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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s pretty natural not to reserve seats on shinkansen, because you can find seats unless you are travelling at peak hours (and there are trains every 20 minutes or better)

    The travel time to and from airport, and the baggage+security easily eats into the 1.5 hour savings. Same day fare on shinkansen remains constant, unlike 30k+ that flights demand.

    On shinkansen, you have lots of leg room compared to LCC seats. There’s also enough space to move, talk and option to reconfigure the seats for a group of 4 or 6 travelers. There’s cell connectivity (and decent wifi onboard) so you don’t have to pay through your nose for in flight WiFi. The toilets are spacious. There’s dedicated place to talk on the phone. Less noisy and fewer bumps than a flight.

    This makes the bullet trains really attractive for business and family travels (with kids). You don’t need to plan beforehand and there’s less inconvenience compared to flight. Moreover, the cost also balances out if you’re traveling to a smaller city with poor air connectivity.

    These kind of options actually allow spur of the moment travels over such distances.

    I know plenty of people who plan and use bus and flights due to the cost benefit, but also tons of people prefer the hassle free travel on shinkansen



  • If it’s a revenue generating machine, the impact of 10 or 20% improvement in day to day could recoup the additional cost in a few months or a year.

    Similarly, for someone who travels a lot, having a useful battery life of 8-10 hours of internet+video playback allows a work routine that is worry free wrt charging and this allows tighter travel schedules.

    Ofc, this isn’t the case every time, but this creates anchor effect on several segments of the market. This also doesn’t include the extra cost of “luxury” aka thin and light or small bezels.

    350 USD is perfectly fine if you don’t need a ton of battery life or color accurate screen or multimedia or multicore workloads. If you need any of this, most of the options get pricier than 700 USD. It’s not uncommon to have to shell out 1500 USD or more for the desired specs.



  • Without context this link is just bad. Plant growth will not reduce CO2 levels because biosphere is temporary store or carbon (since it is a part of the carbon cycle)

    We are putting carbon (into the atmosphere) that was previously buried. So putting a tiny bit of it back into plants doesn’t help because:

    • those plants will die and release the carbon back
    • the number of plants added is inconsequential compared to the deforestation
    • the number of plants needed to offset additional carbon is humongous