It would work great if they had built it back in the 1960s. You could get a project done back then, and the land and labor would have been cheap. But we can't go back in time to the 1960s to build it. And now that it's going to be the 2020s, the world has moved on and there are less backward looking alternatives.
Long before (the plan says) you can take a high speed train from San Francisco to LA, you'll be able to hire a robot car to drive you.
And it will pick you up and drop you off wherever you are going on your own schedule. It will be a little slower, but not that much because it won't stop in Merced or Palmdale unless you want it to, and because robot cars will be safe on rural freeways at 100 mph at least. The price will probably be less than the price of an HSR ticket (and almost surely less than the cost of the HSR ride) for 1 passenger.
For the environmentally religious types, there will probably be all electric options that only take a little longer because you have to switch cars once or twice along the way.
And there will be cheaper, faster options to fly, of course. With robot cars picking you up and dropping you at the airport.
Or much much cheaper, slower options involving busses.
But HSR is needed because... um... trains. Ideas based on emotion or faith are self-justifying.
Because upgrading the tracks doesn't increase average speed very much. The trains still have a lot of stops so speeds average slower than driving.
Plus we have airplanes now. Any money that could be spent on trains could be spent much more efficiently to solve whatever issues might make people want to choose rail travel over airline travel.
Can you imagine the pollution produced by airliners?
I'm not a member of the green religion, so my airline flights aren't a sin.
Grand railway terminals can be placed lin the heart of cities
That's not how they are building the train in CA though. The high speed transfers are (planned to be) from the far ends of the commuter rail systems, far outside the heart of the city. They abandoned the plan to directly link the city centers to keep the cost under $100 Billion.
Why not build a railway for the entire route, so people can travel city centre to city centre, without changing modality?
Because it's slower, much more expensive, and technologically backward. And airports can serve people who don't just want to go between LA and SF.
Make those states not fucking suck and people will want to live there and start companies there.
Yeah, that's the goal.
We have a concentration of educated people here.
Other places should be allowed to import more educated people. By changing the rules for H-1Bs.
Of course, the fucking electoral college means that California consistently gets raped on taxes, and then again at vote time.
Californians love to vote for more taxes. California consistently supports high tax candidates and policies that lead to California paying more. So you can't really be for more influence for California and not also be for more taxes.
But the central question is: why should the rest of the US support an H-1B program where almost all the benefits go to only a few places?
Plenty of people care about living on a 2+ acre plot of land more important than access to recent Broadway musicals, or are satisfied with Outback Steakhouse and Chili's being the best food options in their town, but once people are introduced to the options urban living offers most choose either city life or high rent suburbs.
People mostly live in expensive suburbs because we have a coercive government school system that fails to educate your children unless you live in an expensive area. You could live in a cheaper area and send your kids to a private school, but private school is expensive, there are limited options, you still have to pay for the government schools that you don't use, and if you own a house in a neighborhood where the schools are bad your house doesn't go up in value.
It's a system that hurts generation after generation of poor and lower middle class people. But it can't be solved because rich people in rich neighborhoods have good schools that they don't want changed. -- Regardless of this preference though, US immigration rules exist to benefit the US. If all the benefits are going to a tiny fraction of the country, then the rest of the country should adjust the rules to spread the benefits out to the country at large.
You know, precisely the kind of workers you want to come to the US
Why do I want that? I don't live in San Jose and I'm not one of Facebook's VCs. Why does anyone in America outside of San Jose want yet another software guy in San Jose?
Immigration laws are supposed to benefit the US. Not just San Jose. (And not really foreign nationals either -- countries make laws for their own benefit.)
Nothing if you are a farmer. Everything if you are a software engineer.
What if you're someone who wants life to be about something else in addition to work?
I don't think you've ever been to Idaho. They have Internet there.
Yes, like top talent is going to want to move to the US to live in a shitty city.
If they are prejudiced against those places in America then they are welcome to stay home.
You will only get workers from places that are even shittier,
San Jose isn't exactly a paradise, you know.
So who do you think is going to want to come to the US to live in Idaho under those conditions?
What's wrong with Idaho? You can own a great big house on a middle-class income. There's skiing and hunting and fishing. It's a very American place. If you find Americanism objectionable, then (obviously) don't come here to live.
If they wanted to do that, why wouldn't they already be doing it?
And how many companies do you really think have a business model that depends on importing H-1Bs and paying them $65k? Lots of people would welcome those companies to go offshore in order to free up H-1B slots for higher-paid people and to preserve some middle-income jobs for the people who are already here.
I would restrict H-1Bs to only areas of the country where residential rents (per sq. foot) are in the lower 50 percentile. If Google or Facebook wants to hire someone on an H-1B, open an office in Idaho or Mississippi or Fresno and hire them there. High skilled immigration is supposed to help the US, not just San Jose.
Or, alternately, if you want to hire $1 worth of H-1B payroll in a high rent area, then move $3 in payroll to a lower rent area.
This would help immigrants learn about America and Americans learn about immigrants. And it would help encourage tech companies to open facilities somewhere where people go to live rather than somewhere people go only to work.
I work in the semiconductor industry and our ASIC designs have seen a few large jumps in productivity: - Transistors and custom layouts transitioned to standard cell flows and automated P&R. - Design using logic blocks transitioned to synthesized design using RTL with HDLs. - Most recently, we are synthesizing circuits directly from C language.
In the same timeframe, programming has remained more or less the same as it always was. New languages offer only incremental productivity improvements, and most of the big problems from 10 or 20 years ago remain big problems. Programmers still have to deal with syntax issues in various languages, and if I want parallel execution in my code, I have to design for it from the beginning.
Software is helping us design our ASIC circuits from higher and higher level abstractions. But software doesn't seem to be helping us write our software. The abstractions aren't much higher level.
Do you know of any initiatives that could produce a step-function increase (say 5-10x) in coding productivity for average engineers?
When I first heard rumors about what became Swift, that's what I was hoping for. But it turned out to be just another programming language.
If Amazon makes a profit doing that, they'll get in trouble for "price gouging". It makes more business sense not to sell needed equipment or supplies to disaster victims.
Certainly it doesn't make business sense to make any special effort to bring needed goods to disaster victims for sale -- because if they charge extra to cover the extra costs it's "price gouging" again. That really too bad for disaster victims who need stuff and would be willing to pay to make it worth Amazon's trouble.
How do you think they could be brought down? They aren't really vulnerable to small arms fire. If you built a fleet of sizable quadcopter drones with fuel supplies and flamethrowers you might be able to do it. But I think we can trust people not to do that.
It will be news when it actually happens. Can't we wait until then instead of pretending that it's news that something is supposedly going to happen in a few hours?
Slashdot Mirror
It would work great if they had built it back in the 1960s. You could get a project done back then, and the land and labor would have been cheap. But we can't go back in time to the 1960s to build it. And now that it's going to be the 2020s, the world has moved on and there are less backward looking alternatives.
Also, it can be tricky to drive from London to Paris while sending emails.
Long before (the plan says) you can take a high speed train from San Francisco to LA, you'll be able to hire a robot car to drive you.
And it will pick you up and drop you off wherever you are going on your own schedule. It will be a little slower, but not that much because it won't stop in Merced or Palmdale unless you want it to, and because robot cars will be safe on rural freeways at 100 mph at least. The price will probably be less than the price of an HSR ticket (and almost surely less than the cost of the HSR ride) for 1 passenger.
For the environmentally religious types, there will probably be all electric options that only take a little longer because you have to switch cars once or twice along the way.
And there will be cheaper, faster options to fly, of course. With robot cars picking you up and dropping you at the airport.
Or much much cheaper, slower options involving busses.
But HSR is needed because ... um ... trains. Ideas based on emotion or faith are self-justifying.
Not in California. It's always a drought here, regardless of how many times it rains.
Neither LAX nor SFO airports are on the outskirts. Nor is SAN, nor SNA, nor SJC. Which California airport are you talking about?
Because upgrading the tracks doesn't increase average speed very much. The trains still have a lot of stops so speeds average slower than driving.
Plus we have airplanes now. Any money that could be spent on trains could be spent much more efficiently to solve whatever issues might make people want to choose rail travel over airline travel.
You should make up more interesting numbers. Say your $10 would save $10000. Why tell merely a dramatic story when you could tell a fantastic one?
Can you imagine the pollution produced by airliners?
I'm not a member of the green religion, so my airline flights aren't a sin.
Grand railway terminals can be placed lin the heart of cities
That's not how they are building the train in CA though. The high speed transfers are (planned to be) from the far ends of the commuter rail systems, far outside the heart of the city. They abandoned the plan to directly link the city centers to keep the cost under $100 Billion.
Why not build a railway for the entire route, so people can travel city centre to city centre, without changing modality?
Because it's slower, much more expensive, and technologically backward. And airports can serve people who don't just want to go between LA and SF.
It will never have a single paying passenger. This has been an easy prediction since at least the year after it was approved.
It's the 21st century, not the 19th. How many airports could you build with $68 Billion ?
Make those states not fucking suck and people will want to live there and start companies there.
Yeah, that's the goal.
We have a concentration of educated people here.
Other places should be allowed to import more educated people. By changing the rules for H-1Bs.
Of course, the fucking electoral college means that California consistently gets raped on taxes, and then again at vote time.
Californians love to vote for more taxes. California consistently supports high tax candidates and policies that lead to California paying more. So you can't really be for more influence for California and not also be for more taxes.
But the central question is: why should the rest of the US support an H-1B program where almost all the benefits go to only a few places?
Plenty of people care about living on a 2+ acre plot of land more important than access to recent Broadway musicals, or are satisfied with Outback Steakhouse and Chili's being the best food options in their town, but once people are introduced to the options urban living offers most choose either city life or high rent suburbs.
People mostly live in expensive suburbs because we have a coercive government school system that fails to educate your children unless you live in an expensive area. You could live in a cheaper area and send your kids to a private school, but private school is expensive, there are limited options, you still have to pay for the government schools that you don't use, and if you own a house in a neighborhood where the schools are bad your house doesn't go up in value.
It's a system that hurts generation after generation of poor and lower middle class people. But it can't be solved because rich people in rich neighborhoods have good schools that they don't want changed.
--
Regardless of this preference though, US immigration rules exist to benefit the US. If all the benefits are going to a tiny fraction of the country, then the rest of the country should adjust the rules to spread the benefits out to the country at large.
You know, precisely the kind of workers you want to come to the US
Why do I want that? I don't live in San Jose and I'm not one of Facebook's VCs. Why does anyone in America outside of San Jose want yet another software guy in San Jose?
Immigration laws are supposed to benefit the US. Not just San Jose. (And not really foreign nationals either -- countries make laws for their own benefit.)
Nothing if you are a farmer. Everything if you are a software engineer.
What if you're someone who wants life to be about something else in addition to work?
I don't think you've ever been to Idaho. They have Internet there.
Yes, like top talent is going to want to move to the US to live in a shitty city.
If they are prejudiced against those places in America then they are welcome to stay home.
You will only get workers from places that are even shittier,
San Jose isn't exactly a paradise, you know.
So who do you think is going to want to come to the US to live in Idaho under those conditions?
What's wrong with Idaho? You can own a great big house on a middle-class income. There's skiing and hunting and fishing. It's a very American place. If you find Americanism objectionable, then (obviously) don't come here to live.
If they wanted to do that, why wouldn't they already be doing it?
And how many companies do you really think have a business model that depends on importing H-1Bs and paying them $65k? Lots of people would welcome those companies to go offshore in order to free up H-1B slots for higher-paid people and to preserve some middle-income jobs for the people who are already here.
I would restrict H-1Bs to only areas of the country where residential rents (per sq. foot) are in the lower 50 percentile. If Google or Facebook wants to hire someone on an H-1B, open an office in Idaho or Mississippi or Fresno and hire them there. High skilled immigration is supposed to help the US, not just San Jose.
Or, alternately, if you want to hire $1 worth of H-1B payroll in a high rent area, then move $3 in payroll to a lower rent area.
This would help immigrants learn about America and Americans learn about immigrants. And it would help encourage tech companies to open facilities somewhere where people go to live rather than somewhere people go only to work.
the Decepticons. They're bringing the Age of Extinction!
I work in the semiconductor industry and our ASIC designs have seen a few large jumps in productivity:
- Transistors and custom layouts transitioned to standard cell flows and automated P&R.
- Design using logic blocks transitioned to synthesized design using RTL with HDLs.
- Most recently, we are synthesizing circuits directly from C language.
In the same timeframe, programming has remained more or less the same as it always was. New languages offer only incremental productivity improvements, and most of the big problems from 10 or 20 years ago remain big problems. Programmers still have to deal with syntax issues in various languages, and if I want parallel execution in my code, I have to design for it from the beginning.
Software is helping us design our ASIC circuits from higher and higher level abstractions. But software doesn't seem to be helping us write our software. The abstractions aren't much higher level.
Do you know of any initiatives that could produce a step-function increase (say 5-10x) in coding productivity for average engineers?
When I first heard rumors about what became Swift, that's what I was hoping for. But it turned out to be just another programming language.
The fact that they're no longer offering them for sale probably doesn't significantly change the number they are selling.
You probably can't make it crash. And if you try you'll get caught and go to prison for a long time.
If Amazon makes a profit doing that, they'll get in trouble for "price gouging". It makes more business sense not to sell needed equipment or supplies to disaster victims.
Certainly it doesn't make business sense to make any special effort to bring needed goods to disaster victims for sale -- because if they charge extra to cover the extra costs it's "price gouging" again. That really too bad for disaster victims who need stuff and would be willing to pay to make it worth Amazon's trouble.
How do you think they could be brought down? They aren't really vulnerable to small arms fire. If you built a fleet of sizable quadcopter drones with fuel supplies and flamethrowers you might be able to do it. But I think we can trust people not to do that.
It will be news when it actually happens. Can't we wait until then instead of pretending that it's news that something is supposedly going to happen in a few hours?
A politician saying something that's not the whole truth? Inconceivable!
Such shenanigans will never cease no matter what. Maybe we shouldn't pretend it's somehow worse when the other team is doing it?
Politicians are self-promoters and they take credit for things other people did.