This map is a joke.

This pictorial is woefully lacking in breadth of nuclear activity prescribed by the SIOP. I distinctly remember thinking that the biggest threat to "strike line" aircrews was other NATO nuclear detonations in Europe. The map was literally covered with dots representing detonations during the first 2-3 hours of the war scenario, should Europe be invaded. I once mapped a line for a "tree blowdown" since all other useful standing targets had been hit multiple times. Of course that assumed my base or origin was still functional.

It's hard to know what to make of this "Black Friday" entry. First of all, the author and his family couldn't have taken Amtrak into the city of San Francisco in the sense of taking a train all the way there, because Amtrak doesn't run trains into the city. The only intercity trains running into San Francisco are the Caltrain commuter trains (run by the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board), which go from San Jose to downtown San Francisco (with numerous brief intermediate stops). Amtrak passengers can go by train to Emeryville and then transfer to one of Amtrak's "Thruway" buses, which make stops at several points in San Francisco; or they can take Amtrak to Richmond and transfer to BART, or they can take Amtrak to San Jose and transfer to Caltrain. Which of these did the author and his family do?

We also don't know where their trip began, so it's impossible to tell what sort of trip they made, on what sort of train.

The complaints that the train they took was expensive and late are clear-cut ones that are no doubt justified; it's _not_ justifiable, however, to conclude that therefore Amtrak as a whole, and beyond that the technology it's based on, are expensive and late as a general matter. As for the complaint that the train, and therefore Amtrak, and therefore the technology, are "inadequate", what are we to make of that? Since the author doesn't tell us specifically what kind of inadequacy he's talking about, we have to regard that complaint as meaningless. Regarding the train being slow, maybe it was and maybe it wasn't: we can't evaluate that without knowing what trip the author and his family made and how long it took. I would point out that inexperienced rail travelers often underestimate the speed of their train because they're used to the sensation of speed you get in a car, and being higher off the ground lessens that sensation: if, for example, the train is traveling at 79 miles per hour (a common top speed for Amtrak routes), the sensation of speed superficially resembles that which you get traveling at 45 or 50 in a car. And as for Amtrak and its technology being slow as a general matter, I'd point out that Amtrak's diesel-electric locomotives can go over 100 (some as high as 110), and its electric-powered trains on the Northeast Corridor can go faster than that, in some cases going as high as 150 in normal service. The _average_ speed of the Amtrak system is neither slow nor fast but moderate.

Finally, referring to Amtrak as a "subsidized 19th[-]century technology" is just a meaningless cheap shot. First of all, all major forms of transportation in the United States are heavily subsidized, if we count the _real_ subsidies (which include many items not usually included in subsidy calculations, such as the exemption from property tax of highway and airport land), net of user fees. The only thing unusual about Amtrak's subsidies is that they're more visible than most. Second, while it's true that railroad technology in its basic current form dates to the nineteenth century (just as automotive technology does), American intercity passenger trains, like automobiles, have been modernized in almost all respects since the nineteenth century. To take just a few examples, they use diesel-electric or electric locomotives rather than steam; they run on continuous welded rail almost everywhere rather than jointed rail; they are guided by signaling and switching that is automated to a degree unknown in the nineteenth century; their cars are heated and lit by locomotive-generated electricity rather than by burned fuels or wheel-generated electricity; the cars are joined by vestibules universally; and the trains are equipped with numerous comforts and amenities that were unknown or nearly so to nineteenth-century travelers. In sum, while saying that Amtrak has "nineteenth-century technology" is a standard insult routinely delivered by the uninformed, I would defy the author to defend it logically.