles, where passengers can transfer onto suburban services.

“Travelling at 186 mph, the route has an estimated journey time of two hours and 10 minutes – less than half the time of the five hours it takes to travel between the two metropolises by car.”

218 miles at 186mph takes one hour and 10 minutes, not two hours and 10 minutes (ignoring acceleration/deceleration times and any intermediate stops, of which there will apparently be two, but any rational design will have bypass tracks so that they can run fast services non-stop between the endpoints as well as slower stopping services).

[andrewducker]

Interesting. The figures match the projects own website. https://www.brightlinewest.com/

I wonder what the explanation is.

[drplokta]

My uninformed guess would be that they’re buying rolling stock that can technically go at 186mph so that they can call it high-speed rail for PR purposes, but they won’t be building much of the track to that standard and will actually be running at similar speeds to the main lines in the UK.

[andrewducker]

Could well be. The line doesn't look very straight, and I expect that they've not actually designed it so that they can run a non-stopping service.

[bens_dad]

3 Housing. The article doesn't match your headline.

Whilst the article talks about homelessness I see no suggestion that we need to *build* more.
The issue seems to be affordability. Yes, increasing the supply of *suitable* homes should reduce the price, so that could help.

The new houses that I see being built are, often large, ticky-tacky boxes crammed together or an occasional one squeezed into a corner somewhere. Usually you need a car to get to/from them. They are not potential homes for a separated man working in a chip shop, nor is it likely that a chip shop would open nearby.

I think that my new criteria for judging a housing development will be how likely that a chip shop will open up within it.

[andrewducker]

We have a massive housing shortage. We need more houses for the numbers of people that we have. This has been the case for decades, and has been getting increasingly worse. We need more homes for people to live in.

[andrewducker]

Just encountered figures for Edinburgh. In 1999 the population was 477k. It's now 559k.

So we need homes for 82k more people.

To give some context, the massive new area being planned to the west of the city will have...7k homes in it.

https://west-town-edinburgh.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/west_town_boards_final.pdf

So we need several of those. (It does look to have cafes, restaurants, and hopefully a chip shop.)

[channelpenguin]

Well, could always to a repeat of the whole New Towns thing from back in the day. LOL. This will NEVER happen.

I grew up in East Kilbride, which worked BRILLIANTLY ....UNTIL the large scale private building started, without the schools, shops, pubs, libraries, health centre "hubs" that the orginal planned council house developments had. Then it became a much worse place to live in pretty much all ways.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, when I see the large areas being built without all of the infrastructure I am completely baffled. It seems so obvious that it will go badly wrong.