Alright then it would be a serious misallocation of funds. I’m not saying that connecting people from small towns to big cities is a silly thing for the government to do, but going with the most expensive option of doing so definitely is. The government right now operates the essential air service which does basically what you said, connects people in small towns to big cities, and it does it for over 150 small towns across the U.S.. every day as a public service. However, the EAS only spends about 350 million a year total in subsidies to these routes.

Like I said before for a 50 mile stretch of track its 5 billion with a lot of benefits of the doubt, which is over 14x that, for one single small route. Spending that for say all EAS routes, which again I’ll round out to 50 miles for each even though most are going to be significantly longer is 795 billion dollars. So sure if you want that high speed rail for the small towns to the big cities go for it, but just throw away pretty much all of the defense budget for the year on a single public service very few people are going to use hedging your bets that people will come, and that jobs won’t dry up in those cities super quickly.

You act like government aren’t economic entities. No amount of nationalization or socialism breaks you from being an economic entity. From North Korea to the U.S., money is still king. We can’t go wasting millions on expensive projects that can be done cheaper and pretty much just as conveniently.

See I totally agree with that. Standard Gauge rail has worked in the U.S. over small populations in the past, and has proven to work in countries with higher population dispersions like Russia. It’s in fact working really well right now with cargo rail.

If I wanted to go forward with a plan to bring rail back into common use with the U.S. I would go to CSX, Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific, etc. and propose government subsidized passenger cars/trains on their trains to government owned stations along their routes. The routes are already there, the U.S. already has one of the largest cargo rail networks in the world. The cost would be relatively minimal for these companies, the real question is how much profit is there to be gained from it? The problem with Amtrak is its sharing the cargo rail for passenger service, essentially competing with the cargo companies on their rail. The key would be to work with these companies so that they make them a priority.

This guy was talking about HSR across the U.S., which is laughable given our population dispersion.

It makes no economic sense to do so. Say you have buttfuck nowhere station, and you want to bring it to buttfuck somewhere station. Buttfuck Nowhere has a population of 3000. To get to buttfuck somewhere station it is 50 miles.

For this project in California its some 200 million per mile. That’s a low estimate, but it is in Cali. So we’ll be extra gracious and call it 100 mil per mile. 100 mil per mile for 50 miles is now a 5 billion dollar project not counting upkeep. Now how are they, either the government or a business going to make a return on their investment for 3000 farmers who maybe say 50 will use it on any given day for a fee of 20 bucks(which low fees are why someone would take it over car), and that’s being gracious as well because farmers don’t really need to leave their farm every day to go to the bigger city.

Thats 1000 bucks a day for a 5 billion dollar project. 365k a year. Now how much is the for the planet excuse going to work when there’s a .000073% return on investment in the first year?

Now if we’re talking a small town with a population of 3 mil to a population of 50 mil like in China it totally makes sense to have HSR. Not in the U.S..

It doesn’t make much sense to build.a large HSR network in America, Australia is the same way. Canada is the same way.

One simple reason, population dispersion.

Sure from SF to LA there is a large population in pretty much every city to support it, but what if we were to go through the midwest or the Great Plains, or the rockies, midwest suburbs, all of which require a lot of expensive track to build for a population of a few thousand? Even when talking about cities are small cities have 300k, 400k, with suburbs 10, 20, even 30 miles away, which combined have a nice big population, but they’re so far apart it would be impractical to build HSR. Roads and airports are relatively cheap. You can just plop them down anywhere with a little bit of pavement and in an airports case an FBO or tiny terminal.

America has 300 mil. people spread over 9.8 mill kilometers. China has 1.4 billion over 9.6 mil. Km. Western Europe has a smaller population, about a third of the US, but its spread out over a 9th of the size of the U.S. .

In places with tight populations like China or Japan, it makes sense to have really intricate HSR networks. In places like Europe where populations are more concentrated it makes sense. In the high population parts of the US it makes sense, which is why they are either built or are in the process of being built.

With the entire U.S. though it makes zero sense.

Everything is on a spectrum, but without categorizing life would become impossibly confusing. I like to think of color for example, there’s really only one specific true blue color, there are a bunch of different types of blue, light shades, dark shades, some mixed in with other colors, however at the end of the day everyone still calls it blue. It may not be fully accurate, specific shades may have their own identities which again may not fully match, some may just barely be blue, but its helpful because without calling it blue you would need a Phd to know what each minute color is.

Look at cutting edge attitudes on gender, the entire thing is an absolute mess, filled with genders that most don’t even know exists, and insistence on people respecting them, and even some wanting to get rid of the concept of gender entirely.

If you were to ask me, I’d argue to keep the binary gender in place, but stop doing the thing people do where they start assigning a million different traits to it. Stop saying “a true man must act like” or “a proper lady does”, and just accept that like a color spectrum, every person is just slightly different, and may not do the things the way you do them, and as long as they aren’t hurting anyone, that’s ok. And that goes for most binaries we have.