12 ms·

Watch McDonald’s put up a restaurant. I went to school and they changed zoning along this big road where I lived. When I can back from winter break it was unre

Watch McDonald’s put up a restaurant. I went to school and they changed zoning along this big road where I lived. When I can back from winter break it was unrecognizable and the stores were open. Now in CA - voted for high speed rail and was absolutely promised it would not go over budget. The first contractor quit in disgust SNCF and started doing projects in Africa saying they were less dysfunctional :) Most recent audit committee reports are that everything is on track. We will see One argument on ballot was 10 years of planning went into project before ballot - so starting 1998 or so - 24 years later now

Cyberdog 4y ago
I voted against high speed rail because it it wouldn't be serving anywhere near my area - I get it, the majority of the population lives on the coast between the Bay Area and San Diego, but why increase the tax burden on the people who live in the other 90% of the state who will likely never ride it? - and because I knew it would go over-budget and over-schedule. Unsurprisingly, I got outvoted. And unsurprisingly, however many years and billions of dollars later, there are still no high speed trains running.
- bagels 4y ago
  I voted against it and lived where it would be useful because I didn't think it would be on time or on budget, because no infrastructure project is in the US.
  - vasco 4y ago
    By that yardstick no infrastructure would be built.
    - bagels 4y ago
      We don't get to vote on all of them.
    - MontyCarloHall 4y ago
      Perhaps none should be built until we figure out how to get costs on par with other first world countries.
      - cultofmetatron 4y ago
        THis is disastrously unproductive thinking. perfect is the enemy of good enough and if we don't build infrastructure, there's no incentive to create the supply chains that bring costs down overtime in the first place.
        xboxnolifes 4y ago
        Perfect may be the enemy of good, but thankfully the US' ability to construct in a reasonably fast and affordable way isn't good.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  Personally, this is why I vote against schools. No child of mine goes to public school. Big waste of money. Wish I could do that with universities but that's mostly federal and state. Fortunately, can just vote against property tax and bonds to stop local schools.
  - s5300 4y ago
    Do you not realize how fucked up & demented you sound in saying this…? Education is the only path to a better world. The vast majority of the populace cannot afford private schooling. & to them - you say - fuck them. Makes me feel as if nepotism might be a fetish of yours.
    - wizzwizz4 4y ago
      Education is incredibly important… but I'm not confident US schools actually provide it. It's better than nothing, sure, but if you can do better than schools, why send your child to one? https://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/mnewman/LockhartsLament.pdf https://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/mnewman/LockhartsLament.pd... So long as you make sure they have friends and peers – which is, admittedly, really hard outside the school system – what's the advantage of school?
      - s5300 4y ago
        I went to a public school in one of the 10 poorest counties in the US. I lived well below the poverty line with food insecurity. Socially it was somewhat hellish & there were definitely more than enough teachers that gave zero fucks about anything, but also teachers who cared more than you could ever imagine. I came out of it with full ride scholarships for mechanical engineering, to a University ranked something within the top 20 of whatever with regards to their engineering programs in general, & of their various fields, their MechE & ElecE were regarded as the best (within the engineering college, realized my poor wording could be interpreted in another way). I also received - actually, was harassed with - endless offers from military recruiters to go down a navy nuke/Air Force officer path, w/a $30k-$40k enlistment bonus, just for being in the top percentile of the ASVAB test - offered by my public school, that I reluctantly took. Public schools, administration wise, are in general part of the problem. But cunts of parents raising shitty little cockgargling douchecunts of kids that inhabit the public schools are the larger problem. I don’t know the best solution to the problem, but burning down public schools even more is definitely not it. I think giving a baseline pay of $70k/yr, a $20k or so one time “bonus”, as well as a “if you hate being a teacher, here’s $15k-$30k severance to quit, but you can never be in any position dealing with public education systems again” to every teacher may be a decent start. Sorry for the poor articulation & vocabulary in this comment, quite tired after a long day & in a good amount of physical pain.
- vincnetas 4y ago
  You would benefit by less traffic on roads because someone else would be using high speed trains.
  - chucksmash 4y ago
    If high speed rail does not serve their region, then I think it stands to reason that high speed rail wouldn't improve traffic in their region.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      That is a bad assumption. Because if you have other public transport and regional rail, that connects to the high speed rail backbone. All of sudden somebody that wants to go to LA of SF would take the regional rail to the next high speed train station. Thus those persons wouldn't drive. California has done a lot since the 1990 in terms of regional rail and things like electrification of Caltrain are no brainers. But they need to do a lot more. High speed rail is successful when its integrated into lots of regional rails.
    - Cyberdog 4y ago
      Precisely. The closest high speed rail train station to where I grew up would be… three hours away, maybe? And no, there are no regional trains I could take to get there. I don't think there are any buses either. The entire state is not the SF-LA corridor. That's my entire point.
- CalRobert 4y ago
  Similarly, we should end services to low density areas that can't support themselves. It's very unfair on a per-person basis.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  This doesn't really make sense. The whole point of high speed rail is to reliably and effectively connect the northern and southern existing transit regions that are currently separated. Its like saying the US should never have built rail across the US because most people don't use it. Of course if you just do high speed rail, you don't have much, what you actually need is to extend and expand your regional rail and transit network. Then high speed rail benefits both regional transit networks. Given how much money is invested in highways and how much it cost to build the absurd highway system, rail just makes way more sense. Its pretty funny to me that what is supposed to be 4 largest economy in the world can't manage a half way decent train network. When there are multiple cities with 500k to millions people are between SF and LA. There is easily enough population to have a really successful high speed rail if its correctly connected to a larger regional network.
  - adolph 4y ago
    > Its like saying the US should never have built rail across the US because most people don't use it. Initialization of rail across the US was a greenfield project with little in the way of previous context and self-funded by land grants. The comparison is specious since about the only thing HSW and historic rail have in common is their use of rails.
    - mymythisisthis 4y ago
      To call it 'self-funded' is a bit of a stretch. Most rail financing went bankrupt and had to have been bailed up by the government at some point. Even though rail was a greenfield project, native treaty rights were trampled, that should also be remembered. Technology wise, it was WWI that killed rail, unintentionally. All the trucks, post war, were dumped and sold for cheap. Companies bought them up and started hauling goods to market, without having to buy real-estate, or a factory, near a rail line.
      - adolph 4y ago
        "self-funded": sure, lets say "intended as self-funded"; "native treaty rights": yes, relatively greenfield compared to today WWI and rail: another aspect was nepotistic political control (which might not have been a bad thing but definitely has an odor). [0] I wonder if dumping the Liberty trucks a conceptual/capacity jump start more than a physical one. The 1917 rolling stock was 2,250,000 freight cars [0], and roughly 10k Liberty Trucks were produced [1]. On March 21, 1918, the Railway Administration Act became law, and Wilson's 1917 nationalization order was affirmed. Wilson appointed his son-in-law, Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, as Director General of the newly formed USRA. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Railroad_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Railroad_Adminis... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_truck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_truck
stephen_g 4y ago
It's a little bit different than building a McDonalds - they're building an underground rail line in my city, and just the acoustic sheds and site offices (before they could start even digging a shaft to drop in a tunnel boring machine) on one of the six or so major sites is like building a dozen McDonald restaurants in itself! Not to mention water treatment, spoil handling and treatment, ventilation systems, moving utilities etc. etc.
- onphonenow 4y ago
  If you travel internationally you quickly realize all the excuses for why things take so long are just that. Be curious how long Tesla would take to build a huge full factory in China. In ca the permitting alone is on the order of years.
  - Game_Ender 4y ago
    They built their factory in China in less than a year [0]. Tesla pushes equally hard everywhere which you can see in Germany where they pulled out every stop they could to build quickly and still took about 2 years [1]. 0 - https://www.pmi.org/most-influential-projects-2020/50-most-influential-projects/tesla-gigafactory-shanghai https://www.pmi.org/most-influential-projects-2020/50-most-i... 1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_Berlin-Brandenburg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_Berlin-Brandenbu...
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      The Berlin factory was larger then the initial factory in China. Its more like the second extension in China.
  - adolph 4y ago
    Seems like in the US Tesla can get something up and running within a couple years. May 2020, a selection process was underway by Tesla July 2020, Tesla selected Austin as the site July 2020, Construction began end of 2021, limited production of Model Y starts April 2022, initial deliveries of vehicles built at the factory took place at an opening party called “Cyber Rodeo” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_Texas
Fiahil 4y ago
I think the US don't deserve high speed trains. This can be revisited in a few decades when the population becomes less hostile towards rails. (Cf this : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33502387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33502387) Building a nerwork in Africa, however, is a great idea !
- snovv_crash 4y ago
  I saw protest graffiti against high speed trains in Spain as well.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
newaccount2021 4y ago
madengr 4y ago
panick21_ 4y ago
Thing is, because of property tax systems, these large companies build these box stores and fast food joints in the cheapest way possible so they can basically not pay property taxes and basically write it off after 10 years. The tax system and the infrastructure fees insensitive totally the wrong way of development. And this is why cities are mostly broke.

Cyberdog 4y ago

I voted against high speed rail because it it wouldn't be serving anywhere near my area - I get it, the majority of the population lives on the coast between the Bay Area and San Diego, but why increase the tax burden on the people who live in the other 90% of the state who will likely never ride it? - and because I knew it would go over-budget and over-schedule. Unsurprisingly, I got outvoted. And unsurprisingly, however many years and billions of dollars later, there are still no high speed trains running.

bagels 4y ago
I voted against it and lived where it would be useful because I didn't think it would be on time or on budget, because no infrastructure project is in the US.
- vasco 4y ago
  By that yardstick no infrastructure would be built.
  - bagels 4y ago
    We don't get to vote on all of them.
  - MontyCarloHall 4y ago
    Perhaps none should be built until we figure out how to get costs on par with other first world countries.
    - cultofmetatron 4y ago
      THis is disastrously unproductive thinking. perfect is the enemy of good enough and if we don't build infrastructure, there's no incentive to create the supply chains that bring costs down overtime in the first place.
      - xboxnolifes 4y ago
        Perfect may be the enemy of good, but thankfully the US' ability to construct in a reasonably fast and affordable way isn't good.
renewiltord 4y ago
Personally, this is why I vote against schools. No child of mine goes to public school. Big waste of money. Wish I could do that with universities but that's mostly federal and state. Fortunately, can just vote against property tax and bonds to stop local schools.
- s5300 4y ago
  Do you not realize how fucked up & demented you sound in saying this…? Education is the only path to a better world. The vast majority of the populace cannot afford private schooling. & to them - you say - fuck them. Makes me feel as if nepotism might be a fetish of yours.
  - wizzwizz4 4y ago
    Education is incredibly important… but I'm not confident US schools actually provide it. It's better than nothing, sure, but if you can do better than schools, why send your child to one? https://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/mnewman/LockhartsLament.pdf https://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/mnewman/LockhartsLament.pd... So long as you make sure they have friends and peers – which is, admittedly, really hard outside the school system – what's the advantage of school?
    - s5300 4y ago
      I went to a public school in one of the 10 poorest counties in the US. I lived well below the poverty line with food insecurity. Socially it was somewhat hellish & there were definitely more than enough teachers that gave zero fucks about anything, but also teachers who cared more than you could ever imagine. I came out of it with full ride scholarships for mechanical engineering, to a University ranked something within the top 20 of whatever with regards to their engineering programs in general, & of their various fields, their MechE & ElecE were regarded as the best (within the engineering college, realized my poor wording could be interpreted in another way). I also received - actually, was harassed with - endless offers from military recruiters to go down a navy nuke/Air Force officer path, w/a $30k-$40k enlistment bonus, just for being in the top percentile of the ASVAB test - offered by my public school, that I reluctantly took. Public schools, administration wise, are in general part of the problem. But cunts of parents raising shitty little cockgargling douchecunts of kids that inhabit the public schools are the larger problem. I don’t know the best solution to the problem, but burning down public schools even more is definitely not it. I think giving a baseline pay of $70k/yr, a $20k or so one time “bonus”, as well as a “if you hate being a teacher, here’s $15k-$30k severance to quit, but you can never be in any position dealing with public education systems again” to every teacher may be a decent start. Sorry for the poor articulation & vocabulary in this comment, quite tired after a long day & in a good amount of physical pain.
vincnetas 4y ago
You would benefit by less traffic on roads because someone else would be using high speed trains.
- chucksmash 4y ago
  If high speed rail does not serve their region, then I think it stands to reason that high speed rail wouldn't improve traffic in their region.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    That is a bad assumption. Because if you have other public transport and regional rail, that connects to the high speed rail backbone. All of sudden somebody that wants to go to LA of SF would take the regional rail to the next high speed train station. Thus those persons wouldn't drive. California has done a lot since the 1990 in terms of regional rail and things like electrification of Caltrain are no brainers. But they need to do a lot more. High speed rail is successful when its integrated into lots of regional rails.
  - Cyberdog 4y ago
    Precisely. The closest high speed rail train station to where I grew up would be… three hours away, maybe? And no, there are no regional trains I could take to get there. I don't think there are any buses either. The entire state is not the SF-LA corridor. That's my entire point.
CalRobert 4y ago
Similarly, we should end services to low density areas that can't support themselves. It's very unfair on a per-person basis.
panick21_ 4y ago
This doesn't really make sense. The whole point of high speed rail is to reliably and effectively connect the northern and southern existing transit regions that are currently separated. Its like saying the US should never have built rail across the US because most people don't use it. Of course if you just do high speed rail, you don't have much, what you actually need is to extend and expand your regional rail and transit network. Then high speed rail benefits both regional transit networks. Given how much money is invested in highways and how much it cost to build the absurd highway system, rail just makes way more sense. Its pretty funny to me that what is supposed to be 4 largest economy in the world can't manage a half way decent train network. When there are multiple cities with 500k to millions people are between SF and LA. There is easily enough population to have a really successful high speed rail if its correctly connected to a larger regional network.
- adolph 4y ago
  > Its like saying the US should never have built rail across the US because most people don't use it. Initialization of rail across the US was a greenfield project with little in the way of previous context and self-funded by land grants. The comparison is specious since about the only thing HSW and historic rail have in common is their use of rails.
  - mymythisisthis 4y ago
    To call it 'self-funded' is a bit of a stretch. Most rail financing went bankrupt and had to have been bailed up by the government at some point. Even though rail was a greenfield project, native treaty rights were trampled, that should also be remembered. Technology wise, it was WWI that killed rail, unintentionally. All the trucks, post war, were dumped and sold for cheap. Companies bought them up and started hauling goods to market, without having to buy real-estate, or a factory, near a rail line.
    - adolph 4y ago
      "self-funded": sure, lets say "intended as self-funded"; "native treaty rights": yes, relatively greenfield compared to today WWI and rail: another aspect was nepotistic political control (which might not have been a bad thing but definitely has an odor). [0] I wonder if dumping the Liberty trucks a conceptual/capacity jump start more than a physical one. The 1917 rolling stock was 2,250,000 freight cars [0], and roughly 10k Liberty Trucks were produced [1]. On March 21, 1918, the Railway Administration Act became law, and Wilson's 1917 nationalization order was affirmed. Wilson appointed his son-in-law, Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, as Director General of the newly formed USRA. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Railroad_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Railroad_Adminis... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_truck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_truck

stephen_g 4y ago

It's a little bit different than building a McDonalds - they're building an underground rail line in my city, and just the acoustic sheds and site offices (before they could start even digging a shaft to drop in a tunnel boring machine) on one of the six or so major sites is like building a dozen McDonald restaurants in itself! Not to mention water treatment, spoil handling and treatment, ventilation systems, moving utilities etc. etc.

onphonenow 4y ago
If you travel internationally you quickly realize all the excuses for why things take so long are just that. Be curious how long Tesla would take to build a huge full factory in China. In ca the permitting alone is on the order of years.
- Game_Ender 4y ago
  They built their factory in China in less than a year [0]. Tesla pushes equally hard everywhere which you can see in Germany where they pulled out every stop they could to build quickly and still took about 2 years [1]. 0 - https://www.pmi.org/most-influential-projects-2020/50-most-influential-projects/tesla-gigafactory-shanghai https://www.pmi.org/most-influential-projects-2020/50-most-i... 1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_Berlin-Brandenburg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_Berlin-Brandenbu...
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    The Berlin factory was larger then the initial factory in China. Its more like the second extension in China.
- adolph 4y ago
  Seems like in the US Tesla can get something up and running within a couple years. May 2020, a selection process was underway by Tesla July 2020, Tesla selected Austin as the site July 2020, Construction began end of 2021, limited production of Model Y starts April 2022, initial deliveries of vehicles built at the factory took place at an opening party called “Cyber Rodeo” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_Texas

Fiahil 4y ago

I think the US don't deserve high speed trains. This can be revisited in a few decades when the population becomes less hostile towards rails. (Cf this : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33502387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33502387) Building a nerwork in Africa, however, is a great idea !

snovv_crash 4y ago
I saw protest graffiti against high speed trains in Spain as well.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

newaccount2021 4y ago

madengr 4y ago

panick21_ 4y ago

Thing is, because of property tax systems, these large companies build these box stores and fast food joints in the cheapest way possible so they can basically not pay property taxes and basically write it off after 10 years. The tax system and the infrastructure fees insensitive totally the wrong way of development. And this is why cities are mostly broke.