Once, as a teenager, I switched channels on the TV, and there was a movie. A caption appeared on screen: "Rhode Island".
"Nice!" I thought. "I always like movies set in cultures that are very foreign to mine."
As the movie went on, I was increasingly confused, as those Greeks, or Turks, seemed very similar to US Americans, and the setting appeared to be the USA. (It was dubbed in French, so I couldn't tell from the language)
I soon figured that it must be a location in the USA named after an Old World location.
New England has two types of place names. Old English colonial names and Native ones. Like a river called Woonasquatucket from the very same state you mentioned, Rhode Island.
That should be clear. Palestine is a nation, but not a location.
Edit: I don’t know why people are so upset. This is a factual statement, not meant to discredit Palestine, and is a very important part of Israel’s oppressive leverage. As a direct result of their displacement, Palestine is a people. The nation is wherever the Palestinians live. The land they govern is only defined by their occupation.
Palestine is recognized by the UN as self-determined nation of people. It is not a country with internationally recognized borders. That is why their land is referred to as Palestinian territory and not the country of Palestine. It’s also why Netanyahu wants to evict them for easy circumvention of international law prohibiting settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.
Palestine, officially the State of Palestine, is a country in the southern Levant region of West Asia. It encompasses two disconnected territories — the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, collectively known as the Palestinian territories — within the larger region of Palestine.
I'm so glad that Norfolk Southern is going to pay for all of the necessary remediation. Really a very considerate, and socially/ enviromentally conscious company. Bravo!
What are you talking about? Some politician grimaced as he took a sip of water and another one put it to his lips without actually taking a sip. Everything is fine!
Rail workers do not have the proper time to fully inspect cars and arrange them in the proper order due to understaffing and the high volume created by maximized rail schedules that prioritize profits over safety.
That's a huge reason why rail workers wanted to go on strike before there was bipartisan cooperation led by Biden to take away their labor rights.
The engineering is fine, great even. Executives have demanded that the trains run at the red line, for maximum profit. With no safety margin, when something goes wrong it goes really really wrong. That's why it was so important to hold them accountable and so fucked that we didn't. It's just a matter of time until the next accident.
It's effectively impossible to engineer around knowingly unsafe operation. The trains are fine, it's the railroads operating them unsafely and the state and federal governments refusing to maintain infrastructure that is the problem.
i wish the govt was in charge of maintaining the infrastructure, and i wish the govt owned the infrastructure then prioritized passenger traffic over freight so we could get some semblance of a working regional rail system.
I dunno. You never hear about high speed rail in Japan derailing, or the monorail at DisneyWorld going off the track. There was some crazy invention ages ago where a train with a gyroscope actually traveled on a single rail. We’ve got to do better than this.
Boats still sink, planes and cars still crash.
Fundamentally, transportation will fail. The question is are these failures within an acceptable rate due to unforseen issues, or is this a problem with the system that operates and profits off of these devices, letting safety slip to maximize profit?
Maybe have a transportation secretary who has experience in transportation, as opposed to being a consultant and focusing on ticket refunds instrad of aircraft doors coming off and trains exploding...or would that hurt profitability?
So nice that before this happened, the railworkers wanted to strike duets safety concerns and understaffed Railroads. All to keep them from taking days off and lowering profits.
Good old Joe Biden (friend to the working man) denied the strike request because interfering with Christmas shipping would be a problem.
I think the railworkers should have called his bluff and all off the job. Unlike Reagan and the Air Traffic Strike, the military can't just take over those jobs. He couldn't replace the entire unionized jobs like the AIR Force could take over flight operators.
And then they negotiated behind the scenes and got most of what they wanted without a strike. The part that anti Biden posters conveniently leave out every time they bring this up
For roughly half the unions. The Rail companies gave a ton of stuff to their IT department and everyone called it a win to save face. Meanwhile the guys on the trains themselves are only sporadically getting wins. The points system that automatically fires people for being sick notably still exists which means one of the core complaints, (people literally falling over dead on the job because they worked through being sick) is unaddressed. As is the low staffing numbers on the actual trains and maintenance crews. To be clear a bunch of those guys officially have sick days now, but the points system will still deduct points if they miss a duty call that day.