wbsss4412

If I could make one change to popular parlance (or perhaps I should say technical jargon), it would be the usage of the word externality. While it is a technically correct description, the framing implied leads to analysis that I don’t think is fundamentally sound.

Markets optimize for products. If something can’t be made into a product wherein the full value and cost to society is express captured within the transaction itself, you generally end up with less than ideal outcomes.

Capitalism is the best system for optimizing for productive efficiency, but creating an abundance of material wealth isn’t quite the same thing as making society as a whole the best that is can be.

> Especially since you would get 3.5 hour trains Bay Area <-> Seattle and 4.5 hour trains to Vancouver.

Hiroshima to Tokyo is just over 3.5 hours on the Shinkansen, and it’s a 500 mile trip. SF TO Seattle is roughly 800 miles… You’re making a very optimistic projection.

> Just looking at the towns between Portland and Sacramento Salem, Eugene and Medford exist.

You’re barely cracking 500k people and covering the most difficult terrain on the entire corridor.

The resale value of the car, insurance (even if you don’t do pay per mile, insurance quotes are generally going to have some basis in miles driven per year), and maintenance are all directly correlated with miles driven. So, while these are often treated as sunk costs, that is due to improper accounting.

So, to reiterate, the cost of driving is much more than the cost of gas.

It doesn’t make sense to connect Portland and SF, but there’s a lot of value to be gained in connecting Portland and Vancouver BC, and San Diego to SF/possibly Sacramento.

We would definitely want to have a “constellation” of networks rather than one interconnected system given the geography of the US, and that’s fine. There’s never going to be a time when it makes more sense to travel from LA to NYC by rail instead of flying.

The biggest takeaway is that there is a specific role that HSR can play, but it’s not going to take over all long distance trips. Given where we are starting in the US, however, there is a massive mine of untapped potential.

> Cost of the train is $42 (coach) each way. Cost of gasoline would be ~ $24 each way.

The cost of driving is more than just the cost of gasoline.

The center of population in the US is still just barely to the west of the Mississippi, whenever people point out how vast and largely empty the US is, the leave out that the population itself is actually generally fairly close together for a majority of the country.

You could easily have HSR all over the south, Midwest and NE, and then between population centers on the west coast, just likely not in the desert and western Great Plains.

1. You, and many others are willing to pay the price, so that would imply that the price is worth it.

2. How much do you think it should cost, exactly? Do you mean to imply that the cost structure of such services should be much lower?

I’m not sure what connection you’re drawing here.

The main issue at hand is related to the fact that congresspeople are able to trade stocks on the basis of the insider information they have about upcoming legislation/changes to government policy.

Politicians don’t receive money directly from lobbyists and donors. Doing so would be a violation of rules against taking bribes.

Lobbyists and donors give money to campaigns, which require untold sums of money these days, and a congresspersons power within the party is directly correlated to their ability to fundraise for the party.

As to their actual personal means of a congresspersons wealth, they’re paid fairly high salaries (close to 200k per year, which, despite the expectations of this forum is quite a bit for the US) and yes, they have the ability to engage in their own investments and business dealings on the side. Not to mention their incredibly generous pensions.

Realistically I think the biggest impact is that people are hoarding dollars in offshore accounts rather than converting their currency.

That’s one way to look at it.

Another way to look at it is that crypto is strengthening the dollar’s foothold in Argentina and weakening the state’s ability to manage their own currency, to extremely detrimental effects.

Yes, it’s a really a breakdown of civil society as a whole. Any individual person is going to through their hands up at the whole thing and go along with it because it appears there’s nothing to be done.

Crypto advocates on this forum frequently list Argentina as a specific use case ( ie getting around foreign currency rules/restrictions ), that would imply that the market doesn’t just happen in “Cuevas”

How can you verify the actual size of the black market dollar?

11. Due to extremely taxes and an extremely unfavorable official exchange rate, citizens hoard dollars illegally and it exacerbates their currency reserve problems.

Note that 11 is really an issue of both government policy and the culture. Tax evasion is both a response to inflation and a result of a culture that doesn’t see an issue with putting private benefit over public good.

It definitely isn’t, but at this point “free market” has been watered down so heavily it gets used improperly all the time.

It’s more of a political slogan than an actual policy.

Rapid and frequent transit is a matter of planning, investment and demand. You don’t need to have a particularly large population to sustain it.

Madrid for example is a city of about 3 million in a metro area of 6 million. Trains come every few minutes throughout the day.

> I would hasten to point out that not everyone walks or can take all public transit (BART elevators frequently being broken is an issue for wheelchair users, for example).

That is a BART problem, not a “public transit is inaccessible” problem.

Stellantis really is a European company, which was the point. I felt the need to choose a country so I chose where they’re headquartered. Regardless, most people would identify those brands as “American” cars, which was the overarching point.

Yes, that is indeed correct. Thank you for clarifying for me.

I never meant to say that Volvo isn’t Chinese. It’s just odd that people really feel the need to bring it up, despite the fact that operationally little is different.

It’s Chinese in the same way that Jeep/ram/dodge/Chrysler are Dutch now. No one ever seems to bring that up when they are mentioned, though.

Apologies, that was a typo.

The risks of posting on a phone…

Volvo is owned by a Chinese parent company, but their operations are still based in the same places as before.

Using the definition implied by your comment, they were previously and “American” car manufacturer as they were sold to geeley by ford.

Edit: absurd typo, it is owned by a Chinese company.

> You will face discrimination even if you speak fairly fluent level.

Are you speaking from personal experience? Just curious because I am aware of this reputation but haven’t experienced it directly myself.

Yes exactly, I was only focused on the direction, not the magnitude.

Unfortunately I am not well versed in relativity, my response was completely rooted in linear algebra.

That is, any vector is going to be inherently one dimensional, regardless of its coordinates. Dimension is a property of a set of vectors, dependent upon how many are linearly independent of the rest of the vectors in the set. What I described doesn’t imply that there are infinite dimensions.

The vector [0,0,1] is traveling through three dimensions just the same as [1,1,1].

This is often repeated, but it misses the full story.

I myself used to believe that to be the case, but fairly recently learned that many European cities used to have significantly more car infrastructure and reversed course, while at the same time, many American cities had walkable infrastructure that was later bulldozed for cars.

There’s nothing inevitable about the way we build/built cities in America, it’s a matter of choice and priorities.

Said vector doesn’t span all of 3D space though. It is a one dimensional vector.

x, y, and z are just shorthand for orthonormal basis vectors. What you’ve described isn’t “traveling in all three dimensions” simultaneously, it’s traveling along on of the dimensions with a different basis.

The difference is really just the perception of control.

“Justify” doesn’t mean shopping rates in the market, it’s means “demonstrate the ROI we are getting for the rate you are charging”.

Comparing it to the market only matters if they decide you’re unlikely to be worth the value they are getting from your work.

> This inarguably happened.

Hubris. This is not what happened in the slightest.

Oil is traded on a global market, the little impact domestic production has on the price of oil is due to its contribution to global supplies.

The only domestic industry that has an impact on local capacity is refining.

Here is what happened: the fracking boom that began in the early/mid 2010s led to an oil glut as OPEC kept production high in order to drive out domestic US producers from the market (the shale producers had a higher cost structure and needed +$60 oil to break even). This strategy worked even before Covid, and once Covid hit, oil traded negative for a short period.

During 2021 oil inventories slowly drew down. Yet, given the experience of the latter half of the previous decade, US producers have been understandably hesitant to invest. Obviously the Biden administration did not disabuse them of this notion, but the effect of their actions is consistently overstated. Shale companies had been failing since before Biden even declared his run for president.

The war in Ukraine was then a precipitation even for oil prices to spike, but the biggest impact on gas prices has less to do with oil production challenges (though that was impacted) and more to do with refining.

Crack spreads (the difference in profit between refining a barrel of oil into gasoline vs other distillates) hit record highs this year. The value of refining diesel and jet fuel was higher than refining gasoline, when it is usually the reverse. This can be pretty clearly traced to, on the one had, a rapid rebound in air travel, and on the other, shifted supply chains from Europe where diesel is the primary fuel for passenger vehicles (though I’ll admit that the latter is more speculative on my part).