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MickeyFinn posted:but that is just a train. 
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Apr 11, 2024 16:36
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Cugel the Clever posted:Just?! alright, fine, just a pale imitation of a train 
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Apr 11, 2024 16:58
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That’s one thing I’ve never understood in this country that has endless land between cities - why the jimminy cricket is there not a separate trucks only lane that all trucks must be in parallel to the regular highway that they have to use?
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Apr 11, 2024 19:14
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Ubiquitus posted:That’s one thing I’ve never understood in this country that has endless land between cities - why the jimminy cricket is there not a separate trucks only lane that all trucks must be in parallel to the regular highway that they have to use? Deal, but instead of 30' of concrete and asphalt, how about 4 lines of solid steel set on timber and gravel? There are very few instances where trucks make sense for long distance transport that rail (large volumes, low time sensitivity) or air (small volume/weight, needs to get there yesterday) can't fill. The real reason is that there isn't enough demand for an extra lane and trucks still need to pass each other. A dedicated truck lane would also need to be repaired 4x as often because of the weight.
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Apr 11, 2024 19:22
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because the interstate highway system is already the single most expensive piece of centrally coordinated infrastructure on earth?
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Apr 11, 2024 19:23
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Ubiquitus posted:That’s one thing I’ve never understood in this country that has endless land between cities - why the jimminy cricket is there not a separate trucks only lane that all trucks must be in parallel to the regular highway that they have to use? It would cost a million dollars a mile per lane plus acquiring the land and people would be horrified that they still would have to pay to fix it once it becomes clear even to the non civil engineering nerds what percentage of damage is caused by over the road shipping. Currently roadway infrastructure and repair budgeting is a huge invisible subsidy that covers the externality of that damage. People wouldn't want to pay it if it was a blatant handout. You could reduce this by using a more durable surface, like steel rails, and reduce micro plastic pollution with steel wheels. Overall efficiency can actually be gained with this system by linking many trailers together. It would have the same footprint and build cost but return way more value. You could even reduce regular road traffic with some kind of multi unit super bus, and even use surplus weight and volume capacity to add mid trip amenities with a convince markup.
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Apr 11, 2024 19:27
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It's worth pointing out that there is a huge amount of freight rail in the US already. In fact, it's why the US actually has over double the amount of rail than Europe does (over 224,000 miles of track compared to Europe's mere 94,000 miles). Per the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics: BTS.gov posted:Trucks carry the largest shares by value in both current and constant dollars for shipments moved less than 2,000 miles, while rail is the dominant mode by weight and ton-miles for shipments moved 1,000 to 2,000 miles in 2020. Air, multiple modes and mail, water, and rail accounted for over half of the value of shipments moved more than 2,000 miles. It isn't some case of the US just being too car-brained to understand the value of trains. Even Europe moves more freight by truck than by train overall. (From Eurostat, with maritime freight removed from the graph as it really skews the numbers.) 
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Apr 11, 2024 19:46
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Trucks are excellent at moving a moderate amount of products a long distance in a fairly short period of time. Part of this is because highway infrastructure is so heavily subsidized in the US and in Europe, but it's really tough to beat for timely performance.
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Apr 11, 2024 19:54
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Ubiquitus posted:That’s one thing I’ve never understood in this country that has endless land between cities - why the jimminy cricket is there not a separate trucks only lane that all trucks must be in parallel to the regular highway that they have to use? The word you're looking for is "trains" Zoom out on any map and you'll see they're parallel to most interstates There is a LOT of train infrastructure in this county and most of it is in use both long haul and short lines Edit: the way Eisenhower got the interstate system passed into law and funded (after seeing how well the Nazi army got around in the Autobahn) was to make 1 in 5 miles capable of being used as an airstrip during war, in theory Having a single lane truck road wouldn't be able to be used as an airstrip, and wouldn't qualify for defense spending Hadlock fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Apr 11, 2024 |
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Apr 11, 2024 19:56
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Trucks are also far more nimble than trains. You don't require much in the way of special infrastructure to load and unload them - just a loading dock and dudes with hand carts. This minimal infrastructure can be put basically anywhere, to the point that just about every lovely little strip mall retailer you've ever driven past has some kind of loading dock in the back to take deliveries. What's more, they handle smaller loads Assuming you aren't some giant operation that is moving enough crap at once to and from single locations you're probably not going to be filling a train by yourself. Which means you need to coordinate with the freight company operating the train and drive your poo poo to them for transport and/or drive to their freight yard to grab it when it arrives. I do think more stuff should move by train, and I think trucks should be more restricted to short haul only, but good lord there are a ton of benefits to shipping by truck.
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Apr 11, 2024 19:57
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There are a few big obstacles to increasing train usage, some of them are obvious like funding, but one that is less obvious is the enormous number of level crossings. A level crossing is where a road runs across rail and they have to lower a gate and stop road traffic for the train to go through... and the train has to go through a lot slower. Re-engineering level crossings to be over/underpasses is enormously expensive, which is why there's so many level crossings in the first place. Elon Musk's hyperloop is incredibly stupid but the one thing it does that would be maybe worth doing anyway is elevate the rail, except it's probably cheaper to elevate the roads because cars and trucks weigh less than trains. A huge obstacle to high speed rail is level crossing issues, and you get like 80% of the benefit of the hyperloop without having to stuff human beings into a vacuum tube just by creating long stretches of uninterrupted rail that the trains can actually go fast on. https://railroads.dot.gov/safety-data/crossing-and-inventory-data/crossing-inventory-map-equipment There are over 244,000 rail crossings in the continental US. This cool tool lets you zoom in on a map and see them. Rail bed upgrades, power, etc. are also needed for high speed rail, but this is kind of like "why we don't have high speed rail.jpg" Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Apr 11, 2024 |
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Apr 11, 2024 20:01
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that's a lot more of a passenger rail issue than a freight rail issue freight rail isn't slow because the trains drive slow, it's slow because all the yards are jammed up and there isn't sufficient capacity on a bunch of routes. it makes a lot more sense to add some parallel tracks and more classification yards than to spend money getting rid of level crossings (for freight purposes).
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Apr 11, 2024 20:05
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I'm a huge fan of intermodal freight (same container used on ship/train/truck). It was growing like crazy in the US, but has run into some issues lately - I think primarily infrastructure related. https://www.freightwaves.com/news/improving-rail-service-key-to-growing-intermodal-volumes-consultant But it just makes sense to not unpack/pack containers as they are handed off, and to use rail for the long distances in between cities.
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Apr 11, 2024 21:05
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Baddog posted:But it just makes sense to not unpack/pack containers as they are handed off, and to use rail for the long distances in between cities. Destroying the long proud tradition of your longshoreman uncle always having some nice stuff for you, as long as you never asked where he got it…
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Apr 11, 2024 21:15
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containers themselves mostly did that
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Apr 11, 2024 21:16
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bob dobbs is dead posted:containers themselves mostly did that Right, we got really good at going from ships to trucks. Just gotta get the infrastructure to do more ships to trains and trains to trucks. 
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Apr 11, 2024 21:52
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There's no hurdle* to load containers from ships to trains directly. A lot/most ports are capable of doing this today. You could load a ship worth of containers onto a train in LA and send it directly to NYC and then unload it onto trucks for final delivery. I'm sure temu has evaluated that at one point or another *Besides physically lifting it over the side of the ship
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Apr 11, 2024 21:57
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How much freight goes long haul once it hits a port? If I was shipping a box of non-perishable dodads from China to Atlanta it feels like it would make more sense to put them on a container ship going to Savannah and then truck them from there than it would to bring them into LA and put them on a train.
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Apr 11, 2024 22:06
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Hadlock posted:There's no hurdle* to load containers from ships to trains directly. A lot/most ports are capable of doing this today. You could load a ship worth of containers onto a train in LA and send it directly to NYC and then unload it onto trucks for final delivery. I'm sure temu has evaluated that at one point or another heh, it's everywhere in between that's the problem for having capacity, not so much LA and NYC. https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter6/rail-terminals/intermodal-rail-terminals-north-america/ If your train segment only cuts out half the distance, and it takes 10x as long because rail is slow and the container sits in the yard too long on both ends ("dwell" time), it's hard to be competitive. They have been building more though, just takes time. https://bizwest.com/2023/06/19/bnsf-on-track-for-massive-weld-county-intermodal-facility/
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Apr 11, 2024 22:13
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Cyrano4747 posted:How much freight goes long haul once it hits a port? If I was shipping a box of non-perishable dodads from China to Atlanta it feels like it would make more sense to put them on a container ship going to Savannah and then truck them from there than it would to bring them into LA and put them on a train. Freight moves a lot faster by rail than by sea. Time in transit is money. Most companies that bring containers from Asia bring them to the west coast regardless of final destination.
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Apr 11, 2024 22:21
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Cyrano4747 posted:How much freight goes long haul once it hits a port? If I was shipping a box of non-perishable dodads from China to Atlanta it feels like it would make more sense to put them on a container ship going to Savannah and then truck them from there than it would to bring them into LA and put them on a train. It depends… They’re different vessel services. The CNSGH to USSAV is a different route than CNSGH to USLGB. China LA service is basically the biggest ships doing that back and forth. China to SAV that vessel goes Asia — west coast— canal — east coast — Europe and then back the other way (include Mexico’s west/east coasts too). Right now the canal is making these slower Longer voyage have other potential surprises too. It really really depends on what one’s cargo exactly is. There is a tremendously variety of ways to gently caress up a shipment.
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Apr 11, 2024 22:22
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Freight moves a lot faster by rail than by sea. Time in transit is money. Most companies that bring containers from Asia bring them to the west coast regardless of final destination. Some Asia — Europe trade is railbridged across the US too for that reason. That has its risks though.
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Apr 11, 2024 22:24
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Cyrano4747 posted:How much freight goes long haul once it hits a port? 60% live in Urban areas; 40% live near the coast, in the US My (wild, unfounded) guess is that 70% of ocean freight travels less than 250 miles to a warehouse, and again less than 250 miles to the final retail store or customer The other 30% go to flyover states etc and probably more of this goes by train to cover the distance to the soft chewy inner core of the country
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Apr 11, 2024 22:25
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Most of it goes to a nearby CFS gets stripped and then gets transloaded and delivered . Or goes to a major distribution center for a retailer or similar and then gets transloaded and delivered to stores.
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Apr 11, 2024 22:59
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Leperflesh posted:That the Fed has been over the last four years an incredibly successful agency that may have saved us from the recession that most every other big country is currently reeling from is just not a message that people want to hear when they want to be mad at someone. I think we need a lot more time and retrospect to be confident that they've done a good job. I'm sure people were praising the fed in the late 90s or early 2000s, only to find out later that they were driving us straight to the fireworks factory.
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Apr 13, 2024 17:04
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big shtick energy posted:I think we need a lot more time and retrospect to be confident that they've done a good job. I'm sure people were praising the fed in the late 90s or early 2000s, only to find out later that they were driving us straight to the fireworks factory. They absolutely were. All through the 90s Greenspan was spoken of like he was a genius.
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Apr 13, 2024 20:48
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The Maestro! I'm shocked that he's still alive
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Apr 13, 2024 21:16
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big shtick energy posted:I think we need a lot more time and retrospect to be confident that they've done a good job. I'm sure people were praising the fed in the late 90s or early 2000s, only to find out later that they were driving us straight to the fireworks factory. That's totally fair. Mostly I'd like to counter the extremely common narrative that people are 100% sure the Fed is loving us, right now, and that's why our economy is in the toilet. We don't know that first part, and the second part is false.
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Apr 13, 2024 23:30
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big shtick energy posted:I think we need a lot more time and retrospect to be confident that they've done a good job. I'm sure people were praising the fed in the late 90s or early 2000s, only to find out later that they were driving us straight to the fireworks factory. ehhhh pretty tough imo to pin the GFC entirely on the Fed, even in its role as bank regulator. the biggest causes were the subprime mortgage crisis (not the Fed's portfolio; GSE policies should have been in place to prevent it) and overleveraged hedge funds and investment banks ("shadow banking"; a grey area in hindsight, but at the time no one thought the Fed had the authority to regulate Bear Stearns et al.) Fed interventions prevented worse recessions after 2008 and the pandemic, and the Fed has been successful in its fight against inflation over the past 18 months. That's a long track record of doing a good job, especially when the rest of the government is doing... whatever it's been doing since 2008.
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Apr 13, 2024 23:30
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i think the fed definitely has a share of the blame for the post '08 extended run of high unemployment. they should have weighed full employment more heavily against price stability, especially given how minimal inflation was that decade. to be fair, they had taken this failing to heart when it came to covid
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Apr 14, 2024 01:58
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hypnophant posted:ehhhh pretty tough imo to pin the GFC entirely on the Fed, even in its role as bank regulator. the biggest causes were the subprime mortgage crisis (not the Fed's portfolio; GSE policies should have been in place to prevent it) and overleveraged hedge funds and investment banks ("shadow banking"; a grey area in hindsight, but at the time no one thought the Fed had the authority to regulate Bear Stearns et al.) I wouldn't pin it on them entirely, but I think the loose money supply has to be a big factor in why the crisis happens at the scale that it does. Like you can make an overly simple argument that it's just loose money -> asset bubble, and that all of the bad stuff that happened around mortgage policy and securitization was an outcome incentivized by the monetary policy rather than a separate cause. In reality I'm sure the explosion of the creation and trading of exotic mortgage-based securities was both an effect and a cause of the asset bubble, but I still put interest rates as a big factor in the issue. Then again, interest rates as the main cause is also one of the more popular layperson explanations of the crisis, which should probably bias us to have some doubt in it.
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Apr 14, 2024 05:07
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:i think the fed definitely has a share of the blame for the post '08 extended run of high unemployment. they should have weighed full employment more heavily against price stability, especially given how minimal inflation was that decade. to be fair, they had taken this failing to heart when it came to covid big shtick energy posted:I wouldn't pin it on them entirely, but I think the loose money supply has to be a big factor in why the crisis happens at the scale that it does. Like you can make an overly simple argument that it's just loose money -> asset bubble, and that all of the bad stuff that happened around mortgage policy and securitization was an outcome incentivized by the monetary policy rather than a separate cause. In reality I'm sure the explosion of the creation and trading of exotic mortgage-based securities was both an effect and a cause of the asset bubble, but I still put interest rates as a big factor in the issue. I like that the first two responses are disagreeing with me, but also directly opposed to each other - muir is saying monetary policy was too tight, schtick is saying it was too loose. Doesn't necessarily mean they got the balancing act exactly right, but they were at least in the ballpark. One of the things I credit Bernanke with is that faced with the zero lower bound, they innovated some new techniques (QE, forward guidance) to implement the looser monetary policy they wanted. The ECB instead tried a negative interest rate which was not successful, and after a few years (and a non-german* in charge) they also went to QE, which finally started to move the needle on the eurozone crisis. *trichet was french but the german chief economist, and bundesbank institutionally, had a lot of influence hypnophant fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Apr 14, 2024 |
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Apr 14, 2024 14:46
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hypnophant posted:I like that the first two responses are disagreeing with me, but also directly opposed to each other - muir is saying monetary policy was too tight, schtick is saying it was too loose. Doesn't necessarily mean they got the balancing act exactly right, but they were at least in the ballpark. I was specifically referring to pre-2007 monetary policy in my comments on its role in creating the crisis.
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Apr 14, 2024 16:56
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and i was specifically referring to post '08 policy and its role in extending the impacts of the crisis. and if you read 21st century monetary policy, you'll see that bernanke basically agrees and saw the aggressive response to covid as a success in incorporating lessons learned from '08-'12 (though it was published in 2022, so maybe the inflation spike would temper that, though i think the rough patch of inflation was much, much preferable to the type of extended doldrums we saw in '08-'12) though i will say that i don't think loose interest rates played anywhere near the role in the crisis that the proliferation of mbs did in causing the housing crisis. banks had huge short term incentivizes to issue as many mortgages as possible, and after the good borrowers had all taken loans, they were fine with take big credit risk to keep growing the amount of mbs they could sell. i mean, the increasing popularity of adjustable rate mortgages were specifically so the banks didn't have to pay much attention to current rates when issuing new mortgages, because you could get risky borrowers to sign up on below overnight lending rates and then get it off your books before the payments ballooned when the rates adjusted a year or two later. banks issuing arm ninja loans were never going to give a poo poo if the fed tightened by even a couple hundred bps, they had a clear goal of just getting as many new loans on the books as possible to get the fees from selling them on to be securitized. everyone knew that they were handling a hot potato, they just all thought it would only burn the next guy. the only way tight monetary policy could have stopped it would have been to just crash it early by taking the rate to punitive levels that would have never flown when it wasn't clear ahead of time just how bad the systemic overleverage was. it was entirely a regulatory failure, monetary policy was never going to do much to stop it, but it could have done more to keep money circulating after the direct crisis was halted
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Apr 14, 2024 21:55
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Some dedollarization fan fic I missed from last month, apparently https://archive.is/2024.02.17-031526/https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/mexicos-peso-an-uber-dollar-2024-02-16/
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Apr 14, 2024 22:15
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:and i was specifically referring to post '08 policy and its role in extending the impacts of the crisis. and if you read 21st century monetary policy, you'll see that bernanke basically agrees and saw the aggressive response to covid as a success in incorporating lessons learned from '08-'12 (though it was published in 2022, so maybe the inflation spike would temper that, though i think the rough patch of inflation was much, much preferable to the type of extended doldrums we saw in '08-'12) The Fed has a role in oversight of banking and risk management practices, including sub-prime mortgages, they chose not to exercise those powers. Greenspan is far and away the most responsible for what happened, he created both the monetary policy conditions and he lobbied for the repeal of things like Glass-Steagall, ultimately creating the regulatory conditions that allowed for things like NINJA loans and instant securitization. The messed up part is even with 2008 and some reforms banks are still allowed to make loans and then instantly hand them off.
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Apr 14, 2024 23:13
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I was at a conference last week about carbon accounting and CCUS for oil and gas and lol, lmao. Using the 45Q tax credits ($50-180/ton), you can offset all corporate taxes with about 50% of the CO2 being disposed. Luckily the government estimates a max of 2%. It is also nearly impossible to finance these projects because there is no long term guarantee of a revenue stream if you keep disposing of the CO2.
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Apr 14, 2024 23:34
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big shtick energy posted:I was specifically referring to pre-2007 monetary policy in my comments on its role in creating the crisis. well then i did misread you, but I also don't understand your argument - the target rate got down to 1% from 2003-2004, after the first dotcom bubble popped, but then climbed back up to 5%, and stayed there from 2006 to september 2007. Other than that short period, it wasn't much looser than it had been for much of the nineties. IMO the biggest cause of the housing bubble didn't have anything to do with american regulators at all, it was asian and european money pouring in looking for a return. Certain Fed emergency facilities were used near-exclusively by Deutschebank, UBS, Credit Suisse, and other big euro banks, with very little money (from those specific pots) going to american banks. TFCMP glosses over it iirc but Tooze has a lot about the trans-atlantic aspects of the crisis in Crashed.
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Apr 15, 2024 01:50
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Today in lol Turkey: https://archive.md/sSJFp quote:The Turkish central bank had a loss of 818.2 billion liras ($25 billion) in 2023, a reversal from years of profits driven by sharply higher interest rates and the cost of a government-backed savings program designed to shield depositors against currency depreciation. Hey guys you can backstop a depreciating currency by just handing out sacks of that same currency to cover fx losses, right? That's how money works? Asking for a friend.
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Apr 16, 2024 16:35
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mrmcd posted:Today in lol Turkey: Sorry does this say "sorry Turkish government, we lost all your money": quote:the central bank will have to waive a transfer to the nation’s Treasury Maaaaybe that's not a default by the bank?
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Apr 16, 2024 20:39
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