In it, customs officers went through the train like a ticket checker to check your passport as the train travels near jet speeds through the Russian forests.
That wasn't the plot of course, but it's part of the setting. The characters desperately cling to 19th century ideas of nationalism like small European countries still have a king even in a time where vast oceans no longer matter. There's a cadence problem with the emotional salience of our institutions and their relevance. This includes the personal.
All things start and end as ceremony and theater but somewhere in the middle, they become real.
Even where I live there is the 110 to pasadena, one of the oldest freeways there is (if not THE oldest) and some of the shortest onramps you've ever seen. Even then, you do not need to go from 0-60 in five seconds to safely merge.
And with the 120 on the other end, sure, maybe the engines are good for that, but why even allow the car to go that fast? Why not just put in a speed limiter? Doesn't make much sense why we have all this power imo when the driving rules and laws were written around cars that probably took 20 seconds to reach 60mph and might have needed to go downhill with a tailwind to breach 75mph. And what do you know, the laws always have to account for these anemic vehicles thanks to just old vehicles and stuff like commercial equipment that is going to be heavy and slow no matter what, so you won't find yourself ever needing more performance to keep up with faster interchanges or anything like that since things are always going to built to these meager performance expectations. It's like buying a $4000 gaming PC to run microsoft word 98; wrong tool for the job.
There is a vast market for efficient, fast, and affordable methods of transferring money/wealth across political boundaries. Blockchain/crypto seems to be filling that niche for many people, myself included, without "speculation and crime" being a factor. There is no "remittance app" for it because you can do it with your pick of various widely available crypto coins and exchanges.
> Covid zero is an ideological pipe dream unless NZ wants to permanently ban international travel
The goal of eliminating COVID there is to reduce the burden on the healthcare system during an active global pandemic. Until recently NZ had very low vaccination rates - zero COVID as a policy was closely tied to this and few (none?) of their mitigation measures will be permanent.
I'm a dual US/NZ citizen with family on both sides of the Pacific. It's almost comical how much negativity there is outside of NZ towards their COVID strategy, especially when you consider how minimal the disruption had been until this most recent outbreak.
> especially when you consider how minimal the disruption had been until this most recent outbreak.
Does your family live in Auckland? The on-again/off-again severe lockdowns there have been brutal to families and businesses alike. Simple business calculations become extremely difficult in that environment even if your employees getting severely ill isn’t one of them. The tourism industry employed ~14% of the national workforce directly or indirectly, when will that sector recover? I would hardly call the disruption minimal.
Yes, many of my family and friends are in Auckland.
I don't mean it hasn't caused any disruption - only that the disruption prior to this outbreak was minimal compared to much of the world over the last 18 months.
Zero Covid makes sense as an objective prior to the recent Delta outbreak. Delta's R0 is too high for zero covid to be a realistic objective. The experiences of other places that have tried to go for elimination and failed is evidence of this. That's why it's an ideological pipe dream and it's why I may sound negative about it. It's a fantasy. New Zealand will never be Covid zero from this point. Even if they get to Covid zero (which they won't), the only way to maintain that is to permanently ban international travel, which would be a move that has no public health justification once high vaccination rates are reached.
Managing covid to reduce the burden on healthcare and buying time for vaccinations is not the same thing as going for an impossible covid zero.
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Appetite is exceptionally low for ill advised forever wars... defending an ally against the CCP however is something that many Americans would likely be in favor of.
