The London-Calcutta bus came up on HN today (and yeah I'm part of the problem for ever opening HN but whatever, I'm one of the Good Ones trust me on this). It was basically some company who ran a bus service in the 1950's between those cities, going overland through central Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and India. It took 50 days. Obviously this is a niche product, sort of a land cruise, which you embark upon not because you really need to get to Calcutta but because you're up for a grand adventure.

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50 days one way? Some research shows it was £85 vs. £200-£400 for a one-way plane ticket. What is the use case for this? I guess:

  • very motivated to go

  • plan to stay for a very long time

  • absolutely CANNOT afford a plane ticket

  • or, afraid of flying

Reminds me of a lot of Amtrack routes in the US. I looked at trips from NYC to Chicago. I thought it would be fun and I needed to get to Chicago. But it was more expensive than flying and like 25 hours. There is just absolutely no reason to travel that way.

  • My sister works in VC and while I think she keeps a pretty level head about tech writ large I’ll catch something every once in awhile where The Valley takes over and she says something that is/would be incredibly alien to me and like 98% of the country.

    I was at a family wedding recently and discovered that my sweet nerdy cousin who I haven’t seen in ~5 years and wanted to be a doctor is now working for Palantir which was a real eye opener.

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    What are some examples?

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    Commonly bringing laptops/tablets to a restaurant so you can work while out to dinner (socially, not a work dinner) came up over Christmas

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    I figured that was ragebait is that for real

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    Common enough to not be put off by it if you’re in tech or tech finance

    My brother in law took a work call in the bathroom about 20 minutes into Marty Supreme on Christmas Day lol

    They both make fuckin bank though so jokes on me I guess

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    See the laptops at dinner strikes me as weird strivers trying to make a point but a work call on Christmas seems more like he likes what he does. I’m hoping that’s the case at least. Doing work you don’t care about from 12/25-1/1 is truly torture for anyone with a soul.

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    Maybe, I’ve never really asked about his enthusiasm levels but the way he talks about it is very practical. It pays well, it doesn’t fill me with dread, there’s space to move up, that kinda stuff.

    I love my job but I’m not taking a phone call with my boss at 8 o’clock on Christmas Day when I’ve got plans with my in laws y’know?

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    If the pay is good and he doesn’t want to kill himself he’s already in the minority so yeah sometimes you take a work call from the right person on Christmas.

    I’m with you though, if I’m being asked to do anything around the holidays that doesn’t immediately bring in millions in fees or save the entire company millions of dollars I’m not doing it and the people who do are freak losers.

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    I'm still typing despite shooting myself in the head after reading this:

    Nabeel Khan knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur early in life.

    In high school, Khan hired “12 of the smartest kids I could find,” he says, and co-founded an AP tutoring company. They charged between $20 and $50 per hour and made “about $5,000″ within the first month, he says. He says he loved the challenge of working in customer service and balancing costs and earnings.

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    😂 🔫

    I live in Los Angeles, but I lead sales and marketing as Head of GTM (go-to-market) at the AI startup daydream. In addition to two flights, my weekly commute also consists of too many Ubers and more 4:30 a.m. alarms than I care to count.

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    adam told about how he went to bed with this korean chick and after their congress had ended she opened up her seeking arrangements account. and i says to myself that's rough but the bug had it coming. look if my ethnicity was fetishized by people who tend to work in media or finance, it'd be throwing money away not to, you know, whatever.

    now if that same girl started working on her software as a service portal, i don't know. you know, he heard her whispering, "so i want to circle back to..." i think it might could be like the end of the guilty conscience video where andre is the voice of reason but he finally says, "just shoot that bitch."

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    I get it if they were oncall, because someone needs to be accessible if the system goes down but otherwise this is insane.

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    Did your parents immigrate from India?

    Not racist, just curious

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    No they’re very old stock New England people (not in a dog whistle way) they’re just grind-a-holics. I am much less aggro about my career (I’m a brewer) and it causes a lot of “what do I even talk to you about” moments when the extended fam gets together. My grandfather practiced medicine until he was 92 years old so there’s a lot of whatever that instinct is at play among his kids.

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    My sister used to physically fight this kid (family friend) and they both ended up going to MIT and he works for palantir and she works for meta. Whoa 

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  • Disgusting, soulless people.

    You take the Amtrak so you can eavesdrop on 400 lb black Amtrak conductors giving advice to Mennonite teenagers on how to get pussy in the dining car. No airplane experience can replicate the witnessing of such beautiful cultural exchanges.

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    I was up all night doing shots with a group of Russians once on the Lake Shore Limited. They had a huge plastic bag of obscure mushrooms they picked somewhere that they kept rifling through for the best bites (I didn't eat any and they made fun of me in Russian for it)

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    Russian and Slavic randos are the best. Several jobs ago I was in SFO visiting a branch office and went shooting with our old Belarusian employee. That was an experience enough in San Francisco, but the man literally just brought a cloth sack full of different Soviet countries' Tokarev pistols.

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    You gotta give respect to get respect.

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    I was on an Amtrak once and a black teenager was in the row next to mine talking to his sister on speakerphone the entire ride. The conductor came over halfway through the ride and it turns out he was on the wrong train.

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    A beautiful example of the universal respect economy. Preemptive shout out to Obediah for pulling an Au Sexuale style of bitch.

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    A middle aged black woman in a fedora sat on my lap by accident, so I moved over for her to sit and she fainted. Treated her and within moments of her coming to, another middle aged black woman and her adult son started calling her a fraud and viciously berating her for her choice of hat. I told her to be nice and she started asking deeply uncomfortable passengers “who this 🚬 is”. Best part of the entire trip (I was going to my mom’s funeral)

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  • it’s a disgrace that we don’t have proper high speed rail between NYC and Chicago and up and down the northeast corridor at the bare minimum, preferably the whole east coast

    we have the money and the population density to do it there’s no reason not to

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    We can’t do it because of the cost and the fact that it will go by peoples houses and they can complain and get the work stopped.

    Somehow these aren’t issues with freeways.

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    There are issues with freeways its just the bulk of interstate system was built in a different time.

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    developers used eminent domain to level a whole brooklyn neighborhood for the ugly ass barclays center, this was maybe 15 years ago. we can absolutely pay off a handful of townhouses in baltimore to put our transportation system in the 21st century

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    I would bet good money the first proper American bullet trains are going to be the Texas Triangle and Miami-to-Orlando.

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    The Florida one is really funny because they skimped on grade crossings and Americans are mega regarded about stopping at rails so it's like the deadliest train in American history.

    If they get it up to 200mph it'll be a hick genocide

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    It’s so perfectly Florida, I love the Brightline.

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    I unironically love the Brightline and hope it expands to Tampa and Jacksonville. The Atlantic wrote a handwringing article a few months ago about all the deaths the Brightline caused and I couldn’t stop rolling my eyes the entire time.

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    On one hand it is purely the fault of those who are dumb enough to try to cross despite the dozens of warning signs etc, on the other hand, maybe we do have some kind of responsibility to the mentally handicapped members of our society.

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    Need to see a bullet train with a cattle guard but for cars.

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    The Northeast corridor has the same population density as England which is one of the most densely populated regions of Europe in itself

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    Acela is pretty good between Boston and DC tbh. Solid balance, considering all of the US’s unique constraints

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    Yeah it gets up to 150mph for like two miles in central Jersey!

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    The only rail route between Seattle and Spokane drops you off in Spokane at like 1 in the morning. Amtrak on the West Coast is pretty much useless unless you're going between cities in California or between Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver.

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    I doubt Chicago to NY is viable. Even averaging 100mph in a straight line that’s a 7 hour trip,  Minneapolis -> Chicago via Madison and Milwaukee would be sweet

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    The chinese, japanese, italian, and french have trains that go nearly 200mph

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    100mph is understating it, but 200mph is still not the average speed. A lot of Italian cities have terminal stations too, which means they have to go out the same way they go in.

    The distance from Chicago to New York is pretty much the same as Milan to Calabria, and the only city directly on the way from Chicago to NYC is Cleveland

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    The distance between Beijing and Shanghai similar to between NYC and Chicago and they have a high speed rail line.

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  • What is HN

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    I assume Hacker News

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    What is Hacker News

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    2012 reddit with a more autistic UI

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    you know that scene in Go where Timothy Olyphant bitches about the Family Circus? In the original script he was actually talking about HN but it didn't focus-group very well so they changed it last minute.

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    This sounds unlikely but Go is on my to-watch list!

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    Does sound unlikely but Go is a very timely, golden piece of Americana. Perfectly casted.

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    CAST

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    WHY ARE YOU YELLING PAST PARTICIPLES ACROSS THE ROOM AT ME?

    it’s akchtkyklyyyy castened

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  • You’re browsing hacker news lol. Why are you surprised by Autism on Autism central. Plenty of people in tech I know love taking expensive vacations on like luxury trains etc lol

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    whew not noveau riche at all, expensive vacations! luxury trains!

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    you think working class people can afford to take 50 days off to ride a bus across Asia? Or pay way more than a plane ticket to take an amtrak from SF to Chicago in 4 days?

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  • Referring to yourself as a “Good One” despite going on Hacker News is crazy work, to quote zoomers. That being said, the average Hacker News poster is an unholy mix of smug autistic Redditor and I Fucking Love Science poster. For a bunch of people who supposedly love tech, they love picking apart new tech and explaining why it’s ackshually bad.

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  • I am literally shitting myself because of a RANDOM comment on ytpeople.com

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  • Seems like a really milquetoast comment not sure why you’re so buttmad OP

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    A stunning display of instrumental rationality/inability or unwillingness to see the joy in "useless" experiences. It's only milquetoast in that it's actually not that surprising and I was expecting something more infuriating.

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    Have you ever taken a 25 hour Amtrak train? Get da fuck outta heya!!

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    This is probably one of the least controversial or demonic comments on Hacker News on any given week lol

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  • Ok still confused what is so infuriating about the Amtrak comment...?

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  • The Vengabus is coming and here's what that taught me about b2b sales

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  • My grandfather did this in reverse - Delhi to South Wales in about 1965. He talks about it as probably the foundational experience of the rest of his life, something almost impossible to undertake today but which led him into a forty year career as a cultural attaché. It makes me so incredibly sad to think of a world where such trips are monopolised by country-baggers and speedrunners or else demeaned by subsocial freaks.

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  • Someone should reply to this fool: the action is the juice

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  • What is the longest you have spent on a bus? 

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  • Same type of person who says reprehensible shit like "I only eat to fuel my body"

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  • I'm one of the Good Ones trust me on this)

    Just found out today that paulg is pro-Palestine and has openly called out Israel on Gaza, which made me reappraise his recent past activity by quite a lot, a lot lot. Otherwise that place has become pretty damn depressing, or maybe I've grown out of it, or the two at the same time. It was never that open-minded to begin with, come to think of it.

    Back to the discussion at hand, I've recently taken a 30-hour mini-van ride from somewhere in Thuringia, Germany, to Bucharest, where I live, and it was one of the most interesting trips in my life (and I'm already in my mid-40s by now). The clients on said van-ride were Romanian immigrant workers for whom saving 50 or so euros by taking the mini-van instead of the plane made total sense (I'm afraid of flying, that's why I was there, and my car had broken down on the way to Germany).

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  • I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about

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  • I fucking hate that all these people talk the same. And they are the purest philistines on Earth, constantly claiming not to understand basic human cultural experiences like wine, music, literature, romance.

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  • This is schizophrenic

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  • Calcutta/Kolkata is the only city in India I'd willingly see again. Really otherworldly and aesthetic and noble, and I am not a curryboo by any stretch.

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  • Yeah I freaking hate tech dorks and dweebs. Freaking twerps. I should shove them in a freaking locker. Thanks OP this restored my faith in humanity

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