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Comment by nojvek | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile China has built 42,000km (26,100 miles) of high speed rail.

https://www.travelchinaguide.com/china-trains/high-speed/rai...

US is now cursed by their own success. Eisenhower jump started the highway to connect all of US as the largest transport infrastructure project. We have been riding the success of that for a massive economy. We are on the plateauing side of that S curve.

cursed because we spent a ton of money and got into debt with trillions spent for wars without much to show.

Now we don’t have to money, nor the will to invest in the next S curve infrastructure project.

Meanwhile China is pumping out infrastructure at speed of thought.

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Why do people say 'we don't have the money' for stuff like infrastructure? We never have a problem finding the 'trillions of dollars for wars'. It seems there is only ever a problem coming up with funds these days when it is to invest in things that help our own citizens (outside of just throwing money at them).

Because the debt is now due?

"U.S. Debt: Visualizing the $31.4 Trillion Owed in 2023" - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/us-debt-31-4-trillion-ow...

> Because the debt is now due?

The so-called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) credibly posits that because the U.S. borrows in its own currency (dollars), it can simply "print money" as needed — as long as the U.S. economy has sufficient unused productive capacity to absorb the resulting increase in demand. [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/06/business/economy/modern-m...

MMT is basically modern day heliocentrism - objectively correct, but threatening to established wealth and power structures and therefore Wrong.

A few years ago we had an opportunity to borrow at a negative interest rate. Should have leaned into that opportunity.

Also we’re under-taxing bajillionaires and politically-active but tax-exempt megachurches.

It was a choice not an opportunity. They decided to do that to boost asset values.

If the government sent out a hit team to forcefully rob every single last penny of net worth every US billionaire has, what impact would that income have on the national debt? I'm pretty sure it'd be extremely negligible.

'Tax the billionaires' is a red herring. Nobody should use that or engage with it. The issue is that they exist in the first place.

nah, bro. like pigs, you fatten them up and then eat them. do it in 3 or 4 cycles and then there will be no more billionaires.

? American debt is only due, if they abandon the world, which pays for this debt by valuing american security and insurances of free trade high, by using the dollar to trade and as reserve currency.

You're right. It's not about how much money is available. It's always about the choices of where they spend it and those choices rarely benefit the citizens, somewhat ironically.

It’s not even just about choices, it’s about consensus and we’ve forgotten how to see a win from a partial loss. We no longer know compromise at a federal level

As you say, we have forgotten consensus building.

And we have forgotten the rational can-do optimistic spirit of problem solving via hard work, (the ideal of) objective thinking, and the hunger for adopting ideas from anywhere.

A lot of this is the result of power centralization in our social and political sphere's. Winner take all dynamics are so immediately and decisively rewarding, that long term, collaborative and independent thinking have become self-defeating (for the political and socially powerful).

Technology can solve many problems. Unfortunately, that can include shifting the price of growing problems into the future and onto the powerless. Enshittification of the whole planet and human condition.

It isn't technology's fault, and if/when society gets shocked into organizing better, we are going to need every technological edge we have accumulated to turn things around.

Not just federal. Federal is where things are most obviously broken, but the same is going on all the way down to the bottom, just slower. I live in a town of ~8k and local politics (over local issues!) is insanely partisan in a way it wasn't even 10 years ago.

I don't think it is so much about win/partial loss but considering large views or long term thinking/strategizing. Especially true in politics because we've developed a system where a representative is only concerned about the timeframe of an election cycle, rather than concerned with what they can do for the people. And we hold them accountable by that metric. So any project that is longer than an election cycle can end up being a game of hot potato where the last one holding it loses. In reality there are several members to blame. It's like how people judge a president based on the economy yet often policies they make don't actually have large effects until years later (definitely some are shorter term, but also remember that effects compound and set a stage). World is too complicated and we're too dumb. We can be not as dumb, but that's not quite easy because complexity is de facto hard.

Why even mention wars? We have the money for Hyperloops, Solar Freaking Roadways, Boring Company, and so much more... you know... terrible ideas that clearly won't work, don't even pass a sniff test, but we throw millions or sometimes billions at. I'm totally okay with pushing the bounds of what we can do as humans, and even encourage it. But running on hype is not a sustainable system and arguably fraudulent (I believe it is). The Bloomberg article sure makes Hyperloop look like it is...

I different version of hype applies in a different way. With the systems destroying themselves through compounding "compromises" to get political allies. It's a Vox video, so high level but not a bad intro[0]. Tldr: easy to derail (pun intended) any political project, and the bigger the project the easier it is to derail.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0dSm_ClcSw

It's easier to steal pentagon contract money than money issued for highways or train tracks therefore military contracting has a higher profit margin therefore that's what the lobbyists advocate for.

They do have money. But off by a few orders of magnitude. Proposed Texas high-speed Houston-Dallas rail lands $500K in federal funds: https://energycapitalhtx.com/high-speed-houston-dallas-rail-...

That 500K should be enough to build 1/4 of a bathroom: https://slate.com/business/2022/10/san-francisco-toilet-mill...

The reality is that the highway project has gone to far. It has been institutionalized with a gigantic lobby behind it. The highway are done, and have been for decades.

And even before that a huge numbers of highway built made no fucking sense and were a negative for the economy. And state DoT are literally just highway building departments with a fetish for destroying cities.

You are not riding the plate of the S curve, continued investment in that nonsense is an active negative.

> Now we don’t have to money, nor the will to invest in the next S curve infrastructure project.

How about this. Stop spendign such an mind blowing amount of money on highways and other roads, and instead invested in financially smart things like walking, bike, buses and trains.

Planes are better than high speed rail: faster, flexible routing, flexible capacity, proven technology, doesn't require billions in upfront infrastructure, less habitat disruption, lower carbon footprint.

how are trains not a proven technology???

planes are faster, have flexible routing, and cheaper upfront cost sure

the rest is simply not true. how do planes have "flexible capacity"? how do trains not have flexible capacity? wtf?

Good questions.

> how are trains not a proven technology???

The US currently has nothing that would be considered high speed rail by the rest of the world. It could be built here, but it would cost billions and take decades. Hofstadter's law strongly applies to major infrastructure projects in the US. "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."

> how do planes have "flexible capacity"? how do trains not have flexible capacity?

Planes can be put in service or redistributed to serve a certain route in hours. Extra train engines and train cars cannot be moved nearly as easily.

Exactly the same thing with trains. I live in Switzerland, and they are adapting the capacity of the trains route by route, and to the time of the day.

The train I take every day to work has 12 cars in rush hour, and 4 cars off-peak, sometime 6 cars in the middle of the day, or 10 cars just after rush hour. They put extra trains in rush hour, have trains in standby is case of a breakdown of other trains, and they even introduce special trains dedicated for events (football games, big concerts, sports event). How is this "not flexible" ?

The only valid point is that the US forgot how to efficiently build huge infrastructure projects. But it is not an impossible thing to solve. Sent some experts to France, Spain and ask them how to manage high-speed project within reasonable costs. France is building the Grand Paris Express (a lot of tunneling, more than 200km of tracks) for a reasonable cost, and is now reusing tunnel boring machines to build another project in Toulouse.

It's not a technical issue with the costs in US; it's a political issue. On one hand, any construction project gets mired in massive amounts of red tape even when things go well. And then you have all the people who see public transit and similar projects as a threat to their neighborhood's "character" (i.e. who gets to live there), and who have mastered the art of using said red tape for their advantage.

I'm sorry, but rail is the lowest form carbon footprint you can find, if you exclude biking and walking.

Also, boarding a train is so much more comfortable and convenient than boarding a plane (no security check, at least in Europe, wide seats, no emergency tutorial, ...). Also the train drops me right in the city center.

I would argue that up to 500 km of distance, high speed train is the best option, then it becomes debatable.

Trains on existing tracks are very efficient at moving weight.

When the tracks don't exist (i.e. in the US) there are billions of dollars of carbon cost (moving earth, concrete, steel) to building new track.

This study [1] cites a 80 to 280 tCO2 per km of new high speed track laid (it includes bridges, tunnels, ...). Lets lay 700km of new high speed tracks (Orlando to Atlanta). So 700km of high speed track is 56'000 tCO2 to 196'000 tCO2.

Orlando to Atlanta will have sold more than airplane 310'000 seats in December 2023. At 250g per km per passenger, we get to 54'250 tCO2 emitted on this route alone in December. You can see that laying 700km of high-speed tracks that will last more than 30 years before renovation will emit as much as one to four months of flight emissions on the busiest US airplane route.

You can argue about the specifics of this back of the envelope calculation, but flying emit orders of magnitude more tCO2 than any form of transport (on short haul) that even building a whole new high-speed rail route is worth it after a few years of exploitation. Obviously you are not going to convert 100% of passengers to rail, especially in the beginning with spotty transport coverage, but focusing on busy airplane routes (< 1000km) and building high-speed rail is worth it in the medium-long term.

[1] https://uic.org/IMG/pdf/carbon_footprint_of_railway_infrastr...

Thanks for referencing some data. Unfortunately, on page 10 it looks like they are specifically excluding the impact of constructing rail lines ("construction infrastructure").

The high speed rail line from LA to San Francisco (~380 miles) was estimated to cost $128 billion. The Orlando to Atlanta route is longer (~440 miles), but lets pretend it could be built for the same cost.

A one-way plane ticket from Orlando to Atlanta is about $100. For $128 billion you could buy 1.28 billion plane tickets. It looks like ~3 million people current fly between Orlando and Atlanta each year.

For the cost of building a new high speed rail line, you could fly everyone for the next 426 years. It's not hard to imagine that the fuel expended during construction of the high-speed rail line would be greater than the fuel consumed by all the planes flying between those cities for decades.

Sorry but you misread the report. They are saying that typical eco-calculator usually do not take into account the emissions from construction and maintenance. You can see on the document that on table 2, emissions of construction is taken into account. It is the point of the report. So my point about carbon emission stands. You can build miles of high-speed rail and offset the emissions caused by construction compared to the same route in airplane in a few months.

Also, the California is the most expensive high speed rail project in the world. The US simply does not have the expertise anymore to build effienctly big infrastructure project. In comparison, Spain is building highspeed rail for 17.7m€ per km (also Spain has a lot of mountains), while the rest of European countries build at 45.5m€ per km. This makes this 700km line more like 12.4 billions € to 31.9 billions €. So 50 to 89 years worth of plane tickets.

I agree, still expensive, but then by the same logic you should stop investing in highway expansion, because they are super expensive and always prove ineffective at reducing congestion. The US has proven in the past they are able to make big projects. Why admit defeat and try to keep the status quo?

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