Some of this was covered in the article, but it’s not actually Los Angeles’ leadership’s fault (rare praise for a city I love and call home), it was shovel-ready and funded to be built in the 80s. Then there was a ballot measure due to ongoing construction problems of a separate line in the 80s that banned tunneling in Los Angeles. This wasn’t overturned until 2007! Then Beverly Hills (which is also not part of Los Angeles city government) fought this line for another 10 years, again with tunneling concerns, because they didn’t want it under them (not so fun fact, Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’ husband, represented them). It went to the California Supreme Court and then the Federal Appeals Court, and finally, in 2017 was allowed to commence construction. Then Beverly Hills decided they wanted (and got) not one but TWO stops (and the only ones outside of downtown with turnstiles). Funny.

An indictment of the state legal system’s slowness, yes (see CAHSR), but the city consistently has fought many of its own nimby residents, other cities, the state, and the United States trying to claw back funding for this for those 60 years. It would not have been built without generations of support from city leadership. So there is hope!

With hundreds of miles funded and planned for or already under construction in the next two decades, the city’s rail future may be the brightest in the country.

Well, if we’re comparing CA infra costs, for a more 1-1 comparison you can look at the $9.7B Los Angeles is spending on building out a long-awaited subway line (phase 1 of 3 opened Friday!) and see how tunneling underwater looks like a bargain in comparison.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-05-07/los-ange...

You clearly have a different view of “innocent until proven guilty” than most US citizens, which is fine, maybe you aren’t one, but that line of rhetoric is going to be anathema to most people on this website.

Not that the US criminal system isn’t its own complete mess, but thank God for the concept of bail (going about your life outside of jail until trial or dismissal, within certain parameters) and right to see a judge within 24 hours, to avoid any kafkaesque nightmares like this.

According to her video it appears she was deemed a flight risk because she didn't respond to an email requesting information on the matter being investigated while she was overseas. She didn't have the information on hand or at the time or at all and instead of saying that she didn't respond to the email. When she returned from her trip they deemed her a flight risk.

In the US if you're a flight risk you wouldn't get bail either.

You wouldn’t be deemed a flight risk in the US on that basis. Returning to the country after receiving email notifying you about the investigation is obviously evidence against flight risk.

> You clearly have a different view of “innocent until proven guilty”

Most people don't really understand it, and even the ones who do often have personal exceptions driven by emotion. The idea that you need to defend the guilty to protect the innocent is alien to a lot of people. Japan takes the lack of that assumption a step further though, since it's a society based on strict compliance to cultural norms... for better and for worse.

Having said all of that, most of these systems do a credible job of distinguishing the innocent from the guilty, although there's always more to do on that front. If you've ever worked anywhere near the court system you start to notice that people who make it through the system all of the way to a trial are frequently guilty and even more frequently recidivist.

Most people aren't criminals and never commit a serious offense, but speaking for myself I don't think the "sorting" the system does has to be anywhere close to as brutal and impersonal as it often is in many countries including Japan.

Primarily the US’s approach is: “we know our system will never be perfect [and the system we have is actually a hell of its own making], so we will ensure an escape hatch for BOTH innocent/guilty from the shortcomings of the system until a definitive verdict has been reached”

While Japan’s/many other countries approach is: “We intend our court system to be a perfect representation of our culture, history, and policy objectives. Therefore it should apply in every case, regardless of individual circumstance, so there is no escape hatch, because why deviate from a perfect process.”

The former is how you get the wildly inconsistent US approach to the criminal system, while the latter is how you get a kafkaesque nightmare (or worse, a system weaponized to intentionally target innocent undesirables, like El Salvador’s CECOT)

Both are simplified, none are perfect, of course. But I know which system I’d rather be accused under.

It's wild how much curricula within high schools must differ, because my school went out of its way to teach and encourage/require its use on nearly every quiz and exam. We joked sometimes class felt more like calculator class than math class. This was Texas, too, which I hardly consider a pioneer in education. Maybe TI pride?

Now that I think about it, this could have been a strategy my high school drilled into us as a way to increase SAT scores, since TI-84s were allowed to be used there.

Texas (TI) invented the handheld calculator after all.

Because [] is an array with nothing in it, and [0] is an array with something in it.

So saying “give me the array containing the first 100 elements of this array with one element” would obviously give you the array with one element back.

Saying “give me the array containing the first 100 elements of this array with zero elements” would follow that it just gives the empty array back.

On top of that, because ruby is historically duck-typed, having something always return an array or an error makes sense, why return nil when there’s a logical explanation for defined behavior? Ditto for throwing an error.

Seems thoughtfully intuitive to me.

Yeah, returning an empty array is pretty much exactly what I would expect given the first example. It would be a lot weirder to me if you were allowed to give an end index past the last element only if the array happened to be non-empty.

Sorry, I mis-spoke earlier, this is what I should have shared:

  [].slice(5, 100)

^-- *THIS* either returns nil or throws an exception.

Edit: Longer example:

  puts "[1, 2, 3].slice(1, 100) -> #{[1, 2, 3].slice(1, 100).to_s}"
  puts "[1, 2, 3].slice(3, 100) -> #{[1, 2, 3].slice(3, 100).to_s}"
  puts "[1, 2, 3].slice(4, 100) -> #{[1, 2, 3].slice(4, 100).to_s}"

Yields:

  [1, 2, 3].slice(1, 100) -> [2, 3]
  [1, 2, 3].slice(3, 100) -> []
  [1, 2, 3].slice(4, 100) -> 

So, there is a behavior difference between "array a little too short" and "array slightly more too short" that creates unexpected behavior.

That's not a big surprise in a tiny example like this; but if you expand this out into a larger code base, where you're just being an array and you want the 100 through 110th values for whatever reason - say it's a csv. Suddenly you're having to consider both the nil case and the empty array case; but then why are they different?

Interesting! From playing around with it, seems like if the start index is exactly the same as the length, it returns empty array, but if it's further than that it returns nil. That's certainly not something I would have been able to predict, so I'd also be curious if anyone happens to know the explanation for it. My instinct is that it does seem like the type of edge case that might come up with a way to implement it tersely, but that's not a particularly good reason to leak that in the form of user-facing behavior, so hopefully there's a better explanation.

Some additional things I discovered when trying to figure out why it might work like that:

    * the behavior also seems consistent whether using `array.slice(a, b)` or `array[a..b]`
    * `array[array.length]` and `array[array.length + 1]` both return nil

the docs say... if index is out of range return nil. the edge case is that if you specify the exact end index of the array and want a slice of that index to 100 it will return an empty array. if you go out of bounds it informs you that you are out of bounds with nil. not sure it's the best api but probably is mimicking some C api somewhere as a lot of ruby does that. that said it will never error on this alone but it will almost certainly error if you chain it with something not expecting nil.

The easiest way to get around that if you are not carefully using the ranges would be to do `Array(array.slice(a, b))` as that will guarantee an array even if it's invalid. you could override slice if you really wanted to but that would be a performance penalty if you are doing it often.

Indeed. I had heard that it was a carryover from C; but for an "implicit is better than explicit" and "magic ducktyping, it just works, I promise" language, like Ruby, this feels like a direct contradiction to its intended behavior and this specific example has always stood out to me in a "... but why?" sort of way.

Yeah, I'd argue that it would be less confusing to return the same thing even if it's inconsistent with some C API that plenty of Ruby programmers might never have encountered. I'm honestly not sure I even understand what the C API is that's being referred to; slices and bounds checks aren't things I typically associate with being built into C.

looked into it more and the docs say that an index out of bounds will return nil. also says if offset == size and length >= 0 it will return an empty array.

``` If offset == self.size and size >= 0, returns a new empty array.

If size is negative, returns nil. ```

either way if you are doing stuff with arrays and not checking bounds you can throw an `Array(some_array.slice(x, x+100))` and it will always behave.

Sure, the docs seem to be accurate, but that only explains "what will this do?", not "why is this what it will do?" It's not what I expect most people would come up with if they designed this API, so I have to wonder why they didn't pick something more intuitive

Especially because in ruby

[0, nil, nil, nil, …x100, nil] is the same as [0] in terms of access.

In both cases, trying to access the 100th element (e.g. [0][100]) will give nil.

Yes, but with caveats.

Culturally, though, it’s because that over half of the population doesn’t know that they would benefit from trains? In the same way outside (just as inside) the US there’s an age-old divide between farmers and city folk (see Denmark or France for the most recent protests).

In China, >66% of the population lives in urban areas. In the US, <30% live in proper urban areas (a vast majority, 60%, live in historically car-centric suburban areas mostly developed post WWII).

The issue is not that those areas that would benefit the most don’t support it, it’s that the areas that would benefit the most from it are surrounded by areas that currently have no viable alternatives (and thus knowledge that something else is possible) other than a car. They’re already driving >1hr to get to work or an airport. Therefore, of course they think anything that takes away resources from wider roads is a waste of their own time and tax money, as it does not benefit them.

The reason the California HSR, if ever finished, will actually mark a cultural shift is that it’s the only megaproject attempted since the 21st century that actually puts modern alternatives to the car in rural areas: vast amounts of money could’ve been saved by connecting LA to SF and SD by electrifying and tunneling on the current Amtrak route, but that would’ve left out about half the state.

Was it too ambitious? Maybe. But in 50 years, maybe everyone will be talking about how it changed California, and the US’s, entire attitude toward rail.

> Culturally, though, it’s because that over half of the population doesn’t know that they would benefit from trains

No it’s not. Everyone in America goes to Disney World, which was made by a train nerd and you can’t even drive into the parks. Everyone goes there, rides around the trains and walkable areas, and then goes home to Ohio and drives around in their giant SUV.

It’s not because people don’t know about trains. It’s because they don’t value the things you do, and they value things you don’t, like having distance from strangers and being able to buy a lot of stuff and cart it around with them everywhere.

All my family is immigrants from Bangladesh. They’re not steeped in generations of American car culture. But, for some reason, car culture is the thing they assimilate into most easily. My cousin was living in Queens (where all the recent Bangladeshi immigrants are) and moved to Dallas. She’s thrilled about having all the space for her kids to run around, the apartment with a pool, etc. She doesn’t miss having to schlep her kids on the subway around aggressive homeless people, people singing to themselves, panhandlers, etc.

That’s fun, because I’m from a third generation Dallas family :) I hope they enjoy Dallas and all Texas has to offer.

Dallas, TX has continually voted in expanding its DART Rail funding the past 40 years. It has the most miles of intercity rail in the entirety of the South. It has the most light rail, by mileage, built in the entirety of the US. It just opened up an entirely new rail line through the suburbs (and only the suburbs) in March, and is its third(!) line which connects directly to DFW airport, which makes it the most rail-connected airport in the United States, and tied with Shanghai, Tokyo and London for the world.

I also personally currently live on a farm in California, and am an advocate of HSR. I believe many of those in similar areas are afraid of rail because they have never experienced its benefits, and change without knowledge is scary.

So please forgive me if I say that you are incorrect in both your assessment of how the majority of Dallas, Texas supports rail and your assumption of what I value.

And regarding your point about Disney World, I believe you are actually agreeing with me. Disney is one of the only places in the US it makes more sense to use the train or shuttle than a car. It does not in most of the US. Many people go to Disney World and experience for the first time how well trains can work for day-to-day transit, if designed well and intentionally. People will use what is most convenient, immigrant or not — most people (including me) do not take trains out of some principled stance, they do so when it’s more convenient. And my argument is we should make it more convenient, safety and all.

> So please forgive me if I say that you are incorrect in both your assessment of how the majority of Dallas, Texas supports rail and your assumption of what I value.

I'm correct in my assumption about what you value. But you're correct in your assumption about what other people value.

> People will use what is most convenient, immigrant or not — most people (including me) do not take trains out of some principled stance, they do so when it’s more convenient.

Right, and virtually nobody in the Dallas, Texas area actually takes transit themselves. The proof of what they value is right there in their revealed preferences.

> It’s not because people don’t know about trains. It’s because they don’t value the things you do, and they value things you don’t, like having distance from strangers and being able to buy a lot of stuff and cart it around with them everywhere.

But isn't this pretty fungible? Like it can't be that all the people genetically predisposed to like high density neighborhoods and biking to the grocery store happen to be in the Netherlands.

100% This is true.

The only people I hear clamoring for trains in non urban areas are younger online folks (mostly living in urban areas).

I rarely hear anyone ask for it in suburbia.

Frankly, if you've never lived in a place with clean, reliable, fast trains, you probably would be disillusioned and would never go to the train life. Or if your public infrastructure is deemed "for poor people".

Back to my original point, it's a cultural problem.

I go to Tokyo sometimes multiple times a year. It’s not like I don’t know about reliable trains.

And we would not need rules at all if everyone was perfect all the time.

So like what California did, which resulted in only a couple hundred thousand units over half a decade when they were hoping for/needing a couple million statewide.

Not the mention that ironically, the private owners with the space to build an ADU on their lot are the ones most likely to already be wealthy, and not actually rent it out to anyone below their socioeconomic bracket.

I can’t agree with this statement because One Battle After Another is actually a movie about fatherhood and the lengths you go to to raise a child, and very explicitly makes fun of how many “fight the power” movements are often ineffective or devolve into making the problem you’re fighting against worse.

It’s a movie about family loyalties transcending and persisting through all else, which is a pretty universal message.

I agree that it paints both sides as silly, but it does so incredibly badly. This is evidenced by, eg., the comments on Letterboxd, who all seem to either think their outgroup is lampooned (yay 5 stars) or their ingroup is slighted (grr 1 star). The movie set out to combat division and failed catastrophically. At least that’s my charitable interpretation. It’s also too long, lol.