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Comment by syops | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, the demographic density argument fails to hold up to the fact that spending $6 trillion on high speed rail would have been much more beneficial to society than spending it on Iraq/Afghanistan.

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I like inter-city travel via train more than flying or driving, but even in the Northeast Corridor, which is the most well-serviced rail area in the US and certainly has the demographic density, it's not always worth it in practice.

Boston to Providence is 45 minutes, faster than driving, very happy to take that trip. (For those who don't know, Providence traffic is more ridiculous than Boston traffic, so even my more car-oriented friends tend to like this trip via train)

Boston to NYC is about 3 and a half hours, with the convenient location of Penn Station, the lack of airplane+airport bullshit, it's not bad. I like it more than flying, plus you can just buy a ticket and travel on a whim.

But Boston to DC is 7 hours assuming everything goes smoothly, and much longer if it doesn't. I can't justify the DC trip by train, it's only a 90 minute flight.

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

Wikipedia says "Concepts for improvements to achieve "true" high-speed rail on the corridor, which have been estimated by Amtrak to cost $151 billion, envision cutting travel times roughly in half, with trips between New York and Washington that would take 94 minutes."

But I remember something similar being on the Wikipedia page when I was in college, and I graduated a decade ago. We really have no excuse to not have spent that money on our own infrastructure. We could have Boston to DC in 3 hours. Suddenly the train would be a lot more viable for a lot of people.

I'm not trying to be a troll with this, but is that true?

I don't mean the fact that Iraq and Afghanistan were failed missions. But I've heard that 90% of the money spent on those wars went to Americans in some way or another, military contractors, suppliers, etc. all the way down the line to people like me in tech who may work on software used by the military.

you could make sure 90% of the money spent on high speed rail went to americans. that’s orthogonal to what the outcome of paying those americans is.

That goes back to the Milton Friedman quote I love: “what’s good for me is good for the country.”

You could spend all that money employing contractors producing weapons and weapons research. Or you could spent that money employing contractors producing high speed rail.

More interestingly, if instead of bombing Afghans you built them a nice high speed rail network along a nice freight network, economically integrating the traditionally independent regions, they may be grateful enough to make the Taliban lose political power.

Or, more interestingly, you could abandon the "contractor" model which is just a way to siphon public money into the hand of private shareholders, and fund self-organized public services. Self-organized, as in not centralized/authoritarian bureaucracies, but actual field workers coming together and deciding on strategies to do their job (turns out they're usually much better than managers at doing that).

Right now, the money went to Americans and the result was we blew up countries the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia. Imagine instead if the money went to Americans anyway, AND we had much better national infrastructure. You could even pitch it as necessary for national defense anyway.

According to this Adam Tooze article the wars cost around 800,000 dead people. Then there is the incalculable emotional cost to survivors and participants. This alone means that spending $6 trillion building trains would have been much better than on war.

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-34-how-we-paid-fo...

Dont forget that the some of the kids who watched their parents being killed by American drones would have the desire to take revenge later when they grow up.

If it’s a choice between paying Americans to dig and fill 2.5 trillion dollars worth of holes and the only deliverable after 20 years is dead Americans and Afghanis, versus paying Americans 1/3 that amount, and the deliverable is a durable high speed rail network and all the economic knock-on effects that would bring in coming decades, what rational person would choose the former?

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