Considering the article is talking about the UK, which recently axed a significant portion of its new high-speed railway corridor: don't count on it.
Even worse: railway electrification is not at all a given in the UK. A big downside of being the first country to roll out railways is that a huge number of railway lines (crucially, including tunnels and overpasses) were built to the dimensions of early trains. In practice this means that electrification isn't just adding some wires, it means having to re-dig all of the tunnels and having to raise all of the overpasses. To illustrate, the UKs universal loading gauge is small enough that you can't even fit regular intermodal container trains into it - and that's without overhead wiring!
There'll be no new third rail electrification, though (apart from some minor infill, or reorganisation around depots).
The conversion of remaining mainlines to 25 kV overhead AC is going slower than anyone wants, but already over 70% of passenger rail journeys use electric traction (and actually more like 80% by passenger kilometers).
There are an awful lot of low-traffic rural lines that it won't be economic to electrify using current technology, so we'll need to rely on battery electric for those.
Either way, it's largely orthogonal to the problem of electrifying road transport.
For example, terraced housing with on-street parking can support EVs by allowing homeowners to place cable ducts[0] inside the sidewalk. With large apartment buildings you can incentivize (or even mandate) that whoever manages it supports installing shared chargers. With all other kinds of awkward publicly-owned spaces you can have the local government install shared chargers.
The irony with it being an "expensive toy for the rich" is that EVs are significantly cheaper to operate than ICE. Especially with the upcoming new generation of cheap Chinese EVs, it would be quite possible to have the government offer a low-interest loan where the total monthly cost of car ownership stays the same - or is even lower.
This is already happening. Near where I live there is a newly built 7-home terrace. Each one has both a garage and a cable duct sprouting up from the edge of sidewalk in front of them.
> With large apartment buildings you can incentivize (or even mandate) that whoever manages it supports installing shared chargers
And then the the management company that controls the shared chargers can charge rates that are even higher than the vastly inflated costs at public chargers, as they know the users will pay for the convenience of charging at home :(
This isn't the nice future we were promised, with clean electric cars and plentiful renewable energy. This is the future of late-stage capitalism and the enshittification of everything.
> This isn't the nice future we were promised, with clean electric cars and plentiful renewable energy. This is the future of late-stage capitalism and the enshittification of everything.
/Exactly/ this! The UK is all about maximising rent extraction, enshittification of everything and profiteering.
Quick, without doing any kind of Googling or calculation: if I asked you to count 3B grains of rice by hand, how long would that take you? How big would that pile of rice be? How long would it take you to eat it?
A billion is already unfathomably large. If you think it isn't, you just haven't tried imagining what a billion of anything would be like.
The problem with this exercise is that I have a few million in wealth and I cannot actually visualize a few million grains of rice but I am fully aware of my total capacity to allocate capital to problems.
Neither $3b nor $300b are realistically unfathomable to me. I find them easy to consider in terms of the projects I can build if I achieved each of these amounts.
As an example I’d have to allocate somewhere between $50m to $250m to get people to vote on a California proposition. I’d need to spend $1.5b to create a wing of a major hospital. I’d need between $100m and half a billion to create a new K-12 school in my city.
These are large sums of money and are currently out of my reach so if AI doesn’t destabilize everything my best bet is to take the same approach each of my ancestors did. Move my children one level up the wealth ladder and hopefully give them the values that help them prioritize these actions and the optimal way of getting there. I think that involves some amount of compounding and then some amount of spending.
The problem is that decisions at the olympic level tend to trickle down to lower competitions. There are plenty of sports where the gap between "college kid having fun" and "Olympics" isn't very wide.
Fortunately there's a big gap between "College kids" and "Kids", and by the time you're in college it's not just about having fun anymore. Sports in college, whether we like it or not, are a large source of upward mobility for a lot of people, sometimes whole families and communities. College sports can determine access to college through the system of scholarships, and of course they can lead directly to pro careers.
Generally speaking when people talk about "kids sports" they specifically mean pre-collegiate, not in the least because colloquialism aside, college students are adults.
More often than you'd think! You can easily go your entire life without knowing. It is not uncommon for the first hint to be that a couple is having trouble conceiving.
> You can easily go your entire life without knowing.
Sure, since we already established that the tests are usually not done at all.
An overwhelming majority of people (at least among those who have a basic understanding of the underlying science) could, however, guess correctly about themselves.
The combined prevalence of all intersex conditions is simply not that high.
> For better or worse nor is our medical science sophisticated enough to swap out the systems to be true comparables
The problem is that it isn't a hard binary. All the relevant metrics are going to fall on a spectrum, and there is a significant overlap between the male and female spectra.
The real question is: do you consider it fair if a top 1% male spectrum transitions to a top 1% female spectrum, or it only fair if that top 1% male spectrum ends up at the 50% percentile on the female spectrum?
Starting out with this: are you proposing a height limit on female athletes? If having a larger bone structure is an unfair advantage, surely tall women should be banned from competing?
It comes down to where we draw the line. We limit healthy women from competing in paraplegic games for example, because of inherent advantages.
In certain sports, height might not be formally regulated, but weight classes are regulated. And in those sports it is arguably an advantage to be shorter, as you can be bulkier overall and dedicate more of the limited weight to pure muscle mass vs your skeleton. Although there are also considerations for things such as reach in some circumstances.
Overall though, the difference between a slightly taller athlete of a given sex is nowhere near the athletic prowess differences between a given athlete of the same height and of different sex. A 5' Lebron James would still dominate a 7' Caitlin Clark. Maybe there would be height classes just like there are weight classes and sex classes, if height were such an influencing factor.
Look up Elizabeth Swaney, she got to the Olympics by not falling off her skis. And I mean that quite literally: Ignoring DNFs she was dead last in all the qualifying events, but by doing a massive amount of them she somehow managed to get enough points in total to qualify.
Or there's Eric Moussambani, who participated in the 100 meter freestyle swimming without ever having seen an Olympic-sized swimming pool before. Similarly with a Jamaica bobsleigh team: horribly equipment, very little experience, still at the Olympics.
At the top it is indeed about being the absolute best, but at the bottom it is very much about being a competition between nations, and for some countries being the best at an obscure sport can still mean being pretty bad at it.
Exactly my point, your country is only sending you to the Olympics if you are their absolute best.
The competitive part does not start at the Olympics. The Olympics are already the price.
So what about the kids who already get all of that and still say they are transgender? Should they perhaps be treated like they actually are transgender, or do you propose forced conversion therapy - like we tried in the past with gay people and left-handed people?
Puberty blockers aren't being handed out like candy. There's a rather intense psychological diagnostic process before it.
Even worse: railway electrification is not at all a given in the UK. A big downside of being the first country to roll out railways is that a huge number of railway lines (crucially, including tunnels and overpasses) were built to the dimensions of early trains. In practice this means that electrification isn't just adding some wires, it means having to re-dig all of the tunnels and having to raise all of the overpasses. To illustrate, the UKs universal loading gauge is small enough that you can't even fit regular intermodal container trains into it - and that's without overhead wiring!
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