You’re right, except in British Columbia where all the most expensive highways were built. Not better, but affordable because Vancouver, Victoria and Kelowna dgaf about the rest of the province and outnumber everywhere else. If we didn’t have all these tourist-focused roads, they’d have still torn up the rails and left us to drown.

Wait, are you implying it can’t be a choke point as an East-West route? Or implying it is a choke point for Edmonton? Or am I missing the point?

Yes, and tunnels too. The issue’s not just the temperature but the altitude, at least on the west coast, and lack of adhesion rail or deep bore passenger train tunnels on Canadian mountain routes. On the flat lands eastwards it’s mostly that passenger engines are built differently than freight locomotives that makes the difference.

The problem can be fixed, but is it worth it? Maybe. Sadly, no politicians here seem too interested in building rail services in BC, unless it’s to feed the KelVicVanSeaTac metro-economic machine.

I will say I was trying to make something resembling small talk, so I admit I’m wrong if you know otherwise. Just as far as I’ve seen, that’s what seems to be the truth.

Admittedly, I can understand playing the devil’s advocate. Yeah, when they say “Eat the Rich”, it’s not supposed to be literal. And yeah, I’ve made mistakes as I’ve said, and haven’t always owned mistakes.

Basically, yes. Search engines are no longer as useful, and AI is only making that impossible to ignore. Doesn’t mean I said most of what I said except sarcastically. My point is, “TheSaddestMan” is how I tell the world I’m sick of their cynicism. Dystopian fiction and anti-escapism didn’t save the world from becoming a cyberpunk story.

To anyone who saw the post I am replying to, tread with caution. There’s a reason that peer pressure is dangerous and it has nothing to do with the supposed “War on Drugs”. The real villain of those old PSAs should have been fascism, not a random dealer, if there was any true benevolence behind it. If you must frame it in Conservative worldview, read “Fahrenheit 451” and remember Bibles burn just as easily as biology textbooks.

“When they came for the drug addicts, I said nothing. Until they said Jesus was a hippie and took my whole church.” Fascism is never good, for anyone. Even the perpetrators. Or do you honestly think no other Nazis wanted to bump off Hitler for personal gain? Fascism is, at it’s core, a cancer. It kills societies as much as people, no one is truly safe.

We didn’t quite forget yet, but if we are too distracted in 2105 to remember 2025’s echoed warnings from WWII and the Holocaust (1945), humanity will not survive to see 2185.

tl;dr: Warning: May contain nuts or cults.

stop staring at my tits and see me as a person

I’m glad I’ve never been accused of this (okay, once but I wasn’t even serious, more like “Wait, how do people react if you DO stare at them ‘too long’ instead of avoiding looking at them at all? Oh, they feel bad is what, that’s not nice of me.” ). Not that I actually do it, but that I’m really self-conscious about accidentally making people sexually uncomfortable.

I think the problem is sexually aggressive men often like sexually aggressive women. So the most lecherous don’t understand because either they think “handsome and beautiful/sexy belong together” and therefore would WANT to have their (i.e.) crotch stared at by a woman they don’t know (provided she looks “attractive”) or they don’t mind “ugly” but don’t think of themselves as “not ugly” and otherwise think the same (liking being watched by a woman). That’s a small enough part of the population that it has, in it’s own way, become a minority (“Incels” deserve to be ridiculed, they just aren’t common).

None of it is justified behavior, obviously. People don’t like being stared at, how hard is it for a supposed “manly extrovert sex god” to realize that, when nerdy 16-year old introverted me understood a girl deserved an apology for my random “social experiment”? Respect must be mutual, and if anyone didn’t say “yes” to actual physical contact, it’s sexual assault. Unfortunately, even in nature (see: Ducks) there is nothing physically preventing rape, and so the struggle was inevitable the moment humans existed because - to some degree - genders and gender identities exist.

All I’m saying is, the culture wars are nothing but unwarranted posturing. From both/all sides. Be what and who you want. Oh, and fuck over that wealthy 1%, nobody can own 99% of the money and have obtained it by purely honest means.

We’re living in cyberpunk’s awkward unwanted step-child. It has to be said. I play Cyberpunk 2077 because it feels more like reality than reality does at this point. The Matrix Has Us.

The colors are also common in ALL 2010s-era media. Vaporwave, Corporate Memphis, Mallsoft, Kaybug, the twisted necromancing of McBling, and absolutely in LGBTQIA±whatever media, which isn’t bad (the 2010s was an actual cultural decade) in general (especially not in reference towards that last one) but everyone was a sexuality civil rights protester in Hollywood in that decade and the general color scheme was so common that a 13-year old may be realizing for the first time that we once used red. We used green. We used yellow with red and green and blue, in so, so many ways.

Experience is relative. The 80s was never as pink as Vaporwave makes us think it was. The 70s was brown because of Kodak color cameras made specifically so that “Black” people’s skin now shows up as it’s actual color on film (and digital photos). The 60s was more than counter-culture. The 90s was indeed a golden age, but one that was built on foundations too unstable to last. The 2000s were not devoid of culture, but drained of it by the “War on Terror” and shallow celebrity cultist behavior.

Someday, people will look back on this like a news article from WWII. Elon’s “Xitter” logo is the new swastika, mark my words. As for the American Flag, it’ll be lucky if it gets off easy like the Soviet Flag did.

There is also a newer technology called a “Language Model”. From what I understand it is the most successful and most private, but also most controversial, method. It completely displaced and rendered redundant these “search engines”, by polluting the interwebs with false information. </sarcasm> Also, Google was stupid enough at one point to give reddit as the primary source for all information in searches, that’s not a good method no matter whether you use an LLM, a locally-hosted LM, or a search engine.

It’s not just that. Trains don’t run as well or brake as efficiently in cold weather, they have slippery metal rails for a reason. That’s why we switched to cars and trucks too readily, and as sad as that is, I think we might need electric cars more than Americans ever needed any cars.

(That said, electric cars should be thanks to electrified smartroads, not stuffing the car itself full of computer hardware.)

Isn’t there an HST project’s route being prospected between Calgary and Edmonton?

Us? You-S-A tarriff’d the world!

<sincerity> I know you’re joking :P It’s legit a potential weakness actually. Trump could invade with very little resistance beyond the border, our population was too focused on trade by land and now we’ve had to reconsider our priorities. Also, the image neglects Edmonton’s existence. </sincerity>