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From the New York Times opinion page:
What America Needs Is a Liberalism That Builds
May 29, 2022
By Ezra Klein, Opinion Columnist
… Do we have a government capable of building? The answer, too often, is no. What we have is a government that is extremely good at making building difficult. …
It costs about $538 million to build a kilometer of rail here. Germany builds a kilometer of rail for $287 million. Canada gets it done for $254 million. Japan clocks in at $170 million. Spain is the cheapest country in the database, at $80 million.
The NYT’s choice of a silhouette photo of old-time construction workers actually getting big things built reminds me that if they’d shown a more revealing photo of a great construction site of liberalism, such as the Golden Gate Bridge or the Grand Coulee Dam, that it would be striking in 2022 just how deplorably white male the work force was back in the Bad (Yet, Inexplicably, Efficacious) Old Days.
Maybe one step in actually get things built again is for liberalism to cut way back on expensive race and gender preferences?
But, in contrast to environmental delays, the entire topic of race/gender affirmative action is largely unspeakable for the Establishment today (Klein’s long article includes one vague reference to “picayune legal rules governing hiring and procurement”) because merely mentioning affirmative action could remind the public that it exists, which is bad for The Narrative that America is systemically racist/sexist as proved by FDR’s redlining, Emmett Till, and no doubt lots of other events of more recent generations although few specific examples come to mind offhand, but we know they must exist because the Theory of Intersectionality, which no one must ever doubt, says so.
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Does this mean we can now taunt liberals with, “you didn’t build that”?
We can add: "You tore that down"; "You neglected that into ruin"; "You regulated that into oblivion."
Passing by a few building sites recently, I’ve noticed some vibrant and female individuals standing around nodding sagely while white guys are using theodolites. The actual grunts – labourers, bricklayers, carpenters, plasterers &c – are all white.
Ezra Klein is a pretty ironic voice for questioning government inefficiency. He's a standard big government woke lefty who's probably never seen a specific regulatory burden about unions, affirmative action, health, safety, environmental review, prevailing wages, or "community" involvement," that he wouldn't support by itself.
Yet his big insight now is that "somebody outta do something" about how government projects cost so much and produce so little. Klein is a facile wordsmith but he really seems to have zero actual understanding of anything real, certainly not economics or engineering.Replies: @bomag
Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
Donald Trump:
“I’m gonna create so many jobs that there will be a labor scarcity…and therefore, I want to import China’s youth population and India’s Youth Population into America to fill all these jobs that I am going to create…”
The above is a direct quote of Donald Trump. And I guarantee you that Steve’s readers will give the wrong response to what Trump said on Fox News at the start of the Covid Crisis…The correct response is one of my incessant meme comments since day one of isteve.com…
And the demographics of the photo is my incessant meme comment from day one on isteve.com…
one step in actually get things built again is for liberalism to cut way back on expensive race and gender preferences?
That surely helps. But I think Canada, Germany etc., have their preferences too (surely some form of gender, if not race). Genuine meritocracy, instead of political backscratching, helps too (sadly, the example there is, China, which is not to be emulated).
But, the rather well-known reason, why we bill $538 million per kilometer while Japan bills at $170 million per KM is, we have to support 1.3 million lawyers in U.S. while Japan has to support only 35,000 for a population half as much. So, our legal overhead is, Twenty times that of Japan. That will ensure that our public infrastructure will forever be condemned to be in third world mode.
https://www.clio.com/blog/lawyer-statistics/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attorneys_in_Japan
Basically, huge open graft to support the people-with-BAs-and-no-discernable-skills-anyone-wants-to-pay-for.
Again, this is not a nation anymore. It is a continental marketplace, run for the benefit not of productive people, but all the grifters and parasites.
our genius girls-and-boys with BAs bureaucrats cough up the shittiest, lamest projects--at extreme costs.
Anecdotal example:
They have been "building light rail" in Seattle for seemingly forever. But AnotherMom and I a few years ago--kid and neighbors both unavailable--decided to try the "ride to the airport". After the bus to UW station ... a long slow ride. Slowly accelerating trains. At grade crossings in South Seattle. Took forever.
Last summer was teaching wife's cousin's kid (whatever that is "2nd niece"?) to drive. Her test was in Bellevue so we drove all the streets near the testing center, every interesection, all the gotchas. Sure 'nuff the light rail extension to Microsoft/Redmond ... is running at grade in places and has grade street crossings!
Logically one would think:
-- there is a fortune spent on lawyering and bureaucracy
-- plus the actual cost of land
-- then smaller, the actual cost of building the roadbed
...
so if we're spending all this money just to get a line in place don't we want
-- a line that can be really speedy and high capacity?
-- no grade crossing
-- super fast train sets, expandable for higher capacity
-- stations that allow bypass and express trains
Nope, the girls and boys with BAs have a "light rail" fetish and dainty ideas about what it should be like ... and that is what is important. Speed, capacity, expandability ... the future? ... not important. So you pay billions and in the end still get mediocrity.Replies: @Pixo, @epebble
And China has built about 25,oooKm of rail in past 6 years.*
At US prices that’d cost USD 13 trillion (or about 6 Afghanistan’s)
Little wonder everyone is going to trade with China in the future.
You can see how useful the war in Ukraine is for keeping Europe locked in to US imports.
*Incredible isn’t it – implied from these numbers
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/china-high-speed-rail-cmd/index.html
But the more startling figure at that link is that the high-speed Zhengzhou-Wangzhou line was built for only $16 million/km. So Germany and Canada build at half the US cost, and Japan at one quarter the US cost? Such inefficieny! China builds at 1/33rd the US cost to build a km of slow rail (and no doubt in much less time)!
There is an impression that Chinese high speed rail diesn't really pay for itself, but the government considers the societal dividends to be worth the book loss. Arguably, all public transportation worldwide loses money, and is governmentally subsidized for reasons other than shareholder profit. Those reasons may be good or ill, and there's the rub.
Subsidized mass public transport is a net benefit for China because there is still plenty of favorable HBD to bring to the metropole. In the US though, subsidized public mass transit just brings in bl— errr, negative HBD, so it is a net loss.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
A Liberalism that builds.
I can’t even.
It is the difference between an expansive empire on the way up, and one on the way down.
How can government build when they are so busy tearing everything down?
Maybe a little here and there, such as fixing a few pothole in one of the less diverse venues?
Diversity, Inclusion, Equity work very well in the military. Here is some action that is very affirming!!!!
America sent a bunch of young men off to fight and die for their nation. (400,000 did die. A few hundred thousand others seriously wounded.)
Then the nation they fought for was destroyed--tossed in the scrap heap. If those guys could see what the resulting "America" the fought for was, a majority would simply not bother.
If you could pose to the American public in 1941, "Hey we're going to fight and win this war so that America can be like this", and show them what we've become, it would be a landslide for "pass". Uh ... let's take a gamble on what is behind curtain #2.Replies: @Uncle Walter, @Art Deco
But even builders need a lunchbreak, such as these gentlemen enjoying themselves on the 69th floor of what is now the Comcast Building (30 Rock).
Liberalism… Build… hahaha. I needed a good laugh. Oh they can build alright, at about 10x the going rate using your money.
https://midwestepi.org/2017/05/03/what-are-road-construction-costs-per-lane-mile-in-your-state/
We’re in a kind of stalemate when it comes to building big infrastructure things in the U.S.
Democrats have redefined the word “infrastructure” to mean anything from hiring more teachers to subsidized birth control pills, and internally they seem to think of big construction projects as an opportunity to bring constituent groups to the trough for a big long drink. “The Big Dig” in Boston, and the perennial funding of levees in New Orleans before Katrina come to mind. Rather than skimming 5% off the top, it seems like about 5% of “infrastructure spending” gets used to purchase concrete, steel, and the manpower to install it. The rest gets parceled out to the people who reliably vote for Democrats.
Naturally, Republicans are reluctant to vote for bills which are thinly disguised spoils payments to their political opponents’ clients. So they pretend that “fiscal responsibility” precludes infrastructure spending entirely.
One thing that should be done to reset the script is to have a forensic accounting of past infrastructure spending. A sort of diagnosis of the obscene graft. Some sort of honesty and reconciliation and a resolve not to repeat the same frauds would seem necessary before we could ever move forward with new spending.
The Republican Party controlled both Houses of Congress and could have rammed it through. They could have insured that the money did NOT go to teachers, social workers, and community organizers, but rather to construction workers, electricians, pipe-fitters, plumbers, surveyors, engineers, and their families. Instead they pushed through the agenda of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, lost Congress, and then the White House.
A lot of Republican office-holders are stupid. A lot of them are bought. (A lot of them are both). They do serve their masters, it's just that their masters aren't us.
White men still build big (and tall)!!!! The 1,100-ft tall Wilshire Grand project is now the tallest building in Los Angeles and west of the Mississippi River (2016).
The NYT has been full onboard with everything that has added costs and slowed construction and infrastructure projects in the US: affirmative action, The DIE agenda, extended and extensive environmental impact assessments and community engagement programs.
So this article begs the question: which if the following conclusions is correct?
1. The NYT is admitting that its support for the above was wrong.
2. The NYT is too economically illiterate to see the connection between the above and high construction costs.
3. The NYT is just pretending to support low cost construction because they see the support for Democrats cratering.
x
What are these retards thinking? You can’t build jack squat on modern liberalism. Its whole M.O. is to impede the building of anything concrete.
You mentioned the environmental regulations, but there are OSHA, healthcare mandates, and dozens of other regulatory agencies voted into place by the left that keep business from getting done, unless one is big and in big with government.
Though he never worked in a real industry, Donald Trump, as President too, did mention the regulatory burdens that are part of the reason so much work has been sent overseas and small business is no longer a big employer. I appreciated that, as it was probably since Ronald Reagan that any other President talked about this. Other than that, it’s been guys like Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, the Penn & Tellers, and other “LOLbertarians”* who have talked about this for YEARS!
There are many jokes, including the standard “screwing in a light bulb” one, about the inability to get anything done in America. Thanks, anti-Libertarians. You own this shit too.
.
* The Reason magazine folks are pretty damned good too, other than with their idiotic stance on immigration.
Aside from high-speed rail, I can’t think of something that the Left would want to build even if it could build something. There’s no great outcry for new opera houses, theatre, recital halls and other cultural buildings, because those cultural artifacts are not being produced in the quality and quantity necessary to drive demand. Airports, roads, and seaports would be opposed due to the environmental considerations. Cathedrals and churches would be opposed due to secularism. Schools often resemble prisons. Government buildings are often lucky if they resemble a prison. Even monumental architecture of Leftist heros gets half-assed. That’s how we ended up with a white statue of MLK that resembles Mao. Maybe the reeducation camps will be nice, but I expect the ambiance of a strip mall in Dayton.
Everything is cheap. Nothing is glorious. There’s a decadence about us.
Agree. What we need to get things moving is a man who could cut through the red tape, a man with the vision of an artist who would bring to bear upon our organization of public spaces a vision inspired and enlightened by something other than mere economic values, a man with a vision of immense public spaces in which the people could gather and celebrate their communal Spirit, a visionary who would create public spaces which functioned as vast opera halls, complete with lighting and fabric stage flats to create the illusion of temples on a cosmic scale which would direct the Spirit of the gathered people into a collective belief in their own transcendence, help them rise the above the quotidian if but for a few hours and give them the glorious feeling of being part of a pulsing chorus of fellow citizens united in intent and work and celebration, a man who could help us realize that we are one people, united under one government, one People, one government, one People, one government...
Huh? what? I must have been dreaming there for a moment....now where were we?
Democrats have redefined the word "infrastructure" to mean anything from hiring more teachers to subsidized birth control pills, and internally they seem to think of big construction projects as an opportunity to bring constituent groups to the trough for a big long drink. "The Big Dig" in Boston, and the perennial funding of levees in New Orleans before Katrina come to mind. Rather than skimming 5% off the top, it seems like about 5% of "infrastructure spending" gets used to purchase concrete, steel, and the manpower to install it. The rest gets parceled out to the people who reliably vote for Democrats.
Naturally, Republicans are reluctant to vote for bills which are thinly disguised spoils payments to their political opponents' clients. So they pretend that "fiscal responsibility" precludes infrastructure spending entirely.
One thing that should be done to reset the script is to have a forensic accounting of past infrastructure spending. A sort of diagnosis of the obscene graft. Some sort of honesty and reconciliation and a resolve not to repeat the same frauds would seem necessary before we could ever move forward with new spending.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Mr. Anon
Good point, Alec. “Infrastructure” no longer means infrastructure. The D’s misused that word into a big lie, so nobody believes that talk about infrastructure anymore.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Lunch_atop_a_Skyscraper_-_Charles_Clyde_Ebbets.jpgReplies: @JimDandy, @Mike Tre, @Ganderson, @ThreeCranes, @vinteuil
Nope.
And now for something completely different: the website of a nation at war.
https://war.ukraine.ua/
Not all of our construction workers were white.
But America doesn’t use the available, wage-controlled, non-white construction labor force very much, anymore, though its numbers have increased in recent decades.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Lunch_atop_a_Skyscraper_-_Charles_Clyde_Ebbets.jpgReplies: @JimDandy, @Mike Tre, @Ganderson, @ThreeCranes, @vinteuil
That was what I’d call a high trust society.
A few years ago, Glenn Beck aired some anti-union piece about how racist unions were. So diversity is a good enough stick to bust a union with.
How dare those racist proles demand that construction workers had to be able to measure, understand A and B are followed by C , have been able to roll out of bed and sit in a high school classroom for 4 years and be able to read the questions and answers on apprenticeship tests.
Affirmative Action was a real win win for the Econ 101 crowd who firmly believe the only way a business can succeed is by paying such low wages the workers have to depend on their kids welfare checks for basic living expenses.
But America doesn't use the available, wage-controlled, non-white construction labor force very much, anymore, though its numbers have increased in recent decades.
https://youtu.be/tiCEVl_9-MMReplies: @Mike Tre, @ThreeCranes
Forgive me if I happen to notice there were no chain gangs building skyscrapers, or bridges, or dams, or refineries, or pipelines. Laying track and carving improved roads into the landscape was brutal labor no doubt, but under the supervision of engineers pretty difficult to screw up.
https://war.ukraine.ua/Replies: @PiltdownMan
Thanks. It’s really well done, a model for how to run a wartime propaganda website in 2022. There’s some deliberate disinformation there, which is, of course, a part of wartime propaganda. For instance, the blue and white map of 141 countries that “stand with Ukraine” includes India. In reality, India has abstained from any condemnation of Russia.
Including its own coherent explanatory system that it could then apply to an indifferent, unimpressed and unyielding reality.
Our woke-warmonger elite has a problem. First, their warmonger side wants to rule the world. But, in order to rule the world, you need to be strong. However, their woke side wants to enact policies that will surely weaken this country.
So, what is the woke-warmonger’s solution? Their only solution is to conquer the world while we are still strong. Once we conquer the world, we can enact woke policies that will weaken other countries. Then, the fact that America becomes weak will not matter.
Technocratic tales of the legal obstacles to building are true as far as they go, but they don’t get to the heart of the matter. The bureaucracies and the legal system are simply the arenas in which different groups, with different goals and different visions of what constitutes a good life, fight it out.
The deeper problem is that there’s no supermajority consensus about what America is and where it should be going as a civilization. If there were, all of these regulatory problems would be swept aside easily. But the country is now made up of groups who have little in common and who often hate each other. But that is precisely what it means to be “diverse” and “pluralistic”. Klein and his political allies wanted this society, and now they have it. Way to go.
—Ezra Klein's cousins
https://i.redd.it/oaw8udtpgily.jpgReplies: @EddieSpaghetti, @AndrewR, @PiltdownMan
CCZ showed a picture of high steel workers in Los Angeles, with the following caption:
Definitely an awesome picture. And, of course, white people are still great builders. However, with the inclusion of these cool pictures of skyscrapers and their high steel construction workers, it would be remiss to not note that for many years a large number of high steel workers in New York City were American Indians.
Did anyone else look at the second picture of the eight guys lined up in front of the oil rig and immediately think that the fifth guy from the left in the white shirt looked like some kind of proto-tranny? Have we been so bombarded with Tranny Mania that we now subconsciously engage in Trannyspotting? Is Trannyspotting more fun than Trainspotting?
And check out the forearms on the third guy from the left, holy crap, you don’t get arms like that at the gym, you get them from slinging 100 lb. sections of pipe for 12 hours a day. And from smoking 3 packs of non-filtered Lucky Strikes, and a pint or two of the cheapest whiskey you can find. Those guys remind me of my Grandpa and Uncles. Tough as Nails. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.
I'm so scared of heights that when I grew to over 6 feet it took me a week to muster up the courage to get out of bed.We shall not see their likes again.
I remember when Ross Perot was running for President, he got wind of a damaged highway needing repair that had been given an absurdly prolonged and complex repair timeline. Perot made a major issue out of it, explaining how he could get it done in a fraction if the time and for less cost. Americans had their chance to embrace sensible, rational infrastructure right then and there, but rejected it. But then again, Perot lost for many reasons, like his wild and crazy idea that America should not offshore its manufacturing base.
https://youtu.be/FL6mKCwYo1w
Everybody believed that Mohawk Indians were naturally not afraid of height. But I read that a skyscraper working Mohawk admitted that they were afraid, they just wouldn’t tell anybody because high rise work paid really well.
Democrats have redefined the word "infrastructure" to mean anything from hiring more teachers to subsidized birth control pills, and internally they seem to think of big construction projects as an opportunity to bring constituent groups to the trough for a big long drink. "The Big Dig" in Boston, and the perennial funding of levees in New Orleans before Katrina come to mind. Rather than skimming 5% off the top, it seems like about 5% of "infrastructure spending" gets used to purchase concrete, steel, and the manpower to install it. The rest gets parceled out to the people who reliably vote for Democrats.
Naturally, Republicans are reluctant to vote for bills which are thinly disguised spoils payments to their political opponents' clients. So they pretend that "fiscal responsibility" precludes infrastructure spending entirely.
One thing that should be done to reset the script is to have a forensic accounting of past infrastructure spending. A sort of diagnosis of the obscene graft. Some sort of honesty and reconciliation and a resolve not to repeat the same frauds would seem necessary before we could ever move forward with new spending.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Mr. Anon
Soon after Trump was inaugurated, Steve Bannon was talking about taking advantage of the prevailing low interest rates and launching a huge infrastructure program. Specifically, his idea was to pour money into the rustbelt / upper-midwest – states that had just barely put Trump over the top and which he would need to win in 2020 to secure re-election. It would have meant a lot of money put in the hands of blue-collar workers, many of them Democrats who voted for Trump and would have voted for him again.
The Republican Party controlled both Houses of Congress and could have rammed it through. They could have insured that the money did NOT go to teachers, social workers, and community organizers, but rather to construction workers, electricians, pipe-fitters, plumbers, surveyors, engineers, and their families. Instead they pushed through the agenda of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, lost Congress, and then the White House.
A lot of Republican office-holders are stupid. A lot of them are bought. (A lot of them are both). They do serve their masters, it’s just that their masters aren’t us.
They are scuttling America, and will soon be transferring their command to their new flagship – China.
Obviously, you are not in California.
Oh I thought Muh Covid Lockdown was going to accomplish all that. Remember?
Get it through your head. These people will risk everything, including their own health and safety, to harm destroy White society.
Troglodytes with theodolites. Likely sodomites.
Encuentro difícil de creer.
Exhibit A: labourers
“ It costs about $538 million to build a kilometer of rail here. Germany builds a kilometer of rail for $287 million. ”
Per capita GDP is about 50% higher in the USA than Germany, the UK, and France and about 100% higher than Spain.
That by itself accounts for a large part of this difference.
The second largest are environmental review delays. In Europe there is generally a single review and then you build. In the USA, there is the initial review and approval by government staff, but then years of lawsuits saying the review was done wrong.
Europe also has economies of scale in their mass transit projects, while the US doesn’t have a big pool of specialist mass transit design and build workers. We build new housing, rural roads etc at reasonable prices.
See for example:
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/construction-worker/united-states
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/construction-worker/germany
This holds that the average German construction worker makes about $45,000/year, whereas the average American construction worker makes $47,000/year. And the German surely benefits from more vacation time, a less rigorous working schedule, and a substantially lower cost of living.
America's end-stage-malignant legal and regulatory systems are responsible for the fact that nothing can get built. Which is why, as Peter Thiel and Neal Stephenson both noted, people who want to actually build things build them from bits -- which are mostly unregulated -- rather than atoms.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Achmed E. Newman, @Almost Missouri, @The Last Real Calvinist
Holding the SLOW sign seems to be a favorite for the female construction workers in my area. (Here in LA, construction is pretty evenly divided between whites and Hispanics – but very few blacks).
Ezra Klein is a pretty ironic voice for questioning government inefficiency. He’s a standard big government woke lefty who’s probably never seen a specific regulatory burden about unions, affirmative action, health, safety, environmental review, prevailing wages, or “community” involvement,” that he wouldn’t support by itself.
Yet his big insight now is that “somebody outta do something” about how government projects cost so much and produce so little. Klein is a facile wordsmith but he really seems to have zero actual understanding of anything real, certainly not economics or engineering.
I'm tangentially involved with some projects on Indian reservations. Third world levels of grift and non-performance, yet the Kleins of the world are eager to hand out ever more money and sovereignty with no criticism.
“Don’t blame me, I voted for Perot”.
OK, but who want’s a kilometer of track? There is a ‘Field of Dreams’ aspect to the notion that Americans want new rail projects. Rail is so 19th century. So NIMBY Californians get the money, but lack a consensus that it matters enough to inconvenience people with money.
15 years ago, there was a highly plausible fear of the economic consequences of oil scarcity in the US. And, surprisingly enough it was solved. Through the creation of the ‘unconventional’ or ‘tight’ oil industry. Trillions were spent on the implementation of this technology. It was the reason that the 2008 housing bust wasn’t’t a permanent disaster. They built out about 8,000,000 barrels per day of capacity. A huge part of it pipelines and infrastructure. Pipelines costing about the same as railroad track. The industry was popular enough until about 2014, when prices peaked at about $100/bbl.
The point being that if something is truly in demand, and markets reflect this demand, it gets done in the US. And did get done on a huge scale since roughly 2000.
Oil prices then crashed to below $40 bbl and the public lost interest and there wasn’t quite enough funding. And renewables became the next big thing.
Unconventional oil was very doable with ‘the invisible hand’ and with government simply moving out of the way a bit. And renewables are getting done via ‘the invisible hand’ and generous governmental subsidies. And Elon Musk.
The obvious problem is that America just solved a huge problem, then wanted to move on to something else before it was finished. And before the next solution was ready for implementation.
So its wrong that we can’t do big things anymore.
Another example … the US built out a multi-billion wireless network this century. On top of a wired system that worked.
There is plenty of capital to fund these sorts of projects. But a shortage of projects.
I live less than half a mile from a CSX rail line. I did some research and learned that the portion running near my house was part of a 22-mile segment that was built in 22 days in March and April 1927. (That’s right – they averaged a mile a day.)
To quote a newspaper article:
They didn’t screw around in 1927.
Last year the power company replaced some concrete poles in the area, necessitating the removal of a few segments of the sidewalk. It took several months to complete the work.
A brand-new flyover interchange opened on a nearby expressway last year. The foundational work began in 2015 or 2016. So that’s a good five or six years of construction – longer than it took to build the entire expressway back in the 1970s.
1) You're in Florida - seems like the best place in the country to lay out railroad track. You need culverts for the water, but there's no rock, no grades, and no curves, unless you want the curves. Back in 1927 how many roads were there that needed anything but a grade crossing? Now, you'd have to build bridges to get over the limited access highways.
2) It is SO much easier to build things from scratch than to work within an existing complicated and often-crumbling infrastructure. Think digging up the streets to get to water lines in the city or replacing wooden power poles, one bad one at a time, in my neighborhood. (On the latter, I'm amazed that it can be done at all!) Peak Stupidity has a post on that - see Chinese vs. American infrastructure - "From Scratch" vs. Repair modes.Replies: @Stan Adams
And check out the forearms on the third guy from the left, holy crap, you don't get arms like that at the gym, you get them from slinging 100 lb. sections of pipe for 12 hours a day. And from smoking 3 packs of non-filtered Lucky Strikes, and a pint or two of the cheapest whiskey you can find. Those guys remind me of my Grandpa and Uncles. Tough as Nails. They don't make 'em like that anymore.Replies: @Bill Jones, @Almost Missouri
My Post WWII Godfather, an ex paratrooper turned steel erector (Liverpool needed a lot of steel re-erected) fell 40 odd feet (height 40-50 depending on the time of telling) rolled and walked away.
I’m so scared of heights that when I grew to over 6 feet it took me a week to muster up the courage to get out of bed.
We shall not see their likes again.
Black Silhouettes Matter.
Affirmative Action is my main concern on racial issues. Nixon’s Philadelphia plan, Griggs 1973 and Kaiser 1979 were what destroyed the well paid White men union jobs.
How dare those racist proles demand that construction workers had to be able to measure, understand A and B are followed by C , have been able to roll out of bed and sit in a high school classroom for 4 years and be able to read the questions and answers on apprenticeship tests.
Affirmative Action was a real win win for the Econ 101 crowd who firmly believe the only way a business can succeed is by paying such low wages the workers have to depend on their kids welfare checks for basic living expenses.
LOL
We can add: “You tore that down”; “You neglected that into ruin”; “You regulated that into oblivion.”
At US prices that'd cost USD 13 trillion (or about 6 Afghanistan's)
Little wonder everyone is going to trade with China in the future.
You can see how useful the war in Ukraine is for keeping Europe locked in to US imports.
*Incredible isn't it - implied from these numbers
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/china-high-speed-rail-cmd/index.htmlReplies: @Redneck farmer, @Almost Missouri, @EddieSpaghetti
Impressive…… if they can stop crashing the trains.
Ezra Klein is a pretty ironic voice for questioning government inefficiency. He's a standard big government woke lefty who's probably never seen a specific regulatory burden about unions, affirmative action, health, safety, environmental review, prevailing wages, or "community" involvement," that he wouldn't support by itself.
Yet his big insight now is that "somebody outta do something" about how government projects cost so much and produce so little. Klein is a facile wordsmith but he really seems to have zero actual understanding of anything real, certainly not economics or engineering.Replies: @bomag
Agree.
I’m tangentially involved with some projects on Indian reservations. Third world levels of grift and non-performance, yet the Kleins of the world are eager to hand out ever more money and sovereignty with no criticism.
“What America Needs Is a
LiberalismRadicalism That Builds”FIFY
Who needs a liberalism that builds? We have a liberalism that prints money!
—Ezra Klein’s cousins
They had their chance, they chose unbuilding, even as their own bases begged them to do right. All Biden had to do was leave three or four Trump policies in place and pretend they were his (like he did with the clot shot). He would’ve gotten away with it, too. Normies don’t know that there are “Trump policies,” they think “Trunp is mean” and “Biden was a civil rights hero.”
And check out the forearms on the third guy from the left, holy crap, you don't get arms like that at the gym, you get them from slinging 100 lb. sections of pipe for 12 hours a day. And from smoking 3 packs of non-filtered Lucky Strikes, and a pint or two of the cheapest whiskey you can find. Those guys remind me of my Grandpa and Uncles. Tough as Nails. They don't make 'em like that anymore.Replies: @Bill Jones, @Almost Missouri
Has a somewhat classical-feminine face, but no woman has arm musculature like that.
No (despite what a low bar that is), it’s just more necessary.
Agreed. The entire photo is physical types that hardly exist anymore, right down to the swagger. Gymbros can looksmax, but it ain’t the same.
True. Even the guys in CCZ’s photo have a certain pouchiness and indrawn-ness. Probably a side-effect of the GMO-plastic-HFCS-antibiotic-PFAS food supply.
Per capita GDP is about 50% higher in the USA than Germany, the UK, and France and about 100% higher than Spain.
That by itself accounts for a large part of this difference.
The second largest are environmental review delays. In Europe there is generally a single review and then you build. In the USA, there is the initial review and approval by government staff, but then years of lawsuits saying the review was done wrong.
Europe also has economies of scale in their mass transit projects, while the US doesn’t have a big pool of specialist mass transit design and build workers. We build new housing, rural roads etc at reasonable prices.Replies: @Adept, @Dream
It doesn’t translate to wages. The average German worker makes approximately as much as the average American worker.
See for example:
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/construction-worker/united-states
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/construction-worker/germany
This holds that the average German construction worker makes about $45,000/year, whereas the average American construction worker makes $47,000/year. And the German surely benefits from more vacation time, a less rigorous working schedule, and a substantially lower cost of living.
America’s end-stage-malignant legal and regulatory systems are responsible for the fact that nothing can get built. Which is why, as Peter Thiel and Neal Stephenson both noted, people who want to actually build things build them from bits — which are mostly unregulated — rather than atoms.
I remember mentioning to people back in the dot-com 1.0 era 23 years ago, maybe even a few years before that when software was being sold by all sorts of upstart companies, the following: The great thing about software is that a couple or a few guys can do so much of the work without any interference by the regulators - with no physical stuff to be made and nothing but a few computers as the "production" equipment, nobody has to know what's going on until you've got something working.
Only then would you need to get business types involved and run into possibly some of the regulations. However, you know you have something by that time and can afford to pay for some of the BS work.
See for example:
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/construction-worker/united-states
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/construction-worker/germany
This holds that the average German construction worker makes about $45,000/year, whereas the average American construction worker makes $47,000/year. And the German surely benefits from more vacation time, a less rigorous working schedule, and a substantially lower cost of living.
America's end-stage-malignant legal and regulatory systems are responsible for the fact that nothing can get built. Which is why, as Peter Thiel and Neal Stephenson both noted, people who want to actually build things build them from bits -- which are mostly unregulated -- rather than atoms.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Achmed E. Newman, @Almost Missouri, @The Last Real Calvinist
But big city construction workers, the only ones who work on subways, make a lot more than construction workers in general.
For the last five years, I’ve been hoping to take the Los Angeles subway to the 2023 U.S. Open Golf Tournament at Los Angeles Country Club, because the Rodeo Drive station was supposed to be open in 2023, but now it says it won’t be open until 2025.
To quote a newspaper article:They didn't screw around in 1927.
Last year the power company replaced some concrete poles in the area, necessitating the removal of a few segments of the sidewalk. It took several months to complete the work.
A brand-new flyover interchange opened on a nearby expressway last year. The foundational work began in 2015 or 2016. So that's a good five or six years of construction - longer than it took to build the entire expressway back in the 1970s.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
Stan, due to the huge regulatory burden, this is not a CAN-DO country anymore. However, regarding 2 of your examples, I’ll grant this:
1) You’re in Florida – seems like the best place in the country to lay out railroad track. You need culverts for the water, but there’s no rock, no grades, and no curves, unless you want the curves. Back in 1927 how many roads were there that needed anything but a grade crossing? Now, you’d have to build bridges to get over the limited access highways.
2) It is SO much easier to build things from scratch than to work within an existing complicated and often-crumbling infrastructure. Think digging up the streets to get to water lines in the city or replacing wooden power poles, one bad one at a time, in my neighborhood. (On the latter, I’m amazed that it can be done at all!) Peak Stupidity has a post on that – see Chinese vs. American infrastructure – “From Scratch” vs. Repair modes.
One project I’ve followed with great interest since childhood has been the evolution of Miami International Airport, which is landlocked with no room for expansion. Proposals to build a new airport at another location have been scuttled due to environmental concerns. The current setup is adequate, but much time and money were wasted over the years having to rebuild in place while still accommodating a full load of passenger traffic.
I remember reading about the plans for American’s terminal when I was in elementary school. The project was not completed until I was several years out of college. For many years the American area was such a dump that people compared it unfavorably to various Third World airports.
Even LaGuardia was able to build a brand-new terminal from scratch, but MIA is still using the 1959 facility with numerous additions grafted onto it. (At other airports, different terminals are in completely different buildings, but in Miami it’s all just one big building.)
I also follow developments in mass transit. Right now the county is attempting to convert a dedicated busway (formerly a railway) into a “Bus Rapid Transit” line, which supposedly will make the buses nearly as efficient as the elevated rail line we were promised when the voters approved the transit sales tax in 2002. (The seed funding for the mass-transit network was provided in a massive bond issue passed by the voters in 1972. That’s fifty years’ worth of broken promises.)
They’re tearing down all of the existing bus shelters and replacing them with these (photo credit: me):
https://i.ibb.co/chjyHYS/BD2-CE9-B3-6-D47-4-BE1-B900-05-E196-ABD9-B7.jpg
…which are designed to require riders to pay their fare before boarding. (This will allow the buses to load passengers more quickly, or so we are told.)
They’re also adding “signal preemption” to give the buses priority. Signal preemption was attempted in 1997, when the busway first opened. But the timing of the green-yellow-red transition was too rapid and too many drivers tried to beat the light. (Keep in mind that down here it’s legal to turn right on red unless otherwise indicated.) There were dozens if not hundreds of accidents, some fatal, in a six-month time span. Eventually they had to abandon the scheme altogether.
Now they’re adding bus crossings like the ones you see at train intersections. This will exacerbate the existing horrendous traffic into something out of Dante’s Inferno.
The busway runs parallel to the busiest, most congested road (U.S. 1) in the county. It intersects numerous major roads. There is no logic in building a grade-level mass-transit line.
Miami is too close to sea level for underground subways. Elevated rail is the only viable option.
The existing elevated-rail system - often derided as the “train to nowhere” - opened in 1984. It prompted Reagan’s famous quip that it would have been cheaper to buy everyone in Miami a limousine. The Miami Herald once calculated that, for a fraction of the cost, we could have had free buses running every 15 minutes 24/7/365 along every major street in Dade County.
We are paying for expansion of elevated rail. (Like it or not, that’s what the voters were promised, and that’s what they approved.) We have been paying for elevated rail in one form or another since 1972. We have been paying a half-penny sales tax for elevated rail since 2002. And we are not likely to see it in my lifetime.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @prime noticer
OT: iSteve content generator Mathew Yglesias actually has a really insightful article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-flaw-in-the-progressive-stance-on-guns/2022/05/29/162edf0e-df50-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html
I’ve come to the conclusion that neither party will seriously reduce homicides in the short to mid term. Republicans won’t do anything to support gun control (I’m a former NRA member who currently supports it) and Democrats don’t want to incarcerate feral Knee Grows. America is just doomed.
Yglesias basically says: talking about gun control hurts Democrats with swing voters so instead the police should focus their resources on beating up unarmed black teenagers because that will improve the quality of life for white liberals in urban areas while helping us win elections.
Yglesias is the most disgusting kind of liberal because he doesn't even bother to hide what he is. Most liberals, like Klein, at least lie to themselves but Ygiggy won't even do that much.We already have gun control. The question is, should we have even more? The answer is, "no". The only reason the US lockdowns ended so early was because the authorities realized that we were weeks, if not days, away from dead cops had the lockdowns continued.Replies: @Ian Smith
At least on a demographic level, these factors cause men to become more conservative, or more specifically in his case Aspie right-wing open-borders libertarianism.
See for example:
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/construction-worker/united-states
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/construction-worker/germany
This holds that the average German construction worker makes about $45,000/year, whereas the average American construction worker makes $47,000/year. And the German surely benefits from more vacation time, a less rigorous working schedule, and a substantially lower cost of living.
America's end-stage-malignant legal and regulatory systems are responsible for the fact that nothing can get built. Which is why, as Peter Thiel and Neal Stephenson both noted, people who want to actually build things build them from bits -- which are mostly unregulated -- rather than atoms.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Achmed E. Newman, @Almost Missouri, @The Last Real Calvinist
Exactly! (on your last paragraph)
I remember mentioning to people back in the dot-com 1.0 era 23 years ago, maybe even a few years before that when software was being sold by all sorts of upstart companies, the following: The great thing about software is that a couple or a few guys can do so much of the work without any interference by the regulators – with no physical stuff to be made and nothing but a few computers as the “production” equipment, nobody has to know what’s going on until you’ve got something working.
Only then would you need to get business types involved and run into possibly some of the regulations. However, you know you have something by that time and can afford to pay for some of the BS work.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-flaw-in-the-progressive-stance-on-guns/2022/05/29/162edf0e-df50-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html
I’ve come to the conclusion that neither party will seriously reduce homicides in the short to mid term. Republicans won’t do anything to support gun control (I’m a former NRA member who currently supports it) and Democrats don’t want to incarcerate feral Knee Grows. America is just doomed.Replies: @J.Ross, @Greasy William, @Art Deco, @Pixo
You don’t reduce homicides with gun control, you reduce homicides with unapologetic policing and prosecution.
https://i.redd.it/oaw8udtpgily.jpgReplies: @EddieSpaghetti, @AndrewR, @PiltdownMan
I shat my pants just looking at that
At US prices that'd cost USD 13 trillion (or about 6 Afghanistan's)
Little wonder everyone is going to trade with China in the future.
You can see how useful the war in Ukraine is for keeping Europe locked in to US imports.
*Incredible isn't it - implied from these numbers
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/china-high-speed-rail-cmd/index.htmlReplies: @Redneck farmer, @Almost Missouri, @EddieSpaghetti
Thanks.
I hate to “Ackshually” this, but I get 17,000 km. OTOH, they’ve built 38,000 km since 2008 and the “network is expected to double in length again, to 70,000 kilometers, by 2035.”
But the more startling figure at that link is that the high-speed Zhengzhou-Wangzhou line was built for only $16 million/km. So Germany and Canada build at half the US cost, and Japan at one quarter the US cost? Such inefficieny! China builds at 1/33rd the US cost to build a km of slow rail (and no doubt in much less time)!
There is an impression that Chinese high speed rail diesn’t really pay for itself, but the government considers the societal dividends to be worth the book loss. Arguably, all public transportation worldwide loses money, and is governmentally subsidized for reasons other than shareholder profit. Those reasons may be good or ill, and there’s the rub.
Subsidized mass public transport is a net benefit for China because there is still plenty of favorable HBD to bring to the metropole. In the US though, subsidized public mass transit just brings in bl— errr, negative HBD, so it is a net loss.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Lunch_atop_a_Skyscraper_-_Charles_Clyde_Ebbets.jpgReplies: @JimDandy, @Mike Tre, @Ganderson, @ThreeCranes, @vinteuil
I’m not especially afraid of heights, but YIKES! Are Mohawks still heavily involved in the high iron trade?
Everything is cheap. Nothing is glorious. There’s a decadence about us.Replies: @Ganderson, @ThreeCranes
I’d argue that a lot of modern buildings are aggressively ugly.
But the more startling figure at that link is that the high-speed Zhengzhou-Wangzhou line was built for only $16 million/km. So Germany and Canada build at half the US cost, and Japan at one quarter the US cost? Such inefficieny! China builds at 1/33rd the US cost to build a km of slow rail (and no doubt in much less time)!
There is an impression that Chinese high speed rail diesn't really pay for itself, but the government considers the societal dividends to be worth the book loss. Arguably, all public transportation worldwide loses money, and is governmentally subsidized for reasons other than shareholder profit. Those reasons may be good or ill, and there's the rub.
Subsidized mass public transport is a net benefit for China because there is still plenty of favorable HBD to bring to the metropole. In the US though, subsidized public mass transit just brings in bl— errr, negative HBD, so it is a net loss.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
Agreed, A.M. China, no matter what bad I have to say about the latest developments, is a CAN-DO country. I was greatly impressed last time I was there, which is going on 5 years back. (I don’t think they would let us back in.)
From the post A Peak Stupidity apology to our Chinese readers, let me excerpt the following:
Yes, it’s very impressive. No, America is not really made for long-distance trains. I remember iSteve bringing up the very good point that with the people that would make use of them no longer living in the inner cities, that’s a big point hurting any comparison of long-distance trains to flying. In China, the inner cities are not dangerous, hence are full of people with means. We all know the deal on this.
See for example:
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/construction-worker/united-states
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/construction-worker/germany
This holds that the average German construction worker makes about $45,000/year, whereas the average American construction worker makes $47,000/year. And the German surely benefits from more vacation time, a less rigorous working schedule, and a substantially lower cost of living.
America's end-stage-malignant legal and regulatory systems are responsible for the fact that nothing can get built. Which is why, as Peter Thiel and Neal Stephenson both noted, people who want to actually build things build them from bits -- which are mostly unregulated -- rather than atoms.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Achmed E. Newman, @Almost Missouri, @The Last Real Calvinist
Yes. The error was assuming that per capita GDP means anything. GDP measures activity not productivity. In the US, a big portion of GDP is the things that actually obstruct productivity: lawyers, regulators, diversity grifts, more overt corruption, etc. So saying that GDP differences “by itself accounts for a large part of [construction cost] difference” is semi-tautological as well as a WellThere’sYourProblemRightThere-type of thing. Showing that the actually productive workers—the construction workers—earn about the same shows that at least half the US cost is simply corruption, hard and soft.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Lunch_atop_a_Skyscraper_-_Charles_Clyde_Ebbets.jpgReplies: @JimDandy, @Mike Tre, @Ganderson, @ThreeCranes, @vinteuil
And if you watch the Grand Coulee Dam being built on YouTube, you’ll see guys riding girders as they’re being lifted skyward by cranes, guys repelling down the face of concrete walls, all without burdensome safety gear. And what rankles the liberal, what galls them the most, is that the guys doing these tasks are superb athletes–and they know it. They took pride in knowing that they were performing incredibly difficult athletic feats without safety nets–and pulling it off.
The Liberal Mind just cannot wrap itself around the notion that some humans WANT to go up against an on-the-job physical challenge that tests their courage and skill and mettle. What would OSHA say about the men out on the yardarms of the square-riggers?
Rock climbing? Oh, that’s okay. It’s conspicuous consumption, a game for the leisure class. But on-the-construction-site manliness? Taboo. It’s too unifying. It could result in a sense of fraternity amongst the deplorables.
Plus honest reporting about real working men would go up against the beer/pickup truck commercial stereotype which depicts all those guys as rough shaven, coarse ignoramuses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRP_Sagres_(1937)
Those guys were carrying on a rich tradition.Replies: @ThreeCranes
Surely, the reason they chose to show a silhouette of the construction workers in the photo was precisely because it helps to hide the fact that the workers were all white.
Donald Trump is not your friend. Donald Trump wants to race-replace the Historic Native Born White Working Class with China’s Youth and India’s Youth…
And Donald Trump said he will do this to deal with any labor scarcities that come up during his administration….
True that.
https://midwestepi.org/2017/05/03/what-are-road-construction-costs-per-lane-mile-in-your-state/
This was based on published costs of public new construction projects. And in the US costs a lot and not much gets built.
Ironically, our Class 1 freight railroads re-build a few thousand miles/year of main line track, for a few billion or so. Based on estimates using 40 years of track life. Or a couple of orders of magnitude less than the 1/2 billion to build a kilometer of rail. If anyone cares, they could read the notes in the 10-K’s of the 4 major railroads in the US.
The cost is so high because it includes projects like New York’s Second Avenue Subway, started in 1917. And still not finished. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway
It was an inside joke in the TV series MadMen. Some real estate agent talking about the advantages of this line on property values.
You aren’t talking about building anything. Rather the cost of digging up a city.
Everything is cheap. Nothing is glorious. There’s a decadence about us.Replies: @Ganderson, @ThreeCranes
“Everything is cheap. Nothing is glorious. There’s a decadence about us.”
Agree. What we need to get things moving is a man who could cut through the red tape, a man with the vision of an artist who would bring to bear upon our organization of public spaces a vision inspired and enlightened by something other than mere economic values, a man with a vision of immense public spaces in which the people could gather and celebrate their communal Spirit, a visionary who would create public spaces which functioned as vast opera halls, complete with lighting and fabric stage flats to create the illusion of temples on a cosmic scale which would direct the Spirit of the gathered people into a collective belief in their own transcendence, help them rise the above the quotidian if but for a few hours and give them the glorious feeling of being part of a pulsing chorus of fellow citizens united in intent and work and celebration, a man who could help us realize that we are one people, united under one government, one People, one government, one People, one government…
Huh? what? I must have been dreaming there for a moment….now where were we?
But America doesn't use the available, wage-controlled, non-white construction labor force very much, anymore, though its numbers have increased in recent decades.
https://youtu.be/tiCEVl_9-MMReplies: @Mike Tre, @ThreeCranes
That photo just shows that black men can be productive citizens if they are handled the right way. Think of them as half-domesticated, semi-wild animals. Under the right conditions, with lots of special attention, they can produce useful results. But don’t ever turn your back on them.
That surely helps. But I think Canada, Germany etc., have their preferences too (surely some form of gender, if not race). Genuine meritocracy, instead of political backscratching, helps too (sadly, the example there is, China, which is not to be emulated).
But, the rather well-known reason, why we bill $538 million per kilometer while Japan bills at $170 million per KM is, we have to support 1.3 million lawyers in U.S. while Japan has to support only 35,000 for a population half as much. So, our legal overhead is, Twenty times that of Japan. That will ensure that our public infrastructure will forever be condemned to be in third world mode.
https://www.clio.com/blog/lawyer-statistics/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attorneys_in_JapanReplies: @AnotherDad, @Art Deco, @AnotherDad
Exactly. The difference of a quarter billion a mile is basically to support legions of JackDs and their corresponding government bureaucrats (at lesser pay, but fat, guaranteed pensions) and assorted “consultants”. In Germany maybe that’s 15% of the cost. Here it is *most* of the cost.
Basically, huge open graft to support the people-with-BAs-and-no-discernable-skills-anyone-wants-to-pay-for.
Again, this is not a nation anymore. It is a continental marketplace, run for the benefit not of productive people, but all the grifters and parasites.
https://i.redd.it/oaw8udtpgily.jpgReplies: @EddieSpaghetti, @AndrewR, @PiltdownMan
Columbia Tower, Seattle, 1984.
Twitter credit to @historydefined
Generally speaking in my experience, the more politically left a jurisdiction is, the more hoops there are to jump through to go from project concept to fully permitted and shovel-ready project. There are an enormous number of boards, impact reviews, and so on that are required which all cost a ton of time and money for engineering and architectural, impact fees are high, and other carrying costs associated with the project pile up as well. I work in multiple regions so I see how quickly similar projects in different jurisdictions move through the process. An apartment project in a red midwestern state can be fully designed and permitted in under a year, while a comparable one in suburban Maryland will take 2.5 as long and cost close to double to build in the end.
So if Klein wants a liberalism that builds, he needs to accept a liberalism that exercises far less oversight over construction and development, which of course also means shedding a fair number of public employee jobs. I am guessing he and a lot of people on the left prize the latter more than the former so nothing will change.
That surely helps. But I think Canada, Germany etc., have their preferences too (surely some form of gender, if not race). Genuine meritocracy, instead of political backscratching, helps too (sadly, the example there is, China, which is not to be emulated).
But, the rather well-known reason, why we bill $538 million per kilometer while Japan bills at $170 million per KM is, we have to support 1.3 million lawyers in U.S. while Japan has to support only 35,000 for a population half as much. So, our legal overhead is, Twenty times that of Japan. That will ensure that our public infrastructure will forever be condemned to be in third world mode.
https://www.clio.com/blog/lawyer-statistics/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attorneys_in_JapanReplies: @AnotherDad, @Art Deco, @AnotherDad
The actual number of working lawyers here is 745,000. Japan has a large paralegal corps who perform functions that are undertaken by licensed attorneys in this country, and if I’m not mistaken, they can work as stand-alone practitioners. Here, working attorneys outnumber lay staff by 1.7-to-1.
Lawyers are responsible for perversity and delay up the wazoo. However, only about 1% of the revenue in the economy is booked by law firms.
It is not just the share of revenue, but the effect of throwing even small amount of sand into gearbox. A 737 can be easily crashed by a flock of geese. Those 100 pounds of geese are only $2,610. A 737 is $100 million.
https://www.dartagnan.com/goose-whole/product/FGORE004-1.html
the entire topic of race/gender affirmative action is largely unspeakable for the Establishment today
Women account for about 4% of those in ‘construction and extraction occupations’. Blacks account for about 7%. We might consider the possibility that affirmative action is pushing on a string in this sector. Hispanics are about 3x as likely as other men to follow those occupations and account for 39% of the total workforce therein. I’d wager that has more to do with immigration policy and the distribution of preferences among different segments of the population than it does with AA.
That's the point that I think Steve was making - when a developer builds an office building or high rise condominium or whatever, there are challenges but things get done seasonably and according to predictable, market costs.
When the project is a Federally or State funded and overseen infrastructure construction project, it's like when a Sperm Whale dies and sinks to the bottom of the sea - a whole ecosystem of parasites appear to siphon off the government money. What is built is secondary or tertiary. Those construction firms that are engaged by private developers to work with some efficiency and within defined costs are largely not eligible for the government work.
I'm guessing that most people posting here were alive and aware in 1980. The 1980 Census counted 226,000,000 inhabitants of the U.S. The 2020 Census counted 331,000,000 or so inhabitants. That's a nearly 50% increase in population in 40 years. Can you identify a commensurate degree of new infrastructure that has been built in your experience which would accommodate such an increase in population?
Can’t believe you elided this gem from the heady early Obama days:
In the original bill, 13% of the Stimulus money was allocated to programs for the Lollipop Guild.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-flaw-in-the-progressive-stance-on-guns/2022/05/29/162edf0e-df50-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html
I’ve come to the conclusion that neither party will seriously reduce homicides in the short to mid term. Republicans won’t do anything to support gun control (I’m a former NRA member who currently supports it) and Democrats don’t want to incarcerate feral Knee Grows. America is just doomed.Replies: @J.Ross, @Greasy William, @Art Deco, @Pixo
The article is not insightful. It’s garbage like everything else Yglesias has written in his entire career.
Yglesias basically says: talking about gun control hurts Democrats with swing voters so instead the police should focus their resources on beating up unarmed black teenagers because that will improve the quality of life for white liberals in urban areas while helping us win elections.
Yglesias is the most disgusting kind of liberal because he doesn’t even bother to hide what he is. Most liberals, like Klein, at least lie to themselves but Ygiggy won’t even do that much.
We already have gun control. The question is, should we have even more? The answer is, “no”. The only reason the US lockdowns ended so early was because the authorities realized that we were weeks, if not days, away from dead cops had the lockdowns continued.
The fact that someone like you would be prevented from owning a gun is all the more reason to pass gun control stat!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-flaw-in-the-progressive-stance-on-guns/2022/05/29/162edf0e-df50-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html
I’ve come to the conclusion that neither party will seriously reduce homicides in the short to mid term. Republicans won’t do anything to support gun control (I’m a former NRA member who currently supports it) and Democrats don’t want to incarcerate feral Knee Grows. America is just doomed.Replies: @J.Ross, @Greasy William, @Art Deco, @Pixo
You absolutely do not need to engage in mass confiscation of firearms if you want to reduce the homicide rate. Nor do you need to restrict the ownership of firearms among any class of adult bar those who have had their rights abridged by legal proceedings (civil commitment, guardianship, and conviction for a violent offense or for being armed during a burglary).
On the other hand, being serious about prosecuting violent crime and incarcerating violent criminals would incapacitate the likely future perpetrators of violent street crimes.
Rumor has it that China has politely declined.
1) You're in Florida - seems like the best place in the country to lay out railroad track. You need culverts for the water, but there's no rock, no grades, and no curves, unless you want the curves. Back in 1927 how many roads were there that needed anything but a grade crossing? Now, you'd have to build bridges to get over the limited access highways.
2) It is SO much easier to build things from scratch than to work within an existing complicated and often-crumbling infrastructure. Think digging up the streets to get to water lines in the city or replacing wooden power poles, one bad one at a time, in my neighborhood. (On the latter, I'm amazed that it can be done at all!) Peak Stupidity has a post on that - see Chinese vs. American infrastructure - "From Scratch" vs. Repair modes.Replies: @Stan Adams
That’s a good point. In 1927 the area near my house might as well have been the far side of the moon in terms of development. It was basically a vast pine forest interspersed with patches of sawgrass prairie. Even in the early ‘60s it was still a remote rural area.
One project I’ve followed with great interest since childhood has been the evolution of Miami International Airport, which is landlocked with no room for expansion. Proposals to build a new airport at another location have been scuttled due to environmental concerns. The current setup is adequate, but much time and money were wasted over the years having to rebuild in place while still accommodating a full load of passenger traffic.
I remember reading about the plans for American’s terminal when I was in elementary school. The project was not completed until I was several years out of college. For many years the American area was such a dump that people compared it unfavorably to various Third World airports.
Even LaGuardia was able to build a brand-new terminal from scratch, but MIA is still using the 1959 facility with numerous additions grafted onto it. (At other airports, different terminals are in completely different buildings, but in Miami it’s all just one big building.)
I also follow developments in mass transit. Right now the county is attempting to convert a dedicated busway (formerly a railway) into a “Bus Rapid Transit” line, which supposedly will make the buses nearly as efficient as the elevated rail line we were promised when the voters approved the transit sales tax in 2002. (The seed funding for the mass-transit network was provided in a massive bond issue passed by the voters in 1972. That’s fifty years’ worth of broken promises.)
They’re tearing down all of the existing bus shelters and replacing them with these (photo credit: me):
…which are designed to require riders to pay their fare before boarding. (This will allow the buses to load passengers more quickly, or so we are told.)
They’re also adding “signal preemption” to give the buses priority. Signal preemption was attempted in 1997, when the busway first opened. But the timing of the green-yellow-red transition was too rapid and too many drivers tried to beat the light. (Keep in mind that down here it’s legal to turn right on red unless otherwise indicated.) There were dozens if not hundreds of accidents, some fatal, in a six-month time span. Eventually they had to abandon the scheme altogether.
Now they’re adding bus crossings like the ones you see at train intersections. This will exacerbate the existing horrendous traffic into something out of Dante’s Inferno.
The busway runs parallel to the busiest, most congested road (U.S. 1) in the county. It intersects numerous major roads. There is no logic in building a grade-level mass-transit line.
Miami is too close to sea level for underground subways. Elevated rail is the only viable option.
The existing elevated-rail system – often derided as the “train to nowhere” – opened in 1984. It prompted Reagan’s famous quip that it would have been cheaper to buy everyone in Miami a limousine. The Miami Herald once calculated that, for a fraction of the cost, we could have had free buses running every 15 minutes 24/7/365 along every major street in Dade County.
We are paying for expansion of elevated rail. (Like it or not, that’s what the voters were promised, and that’s what they approved.) We have been paying for elevated rail in one form or another since 1972. We have been paying a half-penny sales tax for elevated rail since 2002. And we are not likely to see it in my lifetime.
i'm no expert on this, but the Boring Company already has their proposal out for tunnel construction in Miami.
i couldn't say on any particular fully completed and operational project whether a 2 way tunnel for tesla vehicles makes for a viable underground transit system, it seems highly specific to where it's built, city by city. but it does seem technically feasible to build such a thing even in Miami.
the use case possibly does make sense in certain areas for limited routes, unlike passenger rail, which doesn't work almost anywhere in the US.Replies: @Stan Adams
Cities like Chicago, Detroit and Atlanta have GDP per capitas of over 50,000 dollars.
“What America Needs Is a Liberalism That Builds”
there’s never been such a thing in history. liberalism is an emergent phenomenon that occurs after centuries of hard work and building have already happened. it is a post world-construction psychology that appears in the upper classes first, the people most divorced from real, hard blue collar labor and war fighting.
and most importantly, liberalism is not an end state. it is a transitory phase. a society doesn’t ‘get’ to liberalism and then stay there. it gets to liberalism for a while on it’s way to a much worse state, the kind of society that the (Ezra Kleins) of the world are more comfortable with.
needless to day, the (Ezra Klein) people are never part of the first, hard stage of world construction. they only show up later, after things have already been built. they have no skin in the game, tend to complain loudly if things don’t move politically in the direction they want, and might even leave for some other country if they don’t think they’re gonna be able to control the transition from liberalism -> communism.
if Elon is successful, then many decades after a Mars City is somewhat up and running, with a few thousand humans living on Mars, the (Ezra Klein) people might show up on another planet, and start doing the same thing they always do.
Per capita GDP is about 50% higher in the USA than Germany, the UK, and France and about 100% higher than Spain.
That by itself accounts for a large part of this difference.
The second largest are environmental review delays. In Europe there is generally a single review and then you build. In the USA, there is the initial review and approval by government staff, but then years of lawsuits saying the review was done wrong.
Europe also has economies of scale in their mass transit projects, while the US doesn’t have a big pool of specialist mass transit design and build workers. We build new housing, rural roads etc at reasonable prices.Replies: @Adept, @Dream
I would have thought Europe would be worse in that regard.
That surely helps. But I think Canada, Germany etc., have their preferences too (surely some form of gender, if not race). Genuine meritocracy, instead of political backscratching, helps too (sadly, the example there is, China, which is not to be emulated).
But, the rather well-known reason, why we bill $538 million per kilometer while Japan bills at $170 million per KM is, we have to support 1.3 million lawyers in U.S. while Japan has to support only 35,000 for a population half as much. So, our legal overhead is, Twenty times that of Japan. That will ensure that our public infrastructure will forever be condemned to be in third world mode.
https://www.clio.com/blog/lawyer-statistics/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attorneys_in_JapanReplies: @AnotherDad, @Art Deco, @AnotherDad
The other angle, beyond our extreme legal and bureaucratic costs, is that well all is said and done …
our genius girls-and-boys with BAs bureaucrats cough up the shittiest, lamest projects–at extreme costs.
Anecdotal example:
They have been “building light rail” in Seattle for seemingly forever. But AnotherMom and I a few years ago–kid and neighbors both unavailable–decided to try the “ride to the airport”. After the bus to UW station … a long slow ride. Slowly accelerating trains. At grade crossings in South Seattle. Took forever.
Last summer was teaching wife’s cousin’s kid (whatever that is “2nd niece”?) to drive. Her test was in Bellevue so we drove all the streets near the testing center, every interesection, all the gotchas. Sure ’nuff the light rail extension to Microsoft/Redmond … is running at grade in places and has grade street crossings!
Logically one would think:
— there is a fortune spent on lawyering and bureaucracy
— plus the actual cost of land
— then smaller, the actual cost of building the roadbed
…
so if we’re spending all this money just to get a line in place don’t we want
— a line that can be really speedy and high capacity?
— no grade crossing
— super fast train sets, expandable for higher capacity
— stations that allow bypass and express trains
Nope, the girls and boys with BAs have a “light rail” fetish and dainty ideas about what it should be like … and that is what is important. Speed, capacity, expandability … the future? … not important. So you pay billions and in the end still get mediocrity.
She’s your first cousin-in-law once removed.
I think this is from a mistaken belief that "heavy" (and fast) rail is somehow noisy and dangerous. This was true of the American steam hauled trains of the 1950's and the diesel-electric trains of the present. But the Japanese Shinkansen ("Bullet trains"), built in 1964, are eerily silent due to high quality of suspension, tracks and electric traction. The only noise you hear travelling inside at 200 MPH is air swooshing. And in terms of danger: Not a single person has died in 58 years in the entire network.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-flaw-in-the-progressive-stance-on-guns/2022/05/29/162edf0e-df50-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html
I’ve come to the conclusion that neither party will seriously reduce homicides in the short to mid term. Republicans won’t do anything to support gun control (I’m a former NRA member who currently supports it) and Democrats don’t want to incarcerate feral Knee Grows. America is just doomed.Replies: @J.Ross, @Greasy William, @Art Deco, @Pixo
Yglesias has been drifting right. He’s married to a white woman, lives in a very high-crime city, and has a white kid.
At least on a demographic level, these factors cause men to become more conservative, or more specifically in his case Aspie right-wing open-borders libertarianism.
If you narrow the scope of your inquiry to Federal and State contracting, those numbers likely change significantly, and the makeup of the ownership of the construction firms in government contracting is even more skewed.
That’s the point that I think Steve was making – when a developer builds an office building or high rise condominium or whatever, there are challenges but things get done seasonably and according to predictable, market costs.
When the project is a Federally or State funded and overseen infrastructure construction project, it’s like when a Sperm Whale dies and sinks to the bottom of the sea – a whole ecosystem of parasites appear to siphon off the government money. What is built is secondary or tertiary. Those construction firms that are engaged by private developers to work with some efficiency and within defined costs are largely not eligible for the government work.
I’m guessing that most people posting here were alive and aware in 1980. The 1980 Census counted 226,000,000 inhabitants of the U.S. The 2020 Census counted 331,000,000 or so inhabitants. That’s a nearly 50% increase in population in 40 years. Can you identify a commensurate degree of new infrastructure that has been built in your experience which would accommodate such an increase in population?
our genius girls-and-boys with BAs bureaucrats cough up the shittiest, lamest projects--at extreme costs.
Anecdotal example:
They have been "building light rail" in Seattle for seemingly forever. But AnotherMom and I a few years ago--kid and neighbors both unavailable--decided to try the "ride to the airport". After the bus to UW station ... a long slow ride. Slowly accelerating trains. At grade crossings in South Seattle. Took forever.
Last summer was teaching wife's cousin's kid (whatever that is "2nd niece"?) to drive. Her test was in Bellevue so we drove all the streets near the testing center, every interesection, all the gotchas. Sure 'nuff the light rail extension to Microsoft/Redmond ... is running at grade in places and has grade street crossings!
Logically one would think:
-- there is a fortune spent on lawyering and bureaucracy
-- plus the actual cost of land
-- then smaller, the actual cost of building the roadbed
...
so if we're spending all this money just to get a line in place don't we want
-- a line that can be really speedy and high capacity?
-- no grade crossing
-- super fast train sets, expandable for higher capacity
-- stations that allow bypass and express trains
Nope, the girls and boys with BAs have a "light rail" fetish and dainty ideas about what it should be like ... and that is what is important. Speed, capacity, expandability ... the future? ... not important. So you pay billions and in the end still get mediocrity.Replies: @Pixo, @epebble
“ wife’s cousin’s kid (whatever that is “2nd niece””
She’s your first cousin-in-law once removed.
No, GDP is a measure of value-added.
But consider it in the Income Approach to GDP: the sum of everyone's wages (+rent+interest+profits). How many of the people getting paid in the the US are actually productive? A bare majority? A distinct minority?
How many are doing something barely productive that could be done in much less time for much less pay? Almost all government workers, for sure. And many govt workers are really in the counter-productive column.
A lot of economics consists of the tautology that if money changed hands, value must have been created. Real life is unsparing with counterexamples, however.Replies: @Art Deco, @epebble
Yes, you do.
Getting more aggressive with mental health interventions and relaxing medical and educational privacy restrictions (HIPAA and FERPA) would probably go a long way towards intercepting mass school shooters before they can make and execute their plans. As it stands now, it is very frought for a teacher or guidance counselor to talk with the school nurse, or for a doctor to talk with teachers or administration and say “keep an eye on this kid, he’s on SSRIs and has expressed suicidal and homicidal ideation.” And neither the teachers nor the doctors are supposed to speak to law enforcement about a kid’s medical or educational information unless they have discovered some kind of imminent real threat of harm to the self or others. The laws inhibit the kind of necessary communication that would greatly help in these circumstances, but they’re also more chilling than the text of the laws themselves – no teacher or administrator or doctor is going to know the ins and outs of these privacy laws so they’re going to err on the side of self-preservation.
On the other hand, being serious about prosecuting violent crime and incarcerating violent criminals would incapacitate the likely future perpetrators of violent street crimes.
https://twitter.com/DidTheyDie4This/status/1530977964157976576Replies: @AnotherDad
The War memes are easy because they are so true.
America sent a bunch of young men off to fight and die for their nation. (400,000 did die. A few hundred thousand others seriously wounded.)
Then the nation they fought for was destroyed–tossed in the scrap heap. If those guys could see what the resulting “America” the fought for was, a majority would simply not bother.
If you could pose to the American public in 1941, “Hey we’re going to fight and win this war so that America can be like this”, and show them what we’ve become, it would be a landslide for “pass”. Uh … let’s take a gamble on what is behind curtain #2.
Wars are bred by mendacity. Productive humans do not, and are not, involved with mendacity; too busy with creation, but, are casualties.
It seems the meek are never aggravated by destruction. They see one side of creation.
We have a dichotomy. The meek, rooting for appropriate "sides", and the mendicants leading the route.
One eternal, prevailing, asinine constant.
QED
In your imagination only. That level of alienation is not found among WWii vets.Replies: @Mr. Anon
Does that figure, my man? Quickest journey to realization is OBSERVATION.
Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
No harness on that guy. Hard to tell if they first guys’ were actually connected to anything.
only about 1% of the revenue in the economy is booked by law firms.
It is not just the share of revenue, but the effect of throwing even small amount of sand into gearbox. A 737 can be easily crashed by a flock of geese. Those 100 pounds of geese are only $2,610. A 737 is $100 million.
https://www.dartagnan.com/goose-whole/product/FGORE004-1.html
America sent a bunch of young men off to fight and die for their nation. (400,000 did die. A few hundred thousand others seriously wounded.)
Then the nation they fought for was destroyed--tossed in the scrap heap. If those guys could see what the resulting "America" the fought for was, a majority would simply not bother.
If you could pose to the American public in 1941, "Hey we're going to fight and win this war so that America can be like this", and show them what we've become, it would be a landslide for "pass". Uh ... let's take a gamble on what is behind curtain #2.Replies: @Uncle Walter, @Art Deco
The saddest facet? Unnecessary, all of it. I would direct you to a Book that will explain the entire panoply; “Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil”, by Gerard Menuhin.
Wars are bred by mendacity. Productive humans do not, and are not, involved with mendacity; too busy with creation, but, are casualties.
It seems the meek are never aggravated by destruction. They see one side of creation.
We have a dichotomy. The meek, rooting for appropriate “sides”, and the mendicants leading the route.
One eternal, prevailing, asinine constant.
QED
our genius girls-and-boys with BAs bureaucrats cough up the shittiest, lamest projects--at extreme costs.
Anecdotal example:
They have been "building light rail" in Seattle for seemingly forever. But AnotherMom and I a few years ago--kid and neighbors both unavailable--decided to try the "ride to the airport". After the bus to UW station ... a long slow ride. Slowly accelerating trains. At grade crossings in South Seattle. Took forever.
Last summer was teaching wife's cousin's kid (whatever that is "2nd niece"?) to drive. Her test was in Bellevue so we drove all the streets near the testing center, every interesection, all the gotchas. Sure 'nuff the light rail extension to Microsoft/Redmond ... is running at grade in places and has grade street crossings!
Logically one would think:
-- there is a fortune spent on lawyering and bureaucracy
-- plus the actual cost of land
-- then smaller, the actual cost of building the roadbed
...
so if we're spending all this money just to get a line in place don't we want
-- a line that can be really speedy and high capacity?
-- no grade crossing
-- super fast train sets, expandable for higher capacity
-- stations that allow bypass and express trains
Nope, the girls and boys with BAs have a "light rail" fetish and dainty ideas about what it should be like ... and that is what is important. Speed, capacity, expandability ... the future? ... not important. So you pay billions and in the end still get mediocrity.Replies: @Pixo, @epebble
“light rail” fetish
I think this is from a mistaken belief that “heavy” (and fast) rail is somehow noisy and dangerous. This was true of the American steam hauled trains of the 1950’s and the diesel-electric trains of the present. But the Japanese Shinkansen (“Bullet trains”), built in 1964, are eerily silent due to high quality of suspension, tracks and electric traction. The only noise you hear travelling inside at 200 MPH is air swooshing. And in terms of danger: Not a single person has died in 58 years in the entire network.
Yeah I know GDP measures “finished goods”, as if there were no counter-productive finished goods…lol.
But consider it in the Income Approach to GDP: the sum of everyone’s wages (+rent+interest+profits). How many of the people getting paid in the the US are actually productive? A bare majority? A distinct minority?
How many are doing something barely productive that could be done in much less time for much less pay? Almost all government workers, for sure. And many govt workers are really in the counter-productive column.
A lot of economics consists of the tautology that if money changed hands, value must have been created. Real life is unsparing with counterexamples, however.
Productive enough that people are willing to hire them. (About 14% of the working population are public employees).Replies: @Almost Missouri
How did he even manage to stand up on that thing?
But consider it in the Income Approach to GDP: the sum of everyone's wages (+rent+interest+profits). How many of the people getting paid in the the US are actually productive? A bare majority? A distinct minority?
How many are doing something barely productive that could be done in much less time for much less pay? Almost all government workers, for sure. And many govt workers are really in the counter-productive column.
A lot of economics consists of the tautology that if money changed hands, value must have been created. Real life is unsparing with counterexamples, however.Replies: @Art Deco, @epebble
How many of the people getting paid in the the US are actually productive? A bare majority? A distinct minority?
Productive enough that people are willing to hire them. (About 14% of the working population are public employees).
Increasingly large portions of the US economy are like that: zero- or negative-productivity but logging big GDP numbers.
America sent a bunch of young men off to fight and die for their nation. (400,000 did die. A few hundred thousand others seriously wounded.)
Then the nation they fought for was destroyed--tossed in the scrap heap. If those guys could see what the resulting "America" the fought for was, a majority would simply not bother.
If you could pose to the American public in 1941, "Hey we're going to fight and win this war so that America can be like this", and show them what we've become, it would be a landslide for "pass". Uh ... let's take a gamble on what is behind curtain #2.Replies: @Uncle Walter, @Art Deco
Then the nation they fought for was destroyed–tossed in the scrap heap. If those guys could see what the resulting “America” the fought for was, a majority would simply not bother.
In your imagination only. That level of alienation is not found among WWii vets.
If you showed the average WWII vet, when he was a young man, the America of 2020 - the George Floyd riots, statues being torn down, illegal aliens flooding the country, immigrants from the 3rd World lecturing Americans about what their country should be........Drag Queen Story Hour?
They very well would have - as Another Dad contented - said "No thanks, we'll take Door Number 2."Replies: @Art Deco
But consider it in the Income Approach to GDP: the sum of everyone's wages (+rent+interest+profits). How many of the people getting paid in the the US are actually productive? A bare majority? A distinct minority?
How many are doing something barely productive that could be done in much less time for much less pay? Almost all government workers, for sure. And many govt workers are really in the counter-productive column.
A lot of economics consists of the tautology that if money changed hands, value must have been created. Real life is unsparing with counterexamples, however.Replies: @Art Deco, @epebble
By that measure, how do you explain “Real life” that the scientists who developed, say, polio vaccine or mRNA earned less in their lifetime than a celebrity ball thrower earns in a season? Many individuals may feel that is horrible, but the population thinks that is fair.
No, you do not. Great success has been had with reductions in violent crime with no changes at all in the law governing firearms (see New York City, 1990-2010). Guns are tools. You need to concentrate on deterring and incapacitating the operators. And you certainly don’t need to be harassing people in small towns and rural areas over their long guns. Those people and those weapons are responsible for a low-single digit share of all the homicides in this country).
I can't even.Replies: @SunBakedSuburb
Western liberalism has devolved into something dark and deeply destructive. But let’s remember that conservatives in this country have always used insufficient market metrics to gauge whether a road or bridge should be built rather than taking an all-inclusive approach. None of the ideologies currently dominating discourse and governance are big picture.
I’m a native NYCer and recall a construction project called “Bruckner Boulevard” that was very visible and caused traffic delays for years. It was so visible that the New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable titled a book “Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?”.
Back in the 1980s Donald Trump stepped in for a faltering city government and rehabbed the Wollman Rink in Central Park at a fraction of the cost the city was planning to spend.
“America is not really made for long-distance trains.”
Only because of the domination of Big Petroleum in the post war period. The Climate Cabal has marginalized BP to the point that Woke gestures have now replaced oil field swagger. I don’t believe the CC is sincere about anything; but if they were they’d ixnay Amtrak and begin laying rail for a passenger train system. Unfortunately, the oligarchs in the CC desire to reduce the human population through a series of pandemics and vaccines and confine the survivors to drawers filled with a gelatin-like substance.
“We all know the deal on this.”
It starts with an upper case B and ends with a lower case x — Blax. I lived for a few years in a small European country populated with many good looking white women. Owning a car was a ridiculous notion so I took the train everywhere: intercity and southbound into Germany and the East. The only Blax that rode the rails were vastly outnumbered and thus well-behaved. But those glory days were before Merkel opened the gates to the POColoureds.
Regarding passenger service. I've taken Amtrac across country twice and, well, it was for the view and the experience (slept in the club car, played cards, etc.) I would not even give someone on the other end a time of day to pick me up, maybe just "it'll be sometime on Thursday". ;-} Yeah, well that's government, so ...
Take Steve's point. Because of yes, Blacks (you guessed it!), people who would want to ride HS rail don't live in inner cities. Therefore, going to the downtown rail station (from whatever exurbs) would be like driving to the airport, so that advantage is gone. Secondly, America has 2 one-dimensional places for HS rail, up the east coast, arguably only Washington, FS through Boston, then San Diego to Seattle, I suppose. You've got to realize that in China it is only really 1/2 the distance E-W wise, vs. America that needs to be covered with about an equal distance N-S, more like a square. Within that, there are dozens, many dozens probably, of cities with 5 to 10 million people in them. People can get downtown with no car, or they are already there.
It's not the same situation at all in China (or W. Europe, for that matter) as in the US. Airline travel makes more sense than HS rail in the US.
.
* I remember even 30 years ago seeing their placards on the backs of semi-trucks saying "I pay $9,350 in road taxes every year" and thinking - when this was like $25,000 now - "man!" However, they do so much damage to the roads compared to cars that they still don't seem to be paying their way.Replies: @EddieSpaghetti
Liberalism that builds? I’ll settle for one that doesn’t actively destroy.
Even in the relatively peaceful 90s and 00s, the US still had the highest murder rate in the West.
Nobody is permitted to decline their appointed role. Nobody is allowed to opt out. Wait till the New World Order makes them an offer they can’t refuse.
Well said.
In your imagination only. That level of alienation is not found among WWii vets.Replies: @Mr. Anon
WWII vets barely exist anymore. They are almost all dead. And most of them never realized just how far gone their country had become. They held on to the conception of a country that was already dead. Another Dad’s point was that they would be so alienated if they could see what this country has really become. And I think they would be.
If you showed the average WWII vet, when he was a young man, the America of 2020 – the George Floyd riots, statues being torn down, illegal aliens flooding the country, immigrants from the 3rd World lecturing Americans about what their country should be……..Drag Queen Story Hour?
They very well would have – as Another Dad contented – said “No thanks, we’ll take Door Number 2.”
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Lunch_atop_a_Skyscraper_-_Charles_Clyde_Ebbets.jpgReplies: @JimDandy, @Mike Tre, @Ganderson, @ThreeCranes, @vinteuil
Yeah, as if. This “photo” is a crude & obvious fake.
You can do both! Anyway, https://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9212725/australia-buyback
This reminds me of the sequence of A Man in Full in which Conrad develops fantastically strong hands and forearms doing warehouse work. Wolfe truly was the Tolstoy of Testosterone.
Yglesias basically says: talking about gun control hurts Democrats with swing voters so instead the police should focus their resources on beating up unarmed black teenagers because that will improve the quality of life for white liberals in urban areas while helping us win elections.
Yglesias is the most disgusting kind of liberal because he doesn't even bother to hide what he is. Most liberals, like Klein, at least lie to themselves but Ygiggy won't even do that much.We already have gun control. The question is, should we have even more? The answer is, "no". The only reason the US lockdowns ended so early was because the authorities realized that we were weeks, if not days, away from dead cops had the lockdowns continued.Replies: @Ian Smith
“ We already have gun control. The question is, should we have even more? The answer is, “no”. The only reason the US lockdowns ended so early was because the authorities realized that we were weeks, if not days, away from dead cops had the lockdowns continued.”
The fact that someone like you would be prevented from owning a gun is all the more reason to pass gun control stat!
See for example:
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/construction-worker/united-states
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/construction-worker/germany
This holds that the average German construction worker makes about $45,000/year, whereas the average American construction worker makes $47,000/year. And the German surely benefits from more vacation time, a less rigorous working schedule, and a substantially lower cost of living.
America's end-stage-malignant legal and regulatory systems are responsible for the fact that nothing can get built. Which is why, as Peter Thiel and Neal Stephenson both noted, people who want to actually build things build them from bits -- which are mostly unregulated -- rather than atoms.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Achmed E. Newman, @Almost Missouri, @The Last Real Calvinist
This is depressingly true. Even the UK has (finally) been able to complete and open its new Elizabeth train/tube line running straight through the heart of London. That could not have been easy to build. And it’s not a half-assed ‘light rail’ project, either; the trains (and hence the stations) are big.
This is an excellent insight; thanks.
The most irritating thing about Ezra Klein is that not only is he disingenuous and a malignant liar, but we will be stuck with him for decades as editor of the Times or head of NBC etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunch_Atop_a_Skyscraper
Yeah, whatever.
Back to the Second Avenue Subway:
“How much will it cost? “A New York Times investigation showed that at $2.5 billion per mile, construction for the first section of the Second Avenue subway cost more than almost every other recent transit project in the world. In total that section cost more than $4.4 billion.”
I’ll go out on a limb. After 100 years, maybe there is an elite or a powerful constituency that simply doesn’t want it. Or profoundly doesn’t care. In which case the $2.5 billion per mile is a feature, not a problem. Just another reason something can’t be done. That somebody doesn’t want done.
An urban transit system? I’ll pass. Low income housing. Absolutely not. Quality education buildout for underserved urban youth? We did it and nothing happened. Biden’s free Community College? Nobody actually wants to attend Community College that has a choice. And haven’t about 1/2 the states tried it? We know what would change.
So it isn’t the frictional costs of AA, or lawyers, or all these annoying things. My White suburban County is white because it is expensive. It’s not ideal, but the lack of diversity is priceless.
"How much will it cost? "A New York Times investigation showed that at $2.5 billion per mile, construction for the first section of the Second Avenue subway cost more than almost every other recent transit project in the world. In total that section cost more than $4.4 billion."
I'll go out on a limb. After 100 years, maybe there is an elite or a powerful constituency that simply doesn't want it. Or profoundly doesn't care. In which case the $2.5 billion per mile is a feature, not a problem. Just another reason something can't be done. That somebody doesn't want done.
An urban transit system? I'll pass. Low income housing. Absolutely not. Quality education buildout for underserved urban youth? We did it and nothing happened. Biden's free Community College? Nobody actually wants to attend Community College that has a choice. And haven't about 1/2 the states tried it? We know what would change.
So it isn't the frictional costs of AA, or lawyers, or all these annoying things. My White suburban County is white because it is expensive. It's not ideal, but the lack of diversity is priceless.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Rep. Henry Waxman vetoed in 1986 the Los Angeles subway going to the 405 freeway in Westwood because he didn’t want it to bring non-car owners to Beverly Hills. Now they are building it, although last I checked the Rodeo Drive station has been delayed from 2023 to 2025.
The missing Georgetown Station isn't like it looks. But it worked out that way.
By the way, Chris Rock has weighed in on this matter. His insight, which I will generalize and paraphrase, is that every city has two types of shopping areas, the ones that "car owners" go to, and the ones that "car owners" used to go to. Waxman was just, in effect, saying lets keep Beverly Hills' Rodeo Drive firmly in the "car owners" go to camp. Diversity in transportation modes for thee, but no diversity in transportation modes for me, just hypocrisy. Unfortunately, as far as "non-car owners" is concerned, hypocrisy is almost always the safest choice.
https://www.washingtonian.com/2021/11/10/everything-you-think-you-know-about-the-nonexistent-georgetown-metro-stop-is-wrong/
The missing Georgetown Station isn’t like it looks. But it worked out that way.
Productive enough that people are willing to hire them. (About 14% of the working population are public employees).Replies: @Almost Missouri
If I file a frivolous lawsuit against you, and you are compelled to hire an attorney to defend against it, and we each spend $1m on our side until a judge finally dismisses the lawsuit because it is frivolous, that increases the GDP by $2m, yet what productive result was there? None at all. That $2m of GDP is entirely phantom value. Worse, if the lawsuit obstructed you (or even me) from doing something actually productive—which is almost certainly the case, then the productive value of the lawsuit was not zero but negative.
Increasingly large portions of the US economy are like that: zero- or negative-productivity but logging big GDP numbers.
You are omitting the real reasons why lawyers cost the economy tremendous sums. I’ll give you an example. Actual legal costs and liability insurance costs for the medical system in this country are relatively small, but the fear of lawsuits egged on by “ambulance chasers” incentivizes the system-wide practice of “defensive medicine” in the entire field, whose costs are staggering – some estimates are as high as 20% of the total healthcare costs (somewhere in the $700 billion range).
And this kind of “legal defensiveness” is practiced in virtually every industry and profession in this country today whose combined costs are likely in the trillions of dollars. That’s why the legal profession in this country is not engaged in a zero sum game (of value transfer from producers to themselves), but in a negative sum game, in other words, value destruction. So that value destruction economy-wide is many orders of magnitude greater than “revenues… booked by law firms.”
Is “non-car owners” what they call minorities in LA? If so, then how ironic that Waxman, the liberal, was denying subway services to “non-car owners,” who are, objectively, the people who need it the most. Of course, nobody wants “non-car owners” around. However, the more equitable solution is to build the subway all the way to the 405 freeway in Westwood, but stop it before it gets to Beverly Hills. That’s what we do, quite successfully, where I live.
By the way, Chris Rock has weighed in on this matter. His insight, which I will generalize and paraphrase, is that every city has two types of shopping areas, the ones that “car owners” go to, and the ones that “car owners” used to go to. Waxman was just, in effect, saying lets keep Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive firmly in the “car owners” go to camp. Diversity in transportation modes for thee, but no diversity in transportation modes for me, just hypocrisy. Unfortunately, as far as “non-car owners” is concerned, hypocrisy is almost always the safest choice.
Obama was right about one thimg – these people are wedded to their guns. That I can understand but at least be honest about the reasons – no Second Amendment BS, you want guns because other people have guns and you’re scared of them. On an individual level, it’s rational to want a gun, but it’s irrational on a societal level.
At US prices that'd cost USD 13 trillion (or about 6 Afghanistan's)
Little wonder everyone is going to trade with China in the future.
You can see how useful the war in Ukraine is for keeping Europe locked in to US imports.
*Incredible isn't it - implied from these numbers
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/china-high-speed-rail-cmd/index.htmlReplies: @Redneck farmer, @Almost Missouri, @EddieSpaghetti
As much as I love high speed trains in other parts of the world, I would be very reluctant to ride a high speed train in the US. The thought of an affirmative action hire smoking a joint while he is driving a train at 200 mph kind of makes me want to take my car.
As a resource investor I largely avoid the US, mines just aren’t permitted. Trilogy Metals saw its access road to its Ambler project in Alaska held up by regulators, Hudbay Minerals’ $1.9-billion Rosemont copper mine in Arizona is facing its own regulatory hold ups and the Biden clown show blocked Antofagasta’s Twin Metals copper and nickel mine project. Of course Europe is as bad, we have been warned of power cuts coming, having demolished several perfectly good coal plants in recent years.
The green lunatics, whether they realise it, want us going back to the stone age.
Yes, because vigorous efforts to combat violent crime were implemented only selectively. You can see this in New York by comparing New York City to Buffalo and Rochester. You can see it in spades by comparing New York City to Baltimore. In 1980, the homicide rate was about the same in these two cities. Thirty years later, that in Baltimore exceeded that in New York by a factor of 7-to-1.
I’m not saying that control is a magic cure-all for society’s ills. But I can’t pretend that any of that ‘armed society is a polite society’ BS makes sense and I’m not going to support a dumb policy just because it’s considered ‘right wing.’Replies: @J.Ross, @John Johnson, @Art Deco
The chap who caused that gruesome derailment in Philadelphia in 2015 was not under the influence nor did he have any diversity Pokemon points other than his homosexuality. He was a red-headed graduate of the University of Missouri.
If you showed the average WWII vet, when he was a young man, the America of 2020 - the George Floyd riots, statues being torn down, illegal aliens flooding the country, immigrants from the 3rd World lecturing Americans about what their country should be........Drag Queen Story Hour?
They very well would have - as Another Dad contented - said "No thanks, we'll take Door Number 2."Replies: @Art Deco
It’s very peculiar that you find the history of the last 75 years to be an integral whole with no consequential decisions being made between now and then and no contingencies. And you fancy Europe would have been better off run by the Nazi Party.
Real sophisticated. They teach you that in library school?
1. Baltimore continued to get blacker from 1980 onwards, NYC not so much. 2. Stop-and-frisk amounted to a form of both Negro AND gun control.
I’m not saying that control is a magic cure-all for society’s ills. But I can’t pretend that any of that ‘armed society is a polite society’ BS makes sense and I’m not going to support a dumb policy just because it’s considered ‘right wing.’
It went from about 54% black to 63% black, not enough to account for an 85% increase in the homicide rate.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic
I’m not saying that control is a magic cure-all for society’s ills. But I can’t pretend that any of that ‘armed society is a polite society’ BS makes sense and I’m not going to support a dumb policy just because it’s considered ‘right wing.’Replies: @J.Ross, @John Johnson, @Art Deco
What is your explanation for why every single legal gun owner does not commit a massacre, so that we have a school shooting every minute? Is it the same as with enormously popular violent video games, that, clearly given the numbers, ownership of the object and engagement in the activity actually mean nothing? School shootings are still enormously rare, much too rare to be a basis of policy, and they are dishonestly and dangerously promoted by the lyingpress.
This is a really silly straw man. I get that most people who own guns don’t use them for violence. Look, I am a former NRA member. I have been to dozens of gun shows. Incidentally, I am also a former libertarian. I know all the talking points because I used to spout them myself. And I get that gun accessibility isn’t the only factor in the tragedies. But can any deny that, all else being equal, allowing people to legally own firearms (especially military firearms) leads to more senseless death?
99.9% of people, if given a nuke or a vial of the bubonic plague, would have no desire use them. It is still a bad idea to allow private citizens to own such things. Likewise, the vast majority of people with, say, AR-15s would not use them to massacre schoolchildren. Seriously, let’s do a cost/benefit analysis. All this bloodshed, horror, and paranoia so that Jethro and Cletus get to feel like Minutemen ready to take on the Redcoats?Replies: @Art Deco
This is true. Every aspect of life in the US is affected by the gray hand of the legal system.
In the road where I lived in Florida, somebody tripped on the crack on the sidewalk (not severely injured) and as a result six tall and beautiful trees were killed and chopped up as a punishment for putting roots under the sidewalk. This operation probably cost thousands of dollars, and significantly disfigured the avenue.
Here in Ecuador the side walks are so rough that it is often easier to walk in the road (honest!) but at least the cost of living is lower, and they population has evolved to be more agile.
Probably very few USians are aware of the high price they pay for smooth sidewalks for that kids to ride their bicycles on, but there is a price.
There is a price for everything in the US. Even drinking water is more expensive than gasoline, and that is why it is one of the most expensive places in the world to live. And if you choose not to, dying in the US is even more expensive.
No it isn't. And it's not particularly close.Replies: @Jonathan Mason
My wife, an art historian, reminded me that there are regulations demanding art be part of things such as the stations at light-rail stops.
I’m not saying that control is a magic cure-all for society’s ills. But I can’t pretend that any of that ‘armed society is a polite society’ BS makes sense and I’m not going to support a dumb policy just because it’s considered ‘right wing.’Replies: @J.Ross, @John Johnson, @Art Deco
The unspeakable truth is that a White society is normally a police society and it doesn’t matter if it is armed or not.
Race correlates with homicide rates more than gun ownership.
But with that said the conservatives need to come up with something more than “arm the teachers” non-sense in response to these mass shootings.
This is the second time we have had trained police that were too scared to charge the shooter. Arming some fuzzy headed liberal teacher that hates guns is not the answer.
If conservatives don’t compromise and block AR sales for under 21 then the Democrats will eventually ban them. Doing absolutely nothing favors the Democrats.
With that said I have zero faith in our conservatives. Most are clueless morons that want to live in some Randian delusion where AR-15s for 18 year olds and slave wages will somehow make the best society. As long as they can still go to church and watch football they will shrug.
Joe Biden, in off-the-cuff remarks yesterday, said that nobody "needs to own military weaponry" like............. 9 mm pistols.
The Democrats don't want "reasonable gun control". They want to outlaw all gun ownership.Replies: @John Johnson
15 years ago, there was a highly plausible fear of the economic consequences of oil scarcity in the US. And, surprisingly enough it was solved. Through the creation of the 'unconventional' or 'tight' oil industry. Trillions were spent on the implementation of this technology. It was the reason that the 2008 housing bust wasn't't a permanent disaster. They built out about 8,000,000 barrels per day of capacity. A huge part of it pipelines and infrastructure. Pipelines costing about the same as railroad track. The industry was popular enough until about 2014, when prices peaked at about $100/bbl.
The point being that if something is truly in demand, and markets reflect this demand, it gets done in the US. And did get done on a huge scale since roughly 2000.
Oil prices then crashed to below $40 bbl and the public lost interest and there wasn't quite enough funding. And renewables became the next big thing.
Unconventional oil was very doable with 'the invisible hand' and with government simply moving out of the way a bit. And renewables are getting done via 'the invisible hand' and generous governmental subsidies. And Elon Musk.
The obvious problem is that America just solved a huge problem, then wanted to move on to something else before it was finished. And before the next solution was ready for implementation.
So its wrong that we can't do big things anymore.
Another example ... the US built out a multi-billion wireless network this century. On top of a wired system that worked.
There is plenty of capital to fund these sorts of projects. But a shortage of projects.Replies: @Mark G.
There was a lot of money available to be loaned out at very low interest rates and much of it found its way to the oil fracking industry. The low interest rates were because of government intervention so this was not the result of the invisible hand of the market. We had a lot of oil for the same reason we had a lot of house building before the 2008 housing crash and the oil fracking bubble couldn’t last forever for the same reason the housing boom didn’t.
The free market certainly works better than a command-and-control economy. However, we have to accept that this is no longer a country with a small population and lots of natural resources. Most of our population growth for the last 50 years has been driven by recent immigrants and their descendants. We can reduce future immigration. We can let the free market work in the energy sector, including more extensive use of nuclear power. It is likely, though, that we are going to have a reduced standard of living in the future because we don’t have a limitless supply of any natural resource, including oil.
Yes, there were many decisions made. And they were made within the context of a system that was set up after WWII.
Nice Strawman there, Art. Only took you two posts to get to “No, poopy-head, you’re Hitler!”.
Real sophisticated. They teach you that in library school?
As I recall, the Sandyhook murderer’s AR was bought for him by his Mom.
Joe Biden, in off-the-cuff remarks yesterday, said that nobody “needs to own military weaponry” like…………. 9 mm pistols.
The Democrats don’t want “reasonable gun control”. They want to outlaw all gun ownership.
School shootings are still enormously rare, much too rare to be a basis of policy, and they are dishonestly and dangerously promoted by the lyingpress.
Since when has the press or left been interested in policy based on honesty?
They don’t want an honest discussion about policy and crime since it will lead to the unspeakable.
Conservatives aren’t any better. They don’t have the guts to talk about race and crime. All they can do is speak of rights which the left will eventually overrule. Conservatives are Rand worshipping dopes that will eventually be crushed by a liberal coalition of Hispanics and guilt ridden/indoctrinated Whites.
Just look at Canada for a preview. The shooting didn’t even take place they and they just passed a bunch of gun laws.
The only discussion you need to have about 'race and crime' is to make clear that (1) we all face the same laws and (2) those laws will be enforced without fear or favor and (3) if it has a 'disparate impact', tough.
That is a discussion you can have in every venue - crime control, recruitment and promotion in the civil service, distribution of berths in public higher education, school discipline, &c. And you will always be on the side of justice.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic, @John Johnson
‘What is your explanation for why every single legal gun owner does not commit a massacre, so that we have a school shooting every minute?’
This is a really silly straw man. I get that most people who own guns don’t use them for violence. Look, I am a former NRA member. I have been to dozens of gun shows. Incidentally, I am also a former libertarian. I know all the talking points because I used to spout them myself. And I get that gun accessibility isn’t the only factor in the tragedies. But can any deny that, all else being equal, allowing people to legally own firearms (especially military firearms) leads to more senseless death?
99.9% of people, if given a nuke or a vial of the bubonic plague, would have no desire use them. It is still a bad idea to allow private citizens to own such things. Likewise, the vast majority of people with, say, AR-15s would not use them to massacre schoolchildren. Seriously, let’s do a cost/benefit analysis. All this bloodshed, horror, and paranoia so that Jethro and Cletus get to feel like Minutemen ready to take on the Redcoats?
Some things are true qualitatively, but are quantitatively unimportant.Replies: @Ian Smith
One project I’ve followed with great interest since childhood has been the evolution of Miami International Airport, which is landlocked with no room for expansion. Proposals to build a new airport at another location have been scuttled due to environmental concerns. The current setup is adequate, but much time and money were wasted over the years having to rebuild in place while still accommodating a full load of passenger traffic.
I remember reading about the plans for American’s terminal when I was in elementary school. The project was not completed until I was several years out of college. For many years the American area was such a dump that people compared it unfavorably to various Third World airports.
Even LaGuardia was able to build a brand-new terminal from scratch, but MIA is still using the 1959 facility with numerous additions grafted onto it. (At other airports, different terminals are in completely different buildings, but in Miami it’s all just one big building.)
I also follow developments in mass transit. Right now the county is attempting to convert a dedicated busway (formerly a railway) into a “Bus Rapid Transit” line, which supposedly will make the buses nearly as efficient as the elevated rail line we were promised when the voters approved the transit sales tax in 2002. (The seed funding for the mass-transit network was provided in a massive bond issue passed by the voters in 1972. That’s fifty years’ worth of broken promises.)
They’re tearing down all of the existing bus shelters and replacing them with these (photo credit: me):
https://i.ibb.co/chjyHYS/BD2-CE9-B3-6-D47-4-BE1-B900-05-E196-ABD9-B7.jpg
…which are designed to require riders to pay their fare before boarding. (This will allow the buses to load passengers more quickly, or so we are told.)
They’re also adding “signal preemption” to give the buses priority. Signal preemption was attempted in 1997, when the busway first opened. But the timing of the green-yellow-red transition was too rapid and too many drivers tried to beat the light. (Keep in mind that down here it’s legal to turn right on red unless otherwise indicated.) There were dozens if not hundreds of accidents, some fatal, in a six-month time span. Eventually they had to abandon the scheme altogether.
Now they’re adding bus crossings like the ones you see at train intersections. This will exacerbate the existing horrendous traffic into something out of Dante’s Inferno.
The busway runs parallel to the busiest, most congested road (U.S. 1) in the county. It intersects numerous major roads. There is no logic in building a grade-level mass-transit line.
Miami is too close to sea level for underground subways. Elevated rail is the only viable option.
The existing elevated-rail system - often derided as the “train to nowhere” - opened in 1984. It prompted Reagan’s famous quip that it would have been cheaper to buy everyone in Miami a limousine. The Miami Herald once calculated that, for a fraction of the cost, we could have had free buses running every 15 minutes 24/7/365 along every major street in Dade County.
We are paying for expansion of elevated rail. (Like it or not, that’s what the voters were promised, and that’s what they approved.) We have been paying for elevated rail in one form or another since 1972. We have been paying a half-penny sales tax for elevated rail since 2002. And we are not likely to see it in my lifetime.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @prime noticer
Thanks for the great run-down on Miami, Stan. I’d just guess that because it’s been heavily Hispanic for so long now, the corruption level as got to be higher than average.
Joe Biden, in off-the-cuff remarks yesterday, said that nobody "needs to own military weaponry" like............. 9 mm pistols.
The Democrats don't want "reasonable gun control". They want to outlaw all gun ownership.Replies: @John Johnson
As I recall, the Sandyhook murderer’s AR was bought for him by his Mom.
Joe Biden, in off-the-cuff remarks yesterday, said that nobody “needs to own military weaponry” like…………. 9 mm pistols.
The Democrats don’t want “reasonable gun control”. They want to outlaw all gun ownership.
The Democrats may be deceitful and led by a clueless president but they have the better long term strategy.
Simply trying to hold the line isn’t going to work. We saw this in California.
Ban under 21s in exchange for getting rid of the NSA tax. That’s a fair trade.
Would it stop every mass shooting like Sandy Hook? Of course not but we have too many children from single moms that are 18 legally but 12 mentally. They could use a few years in the real world before owning a semi-auto.
I think we are both talking passenger service, but I’ll add this about freight. The trucking industry is heavily subsidized via road-building* compared to the RR, but the 4(?) big freight RRs do pretty well and are nothing to be ashamed of.
Regarding passenger service. I’ve taken Amtrac across country twice and, well, it was for the view and the experience (slept in the club car, played cards, etc.) I would not even give someone on the other end a time of day to pick me up, maybe just “it’ll be sometime on Thursday”. ;-} Yeah, well that’s government, so …
Take Steve’s point. Because of yes, Blacks (you guessed it!), people who would want to ride HS rail don’t live in inner cities. Therefore, going to the downtown rail station (from whatever exurbs) would be like driving to the airport, so that advantage is gone. Secondly, America has 2 one-dimensional places for HS rail, up the east coast, arguably only Washington, FS through Boston, then San Diego to Seattle, I suppose. You’ve got to realize that in China it is only really 1/2 the distance E-W wise, vs. America that needs to be covered with about an equal distance N-S, more like a square. Within that, there are dozens, many dozens probably, of cities with 5 to 10 million people in them. People can get downtown with no car, or they are already there.
It’s not the same situation at all in China (or W. Europe, for that matter) as in the US. Airline travel makes more sense than HS rail in the US.
.
* I remember even 30 years ago seeing their placards on the backs of semi-trucks saying “I pay $9,350 in road taxes every year” and thinking – when this was like $25,000 now – “man!” However, they do so much damage to the roads compared to cars that they still don’t seem to be paying their way.
I’m not saying that control is a magic cure-all for society’s ills. But I can’t pretend that any of that ‘armed society is a polite society’ BS makes sense and I’m not going to support a dumb policy just because it’s considered ‘right wing.’Replies: @J.Ross, @John Johnson, @Art Deco
1. Baltimore continued to get blacker from 1980 onwards, NYC not so much. 2. Stop-and-frisk amounted to a form of both Negro AND gun control.
It went from about 54% black to 63% black, not enough to account for an 85% increase in the homicide rate.
Who do you think is committing those 85% additional homicides, the Amish?Replies: @Art Deco
This is a really silly straw man. I get that most people who own guns don’t use them for violence. Look, I am a former NRA member. I have been to dozens of gun shows. Incidentally, I am also a former libertarian. I know all the talking points because I used to spout them myself. And I get that gun accessibility isn’t the only factor in the tragedies. But can any deny that, all else being equal, allowing people to legally own firearms (especially military firearms) leads to more senseless death?
99.9% of people, if given a nuke or a vial of the bubonic plague, would have no desire use them. It is still a bad idea to allow private citizens to own such things. Likewise, the vast majority of people with, say, AR-15s would not use them to massacre schoolchildren. Seriously, let’s do a cost/benefit analysis. All this bloodshed, horror, and paranoia so that Jethro and Cletus get to feel like Minutemen ready to take on the Redcoats?Replies: @Art Deco
But can any deny that, all else being equal, allowing people to legally own firearms (especially military firearms) leads to more senseless death?
Some things are true qualitatively, but are quantitatively unimportant.
Even in the relatively peaceful 90s and 00s, the US still had the highest percentage of blacks in the West.
They don’t have the guts to talk about race and crime.
The only discussion you need to have about ‘race and crime’ is to make clear that (1) we all face the same laws and (2) those laws will be enforced without fear or favor and (3) if it has a ‘disparate impact’, tough.
That is a discussion you can have in every venue – crime control, recruitment and promotion in the civil service, distribution of berths in public higher education, school discipline, &c. And you will always be on the side of justice.
Regarding passenger service. I've taken Amtrac across country twice and, well, it was for the view and the experience (slept in the club car, played cards, etc.) I would not even give someone on the other end a time of day to pick me up, maybe just "it'll be sometime on Thursday". ;-} Yeah, well that's government, so ...
Take Steve's point. Because of yes, Blacks (you guessed it!), people who would want to ride HS rail don't live in inner cities. Therefore, going to the downtown rail station (from whatever exurbs) would be like driving to the airport, so that advantage is gone. Secondly, America has 2 one-dimensional places for HS rail, up the east coast, arguably only Washington, FS through Boston, then San Diego to Seattle, I suppose. You've got to realize that in China it is only really 1/2 the distance E-W wise, vs. America that needs to be covered with about an equal distance N-S, more like a square. Within that, there are dozens, many dozens probably, of cities with 5 to 10 million people in them. People can get downtown with no car, or they are already there.
It's not the same situation at all in China (or W. Europe, for that matter) as in the US. Airline travel makes more sense than HS rail in the US.
.
* I remember even 30 years ago seeing their placards on the backs of semi-trucks saying "I pay $9,350 in road taxes every year" and thinking - when this was like $25,000 now - "man!" However, they do so much damage to the roads compared to cars that they still don't seem to be paying their way.Replies: @EddieSpaghetti
I found the following remarkable passage on google:
The next question would be, how much damage is due to the weather as opposed to vehicles?
Weather is a factor, as the locations with lots of freezing and thawing in one winter (say, southern Michigan) are the worst. In combination, it can be costly.
I wrote:
Art Deco then wrote:
My response: If a red-headed graduate from the University of Missouri cannot safely drive an ordinary train, how is an affirmative action hire smoking a joint supposed to safely drive a high speed train at 200 mph?
This thread needs Buffalo Joe’s input.
Some things are true qualitatively, but are quantitatively unimportant.Replies: @Ian Smith
Cop out (pun unintended)
“These men were immigrant ironworkers employed at the RCA Building during the construction of Rockefeller Center. They were accustomed to walking along the girders.
Yeah, whatever.
so the Swiss who have a gun in every household are irrational???
It went from about 54% black to 63% black, not enough to account for an 85% increase in the homicide rate.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic
With blacks 5x more likely to commit homicides, and voting for city governance more in line with black social norms, and police standing down from the I-cants-breev movement, yeah, it’s doable by adding 10% more blacks.
Who do you think is committing those 85% additional homicides, the Amish?
IIRC, the rate of homicide perpetration for non-blacks in 1980 was around 5.8 per 100,000 on average. The city's homicide rate was 20 per 100,000 in 1980 and the city had a population that was 54% black. Let's posit the dispositions of Baltimore's whites and others was about average, with a perpetration rate of 5.8 per 100,000; that of the black population would then have been 32 per 100,000.
Now, 30 years later, the perpetration rate of non-blacks is about 2.8 per 100,000 nationally. Whites &c. account for 37% of Baltimore's population. Baltimore's homicide rate has increased to 37 per 100,000. If the perpetration rate among whites &c is 2.8 per 100,000, that among blacks will have to be around 57 per 100,000. That would mean a 75% increase in the homicide rate among Baltimore blacks even as the homicide rate among ordinary blacks nationwide declined by about 45%.
Note that New York City is carved up into about 60 'community districts'. The most dangerous in 2010 were Ocean Hill / Brownsville and Bedford Stuyvesant, which had homicide rates around 20 per 100,000.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic
The only discussion you need to have about 'race and crime' is to make clear that (1) we all face the same laws and (2) those laws will be enforced without fear or favor and (3) if it has a 'disparate impact', tough.
That is a discussion you can have in every venue - crime control, recruitment and promotion in the civil service, distribution of berths in public higher education, school discipline, &c. And you will always be on the side of justice.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic, @John Johnson
That’s white justice. It will have disparate impact, so it won’t be enforced.
Even drinking water is more expensive than gasoline, and that is why it is one of the most expensive places in the world to live
No it isn’t. And it’s not particularly close.
No it isn't. And it's not particularly close.Replies: @Jonathan Mason
When was the last time you bought a bottle of drinking water in a gas station?
What, am I some kind of freier that buys retail?! You can't compare convenience store purchases of water to gasoline purchases. If they sold gasoline in 8 oz. containers for convenience it would be many times the price at the pump per ounce. A gallon of drinking water in the supermarket is $1.00-1.59. A gallon of gasoline is 4.50-5.00.Replies: @Jonathan Mason
It would depend on the reasons for such ownership. If the Swiss have a strong hunting or sport shooting culture, mass ownership would make reasonable sense. If there’s no concomitant problem with gun crime, then I wouldn’t have a problem with it. Heck, even if they didn’t have such a culture – if say 99% of guns were never used for sport or hunting – and mass ownership could be termed irrational (why own stuff you never use?), I still wouldn’t have a problem if there’s no associated societal violence.
How many of American gun owners use them for hunting and/or sport shooting?
I can believe that, Eddie. 20 x the load over only 18/4 (average) = 4.5 times the number of tires. This type of loading is called “contact stress”. I can see there being a number for which the small or even any light vehicles cause negligible damage in absolute numbers, while the trucks tear the hell out of the road.
Weather is a factor, as the locations with lots of freezing and thawing in one winter (say, southern Michigan) are the worst. In combination, it can be costly.
There ya’ go, John. Gotta have that mandated art. It’d be too much for the locals to pick some local artiste in the neighborhood and feature his paintings on their own. There must be no un-mandated thinking!
The point is that the correlation between IQ and job performance as a railway engineer is not that straightforward. Thomas Sowell has discussed this issue in re metropolitan bus drivers.
Who do you think is committing those 85% additional homicides, the Amish?Replies: @Art Deco
[Drums fingers]
IIRC, the rate of homicide perpetration for non-blacks in 1980 was around 5.8 per 100,000 on average. The city’s homicide rate was 20 per 100,000 in 1980 and the city had a population that was 54% black. Let’s posit the dispositions of Baltimore’s whites and others was about average, with a perpetration rate of 5.8 per 100,000; that of the black population would then have been 32 per 100,000.
Now, 30 years later, the perpetration rate of non-blacks is about 2.8 per 100,000 nationally. Whites &c. account for 37% of Baltimore’s population. Baltimore’s homicide rate has increased to 37 per 100,000. If the perpetration rate among whites &c is 2.8 per 100,000, that among blacks will have to be around 57 per 100,000. That would mean a 75% increase in the homicide rate among Baltimore blacks even as the homicide rate among ordinary blacks nationwide declined by about 45%.
Note that New York City is carved up into about 60 ‘community districts’. The most dangerous in 2010 were Ocean Hill / Brownsville and Bedford Stuyvesant, which had homicide rates around 20 per 100,000.
IIRC, the rate of homicide perpetration for non-blacks in 1980 was around 5.8 per 100,000 on average. The city's homicide rate was 20 per 100,000 in 1980 and the city had a population that was 54% black. Let's posit the dispositions of Baltimore's whites and others was about average, with a perpetration rate of 5.8 per 100,000; that of the black population would then have been 32 per 100,000.
Now, 30 years later, the perpetration rate of non-blacks is about 2.8 per 100,000 nationally. Whites &c. account for 37% of Baltimore's population. Baltimore's homicide rate has increased to 37 per 100,000. If the perpetration rate among whites &c is 2.8 per 100,000, that among blacks will have to be around 57 per 100,000. That would mean a 75% increase in the homicide rate among Baltimore blacks even as the homicide rate among ordinary blacks nationwide declined by about 45%.
Note that New York City is carved up into about 60 'community districts'. The most dangerous in 2010 were Ocean Hill / Brownsville and Bedford Stuyvesant, which had homicide rates around 20 per 100,000.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic
Well what’s your argument, that Baltimore whites must be getting more bloodthirsty or that the stats are wrong?
It is as straightforward as any else in psychology.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51804464_Gun_utopias_Firearm_access_and_ownership_in_Israel_and_Switzerland
One project I’ve followed with great interest since childhood has been the evolution of Miami International Airport, which is landlocked with no room for expansion. Proposals to build a new airport at another location have been scuttled due to environmental concerns. The current setup is adequate, but much time and money were wasted over the years having to rebuild in place while still accommodating a full load of passenger traffic.
I remember reading about the plans for American’s terminal when I was in elementary school. The project was not completed until I was several years out of college. For many years the American area was such a dump that people compared it unfavorably to various Third World airports.
Even LaGuardia was able to build a brand-new terminal from scratch, but MIA is still using the 1959 facility with numerous additions grafted onto it. (At other airports, different terminals are in completely different buildings, but in Miami it’s all just one big building.)
I also follow developments in mass transit. Right now the county is attempting to convert a dedicated busway (formerly a railway) into a “Bus Rapid Transit” line, which supposedly will make the buses nearly as efficient as the elevated rail line we were promised when the voters approved the transit sales tax in 2002. (The seed funding for the mass-transit network was provided in a massive bond issue passed by the voters in 1972. That’s fifty years’ worth of broken promises.)
They’re tearing down all of the existing bus shelters and replacing them with these (photo credit: me):
https://i.ibb.co/chjyHYS/BD2-CE9-B3-6-D47-4-BE1-B900-05-E196-ABD9-B7.jpg
…which are designed to require riders to pay their fare before boarding. (This will allow the buses to load passengers more quickly, or so we are told.)
They’re also adding “signal preemption” to give the buses priority. Signal preemption was attempted in 1997, when the busway first opened. But the timing of the green-yellow-red transition was too rapid and too many drivers tried to beat the light. (Keep in mind that down here it’s legal to turn right on red unless otherwise indicated.) There were dozens if not hundreds of accidents, some fatal, in a six-month time span. Eventually they had to abandon the scheme altogether.
Now they’re adding bus crossings like the ones you see at train intersections. This will exacerbate the existing horrendous traffic into something out of Dante’s Inferno.
The busway runs parallel to the busiest, most congested road (U.S. 1) in the county. It intersects numerous major roads. There is no logic in building a grade-level mass-transit line.
Miami is too close to sea level for underground subways. Elevated rail is the only viable option.
The existing elevated-rail system - often derided as the “train to nowhere” - opened in 1984. It prompted Reagan’s famous quip that it would have been cheaper to buy everyone in Miami a limousine. The Miami Herald once calculated that, for a fraction of the cost, we could have had free buses running every 15 minutes 24/7/365 along every major street in Dade County.
We are paying for expansion of elevated rail. (Like it or not, that’s what the voters were promised, and that’s what they approved.) We have been paying for elevated rail in one form or another since 1972. We have been paying a half-penny sales tax for elevated rail since 2002. And we are not likely to see it in my lifetime.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @prime noticer
“Miami is too close to sea level for underground subways. Elevated rail is the only viable option.”
i’m no expert on this, but the Boring Company already has their proposal out for tunnel construction in Miami.
i couldn’t say on any particular fully completed and operational project whether a 2 way tunnel for tesla vehicles makes for a viable underground transit system, it seems highly specific to where it’s built, city by city. but it does seem technically feasible to build such a thing even in Miami.
the use case possibly does make sense in certain areas for limited routes, unlike passenger rail, which doesn’t work almost anywhere in the US.
When was the last time you bought a bottle of drinking water in a gas station?
What, am I some kind of freier that buys retail?! You can’t compare convenience store purchases of water to gasoline purchases. If they sold gasoline in 8 oz. containers for convenience it would be many times the price at the pump per ounce. A gallon of drinking water in the supermarket is $1.00-1.59. A gallon of gasoline is 4.50-5.00.
The same 20 oz bottle of chilled drinking water inclusive of bottle, cap, and label would cost you $0.35 retail in Ecuador, (and the gasoline would be $2.55 per gallon.)
This shows that the distribution system for getting things like water and gasoline to consumers in the United States is ruinously expensive, because what is the real cost of a plastic bottle and label, and why are they so much more expensive in the US then in other countries of the Western hemisphere?
The only discussion you need to have about 'race and crime' is to make clear that (1) we all face the same laws and (2) those laws will be enforced without fear or favor and (3) if it has a 'disparate impact', tough.
That is a discussion you can have in every venue - crime control, recruitment and promotion in the civil service, distribution of berths in public higher education, school discipline, &c. And you will always be on the side of justice.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic, @John Johnson
The only discussion you need to have about ‘race and crime’ is to make clear that (1) we all face the same laws and (2) those laws will be enforced without fear or favor and (3) if it has a ‘disparate impact’, tough.
So you agree with the mainstream conservative position that Black crime shouldn’t be discussed?
If White conservative men were responsible for most murders would that be discussed in the mainstream media? When criminologists study the problem openly?
That is a discussion you can have in every venue – crime control, recruitment and promotion in the civil service, distribution of berths in public higher education, school discipline, &c. And you will always be on the side of justice.
Naive conservatism.
What happens when liberals point out that blacks are “disproportionately affected” by gun violence? Or when they claim out that America is racist because it imprisons so many Blacks?
What is the response if you can’t point out that most violent crimes are committed by Blacks?
Liberals dominate the narrative and don’t give a damn about what is truly just. Conservatives play this game of ignoring race and trying to focus on individual rights which allows liberals to steamroll them in debates. Nice conservatism fails because it allows liberals to play their deception games. Conservatives can’t call them out which makes them look liked dolts. This type of Regan/Rush conservatism ultimately falls to liberalism. Conservatives can only sit on their hands as liberals make all kinds of “disproportionately affected” arguments.
Almost 30 years ago I watched this ship come into Boston Harbor. The ballet by the guys in the yards was something to see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRP_Sagres_(1937)
Those guys were carrying on a rich tradition.
I too watched a square rigger get underway; it was during the 1976 Tall Ships celebration. Norwegians leaving port on Lake Michigan. As they hauled lines, they chanted. Made my hair stand on end. Men chanting in unison in manly voices. Good stuff. Too little of that today. Physically pulling in a common cause. May we someday experience a return of our solidarity.
What, am I some kind of freier that buys retail?! You can't compare convenience store purchases of water to gasoline purchases. If they sold gasoline in 8 oz. containers for convenience it would be many times the price at the pump per ounce. A gallon of drinking water in the supermarket is $1.00-1.59. A gallon of gasoline is 4.50-5.00.Replies: @Jonathan Mason
Yes but it is indicative of the US being one of the most expensive places in the world to live, because a 20 oz bottle of chilled drinking water in a gas station will probably cost you $2 (or $1.99 they invariably say in the US.)
The same 20 oz bottle of chilled drinking water inclusive of bottle, cap, and label would cost you $0.35 retail in Ecuador, (and the gasoline would be $2.55 per gallon.)
This shows that the distribution system for getting things like water and gasoline to consumers in the United States is ruinously expensive, because what is the real cost of a plastic bottle and label, and why are they so much more expensive in the US then in other countries of the Western hemisphere?
Yes, and unidentified clowns were throwing rocks at train drivers in that area that night. The authorities’ stubborn obsession with prosecuting this driver is accompanied by a curious lack of interest in finding out the identity of those clowns.
i'm no expert on this, but the Boring Company already has their proposal out for tunnel construction in Miami.
i couldn't say on any particular fully completed and operational project whether a 2 way tunnel for tesla vehicles makes for a viable underground transit system, it seems highly specific to where it's built, city by city. but it does seem technically feasible to build such a thing even in Miami.
the use case possibly does make sense in certain areas for limited routes, unlike passenger rail, which doesn't work almost anywhere in the US.Replies: @Stan Adams
I have the utmost respect for Elon Musk, and I might have to eat these words in a few years, but I would expect to see a transcontinental pneumatic tube go into service sooner than an underground transport system in Miami.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRP_Sagres_(1937)
Those guys were carrying on a rich tradition.Replies: @ThreeCranes
There ya go.
I too watched a square rigger get underway; it was during the 1976 Tall Ships celebration. Norwegians leaving port on Lake Michigan. As they hauled lines, they chanted. Made my hair stand on end. Men chanting in unison in manly voices. Good stuff. Too little of that today. Physically pulling in a common cause. May we someday experience a return of our solidarity.
The green lunatics, whether they realise it, want us going back to the stone age.Replies: @epochehusserl
AS do the feminists