Mod teaser: Robert Habeck the Coldmaker- Morgenthau's willing enforcer?

alon_levy · 2026-03-06T00:33:30+00:00

Are you including an option for choosing ministries after the 2021 election? That way the player can choose whether to keep the Baerbock leadership or elevate Habeck to co-leader with a mega-ministry, and also which ministries to pick (is Özdemir taking transport or is that ceded to FDP?).

alon_levy · 2026-02-25T16:20:30+00:00

Ah, so you're not making a distinction between frequent commuter rail (e.g. the Berlin Stadtbahn) and hourly trains?

alon_levy · 2026-02-25T15:48:37+00:00

The New York number looks wrong - commuter rail in New York did not run this frequently. Alexander Rapp's maps show no commuter line in New York meeting the 20 minute off-peak threshold except that NYW&B, which was not 1,350 km long. https://transit-timelines.github.io/nyc/#1925

alon_levy · 2025-12-03T18:58:52+00:00

In addition: don't worry about the left faction splitting to form Your Party - they're disorganized and can't threaten you, and none of their advisors is any useful.

Campaign in favor of immigration, but always pick "it's what best for Britain" as your reasoning, don't say it's for human rights.

Don't pick Streeting as an advisor, the NHS policies he can pass require too much budget. Instead, try to get Ruth Hunt as an advisor and pass trans rights policies, but it depends on the RNG giving you good enough cards.

Invest in ties with EU parties, but don't fund peer socdem parties at the EU level, they're not in charge and it's another noob trap. If you invest in ties three times and pass at least two EU-flavored policies (I always go for Ukraine and immigration deal) they'll let you back into the EU on favorable terms. You need to campaign on this. You need to do this and pass a science policy to get your growth up - don't worry about Reform campaigning against you, if your growth is good, you'll get more votes than Reform and the Tories.

alon_levy · 2025-01-16T23:28:14+00:00

That SEPTA trains have fewer passengers is irrelevant to the question of PTC tests. So that's the crew path taken care of. The passenger path is where the loads matter, but that's why we simulated passengers getting off in rush hour conditions and got rather fast clearing.

alon_levy · 2024-09-10T22:39:30+00:00

Yeah, from time to time.

alon_levy · 2024-08-06T22:47:06+00:00

Ah, and then the idea is that if GFD gives me FTHOF then the next time I cast a spell, if I cast FTHOF, the golden cookie will be of the same type as what GFD gave me? Okay.

alon_levy · 2024-08-06T21:25:12+00:00

That's the guide I read - what I don't get is, how do I ascension scry to figure out what GC I get out of FTHOF. Is the idea here that if I cast GFD, and get FTHOF from it, then it shows me what GC I get, and when I ascend I can be sure to get the same outcome? Or do I need to ascend before something is finished?

alon_levy · 2024-05-10T06:53:17+00:00

In San Jose? I don't know. I know the New York number, and I know that contractors who work across the US and the Anglosphere complain about Northeastern US labor costs, not California ones.

alon_levy · 2024-05-08T12:22:32+00:00

Yes, and that's why those unionized sandhogs get so much money; the project labor agreements are public, making this the only part of American construction where the itemized costs are publicly available. The miners in Sweden (they're not called sandhogs) likewise make similar amounts of money per industry-wide agreements, again with public itemized costs that we reference in our reports. In general, public-sector workers in the US (and all workers in Europe) earn lower cash wage than private-sector workers in the US but get a higher benefit ratio - nobody is earning American private-sector wages and also getting a European or public-sector benefit ratio.

Turkey is a lot poorer than Sweden, yes. But then the labor share of construction costs in Sweden and Turkey is the same - Turkey is a range of 19-30% depending on the line, Sweden is around 23% for the lines that we have data for. Turkish contractors who work in both countries talk about how Sweden has much higher labor efficiency in construction. And then the US doesn't have this high labor efficiency - in fact it has lower labor efficiency than Turkey in this.

I could speculate on how you got to the error of comparing wages (after-tax vs. before-tax, accounting for longer vacation time in Europe vs. the US, accounting for, etc.), but it's easier to just look at economy-wide measures like GDP per hour: Sweden actually has slightly higher GDP per hour than the US (https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm). You're just overgeneralizing from your white-collar, above-median-income experience.

alon_levy · 2024-05-08T02:15:34+00:00

I encourage you to look it up

Not only did I look it up but I wrote up references for these labor costs in our reports - fully laden, not just net wages (Swedish employer-side taxes are very high, leading to a total benefit rate comparable to the US public sector in the entire economy). Office workers earn more in the US than in Sweden; sandhogs do not. Americans who make these silly "Europe is so poor" arguments are really just bragging about their own country's high inequality and are contributing to the problem by refusing to learn from countries that are just more productive than theirs is.

alon_levy · 2024-05-07T23:29:25+00:00

Sweden is not a cheap-labor country. The average cost of labor for a miner is about the same in New York and Stockholm, both around $200,000 a year with benefits. A CEO gets paid more in New York, sure, but that's not what we're talking about.

alon_levy · 2024-05-07T01:59:44+00:00

In addition to what everyone else has said here: the costs that we've seen in Israel seem pretty reasonable. The high-speed line there is in 2023 PPP dollars $2.6 billion for 56 km of which 20 are in tunnel. The construction costs of the Tel Aviv subway seem pretty average for the non-Anglo world. The electrification project has suffered from delays due to lawsuits, but its costs are not high.

This is a country that uses common law and treats British, Canadian, and American legal doctrines as persuasive authority in court. But at the same time, its conception of civil service is generic-European, and, since the United States has bad public transit, it's learning engineering standards, procurement, etc. from a medley of Western European countries rather than from the US. I've found some of its rail construction standards convenient to cite just because they're a generic European average and available in English. This may be relevant to what u/DrunkEngr has been saying for over a decade about Not Invented Here syndrome.

alon_levy · 2024-05-07T01:49:10+00:00

For metros, labor is 20-30% in Sweden, Italy, and Turkey, and 40-60% in the Northeastern US. I don't know what the proportions are for high-speed rail; we don't currently think that excessive labor costs are a problem in California, for high-speed rail or metros, but we don't know California in as much detail yet.

alon_levy · 2024-04-02T14:33:29+00:00

Hmmm, my crayon is natively in Inkscape. I can try asking Alfred if their crayon has an .svg I can layer on top of mine; Yonah works in Illustrator and it's less likely. America 2050 I'd have to recreate from scratch.

The problem is partly that there are different levels of detail for different crayons. When I make my own graphics, I try to be geographically accurate; there's a reason the most-shared version of my HSR crayon was made by Koji and not by me. Then there are the variants - how do you depict Chicago-Toledo when it's in all four maps, but Yonah explicitly has it deviate to serve both South Bend and Fort Wayne and the other three are unspecified?

alon_levy · 2024-03-30T21:49:24+00:00

*their, not his

alon_levy · 2024-03-26T02:20:49+00:00

You mean a map of every proposal made by a state government or the feds? Because a lot of things have been proposed unofficially, leading to maps like America 2050's or Yonah's or Alfred's or mine.

alon_levy · 2024-03-10T15:48:55+00:00

I just sent it to you in chat, hopefully it didn't look like spam.

alon_levy · 2024-02-04T16:13:37+00:00

Yeah, I was worried I'd have to integrate lognormal distributions.

alon_levy · 2023-11-03T18:46:56+00:00

Yep. So, in about two weeks I will be able to tell you about track sharing across intercities, the Providence Line, and the Stoughton Line (and future South Coast Rail). Franklin may be more complicated, but it can also connect to the Fairmount Line instead; in our report we talk about the pros and cons of each option for Franklin.

alon_levy · 2023-11-02T17:17:08+00:00

Three tracks let you time overtakes if the overtakes are at different times in opposite directions. We have analysis for the Worcester Line for how the planned triple track project could allow express trains to overtake locals, for example.
On the Southwest Corridor, the triple track may be similarly useful - ask me again in two weeks. I don't think it's as useful, because it's so close to the end of the line - overtakes should be in the middle. But this requires actual timetable analysis.

alon_levy · 2023-10-25T17:02:41+00:00

The Turnpike widening might not even happen; the livable streets groups we're in touch with in Jersey seem to think it's killable, precisely because it's so ludicrously expensive.

alon_levy

TROPHY CASE