While living in northern Italy, I was impressed by the value, quality, and dependability of the rail service. For example, my ride on the high-speed Italo train from Bologna to Rome was one of the best train journeys I’ve ever had. An article in Railway Technology highlights the surprising success of private railway companies and the introduction of high-speed rail services like Italo.
Despite Italo shifting Trenitalia’s 100% market cap […] Trenitalia actually saw an increase in revenue during that period. High-speed rail was, and is, competing with low-cost flights, and despite the shift in market cap between the two train operators, they were actually winning more passengers from air to rail overall than from one another. […] The growth of both Italo and Trenitalia is also thanks to the fact that Italo’s growth was due to induced demand: if you build it, they will come. Or, you could say that the market for low-cost high-speed rail didn’t exist until Italo created it.
An article from Kottke.org contrasts two examples infrastructural politics: the famous case of Robert Moses’s bridge to limit who can access a New York beach, and the recent controversies on the Trump administration trying to dismantle the US postal servervice ahead of the November elections:
The situation here is reversed — e.g. “it’s very hard to rebuild a bridge once it’s torn down” — but the lesson is the same. If you take mailboxes off the streets and junk sorting machines, it’s difficult to put them back, particularly when everyone’s baseline shifts over the next few months and the decreased capacity and delays are normalized (and then exploited for political advantage). Destroying the United States Post Office would be far easier and cheaper than rebuilding it.
The physical side of the internet infrastructure - submarine cables. Impressive visualisation.
Nice explanation by Mozilla on improvements being developed on the Domain Name Service (DNS) infrastructure, and good introduction if you don’t know how this actually works.