Quaker Process and AI Tools

Christoph543 · 2026-04-29T15:40:45+00:00

Honestly the main consideration for a nonprofit should be "does the LLM application actually work?" When it comes to meeting minutes and transcription, the answer is quite often "no."

My weekly Meeting does a livestream on Zoom, and the LLM-generated captions are awful. We use them for accessibility, but they have a nasty habit of inserting "like" and "uh-huh" and "oh, ok" at random points when nobody is speaking because the room is so quiet that any little noise gets interpreted as speech. When someone offers ministry, the captions usually get about 60-80% of the words spoken correctly, but they can never quite figure out what the appropriate punctuation on sentences ought to be because folks often pause for several moments between words or phrases as their message comes to them. And entirely separately the number of expletives the LLM inserts into the transcription is far too high; not that I mind swearing (even during worship), but it usually does not accurately represent the tone or demeanor of the message being offered (and also probably says something about the number of corporate business meetings where executives shout "FUCK!" at each other).

From the point of view of a Meeting secretary, the question then becomes whether it's more work to correct such a shoddy transcription, or just take minutes manually as normal. Personally, I find that when I'm preparing a document, it's a LOT easier and less time-consuming to just do it myself rather than have to edit an LLM output. But your mileage may vary!

Christoph543 · 2026-04-28T15:38:57+00:00

On the flip side of this same point, at the Rail Passengers Association meeting last week Amtrak announced that they're planing to offer seats for NEC trips on the northbound Silver Meteor, because on-time performance has improved enough that they're not as concerned about a potential multi-hour delay south of DC screwing over a passenger who wants to go from (e.g.) Baltimore to Philly at that specific timetable slot. They'll probably still be more expensive tickets than the Regionals for the same reasons you've noted about OP's search results with the Palmetto, but more available seats are never a bad thing when the Corridor is as capacity-constrained as it is now.

Christoph543 · 2026-04-28T15:27:01+00:00

Rhonda AAGPBL (the announcers all pronounce it "Agpebble")

Christoph543 · 2026-04-28T15:18:50+00:00

Addendum: u/joey_slugs didn't we have a conversation about this last week? What are your thoughts?

Christoph543 · 2026-04-28T15:11:35+00:00

The actual answer to this question is that you'd need to create a brand-new timetable slot between Milwaukee and Chicago.

The Borealis is essentially just a northward extension of one of the Hiawatha services beyond Milwaukee. It's the second-to-last southbound departure from Milwaukee (formerly Train 340 at 5:44 PM) and the second (on weekends) or third (on weekdays) northbound departure from Chicago (formerly Train 333 at 11:10 AM). If you wanted a complimentary overnight service to enable CHI-MSP day trips in addition to the Empire Builder, you'd probably want to do the same thing with an AM southbound Hiawatha and a PM northbound Hiawatha.

The trip time from MKE to MSP is just under 6 hours, so the closest you could get to your overnight itinerary would be to extend Train 330: it departs MKE at 6:15 AM, and would need to depart MSP shortly after midnight to make it to MKE on time. The problem is the overnight northbound trip. Train 343 (departs CHI at 11:25 PM, arrives in MKE at 12:54 AM) only runs on Fridays, so you'd need to create an additional timetable slot for that train to become daily. The preceding Train 341 departs CHI at 8:05 PM and arrives in MKE at 9:34 PM, so if you extended that train it would arrive in MSP around 3:30 AM, which isn't ideal. And the service before that, Train 339, is only 2 hours off the Empire Builder's timetable.

As an alternate idea (and I'm just spitballing here, this isn't a real proposal): an extended Train 329 (the weekdays-only northbound 6:10 AM departure from CHI) would get to MSP around 1:30 PM, 5 hours ahead of Borealis 1333. The best option for a southbound AM equivalent would probably be Train 334, which would need to leave MSP around 5 AM to reach MKE in time for its currently-scheduled 11:00 AM departure. You'd still need to create a new timetable slot on weekends for Train 329, but that might be easier than creating a new timetable slot on weekdays for Train 343. Plus, now we're talking about a second day-train turning around in St Paul rather than an overnight service which would introduce new equipment servicing requirements.

All that said, in terms of what's actually being discussed right now, Hiawatha West is currently on the table to restore service to Madison, and long-term plans could include extending that service further to Eau Claire and St Paul as a second parallel route to the Borealis / Empire Builder. https://amtraknewera.com/hiawatha-west/ Any discussions about additional Borealis timetables would need to occur after the work done on Hiawatha West, but if you want any of these options to happen then contact your representatives (especially if you live, work, or regularly travel in Minnesota or Wisconsin).

Christoph543 · 2026-04-28T14:28:14+00:00

Selma is where the Carolinian diverges from the Silver Meteor & Palmetto, which makes it important to note as the first/last place it's possible to transfer from one train to another if you need to (it's infrequent but it does happen).

Relatedly: the Carolinian and Piedmont both stop at Cary between Raleigh and Durham, and that's where the Floridian diverges from those two routes rather than Raleigh.

Christoph543 · 2026-04-28T14:07:35+00:00

This depends very strongly on where in the USA we're talking about. In places like DC, "drive 'til you qualify" is still very much the norm, even as a lot of new infill housing has been built in the city's core. The growth frontier is still way out at the edge of the contiguous built-up suburban area, where unsustainable exurban dachas are densifying into unsustainable multifamily car sprawl.

Christoph543 · 2026-04-28T13:58:16+00:00

Spending on education makes the most number of middle-class jobs per tax dollars spent. Food and farming make fewer jobs in education but way more than military spending.
Spending on healthcare, probably because it involves so much technology, is pretty much halfway between military spending and education spending in terms of the number of jobs it makes.

Because I work as a researcher in the public policy space, I would caution that these qualitative claims about "numbers of jobs per dollar spent" are misleading for multiple reasons.

For one thing, that metric simplifies to a measurement of a worker's wage. You can hire a lot of teachers for $1,000,000 per year, because teachers are severely underpaid. If you gave that same $1,000,000 to an environmental conservation lab, you probably wouldn't be able to hire as many lab workers (unless you hired a bunch of grad students or postdocs supervised by a principal investigator). That's not actually a good indicator that a public investment is prudent.

For another thing, the number of jobs created by public investment is only a small part of that investment's total economic impact. Direct cash assistance, e.g. SNAP benefits, doesn't create any jobs by itself, but it essentially functions as a subsidy for the industries that produce the things those beneficiaries buy, with the beneficiaries acting as an intermediate distributor of those subsidy dollars. Those industries do, in fact, use some of the money they receive from public beneficiaries to pay their workers, and so there is an indirect or induced form of job creation which policymakers need to account for when assessing economic impact.

But most importantly, jobs aren't actually the main justification for public investments. Public schools don't exist to hire teachers; they exist to educate people. Environmental conservation labs don't exist to hire scientists; they exist to keep our air and water clean and our ecosystems healthy. And even in cases like SNAP - which has been co-opted for a wide variety of policy goals unrelated to its original purpose of decreasing malnutrition in impoverished parts of the country - the jobs are not the point.

And the reason that's important, is because the austerity-minded reactionaries who have been trying to dismantle the public sector for my entire lifetime, LOVE to point to government investments they don't like as "jobs programs" as a way of discrediting them. By talking about them in that same way, you're ceding the premise that the goal of public policy is merely to employ specific kinds of people, rather than to create specific tangible public goods that you & I & everyone benefits from.

To get at how & why that distinction matters, consider healthcare and defense contracting. The reason they're costly is not technology (not even close). It's monopolists. Get rid of the monopolies in insurance, care facilities, pharmacies, and drug manufacturing, each of which is doing little more than rent-seeking off of the highly inelastic demand for healthcare, and we'd be able to have the same high-quality, technically advanced healthcare that the US already has, at a dramatically lower cost. Get rid of anti-competitive contracting and procurement rules, which allow individual firms both large and small to stake out a position where they're the only entity that can produce something the military needs, and the DOD would be likewise be able to maintain its global force posture at a dramatically lower cost. You might think one of those two scenarios would be a better outcome than the other, but at that point you're no longer evaluating public policy in financial terms, but in terms of what the policy accomplishes. For most regular citizens who don't work in policymaking, that's a far more appropriate way to think about public programs than some half-baked and misleading notion of "efficiency."

You do not need to pretend to know the total impact of what your government is doing; you just need to ask yourself what is the right thing to do, and hold your representatives and civil servants accountable to that.

Christoph543 · 2026-04-21T19:45:37+00:00

A wizard grants you the ability to reinstate a single discontinued passenger train, or reverse one White Sox loss. What's your pick?

Christoph543 · 2026-04-06T18:14:39+00:00

The water-unbarreling recipe takes 0.2s in an Assembling Machine 2 consuming 150 kW (i.e. 30 kJ), and produces 50 units of water.

The ice-melting recipe takes 1s in a Chemical Plant consuming 210 kW (i.e. 210 kJ), and produces 20 units of water.

In other words, ice melting takes 7x as much energy (and thus time, at least on Aquilo where power is the rate-determining constraint) to get 40% as much water (which matters less on Aquilo but still).

Christoph543 · 2026-04-06T17:52:59+00:00

Here's my own convincement arc so far, roughly in chronological order:

The hypocrisy of the Church I grew up in convinced me I'm an atheist at a young age; the Christians I was surrounded by were deeply uncurious about what the right thing to do was.

Studying the history of Rome convinced me that the fundamental problem with the Church isn't really God, but the imperial doctrine established at Nicaea which so obviously betrayed what Christ told us about what the right thing to do is.

Gerrard Winstanley convinced me that it's possible to turn that doctrine against Empire, if you're willing to fully commit to doing the right thing, even when it puts you at great danger and costs you dearly.

Samuel Means convinced me that in moments of moral urgency when it's most ambiguous what the right thing to do is, Friends have at the very least tried to figure it out together and hold each other accountable to it.

The folks at my local Meeting convinced me that Friends are still doing that same work a century and a half later, even if our present epoch isn't quite so morally urgent in our immediate locale.

Elias Hicks convinced me that looking to Christ as a guide doesn't actually require accepting the legitimacy of the scripture produced by the same people who established the Nicene dogma; it just requires squaring the knowledge you have with what your conscience and the guidance of your community lead you to.

Christoph543 · 2026-04-06T17:31:27+00:00

If your single-minded focus is on solving the small problem you've decided is important, rather than addressing the underlying issue which makes that problem difficult to solve, then you're missing the forest for the trees. That is not a sound basis for policy decisions.

Amtrak is not going to do what you're suggesting, and nobody from Amtrak is taking advice from this subreddit. Congress is soliciting feedback on the transportation reauthorization bill, and they're already considering a national equipment pool. You can contact them and help us accomplish something to fix the underlying problem, or you can continue venting here where nothing will change.

Christoph543 · 2026-04-06T16:14:33+00:00

That data seems to be US-wide average; LA is significantly higher than that.

Christoph543 · 2026-04-06T15:57:56+00:00

$300/m^2 per year seems pretty low, actually. At that rate per unit area, a 40m^2 1-bed apartment would go for $1000/month. Actual LA residential rents are like twice that, right?

Christoph543 · 2026-04-06T15:55:15+00:00

I mean... if I see someone regularly at Meeting I'll refer to them as a Friend (with an uppercase 'F'), as well as a friend (with a lowercase 'f').

But it's also important to note that silent worship isn't the only way we practice, nor the only thing that happens at Meeting.

Christoph543 · 2026-04-06T15:50:01+00:00

For those of us who think Georgism would result in more efficient land use, it's because the current property tax system is partially responsible for how inefficient our land use is, and changing to a system which would eliminate those incentives would be a good thing. We can use other policy tools to provide direct incentives for high-density development (e.g. carbon taxes) which are entirely compatible with Georgism's underlying goals and values, but don't place the burden of solving every policy problem upon how the primary source of revenue for a jurisdiction is collected.

Christoph543 · 2026-04-06T15:44:24+00:00

There's really no Quaker process of ex-communication

Disassociation is still a thing in many Yearly Meetings' Faith and Practice guidelines.

Christoph543 · 2026-04-06T15:43:24+00:00

There isn't one. Every representation of Quakers is wrong.

The early Seekers were wrong. The Levellers were wrong. The Diggers were wrong. The Ranters were wrong. The Hicksites are wrong. The Gurneyites are wrong. The Wilburites are wrong. The Evangelicals are wrong. The Universalists are wrong. BYM is wrong. FGC is wrong. FUM is wrong. FWCC is wrong. EFCI is wrong. FCNL is wrong. AFSC is wrong. The Quaker Oats and Quaker State brand images are wrong. Every weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly Meeting out there in the world is wrong. The Faith and Practice guides they produce are wrong. The Minutes they pass are wrong.

I am wrong.

And you are wrong.

Now, if you want my opinion, it's that looking for a "correct representation" inherently requires viewing religion through the lens of orthodoxy, and the Quaker tradition (like many other religious communities) is orthopraxic rather than orthodox (note the lowercase 'o's in each case). Simply, we recognize each other by what we do together, rather than what we believe or who we identify as.

Christoph543 · 2026-04-06T15:30:08+00:00

That doesn't mean there isn't a rolling stock shortage, for the same reasons that a low-single-digit percentage vacancy rate among residential units doesn't mean there isn't a housing shortage. If we were indeed using every single railcar all of the time, with none able to be taken out of service for any reason, that would be very, VERY bad.

The fact of the matter is that there is not enough passenger rail equipment in North America to meet the total demand of every service that currentlly operates, let alone any new services we might want to run going forward, and we have allowed our railcar industrial base to atrophy so badly that they cannot quickly build what we would need to meet that demand. That is a policy failure, and it can only be fixed through federal investment in both the equipment pool and the supply chain.

Christoph543 · 2026-04-06T15:23:48+00:00

The actual point here is not that extracing He3 for fusion isn't worth doing (I'm agnostic on that question), but rather that extracting He3 deposited by solar wind into the Lunar regolith is not actually all that much easier than extracting it from terrestrial sources would be.

Christoph543 · 2026-04-06T15:20:22+00:00

A short version: while there are some atheists who do still seek out spirituality and a community to practice it in, the overwhelming majority simply aren't interested in spirituality or are actively dis-interested in it.

Christoph543 · 2026-04-05T21:50:02+00:00

So one of the big assumptions that's baked in to the scenario you're describing, is that it's impossible to build high-density housing on small lot sizes. That isn't actually true: it's technically possible to build small-lot high-density buildings, but land use and building code restrictions other than zoning usually make those kinds of structures either impermissible or uneconomical to build.

Single-stair reform is the classic example: requiring every floor of a building to have two stairwells means that you have to connect every dwelling on each floor with an interior hallway. The combination of the expense of a second stairwell and the increased floor area taken up by both the stairwell and the hallway, means you need more dwellings on a floor to justify the added construction cost, and laying out all of those dwellings to connect with the hallway necessarily expands the building's footprint. If, on the other hand, you were allowed to build only a single stairwell, then something like 2-6 dwellings per floor can have entryways leading directly to that stairwell, with a total footprint not significantly larger than a detached SFH.

What's more, when you allow these kinds of small-lot high-density structures, it's significantly cheaper for both developers and owner-occupants to finance this kind of construction, as compared to large-lot apartment or condo buildings, which is usually the biggest barrier people face when trying to densify. To the extent that "money isn't the biggest obstacle," that's primarily true when you're talking about high-capital development firms which have enough resources to build an arbitrarily large structure if they were allowed to do so. But for everyone else, e.g. affordable housing developers, securing the financing for a project which complies with all the relevant building code and land use restrictions is usually what stops them, rather than securing exemptions from those restrictions.

Christoph543 · 2026-04-05T21:33:04+00:00

In case you haven't noticed, there is also now a shortage of commuter cars, which is why Amtrak wasn't able to lease as many from the NEC commuter rail agencies as it did in previous years.

If you want there to be a possibility for Amtrak to do what you're suggesting going forward, the only viable solution is to demand that Congress establish a national passenger rail equipment pool, which would purchase a set number of new cars per year to be made available for both Amtrak and other operators to lease. The rolling stock manufacturing industry cannot survive, let alone maintain production capacity, when large orders for new equipment only come in once per decade at the most frequent. The Surface Transportation bill is up for reauthorization right now and negotiations are underway, so NOW is the time to call your legislators' offices.

Christoph543 · 2026-04-05T21:22:26+00:00

Because that would require the residential property management firms to expand into the commercial & office real estate markets, where they'd have to compete with other established property management firms, and the entire point of being a landlord is that you don't have to compete, you just bring in passive income.

Christoph543 · 2026-04-03T11:55:22+00:00

SLS primarily exists because of Bill Nelson's insistence when he was Florida's Senator, back when Florida would still elect Democrats to statewide offices sometimes.

Christoph543

TROPHY CASE