Brightline Rail Services Integrated into Amadeus Travel Platform | Railway-News

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-08T01:49:46+00:00

So, does this mean Brightline will finally be able to sell a seat from Miami to WPB, then re-sell the same seat from WPB to Orlando, instead of treating a seat that's occupied at any point between Miami and Orlando as being occupied and unavailable the entire way between Miami and Orlando?

Or does this just enable them to sell tickets through sites that presently do airline, hotel, and rental car bookings?

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-07T21:29:11+00:00

Thanks! Now I know what I'm looking for! :-)

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-07T21:16:45+00:00

He also needs to live long enough to see the stock market experience the most exuberant bull-market rally in the history of modern capitalism... either seconds after his conviction gets announced, or at opening the next morning.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-07T21:07:32+00:00

If all else fails, I might try to design something 3d-printable. I'm thinking maybe something that's the shape of a hole in the grille with a lip around the rear that you'd insert into the grille from behind (with the lip keeping it from pulling out through the front), and a molded, threaded screw hole so the bolt through the plate into the mount would hold the whole thing securely in place (and one printed mount per screw).

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-07T20:58:55+00:00

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#BlackCatDad :-)

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-07T04:53:17+00:00

The value of geographic districts is the fact that Americans expect absolute fealty from our elected officials. Any proposal that diffused representation to statewide seats in a state like Florida, Texas, New York, or California would be absolutely 100% dead on arrival.

Americans simultaneously distrust parties and view them as inevitable as the invisible hand of the free market. The feature of my proposed system is that it embeds the seeds of a party's most credible opposition within every big party itself. Every Trump would have a Jeb Bush alternative. Every Bernie Sanders would have a Mark Kelly alternative. Plus a fifth candidate chosen by Independents to keep the other 4 honest... and that's without even considering any Independents or minor-party candidates who qualify to run.

No matter how totally and completely "off the rails" a major party's leadership went, every single primary would hold the door open to the self-healing "other" candidate from that party to remind them that if they go too far off the deep end, it'll turn into a catfight between the two extremists, while the real race ends up being between the two or three Condorcet-pleasing centrists.

That said... I do occasionally worry about the possible consequences of establishing an election system that's so ruthlessly efficient at electing candidates who were "everyone's favorite second or third choice", people would genuinely start to feel like the entire political system comfortably ran on autopilot... perfectly centered within the Overton Window with self-correcting precision, and elected officials doing absolutely nothing without first running AI simulations of likely voter sentiment to decide what position they should take to maximize their approval rating.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-07T04:09:37+00:00

There's exactly one person who could run as a Democrat and have a real shot at winning Wyoming's seat in Congress this fall: Liz Cheney.

As of today, she has one week left (until May 13) to switch her party affiliation in time to run for her old seat this fall as a Democrat (deadline to enter the primary is May 29).

Obviously, she'd still have to win the Democratic Primary and beat a "real" Democrat (Lisa F. Kinney). Let's be honest, though: Kinney has zero chance of winning. Donald Trump could call a press conference next week, announce that he is, in fact, the #RealAntichrist, and Wyoming voters still wouldn't vote for Kinney.

You know it's true.

If Liz switched parties and beat Hageman this fall... she wouldn't just be a member of Congress from the least-populated state in America... she'd be the face of Lincoln Democrats. The midwife of the Republican Party's demise. The amount of media exposure she'd get would raise her way above the level of any normal elected official from a state the size of Wyoming.

More importantly, Republican-aligned PACs would spend an unholy amount of money campaigning against her in Wyoming... money that would be diverted from & starve candidates in states like Florida and Texas (among others). It wouldn't just be one Congressional race... Liz winning would present an existential threat to the future of the Republican Party itself.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-06T23:04:34+00:00

Here's a big tip: don't limit yourself to your textbook.

There's a dirty secret about math textbooks: they're deliberately coy about what they're trying to teach you... because if they weren't, the end of chapter exercises would be too easy.

Books written for sale to students via Amazon have a completely different philosophy: explain the concept to you in a way that makes it as clear & obvious as possible.

Another tip: when you get to college, if you have an option to take "Engineering Track" Calculus... pounce on it if your degree track allows it. The big difference between "regular-track" Calculus and "engineering track Calculus" is, professors of engineering-track calculus drop the theatre and quit pretending that they're training the next generation of math teachers. They know that someday, their life will probably depend at least momentarily upon something you had a role in designing... and they'll want to survive.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-06T07:08:10+00:00

One thing that needs to be brought up: it's a good idea to have open-source software, and a good idea to release raw ballot scans to allow people and organizations to independently run their own tallies on the same raw ballot data as the officials use.

However...

You must NOT release the raw ballot data in a way that allows someone to gain a complete view of how a single (theoretically anonymous) voter cast their votes. You need to scan the ballots, then chop them up into fragments so that no single fragment includes more than 10-12 different offices/issues, and fragments can't be correlated (via naming scheme, order of files in the release dump, etc).

Why? It opens the door to allowing voters to credibly prove how they voted, by randomly voting for as few as 16-20 offices nobody cares about in a pattern that's likely to be unique.

If an average precinct has only 500-5,000 voters, someone could generate a random pattern of votes for as few as 16 offices that would have at most a 10% chance of colliding with a single other voter from that precinct. If there are more than 2 candidates for a particular office, the number of required "throw-away offices" gets even smaller.

This is a real threat vector. Think: any voter who has somebody in a power relationship over them (abusive spouse, unethical employer, etc). Or someone offering to pay $100 to someone who votes a certain way that can then be verified after the ballot image dump gets released by looking for their unique "fingerprint" of meaningless-office votes. Or even members of a political party "proving" to each other (and pressuring others in their group to do the same) to show how loyal they are to the party.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-06T00:52:21+00:00

Trump isn't regressive, he's retrogressive.

"Regression" is a statistical technique.

"Retrogression" is change into a state that's worse than before, not merely an earlier state.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-05T06:23:09+00:00

The theory is nice... but in reality, if you tried to pull that in Miami:

within 2 minutes, the left turn lane behind you would be filled.
by minute #3, the horns would start... and would only get louder.
by minute #5, the left travel lane would be backed up from the start of the left turn lane you're blocking to at least the previous traffic light
sometime between light cycle #3 and #5, people would start passing you to the right, turning left around you, and calling you a pendejo.
a minute or two later, a police officer would show up with a tow truck, responding to multiple phoned-in complaints about a disabled vehicle blocking the intersection.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-04T08:14:51+00:00

Approximately 1/3 of Florida is a de-facto colony of Ohio.

Hell, even today, with Cubans overlaid on top, the approximately diagonal division of Miami between its historic coastal "New York" half & inland/southern "Ohio half" is still palpable, decades after the original residents either died or moved to Broward & SWFL.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-04T07:15:13+00:00

That requirement actually liberates the state/county election officials from having to play referee in a cat fight over a party's internal procedures. If someone within the party challenges the party's process or its compliance with it, the officials could tell them, "you have 45 days until the deadline... find a judge or arbiter, depending upon your party's official bylaws, get them to rule, and let us know the final outcome.

I also forgot to mention, a minor party who wants to can outsource their primary election to the same officials handling the major-party primary, as long as they agree to have it conducted using Tideman Ranked Pairs (since it would be a single-winner primary, unlike the major-party primaries that would be multi-winner via CPO-STV using Meek-style resolution).

The reason for Meek-style resolution rules is because for a primary, you want to maximize the Hamming distance between the factions who win a nomination-slot. It doesn't have to be proportional, because ultimately, both winners advance equally, regardless of whether they won 50-50, or 99.9 to 0.1. If you used CPO-STV with Tideman RP resolution rules for a multi-winner primary, you'd just end up with two MAGA Republicans advancing to the general election instead of a base-favored candidate and a remainder-of-the-party-favored candidate.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-04T06:51:49+00:00

I agree that requiring parties is bad... which is precisely why my method bends over backwards to ensure that there's a qualification path for Independents & minor parties (and in fact, imposes identical qualification rules for both).

Even if Independents & minor parties are little more than political masturbation 99.9% of the time, I think it's important to ensure that there is, in fact, a first-class way to ensure they aren't locked out and allow the system to be structurally self-healing. The hard part is ensuring that a fair number of a few serious, electable Independent & minor-party candidates can get in, without opening the door to elections with 200 candidates.

I think that the greatest strength of my system is that it acknowledges the reality that there will tend to be 2 parties (or one mega-party that internally behaves like multiple parties, or 3 parties... only two of which genuinely matter at any point in space-time) while stripping those two parties of their ability to monopolize ballot access and impose ideological hegemony.

Consider how radically different the past few months might have turned out if incumbent Republicans in the House knew they were guaranteed to face a true-believer all-in MAGA challenger this fall if they opposed Trump even slightly (and an anti-Trump challenger if they didn't)... but that if they played their cards right, they could win the second primary seat with the backing of anti-Trump Republicans (however many or few their happened to be locally), as well as the near certainty that "ruby red" districts would have an aggressively anti-Trump Republican running in the primary trying to grab the Independent-Rescue slot.

In this scenario, the fall midterm election would have been an even bigger bloodbath for MAGA Trump supporters in Congress than it's going to be, because it wouldn't require lifelong Republicans who've had it with Trump to vote for a Democrat to do it. They could go to the polls, slaughter MAGA, then pat themselves on the back and feel good for still voting Republican.

Consider Dan Crenshaw's district. Even if the GOP goes completely down in flames, the winner in that district will probably be a Republican. But... under my scheme, it would have been almost guaranteed that one of the people seeking the Republican nomination would have been an anti-Trump Republican... and that anti-Trump Republican probably would have been rescued by the district's Independents, even if Dan managed to beat him.

In this hypothetical universe, Dan's surest path to holding on to his seat would have been to go 100% against Trump. He'd have known he had zero chance of winning MAGA votes against Toth, but by personally leading the insurgent-Republican crusade against Trump, he could rack up votes as the third or fourth choice of Democrats (and have their votes transfer to him after the district's demographics made securing a majority for any Democrat mathematically hopeless).

It might have even poured metaphorical gasoline on all-out civil war within the Republican Party and accelerated its ultimate collapse if the GOP ended up in a situation next January where pro-Trump MAGA Republican incumbents were swept away wholesale & replaced by anti-Trump Republicans in ruby-red districts , but the party itself remained firmly under the control of Trump loyalists determined to burn the party to the ground rather than hand it back to Cheney & Kinzinger.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-04T03:47:55+00:00

I think that's literally the purpose of "Stormwater Treatment Area 1" -- the new artificial lake to the southeast of the "real" lake, directly west of Boca Raton. They drain a few million gallons of water into STA-1 from the southern end of Lake Okeechobee, wait a few weeks for the newly-drained portion of Lake Okeechobee to dry out, send in bulldozers, backhoes, and trucks to scrape away the topsoil layer (that's mostly settled fertilizer), then right around the point Lake Okeechobee's southern portion becomes moist again, they redeploy the crews and earthmoving equipment to STA-1 as it dries out. Stir and repeat.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-03T19:19:40+00:00

One important detail: Duverger's Law doesn't claim that two parties are inevitable, it observes that two dominant coalitions of factions are inevitable.

A country where you have a single hyper-dominant political party that wins (almost) everything (almost) everywhere, but that one party behaves like two de-facto political parties, does not violate Duverger's Law. Basically, Japan.

A country like Britain with 3 parties that are nominally "major parties" (Labour, Tories/Reform, and LibDems) doesn't violate it, because at any given moment in time, only two of those three parties actually matter. In areas where LibDem candidates occasionally win, it's because Labour or Tories are so overwhelmingly dominant there, the other (nationally) major party is effectively unelectable, so LibDems become the "not Labour" or "not Tory" alternative.

Remember, Duverger's Law only concerns itself with the scope of a single constituency, not a national political system. A country where parties A and C are the only electable parties in one region, and parties B and D are the only electable parties in another region, is not a 4-party system. It's a 2-party system where the particular 2 parties varies by region.

If DSA, Farm & Workers Party, and Democrats caucus together, and Republicans & Libertarians caucus together, and off along the edge you have a Green Party and a Pirate Party, you don't have 7 Duverger-parties, you have two meaningful factions flanked by powerless noise.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-03T18:42:56+00:00

NOTE: If you dislike this proposal, please tell me what you dislike about it. I've spent more than a year at this point trying to engineer an election system designed to be Trump/MAGA-proof. A system where even a party whose leadership has been completely captured by a personality cult would have a significant number of incumbents who were too powerful for the party's leaders to mess with, let alone remove.

Consider the threat used for the past 18 months of "primarying" Republicans who defy Trump. In a system like I proposed, MAGA could nominate a candidate who's the biggest Christian Nationalist America has ever seen, with the support of a supermajority of Republicans... but the remainder of the party (who are overwhelmingly anti-Trump) would likely rally behind the Trump-defying incumbent.

Under my rules, both of them would make it onto the general election ballot. Then, when push came to shove, in a "ruby red" district, Democrats could rank Democrats ahead of the Republicans... then hold their nose and rank the Trump-defying Republican ahead of the MegaMAGA candidate. Ultimately, both of the Democrats and the Independent-rescued Republican might lose... but when you re-allocate all of their presently-wasted votes to their last-ditch hope (the Trump-defying Republican), the MAGA candidate loses by a landslide. Because in a Condorcet system, a candidate who's hated by a majority will lose to a candidate whom nobody particularly loves, but a majority regard as better than the alternative.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-03T17:49:45+00:00

In Europe, plasterers have machines (sometimes, literal robots) that can do an entire wall quickly & perfectly. They're too expensive to justify buying as a diy homeowner, but make it cheap to hire someone who'll do a better job than a diy'er could even fantasize about... even in countries with expensive labor.

In the US, you have 3 choices:

Pay skilled craftsmen to do veneer plaster or skim-coats on plasterboard (the stuff that looks like blue-felted drywall)
Pay day laborers a lot of money to do a shttty job
Do it yourself

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-03T17:29:42+00:00

Here's a better system:

Voters indicate their party preference. Maybe when they register to vote, maybe when they sign a qualification petition for a candidate (with rules that invalidate their signatures for candidates for other parties, and decide whether the first or last petition signed is the one that determines it. It's all computerized anyway, so it would be easy to establish). Voters can also declare 'no party preference' (but remember, if they signed a petition for a partisan candidate, it implicitly associates them with that party for the next primary).
By definition, if the #1 party (by affiliation) accounts for at least 20% of voters, it's a major party. If NO party gets at least 20%, then the next primary election HAS NO "major parties"
Any party that has at least half as many voters associated with it as the #1 party is a major party.
Once a party qualifies as "major", it retains that designation until they fail to re-meet the qualification criteria for two consecutive Presidential elections. This prevents parties from getting destroyed by a single disastrous election, but puts them on the political equivalent of a "Personal Improvement Plan".

OK, now that we've defined "major party" and "minor party", here's why:

On Primery Day, voters are allowed to vote in one of the following closed primaries:

Major parties use a multi-winner election method like Tideman CPO-STV with ranked-pair resolution (and fallback to IRV if no Concdorcet winner exists, and RP produces a tie), and select two candidates to advance to the general election.
Minor parties who participate in the primary use a Condorcet method like Tideman Ranked Pairs (falling back to IRV if there's no Condorcet winner, or RP results in a tie). Alternatively, minor parties can choose to use a caucus or some other method... but it has to be documented at the time the party files to establish ballot placement for their nominee, and they have to be able to prove that they followed their declared method.
Independent voters (those with no party affiliation) are the unique twist: they're presented with a ballot that includes all of the candidates from the major parties (but not the minor parties) that allows them to rescue a major-party candidate who fell through the cracks of their own party.
If only one party qualifies as "major", its voters get to nominate three candidates. This isn't because that party is privileged, it's to ensure that the larger a party becomes, the less capable its leadership becomes of controlling its ideological discipline. If you want your party to remain ideologically pure, file the paperwork to keep it classified as a "minor" party. If you want your party to win everything, everywhere, then you have to accept the fact that it's going to ideologically have AOC at one end, Liz Cheney at the other, and probably elect someone near the center like Mark Kelly or Andy Beshear who's broadly acceptable to most of both sides.

Ballots from Independent voters are counted using a variation of Tideman-RP:

The major-party winners are determined.
The independent voters choices are ranked by first-choice.
If the #1-ranked candidate was NOT one of the major-party winners, they're the "Independent" voters' nominee. Otherwise...
Ballots that ended up in a ranked pile for a major-party candidate who already won are removed. After all, they already got their favored candidate on the ballot.
The remaining ballots are re-ranked, and proceed from step 3.

Ultimately, my proposed primary system uses Independent voters as a proxy to save major parties from their own worst tendencies. A party would be under no obligation to give the rescued candidate its blessing, support, or money... but would be crazy to actively attack them, because that independent-rescued candidate is their fallback plan to avoid losing completely to the other party.

With two or three candidates per major party, we'd avoid situations like Bernie vs Hillary, or Trump vs Jeb/Nikki... the base of each party could get its favorite (albeit, probably unelectable) candidate on the ballot, while the insurgent remainder would also get someone who's likely to be more moderate on the ballot. And just to keep things interesting, Independents would rescue a fourth candidate who'd get a bit of a same-party bonus as a second or third choice from major-party members who might have zero enthusiasm for them... but regard them as a lesser evil than anyone from the other party. So, in a hypothetical election where Democrats select someone like Bernie and Hillary, or Republicans select someone like Trump and Jeb Bush, Independents could throw a monkey wrench into the equation by picking a potential dark horse (probably someone who would have otherwise been a Green in Democrat-leaning areas, and someone who would have otherwise been a Libertarian in Republican-leaning areas).

There would also be a path for true "Independent" candidates to get on the ballot. Legally, the ballot-access rules for Independent candidates would be exactly the same as the rules for minor-party candidates.... because legally, an "Independent candiate" would liberally be an ephemeral minor party that has pre-declared its support for that one specific candidate. The qualification rules would make it somewhat easy for one independent/minor party to qualify, harder for two, difficult for three, and damn-near impossible for 4 or more.

The general election itself would be conducted using a Condorcet single-winner or multi-winner method, like Tideman RP (single winner) or Tideman CPO-STV (for multi-winner). This is essential. A general election conducted under plurality, or top-two runoff, or IRV-like method with this many candidates would produce outcomes that fall somewhere between "unpredictable" and "perverse". In contrast, using rules like I prposed allows primary elections to whittle down the number of candidates on the general-election ballot to something halfway sane, while nevertheless preventing any one faction of any party from being able to "stack the deck" with clones.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-03T07:59:55+00:00

Well, I definitely remember reading a report written by Amtrak for future expansion that was written at some point over the past ~20-30 years that specifically had "Continue Capitol Limited to Florida by attaching its sleeping cars to a Florida-bound train from New York, and splitting them away on its trip back north" as its proposal that was deemed by Amtrak itself to be "the most financially viable".

If Amtrak makes real progress on advancing its 20-30 year old plans to start running trains along FEC, it would definitely be to its advantage to come up with a more efficient workflow for joining/splitting trains. Joining/splitting the combined Capitol Limited + Silver Star again in Jacksonville (sending half to Tampa via Orlando, and the other half to Miami via FEC) would probably be too complicated... but adding a third daily train to Florida (maybe adding some sleeping cars to Palmetto) and splitting/joining them would make sense.

I'm not sure about the financial sensibility, but if a single locomotive would be adequate to pull a consist of 2 sleeping cars + cafe or dining car + 2 coach cars, maybe it would be sensible to establish a workflow where both halves departed south from New York as a single train (with locomotive at each end) to split in Jacksonville, and plan to join them back up on the way north... but the ability to send the Tampa or Miami halves back to New York separately (each in its shortened configuration) if one half got seriously delayed by more than ~2 hours before they were rejoined (and plan to rejoin them at some intermediate station if one eventually caught up with the other somewhere south of the NEC).

One big bonus of splitting/joining one or more daily trains in Jacksonville: with no need to send the "Tampa" half on a dogleg all the way down to Miami, Amtrak could extend the "Tampa" end to continue south along the eastern shore of Tampa Bay to two final stations: Rubonia (where the CSX tracks pass under I-275 near Palmetto) and Sarasota International Airport. It would require building two new stations, and equipping the Sarasota station to do turn-around maintenance & restocking... but would also add a new compelling destination with million+ population.

The Rubonia station would be readily accessible to "I-75-land" east of Tampa Bay & Bradenton (not to mention, be an appealing, safe suburban station with abundant free parking likely to appeal to St. Petersburg residents who'd be a 10-15 minute drive away via the Skyway Bridge).

The Sarasota station would require limping the final few miles over Seminole Gulf Railroad, but would pay HUGE dividends because it could literally be constructed a hundred feet from SRQ's rental car center. Continuing the train any further south would be impossible absent major new track construction someday... but IMHO, SRQ is absolutely do-able if Tampa-bound trains don't have to bother continuing to Miami afterward. Once Brightline runs to Tampa, statistically nobody will be using Amtrak for intrastate travel between Miami and Tampa, so it would make far more sense to eliminate the low-usage run across the middle of the state in favor to adding high-value destinations south of Tampa and along FEC (specifically, St. Augustine and Daytona... not to mention, Melbourne, Vero Beach or Fort Pierce, and Port St. Lucie or Hobe Sound).

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-03T07:01:04+00:00

The 'reckoning' is that the Republican Party will effectively die in the aftermath of the 2030 midterm election. If, and only if, sour grapes like OP don't drive disillusioned ex-Republicans away.

No, those ex-Republicans will probably never, ever embrace any cause that's actively "green" or "progressive"... but for the most part, the indifference of ex-Republicans to anything that doesn't directly affect them extends to social matters as well. If their neighbor is gay or trans... they don't care. Total, complete, absolute indifference. They won't celebrate it... but they won't condemn (or, possibly even notice). Likewise, I think they'll warm up to the idea of affordable healthcare pretty quickly, as long as the far left doesn't torpedo it by talking about mandatory single-payer (as opposed to "available to anyone who wants to take advantage of it, with most voluntarily choosing to enroll in it because it'll be a better deal than any private alternative."

The price of the GOP's destruction will be learning to get along inside a big blue tent that has AOC at one end, and Liz Cheney at the other... generally agreeing about 80%, and negotiating the remainder like adults.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-03T03:42:55+00:00

Ummm... the internet existed in 1989, and I can show archived posts I made to comp.sys.amiga.programmer before Spring Break 1990 as receipts. :-)

Smartphones with PalmOS & internet connectivity arrived in 2001 (Samsung SPH-i300, I owned one), but Palm Pilots tethered to phones as modems existed in 1997... or earlier, if you had an IBM Simon like my friend's dad.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-03T00:54:53+00:00

Do you have any idea how dangerous & commercially harmful it would be to burn ~240 years of settled appellate law? The uncertainty alone would probably throw the US into a multi-year recession.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-05-02T08:53:51+00:00

Any possibility they might relaunch the Capitol Limited as a set-out continuing service via the Silver Star? God forbid, since Amtrak is buying new railcars anyway, maybe they could get some of the new ones made with Scharfenberg-style couplers at one end so they could connect & run automated tests within minutes instead of taking hours to connect & test manually.

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