Tieplate-writes-stuff - Lesbian Space Pirates & Sci-Fi Trains

Here's the infuriating thing though, most of America ALREADY DOES live next to train tracks, or not far away. It's not a matter of building more lines, it's a matter of using them. America has the largest railroad network in the world by a huge margin; it's almost the size of the next two largest networks combined. The problem is that, unlike those countries and nearly every other industrialized nation, American railroads are owned and operated almost entirely by for-profit corporations whose sole concern is to be as profitable as possible. And moving freight is far more profitable, and far less hassle, than moving people (the accounting methods used for the first point are...not always the most objective). So these 6 massive duopolistic railroad companies choose to only move freight instead. As far as I know, there is nothing legally stopping these freight railroads from running their own passenger trains, like they used to do before 1971; Brightline in Florida and the Alaska Railroad (where I was a conductor briefly) both do quite good passenger business, and Brightline doesn't even own its tracks. In fact, when Amtrak first started up in 1971, there was a fee that railroads had to pay in order to get Amtrak to take over their passenger trains. Some railroads, like the Rock Island, could not afford the fee; others, like the Southern and the Rio Grande, chose to continue to operate their own passenger trains for a few years. But eventually they too threw in the towel, and now Amtrak is all we got.

"ohhh wahhh the problem with building out america's rail network is that nobody wants to live next to train tracks-" I DO BITCH!!!!!!!! #I<3INDUSTRIALNOISES #SEXWITHATRAIN

ah, google is still useful sometimes I see

musk is going to die in a Tesla explosion in 6 months after sticking his nose where it doesn't belong and we will never get a conclusive answer on whether it was a CIA car bomb or just a normal Tesla malfunction

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

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Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

public transport and public libraries are making out nasty on the couch

Cleopatra | John William Waterhouse

An Egyptian Pottery Seller near Gizeh | Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann

The Sorceress | Georges Merle

Empress Theodora | Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant

Things the US military could be used for instead of war crimes:

Carpet bombing suburban Pheonix and replacing it with a mix of dense housing in the urban core and desert

Ok wait let her speak