A lawyer familiar with the case mocked this argument as amounting to, “Damn the legal niceties, this mean judge is getting in our way.” – See more at: http://calwatchdog.com/2014/04/22/gov-browns-legal-strategy-to-prop-up-bullet-train-faltering/#sthash.Na3IFURm.dpuf
This is a problem that won’t be solved until California gets an intelligent electorate.
I still think a high speed train in California is a good idea. I do not know about the issues in this particular implementation in detail but the idea makes a fair amount of sense.
Why is it that the US frowns upon certain kinds of infrastructure investments is something that never made sense to me. I still remember the culture clash the first time I went to the US over a decade ago and most shops had no electronic payment systems. It was better last time I was there but a lot of things still seemed oddly old fashioned and technologically backwards.
The US tends to be an early adopter of a lot of technology which never gets widespread properly for cost effectiveness reasons and then gets obsoleted as everyone else implements better cost effective solutions. I have seen this happen more than once. Cellphones is another example. How long did you guys continue pressing TDMA while most of the world was using GSM?
It makes no economic sense, at least the current plans don’t. Ridership is vastly overestimated.
Many people from outside the country underestimate the vast distances between cities. A train makes no economic sense in many cases.
From what I’ve read, the current plan is to spend many billion dollars (perhaps tens of billions) to build a high-speed railway from Los Angeles to San Francisco. How many people do you think travel between those cities in a year? Today, they can drive, ride a bus or fly between the cities. If the train is ever built, they can still drive, ride a bus or fly. That means the train will only attract a certain percentage of the people who travel between the cities and that percentage will likely depend on the price and convenience. If the ticket price ends up being as high or higher than flying (like Amtrak), if the departure and arrival times aren’t convenient, or if you have to drive too far to get to the train station, people won’t bother to ride it except as a novelty. The train will never break even economically and will be yet another money-suck on taxpayers.
it has to do with the IRR. If a company invests into a cheaper technology or one that may give them better
ability to lock in customers, they will stick with it. So TDMA stuck around because the carriers either had
cheap patents or thought the customers would be easier to keep. GSM means they change a SIM card and
they move on.
@ Godzilla,
Are you aware of the vast differences between the California proposal and high speed rail in Europe?
Just for one, by any standard (including European) the California proposal isn’t actually high speed. It’d be the slowest “high speed” train on the planet. They’ve already admitted that it won’t be able to make the promised 2 hour 40 minute LA to San Fran run on scheduled service. The true number will be closer to four hours, and even that’ll happen only if they convert a lot of the existing rail they currently plan to use to high speed track.
Another is the distance involved. Geography dictates the route (you can’t have a fast train on a track with a lot of curves) so we’re talking on the order of 500 miles.
Given the time it’d take to get from LA to SF on this train (flying is far faster) the train would only be viable if it was cheaper. But, it won’t be, so the ridership projections are suitable only for fertilizer.
The notion of a high speed train might sound attractive at first glance, but as always, the devil is in the details, and in this case, the details make it nonviable.
Folks in America don’t ride trains for speed, they ride them to see the scenery and enjoy travel, just as with cruise ships. Rather then spend money trying to duplicate what Europe and Japan do, mostly out of necessity due to crowded cities not designed for autos and distances too short for aircraft to really be time savers, they should simply upgrade Amtrak and expand its routes. It would cost far less while allowing them to claim victory.
You complain about California but you like living and working there.
Are there no libertarian paradises you would enjoy better, such as Kansas or Idaho?
What kind of moron would think that Kansas is a “libertarian paradise”?
I suppose you could really move to the Libertarian paradise of Somalia.
You still can’t explain why you live in California when it’s such a bunch of commies.
Now Somalia is a “Libertarian paradise”? Your comments get stupider by the minute, which is pretty hard to do.
You still can’t explain why you live in California when you say it’s full of idiots and commies.
Oh, I can explain. I’m just not going to bother to explain it to a moron troll who wouldn’t understand the explanation anyway.
Where do you live? Is your state socialist enough? Why don’t you move to a more socialist state?
I live in DC, clunky government, some social policy. Good policy on Medicaid, and energy,
the housing policy is a little busted, but,improving.
DC is about as socialist as you can get. I’m glad you enjoy living there. I’m glad my taxes go to your medicaid and energy.
You do realize the rest of the country finds you guys there in DC parasites, right?
DC is a net beneficiary of tax funds, much as any headquarters.
On Average though half of the American states are net beneficiaries.
Most of these are Red States. If it weren’t for the largesse of the Blue States,
most of red america would be poorer and even more backwards.
I live in Europe man. By the standards of most of you guys in the US I live in a pinko commie nation. Our Conservative party is more left-wing than the Democrats in the US.
If I had to live in the US I would probably pick some place in California near Silicon Valley or San Diego. Outside California probably Austin, TX or Raleigh, NC.
The US does not seem like a great place to raise a family to me though and as I get older that starts to matter. Crap public school and healthcare system. Lots of crime. I would probably make well enough in there in my field, which is software development, to put them in a private school, etc. But it just seems like a pointless waste of effort which could easily be discarded if anything went wrong and I had a health problem or something. I would probably pay enough in housing to basically obliterate any additional income from moving there in the first place. Last time I did the math it was not good.
There are lots of brilliant people there doing interesting products and that is certainly appealing to me. In here it is a lot more hit and miss to find interesting projects to work on.
Apologies for making you think the comment was addressed to you. It was a response to DN, since he’s obsessed with Rand’s living arrangements.
I would argue that the crap public schools, expensive health care and excessive crime are all the results of the liberals. Proof is very easy to provide. Simply look at the bluest states and you’ll find the worst offenders in all the areas that you pointed out.
Not that Europe is any better. I was simply not impressed by anything European when I lived there. There was definitely a lack of an entrepreneurial spirit. A “spectre” still haunts the continent and I believe it will always be there because Europeans are still serfs at heart. They may have given birth to the Enlightenment, but they certainly never lived up to its principles.
Simply look at the bluest states and you’ll find the worst offenders
Have you actually carried out this exercise? If you google “do blue states have more crime” you find things like:
As for schools, the top-ten states by NEAP scores (MA, VT, NJ, NH, MN, CT, PA, MD, WA, OH) are all states won by Obama in 2008 and 2012. The bottom ten (HI, TN, AL, NV, OK, LA, NM, WV, DC, MS) include 3 Obama “states” and 7 Romney states.
Facts don’t matter to conservatives.
First, you get your answers from Yahoo???
Second, you cherry pick your facts.
Third, your answers are irrelevant because you vote for the person who gives you cheap insurance.
Facts don’t matter to socialists, right DN?
Statewide numbers aren’t terribly useful for comparison purposes because, while there are definitely red states, the so-called “blue” states tend to be deep-blue large cities surrounded by red suburbs and rural areas. The crime rates in big “blue” cities like Chicago, for example, don’t look as bad when averaged together with the very low rates outside the Cook County line, but it’s a way of lying with statistics, like the oft-refuted but evergreen chestnut about women making 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. When you look at violent crime numbers by city, liberal Democratic administrations don’t come off so well. I believe the ten cities with the highest violent crime rates all feature multi-decadal Democratic administrations. No one moves to an entire state, they move to some particular place in a particular state. Beverly Hills and Merced are both in California, but no one would mistake one for the other even in the dark. Check the stats for the place you have in mind if you want to know what the quality of life numbers really are.
It’s all relative. I used to work for Serco North America. Our parent company (Serco) is a major government services provider in the UK and other countries. Many of the services performed by government employees in the US are provided by contractors in the UK, so which country is more socialist?
The cost of living varies widely across the US. My youngest son lives in San Diego. It’s a beautiful place to live but very expensive compared to most of the country. Silicon Valley is even more expensive. However, software is developed in many places outside of California. The crime rate varies widely as well, as does the quality of schools and medical care.
“The cost of living varies widely across the US. ”
Yup. IMO, it looks like Godzilla could set up shop anywhere. Why limit yourself to big cities? How cool would it be to step outside your “office” hop in the kayak and paddle around the lake after lunch? Bring clients out for bbq and water skiing. One could just sit on the deck and watch the people in bikinis cruise by.
You must understand the great division. Those individuals with ambition who are willing to take risk all immigrated to America, and still do when we allow them. Folks like Andy Grove and Elon Musk. Those that just wish for a better life but are too risk adverse to go for it stay in Europe and similar nations.
Public trains and public health care fit in perfectly with the risk adverse nature of Europeans as it puts the decision making on someone else. The same is true in Asia. It turns out most of the teens killed in the Korean ferry accident did so because they meekly obeyed their elders and failed to question their orders even though the knew the ship was sinking. Its difficult to image the average American teen staying meekly in their cabins when they realized the ship was sinking regardless what some adult told them to do.
Mr. Matula, the phrase is “Risk averse”, meaning an “aversion” to risk.
There are no “D”s anywhere in this phrase (let alone this comment), other than the one in capital letters and quotation marks.
if anything went wrong and I had a health problem or something
Judging by how many people come here every year specifically for our health care this seems like a particularly brainless statement.
The US has very good specialist medicine, but lousy general and primary medicine.
However the rest of the world is catching up on specialty medicine. The best Plastic
surgeons in the world are in Brazil, not the US.
“The US does not seem like a great place to raise a family to me though and as I get older that starts to matter. Crap public school and healthcare system. Lots of crime. I ”
It used to be very nice, then Reagonomics cut in.
Boy, now you’re blaming Reagan?
I think I’ll blame Roosevelt for all of our problems.
More like public sector unionism cut in. The unions have destroyed the public schools.
If I am not mistaken Rand used to live in the Republican paradise of Florida and he’s originally from Michigan.
I guess he moved to California because the interesting projects were there. I wonder if he ever asked himself why that is the case though.
In my opinion it is the both the weather and the successful joining of a good college system with a robust financial sector and the informal business relationships to back it up.
There are a lot of reasons, historically, but the current state government is systematically destroying them.
And yet you still live there. Surrounded by liberals.
It’s funny. Before I left the UK, the lefties used to tell me that if I didn’t like living there, I should leave. A few years later, when I told them I had my visa and was leaving, they switched to how evil I was for taking my savings and income and all that money the British government had invested in my education abroad.
Just can’t please ’em either way.
You go to the polls with the electorate you’ve got, and with the knowledge that by definition half have an IQ of 100 or less. It’s been a long, slow slide for California, and you haven’t reached the bottom yet.
Actually, that’s not true, unless it’s a normal distribution. By definition half are less than the median, but not necessarily the average. Pedantic, I know.
Given a Gaussian distribution and a sample size of 30 or 40 million or so, the difference between the average and the median is epsilon.
Yes, but I’m not sure it’s a given that it’s a normal distribution.
Me either. California has roughly 1/8 of the nation’s total population, but 1/3 of its welfare clients. Make of that whatever you will.
Despite the tendency of some to think of California as always having been a liberal paradise, it wasn’t. Even 20 years ago, it was much more evenly divided, politcally, than it is now. Most of California’s infrastructure was built in the 30’s through the 60’s under governors who, except for the late Pat Brown, were mostly Republican. As the state has gotten more lefty, infrastructure has been allowed to crumble in favor of paying fat salaries and even fatter pensions to unionized government workers. The pensions were seriously underfunded, of course, and now nearly every municipality in the state is cutting current government workers in order to pay pensions to the huge tail of retirees. An increasing number of cities here are just declaring bankruptcy and letting the courts hash it out. Fun times. Detroit with palm trees and “on-shore flow.”
In a very real sense, you could say modern California was built by Earl Warren, Pat Brown and Ronald Reagan. Pat Brown’s boy Jerry is the main culrit in its subsequent decline. He allowed unionization of government employees during his first pair of admnistrations in 1974 and things have been going downhill ever since, though the tech boom of the 80’s and 90’s disguised the creeping rot for awhile.
Despite its manifestly great climate, California just has very little else to recommend it these days as a place to relocate to. Even illegal aliens who come over the California border from Mexico are likelier than not to catch a bus to Texas these days. The construction business is still in the dumps and the statewide and L.A. County unemployment rates are both well above the national average. The once-vibrant aerospace sector is mostly gone now. No more missiles in Huntington Beach. No more military airlifters in Long Beach. San Diego aerospace is a shell of its former self too. SpaceX is the only significant aerospace startup in decades.
It’s not like people haven’t noticed all this. California’s overall population is now essentially marking time after growing by leaps and bounds for decades. It’s been 20 years since California was awarded even one new Congressional district. As of the 2020 census, it’s probable CA will lose one or more seats for the first time in its history.
Just another in a long series of liberal “success” stories. Whom the gods would destroy, they first convince to vote Democrat.
SpaceX is the only significant aerospace startup in decades.
Well, if you don’t count XCOR or the Virgin stuff in Mojave. And that’s mostly because Elon loves California (though to be fair, there is still a good tech infrastructure here). It’s not a rational business decision. I was on Warren Olney’s show with him a few years ago, and he was adamant that he didn’t want to leave.
Dick, last time I checked Mojave is still part of California. Maybe when it gets broken up into 5 states….
The plan is for six, actually. Mojave would be in Central California, I think.
I’m well aware of XCOR and the rest of the Mojave startups. I said “significant” about SpaceX because they have roughly 3,000 people on payroll in CA. I don’t know what the headcounts of the various Mojave Mafia operations are, but I don’t think any of them, except maybe Virgin/Scaled or Stratolaunch have even 100 apiece. Most are probably in the low to mid two figures at best. I suspect SpaceX’s current CA employee roster is at least twice that of Mojave in its entirety. The mutiple may well be higher. Hell, Rand, you visit these people all the time. Am I right? I don’t see much of a standing army of NewSpaceers at Mojave. The work being done is crucial, but not labor-intensive.
And it’s hardly a secret that even the Mojave Mafia are getting restless. XCOR intends to expand quite a bit in the next decade, it seems, but none of that expansion is slated for Mojave. I’m dubious that even the new tax break just passed for space companies in CA will have much long-term effect. California is firmly in the hands of lefty parasites who regard businessmen as class enemies to be plundered. True, they’re almost comically corruptible – as the new tax break shows – but the problem with paying Danegeld remains. The long-term prospects for entrepreneurial efforts of any kind in California are not promising.