$3B in tax incentives is not the same thing as a $3B tax credit.
I'm not sure I see much practical difference between Amazon owing $27 billion and Amazon owing $30 billion but getting a $3 billion credit so they only pay $27 billion. There are all sorts of technical details but in the end, Amazon is getting a discount. What am I missing?
What I keep coming back to is how unfair this is to other companies wanting to set up shop in Queens. Fair, to me, means we all abide by the same rules and get the same treatment. If I was the CEO of a 1,000 person company, and I wanted us to move our HQ, I don't think I'd get the same discount. That's not fair or just.
They were going to pay $27 billion instead of $30 billion.
Now they will pay $0 billion.
And while Amazon is busy not paying $27 billion, other companies are free to move in, use that land and those people, and pay $30 billion.
Oh, wait, they're not doing that because it's too expensive and difficult to move a business to Queens? Huh. Perhaps someone ought to fix that general problem instead of giving Amazon a special break because they're a large visible deal instead of many small, invisible deals.
(Disclosure: I don't live in Queens, I never have, and how NYC wants to structure their taxes is none of my business. Go ahead and make it difficult, that's good for me personally.)
Glad it still works for you. I dropped the DVD service years ago. To each his or her own. I hadn't thought about studios stopping production of physical disks but you may have a point.
There are a lot of Netflix wannabes. Disney, CBS, BBC, etc, are all pulling a lot of content off of Netflix. Netflix is a veritable wasteland of well-known content compared to what it was even three years ago, and it's only going to get worse.
This concerns me a lot. This was Netflix's biggest selling point: one stop shopping. Netflix and the other studios are going to poison the well by balkanizing video streaming. If I were Netflix, I'd focus on how to get content back before I worried about account sharing,
Editorial node: I mostly blame the studios for this, not Netflix. Not being in the room though it's hard to say. It takes two to make a deal but either side can put a kabosh on it.
AS/400 based system are some of the most reliable systems money can buy. They can handle insane amounts of workloads and can scale from small systems to complete mainframes.
OK, so I was actually looking into this a few days ago. I'm working on modernizing our build system, part of which includes running Jenkins jobs on AIX servers (to build an AIX client module. Whatever.) We fire off around 10 parallel jobs to build on AIX, Solaris/Sparc, Solaris/x86, Windows, Linux/x86, Linux/x64, and so on. I wanted to understand which ones take the longest because that's what I have to optimize.
Funny, the AIX, PA-RISC, and SPARC systems get absolutely crushed by any x86 system. They may get a lot of work done per CPU cycle but the newer systems have just so many cycles it doesn't matter. AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris might be heroes at getting lots of transactions done on a 100 MHz processor, yay for Big Blue, HP and SunSoft, but if I care about actual absolute throughput, just nope.
It's amazing to me that we can all see the problems a government solution would cause in a case like this, but all want to jump on the "Let government control my healthcare" bandwagon.
Dear, it seems as if either this software was NEVER usable, or are users able to take the necessary care to do their work accurately...?
"Usable" isn't a binary choice, it's a spectrum. I have no doubt this software was considered "usable" at the time and it probably beat the paper system it replaced. Standards have gone up since then and now it seems barely functional.
I'm sure at the time, tradeoffs were made based on having a 24x80 character based screen, or maybe very low resolution graphics. I can just hear the conversation: "the clerk needs to enter a street address and a city name but I don't have room for both at once. I guess I'll add a menu item to enter one, it pops up a form, fill it in and close it, a second menu pick, enter city, close again and we're done." We have better screens now so that tradeoff is no longer appropriate.
Or to put it another way, I could program with "cat" piped to "as". Why do I need an editor, compiler, or (shudder!) interpreted language like JavaScript? It was usable for Kernigan and Richie in 1972, why isn't it good enough now?
For the non-programmers in the crowd, my 1981 Chrysler K-car got me from point A to point B. Why would I replace it? Who needs crumple zones, ABS, power steering and brakes, fuel injection, FM radio (Blue what?), navigation, fully galvanized body, keyless remotes, etc. etc. etc.?
And while every city wants to think they are unique, it's also hard to imagine their ultimate needs are radically different than Chicago, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Phoenix or any other random big city.
I defy you to find another city which considers whether you have free-range, organic, atisinal, non-GMO, LGBTQXTY-friendly handrails on your staircase as part of your property tax assessment. Except maybe Portland.:-p
The world is going to be transformed over the next few decades by work like this. Problems like malaria will be addressed.
I'm sort of with you on this. My guess is in the next 20 years, we will find a way to eradicate malaria using some form of genetic modification. This gene drive might not be the ultimate solution and there are other competing approaches. I'm quote confident this is a good thing. Malaria is a horribly debilitating and widespread disease. Good riddance being done with it.
The bad news is that these early efforts carry unknown risks the good news is that the work is being done by experts in the field. This sort of work will be accessible to hackers in very few years so lets hope that regulated agencies beat them to it. If you thought the nuclear standoff of the cold war years was bad just wait for the biological equivalent. The genie is out of the bottle now, work like this is as much a part of national defense as hyper-sonic missiles.
I'm not sure where you were going on this. Here's what concerns me, genii and bottle wise. CRISPR is pretty easy to use. My college-aged daughter uses it to experiment on tobacco plants. You can go to a web site and order DNA strands to order, all set up to be edited in. Procedurally, only the knowledge of what to make limits the use of CRISPR.
So malaria seems a clear case to me. We should eliminate it. What's the next one, guinea worm? Fine, out it goes too. Lyme disease? Sure, gone. The list of pests goes on and on, and no one is going to cry over the top ones. But what happens when we get to pigeons in New York City? They're a pest too. Suppose some bright spark reads up on this, sees how gene drives works, and just tweaks the process to make pigeons sterile? That doesn't seem implausible if this technique becomes well known and is shown to work.
That's the slippery slope I'm concerned about. We'll get good at eliminating plague species and about the time we've eliminated most of the really nasty ones, people will become less careful and start eliminating annoying but less clearly bad species. That's what I'm worried about and that's what we need to start thinking about now. And I think thinking about it when it's plausible but not actually practical seems a good time for sober consideration.
The food chain isn't a single rope, it is crosslinked and has loops all over the damn place. Anything which eats mosquitos will happily eat a fly and with less mosquitos around there will be more of the flies.
I'm curious. Do you actually know this or just suspect it? Some animals are really, really picky about what they eat (e.g. blue whales only eat krill). If you said there are spider species which only eat one of these species of mosquitoes, I would believe you. I'd then have to think about how this would affect the spiders and whether we care more about human health or some spiders. My guess is I'm for the humans because malaria is a horrible disease but I think we should make sure we look into potential consequences.
That being said, this stage of the experiment seems pretty well thought through. They seem pretty careful about not letting the modified bugs lose, and that any which escape will quickly die (and not breed). Given that they're being quite careful where and how they test the bugs, I'm relatively confident the research team is looking into things as obvious as what species depends on them. We had enough careless environmental modification over the last two centuries that they have to know this is an issue.
Yes, I missed the word raise. The idea being that a business might prefer giving money to employees instead of government. Tax is on profit after expenses.
I understand the sentiment but doubt the numbers work out. If I give an employee a $1 raise, that reduces my tax liability by something like 28 cents (or whatever the corporate tax rate is). The business has a lower profit by 72 cents. It's the same argument people give when they say they don't want to pay off their mortgage because they don't want to lose the tax deduction.
Personally, I'd consider giving people raises (although I don't employ anyone so this is not an issue) because I get some personal satisfaction giving people money instead of paying taxes. Turns out most people feel that way: they choose a globally sub-optimal solution if that solution hurts someone or something they don't like.
Wouldn't giving employees actually lower the income tax for the corporation as it is an expense that reduces profits.
Giving employees what? I think you're missing a word here.
It doesn't matter though because you raise an interesting point. Yes, there will be all sorts of adjustments. How this would all play out is beyond me. Someone who actually studied economics might be able to sort it out but that's not me.
What does that say to working people that a company would leave them high and dry simply because some people raised criticisms?
What does it say? It says companies care a lot about their reputations. It says that companies don't want to set up shop where even a small minority object. It says that companies, even very large ones, can't afford to piss off their customers.
And most importantly, Mayor de Blasio, it says that you don't have a right to those jobs. People get to make deals and they get to walk away from them if they change their minds. Perhaps you should think about that a little harder the next time you offer a sweetheart deal to some company.
Corporations don't pay taxes period, that's just the cost of doing business. You, the consumer, are the ones paying the tax.
I'm with you, corporations don't pay taxes. Or more specifically, corporations don't feel the pain of taxes because a corporation is not a human. But I don't think it's a given that consumers bear the burden.
Here's how I think about it. You're going to collect taxes and those taxes are ultimately going to come out of someone's pocket. That person will now have less cash to spend on things they'd like to spend on. This is the true cost of a tax.
Now, who will that person be? It will depend on a lot of specifics. The corporation could lower its dividend, thus paying the tax out of its profits. That will affect the investors and they'll bear the burden. The corporation could raise prices. It could avoid giving employees raises. It could switch to buying less expensive inputs and push the burden onto suppliers.
One could imagine experiments where you try to tease out which of these happens in practice. The entire practice of microeconomics is basically focused on this question. I don't know if anyone has succeeded at this and I don't know of you can deduce any broad generalizations.
To tax geeks, the treatment of executive stock options makes perfect sense: A tax deduction on the corporate side is balanced by taxable income to the employee.
So at the risk of spoiling all the entertaining outrage, you're correct the vast majority of the time. I'm married to a tax accountant so she explains this all to me all the time. I've concluded that the tax code is an awful lot like software. You're constantly engineering the code to ensure that any income eventually gets taxed at the right rate and that there aren't any corner cases which allow income to leak out. So when you look at some goofy seeming provision, there's often a pretty plausible rationalization behind it.
Let me temper that. For provisions which apply to people in general, there's often a plausible reason. For specific tax breaks for, say, Amazon HQ2, it might be a pure giveaway.
They are a business expense and are passed directly to the consumer of their goods and/or services.
So actually, you pay their taxes.
Basically true and there are other ways a corporation can react. In theory, business can also depress wages and benefits, reduce profits, buy cheaper supplies, and probably other things. Depending on elasticities in the markets, some of these might not be very practical. However, it seems unlikely to me that 100% of the tax cost will go to higher prices 100% of the time.
That doesn't change your deeper point that the business will pass the tax burden on to real humans somehow. The business itself doesn't feel any actual pain from the tax.
No, Social security and SSI disability are paid by both the employee and the employer
A philosophical nit but when the dust settles, corporations don't pay taxes. They may write the check but "the corporation" is just a middleman.
Eventually the tax burden will fall on real flesh and blood humans. It may be the employees (through lower wages and benefits), the customers (through higher prices), the investors (through lower profits), or the suppliers (through buying cheaper or fewer inputs). There are probably other ways the tax gets passed along. In any real situation, the corporation will react in some mix of all these ways and the specifics will depend on many details.
When the burden gets to that human, they have to make a choice about what not to buy because they now have less money to buy things with. That's who feels the pain of the tax. And by the way, that's the ultimate cost of the tax: what that human had to give up because they were paying a tax instead.
The original route: Sacramento/LA. Why? California's two big population centers are LA and the SF Bay Area.
Sacramento is a 1-2 hour drive from the Bay Area (depending on which part of the BA you're talking about).
In concept, San FranciscoSan JoseLong cruise stageMultiple LA stopsSan Diego might make sense if you really optimize for travel time. You're competing with flying (about 45 minutes in the air) and driving (5 hours from the south bay to north LA, and you have your car there to boot). Routing it via Fresno and Bakersfield was just too expensive in terms of travel time to make it work. In addition, the only travel-time-feasible routes through the Bay Area (through the middle of San Jose and up the peninsula, 200 MPH the entire way) were not politically feasible so this was never, ever going to actually work.
Why can China figure out how to construct 18,000 miles of high speed rail, and we can't even figure out how to connect LA to SF?
Could that be because we already have a transportation system which beats the snot out of high speed rail? I'd prefer to fly any day compared to the monstrosity they were building.
I mean, this never passed the laugh test. If you want high speed rail, connect the East Coast. Duh. That's the only part of the country with enough people and destinations the right distances from each other to make HSR worth considering.
As a point of comparison, we were planning a trip to France, Germany, and Austria for this summer. Even in Europe, with it's highly touted rail system, it made no sense to take trains to get around. Flying was cheaper and faster. I was quite disappointed because I like taking trains.
Except that California is one of the wealthiest states with the highest wages.
I'll have to look this up but California, being so large, is a microcosm of the entire US. We have rich, liberal areas. We have poor, bright red areas. We have everything in between.
The state tends to seem bright blue and that's not wrong. There are enough urban elite liberals that they dominate state politics. But don't believe that means the entire state feels that way.
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$3B in tax incentives is not the same thing as a $3B tax credit.
I'm not sure I see much practical difference between Amazon owing $27 billion and Amazon owing $30 billion but getting a $3 billion credit so they only pay $27 billion. There are all sorts of technical details but in the end, Amazon is getting a discount. What am I missing?
What I keep coming back to is how unfair this is to other companies wanting to set up shop in Queens. Fair, to me, means we all abide by the same rules and get the same treatment. If I was the CEO of a 1,000 person company, and I wanted us to move our HQ, I don't think I'd get the same discount. That's not fair or just.
They were going to pay $27 billion instead of $30 billion.
Now they will pay $0 billion.
And while Amazon is busy not paying $27 billion, other companies are free to move in, use that land and those people, and pay $30 billion.
Oh, wait, they're not doing that because it's too expensive and difficult to move a business to Queens? Huh. Perhaps someone ought to fix that general problem instead of giving Amazon a special break because they're a large visible deal instead of many small, invisible deals.
(Disclosure: I don't live in Queens, I never have, and how NYC wants to structure their taxes is none of my business. Go ahead and make it difficult, that's good for me personally.)
Glad it still works for you. I dropped the DVD service years ago. To each his or her own. I hadn't thought about studios stopping production of physical disks but you may have a point.
This assumes that 100% of the moochers would have paid for an account if they didn't mooch.
Furthermore, that 100% of the moochers would have bought a Netflix subscription if they couldn't mooch.
There are a lot of Netflix wannabes. Disney, CBS, BBC, etc, are all pulling a lot of content off of Netflix. Netflix is a veritable wasteland of well-known content compared to what it was even three years ago, and it's only going to get worse.
This concerns me a lot. This was Netflix's biggest selling point: one stop shopping. Netflix and the other studios are going to poison the well by balkanizing video streaming. If I were Netflix, I'd focus on how to get content back before I worried about account sharing,
Editorial node: I mostly blame the studios for this, not Netflix. Not being in the room though it's hard to say. It takes two to make a deal but either side can put a kabosh on it.
AS/400 based system are some of the most reliable systems money can buy. They can handle insane amounts of workloads and can scale from small systems to complete mainframes.
OK, so I was actually looking into this a few days ago. I'm working on modernizing our build system, part of which includes running Jenkins jobs on AIX servers (to build an AIX client module. Whatever.) We fire off around 10 parallel jobs to build on AIX, Solaris/Sparc, Solaris/x86, Windows, Linux/x86, Linux/x64, and so on. I wanted to understand which ones take the longest because that's what I have to optimize.
Funny, the AIX, PA-RISC, and SPARC systems get absolutely crushed by any x86 system. They may get a lot of work done per CPU cycle but the newer systems have just so many cycles it doesn't matter. AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris might be heroes at getting lots of transactions done on a 100 MHz processor, yay for Big Blue, HP and SunSoft, but if I care about actual absolute throughput, just nope.
It's amazing to me that we can all see the problems a government solution would cause in a case like this, but all want to jump on the "Let government control my healthcare" bandwagon.
Amen, brother. Funny about that, huh?
Dear, it seems as if either this software was NEVER usable, or are users able to take the necessary care to do their work accurately...?
"Usable" isn't a binary choice, it's a spectrum. I have no doubt this software was considered "usable" at the time and it probably beat the paper system it replaced. Standards have gone up since then and now it seems barely functional.
I'm sure at the time, tradeoffs were made based on having a 24x80 character based screen, or maybe very low resolution graphics. I can just hear the conversation: "the clerk needs to enter a street address and a city name but I don't have room for both at once. I guess I'll add a menu item to enter one, it pops up a form, fill it in and close it, a second menu pick, enter city, close again and we're done." We have better screens now so that tradeoff is no longer appropriate.
Or to put it another way, I could program with "cat" piped to "as". Why do I need an editor, compiler, or (shudder!) interpreted language like JavaScript? It was usable for Kernigan and Richie in 1972, why isn't it good enough now?
For the non-programmers in the crowd, my 1981 Chrysler K-car got me from point A to point B. Why would I replace it? Who needs crumple zones, ABS, power steering and brakes, fuel injection, FM radio (Blue what?), navigation, fully galvanized body, keyless remotes, etc. etc. etc.?
And while every city wants to think they are unique, it's also hard to imagine their ultimate needs are radically different than Chicago, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Phoenix or any other random big city.
I defy you to find another city which considers whether you have free-range, organic, atisinal, non-GMO, LGBTQXTY-friendly handrails on your staircase as part of your property tax assessment. Except maybe Portland. :-p
The world is going to be transformed over the next few decades by work like this. Problems like malaria will be addressed.
I'm sort of with you on this. My guess is in the next 20 years, we will find a way to eradicate malaria using some form of genetic modification. This gene drive might not be the ultimate solution and there are other competing approaches. I'm quote confident this is a good thing. Malaria is a horribly debilitating and widespread disease. Good riddance being done with it.
The bad news is that these early efforts carry unknown risks the good news is that the work is being done by experts in the field. This sort of work will be accessible to hackers in very few years so lets hope that regulated agencies beat them to it. If you thought the nuclear standoff of the cold war years was bad just wait for the biological equivalent. The genie is out of the bottle now, work like this is as much a part of national defense as hyper-sonic missiles.
I'm not sure where you were going on this. Here's what concerns me, genii and bottle wise. CRISPR is pretty easy to use. My college-aged daughter uses it to experiment on tobacco plants. You can go to a web site and order DNA strands to order, all set up to be edited in. Procedurally, only the knowledge of what to make limits the use of CRISPR.
So malaria seems a clear case to me. We should eliminate it. What's the next one, guinea worm? Fine, out it goes too. Lyme disease? Sure, gone. The list of pests goes on and on, and no one is going to cry over the top ones. But what happens when we get to pigeons in New York City? They're a pest too. Suppose some bright spark reads up on this, sees how gene drives works, and just tweaks the process to make pigeons sterile? That doesn't seem implausible if this technique becomes well known and is shown to work.
That's the slippery slope I'm concerned about. We'll get good at eliminating plague species and about the time we've eliminated most of the really nasty ones, people will become less careful and start eliminating annoying but less clearly bad species. That's what I'm worried about and that's what we need to start thinking about now. And I think thinking about it when it's plausible but not actually practical seems a good time for sober consideration.
The food chain isn't a single rope, it is crosslinked and has loops all over the damn place. Anything which eats mosquitos will happily eat a fly and with less mosquitos around there will be more of the flies.
I'm curious. Do you actually know this or just suspect it? Some animals are really, really picky about what they eat (e.g. blue whales only eat krill). If you said there are spider species which only eat one of these species of mosquitoes, I would believe you. I'd then have to think about how this would affect the spiders and whether we care more about human health or some spiders. My guess is I'm for the humans because malaria is a horrible disease but I think we should make sure we look into potential consequences.
That being said, this stage of the experiment seems pretty well thought through. They seem pretty careful about not letting the modified bugs lose, and that any which escape will quickly die (and not breed). Given that they're being quite careful where and how they test the bugs, I'm relatively confident the research team is looking into things as obvious as what species depends on them. We had enough careless environmental modification over the last two centuries that they have to know this is an issue.
I've heard of strapping weights to your ankles to get a more intense workout. Do bricked shoes count? Maybe I should run with real bricks.
but fuck me if that doesn't fit like a fucking glove...
Sneaker. Fits like a good sneaker. And you're not wrong.
I'll be glad when Hollywood gets back to making more movies that actually have stories and quality acting.
Back to?
Do you mean Tracy/Hepburn movies?
Yes, I missed the word raise. The idea being that a business might prefer giving money to employees instead of government. Tax is on profit after expenses.
I understand the sentiment but doubt the numbers work out. If I give an employee a $1 raise, that reduces my tax liability by something like 28 cents (or whatever the corporate tax rate is). The business has a lower profit by 72 cents. It's the same argument people give when they say they don't want to pay off their mortgage because they don't want to lose the tax deduction.
Personally, I'd consider giving people raises (although I don't employ anyone so this is not an issue) because I get some personal satisfaction giving people money instead of paying taxes. Turns out most people feel that way: they choose a globally sub-optimal solution if that solution hurts someone or something they don't like.
Wouldn't giving employees actually lower the income tax for the corporation as it is an expense that reduces profits.
Giving employees what? I think you're missing a word here.
It doesn't matter though because you raise an interesting point. Yes, there will be all sorts of adjustments. How this would all play out is beyond me. Someone who actually studied economics might be able to sort it out but that's not me.
What does that say to working people that a company would leave them high and dry simply because some people raised criticisms?
What does it say? It says companies care a lot about their reputations. It says that companies don't want to set up shop where even a small minority object. It says that companies, even very large ones, can't afford to piss off their customers.
And most importantly, Mayor de Blasio, it says that you don't have a right to those jobs. People get to make deals and they get to walk away from them if they change their minds. Perhaps you should think about that a little harder the next time you offer a sweetheart deal to some company.
Corporations don't pay taxes period, that's just the cost of doing business. You, the consumer, are the ones paying the tax.
I'm with you, corporations don't pay taxes. Or more specifically, corporations don't feel the pain of taxes because a corporation is not a human. But I don't think it's a given that consumers bear the burden.
Here's how I think about it. You're going to collect taxes and those taxes are ultimately going to come out of someone's pocket. That person will now have less cash to spend on things they'd like to spend on. This is the true cost of a tax.
Now, who will that person be? It will depend on a lot of specifics. The corporation could lower its dividend, thus paying the tax out of its profits. That will affect the investors and they'll bear the burden. The corporation could raise prices. It could avoid giving employees raises. It could switch to buying less expensive inputs and push the burden onto suppliers.
One could imagine experiments where you try to tease out which of these happens in practice. The entire practice of microeconomics is basically focused on this question. I don't know if anyone has succeeded at this and I don't know of you can deduce any broad generalizations.
To tax geeks, the treatment of executive stock options makes perfect sense: A tax deduction on the corporate side is balanced by taxable income to the employee.
So at the risk of spoiling all the entertaining outrage, you're correct the vast majority of the time. I'm married to a tax accountant so she explains this all to me all the time. I've concluded that the tax code is an awful lot like software. You're constantly engineering the code to ensure that any income eventually gets taxed at the right rate and that there aren't any corner cases which allow income to leak out. So when you look at some goofy seeming provision, there's often a pretty plausible rationalization behind it.
Let me temper that. For provisions which apply to people in general, there's often a plausible reason. For specific tax breaks for, say, Amazon HQ2, it might be a pure giveaway.
They are a business expense and are passed directly to the consumer of their goods and/or services. So actually, you pay their taxes.
Basically true and there are other ways a corporation can react. In theory, business can also depress wages and benefits, reduce profits, buy cheaper supplies, and probably other things. Depending on elasticities in the markets, some of these might not be very practical. However, it seems unlikely to me that 100% of the tax cost will go to higher prices 100% of the time.
That doesn't change your deeper point that the business will pass the tax burden on to real humans somehow. The business itself doesn't feel any actual pain from the tax.
No, Social security and SSI disability are paid by both the employee and the employer
A philosophical nit but when the dust settles, corporations don't pay taxes. They may write the check but "the corporation" is just a middleman.
Eventually the tax burden will fall on real flesh and blood humans. It may be the employees (through lower wages and benefits), the customers (through higher prices), the investors (through lower profits), or the suppliers (through buying cheaper or fewer inputs). There are probably other ways the tax gets passed along. In any real situation, the corporation will react in some mix of all these ways and the specifics will depend on many details.
When the burden gets to that human, they have to make a choice about what not to buy because they now have less money to buy things with. That's who feels the pain of the tax. And by the way, that's the ultimate cost of the tax: what that human had to give up because they were paying a tax instead.
So join it to BART in San Jose. No need to go all the way to SF.
The budget was 60 minutes from LA to SF. Just taking BART from San Jose to SF is going to take longer than that so that's not an option.
The original route: Sacramento/LA. Why? California's two big population centers are LA and the SF Bay Area.
Sacramento is a 1-2 hour drive from the Bay Area (depending on which part of the BA you're talking about).
In concept, San FranciscoSan JoseLong cruise stageMultiple LA stopsSan Diego might make sense if you really optimize for travel time. You're competing with flying (about 45 minutes in the air) and driving (5 hours from the south bay to north LA, and you have your car there to boot). Routing it via Fresno and Bakersfield was just too expensive in terms of travel time to make it work. In addition, the only travel-time-feasible routes through the Bay Area (through the middle of San Jose and up the peninsula, 200 MPH the entire way) were not politically feasible so this was never, ever going to actually work.
Why can China figure out how to construct 18,000 miles of high speed rail, and we can't even figure out how to connect LA to SF?
Could that be because we already have a transportation system which beats the snot out of high speed rail? I'd prefer to fly any day compared to the monstrosity they were building.
I mean, this never passed the laugh test. If you want high speed rail, connect the East Coast. Duh. That's the only part of the country with enough people and destinations the right distances from each other to make HSR worth considering.
As a point of comparison, we were planning a trip to France, Germany, and Austria for this summer. Even in Europe, with it's highly touted rail system, it made no sense to take trains to get around. Flying was cheaper and faster. I was quite disappointed because I like taking trains.
Except that California is one of the wealthiest states with the highest wages.
I'll have to look this up but California, being so large, is a microcosm of the entire US. We have rich, liberal areas. We have poor, bright red areas. We have everything in between.
The state tends to seem bright blue and that's not wrong. There are enough urban elite liberals that they dominate state politics. But don't believe that means the entire state feels that way.