Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cyberdog | Hacker News Reader

I voted against high speed rail because it it wouldn't be serving anywhere near my area - I get it, the majority of the population lives on the coast between the Bay Area and San Diego, but why increase the tax burden on the people who live in the other 90% of the state who will likely never ride it? - and because I knew it would go over-budget and over-schedule.

Unsurprisingly, I got outvoted. And unsurprisingly, however many years and billions of dollars later, there are still no high speed trains running.

View on HN

This doesn't really make sense. The whole point of high speed rail is to reliably and effectively connect the northern and southern existing transit regions that are currently separated.

Its like saying the US should never have built rail across the US because most people don't use it.

Of course if you just do high speed rail, you don't have much, what you actually need is to extend and expand your regional rail and transit network. Then high speed rail benefits both regional transit networks.

Given how much money is invested in highways and how much it cost to build the absurd highway system, rail just makes way more sense.

Its pretty funny to me that what is supposed to be 4 largest economy in the world can't manage a half way decent train network. When there are multiple cities with 500k to millions people are between SF and LA.

There is easily enough population to have a really successful high speed rail if its correctly connected to a larger regional network.

> Its like saying the US should never have built rail across the US because most people don't use it.

Initialization of rail across the US was a greenfield project with little in the way of previous context and self-funded by land grants. The comparison is specious since about the only thing HSW and historic rail have in common is their use of rails.

To call it 'self-funded' is a bit of a stretch. Most rail financing went bankrupt and had to have been bailed up by the government at some point.

Even though rail was a greenfield project, native treaty rights were trampled, that should also be remembered.

Technology wise, it was WWI that killed rail, unintentionally. All the trucks, post war, were dumped and sold for cheap. Companies bought them up and started hauling goods to market, without having to buy real-estate, or a factory, near a rail line.

"self-funded": sure, lets say "intended as self-funded"; "native treaty rights": yes, relatively greenfield compared to today

WWI and rail: another aspect was nepotistic political control (which might not have been a bad thing but definitely has an odor). [0] I wonder if dumping the Liberty trucks a conceptual/capacity jump start more than a physical one. The 1917 rolling stock was 2,250,000 freight cars [0], and roughly 10k Liberty Trucks were produced [1].

On March 21, 1918, the Railway Administration Act became law, and Wilson's 1917 nationalization order was affirmed. Wilson appointed his son-in-law, Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, as Director General of the newly formed USRA.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Railroad_Adminis...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_truck

It's hard to think about how much technological change, and economies of scale played a part in our history.

In the 1920s suburbs became possible because of telephones, light bulbs,and radio, as much as they became possible because of cheap Model-T's. Lumber could be trucked in, instead of using horses to bring the wood to trains, or floated down river, dropping the cost of housing materials.

Real Estate was expensive along rail lines, but cheaper even a couple of miles away. So now developers could build diagonally out from rail lines.

In the 1920 most suburbs were still street car suburbs. Where street car company developed the land around the station.

Then the street cars went way and suburbs became ever larger and less dense.

Also zoning started essentially forcing suburbs and never let these areas develop out of the state of being suburbs.

What was built in the 1920 is mostly just fine. It really gets bad in the 1960s where everything started to be build for the car only.

But it gets even worse, if you look at classic US suburbs in the 1960s they look almost reasonable. Thin roads, houses reasonably close together. Then they started enforcing ever crazier requirements for the streets and ever crazier requirements for lots sizes and stuff like that.

This results in the already low density of 1960s suburb looking like Paris. Now you have suburbs that have literal highway highways between houses (where you can literally have 4 F-150 next to each other), with lots of distance between houses in all 4 direction, small houses not allowed, no duplex or anything else. Because of zoning literally ever commercial transaction requires a short car trip.

If there was no change, would there be history? Here is Foucault from Archaeology of Knowledge:

The notion of discontinuity is a paradoxical one: because it is both an instrument and an object of research; because it divides up the fields of which it is the effect; because it enables the historian to individualize different domains but can be established only by comparing those domains.

Thank you for proving my point. Please look at a map of California and notice that the SF Bay Area is not directly south of the Oregon border; there's a huge space there. That's where I lived. It takes about as long to drive from my parents' place to San Francisco as it does to drive from San Francisco to LA.

You would benefit by less traffic on roads because someone else would be using high speed trains.

If high speed rail does not serve their region, then I think it stands to reason that high speed rail wouldn't improve traffic in their region.

That is a bad assumption. Because if you have other public transport and regional rail, that connects to the high speed rail backbone. All of sudden somebody that wants to go to LA of SF would take the regional rail to the next high speed train station. Thus those persons wouldn't drive.

California has done a lot since the 1990 in terms of regional rail and things like electrification of Caltrain are no brainers. But they need to do a lot more.

High speed rail is successful when its integrated into lots of regional rails.

Precisely. The closest high speed rail train station to where I grew up would be… three hours away, maybe?

And no, there are no regional trains I could take to get there. I don't think there are any buses either.

The entire state is not the SF-LA corridor. That's my entire point.

I voted against it and lived where it would be useful because I didn't think it would be on time or on budget, because no infrastructure project is in the US.

By that yardstick no infrastructure would be built.

We don't get to vote on all of them.

Perhaps none should be built until we figure out how to get costs on par with other first world countries.

THis is disastrously unproductive thinking. perfect is the enemy of good enough and if we don't build infrastructure, there's no incentive to create the supply chains that bring costs down overtime in the first place.

Perfect may be the enemy of good, but thankfully the US' ability to construct in a reasonably fast and affordable way isn't good.

Similarly, we should end services to low density areas that can't support themselves. It's very unfair on a per-person basis.

Personally, this is why I vote against schools. No child of mine goes to public school. Big waste of money. Wish I could do that with universities but that's mostly federal and state. Fortunately, can just vote against property tax and bonds to stop local schools.

Do you not realize how fucked up & demented you sound in saying this…?

Education is the only path to a better world. The vast majority of the populace cannot afford private schooling. & to them - you say - fuck them.

Makes me feel as if nepotism might be a fetish of yours.

Education is incredibly important… but I'm not confident US schools actually provide it. It's better than nothing, sure, but if you can do better than schools, why send your child to one?

https://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/mnewman/LockhartsLament.pd...

So long as you make sure they have friends and peers – which is, admittedly, really hard outside the school system – what's the advantage of school?

I went to a public school in one of the 10 poorest counties in the US. I lived well below the poverty line with food insecurity. Socially it was somewhat hellish & there were definitely more than enough teachers that gave zero fucks about anything, but also teachers who cared more than you could ever imagine.

I came out of it with full ride scholarships for mechanical engineering, to a University ranked something within the top 20 of whatever with regards to their engineering programs in general, & of their various fields, their MechE & ElecE were regarded as the best (within the engineering college, realized my poor wording could be interpreted in another way). I also received - actually, was harassed with - endless offers from military recruiters to go down a navy nuke/Air Force officer path, w/a $30k-$40k enlistment bonus, just for being in the top percentile of the ASVAB test - offered by my public school, that I reluctantly took.

Public schools, administration wise, are in general part of the problem. But cunts of parents raising shitty little cockgargling douchecunts of kids that inhabit the public schools are the larger problem.

I don’t know the best solution to the problem, but burning down public schools even more is definitely not it. I think giving a baseline pay of $70k/yr, a $20k or so one time “bonus”, as well as a “if you hate being a teacher, here’s $15k-$30k severance to quit, but you can never be in any position dealing with public education systems again” to every teacher may be a decent start.

Sorry for the poor articulation & vocabulary in this comment, quite tired after a long day & in a good amount of physical pain.

I was a nuke for the 'normal minimum' 6 years. It's a depressing place, as normal person will typically get out as soon as possible since they survived that trial by fire there are tons of 'shoe in' jobs around that pay more. This of course means the people left behind to become leaders are afraid of civilian life or trapped there for other reasons (military medical benefits for a family member being a prime example). Also a social situation where nukes hate other nukes (while serving), and the social obnoxiousness of nukes causing nonnukes to hate them as well.

Ultimately that leads to a situation where nuke commands will have the lowest morale out of all branches. Though there was an exception for a while where drone pilot commands had lower morale.

Out of curiosity, what makes the nukes hate each other while serving? Something along the lines of having to hold each other accountable for every tiny little tedious thing on endlessly long checklists or something?

The funny thing for me was that, though it wasn’t obvious just by looking at me & at the time nobody would’ve known unless I’d told them, I medically couldn’t have done anything military because of some internal physical medical conditions & being on some arguably heavy medication to deal with associated nerve pain.

Or at least I presumed that would’ve disqualified me, & things only gradually got worse.

There was one other path the Navy dude mentioned they were pretty desperately in need of intelligent people for, willing to put up with the slog that it entailed & had the same enlistment bonus. Can’t remember what. Had a friend end up in communications on a sub though… definitely said it sucked the life out of him & gtfo as soon as he could.

No, absolutely, burning down public schools is not the answer. Public schools are, in theory, one of the best things in the world, and I (with parents who couldn't have done a better job, since my nearest library was the school's library) benefited a lot. But I hated lots of the school experience, and it would have been strictly better for me if I had not been forced through those parts. I mean things like:

• being forced to execute algorithms on paper for literally hundreds of hours when I understood them better than the textbook author… or worse, being forced to execute algorithms on paper when I didn't understand them, rather than having time to play around enough to understand them. (Mathematics)

• having linguistic prescriptivists telling me my writing was incorrect, even though I was only doing things that were done in the set texts. My writing was bad, sure, but my grammar was good; I've only been called out on an actual grammatical mistake once since the age of 10, and it's not like anyone told me why it was wrong.¹ (English)

• being forced to do sports I had no interest in, and that involved being grabbed and pushed around, rather than being allowed to just play. (Physical Education)

• having to memorise insignificant, isolated minutiae (like the dates of events that, actually, could've happened a week either side and it have made no difference), and being punished if I wrote something incorrect by mistake. (History)

• having to memorise and recite actually incorrect stuff, and being punished if I wrote something correct by mistake. (Computer Science)

• being told to memorise and recite blatantly incorrect stuff ("Liberal Christians believe that everyone goes to heaven after they die; and also that heaven is just a metaphor for a state of mind and there isn't actually an afterlife.") in a strictly-structured format, despite it actually being fine to write correct stuff in free verse in the exam. Heck, I bet even iambic pentameter or double dactyl would've been allowed. (Religion)

• having to memorise a specific set of details about specific case studies, or be punished with the inability to demonstrate entire classes of understanding about the subject. (Geography)

• having my work constantly judged and marked based on whether the teacher thought they could do better (and then having that mark written on the work), basically killing my passion stone cold dead. (Art)

(I also disliked Music, but I don't think there was anything wrong with it. I just wasn't very good. I guess I enjoyed it enough to not be chafed too much by being forced to do it.)

And I'm not even from the US. Everything I've heard about the US public school system says that it's even worse.

> But cunts of parents raising shitty little cockgargling douchecunts of kids that inhabit the public schools are the larger problem.

Schools have to do double-duty as daycare and places of learning, and they don't do a brilliant job of either. Perhaps only admitting children who want to learn might help? But then, that would force kids who would benefit from being there to not attend, allows bullies to make "bully the target out of school" a success criterion…

> Sorry for the poor articulation & vocabulary in this comment,

My English teacher would've marked you down for it ("ElectE isn't a real word", "Don't use &"², "dashes are lazy punctuation"), but I can't see a single actual problem with it. Two potential comma splices where I'd've used a semicolon, but that's pretty minor.

---

¹: It was an issue with tense in reported speech; if the narration is past-tense and the speech is future-tense, you use the conditional tense. I managed to figure it out, about five years later, while reading a fanfic – yes, from the internet!

²: Even though it was considered a letter of the alphabet back in the 11th century, way before the I/J and U/V distinction was made. (The very name "ampersand" comes from "W, X, Y, Z, and per se 'and'"…) It's not a text-speak abbreviation thankyouverymuch, and even if it were, that wouldn't stop it being a legitimate part of the language.

It is easier to appreciate public school when you grow up poor and your family is a disaster. That’s all I had, and it was my way out of poverty.

I mean most people don’t realize that as a country we spend $14.5k per student (top 5 globally). With average class sizes at ~20 students, we spend ~$290k per class per year.

The average teacher’s salary is $55k that leaving ~$235k.

Avg office leases are $35/sqft per year and classrooms are ~1k sqft so that’s only $35k.

Making the core cost of teacher + classroom $90k/yr

So somehow we’re burning $200k per class per year on administration, transportation, facility management, curriculums, and extracurriculars.

I can see not wanting to expand the current wasteful system.

I thought your numbers sounded high, but they're actually too low in CA:

> The total overall funding (federal, state, and local) for all K–12 education programs is $124.3 billion, with per-pupil spending of $21,596 in 2021–22. For 2020–21, per-pupil funding increased from $16,881 in the 2020–21 Budget Act to $23,089 in the 2021–22 Budget Act.

https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/eb/yr21ltr0811.asp

The person upthread said they "vote against schools" I assume the intent it to have the children raise themselves on the street while their parents work in sweat shops like a Dickensian novel.

A teacher's salary might be 55k but you have not accounted for pension, FICA and health care.

A more interesting question is what should it cost to run an education system? A quick search indicates the U.S. "spends about 4.96% of its GDP on education, compared to the 5.59% average of other developed nations" So maybe things just cost more in the U.S.

> what should it cost to run an education system?

That can only be properly determined with a free market, where the supply-side and demand-side participants voluntarily come to an agreement about what services will be offered, and what will be paid in exchange for those services.

What we'd find is that there isn't one specific amount. It would vary significantly, depending on the unique situations of the various participants.

I'm guessing you are a liberterian.

For those who are not, a survey of the best practices in existing developed countries would likely make more sense.

It would help if schools wouldn't have to run its own buses. If there was some kind of system of buses kids could just use.

It's a sad state of affairs that it's very hard to tell if this is sarcasm.

Nah come on, this is clearly sarcastic.

I have heard this argument against school bond issues for more than 50 years. No reason to believe it is sarcastic.

Be prepared to spend more on security.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com