Then why are the workers being forced (extorted) to train their replacements? Seems to me if the previous employees were so incompetent, their employer wouldn't require them to train their replacements.
So what do all those people flying from one place to another in the US do? If you need to drive in your destination then you'll just rent a car like you would have if you flew.
People that fly from city to city:
either park their car or catch a ride with someone else
pay $100-150/each way
tell everyone about all the work they got done on the plane
spend about 6 hours to travel 450 miles
wind up needing to arrange ground transportation to their final destination
And in 13 years "High Speed Rail" passengers will do exactly the same thing.
The Northeast Corridor runs from Boston, MA to Washington D.C., a distance of 438 miles according to Google Maps. People ride that train from Boston to NYC, NYC to PHL, PHL to Baltimore, and Baltimore to D.C., as well as other combinations. It is subsidized - it does not cover operating expenses.
They owned the fucking country. No white people lived there. They used slavery.
Not to the extent you seem to think. The bulk of the work out west was done with Chinese immigrants, paid slave wages but they were not literal slaves. The bulk of the eastern portion of the railroad was built in parts of the country where slavery was illegal but the railroads likely employed many ex-slaves.
You are going to have to price it vs the car. That infrastructure is in place and ready to go. It is a sunk cost vs a possible sunk cost in the future.
You have to price this against airline travel, it's here, it's about the same time and cost, and they are equally inconvenient on either end.
This is a solution to a problem that was solved decades ago by regional airlines...
You know what, I have to pay for auto insurance if I leave my car at home for a week, take a week and drive back and forth between SF and LA, if I drive to the airport and leave my car parked at the airport OR the train station.
You still have to pay for car insurance even if you don't drive your car.
How long did the transcontinental railroad take to complete? It took from 1863 to 1869, and was built with largely minority and immigrant workers using manual methods (and dynamite)...
We're at what 15 years for a 500 mile run up the coast using the latest technology...
We could do better.
Maybe California could offer completion bonuses like the state DOT did to fix the one highway after an earthquake?
On the low end, they estimate 18 million riders a year. Ok, dividing 18 million by 365 days leaves you with almost 50,000 passengers a day. Divided by two, that's about 24,000 passengers SF->LA, and 24,000 passengers LA->SF each day. If they run 24 trains s day, leaving each hour, that means 1,000 passengers per hour, every hour, every day.
Seems unlikely.
Maybe they'll run trains every two hours, but then they gotta stuff 2,000 people on each train 12 times/day, every day.
know the arguments about the population density from the economic point of view, they are correct, but i think California is a right place for trains.
This solves a problem that has already been solved.
Planes travel between SFO and LAX for around $100-150 each way. It takes several hours (all in TSA, waiting, flying, etc), you can work while you wait/fly, and when you arrive at the airport there are dozens of transportation services to get you on to your final destination (buses, light rail, rental cars, etc).
Flying is a pain in the ass. You need to go to an airport, get groped, wait an hour until you can board, sit in an uncomfortable seat, get fed a tiny drink if you're lucky when they want to feed it to you, use a bathroom that's tiny and uncomfortable, and wait for another 40 minutes for your luggage afterwards.
A fair assessment.
A train is just a much better experience. You can show up 2 minutes before departure, get on without a strip search, get a nice big seat, have a dining car, can get up and walk around at will, and just grab your luggage on the way out.
Your imagined high speed train ride is pure fantasy. There will be a TSA checkpoint (high-speed rail will be a terrorist target), trains will run only a couple times a day, so here comes a couple hours wait time for the next train, and you are still going to be surrounded by strangers and your luggage will have to be checked. Oh, and this 'getting work done while I'm on the train' fantasy? Are you going to pay extra for a seat with a work surface?
Oh no, I'm sure trains in the future will be fantastic, completely unlike today's trains.
And that takes what 5-6 hours? The train would be well under half that, and while your on the train you can actually do some useful work or just relax.
Travel time is one concern, but the other is wait time... How often will the trains run? How early will you need to be at the train station before departure? I could easily see those considerations alone extending travel time by 2 or 3 hours, negating any time savings.
And what are you going to do when you get to the other end? Rely on mass transit or rent a car? If you rent a car, there goes your cost savings.
This high-speed train is nothing more than a slower ground-based airline - you'll have a crowded terminal, TSA checkpoints, baggage check, etc... The only real difference is there will be a much smaller likelihood the railway will lose your luggage.
Don't RUN from the cops. The one common denominator from most of the recently publicized cop shootings of citizens, is that the citizen generally ran from the officer.
Not in Ferguson, MO - he was fighting and charging at the officer.
Not in NYC - he was resisting arrest.
But that is not to say it doesn't happen, but it isn't as common as you make it seem.
"And wait patients must. A hospital survey of five countries (United States, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and Australia), conducted by Robert Blendon and colleagues in Health Affairs found that âoewaits of six months or more for elective surgeries were reported to occur âvery oftenâ(TM) or âoftenâ(TM) by 26â"57 percent of executives in the four non-U.S. countries; only 1 percent of U.S. hospitals reported this. Half of all Canadian hospitals reported an average waiting time of over six months for a 65-year-old male requiring a routine hip replacement; no American hospital administrators reported waits this long."
You're right, no one in Canada has any reason to ever seek treatment any faster than it can be provided by their Canadian healthcare system./sarcasm
There is a thriving market for private care in England, despite the unquestioned joy that is the NHS - I wonder why that is? Why would someone in a country with one of the best, most-effective, and cheapest (it's FREE!) healthcare in the world still have a thriving private healthcare coverage market? Perhaps the NHS isn't 'all that', perhaps there are some gaps in the service?
in a civilised country with a decent public health system (i.e. all of the developed world except for the US. and also some of the "third-world" including cuba)
Hold on there, Michael Moore conclusively proved that Cuba has a vastly superior healthcare system than America - he took a boat load of 9/11 first responders to Cuba to get them medical care.
a visit to emergency or even a month-long stay in hospital costs the patient exactly nothing, not a single fucking cent. because civilised countries believe that everyone deserves decent health care, not just those with jobs that pay for their health insurance.
Uh, your simplistic view of economics is showing - those 'civilised' countries have much greater tax burdens to pay for all that marvelous 'free' education and 'free' healthcare.
civilised countries also believe that an employer has no fucking right whatsoever to decide what kind of health care an employee is entitled to. that's just fucking barbaric.
Your perspective is a little off.
Employees are offered subsidized healthcare coverage by employers, employees don't have to take it (many, not all, but many) employers will give you cash money in place of subsidized healthcare if you get outside coverage (for example, if your spouse has better/cheaper coverage available for you through their employer). Your employer in no way can limit What healthcare coverage it's employees can get for themselves. It's like this - I used to work in public school K-12 education, my employer, the school district offered me free lunches in the school cafeteria - I instead choose to go out for lunch. The school district by offering me one thing never removed any other option available to me. I also was offered subsidized healthcare by the school district, but since I already had superior coverage through my wife's employer, I opted out, and instead got a couple hundred extra dollars each month added to my paycheck. I wasn't limited to the coverage my employer offered, it was merely one of many choices.
In the 'famous' Hobby Lobby case, the employer (Hobby Lobby) took the position that they, for religious reasons, did not want to pay for two (2) forms of 'birth control' of the twenty-three (23) forms the PPACA legislation mandated. The distinction was the two forms of 'birth control' they objected to were considered abortifacients, meaning they 'aborted' a fertilized egg/embryo after the fact. They had no problem funding the other twenty one (21) forms of federally-mandated birth control because they all prevented eggs from becoming fertilized. (Their religious belief is that life begins at conception.) But just because an employer doesn't pay for the form of birth control a female employee prefers, she still has the CHOICE to pay for it out of her own pocket - pharmacists and doctors don't 'check with your employer' before dispensing medicines, they WILL check with your insurance company and advise you about your options and what is and is not covered, but no patient is prevented from getting any procedure they want and are willing to pay for.
One thing we really don't have here in the U.S. Is healthcare rationing - for example, we can get MRIs done the day the doctor prescribes it, we have no waiting lists. We have no 'doctor shortage' as our neighbors to the north do - yet. We don't have Emergency Rooms with ambulances idling outside, waiting for hours to 'check in' their patients because the ER is required to see patients within a certain window, and that requirement can only be met by slowing the admission of patients into the ER.
Also, in America, any person that manages to get to an ER will receive medical attention, for free if they are without means to pay - this is a requirement that hospitals here have had for decades before Senator Obama ever ran for the Presidency - a failure to do so could cost the hospital their license to remain open.
Fuck trickle down economics. Schools should be mandatory.
They are - education is mandatory in every state of the Union.
Schools should be funded equally.
Are you serious? If that were implemented inner-city schools would see funding slashed... In my previous home state of New Jersey there were these failing districts referred to as 'Abbott Districts' (after a court case) which resulted in spending in those failing districts to increase to almost double what the average NJ school district spent per-child. Equalizing spending across all schools would hurt the students in inner-city schools. (The schools in the city of Baltimore, where Democrats insist an increased investment in education (among other initiatives) could prevent tragedies like the death of Freddy Grey - which sounds great, until you realize that in Maryland, home to some of the wealthyest counties in country, the Baltimore city school system is the third highest-spending district per student n Maryland.)
And if rich fuckers want a better education for their kids, key them improve the whole system.
Do you understand what 'rich fuckers' do now? They pay property taxes at an obscene rate to fund their local public schools and then leave the public school system to privately fund their children's education elsewhere, leaving more money in the school system for the other students.
If a 'rich fucker' lives in a house that is valued at twice the average value in their community, then they pay twice the property taxes to help fund public schools their 'average' neighbor pays. (There are no deductions or loopholes.) If that 'rich fucker' then turns around and enrolls their child in a private school they are 100% responsible for the tuition costs and get NO deduction or credit on their property taxes.
The real motivation for change/improvement in public education will be school choice/vouchers - that will allow concerned parents to abandon failing public schools for better ones, and as failing schools are shuttered bad teachers can be weeded out of the system. Competition is healthy, the lack of serious competition is (contributing to) our currently failing public education system.
Many argue that public schools are failing our children, but few agree on the cause, so standardized tests have been rolled out to evaluate and quantify the various levels of achievement in the various school systems at both the state and federal level.
That in and of itself isn't really a problem, the problem (IMHO) with standardized testing is that it has become the only way to evaluate career teachers since the teachers and their union groups have typically rejected every other form of teacher evaluation.
For example, in one famous example a new superintendent walked into a major metropolitan school system and was confronted with the reality that some 60% of high school graduates failed to perform at an 8th grade level, yet some 90% of the teachers had peer-evaluated each other to be 'Excellent' teachers.
The issue isn't standardized testing, it is the importance the test results have to the teachers that causes great stress in the children.
That said, I'm not altogether convinced your average suicide bomber would be the giving, sensitive type.
You understand they, by definition give their life to further their beliefs - that beats anything your average Prius-driving, granola-munching, green peace member would ever do.
The NUMBER of gun crimes increased, and you have to do hand-wavy math factoring in population size and gun ownership rates to try and support your position?
If gun control worked the way you and countless other gin control advocates argue it does, the NUMBER of gun-related crimes should have shrunk when gun ownership rights in GB were aggressively curtailed.
They didn't.
Not by a long shot.
Turns out criminals don't obey gun laws, and they commit more crimes involving guns when they can be relatively certain their intended victims are unarmed. When was the last time there was a mass shooting outside a declared 'gun free zone'? (Reminder, aft. Hood shooting occurred in a prt of the base where soldiers are NOT permitted to carry guns, same at the DC Naval Yard.)
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Then why are the workers being forced (extorted) to train their replacements? Seems to me if the previous employees were so incompetent, their employer wouldn't require them to train their replacements.
So what do all those people flying from one place to another in the US do? If you need to drive in your destination then you'll just rent a car like you would have if you flew.
People that fly from city to city:
And in 13 years "High Speed Rail" passengers will do exactly the same thing.
The Northeast Corridor runs from Boston, MA to Washington D.C., a distance of 438 miles according to Google Maps. People ride that train from Boston to NYC, NYC to PHL, PHL to Baltimore, and Baltimore to D.C., as well as other combinations. It is subsidized - it does not cover operating expenses.
They owned the fucking country. No white people lived there. They used slavery.
Not to the extent you seem to think. The bulk of the work out west was done with Chinese immigrants, paid slave wages but they were not literal slaves. The bulk of the eastern portion of the railroad was built in parts of the country where slavery was illegal but the railroads likely employed many ex-slaves.
Like I said:
As I recall, the land around the track was "given" to the railroad as compensation for building the tracks.
You have to price this against airline travel, it's here, it's about the same time and cost, and they are equally inconvenient on either end.
This is a solution to a problem that was solved decades ago by regional airlines...
So? For $5 I can do the same thing in Dallas today.
Wow, in 13 short years riding the train between SF and LA will be just like flying between SF and LA is right now, for the same cost.
And we are calling this train 'the future' of transportation? Seems like it's really just state of the art, circa 1975.
You know what, I have to pay for auto insurance if I leave my car at home for a week, take a week and drive back and forth between SF and LA, if I drive to the airport and leave my car parked at the airport OR the train station.
You still have to pay for car insurance even if you don't drive your car.
How long did the transcontinental railroad take to complete? It took from 1863 to 1869, and was built with largely minority and immigrant workers using manual methods (and dynamite)...
We're at what 15 years for a 500 mile run up the coast using the latest technology...
We could do better.
Maybe California could offer completion bonuses like the state DOT did to fix the one highway after an earthquake?
On the low end, they estimate 18 million riders a year. Ok, dividing 18 million by 365 days leaves you with almost 50,000 passengers a day. Divided by two, that's about 24,000 passengers SF->LA, and 24,000 passengers LA->SF each day. If they run 24 trains s day, leaving each hour, that means 1,000 passengers per hour, every hour, every day.
Seems unlikely.
Maybe they'll run trains every two hours, but then they gotta stuff 2,000 people on each train 12 times/day, every day.
This solves a problem that has already been solved.
Planes travel between SFO and LAX for around $100-150 each way. It takes several hours (all in TSA, waiting, flying, etc), you can work while you wait/fly, and when you arrive at the airport there are dozens of transportation services to get you on to your final destination (buses, light rail, rental cars, etc).
A fair assessment.
Your imagined high speed train ride is pure fantasy. There will be a TSA checkpoint (high-speed rail will be a terrorist target), trains will run only a couple times a day, so here comes a couple hours wait time for the next train, and you are still going to be surrounded by strangers and your luggage will have to be checked. Oh, and this 'getting work done while I'm on the train' fantasy? Are you going to pay extra for a seat with a work surface?
Oh no, I'm sure trains in the future will be fantastic, completely unlike today's trains.
Travel time is one concern, but the other is wait time... How often will the trains run? How early will you need to be at the train station before departure? I could easily see those considerations alone extending travel time by 2 or 3 hours, negating any time savings.
And what are you going to do when you get to the other end? Rely on mass transit or rent a car? If you rent a car, there goes your cost savings.
This high-speed train is nothing more than a slower ground-based airline - you'll have a crowded terminal, TSA checkpoints, baggage check, etc... The only real difference is there will be a much smaller likelihood the railway will lose your luggage.
Not in Ferguson, MO - he was fighting and charging at the officer.
Not in NYC - he was resisting arrest.
But that is not to say it doesn't happen, but it isn't as common as you make it seem.
"And wait patients must. A hospital survey of five countries (United States, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and Australia), conducted by Robert Blendon and colleagues in Health Affairs found that âoewaits of six months or more for elective surgeries were reported to occur âvery oftenâ(TM) or âoftenâ(TM) by 26â"57 percent of executives in the four non-U.S. countries; only 1 percent of U.S. hospitals reported this. Half of all Canadian hospitals reported an average waiting time of over six months for a 65-year-old male requiring a routine hip replacement; no American hospital administrators reported waits this long."
You're right, no one in Canada has any reason to ever seek treatment any faster than it can be provided by their Canadian healthcare system. /sarcasm
There is a thriving market for private care in England, despite the unquestioned joy that is the NHS - I wonder why that is? Why would someone in a country with one of the best, most-effective, and cheapest (it's FREE!) healthcare in the world still have a thriving private healthcare coverage market? Perhaps the NHS isn't 'all that', perhaps there are some gaps in the service?
Hold on there, Michael Moore conclusively proved that Cuba has a vastly superior healthcare system than America - he took a boat load of 9/11 first responders to Cuba to get them medical care.
Uh, your simplistic view of economics is showing - those 'civilised' countries have much greater tax burdens to pay for all that marvelous 'free' education and 'free' healthcare.
Your perspective is a little off.
Employees are offered subsidized healthcare coverage by employers, employees don't have to take it (many, not all, but many) employers will give you cash money in place of subsidized healthcare if you get outside coverage (for example, if your spouse has better/cheaper coverage available for you through their employer). Your employer in no way can limit What healthcare coverage it's employees can get for themselves. It's like this - I used to work in public school K-12 education, my employer, the school district offered me free lunches in the school cafeteria - I instead choose to go out for lunch. The school district by offering me one thing never removed any other option available to me. I also was offered subsidized healthcare by the school district, but since I already had superior coverage through my wife's employer, I opted out, and instead got a couple hundred extra dollars each month added to my paycheck. I wasn't limited to the coverage my employer offered, it was merely one of many choices.
In the 'famous' Hobby Lobby case, the employer (Hobby Lobby) took the position that they, for religious reasons, did not want to pay for two (2) forms of 'birth control' of the twenty-three (23) forms the PPACA legislation mandated. The distinction was the two forms of 'birth control' they objected to were considered abortifacients, meaning they 'aborted' a fertilized egg/embryo after the fact. They had no problem funding the other twenty one (21) forms of federally-mandated birth control because they all prevented eggs from becoming fertilized. (Their religious belief is that life begins at conception.) But just because an employer doesn't pay for the form of birth control a female employee prefers, she still has the CHOICE to pay for it out of her own pocket - pharmacists and doctors don't 'check with your employer' before dispensing medicines, they WILL check with your insurance company and advise you about your options and what is and is not covered, but no patient is prevented from getting any procedure they want and are willing to pay for.
One thing we really don't have here in the U.S. Is healthcare rationing - for example, we can get MRIs done the day the doctor prescribes it, we have no waiting lists. We have no 'doctor shortage' as our neighbors to the north do - yet. We don't have Emergency Rooms with ambulances idling outside, waiting for hours to 'check in' their patients because the ER is required to see patients within a certain window, and that requirement can only be met by slowing the admission of patients into the ER.
Also, in America, any person that manages to get to an ER will receive medical attention, for free if they are without means to pay - this is a requirement that hospitals here have had for decades before Senator Obama ever ran for the Presidency - a failure to do so could cost the hospital their license to remain open.
On trains they call those devices 'dead man switches' - when the engineer's foot comes off the spring-loaded switch, the locomotive slows down.
It's for profit.
They are - education is mandatory in every state of the Union.
Are you serious? If that were implemented inner-city schools would see funding slashed... In my previous home state of New Jersey there were these failing districts referred to as 'Abbott Districts' (after a court case) which resulted in spending in those failing districts to increase to almost double what the average NJ school district spent per-child. Equalizing spending across all schools would hurt the students in inner-city schools. (The schools in the city of Baltimore, where Democrats insist an increased investment in education (among other initiatives) could prevent tragedies like the death of Freddy Grey - which sounds great, until you realize that in Maryland, home to some of the wealthyest counties in country, the Baltimore city school system is the third highest-spending district per student n Maryland.)
Do you understand what 'rich fuckers' do now? They pay property taxes at an obscene rate to fund their local public schools and then leave the public school system to privately fund their children's education elsewhere, leaving more money in the school system for the other students.
If a 'rich fucker' lives in a house that is valued at twice the average value in their community, then they pay twice the property taxes to help fund public schools their 'average' neighbor pays. (There are no deductions or loopholes.) If that 'rich fucker' then turns around and enrolls their child in a private school they are 100% responsible for the tuition costs and get NO deduction or credit on their property taxes.
The real motivation for change/improvement in public education will be school choice/vouchers - that will allow concerned parents to abandon failing public schools for better ones, and as failing schools are shuttered bad teachers can be weeded out of the system. Competition is healthy, the lack of serious competition is (contributing to) our currently failing public education system.
They possibly see a public good in this 'Khan Academy' model of education, but I'm put off at the for-profit motive.
Many argue that public schools are failing our children, but few agree on the cause, so standardized tests have been rolled out to evaluate and quantify the various levels of achievement in the various school systems at both the state and federal level.
That in and of itself isn't really a problem, the problem (IMHO) with standardized testing is that it has become the only way to evaluate career teachers since the teachers and their union groups have typically rejected every other form of teacher evaluation.
For example, in one famous example a new superintendent walked into a major metropolitan school system and was confronted with the reality that some 60% of high school graduates failed to perform at an 8th grade level, yet some 90% of the teachers had peer-evaluated each other to be 'Excellent' teachers.
The issue isn't standardized testing, it is the importance the test results have to the teachers that causes great stress in the children.
You understand they, by definition give their life to further their beliefs - that beats anything your average Prius-driving, granola-munching, green peace member would ever do.
The NUMBER of gun crimes increased, and you have to do hand-wavy math factoring in population size and gun ownership rates to try and support your position?
If gun control worked the way you and countless other gin control advocates argue it does, the NUMBER of gun-related crimes should have shrunk when gun ownership rights in GB were aggressively curtailed.
They didn't.
Not by a long shot.
Turns out criminals don't obey gun laws, and they commit more crimes involving guns when they can be relatively certain their intended victims are unarmed. When was the last time there was a mass shooting outside a declared 'gun free zone'? (Reminder, aft. Hood shooting occurred in a prt of the base where soldiers are NOT permitted to carry guns, same at the DC Naval Yard.)