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Oh, sweet, there's a hostel in downtown Chicago. $56 a night for a bed in a 10-person dorm room. Sign me up. |
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May 12, 2023 12:42
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I bet the hostel has a lower carbon footprint than a hotel room, too. |
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May 12, 2023 12:45
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And if you write "hostel" using French spelling rules, you get "hôtel" anyway, so, like, there's no actual difference when you think about it. |
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May 12, 2023 12:46
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Staying in a hostel means I will have to bring a lock, which will add a little weight, but that shouldn't be a huge problem. I haven't stayed at a Hostel since I was 16 in Switzerland. This sounds fun! |
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May 12, 2023 12:57
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cruft posted:Staying in a hostel means I will have to bring a lock, which will add a little weight, but that shouldn't be a huge problem. A Swiss hostel and a Chicago hostel are going to be markedly different experiences. |
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May 12, 2023 15:35
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I don't stay in hostels anymore because I don't want to subject anyone to my awful snoring.
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May 12, 2023 15:46
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Escape From Noise posted:I don't stay in hostels anymore because I don't want to subject anyone to my awful snoring. Yeah. I'm not sure what to do about that one. Maybe a mouthguard will help. |
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May 12, 2023 16:18
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Note to self: I need to remember to bring a towel from now on. I'm doing okay without one, but I would have liked having one several times on this trip, especially in the train. |
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May 12, 2023 16:19
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cruft posted:Yeah. I'm not sure what to do about that one. I'm pretty sure I have sleep apnea.
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May 12, 2023 16:51
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my experience is that hotels get cheaper the closer you get to the date. i basically have two strategies, one for pre-planning and one when I'm more comfortable winging it. for pre-planning I'll use Priceline's blind booking thing they call "express deals" or something. it tells you the star rating, amenities, and vague location of a hotel at a much cheaper price, but they don't tell you what hotel it is until you book. for winging it I use an app called HotelTonight, and you can regularly get nice (3+ stars) rooms for under $100.
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May 12, 2023 17:51
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Now the train will be 4¾ hours late. This is also okay. The way air travel has been lately, I was already scheduling 2-hour minimum layovers. This is just an extension of "plan for long delays", at least inside my brain. I have 18 hours of buffer left. So this is not a problem. |
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May 12, 2023 17:57
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Goddamn. Traveling in the US is a nightmare, isn't it?
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May 12, 2023 18:01
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Escape From Noise posted:Goddamn. Traveling in the US is a nightmare, isn't it? I was brainstorming how to explain this to my new Polish friend who later turned out to be a professor in Alabama. Here's what I came up with: Because America didn't suffer heavy casualties in WWI and WWII, and because we were the only big manufacturing center left post-war, we had a lot of new middle class, who made a lot of babies. As those babies traveled through the tubes of our economy, they put a ton of stress on our economy every time they hit a new demand. In order to make economic room for all these people with an economic pipe not prepared for them, other things had to give. One of those things was "infrastructure": roads, bridges, trains, etc. A lot of people think these "baby boomers" were just a selfish generation. But the reality is that there were just no many of them that we had to shift a whole lot of money around. So while everyone paid a price for WWII, in America the cost was more spread out over time. Europe got blowed up, and rebuilt, and now their trains are great. Our trains didn't get bombed, the decay happened more slowly and was thus more difficult to pinpoint as problematic. This idea may be full of poo poo, but it makes sense to me. |
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May 12, 2023 18:09
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America is bad and it should be destroyed imo |
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May 12, 2023 18:27
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rear end-penny posted:America is bad and it should be destroyed imo This would make Russia and China the dominant forces in global politics. |
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May 12, 2023 18:31
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cruft posted:This would make Russia and China the dominant forces in global politics. Yeah. Probably.
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May 12, 2023 18:34
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all nations are bad and and they should get hosed, but say hypothetically I was able to destroy this country out of spite alone, I don't think the Russians or Chinese could gently caress it up any worse than *gestures at everything* |
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May 12, 2023 18:35
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I've made this beer last about as long as I could but I guess it's time to go somewhere else now. There's this cart in the station full of books you can take. I already have a good book but maybe I'll check it out to see if there's anything I should add to my queue. |
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May 12, 2023 18:36
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rear end-penny posted:all nations are bad and and they should get hosed, but say hypothetically I was able to destroy this country out of spite alone, I don't think the Russians or Chinese could gently caress it up any worse than *gestures at everything* Yeah, this could be. It seems far from clear whether the US model is even sustainable, much less the best option. I happened to grow up here and I don't think I'd enjoy living under a Russian or Chinese regime, but lots of people are living out fulfilling lives this way, so what do I even know. E: on the other hand, as bad as it in to be in a marginalized community in the US, Russia and China seem like they're 100 times worse. In unrelated news, a guy with a flak jacket and a badge is explaining fentanyl to us now. cruft fucked around with this message at 19:32 on May 12, 2023 |
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May 12, 2023 18:39
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This is the second UB40 song on MTV in the last 15 minutes, so it's definitely time to go. |
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May 12, 2023 18:40
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cruft posted:This is the second UB40 song on MTV in the last 15 minutes, so it's definitely time to go. But maybe I should stay for that red red wiiiine
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May 12, 2023 18:41
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Escape From Noise posted:But maybe I should stay for that red red wiiiine That one hasn't come on yet, surprisingly. There is a "cotton candy cafe" here. They sell gourmet cotton candy, apparently. Not my cup of tea, but I wonder if they turn a good business. |
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May 12, 2023 18:43
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I genuinely can't comprehend what premium cotton candy would be.
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May 12, 2023 18:49
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I am now standing in front of the world's largest Lite Brite mural. |
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May 12, 2023 18:53
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I don't enjoy living period 
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May 12, 2023 19:11
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Amtrak WiFi in St Paul has blocked the SA forums. I wonder why. |
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May 12, 2023 19:31
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probably my fault, op |
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May 12, 2023 19:38
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LOL |
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May 12, 2023 19:45
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Train is moving and I'm on it. We're just under 5 hours behind schedule, meaning I have like 17 hours or something in my buffer, which is enough. Minneapolis they scar your ticket and tell you what car to get on right before letting you onto the platform. You walk onto the car and grab a seat. Chicago they assign you a seat in the station, scan tickets on the train after pulling out of the station. Santa Fe they ask your name and assign you a seat train side, just before you get on. Never scanned a ticket, but did look me up by name. Presumably if two people said they were named cruft, they'd ask for tickets. So that's just all over the place. cruft fucked around with this message at 19:58 on May 12, 2023 |
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May 12, 2023 19:56
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cruft posted:Train is moving and I'm on it. We're just under 5 hours behind schedule, meaning I have like 17 hours or something in my buffer, which is enough. 
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May 12, 2023 20:39
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The train is moving at maybe 9 miles per hour. I don't understand why it does this, but it happens a lot. |
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May 12, 2023 20:45
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Clarification: I understand why the train is going 9MPH. (I checked speed on my GPS app, nailed it). It's because the engineer told it to. What I don't understand is why the engineer told it to. |
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May 12, 2023 20:47
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I have these wired earbuds that I plug into my electronic bagpipes. They're low cost and sound pretty good. They're also thinner than wireless earbuds, which means I can sleep on my side and keep them in. As an added bonus, wired earbuds have better sound fidelity due to [complicated nerd poo poo about Bluetooth]. I'm beginning to think I should just not bother with the wireless ones. |
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May 12, 2023 20:52
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cruft posted:Yeah, this could be. It seems far from clear whether the US model is even sustainable, much less the best option. I happened to grow up here and I don't think I'd enjoy living under a Russian or Chinese regime, but lots of people are living out fulfilling lives this way, so what do I even know. I was born here and I'll die here but I agree that the US has its faults. It's great that we specifically allow for peaceful criticism of the government without retribution and peaceful assembly and all these tools to allow discourse and critical thinking, but it feels that critical thinking itself has been so devalued in modern education that students have to actively seek it out. I blame STEM. Knowing how to use computers is not as important as knowing how they affect industry and society.
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May 12, 2023 21:06
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Anyways, my take on why we have more cars and roads and less trains is because of the incredible machine that is american marketing and lobbying, which created the car culture that is further perpetuated through movies and tv shows and families, which has tilted public perception and incentives and a lot of other societal structures to bring about a society dependant on having your own personal chariot. There's also a lot of NIMBY stuff that would also be worth mentioning, but I won't get into. Also, corporate greed is also a big part of resistance to change, but there's plenty of ink spilled on that topic already. Trying to undo or rework these structures and incentives and perspectives to truly value and seek out shared public transit is going to take a hundred years if we start now. And this is not a joke. Raising all kids to take the bus instead of a car or uber for general transportation will make it easier for them (when they themselves are sitting in congress 40 years from now) to pass laws to fix our transportation system once and for all. But who am I kidding? I'm the only one I personally know of that actually gives public transport a shot and it involves a lot of waiting (there are a lot of public transit users on these forums, and I am not discounting their experience, but I'm speaking about people I know IRL). Now that the covid19 emergency is over, I might start going on buses and trains again.
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May 12, 2023 21:31
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anyways, I would like a junior bacon cheeseburger and a baked potato with chives
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May 12, 2023 21:32
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actually bad news for you my orb, the current Congress is immortal and will be serving their terms indefinitely to rule over the hellish parking lot that they turn this country into forever and ever 
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May 12, 2023 21:55
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If you were wondering whether it is possible to be in a train, and in Wisconsin, at the same time, the answer is YES, MOTHERFUCKER. |
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May 12, 2023 22:25
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cruft posted:If you were wondering whether it is possible to be in a train, and in Wisconsin, at the same time, the answer is YES, MOTHERFUCKER. I've done both of these things separately, but I always just assumed it was impossible to mix them together. |
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May 12, 2023 22:38
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Well I am living proof it can be accomplished! I mean I think I'm living. Maybe I'm only able to accomplish this because... Oh dear 
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May 12, 2023 22:41
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