The freight industry is a huge source of the problems in the US rail system. It should not be able to run trains longer than the passing sections, but it does it anyway because “it reduces labor costs”. Running longer trains is terrible from an engineering perspective.

This passing problem was solved a long time ago, it’s just that the freight rail corps in the US have “optimized” for trains that are longer than the passing rail sections. It’s extremely bad for the entire rail industry and the cause of many of the derailments and accidents, but because capital always gets its way in the US, nothing significantly has changed to resolve the issue.

It’s very frustrating how often there are perfectly workable solutions to making the world better, but if it doesn’t have a fat profit margin, it just gets strangled to death by capital interests in this country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_Donald_Duck

1971 book-length essay by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart that critiques Disney comics from a Marxist point of view as capitalist propaganda for American corporate and cultural imperialism. It was first published in Chile in 1971, became a bestseller throughout Latin America and is still considered a seminal work in cultural studies. It was reissued in August 2018 to a general audience in the United States

The book’s thesis is that Disney comics are not only a reflection of the prevailing ideology at the time (capitalism), but that the comics’ authors are also aware of this, and are active agents in spreading the ideology. To that end, Disney comics use images of the everyday world:

“Here lies Disney’s inventive (product of his era), rejecting the crude and explicit scheme of adventure strips, that came up at the same time. The ideological background is without any doubt the same: but Disney, not showing any open repressive force, is much more dangerous. The division between Bruce Wayne and Batman is the projection of fantasy outside the ordinary world to save it. Disney colonizes the everyday world, at hand of ordinary man and his common problems, with the analgesic of a child’s imagination.”

— Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck, p. 148

This closeness to everyday life is so only in appearance, because the world shown in the comics, according to the thesis, is based on ideological concepts, resulting in a set of natural rules that lead to the acceptance of particular ideas about capital, the developed countries’ relationship with the Third World, gender roles, etc.

As an example, the book considers the lack of descendants of the characters. Everybody has an uncle or nephew, everybody is a cousin of someone, but nobody has fathers or sons. This non-parental reality creates horizontal levels in society, where there is no hierarchic order, except the one given by the amount of money and wealth possessed by each, and where there is almost no solidarity among those of the same level, creating a situation where the only thing left is crude competition.

Cities Aren’t Loud: Cars Are Loud

Urban noise is a common problem, and the vast majority of it is created by motor vehicles. Noise is far too often dismissed as a minor nuisance, rather than the legitimate health issue that it is.

The book “Curbing Traffic” has a chapter about the health impacts of noise pollution. I explore the research in the book, and visit Delft, the city that is highlighted in the book as being a shining example of what can happen when noise pollution is taken seriously.

This video explores the problem that farting cars, farting motorcycles, and farting mopeds create in our cities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8

A few lentils can be used under the valve caps to cause a slow liberation of air from the tires. No property damage, but quite an inconvenience to get refilled.