Every egg carton in my grocery says “cage free” (unless it’s free range). That’s got to be worth something

Huh, I haven’t seen that in a few years

It’s strange that Canada isn’t having the same issue: epidemics don’t usually respect borders

It took us so many years to get trans fats out of the food supply when our lord and savior, Cheetos supreme would have done it with a snap of his fingers

They heard “mined” and thought that had something to do with digging up ore

Iceland. My kid took a geology class and was excited about Iceland. This is actually college: he never got his passport so I said, “sure I’ll take you if you apply for your passport”

Profitable is a point in favor, if you’re one of them. Strong supply chain is a point in favor, if you’re a hawk or if you think we do need defense

Dick Yuengling is kind of a dick

That’s unfortunate. I always tried to getting some when I’m in the area, just because of the local history. I’m not a fan otherwise, but the brand has killer nostalgia

Google search has gotten really horrible lately - I can’t find an English recipe for this one, or even a clean enough web page to use translate. Lots of random unrelated results though

They really can’t. They inherited hundred year old falling apart infrastructure that is one of the things keeping them from providing good service. There’s no way to make enough profit to rebuild all that infrastructure enough to become profitable on most routes in the first place. They are literally slower in places than they were almost 100 years ago

Acela is not at all bad. It’s not very fast, but it has service every hour or so traveling at least as fast as a car on equipment from the 1990s.

Lots of places would benefit from modern equipment from the 1990s and regular service

There’s no way national rail can be a profitable service, and certainly not without huge investments in infrastructure. It’s only the northeast corridor that’s profitable, but quite a few other places can be but only after huge infrastructure investments. Those investments are coming from a wholly private company.

Technically Amtrak already is a private company, but owned by the Department of Transportation. Those owners need to pony up for rail infrastructure the same way they’ve always ponies up for highways infrastructure.

It also means the tracks owner has no incentive to keep things up enough to make the ride smooth or to allow fast trains. Cargo can be slow and bumpy

Passenger rail was faillling across the country. Pretty much every private rail company was going out of business.

Amtrak was the rescue plan. Sounds good right? Amtrak took ownership of a bunch of money losing routes across the US and were required to keep the nationwide service. No track (except northeast), no reliable government funding. Can’t decrease service. Can’t raise fares much. No way back to profitability.

The additional funding signed by Biden was the way back. Currently Amtrak is profitable on the Northeast Corridor only, and that funds the rest of the system. Even that has several choke points that are over 100 years old. They desperately need upgraded infrastructure in order to function. That funding also included increased service in a few places, to try to make it useful to someone. All too much of Amtrak is useless stuff like one train per day. Of course they’re not selling any tickets

We’re talking about”left” here, all lowercase, not “LEFT”. Basic human rights and safety nets, all people created equal kind of stuff, less exploitation, that are still capitalist and democratic.

Lots of people on Lemmy seem to realize …. Too bad that’s not the real world

In the US it’s not really even cheaper - as in maybe you could save a couple hundred on a few models but most won’t offer a choice and it’s nothing in proportion to the cost of the car and the chances of finding one are so small it’s not even worth trying for most cars. There may be a few - are jeeps still available?

My favorite car was a Miata with a stick (even though I’m too tall to fit) - maybe I need to track down an older one before they’re gone forever

You may jest, but there’s a lot of truth here.

• From a self centered or short term view, children are a cost, an inconvenience, and there are way too many such people on the Right.
• from a larger perspective, for a community, a society, a future, children are that future, are the big reason to make things better, are our biggest investment. These overlap a lot of Left or Progressive goals, even with people who have different motivation

An under-appreciated capability of the current ai is its ability to summarize things: this is where it has the most potential.

• We’re using speech to text to create transcripts of meetings, which works really well, and are playing with ai summaries. You can only trust them so far but are generally good to see what the meeting covered.
• similarly ai search, which is currently slow and annoying, but to the extent it is just summarizing the top results, is potentially useful with further improvements
• just yesterday I had some really good coding results. I was writing unit tests, which do follow a pattern. My ide is great for autocompletion and syntax verification, but the ai was suggesting whole lines and even tests that I could use with minor changes

That’s got to be a free speech violation