The volume of freight transported in the United States is expected to double in the next 30 years. An increased use of rail freight could allow the supply chain to accommodate these increased volumes while minimizing highway congestion and improving energy efficiency in the transportation sector. Shippers and policymakers are concerned that the existing infrastructure — much diminished after decades of track abandonment — lacks sufficient capacity to accommodate the increased demand for rail freight. This report draws from publicly available data on the U.S. railroad industry to provide observations about rail infrastructure capacity and performance in freight transportation. Railroads have improved their productivity in the past three decades, mitigating immediate concerns about capacity, but concerns about future capacity constraints appear to be justified. Insufficient data exist to determine whether rail performance is now stable, significantly declining, or improving. The railroad system is privately owned and operated, but there is a public role for easing rail capacity constraints because private decisions about transportation investment and freight shipping have public consequences for safety and the environment. A better understanding of the public and private cost trade-offs between shipping freight by truck and by rail is needed. Improvements to data quality and freight-modeling tools will improve the ability for policymakers to better target public investment in the rail freight transportation system.

The State of US Railroads

Andy Grove:

Let's face it, we are dealing with the adaptation of the world's largest industry, under the pull and push of different problems. To have even a small chance to improve matters and end our dependence on imported oil, we need to ask basic questions: What problems do we intend to solve? And in what order? Environmental? Economic? National security? They are all important, but our answers lead to different approaches and to different outcomes.

Personally, my bias is that national security has to be our first priority. We can't lead the world if we're on our knees begging often-hostile nations for oil. Wars have been fought over natural resources, and this could happen again. But whatever the answer, objectivity and clarity are essential for us to make progress on the issue that informs the life of our generation.

From the archive:

World Made By Hand, by James Howard Kunstler -- a novel of America's post-oil future

Why Pickens and Gore Are Wrong

"We're approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision," said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. "This is like a last stand for webcasting."

We've been here before. This is like that store in the run-down strip mall that has been Going Out of Business for the last ten years, although this one happens to have much better stuff on offer.

Giant of Internet Radio Nears Its 'Last Stand'

Charles Kettering, writing in 1929:

What then, has happened to the car?

"People's minds will have been changed; improvements will come in other cars; new styles will have come. What you have here today, a car that you call 'the best that can be made,' will then be useless. So it isn't the best that can be made. It may be the best you can have made and, if that is what you meant, I have no quarrel with what you said. ..."

Change, to a research engineer, is improvement. People, though don't seem to think of it in that manner. When a change is suggested they hold back and say, "What we have is all right—it does the work." Doing the work is important but doing it better is more important. The human family in industry is always looking for a park bench where it can sit down and rest. But the only park benches I know of are right in front of an undertaker's establishment.

There are no places where anyone can sit and rest in an industrial situation. It is a question of change, change, change, all the time—and it is always going to be that way. It must always be that way for the world only goes along one road, the road to progress. Nations and industries that have become satisfied with themselves and their ways of doing things, don't last. While they are sitting back and admiring themselves other nations and other concerns have forgotten the looking-glasses and have been moving ahead . ...

The younger generation—and by that I mean the generation that is always coming—knows what it wants and it will get what it wants. This is what makes for change. It brings about improvements in old things and developments in new things.

If everyone were satisfied, no one would buy the new thing because no one would want it. The ore wouldn't be mined; timber wouldn't be cut. Almost immediately hard times would be upon us.

You must accept this reasonable dissatisfaction with what you have and buy the new thing, or accept hard times. You can have your choice.

From the archive:

I've come to the conclusion that you actually want shifty, dishonest politicians elected by an apathetic populace. This means that things are working.

I'm confident that technology has improved the resources available to people if/when they choose to act. So far they don't need to, largely. Don't wish for times when they do.

Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied

However deep or long this year-old credit crunch proves to be, the financial system looks doomed to repeat the crisis in some form unless regulators look seriously at preventing banks and investors herding into booms and busts.

From the archive:

That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.

Scatter the herd or financial crises doomed to recur

The reality is that PowerPoint is culture, and at any organization it is a specific culture of pre-determined templates, fonts and expectations. The only way to resolve the problem is for an entire organization to adopt a specific methodology -- a systematic process of producing consistent, reproducible, and quality results. The process has to work across the broadest range of topics and purposes, and yet allow variety within a set of constraints.

From the archive:

Romney is fond of PowerPoint and terms like "strategic audits" and "wow moments."

It's like a pointer that contains its own address. That's the essence of a Power pointer.

Every afternoon about 2:45 the city settles into a temporary coma. You can feel the biological lights dimming. As for those poor people trapped in PowerPoint presentations -- well, for them there is no help.

Better than any article, this briefing captures everything that is wrong, funny and horrifying about outrageous Pentagon weapons that sound too good to be true. I'm posting the briefing, called Directed Energy Sea Mammals, for those who weren't on the e-mail chain when it first came out.

Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand 'association-chain-massacre'. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable TV, emotions and hamsters.

Peter Norvig:

"My belief is that PowerPoint doesn't kill meetings. People kill meetings. But using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table: You can do very bad things with it."

Edward Tufte:

Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.

Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.

How Wide is Your PowerPoint Gap?

On a conference call, J.P. Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon said he expects the credit market to potentially weaken further and that J.P. Morgan's portfolio of prime loans "looks terrible." J.P. Morgan's shares climbed 14 percent.

'Not Bad' is the New 'Great!'

Luis Suarez, of IBM:

Earlier this year, I became tired of my usual morning ritual of spending hours catching up on e-mail. So I did something drastic to take back control of my productivity.

I stopped using e-mail most of the time. I quickly realized that the more messages you answer, the more messages you generate in return. It becomes a vicious cycle. By trying hard to stop the cycle, I cut the number of e-mails that I receive by 80 percent in a single week.

I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip

As a reverse (chronological) follow-up on The Random Wok:

This is the coolest restaurant. It's called Wiki Wiki Teriyaki, and it's in Austin, a few blocks from the convention center.

Rather than having a set menu, they just have a bunch of ingredients and invite you to bring your own. The diners, who call themselves "recipedians," get to put together their own recipes and have them cooked. Other diners can then build on each other's recipes and discuss them, creating a seemingly limitless array of recipes. Soon they'll add ratings and tags to make it easier for diners to parse their options.

Wiki Wiki Teriyaki: Restaurant 2.0

It's funny because it's true.

A panel of top business leaders testified before Congress about the worsening recession Monday, demanding the government provide Americans with a new irresponsible and largely illusory economic bubble in which to invest.

"What America needs right now is not more talk and long-term strategy, but a concrete way to create more imaginary wealth in the very immediate future," said Thomas Jenkins, CFO of the Boston-area Jenkins Financial Group, a bubble-based investment firm. "We are in a crisis, and that crisis demands an unviable short-term solution."

From the archive:

The dot-com crash of the early 2000s should have been followed by decades of soul-searching; instead, even before the old bubble had fully deflated, a new mania began to take hold on the foundation of our long-standing American faith that the wide expansion of home ownership can produce social harmony and national economic well-being. Spurred by the actions of the Federal Reserve, financed by exotic credit derivatives and debt securitiztion, an already massive real estate sales-and-marketing program expanded to include the desperate issuance of mortgages to the poor and feckless, compounding their troubles and ours.

That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.

More recently:

Watch how gasoline hits US$7/gallon by 2012. Watch ethanol peter out and energy capacity fall short. Watch the Case/Shiller HPI continue to plummet as delinquencies soar. And so much more!

Also:

Seen in the best possible light, the housing bubble that began inflating in the mid-1990s was "a great national experiment," as one prominent economist put it -- a way to harness the inventiveness of the capitalist system to give low-income families, minorities and immigrants a chance to own their homes. But it also is a classic story of boom, excess and bust, of homeowners, speculators and Wall Street dealmakers happy to ride the wave of easy money even though many knew a crash was inevitable.

Still more:

Now it's payback time and the mood could get very ugly. Americans, to put it bluntly, have been conned.

In the longer term, lessons must be learnt from the turmoil. One is that you don't solve the problems of a collapsing bubble by blowing up another, which is what Alan Greenspan did after the dotcom fiasco in 2001 - the most irresponsible behaviour of any central banker in living memory.

Finally:

You're supposed to raise your standard of living by working harder, being clever, earning more income -- not by using your long-term savings.

And now this current generation is pretty much f***ed.

Chris Rock: I take care of my kids! (@ ~2:10) (nsfw)

"If my kids have a Southern accent, I will kill myself."

Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble To Invest In