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Comment by alexhutcheson | Hacker News Reader

> through terrain that isn't too challenging

Crossing the California Coast Ranges is very challenging! They have huge elevation changes, minimal usable electrical infrastructure, sensitive environments to protect, and seismic fault lines right where you would want to tunnel. The insane cost and complexity of the Pacheco and Tehachapi passes is the main thing that stopped the project in its tracks.

Granted, the Swiss and the Japanese have pulled off significant projects in similarly challenging terrain, but that's a testament to their competence, rather than evidence that the terrain isn't challenging.

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Not pointing fingers or blaming you, this just feels like apologist rhetoric. When did America stop doing 'hard' things? Whelp, there's a hill in between here and LA, and at some points, there's not enough power lines -- let's just not bother. I watched a great special about the trains heading up the mountains in Switzerland. They designed hybrid rail and rack trackage to handle inclines of up to 25% (!!). They built corkscrew tunnels inside mountainsides to reduce the incline. I thought America in general and California specifically had the world's best engineers. [1] It's sad how paralyzed the nation has become.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mountain_railways_in_S...

>I thought America in general and California specifically had the world's best engineers.

Where on earth did you get that idea? Japan and Germany have long been known to have the world's best engineers. The only engineering that Americans have really proven themselves to be the best in the world at is software. There were times in the distant past when they were best in the world at other things, but those times are gone. There might be an exception for military technology though; no one builds aircraft carriers like the USA still.

Remember the Apollo rocket program? How did America do that? They brought in a bunch of Nazi engineers, remember?

As for when America stopped doing "hard" things, I think it was somewhere in the 80s or 90s maybe, though from what I can tell, the really big turning point in this country was 2001, but things were falling apart before that too.

The US has by far the best engineers in the world. It also has the best scientists by a wide margin. Its top 50 universities embarrass the rest of the world in research output, save for a few foreign universities. The US tech industry, biotech, pharma, farming, aerospace and manufacturing segments are either the best in the world or among the best. The US also still has by far the leading semi conductor industry, you can't do anything in that segment without utilizing US companies.

Intel, nVidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Apple, Micron, Broadcom, Texas Instruments, Applied Materials, LAM Research, Analog Devices - the US has the best hardware and semi engineers of any nation. What do Germany and Japan have that competes that small list?

There is no other country that could enable SpaceX, NASA, Blue Origin, et al. to exist.

There's a reason why it was Tesla of California that pushed the auto industry forward, not Germany or Japan.

Nearly every piece of modern technology that you use today was invented by US engineers. There are few exceptions. From the lithium battery, to modern solar cells, to the smartphone or cellphone, to the microprocessor, to the LED & LCD, to the router, computer networks, and everything inbetween. The modern laser, fiber optics, PDAs, spreadsheets, the relational database, a dozen major programming languages, ethernet, ram/dram, the personal computer, streaming media, DPS, the cable modem, the hard drive, SSD, the GUI, the mouse, email, 3D graphics, the digital camera, the optical disc, and dozens of other critical elements the modern world has relied upon.

The modern world hardly exists save for what US engineers invented.

Most of the tech related to the satellite industry - including GPS - was invented by US engineers, by a fat margin. There's a reason it's SpaceX that is going to lead in global Internet access via satellite, not a company from Russia, China, Germany or Japan. The US has by far the best satellite tech and engineers.

The entire AI industry has been trailblazed by US engineers.

The US is so far ahead on autonomous driving tech that every foreign auto company has had to set up shop in Silicon Valley, because none of them can compete. That includes China, Japan and Germany. Auto Germany's biggest fear is being turned into a cheap box commodity, while Silicon Valley takes over the industry via software - their fear is valid, that's exactly what is going to happen.

Europe is so far behind in biotech, they constantly have to buy US companies to try to keep up. All of their best biotech products and companies have been acquired from the US. Asia isn't remotely competitive in pharma or biotech, they're 20 years behind on most things. Japan has one or two relevant companies there, China is only just now starting to make a dent.

The US has been far ahead on genomics tech for decades. It's US companies like Illumina that lead the way, not hardware from Japan. How about robotic surgery? That has been dominated by another US company for two decades, Intuitive Surgical.

It was the US - Broad and Berkeley in particular - that was responsible for about 3/4 of all progress on CRISPR, which China has aggressively copied from. Once again, elite US engineers and scientists blazing the way.

> Remember the Apollo rocket program? How did America do that? They brought in a bunch of Nazi engineers, remember?

That's dramatically false. Slander in fact. Apollo involved thousands of engineers. It was not largely made up of Nazi engineers.

And Japan? The country that hasn't done anything of consequence in 25 years in engineering or technology. Not only did they entirely lose their hardware industry to South Korea, Taiwan and China, but they can't do software at all. There's a reason their economy hasn't expanded since the early 1990s.

Germany, the country that can't do software, can barely do hardware, can't do mobile, has mediocre military tech, rarely invents anything of consequence, and whose last great remaining industry - the auto business - is about to implode. Yeah sure. Germany certainly used to have vaunted engineers, decades ago. There's nothing special about a BMW or Volkswagen today, and it shows in their stagnation. The future of the auto industry is cheap boxes from China and American software.

> That's dramatically false. Slander in fact. Apollo involved thousands of engineers. It was not largely made up of Nazi engineers.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/history/vonbraun/bio.h...

Accordingly, von Braun became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that would propel Americans to the Moon. At Marshall, the group continued work on the Redstone-Mercury, the rocket that sent the first American astronaut, Alan Shepard, on a suborbital flight on May 5, 1961. Shortly after Shepard’s successful flight, President John F. Kennedy challenged America to send a man to the Moon by the end of the decade. With the July 20, 1969 moon landing, the Apollo 11 mission fulfilled both Kennedy’s mission and Dr. Von Braun’s lifelong dream.

  Japan and Germany have long been known to have the world's best engineers.

That's how they won the war.

No, they lost because, even with better engineering (at least for the Germans), they couldn't match America's industrial production capability. American tanks (esp. the Sherman) were total crap compared to German tanks, but they could pump them out at many times the volume the Germans could. Quantity over quality.

In addition, America was protected by two large oceans, so its industrial production capabilities were never affected by the enemy. Germany's factories were constantly being bombed.

And finally, on top of all that, America entered the war late, and by that time Germany was already softened a lot from fighting with France, Britain, Russia, etc. If they hadn't been stupid enough to invade Russia, we might not be having this exchange.

All the best minds in America are devoted to either getting people to click on ads or fleecing them out of their retirement savings. There's nobody left to plan out infrastructure work or make the government function.

/haha-only-serious

> When did America stop doing 'hard' things?

Basically the 70s. We never really recovered, even if the economy did.

How many of those lines are high speed rail? I’d venture to guess that the answer is a big fat zero.

There are freight lines that go through these mountains, but they do so at very low velocities. The passes through these ranges are higher than about half the lines on that list.

The speed of the line isn't the tricky part in these Swiss tunnel projects. Switzerland's trains aren't as fast simply because Switzerland is too small and too dense to require it. The fastest Swiss trains are still pretty fast though at 200km/h.

Much more relevant are the insane projects achieved. The Gotthard Tunnel project is probably one of the hardest things humanity has ever achieved (on par with the moon landing).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel

> Crossing the California Coast Ranges is very challenging! They have huge elevation changes,

The project scaled back its goals significantly. There's a lot of talk about SF<->LA, but the only concrete plan is (was?) Merced<->Bakersfield, where the elevation changes consist primarily of overpass abutments. Everything else is placed on definite hold. This is the equivalent of trying to put a man on the moon and settling for watching Star Wars on Netflix.

And connecting Merced, Fresno, and Bakersfield by train is not a billion dollar priority. These towns are already connected by train, and nobody uses it. The reason the California HSR project was interesting is because it replaces the bus route which currently connects the Bay Area to the LA metro area, not because it upgrades the current rail system which already connects these much, much smaller Central Valley towns. Merced has a population of 80k people. Bakersfield is 380k. Who cares?

> There's a lot of talk about SF<->LA, but the only concrete plan is (was?) Merced<->Bakersfield

No, the only place construction is actively underway is Merced-Bakersfield. The whole SF-LA line is just as much actively doing planning and environmental clearance and seeking funding for actual construction as ever.

Your information is out of date.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/skbaer/california-bulle...

> "Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to LA. I wish there were," he said. "However, we do have the capacity to complete a high-speed rail link between Merced and Bakersfield."

I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think most of the difficulty in the CAHSR project didn't come from technical challenges. It came from mismanagement and NIMBYs, in particular NIMBYs in Atherton, Palo Alto, the Tehachapi pass, and other segments that blocked construction and put the project into a death spiral.

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