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Yes, high speed rail is going to be expensive. Yes, it's now projected to cost much more than the original estimate. (The cost has largely increased due to delays (the longer it takes to build a project, the more it costs), particularly fuelled by NIMBY appeasement ("We don't want the train passing near our house!" "But it is much quieter than standard trains and will increase your property values by being near an HSR station." "Build a tunnel!" "Okay, we'll build a tunnel." "The costs on this project are ballooning!").)

But you have to compare the cost to the alternatives. California's freeways and airports are jammed. With increasing population and mobility, something to move people around will have to be built. And the estimated costs to add volume to airports and highways is estimated to be $100-billion as well.

And, to top it off, high speed rail runs on an operational profit. (This means that yearly revenues are higher than yearly costs.) Everywhere. Yes, high speed rail lines run an operational profit in Japan and France, Spain, Russia, Taiwan and car-loving-and-train-hating America. In Britain all rail is private, and for-profit companies are in fierce competition to pay for the rights to run rail services, which are barely at HSR levels if at all. It's a strongly held misconception that rail travel is unprofitable: HSR makes a profit all over the world, and it usually subsidizes local and regional rail transport (which the US has much of).

And though only the Tokyo-Osaka and Paris-Lyon line have paid off all their construction costs, that's because they're the oldest HSR lines; others are on track to in the future. Which modes of transportation don't pay off their construction costs? Oh, that's right, nearly all roads. Remember Carmageddon/The Carpocalypse, when an overpass outside LA was torn down, shutting traffic for the weekend? That was all so they could widen the highway through a mountain pass. Were the anti-HSR people asking for ridership studies for the Sepulveda Pass? Were they asking for the expansion to run an operational profit, let alone an overall profit? Of course not; only rail is subjected to such standards.

Add to this that a train is much more efficient in transporting this number of people, from an energy, environmental and economic perspective, and this is using studies that are assuming that gas prices will be relatively stable over the next few decades.

Obviously there still has to be overview of the project, making sure money is being spent efficiently and for best value. But the entire transportation sector needs to be looked at from this viewpoint. Airlines can work with rail to transport their passengers on their "last mile", freeing up their planes for more profitable medium- and long-haul routes, like done in Germany (Frankfurt Airport has two train stations). Road funds can be diverted to repairing our existing infrastructure as opposed to building more asphalt that needs to be maintained. And everyone will get to where they are going sooner. If this is done, North America will look back 20 years from now, not wondering "How could they do this?", but instead "How did they wait so long?"

People who actually want to do scientific research are not in a good position at the moment either, unless you count insecure, mediocre-pay employment in endless strings of post-docs as a good position.

It's true that you can make money with a science degree if you don't care about actually advancing fundamental science, though.

I believe that the only profitable HSR line in the world is Paris-Lyon.

There are two HSR lines that have paid off all their construction costs, Paris-Lyon and Tokyo-Osaka.

Taiwan's is the only HSR line in the world right now that is falling behind on the loan payment, but it still covers all of its operating costs through fares. Every other HSR line in the world is making positive progress toward paying off the construction costs.

So what this all boils down to is, what is your definition of "profitable"? I've given three possible definitions from which you may choose.

Sorry, kinda messed up some stats. It's every third house that has a gun, and Switzerland is said to be Europe's best-armed nation. Here's more:

The Swiss and Their Guns
* http://www.miller-mccune.com/politics/the-swiss-and-their-guns-27329/

* http://www.davekopel.com/2a/Foreign/The-Swiss-and-their-Guns.htm (2 different articles)

The Real Science Gap basically makes the same point - the jobs are horrible for scientists, so lots of smart people avoid the field.

"The United States is still pumping out tremendous numbers of new Ph.D.s in the sciences -- more, in fact, than our economy can presently absorb, as there is a well-reported dearth of jobs for newly-minted science Ph.D.s. The same is true in engineering: According to a recent National Science Foundation report, the number of engineers graduating from U.S. schools will continue to grow into the foreseeable future, out-stripping the number of available jobs..." --- 2005 Summer _New Atlantis_ "How We Measure Up"

2009-01-08: Cheap Science

Studies carried out from the 1990s through 2010 by researchers from Columbia U, Computing Research Association (CRA), Duke U, Georgetown U, Harvard U, National Research Council of the NAS, RAND Corporation, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rutgers U, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Stanford U, SUNY Buffalo, UC Davis, UPenn Wharton School, Urban Institute, and US Dept. of Education Office of Education Research & Improvement have reported that the USA has continually been producing more US citizen STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) workers than we've been employing in these fields.

In testimony to the House Science and Technology Committee, Harold Salzman reported that we've been producing as many as 3 times the numbers of STEM workers as we've been employing in these fields.

"Unemployment rates are available and plotted in Figure 6 for chemists, recent mathematics PhDs, and recent biomedical PhDs and MDs. Although not fully comparable in population or time period, these 3 rates, when compared to the overall U.S. unemployment rate, suggest a general increase or leveling in the 1990s, while the general unemployment rate was falling substantially. Rising unemployment in one sector, while the overall economy is doing well, is a strong indicator of developing surpluses of workers, not shortages. Hence, neither earnings patterns nor unemployment patterns indicate an S&E shortage in the data we are able to find." --- William P. Butz, Gabrielle A. Bloom, Mihal E. Gross, Terrene K. Kelly, Aaron Kofner, Helga E. Rippen 2002-11-12 "Is There a Shortage of Scientists and Engineers? How Would We Know?" _RAND Science and Technology Issue Paper_

2009-10-28: "U.S. colleges and universities are graduating as many scientists and engineers as ever, according to a study released on Oct. 28 by a group of academics..."

2010-06-14 Beryl Lieff Benderly _Miller-McCune_ http://www.miller-mccune.com/science/the-real-science-gap-16191/ The Real Science Gap Is a Shortage of Employment Opportunities

* 2010-12-24: "AT&T is getting about 50K applications a month, or around 30 for each person it hires on average, Mr. Smith says." (James R. Hagerty & Joe Light _Wall Street Journal_ "Job ads rising as economy warms up")
* 2010-12-24: Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System receives 10K applications per month (Eileen Ambrose _Baltimore Sun_/_Grand Forks Herald_)
* 2011-02-03: Google received 75K job applications last week.

http://www.kermitrose.com/econ01NoShortage.html more corroboration and citations.

The main reason to become a scientist is because it is fun.

Oh for God's sake. Look, there are tons of us who consider science (or at least our various STEM fields) fun. The question is: when does "do it for the fun, not the money" become just another excuse for a career path in which I can't hope to start a family?

a recent article:

  'Business leaders have cried "scientist shortage," but scores of thousands of young Ph.D.s are laboring in U.S. university labs as low-paid, temporary workers, ostensibly training for permanent faculty positions that will never exist.'

  http://www.miller-mccune.com/science/the-real-science-gap-16191/

The article shows there is no scientist shortage in the US, but a shortage of jobs for scientists, and so "If the nation truly wants its ablest students to become scientists, Salzman says, it must undertake reforms — but not of the schools. Instead, it must reconstruct a career structure that will once again provide young Americans the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career."

The definition I have always heard of American Exceptionalism has more to do with a country that is still an infant compared to most others becoming a world leader/dominant power in just a few centuries using the same humans and not having any unique power due to natural resources, but just by giving individuals the power to control their own destinies more than had been possible on a large scale in any other country.

What a distorted view of American history.

The U.S. rose to power because people of European decent used superior military technology to commit genocide against the natives of land that was both highly fertile and well-forested. (Wood was the oil of the time.) After forming their own nation, those people continued to use slavery and theft to power their economy's expansion up until they were well industrialized. (Via, it ought to be noted, numerous patent violations.)

While the powers of Europe tore each other up in the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, WWI, and WWII, Americans kept stealing land from Indians (and later, from Hawaiians, Filipinos, and other people with fewer guns) and exploiting people of African ancestry and building a strong industrial base. American experienced booms after WWI and WWII by exporting goods to war-ravaged Europe; as the British Empire declined, the U.S. was set to step into the vacuum for a few decades. (I suspect, though, that in the histories a thousand years from now, the U.S. will be a footnote to the British Empire the way Constantinople is a footnote to Rome.) The U.S. then dissipated itself on the "Cold War", running up enormous debt in a dick-size competition with the U.S.S.R.

Don't get me wrong: I'm a fan of the all-American idea of constitutional representative democracy, and proud that the bootprints on Luna are American. And we are the country that taught the world to rock-and-roll, thank you very much. But this "American exceptionalism" nonsense is an ahistorical, anti-intelelctual embarrassment.

There's lots of talk and theorizing, but little research on the effect and influence of lobbyists. Thankfully, there is a large ten year study of lobbying, Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why (available at your favorite bookstore). There's a pretty good review of it at Miller-McCune. An excerpt:

The real outcome of most lobbying -- in fact, its greatest success -- is the achievement of nothing, the maintenance of the status quo. "Sixty percent of the time, nothing happens," says Frank Baumgartner, one author of the book and a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "What we see is gridlock and successful stalemating of proposals, with occasional breakthroughs. We see a pattern of no change, no change and no change -- and then some huge reform."

But those large reforms -- such as health care for 32 million uninsured Americans under President Barack Obama, the scheduled phase-out of the estate tax under President George W. Bush, and the normalization of trade relations with China under President Bill Clinton -- are far more often linked to a change in who inhabits the White House than to campaign contributions or K Street hires.

The weak link between money and policy change is counterintuitive but understandable, the authors say. The balance of power in Washington already hugely favors the rich. The status quo reflects the considerable advantages the wealthy have managed to secure in the law, down through the generations.

[...]and I guarantee you, a computer will never be able to produce the emotions that some of the great artists' recordings can.

I'm sure Emilly Howell beg to differ.

Those german salt mines were supposed to be safe when then put the waste in there. Only a few dozen years later they were proven wrong. (Please check the facts on this one, not your believes)

Hmmm...
Sigmar Gabriel, Germany's environment minister, has called the mine "the most problematic nuclear facility in Europe."
"The standards that were set [in the early days of Asse II] would be completely unacceptable today,"
American salt storage facilities are generally in better shape. James Conca, a geophysicist at New Mexico State University,

Same problem happen in yucca: can you granantee it still is safe in 100 years? And what if the operator goes bankrupt in 50 years, what will the state of yucca be 100 years later? That is a long period!

I can guarantee nothing, but I'd be perfectly willing to take a bet with long odds of a leak. The odds, even now, of Yucca leaking was in the eons, not centuries. As for the operator; that was the Federal government, and as long as our 'no reprocessing' requirement was in place I want the waste stored in a way we can get to it. After all, it's still got valuable fissile material in there!

And because you are talking about glassified waste it is high energy waste, but don' forget there also is a multiple of low radiation waste (gloves, pipes of the centra) that needs to be taken out of the biosfere for a long period.

I wasn't talking about glassification, that was Chibi. Still, as long as we're on the topic; part of the beauty of glassification is that you can even do it with the gloves and the pipes and such.

Honestly enough, it doesn't even 'need' to be taken out of the biosphere for that long. There are a lot of chemicals that are released that is deadlier by the pound or gallon than low level nuclear waste.

This 'Cyber-warrior gap' discussion echoes a similar discussion about the 'Science gap'. One perspective is that not enough smart people are going for a particular career. Another perspective is that actually the smart people consider that career, and decide pursuing that career is for chumps.

If you want to attract smart people, you need to make the career look good. In the science gap, the career is unappealing because the effort/reward ratio is unfavorable (get a Ph.D., do some post-docs, then hope a search committee picks you out of the hundreds or thousands of other applicants for one of the three jobs opening up this year in which you might eventually be offered a permanent job). It sounds like for "cyberwarriors" the situation is similar: spend your time doing stuff that might get you arrested or that nobody cares about and then hope the government suddenly decides to actually start hiring.

I've listened to some excellent music composed by Emmie, a computer program that does much of what you describe (analyses parameters,etc). David Cope is far more prolific this way than composing "by hand". At some point we are going to realise that "creativity" is not about creating anything at all, but rather about generating and recognising interesting permutations. I have every confidence that machines will be producing new and listenable music in the near future.

As David Cope discovered after producing AI-generated scores which emulate classical composers so well that even musically educated listeners couldn't reliably distinguish between "real" and "generated": this article provides more detail.

Ya, about that. The US average for solving murder cases is floating at about 60% [1] I'm not sure what is for theft, but given that fewer resources are brought to bear for a theft than a murder, I'm gonna guess that it's as bad or worse.

Yes, "too good to be true" is exactly the description that I gave it five years ago when I ran into it. It doesn't help much that very few of the authorities on the subject will even recognize its existence, although most psychiatrists accept that the concept is sound.

However, both the scientific and anecdotal evidence supports it. Of the seventy or so studies that have been performed with naltrexone and alcohol, they all either support or at least fail to contradict the results. There are currently numerous people who have taken up the process since the release of the book, and their success rate does seem to fall in the range of 4 out of 5. There are literally tens of thousands in Finland who have undergone the treatment with the same results.

The concept of it being usable for any addiction is close but not quite correct. It's been demonstrated to be usable for opiate addictions, and for endorphin based behavioral issues like kleptomania and gambling addiction. Smoking, however, isn't on the list because nicotine addiction is acetylcholine based.

Miller-McCune.com writer Tom Jacobs posts a story about how the world's various religious traditions may speak of respect for and stewardship of nature, but the current ecological plight suggests the message may need some reinforcement as it moves from pulpit to pew. Check it out here: http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture_society/religions-to-worship-ecologically-1157

Some elderly aren't all there, but if they aren't I doubt they vote much in any case.

Think again. The majority of Americans who actually turn out for elections tends to be much older, and that will probably be true even in this election, despite Obama's youth pull. And, indeed, these seniors have been found to be less likely to make wise decisions when voting.