You're correct, but there's more to it then that.
Rural counties are experiencing population loss.
The current generation of small town residents will not be replaced. They'll simply die off and create ghost towns. If a midwestern "town" doesn't now have a medical center, a community college, a proper grocery store, a Walmart, and a chain hardware store, in fifty years it'll probably be abandoned.
This will really accelerate if states institutionalize online primary education in an attempt to get in front of home schooling. In many small towns the school is the last remaining big employer.
In parallel, if a high speed network is established in the east and west coastal areas, it will begin to grow inwards to reach more top-25 cities.
The balance falls somewhere between the two. To achieve European or Japan like efficiency you need equivalent population. "Trains" don't replace cars... subways do. But to get to the point of subways you need incredibly high population density.
The high speed city-to-city routes continued to develop after the war because the Asian and European post war economies couldn't afford mass car ownership until the 70's or 80's.
Meanwhile the US was flying high with a postwar economy that saw basically the top 75 population centers get jet service with 707's.
To make high speed work in the US, you have to make it work between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and between Boston and Philadelphia. Until that works, there's nothing to build off of.
Trains are also less efficient
In actuality, no. In terms of passenger-mile-gallons diesel electrics sip fuel compared to turbofans. The diesel cycle is just so much more efficient than the brayton cycle that there's no meaningful comparison between the two.
Like, that's not even controversial. It's how commuter rail can remain economical against buses.
The problem with nationwide rail is:
- Atrophy of the established 19th century rail base.
- Failure to develop routes to match population trends since the Eisenhower Administration.
- The overall size of the country, which was always going to make coast to coast flights economical.
- Extremely low average population density and long distances between the top 25 population centers.
The nemesis of trains in America never was air transportation. It was always highways and interstates. THIS IS HOW MANY SHINKANSEN-SPEED TRAINS YOU'D NEED TO MAKE IT ALL WORK IN THE US. The cost would be in the trillions.
Yeah. It was done in the style of a late-night b-movie theater, with an MC doing a brief intro for the night's lineup. They'd open with Jack Horkheimer, PBS's weekly 5 minute stargazing show. Then always Red Dwarf, and then after that the schedule varied although it always ended with two episodes of Doctor Who and then the station would shut down for the night.
While throwing hammers at him
Steampunk is a genre, manga is a medium.
Steamboy came out in 2004. And the english dub had Patrick Stewart. A novelization and a manga were both done in parallel.
Sakura Taisen started as a squad tile fighting game game on the Sega Saturn. A manga was done by Tokyopop and the scans are on Mangadex.
Nadia is much older, all the way back in 1990. Loosely based on 10,000 Leagues Under the Sea but it's from Hideaki Anno (Neon Genesis Evangelion) and... Hayao Miyazaki of all people, so all pretense about being based on anything disappears pretty quickly. Where things get really weird is that Evangelion was originally supposed to be a direct sequel to Nadia set like a hundred-some years later in modern day, but the project backers wouldn't okay it in that form.
steampunk equivalent of Akira
Well, the obvious answer is Steamboy...
Y'know, the OTHER movie by Katsuhiro Otomo.
Nadia and Sakura Taisen are typically counted as Steampunk, although to my knowledge Nadia was never done as a manga. And while you're in that period you might as well pick up Emma (although it's purely a romance, albeit a Kaoru Mori work so heavy on historical detail).
you mean they reran it during said hiatus
Yes.
Doctor Who has been on Iowa Public Television's weekly schedule continuously (excepting the occasional interruption for special events) since 1974.
The hiatus years were actually IPT's heyday, when they were airing it along side Red Dwarf, Hitchhiker's Guide, Neverwhere, and Blake's 7 as a friday night block.
They were the station that prevented Sci-Fi channel from getting exclusive rights to Doctor Who back in the 00's. They'd been paying for Doctor Who for so long that BBC didn't want to cut them out, and Sci-Fi wanted a monopoly on US distribution.
Yes, and it's weapons grade bullshit.
The EPR design is ill suited to plutonium production. As a pressurized design, it has to be stopped, depressurized, and opened in order to remove the fuel bundles. But producing plutonium only needs the fuel to burn for maybe 6 weeks. Longer than that and you start accumulating more isotopes you don't want.
This is why PWRs have NEVER been used (emphasis on NEVER) for enrichment by anyone. They're the least suited to it because they have to be off to be refueled.
It's not practical.
Olkiluoto 3 is an EPR. Production of weapons plutonium requires a short soak time of only a few weeks. A pressurized reactor isn't suited to such short fuel burn, since it has to be stopped and depressurized to swap fuel bundles. There's no capability to continuously feed and remove fuel pellets in FIFO order (like the Hanford reactors), or remove individual bundles while running (like an RBMK or CANDU).
deliver in one week
This is either going to work exactly as planned or fail so spectacularly that credit card companies will have to clean up charge errors.
I have no doubts that it can be done.
But it sure as hell isn't going to be done well.
The biggest expense is legal.
There is an ungodly amount of paperwork to do in order to establish a bank or credit union. Paying someone else to do it, that's going to run into the hundreds of thousands or low millions.
Your typical short lifespan credit union is generally founded by the village idiot with a law degree, who has pretentions of being a big balls businessman.
The key step is to obtain a State Charter. This sounds hard, it's not. The hurdle is basically "do you have a business plan". If your business plan is "We're starting a online payment processor that will also offer traditional banking services like checking", and you sound like you can actually deliver it, then you'll get your charter. Hell, you might even get some business startup grants cuz that's the sort of new world tech business states are fighting each other for.
With a charter in hand, you open an account with the Federal Reserve (which functions much like any other bank account, you just need a bank charter to do it), and apply for FDIC insurance.
Then you're in business.
Now, there are requirements. You have to maintain certain levels (reserve requirements). But if you're not issuing any loans, just holding all deposits, paying no interest, and paying operating costs on fees... then maintaining reserves and thus solvency is not a problem. You can't be bank-runned if you have all the money in reserves. Now, why someone would WANT to bank with you under such terms is a mystery (to the fed) but it's not illegal.
What I described above is how paypal works anyway (no loans, everything paid for by fees).
Now, to actually do what we're proposing (replace paypal) you're gonna need some heavy hardware and a bunch of bespoke software. That's all separate from the cost of building a bank, and frankly the bigger problem.
But if an entity like subscribestar had established themselves as a bank first BEFORE going live, it would be almost impossible to prevent money from reaching them, at least by check/ach.
To put it another way...
When you write a check, you are telling your bank, "Hey, bank, send money to here". If you have the money, and "here" exists, they send the money.
The bank doesn't have the liberty to say "We don't think you should be sending money to there". The federal courts and the treasury can, but that's a high hurdle and basically means "there" is under investigation for crimes.
What the bank CAN do is say "you don't have that money", or "we don't think you're actually you". The latter case, they have to ask you "hey, did you authorize this?" and if you did, they send it through. But compared to credit cards, banks tend to be more fast and loose about sending transactions through as long as the balance is okay. They simply don't care too much.
If you don't offer loans, what stops "real" banks refusing your customers loans purely because they are with you?
Because clearing isn't a loan.
Think of it as a "push". The other bank can only refuse if they don't believe that the transaction was authorized by their depositor.
It is a depositor telling their bank "take my money and sent it to here".
They can only say no if they believe their depositor didn't actually authorize it, or didn't have the money to do it.
Bank runs are only possible if you write loans.
It's entirely possible to run a bank that doesn't operate on loan income. It'd just have to charge fees...
Like PayPal does.
The second you could have a positive balance at PayPal, it became a bank. Albeit a crummy one with no depositor's insurance.
I am aware of all of that, yes.
Consider the Keiretsu.
The keiretsu are vertically and horizontally integrated business groups in Japan, each built around their own... private... bank.
As in, it's theirs. They control it.
Suppose the free speech wing of the internet decided to get its ass together and form a keiretsu. With a real bank, that clears real transactions.
I don't think it's impossible. It's just a lot of work from people who are as lazy as Ian Fucking "Free the Code" Crossland.
Because I'm already rich from a software startup, on the back 9 of my life, and don't care to help people who get their kicks posting racist slurs like a 12 year old.
It's a lot of work, and I'm an engineer. I make what I'm paid to make.
During the era of checks, every federal reserve bank hosted a "clearinghouse".
This was a location where all the banks under that Reserve Bank would meet and swap checks that had been given to them. Balances would be paid out.
ACH replaced that system electronically. Instead of a paper check, an ETF record is handed around and then money changes hands.
The system is still fundamentally controlled by the government. The only ways a transaction can be refused is either because it was unauthorized/fraudulent, or because the account doesn't have the funds.
To actually kick a participant out of the ACH system would require the participating entity to be recognized as a habitual source of fraudulent or overdrafting transactions, and that determination is made by the government, and can be fought in federal court.
I think you underestimate the sheer amount of licenses and regulations you have to meet, and how expensive it is.
No, you just don't have the professional experience in the subject matter that I do.
Now pray tell, how do you stop the government
Because, the Treasury Dept is the rule making body. They administrate the system, not NACHA.
Which means they're subject to the fucking constitution. People have a right to conduct commerce freely. A participant in the ACH system doesn't have the right to refuse to conduct transactions with another participant, they have to go to the Treasury Dept and argue that the other participant is acting criminally and needs to be kicked off the network. They can only refuse transactions on the basis that they were unauthorized by the account holders.
That's a much higher hurdle.
Banks have capital requirements that none of us could meet.
You are thinking the numbers are a couple orders of magnitude larger than the numbers really are.
How do you think local credit unions keep poping up and then going under?
If you go under them for a second, you'll be shut down.
Yes, and?
ACH suffers from the same problem as MasterCard.
NACHA IS ONLY AN INDUSTRY GROUP, THE RULE MAKING BODY IS THE DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY.
Yes, tell us more about your giant offworld industrial salt mining operation.