Regular trains don’t run underground. Lots of opencast mines exist .

Basically all mines have an above ground terminal where whatever you mined is unloaded from your underground trains, lifts, haul trucks or whatever else onto storage piles, then loaded onto the actual long distance trains.

If the mine entry is up a mountain, then the trip down from that point will be a net energy producer regardless of anything else.

Two religions is not more statistically significant than one.

Referring to yourself in the third person and acting like this comes off as extremely condescending.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there are electrified railway lines doing the same. Regenerate large amounts of energy into the grid while descending loaded; consume a relatively small amount of energy to haul the empty train back uphill.

If you’re thinking of that CGI crane lifting concrete blocks, it’s unfortunately a really bad idea.

Pumped hydro stores energy by lifting weight uphill, instead. Water is basically the cheapest thing you can get per tonne, and is easy to contain and move.

To store useful amounts of energy using gravity, you need pretty large elevation differences and millions of tonnes of mass to move.

Oh, I mixed up your post. Sorry.

If you’re considering the US federal government (excluding the newly elected carrot…) ‘tyrannical’, what civilisations are you considering not tyrannical? The list has to be very, very small.

None of the definitions of tyranny I see have a restriction on scale. You can be a tyrant ruling a hundred people or a billion. It’s technology (transport, food storage, writing/communication) and geography that limit the size of a tyranny. I’d argue lots of small tribal societies wander into tyranny; it’s just hard to rule over multiple islands when you don’t have writing or metals.

There’s religions in Asia other than Buddhism.

There was rampant cannibalism in Polynesia along with all kinds of infighting. Maori gods have plenty of murder and war in the mythology.

War in Asia goes far wider than just one empire. Imperial Japan were thoroughly tyrannical during WW2, as well as many other conflicts.

Any civilisation that could spare, mobilise, and feed enough people to form an army basically did so, sooner or later. It’s a supply lines and population problem. Small populations can’t raise large armies and send them long distances.

Those specific cases are learned behaviour, but general purpose cruelty and theft is something that’s been around longer than capitalism has, and has to be unlearned as kids, not learned.

Anyone attempting to claim that humans are inherently humane has not met many humans.

I feel dumber having read that.

Banning a whole country because you disliked a company?

Dealing with stuff that’s ‘almost working’ is often harder than starting from scratch; ask any tradesperson.

They also apparently cannot get their heads around the fact that people might give you a discount if you advertise their brand. Ad-supported pricing has been around for a long time; it’s not some voodoo.

Until the day comes that I get a letter in the mail from the government saying, “Here’s how much you paid in taxes, if you’re cool with that then please disregard”, I will not be satisfied.

NZ does that. More accurately, they email you to tell you that there’s a letter available online - I don’t think they send physical mail by default.

Then they pay any refund straight into your nominated bank account.

I’ve heard flammable gas uses reverse (left hand) thread to prevent cross connection. At least for welding gases in NZ; not sure about natural gas.

If we knew what city/route/service and day, we might be able to get a better idea.

• Sometimes operators declare a ‘fare holiday’ when everyone rides free, usually as compensation for some major fuckup previously, or for some other PR stunt. Metlink in Wellington doesn’t charge on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, or New Year’s Eve.

• Operators sometimes half-strike and refuse to collect fares.

• The specific route, service, or time of day might be free.

• It’s an express service that you can’t pay cash on (only fare cards) and it’s easier/nicer to tell you to ride for free than to tell you to get the next bus because they don’t take cash.

• You might be part of some group (youth, students, elderly) that doesn’t have to pay.

• Something is broken and they can’t collect fares.

• They don’t want to deal with the big banknote you had.

Any hard drive can fail at any time with or without warning. Worrying too much about individual drive families’ reliability isn’t worth it if you’re dealing with few drives. Worry instead about backups and recovery plans in case it does happen.

Bigger drives have significantly lower power usage per TB, and cost per TB is lowest around 12-16TB. Bigger drives also lets you fit more storage in a given box. Drives 12TB and up are all currently helium filled which run significantly cooler.

Two preferred options in the data hoarder communities are shucking (external drives are cheaper than internal, so remove the case) and buying refurb or grey market drives from vendors like Server Supply or Water Panther. In both cases, the savings are usually big enough that you can simply buy an extra drive to make up for any loss of warranty.

Under US$15/TB is typically a ‘good’ price.

For media serving and deep storage, HDDs are still fine and cheap. For general file storage, consider SSDs to improve IOPS.

I don’t remember if they fully closed the loopholes, but there are inputs that programs cannot catch unless you actually replace the OS.

Here in NZ they do a factory reset on your calculator at the start of every exam.

I didn’t realise it was possible to hate every side of an argument this strongly.

Essentially no processors follow a standard. There are some that have become a de facto standard and had both backwards compatibility and clones produced like x86. But it is certainly not an open standard, and many lawsuits have been filed to limit the ability of other companies to produce compatible replacement chips.

RISC-V is an attempt to make an open instruction set that any manufacturer can make a compatible chip for, and any software developer can code for.

Kinda yes, kinda no. There have certainly been times, particularly after 9/11 and various crises, when demand dropped significantly.

There’s also airliners that just haven’t sold well. A340NG, A380, 747-8, 767-400, the MD-11, until recently the Cseries/A220. The A330neo has also not sold particularly well and you could probably get a slot within a year easily.