[ExI] high speed rail: was RE: vaccines again

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of spike jones via extropy-chat



 

 

>…move passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles, or between Sacramento and Los Angeles, but regardless of that, all three of those places have a waaaaay bigger problem than how to move people: they have become very very dangerous places to be.  …spike

 

 

Will, I can be more specific.  California passed a law decriminalizing theft of items valued at less than 1000 bucks.  It is a misdemeanor, but that is the functional equivalent of legal: homeless people don’t care how many misdemeanors they commit.  They don’t pay anyway.  So now in the big cities especially, the bad guys can ransack parked cars without fear, with complete functional impunity.  People need to get to the train station somehow, but now their car is at higher risk than it is at the airport, for the airport charges enough to hire security people.  BART is still trying to offer free parking, which is anything but free.

 

Given that California has effectively legalized ransacking cars, it is now considered by many the best way to make a living, which attracts the kind of people who ransack cars for a living.  This means that people with expensive cars leave, and are replaced with people who don’t drive at all.  Result: the population of California is dropping for the first time since it became a state, but more importantly: people with money are leaving while people with none are arriving.

 

Someone must pay for that high speed rail infrastructure.  What happens when the state collectively realizes (as I did in 2008) that we can’t afford this?

 

spike  

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