> there is a significant fixed overhead (from power usage and cable wear) to having the system running at all, regardless of how many cars are on it.
Each cable car trip costs Muni about US$20. They charge about $8.
I was amazed when I first found out how the grip worked. I figured they clamped pulleys around the cables and then applied brakes to the pulley system. Nah. It's brutally simple. They squeeze two soft metal plates around the cable. The cable wears a groove in the plates during starting and stopping. Those plates are replaced every 3-4 days. The cables are replaced every few months.
Plus the thousand or so pulleys under the street need regular attention. The whole system has way too many friction points, which means intensive maintenance.
The PCC streetcars were a really good design, built for efficient operation with modest maintenance.
Their successor in San Francisco was built by Boeing Vertol, which totally botched it.[1] None of those cars are still around. The PCC cars roll on.
I'm openly (very) curious to hear the reasoning behind that statement, not having lived in SF.
From what I've read, George Lucas funded 100% of the project, and the Presidio trust rejected it. Then he tried building the museum in Chicago, but he was sued and blocked for a couple years and eventually gave up. Finally he found a spot in LA. IIRC the project took 12 years. The same source mentioned SF hasn't started any major museum projects since 2016.
America is falling behind on public works. We used to have the largest aquarium in the world, and now we're sitting at #5 or #6.
So I am genuinely curious why you and others are opponents of public works projects? I honestly do not understand.
Don’t know if you’re kidding, but I strongly disagree. We need to radically expand housing in SF, to provide enough luxury high-rise apartments with waterfront views for the upcoming wave of AI IPO multi-millionaires.
It was an impasse. Chicago wants the development money and tourism, but it also holds pretty strongly to the idea that the lakefront belongs to everyone and shouldn't be developed with private money and closed off. Yes, it was a parking lot. But it was a public parking lot.
That means sometimes these kinds of developments don't happen and you can argue either way. Lucas got a little pushy about how he wanted the museum to be developed and also turned down alternate sites. So he took his ball and left and that's okay too.
Nope. None of the frivolous NIMBY lawsuits ever made it to trial, nor was the museum ever a defendant in any of them (it was the city being sued for approving it). I don't see what you gain from misrepresenting this years after the fact.
The city could've gone to trial for the one case you're referencing, and would've won given enough money and time, but by that point the museum had already started investigating other locations.
There's an existing HF service called SailMail.[1] This is email for sailboats over HF. There are about 20 fixed stations around the world maintained by the organization. Cost is $275 per vessel per year. You can use 90 minutes of connect time per week. All it does is email over the HF links. There are now some satellite options which interoperate with it, but it predates those. There's very little infrastructure; the boat-side equipment is an SSB transceiver, and the shore stations are quite modest.
It was set up by Stan Honey, who invented car navigation systems (Etak) and the thing that puts the yellow line on TV views of football fields (Sportsvision). He's into long-distance sailing, and wanted some basic comms that would work on most of the world's oceans.
It's not that advanced technically. It just works.
Southwark is now full of purpose-built marginal tourist attractions. The big Ferris wheel. The springy Millenium Bridge. The Tate. The Globe Theater rebuild. And I see that the Oxo Tower has now put in a bar. Battersea itself now has a giant glass elevator that rises up one of the smokestacks and comes out the top. All the sights of historical importance are elsewhere.
I spent a few weeks in that area once. It's apparently less grungy now.
FWIW, most of the things you describe there are affordable and very grounded in London.
The Millennium Wheel, that is a tourist attraction, obviously, and is a slightly odd experience and not terribly cheap but it's accessible to everyone. The Globe Theatre is pretty grounded in London culture and is really affordable.
The springy bridge is a functional thing that goes between the City and the more affordable and touristy bits of Bankside.
Tate Modern is IMO a triumph. Free to enter and chock-full of properly amazing stuff that is free to view. (Go see "In Search of Vanished Blood" by Nalini Malani). There are other free galleries along that side including in the development around the Oxo tower.
For all the glitzy aspects and the touristy bits, it actually still feels at least a little like London (and is just round the corner from both normal working London and
heritage London).
None of that is even close to being as soul-deadened as the Battersea Power Station development, which exists outside culture.
I'd been to the War Rooms decades ago, when they were simply a WWII restoration.
It was an obscure grim bunker where important decisions had been made during the worst period in 20th century British history.
I remember a small electric bell at an exit with a small sign "Immediate danger above if ringing". Just a warning not to go outside during bombings.
Apparently it's been gentrified to the point of ridiculousness.
How do you mean, gentrified? I went for the first time early last year and it was an amazing experience. It's definitely very museum-like, and not cheap to enter, but the rooms all look like perfect time capsules and the audio tour is excellent.
There's a similar problem with AI-generated video, but it's in the time dimension. There's a huge genre of Asian vertical dramas, and now about 17,000 a day are being cranked out by AI systems. But there are maybe ten major plots. "Lost daughter of rich family comes home" appears over and over. There are longer videos where the plot gets lost. I was watching one where it seemed like the "save the world" goal scrolled off the history buffer and the hero was off on side quest after side quest with the main goal forgotten.
This probably comes from a lack of intermediate level structure. To make a good dramatic story, you usually start from a plot summary, add character sheets, develop a plot, then a storyboard, then detail the storyboard. That way, you end up at the desired end. If you just let LLM-based systems free run, they go on forever, which is real life but bad entertainment. Unless the goal is a soap opera.
There's good stuff out there, from people who can plot.
"I was watching one where it seemed like the "save the world" goal scrolled off the history buffer and the hero was off on side quest after side quest with the main goal forgotten."
That's hardly a problem unique to AI-generated low budget dramas. That's a problem that literally derailed the latter seasons of Game of Thrones, a show with a huge budget, massive human writer's room, drawing from award winning source material.
People ascribe every problem to AI, instead of just recognizing that people can make crap with any tool you put in their hands, be it Seedance, Houdini, or a typewriter.
The goal for most of these vertical shorts is soap opera so this is a feature and not a bug. Also, in order to maintain engagement, they often need to have continuously escalating plots which makes for bad writing (typically in good plots you have dips in action before the next climax). The problem isn't what AI can generate and rather what people are asking for (both the audience and the producers).
> it seemed like the "save the world" goal scrolled off the history buffer and the hero was off on side quest after side quest with the main goal forgotten.
Putting aside the question of "why consume any media," and even admitting that I myself have seen hundreds of hours of General Hospital (don't ask), why consume this media specifically? Are people seeking this out or is it just TikTok algorithms?
Is it reductive to ask what the point is? Do fans get together and discuss plot developments? "I can't believe X did Y!" Maybe it's the future of media but to me it just rings hollow.
Social media algorithms have increasingly promised to replace self-curation, an effort consuming higher thinking activity, with an automatic optimization of limbic responses. AI just proved to be an effective tool for stretching the base motif into an infinite series of stimulus, fulfilling that same function and winning over by volume.
Each cable car trip costs Muni about US$20. They charge about $8.
I was amazed when I first found out how the grip worked. I figured they clamped pulleys around the cables and then applied brakes to the pulley system. Nah. It's brutally simple. They squeeze two soft metal plates around the cable. The cable wears a groove in the plates during starting and stopping. Those plates are replaced every 3-4 days. The cables are replaced every few months.
Plus the thousand or so pulleys under the street need regular attention. The whole system has way too many friction points, which means intensive maintenance.
The PCC streetcars were a really good design, built for efficient operation with modest maintenance. Their successor in San Francisco was built by Boeing Vertol, which totally botched it.[1] None of those cars are still around. The PCC cars roll on.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Standard_Light_Rail_Vehicle
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