According to Practical Engineering, tracks are no longer given a gap. The gap causes premature wear and excess noise. Instead, they lay the track under tension, and weld the joins between sections.
There is still a limit on how much heat they can handle before buckling, of course. I just thought that was a neat innovation.
And now you compare the Republicans to some natural force, as if they are inevitable and inescapable. Gravity has no will, no plan. It just is. Republicans have a will and a plan. Getting mad at the Democrats for not being good enough to stop that is akin to victim blaming. The Republicans should never have gone down this road in the first place.
Do you blame the thief, or do you blame the homeowner for not having better locks? Who do you hold accountable?
We're not talking about a diseased animal, we're talking about people who are making conscious decisions knowing what the results will be. I can and so absolutely blame people for that.
Your metaphor insinuates that Republicans are unable to control their actions. If that were the case, that's all the more reason to vote and get them out of positions of power.
Because the Republicans control Congress, and at this point only an act of Congress can restore it.
It comes down to this: a Republican president would veto any abortion protection law, but a Democratic president would pass it. But the law has to get to his desk first.
And it took a lot of hard work by a lot of people to adopt new date standards to avoid that problem. Now it's time to adopt new IP standards, and it's going to take a lot of hard work by a lot of people.
I'm not saying planned obsolescence isn't a thing (because it is), but that's not the only reason. Making phones smaller, lighter, faster, and more feature-dense all mean that the phone has to be built with tighter manufacturing and operating tolerances. Faster chips are more prone to heat and vibration damage. Higher power requirements means the battery has a larger charge/discharge cycle. And unfortunately, tighter operating tolerances mean that they can fall out of those tolerances much more easily.
They get dropped, shaken, exposed to large environmental temperature swings, charged in wonky ways, exposed to hand oils and other kinds of dirt, and a slew of other evils. Older phones that didn't have such tight tolerances could handle all that better. Old Nokia phones weren't built to be indestructible, they are just such simple phones that there isn't much to break; but there's a reason people don't use them much anymore. You can still get simple feature phones, but the fact remains that they don't sell well, so not many are made, and the ones that are made don't have a lot of time and money invested in them.
Now Voyager is an extremely simple computer, made with technology that has huge tolerances, in an environment that is mostly consistent and known ahead of time so the design can deliberately account for it, had lots of testing, didn't have to take mass production into its design consideration, didn't have to make cost trade-offs, and has a dedicated engineering team to keep it going. It is still impressive that it has lasted this long, but that is more a testament to the incredible work that was and is being put into it than to the technology behind it.
If I interpret your question correctly, you are basically asking what the practical difference is between interpreting a model as a reflection of reality and interpreting a model as merely a mathematical tool.
A mathematical model, at its core, is used to allow us to make testable predictions about our observations. Interpretations of that model into some kind of explanation about the fundamental nature of reality is more the realm of philosophy. That philosophy can loop back into producing more mathematical models, but the models themselves only describe behavior, not nature.
A model by nature is an analogy, and analogies are always reductionist. Like any analogy, if you poke it hard enough, it starts to fall apart. They make assumptions, they do their best to plug holes, they try to come as close as they can to mirroring the behavior of our observations, but they always fall short somewhere. Relativity and Quantum Chromodynamics are both good examples. Both are very, very good at describing behavior within certain boundaries, but fall completely apart when you step outside of them. (Both, to expand on the example, use constants that are impericaly determined, but we have no idea where they come from.)
The danger is in when you start to assume that a model of reality is reality itself, and you forget that it's just a best guess of behaviors. Then you get statements like you first made. "Relativity assumes time is a dimension. The model for that works. Therefore time must be a dimension in reality. That must mean that not treating time as a dimension anywhere must be wrong." That line of thinking, though, forgets that a model is only correct within the scope of the model itself. As soon as you introduce a new model, any assumptions made by other models are no longer relevant. That will pigeonhole your thinking and lead you to incorrect conclusions due to mixed analogies.
That is how you get statements like your first one. "Model A treats time like an illusion, but model B treats time like a dimension. Ergo, all dimensions are illusions ." That is mixing analogies.
Nope, you can do that with GPay, which is not the same as Google Pay, which is not the same as Google Wallet, but they all connect to the same account. Yay Google naming 😑.
"Google Pay" app is going away, but the "GPay" app is not, and you can use that for person to person transactions. Yay Google naming conventions.
Because Google is Google and can't keep their own shit straight, there is a bit of confusion. "Google Pay" is going away, but "GPay" is not. You can still use the GPay app for person to person transactions. Google Wallet is used for things like tap-to-pay. Both apps link to the same underlying account.
I would be careful of confusing "reality" (whatever that is) with our model of reality. Relativity, which treats time as a dimension, is a good model that fits well with most of our observations. It's not perfect, though, and it doesn't fit well with some other observations. That's how we know that it doesn't fully match reality, and why we're looking for a new model.
Paraphrasing the old saying: all models of the universe are wrong, but some are useful.
Basically, yes, though I think they have special hydraulic pullers, too. I forget the exact name. They have to take special measures if the day is too cold.
https://youtu.be/zqmOSMAtadc?si=FCG7HxiPWXNQY6Uj