diogenescynic

Because the entire career or job experience is like a never ending marathon where the only reward is keeping your job and not becoming destitute. You never have true job security and if you work at a company long enough to go from start up to mature company then they eventually start trying to outsource or automate your job etc. It's nothing but stress and fake positivity for years and years and hopefully your lottery ticket/RSUs actually increase in value and you're eventually able to afford your freedom. It's brutal. I keep fantasizing about cashing out my retirement and running some kind of small business. I am sick of the corporate world and being a hostage to some corporate executives whims.

Just like how Detroit stopped making cars and Silicon Valley no longer manufactures semiconductors. Seems like capitalism always finds a way to outsource those jobs in a race to the bottom for the lowest wages/taxes/regulation.

Wah wah wah, make it personal because you're mad about facts:

-China built 820 miles of high speed rail in 3 years.

-The Golden Gate Bridge took 4.5 years.

-Millau viaduct in France took 3 years.

-But now we can't even build 2 miles of LAX train in the same time...

Costs and the completion time for infrastructure to be completed are horrible. You can keep defending this as totally reasonable all you want but it's exactly why our quality of life keeps going down and we keep getting outclasses by every other country.

California could be so much better if we didn't have a bunch of people like you always making excuses for everything and removing any accountability from our government. Keep electing the same people and you'll get the same results.

>so your thesis reveals a lack of discernment.

You're really quick to just get angry mad and throw out insults over me saying something as benign as 'wow it'd be nice if California used our tax money as effectively as the example in the article?' Just seems like a bizarre totally mundane thing to get hung up on and then have this nauseating Karen-like condescending tone 'actually... the costs are totally justified, it's fine that California spends 7-10x what every other developed country does--it just makes sense'. You reek of assigned opinion and just conformist talking points from Newsom.

I've lived in California for 40 years and every year the government becomes less effective and more tax money is embezzled and fleeced and squandered. I don't know how someone could travel to Europe or Japan and then come back to California and defend the state of our infrastructure and not be wholly embarrassed. Our schools, roads, bridges, everything that matters are decades behind (despite a sufficiently large tax base to fund those same projects).

We could be doing better, but simps like you just keep giving the one party system a free pass so there've never any accountability whatsoever. Good job, let's just keep lowering our expectations and shrugging this magnitude of incompetence off.

> I believe there's a place called "Flint Michigan" where the citizens would disagree.

How do you think Flint reinforces your argument? If anything it is evidence of exactly what I'm talking about---government bureaucrats making unaccountable decisions that then devastate and rip off the local constituents. They never fixed the Flint crisis... even Obama and Biden did nothing.

Google it yourself. I've lived in California my entire life and will never leave. I'm allowed to criticize it. I want it to work harder and more effectively and stop wasting resources. Unfortunately there's zero accountability to voters because we're a one party state and the party nominee practically always wins. You can let an entire neighborhood burn down while out of the country at a party and the voters will still defend you.

There's no reason we pay such high taxes and have so little to show for it. I get tired of the endless excuses. Every other country--even the more expensive ones like Switzerland--have more effective infrastructure projects. I honestly don't even think this is debatable. Go look at how poorly maintained practically everything in the state is--schools, roads, bridges... It doesn't make sense when we're paying such high taxes and have all the big tech companies here... I don't know why people are so comfortable with that cognitive dissonance.

You think $115M is a reasonable price to build a 200 foot bridge that doesn't have to support any real heavy weight? You wouldn't rather have that money spent on you know... humans? The money is skimmed off the top by the people who pay for the politicians to get elected who sign off on these projects. It's all about money and political patronage.

Ah yes, let's ignore that California has spent ~$15B on high speed rail and has literally nothing to show for it... I guess that just makes sense to some people...

To me, I can't accept it when I see other countries rapidly doing these infrastructure projects at a fraction of the cost and multiple times faster. Compare our costs to Switzerland or any other high income developed first world country--we're off the charts. It makes no sense other than lobbyists and environment lawyers and other ticky-tack bullshit that helps no one.

I also see it as a longterm competitive disadvantage and liability for the country. We can't complete big projects any more without squandering most of the tax payer money. It also lowers our quality of life when we're spending this much time in traffic and wasting our tax money for such little to show for it.

I may be exaggerating the exact number, but it's a well known fact that infrastructure costs more in California. The subway in San Francisco's Chinatown was more expensive than most modern airports... we're being scammed.

You're making my argument for me. Infrastructure costs in California are outrageously more expensive than any other developed country--for no reason other than grift.

At the cost of $115M we could have built a new public university or added more light rail somewhere it's desperately needed like Orange County or San Diego. I am not against land crossings for animals, but the way the government just blows tax money with no accountability on projects the public has almost no direct benefit from is quite extraordinary.

Or maybe it's just a good project for lawyers and lobbyists to get kickbacks...

Sure, but that's not the point. My point is that infrastructure costs are like 20-50x more in California than in other developed countries for no apparent reason. We spend a million dollars of tax payer funds to build one single public bathroom in LA or even more in SF. There's something fundamentally broken... I appreciate seeing cost effective solutions that actually works. In California, it seems like most government 'solutions' are a complete scam to divert tax dollars into someone's pet project and create a funnel for their own income/profit.

California would find a much more expensive solution that worked far less well. The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing cost an estimated $115M--a total waste of tax payer funds. Bravo to this practical and effective solution.

It reminds me of the people who have been saying real estate was going to crash since like 2018. And I like Ed Zitron a lot and think he's right about a lot, but ultimate markets can be irrational for so long that that what he's saying may not actually play out to the extent he says so.

It's down to the component level in many cases...

I assume this likely true for nearly all device manufactures. I assume all devices have some kind of unique ID that they use for tracking, whether they said so or not.

Facebook is already renting out their excess GPU capacity. Nvidia is giving out GPU capacity for investment stakes in startups. OpenAI is trying to get the government to take a 5% stake and needs to make the same amount of revenue within 3 years as Google does now or else they're going to default on their payments to Oracle. It may not be the same as the 'dark fiber' from the Dot-com bubble but it sure seems similar. Especially when this hardware is purchased ahead of delivery and ages so quickly it's not even clear it will be reusable after a few years. It's the scale of the investment in this stuff that is the issue. In 3 years, AI spending is off the charts compared to the railway bubble, Dot-com bubble, Roaring 20s, or really any other bubble. I don't think it's going to end well.

I'd rather have USPS or some quasi-government org take over some of these 'obsolete' systems than for them to just disappear altogether. There needs to be a rock bottom, bare bones option to keep prices down. We need to have more competition, not less--there are only a handful of true options for cellular or local internet. This seems to just be a way to cut off legacy infrastructure that was working fine to force people to buy into more modern (i.e. expensive) options.

Very curious how much it cost to do this.

>We've now passed the tipping point where doing telephony end-to-end entirely over IP is cheaper that keeping the baseband analog PSTN going. The main network backbone, of course, has been all-VoIP for years.

Is it really or is one just more profitable because you can charge more for IP than analog? I came here to ask this because it genuinely feels like a way to remove cheaper alternatives.

Costco works hard to charge you less. Amazon works hard to charge you more.

They killed their own citizens on October 7th just to pump up the numbers. There are recordings made public where Ben Gvir is ordering more killings. I can't stand how our mainstream media completely ignores all of Israel's crimes. Even when Israelis come here to sexual assault people in Las Vegas, or open biolabs, or steal technology... it's always swept under the rug.

Definitely and we should have affordable universal healthcare and subsidized state university tuition. Everything else should be cut as much as possible. I don't see any programs that are working well.

They're always handed out as political favors or lotteries at best. How is a lottery sustainable or scalable? These solutions do not work. It's at best virtue signaling and at worst corruption (as OP says).

This. I think crypto is going to have more commercial/industrial applications than retail/consumer applications. Stablecoins allow you to make transfers instantly beyond bank hours. There is real value there.

So we're in the $6 Uber ride era of AI still?

It's crazy how the media just intentionally ignores Israel's ethnic cleansing in Gaza but cares about a billion other fake issues. Rachel Maddow gaslighted half the country into thinking Russia was controlling the White House... meanwhile ignoring that we're starting wars at Netanyahu's request/demand. Or how Israel tried to blackmail Clinton over Monica Lewinsky. We can never actually assess our relationship with Israel--anything but slavish devotion is immediately called anti-Semitism.

Iran has been incredibly restrained. Notice how Israel keeps attacking civilians but Iran has been attacking military targets? Iran is letting Israel know (since they know Israel is the one driving negotiations...) that Iran can still attack them whenever they want--and they know Israel is running out of missiles for Iron Dome. Iran knows they just have to wait this out. Every day American support for the war decreases and people begin to resent Israel more and more for dragging us into the war. Iran is winning the war by every metric. This is the first war where the target ended up coming out of the war more economically powerful... it's a complete backfire.

Yep, the conflicts in Iran and Ukraine have shown how weak our strategy is. Iran is beating us with balsa wood drones. Cheaper is better in this case. But we still like buying the best/most expensive/most over-engineered option available. We should be figuring out how to design a supply chain that can mass produce these in the event of a real conflict from local materials... not building the most high spec exotically sourced version... which is what we are currently doing.

Exactly. Iran is beating us with balsa wood (paper airplane) drones. We're outspending them, but they can produce them faster and cheaper. We have to spend hundreds of thousands/millions per drone and missile. They are producing them for a fraction of that. We're being sold an expensive military industrial complex that actually is going to fail when put to the test of reality.