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Think your country of Doodoovania is the greatest country on Earth? Then join the "Let's Build A Pyramid" competition.
Can only use ancient technology, no tractors, diesel trucks, pnumatic jack hammers, only bronze age tools.
Now here's the twist, since this would never happen, you program your
system and method of building a pyramid into an AI that generates a virtual competition and creates a time lapse movie of the different methods showing which would work best.
The results would be played to all the countries in real time with a winner declared by the first one that looks good.
Bad systems would be fun to watch, for instence sand berms holding 70 ton blocks in place might collapse and the whole thing would come tumbling down.
Since we're not exactly sure how they did it, this would also be interesting from an exploratory perspective too.
I wonder if anyone in the Bronze Age had pillows?
https://hypeandhype...s-biggest-mysteries
[a1, Nov 28 2023]
I vote for this guy.
https://en.wikipedi...g/wiki/Coral_Castle
Edward Leedscalnin. [2 fries shy of a happy meal, Nov 29 2023]
Sphinx
https://www.smithso...m%20wind%20erosion.
Wind May Have Helped Sculpt Sphinx [a1, Nov 29 2023]
11 Million Brick Viaducts.
https://www.amusing...t-brick-bridge.html
[bs0u0155, Dec 05 2023]
(link)
https://www.merriam...com/dictionary/jest
[doctorremulac3, Dec 05 2023]
The Texas Sharpshooter
https://en.wikipedi...harpshooter_fallacy
[pertinax, Dec 10 2023]
The Austrian Sharpthinker
https://en.wikipedi...cientific_Discovery
[pertinax, Dec 10 2023]
This is what the competition might look like.
https://www.youtube...watch?v=_mRrB33wvGk
I would absolutely watch. [doctorremulac3, Dec 13 2023]
California trying to do what Japan and many other countries have done successfully for decades.
https://www.nytimes...-rail-politics.html
[doctorremulac3, Dec 14 2023]
Wow! That's simple but really clever.
https://www.youtube...watch?v=yvvES47OdmY
[doctorremulac3, Dec 24 2023]
[link]
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[+] though I have some misgivings about a Bronze Age AI. |
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Multi- level marketing with old technology would also present a challenge. Could the feudal system be improved on? Specifically, could it be engineered with less violence? |
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Interesting thought to ponder, "Hey ancient Egyptions with your pyramid schemes, think you're so clever. Well modern man came up with our OWN pyramid schemes. Top that!" |
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"It's difficult to build a pyramid without a pyramid" |
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I don't know if LLM is a good choice to trust with large blocks of stone. |
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Last I heard, we have a reasonably good idea of how they did it, including the master cubit used for calibration of the working cubits. But then again, I'm a QA geek, so I could be prejudiced. |
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" Could the feudal system be improved on? Specifically, could it be engineered with less violence? Help help, I'm being repressed! " |
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Here we see the magically-sharpened razor blade inherent in the system. |
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// we have a reasonably good idea of how they did it, // |
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Do tell? I've heard several theories and have my own favorites, but would love to hear yours. Pointers to online references fine of the complete exposition won't fit here. |
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//...but would love to hear yours// - obviously, where the pyramids now are used to be mountainous, and they just carved away the mountains into the shape of pyramids |
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Don't be ridiculous [hippo]. That would be too much work. They obviously pressed a pointy thing from underneath to emboss the surface upwards. |
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Or they built wind diverters to let nature do it. It worked for the Sphinx, maybe (link). |
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You know, I think I over thought this. |
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This might make in interesting video game that would serve as a research tool as well. |
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///Do tell? I've heard several theories and have my own favorites, but would love to hear yours.// |
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I disappeared down a pyramid rabbit hole a few years back. I don't think there are any amazing holes to fill. Firstly, everyone always starts with Khufu's pyramid and says "explain how an ancient people with bronze tools did that!". Well, there were some astonishing mistakes in early estimates, including estimating the amount of stone lifted by taking the volume as lifted to half the pyramids height, no no no, that's not how it works, there's a LOT less mass/volume in the top half. So the problem is a lot smaller. |
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Next, it's built on a small hill in the middle of the base, so with a little squaring off and ground work and almost 10% of the volume is accounted for there. |
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Then, there's at least a few chambers that were left hollow and then filled with graded sand. |
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There's good evidence (air shaft dimensions) that the pyramid could well have been built and then later enlarged, which would also reduce the build burden on any given generation. |
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The missing ramp? Archaeologists main problem with a ramp to lift stone was troubled by the fact that for a linear ramp to a significant height of the pyramid would need almost as much material as the pyramid. This is neatly solved by the fact that the pyramid IS the ramp. Jean-Pierre Houdin's hypothesis, with evidence, is that you just build it as a sort of square spiral ramp. |
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There's also the enclosures around the pyramid that were flooded at least some of the time, and moving large bits of stone around is done relatively easily on water. |
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The only remaining issue is the precise cutting of granite. I have no massive problem with that. It's entirely possible in my mind that they had iron working ability and then lost it through the general regression of the egyptian civilization. Egypt was a lot wetter back in the day and Iron doesn't survive. It's also possible that they were just better at working with stone, they clearly did a lot of it. Try and get a quote for stone carving of renaissance quality today, or even Wooden cabinet making upto Edwardian standards. Impossible or leaning heavily on CNC. In a 1000 years, it might be assumed that such carving wasn't possible without CNC carving. |
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Being heavily involved with calcium chemistry, I'm also quite into the idea that they just made limestone slurrys and molded blocks. I'm not sure exactly how you'd do it but you'd start with coarse--ground limestone, in acidified water which would become chunks of calcium carbonate in a saturated solution of calcium bicarbonate. You add just enough acidified water so that it's just about moldable, then put it in the mold, and pop the whole thing in an alkaline solution, water + wood ash would work. |
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// the idea that they just made limestone slurries and molded blocks. I'm not sure exactly how you'd do it // |
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A grant proposal waiting to be written! |
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All very good points, [bs0u0155]. I think having unlimited manpower and a lot of time will make a big difference too. Also, “moving big blocks of stone and building things with them” was probably the most sophisticated technology of their civilisation, and where all the cool, smart kids wanted to go and work after they left school. The Dept of Stone-Masonry was like the CERN of today. If your society really values building things with big blocks of stone and rewards people who make breakthroughs and push the tech forward, then I think it’s not surprising people get incredibly innovative and do things we can’t imagine today. |
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You know, never thought about it but being able to manipulate stone was the ancient equivalent of being a tech titan today. The Masons have even endured as an exclusive club, probably not because masonry is so respected today, but it was in yesteryear. |
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You want a castle to rule your kingdom from? You can task your glorified thug knights with the job or whip the peasants all day, but you ain't looking down from your palace parapet without masons building it for you. |
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So the whole impetus driving of rulers of the ancient world, what drove them to war, treachery and feudal society totalitarianism was the big payoff: having masons stack stone blocks into an attractive looking pile for you. |
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No, the big pile of rocks was purely a symbol. The driving force of all war is population pressure; treachery and feudal society totalitarianism was the result of people trying to be on top of the... um ... pyramid, so to speak. |
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//“moving big blocks of stone and building things with them” was probably the most sophisticated technology of their civilisation,// |
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I think in many ways it's just forgetting the sort of tips and tricks of a trade that build up to near miracles. Watch even a skilled bricklayer work, many can sling 100kg of bricks on a hod walk up 10m of ladder and lay 100-400 aligned & level bricks an hour. Add a laborer and that can go up. Any faster and you start running into laying courses on top of uncured cement. An archaeologist trying to recreate that would never have the muscle memory to knock the bricks in line anywhere near as fast, or to know exactly how hard to tap a brick into two perfect halves. They might miss tools like the hod and crucial bucket on a pulley. |
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Take a look at the size and precision of these hand-laid structures that were going up in a handful of years <link>. |
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//You want a castle to rule your kingdom from?// |
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The vast majority of castles were actually wood, then rendered just as many stone castles were. It's all fun and games until someone knocks off a bit of the render. |
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//No, the big pile of rocks was purely a symbol.// |
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Oh, I thought the goal of all tyrants was just to have a big pile of rocks. (see link) |
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//The vast majority of castles were actually wood, then rendered just as many stone castles were. It's all fun and games until someone knocks off a bit of the render.// |
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Why did they stop building these things anyway? They survived the advent of the cannon, for a little while anyway. Guess you just got a lot more square footage for your money with wood framed construction, then put your money into an army to keep the cannons away rather than investing it into five foot thick stone walls that'll get breached eventually if you don't have an offensive element to your defense. |
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The best defense against a cannon is blowing the cannon up along with its crew. Make yourself a nice palace with pretty windows and put your bucks into a bigger army. |
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Doc, thank you for the link. As a soulless, humorless automaton I find such definitions helpful. |
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If you think the Pyramids were impressive, take a look at the Tower of Babel. Ted Chiang wrote did a good story about it. |
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Thanks [bs0u0155] for the link and for the commentary on craft skills. |
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//The driving force of all war is population pressure// |
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Mmmmmno, it really isn't. Try "*A* driving force of *some* wars is population pressure." |
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Mmm'yes ... it really is. But I guess I should have said "original or root cause" instead of "driving force." |
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No matter what the "driving force" appears to be for any war (past or present)- look far enough back you'll find it started as a dispute over land or other resources someone wanted for their own tribe. |
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//resources someone wanted for their own tribe.// |
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So that's group identity, which is not the same as population pressure. |
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Consider the present war in Ukraine, being fought between two populations which, even before the war, were sparse and shrinking. |
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Or consider the Roman civil wars of the first century BC which, according to Appian's account, took place against a
background of "oliganthropia' - shortage of people. |
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Groups may compete for resources irrespective of whether they are experiencing population pressure. |
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You're defining "population pressure" more narrowly than I would. It doesn't have to be push for lebensraum. Ukraine and Russia are fighting over territory and resources each wants for their own people. Whether taking these to grow or even maintain by a population (at the expense of some other), it's all rock and roll to me. |
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The misnomer of "civil war" or any other that seem to be fought over ideology - they still come down to which group (population) gets to control resources. |
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All right; if by "population pressure" you mean "any group of people wanting anything for any reason" then yes, your claim is correct. Yay. |
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However, as you head to the fridge to open the champagne, you may feel on your shoulder the hand of that old spoil-sport Professor Sir Karl Popper. He would like a word. |
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Never heard of him so looked him up. This guy’s my new hero, thank you Pert. |
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You're not meant to pop champagne. You're meant to very slowly twist the cork out so it barely makes a whisper. |
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But popping it is just gauche. |
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// "any group of people wanting anything for any reason" // |
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ANY reason? Not necessarily. But there's never been a war that didn't boil down to nation states fighting over resources. Even when the propoganda claimed it was for some other reason. |
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//The misnomer of "civil war" or any other that seem to be fought over ideology - they still come down to which group (population) gets to control resources.// |
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Yup, even the Crusades. The propaganda reason was to claim the Holy Land for Christianity. But the operative word there is LAND - control of real estate and trade routes. |
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That dispute has been going on in varying intensities for thousands of years. At least as far back as when Esau got swindled out of his birthright. Which I don't really believe in a historical sense; it's just a bible tale made up to explain an even older dispute. |
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//there's never been a war that didn't boil down [...]// |
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All right - and do you have a "boiling down" process which does not, itself, boil down to confirmation bias? |
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I have a confirmation bias, of course. But you can break it by showing me an example of a war that didn't come down to a group fighting for control of land or resources for one population group against another. Call that something other than "population pressure" if you like, but still... |
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And please don't say something like "What about the Crusades (or some other conflict)?" and leave it at that. Tell me what the conflict was really about and how/why it had nothing to do with one gang saying to another "We want your stuff for our gang, not yours." |
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//you can break it by showing me an example// |
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And what would such a hypothetical example look like? |
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It's easy to produce documentary evidence of individual participants in wars being motivated by things other than group possession of resources. But if I show you one of those, you will just say "Oh, that's just a sucker who fell for propaganda - the *real* reason was something else". But how, then, do we determine that "real" reason? |
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In hard sciences, we might set up a controlled experiment, but you can't do that in social sciences - and hence, you can't isolate one candidate causal factor from another. |
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You could lean into the "Texas sharpshooter" approach, and say that, if there exist any resources, and one side ends up in possession of them, then that proves your theory. It doesn't, but let's suppose it did: in that case, I will show you wars where, because war is in general a negative-sum game, both sides end up worse off than they started. But you won't accept those as counter-examples either, will you? You will just say "Oh, in that case, both sides *wanted* to seize more resources, but they failed". But in that case, you've just shifted back from objective to subjective criteria of causation again - having earlier rejected subjective criteria when they did not fit your model. |
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For any counter-example, then, you will reject it on one or the other of those grounds, won't you? Which brings us back to Popper's point. |
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Just so we're clear, are you mainly invoking Popper here to talk about falsification, rather than anything he said about war? |
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I watched a show on PBS about Stonehenge last week. They compared the weight of both them. Neither is feasible. So I've lost before I started and I'm good with that. |
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Well that's what makes this so interesting, it's a puzzle. |
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And it speaks to the possibility that societies forgetting skills, which I find totally feasible. I have no idea how they built Stonehenge, I couldn't do it. |
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I think the old axiom about strong men (people) making good times, that creates weak people living in those times, who in turn create bad times that generate strong people to get through them is pretty plausible cycle. |
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Could Egyptians build a pyramid now if they wanted to for some reason? Here in California they tried to build a high speed train, started the project in 2015. If California was a country it'd have the 5th biggest economy in the world, but almost a decade later that high speed rail project is a dusty wreck in the desert. High speed trains are all over the world, but not here in the state that's the center of high tech, it was here that what became the internet was invented, the laser printer, the graphic user interface, computer gaming, movies with synchronized soundtracks among other things and we can't build a train? Something that most other civilized countries have? Seriously? |
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And before we make this political, let's keep in mind which party runs California un-opposed. |
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I do think we're loosing skills in many areas due to having a pretty soft society. |
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If it's any comfort, [dr3], Australia has been failing to build high- speed rail between Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne for at least that long. |
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For contrast, I remember the opening of high- speed rail between central London and central Paris as one of the defining moments of the 1990s. |
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Yea, that would fit with my theory of soft civilizations making soft heads. Australia's been a very together society for a long time, when you're born into a well designed society you'd think you could become more advanced than your forebears but maybe that's not the case. Maybe it's hardship that triggers development. That's certainly the case with the physical body. |
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I'm wondering if those folks that build the high speed rail that actually went under the English Channel had kids that couldn't pick out the English Channel on a map, even if you gave them a hint that it was somewhere between England and France. |
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Dunno, hope I'm wrong but I do think we might be getting dumber as a society. |
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But hey, maybe it's just me who's getting dumber, I could live with that. |
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Found a link suggesting how they might have moved the Easter Island heads around with nothing but ropes. |
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Interesting in that this might work in softer soil where rolling logs might get stuck. |
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//Here in California they tried to build a high speed train, started the project in 2015. If California was a country it'd have the 5th biggest economy in the world, but almost a decade later that high speed rail project is a dusty wreck in the desert.// |
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I haven't looked into it, I suspect it might depress me, but my bet would be garden variety political/management-class incompetence. It's not difficult, you want high-speed rail in an environment that crosses earthquake zones. Just acquire the land and sub contract the Japanese. Britain does the same rail incompetence. Not in the past, however. The first rail network, they really went for. Rail everywhere. First practical locomotive: 1839. A few decades later, you have 100 mph trains hurtling over towering viaducts, tunneling through mountains integrating with a mail service. Increasingly efficient steam technologies spill over to ship designs, electrical generation, on and on.
The century before that, the country was criss-crossed with canals, where they took the concept of river transport and made it go over, through and between hills. All dug/built by hand. |
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//Australia has been failing to build high- speed rail between Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne// |
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See above. This isn't a technical/engineering challenge. |
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//I remember the opening of high- speed rail between central London and central Paris as one of the defining moments of the 1990s.// |
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THAT was a technical and engineering challenge. The tunnels had to be dug from both sides simultaneously, or it would have taken decades. They had to meet within a few inches of perfect, despite being 10 miles away from any navigational reference. It's like getting two human hairs to meet end-on-end 2 feet away under 6 inches of soil. They had to be resistant to everything from fire, failure, terrorist attack and the spread of rabies. |
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You can tell that it's political and management failure when the same level of high speed rail doesn't even extend to Manchester. |
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//I haven't looked into it, (the failure of California high speed rail) I suspect it might depress me, but my bet would be garden variety political/management-class incompetence.// |
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Well, maybe that needs a reframe, let's consider it might have been a total success. Politicians and graft based donor class contractors buying those politicians might have had MASSIVE success with this failed project. |
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Ten billion dollars of taxpayer money went to the people in charge of this for what basically amounts to a modern day Stonehenge. If they're crying about this project's failure they're wiping their tears with stacks of cash. |
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