Whenever the subject of trains is brought up here or anywhere else, someone claims that trains will never work in the US because of its population density. But the fact is that the population density of the US as a whole is meaningless. Rail lines do not need to be built equally spread out around the entire country; they can be built in the parts of the country where it makes the most sense.
The land area from Boston to DC is about 120 million square miles (including all of NY, PA, NJ, MA, CT, MD, RI, DC). The population is about 55 million, concentrated mostly in metropolitan areas. France has a nearly the same population with about twice the land area. Germany has a comparable population (80 million), and about the same area. Both France and Germany have train service far superior to that in the northeast. Clearly, it it not the population density that is preventing good train service there.
Similar arguments apply to other areas of the US.
There are about 40 million people concentrated along the west coast. There's no reason, in terms of population density, that train service could not flourish there.
I guess that's funny and all, but as someone who has posted on slashdot before about the evils of lobbying, I can tell you that, as much as I like to see microsoft's lobbyists get some competition, professional lobbying still sucks no matter who is doing it.
The fact is that many congresspeople after leaving office become very highly paid lobbyists. What this means is that their influence on government goes to the highest bidder. If you have enough money, you can essentially purchase your very own Influence on Government (tm), influence which is too expensive for the vast majority. There's no two ways about it, that sucks for a democracy. You might be skeptical that former congresspeople and other highly paid lobbyists actually have all that much more influence on government than your average joe, but the fact is that they wouldn't be highly paid if they did not.
If we can outlaw professional sex workers, I think we can surely outlaw professional lobbyists.
Groups such as the Business Software Alliance spend however many millions of dollars every year on lobbyists only because they get many more millions in return through their influence on government.
Using money to influence government in this way is, in its end result, bribery. But it is different than bribery in that it does not require corrupt politicians--
it requires only politicians who are not all knowing. Even intelligent, well-intentioned
people can be convinced of something if only one side of an argument is heard.
This is especially true for a topic as complex as government policy.
Professional lobbying, because it is effectively bribery, needs to be outlawed-- it should be illegal to pay someone to speak
to a government representative on your behalf. Instead of hiring lobbyists, companies can ask
their employees and shareholders to contact, in their spare time, their representatives. If that is not sufficient, companies can, through advertisement,
raise public awareness of their concerns. In this way, the influence of money will move
one more step away from government.
Public interests groups, such as groups opposed to overreaching copyright and patent laws, will have little problem recruiting volunteer lobbysists, as many of them already do.
Such lobbyists, since they are unpaid, would be perfectly legal.
Not only will public interest groups be able to lobby almost as effectively as before,
but they will also no longer have to compete with highly paid professional lobbying firms.
A program that requires a lot of parsing is the perfect example of why python is superior to ruby. Google "ruby parsers" and "python parsers". For ruby, it's not clear exactly what is available, maybe there's one good hit. For python, on the other hand, there are a ton of different parsers available. The third google link is a list of like twenty of them. There's c-based ones, python-based ones, GLR, LALR, etc., and many of them are very mature.
Maybe it's cool that in ruby you don't need "self" and you can say "arr.length()" rather than "len(arr)" (or whatever the syntax is) etc., etc., but the fact is that when you want to actually get something done, python has much more available for it. The languages themselves, in the grand scheme of things, are pretty much the same.
Timing: It doesn't matter if the war ended quickly; it's the nation building that matters. The administration probably figured that iraq would have had elections and be reasonably peaceful by now, something they could have exploited to no end in the presidential campaign. Going to war too close to the election would be risky, since the war might have taken longer than predicted.
Oil: It's not about "taking" the oil or lowering gas prices. The plan was to make sure we are friendly with the iraqi government so that they won't screw us over if supplies ever start dwindling in the future.
WMD: The administration probably figured they would find some minor chemical stockpiles and maybe a lab which potentially could have created chemical weapons. These weapons would have posed essentially no threat to the US, but could be labelled "WMD" and thus make people think they were actually dangerous.
Bin Laden: Finding Bin Laden would have been difficult and could possibly have failed. The administration would have been blamed for this failure. Much easier was make sure to always mention Saddam shortly after mentioning 9/11 and get some embarassingly large fraction of the population thinking Saddam played a part in 9/11, and then take out Saddam.
Umm, I just read it and Rothbard seems to say exactly what the grandparent says (minus the boycott part):
While the situation for plaintiffs against auto emissions might seem hopeless under libertarian law, there is a partial way out. In a libertarian society, the roads would be privately owned. This means that the auto emissions would be emanating from the road of the road owner into the lungs or airspace of other citizens, so that the road owner would be liable for pollution damage to the surrounding inhabitants. Suing the road owner is much more feasible than suing each individual car owner for the minute amount of pollutants he might be responsible for. In order to protect himself from these suits, or even from possible injunctions, the road owner would then have the economic incentive to issue anti-pollution regulations for all cars that wish to ride on his road. Once again, as in other cases of the tragedy of the commons, private ownership of the resource can solve many externality problems.
Hilarious-- we should privatize all the roads and then individuals can sue the road owner (I love how there's only ONE road owner in this hypothetical situation) for letting air pollution travel from the roads to their private property. Or we could just pass the Clean Air Act of 1970 and similar laws.
I knew this guy who was a die-hard communist. You could ask him a question of the type "doesn't communism blatantly fail in situation X?" And he would have some answer like "well, if every country was communist, then there would be no war, and because of that Y would happen to prevent situation X" or something like that. Libertarians are the same way when it comes to problems like air pollution. They have obviously spent lots of time trying to figure out how their beloved, one-sentence ideology can solve all problems.
This part was also funny:
Suppose, for example, that A builds a building, sells it to B, and it promptly collapses. A should be liable for injuring B's person and property and the liability should be proven in court, which can then enforce the proper measures of restitution and punishment. But if the legislature has imposed building codes and inspections in the name of safety, innocent builders (that is, those whose buildings have not collapsed) are subjected to unnecessary and often costly rules, with no necessity by government to prove crime or damage. They have committed no tort or crime, but are subject to rules, often only distantly related to safety, in advance by tyrannical governmental bodies. Yet, a builder who meets administrative inspection and safety codes and then has a building of his collapse, is often let off the hook by the courts. After all, has he not obeyed all the safety rules of the government, and hasn't he thereby received the advance imprimatur of the authorities?
So I assume we should also get rid of drunk driving laws. After all, we don't want to infringe on the rights of those who can drive drunk safely! Who cares if it would cause X thousand more deaths every year, the right to drunk drive is important! Outlawing it would violate our lovely little ideology!
The short answer is that it is well within the scope of a libertarian government to address externalities, by, say, imposing costs on the source
Umm, "imposing costs on the source" is essentially what pollution credits are doing. In his link about the environment, Badnarik says explicity that he opposes these. If the government we have now uses pollution credits for certain types of pollution (and is investigating extending their use), how is voting for Badnarik going to help shift policies in that direction? It is his intention to shift policies in the exact opposite direction.
I understand that environmental and other groups employ paid lobbyists. But the point is that they don't have to-- there are people who care about the environment enough to volunteer their time. The same is not nearly as true for, say, microsoft or oil companies.
Firms putting together packages to be used for volunteers would be fine. Trying to eliminate the influence of money in all cases would require an extremely complicated law that would be impossible to enforce. I believe that simply outlawing paying someone to speak to your government representative strikes a good balance between enforcability and effectiveness.
It would be great to have effective campaign finance laws. But campaign finance is only part of the problem. According to opensecrets.org, industry spent 1.45 billion on lobbyists in 1999, and only 0.6 billion on campaign contributions, most of which was "hard" money. From these figures, one can guess that the influence from lobbyists was much greater than from campaign contributions.
So it's really more like saying you can't modify your car to violate local pollution laws
But you can modify your car to violate pollution laws. What is illegal is actually driving around in your modified car. A law that says you can't modify your car in any way just because someone might do it to violate pollution laws would be as stupid the European DMCA.
Re:java methcall benchmark not making virtual call
on
Java Faster Than C++?
·
· Score: 1
If the class were created on the stack (as any C++ programmer would create it in this case) then there is no reason the compiler couldn't inline the call.
The point is that this test was obviously created to exploit the fact that java uses jits. This would be ok if there were a test specifically designed to exploit every little advantage C++ has over java, but there doesn't seem to be.
java methcall benchmark not making virtual calls
on
Java Faster Than C++?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Notice that the C++ methcall code declares "activate" a virtual function, but not so in the java version. No kidding you're going to get better performance.
Presumably the java compiler inlined the function call. Do the math-- 4e9 function calls in 2.5 seconds. That's 1.6e9 function calls per second. On a 3.0 GhZ machine that's two cycles per call, so they're probably all inlined.
There's Grover's algorithm, which is an O(sqrt(n)) time algorithm for finding a single marked element in an unsorted database of elements, according to this site:
http://alumni.imsa.edu/~matth/quant/473/473proj/ in dex.html
In a traditional computer, a 32-bit memory location can store a 32-bit number. In a quantum computer, a 32-qubit memory location "stores" a value for each possible 32-bit number. For example, the value stored for 0 might be 0.01, the value for 1 might be 0.25, and so on. When you actually read the memory location, there is (in this example) a 1% chance that you will read a 0, and a 25% chance you will read a 1, and so on.
The above is a little bit simplified. The probability isn't stored directly. Rather, a complex number is stored and the probability is the square of the complex number.
So if you want to simulate this for a 32-qubit number, you need to store in your classical computer 2^32 complex numbers. Each operation you carry out on your 32-qubit number must be done 2^32 times on a classical computer.
I think something like the Toyota PM would be more readily accepted by commuters if there were in place a more economically feasible way to acquire a larger vehicle for ad-hoc short-term missions. Something like, but not exactly like, the current rental market.
The federal government takes in more on fuel taxes than it spends on highway construction (some of it goes to public transportation and such). However, this is outweighed by state and local governments which spend much more on roads than they get back in such taxes. On top of that, most states do not have a sales tax (revenue of which goes into the general fund) on gasoline as they do on pretty much every other good except food.
I disagree that it is subjective whether roads should be paid for by gas or property taxes. It is much more fair (although still far from perfectly fair) to tax gas instead of property. If property is taxed, then road use become a "free good" and is consumed at a level higher than that which is most efficient. Notice how suburbia is almost non-existent in Europe, where gas is taxed at a rate high enough to pay for road construction and maintenance (as well as many external costs).
Goodstein's colleague seems to disagree
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I heard Nathan Lewis, one of David Goodstein's colleagues at Caltech, speak the other day. Lewis says that reserves of coal are so huge that we need not worry about running out of oil for hundreds of years (coal can be turned into oil at about $35/barrel. See http://www.ems.psu.edu/~radovic/Chapter10.pdf ).
Someone in the audience mentioned Goodstein and Lewis made kind of a scoffing noise. Lewis seemed very skeptical of Goodstein's estimates of how soon we will run out of coal.
The real problem, according to Lewis, as I understood it, is not that we will run out of oil, but that we will probably not be able to meet energy demands without putting significantly more carbon into the air than there has been in the last half million years.
I sort of agree (not sure about the DEATH part), but I think something also needs to be done about lobbysists: it should be illegal to pay someone to speak to a government representative on your behalf (or on behalf of your company). That is, you are welcome to lobby the government, but not if you are being paid to do it.
If the government wants to hear industry's take on a certain issue, it should be up to the government to invite an industry representative, and to pay for all hotel and travel costs.
A good question to ask yourself when deciding whether a company "deserves" patent protection is this:
would the company have invested the same amount of money into the creation even if they would not have been able to obtain a patent?
If the answer is "yes", then the patent did not promote invention and therefore allowing such a patent benefits no one other than the company that obtained it.
It's safe to say that, in the case of drug companies, they would not spend millions of dollars developing a drug if ten other companies were able to copy the chemical formula the day after the drug hit the market and sell it themselves for a lower price.
As for Apple, I think they will try to create the best interface they can whether or not they can obtain a patent. I can't imagine Apple (in some universe in which patents are difficult to get) being like "hmm, we could invest another ten million into UI design and create a significantly better UI, but let's go with this crappy UI because we won't be able to get a patent."
Maybe if the plan was to destroy existing train tracks and then rebuild them there would be analogy here. But this is clearly not what would happen.
We would start with something with little value (a strip of land) and wind up with something much more valuable (train tracks).
This is different than starting with a window and ending up with a window.
If you want to argue that train tracks would be worth less than they would cost, then go ahead. But it's not as simple as you suggest.
"Blanketing" the country with train tracks would most likely cost far more than it would be worth. But this is a straw man argument against building some train tracks.
Setting aside the idiotic abbreviation "USicans" (hint: the proper term for citizens of the United States of America is "Americans", for citizens of the United States of Mexico is "Mexicans", etc.)...
and people who belonged to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are "Republicans"? I get it.
The case for public transportation is fairly ugly. The cities that have the most people using public transporation are so crowded that driving a car and parking it is impossible or at the very least, very impractical
And in Los Angeles driving a car is easy and parking is plentiful?
Are you implying that public transporation makes cities crowded??
The Big Dig was financed by federal highway funds which was obtained through...federal gasoline taxes. Every state in the country funds its roads through:
a.) tolls
b.) state gasoline taxes
c.) driver and motor vehicle licensing fees
You failed to mention:
d.) property taxes
e.) general fund appropriations
f.) other taxes and fees
g.) investment income and other receipts
h.) bond issue proceeds
(see the brookings institute's Fueling Transporation Finance: A Primer on
the Gax Tax.) The few billion from the federal gas tax not used on roads is small compared to the billions and billions state and local governments spend on roads out of general funds and property taxes.
Furthermore, in most states, gasoline is given special treatment in that none of the tax on gasoline can legally go to anything other than roads, even though sales tax on most everything else goes into the general fund. Some of that 5% I pay on socks goes into public transportation, why shouldn't at least as much come from gasoline?
And of course, as the original poster mentions (and is mentioned briefly near the end of the aritcle pointed to in this slashdot story), one should also include the less tangible, but very real external costs of automobile usage:
i.) pedestrian injury and death
j.) pollution
k.) public land usable only by private automobiles
When it's all added up, the big dig and other road construction projects are not nearly entirely paid for by fuel and car taxes.
Roads are actually more efficient; every mile of road can carry 30,000 cars per day, however every mile of light rail line can carry only 10,000 people per day.
Straw man. Boston's subways are heavey rail, not light rail.
Anecdotes about Cleveland are interesting, but I'm sure one could just as easily come up with anecdotes about pork-barrel highway projects.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever the subject of trains is brought up here or anywhere else, someone claims that trains will never work in the US because of its population density. But the fact is that the population density of the US as a whole is meaningless. Rail lines do not need to be built equally spread out around the entire country; they can be built in the parts of the country where it makes the most sense.
The land area from Boston to DC is about 120 million square miles (including all of NY, PA, NJ, MA, CT, MD, RI, DC). The population is about 55 million, concentrated mostly in metropolitan areas. France has a nearly the same population with about twice the land area. Germany has a comparable population (80 million), and about the same area. Both France and Germany have train service far superior to that in the northeast. Clearly, it it not the population density that is preventing good train service there.
Similar arguments apply to other areas of the US. There are about 40 million people concentrated along the west coast. There's no reason, in terms of population density, that train service could not flourish there.
The fact is that many congresspeople after leaving office become very highly paid lobbyists. What this means is that their influence on government goes to the highest bidder. If you have enough money, you can essentially purchase your very own Influence on Government (tm), influence which is too expensive for the vast majority. There's no two ways about it, that sucks for a democracy. You might be skeptical that former congresspeople and other highly paid lobbyists actually have all that much more influence on government than your average joe, but the fact is that they wouldn't be highly paid if they did not.
If we can outlaw professional sex workers, I think we can surely outlaw professional lobbyists.
Using money to influence government in this way is, in its end result, bribery. But it is different than bribery in that it does not require corrupt politicians-- it requires only politicians who are not all knowing. Even intelligent, well-intentioned people can be convinced of something if only one side of an argument is heard. This is especially true for a topic as complex as government policy.
Professional lobbying, because it is effectively bribery, needs to be outlawed-- it should be illegal to pay someone to speak to a government representative on your behalf. Instead of hiring lobbyists, companies can ask their employees and shareholders to contact, in their spare time, their representatives. If that is not sufficient, companies can, through advertisement, raise public awareness of their concerns. In this way, the influence of money will move one more step away from government.
Public interests groups, such as groups opposed to overreaching copyright and patent laws, will have little problem recruiting volunteer lobbysists, as many of them already do. Such lobbyists, since they are unpaid, would be perfectly legal. Not only will public interest groups be able to lobby almost as effectively as before, but they will also no longer have to compete with highly paid professional lobbying firms.
A program that requires a lot of parsing is the perfect example of why python is superior to ruby. Google "ruby parsers" and "python parsers". For ruby, it's not clear exactly what is available, maybe there's one good hit. For python, on the other hand, there are a ton of different parsers available. The third google link is a list of like twenty of them. There's c-based ones, python-based ones, GLR, LALR, etc., and many of them are very mature.
Maybe it's cool that in ruby you don't need "self" and you can say "arr.length()" rather than "len(arr)" (or whatever the syntax is) etc., etc., but the fact is that when you want to actually get something done, python has much more available for it. The languages themselves, in the grand scheme of things, are pretty much the same.
Oil: It's not about "taking" the oil or lowering gas prices. The plan was to make sure we are friendly with the iraqi government so that they won't screw us over if supplies ever start dwindling in the future.
WMD: The administration probably figured they would find some minor chemical stockpiles and maybe a lab which potentially could have created chemical weapons. These weapons would have posed essentially no threat to the US, but could be labelled "WMD" and thus make people think they were actually dangerous.
Bin Laden: Finding Bin Laden would have been difficult and could possibly have failed. The administration would have been blamed for this failure. Much easier was make sure to always mention Saddam shortly after mentioning 9/11 and get some embarassingly large fraction of the population thinking Saddam played a part in 9/11, and then take out Saddam.
While the situation for plaintiffs against auto emissions might seem hopeless under libertarian law, there is a partial way out. In a libertarian society, the roads would be privately owned. This means that the auto emissions would be emanating from the road of the road owner into the lungs or airspace of other citizens, so that the road owner would be liable for pollution damage to the surrounding inhabitants. Suing the road owner is much more feasible than suing each individual car owner for the minute amount of pollutants he might be responsible for. In order to protect himself from these suits, or even from possible injunctions, the road owner would then have the economic incentive to issue anti-pollution regulations for all cars that wish to ride on his road. Once again, as in other cases of the tragedy of the commons, private ownership of the resource can solve many externality problems.
Hilarious-- we should privatize all the roads and then individuals can sue the road owner (I love how there's only ONE road owner in this hypothetical situation) for letting air pollution travel from the roads to their private property. Or we could just pass the Clean Air Act of 1970 and similar laws.
I knew this guy who was a die-hard communist. You could ask him a question of the type "doesn't communism blatantly fail in situation X?" And he would have some answer like "well, if every country was communist, then there would be no war, and because of that Y would happen to prevent situation X" or something like that. Libertarians are the same way when it comes to problems like air pollution. They have obviously spent lots of time trying to figure out how their beloved, one-sentence ideology can solve all problems.
This part was also funny:
Suppose, for example, that A builds a building, sells it to B, and it promptly collapses. A should be liable for injuring B's person and property and the liability should be proven in court, which can then enforce the proper measures of restitution and punishment. But if the legislature has imposed building codes and inspections in the name of safety, innocent builders (that is, those whose buildings have not collapsed) are subjected to unnecessary and often costly rules, with no necessity by government to prove crime or damage. They have committed no tort or crime, but are subject to rules, often only distantly related to safety, in advance by tyrannical governmental bodies. Yet, a builder who meets administrative inspection and safety codes and then has a building of his collapse, is often let off the hook by the courts. After all, has he not obeyed all the safety rules of the government, and hasn't he thereby received the advance imprimatur of the authorities?
So I assume we should also get rid of drunk driving laws. After all, we don't want to infringe on the rights of those who can drive drunk safely! Who cares if it would cause X thousand more deaths every year, the right to drunk drive is important! Outlawing it would violate our lovely little ideology!
Umm, "imposing costs on the source" is essentially what pollution credits are doing. In his link about the environment, Badnarik says explicity that he opposes these. If the government we have now uses pollution credits for certain types of pollution (and is investigating extending their use), how is voting for Badnarik going to help shift policies in that direction? It is his intention to shift policies in the exact opposite direction.
Firms putting together packages to be used for volunteers would be fine. Trying to eliminate the influence of money in all cases would require an extremely complicated law that would be impossible to enforce. I believe that simply outlawing paying someone to speak to your government representative strikes a good balance between enforcability and effectiveness.
It would be great to have effective campaign finance laws. But campaign finance is only part of the problem. According to opensecrets.org, industry spent 1.45 billion on lobbyists in 1999, and only 0.6 billion on campaign contributions, most of which was "hard" money. From these figures, one can guess that the influence from lobbyists was much greater than from campaign contributions.
But you can modify your car to violate pollution laws. What is illegal is actually driving around in your modified car. A law that says you can't modify your car in any way just because someone might do it to violate pollution laws would be as stupid the European DMCA.
The point is that this test was obviously created to exploit the fact that java uses jits. This would be ok if there were a test specifically designed to exploit every little advantage C++ has over java, but there doesn't seem to be.
Presumably the java compiler inlined the function call. Do the math-- 4e9 function calls in 2.5 seconds. That's 1.6e9 function calls per second. On a 3.0 GhZ machine that's two cycles per call, so they're probably all inlined.
There's Grover's algorithm, which is an O(sqrt(n)) time algorithm for finding a single marked element in an unsorted database of elements, according to this site:
/ in dex.html
http://alumni.imsa.edu/~matth/quant/473/473proj
In a traditional computer, a 32-bit memory location can store a 32-bit number. In a quantum computer, a 32-qubit memory location "stores" a value for each possible 32-bit number. For example, the value stored for 0 might be 0.01, the value for 1 might be 0.25, and so on. When you actually read the memory location, there is (in this example) a 1% chance that you will read a 0, and a 25% chance you will read a 1, and so on.
The above is a little bit simplified. The probability isn't stored directly. Rather, a complex number is stored and the probability is the square of the complex number.
So if you want to simulate this for a 32-qubit number, you need to store in your classical computer 2^32 complex numbers. Each operation you carry out on your 32-qubit number must be done 2^32 times on a classical computer.
flexcar has a pickup truck (which I used once), among other specialty vechicles.
flexcar.com
zipcar.com
The federal government takes in more on fuel taxes than it spends on highway construction (some of it goes to public transportation and such). However, this is outweighed by state and local governments which spend much more on roads than they get back in such taxes. On top of that, most states do not have a sales tax (revenue of which goes into the general fund) on gasoline as they do on pretty much every other good except food.
I disagree that it is subjective whether roads should be paid for by gas or property taxes. It is much more fair (although still far from perfectly fair) to tax gas instead of property. If property is taxed, then road use become a "free good" and is consumed at a level higher than that which is most efficient. Notice how suburbia is almost non-existent in Europe, where gas is taxed at a rate high enough to pay for road construction and maintenance (as well as many external costs).
Someone in the audience mentioned Goodstein and Lewis made kind of a scoffing noise. Lewis seemed very skeptical of Goodstein's estimates of how soon we will run out of coal.
The real problem, according to Lewis, as I understood it, is not that we will run out of oil, but that we will probably not be able to meet energy demands without putting significantly more carbon into the air than there has been in the last half million years.
If the government wants to hear industry's take on a certain issue, it should be up to the government to invite an industry representative, and to pay for all hotel and travel costs.
would the company have invested the same amount of money into the creation even if they would not have been able to obtain a patent?
If the answer is "yes", then the patent did not promote invention and therefore allowing such a patent benefits no one other than the company that obtained it.
It's safe to say that, in the case of drug companies, they would not spend millions of dollars developing a drug if ten other companies were able to copy the chemical formula the day after the drug hit the market and sell it themselves for a lower price.
As for Apple, I think they will try to create the best interface they can whether or not they can obtain a patent. I can't imagine Apple (in some universe in which patents are difficult to get) being like "hmm, we could invest another ten million into UI design and create a significantly better UI, but let's go with this crappy UI because we won't be able to get a patent."
We would start with something with little value (a strip of land) and wind up with something much more valuable (train tracks).
This is different than starting with a window and ending up with a window.
If you want to argue that train tracks would be worth less than they would cost, then go ahead. But it's not as simple as you suggest.
"Blanketing" the country with train tracks would most likely cost far more than it would be worth. But this is a straw man argument against building some train tracks.
and people who belonged to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are "Republicans"? I get it.
make that here
How I Lost the Big One
Very interesting read.
And in Los Angeles driving a car is easy and parking is plentiful?
Are you implying that public transporation makes cities crowded??
The Big Dig was financed by federal highway funds which was obtained through...federal gasoline taxes. Every state in the country funds its roads through:
a.) tolls
b.) state gasoline taxes
c.) driver and motor vehicle licensing fees
You failed to mention:
d.) property taxes
e.) general fund appropriations
f.) other taxes and fees
g.) investment income and other receipts
h.) bond issue proceeds
(see the brookings institute's Fueling Transporation Finance: A Primer on the Gax Tax.) The few billion from the federal gas tax not used on roads is small compared to the billions and billions state and local governments spend on roads out of general funds and property taxes.
Furthermore, in most states, gasoline is given special treatment in that none of the tax on gasoline can legally go to anything other than roads, even though sales tax on most everything else goes into the general fund. Some of that 5% I pay on socks goes into public transportation, why shouldn't at least as much come from gasoline?
And of course, as the original poster mentions (and is mentioned briefly near the end of the aritcle pointed to in this slashdot story), one should also include the less tangible, but very real external costs of automobile usage:
i.) pedestrian injury and death
j.) pollution
k.) public land usable only by private automobiles
When it's all added up, the big dig and other road construction projects are not nearly entirely paid for by fuel and car taxes.
Roads are actually more efficient; every mile of road can carry 30,000 cars per day, however every mile of light rail line can carry only 10,000 people per day.
Straw man. Boston's subways are heavey rail, not light rail.
Anecdotes about Cleveland are interesting, but I'm sure one could just as easily come up with anecdotes about pork-barrel highway projects.
an african or european bodyguard?