Next thing you’ll tell me is windmills don’t cause cancer..

That's because we let the neocons hitch our wagon to cheap oil by invading the middle east to the tune of trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives. No one, especially politicians, like to admin they were wrong.

Pretty good quarter we had, huh?!

Ubetcha!!

Now back to sailing off the rails. . .

Yes.

Now we tell insiders to buy their bonds. Say, a bankrupt Argentina. Then the Vonpusengropenfurher bails them out. The bond traders get rich(er). Sure it is only a fraction of what it costs the taxpayer, but who cares, we're rich in a bond fund that made no sense otherwise.

Ironically, Argentina has Universal Health Care. Our government is shut down because we can not afford to help our own citizens with health care costs.

But bringing this back to Delta and profits, the US dollar is down 13% relative the Euro (and most everything else) this year. In real terms that 13% decline in our value makes the dollar cheap and lowers Delta's expenses in the short term. In the longer term it is inflationary, once oil gets back to average, airplane parts and even labor, once we figure out that the prices of our Porsches track the Euro (and tariffs).

Energy, yes to all the above. We will find a way to use it. Cheapest is fusion. There is this enormous fusion reaction in the middle of our solar system. All you have to do is plop down a few silicate panels and start collecting what's falling on the Earth every day. Just catch what's already here. That's the most bang for buck.

Be happy to save the slightly under a trillion in oil & gas subsidies every year. We could use $600bn from that to help Americans avoid becoming street folks with their first major medical expense AND put the left over $200BN back on the Treasury's balance sheet. Maybe if there were no oil and gas subsidies we improve traffic and road wear by using trains for interstate transportation and save the diesel for the last mile. Heck, they might even discover that last mile delivery works a lot better with electric (reliable & no maintenance) trucks.

Yes, but they still kill fish and make it impossible to defend against submarines.

Russia could drive a sub right up to Washington DC and drop off videotapes of Epstein instead of plan A which is to nuke us from orbit.

remember the outrage/protests when we tried to build another pipeline next to several already existing pipelines from canada? Now imagine trying to build more railroads. The railroad barons like Warren B still exist and they will continue to fund protestors to keep new railroads or new alternative means of moving product from being built.

same thing with health insurance. The health insurance industry isn’t going to let the market be deregulated like it was when healthcare was actually affordable. Energy same thing. More regulation = more expense = more serfdom.

You do know why unions became a thing in this country, right?

Oops, sorry CC folks, meant to log onto APC!

uh yeah. But unions (despite their corruption) have a much better track record of improving working conditions than bureaucrats owned by lobbyists working for corporations.

I personally look forward to, and welcome our future robot overloads.

Scoop:D

I'm sorry I just can't not reply to this. I have to present the idea that a dollar spent on defense is not automatically worth a dollar of return. The defense industry has A LOT of grift. They are always selling us overpriced high tech **** we don't need. That, and it suffers from the old lack of competition program, while there exists a revolving door of corruption. We're spending trillions on the F35 while they are looking to retire the cheap but effective A10. For some reason we need ULTRA expensive manned stealth bombers in a world of UAVs and long range missiles. They are already replacing the B2 with the B21 costing 700 million per unit. Seven hundred million PER JET. That has grift written all over it. Our military budget is 3 times bigger than Chinas, yet their military is bigger than ours. We have a system that's designed to funnel public money into private hands, and it mostly happens through the defense industry. It must be looked at more carefully than " welp, freedom isn't free".

That is every industry though.

Healthcare……. Does a mucosal collection device (tissue) really cost $45 ?

Automotive-. F150 probably has less than 25k in actual costs and they are now like 70k.....

Entertainment........ Fractions of a penny paid an artist for a stream. Crazy amounts of ticket fees and then tickets resold on same platform generating fees again.....

It's all a scam

New runway at LHR must be paved in gold for the billions of pounds they are planning on spending.

Every industry is doing it. So the military industrial complex isnt special

I'm sorry again. I'm a big casual rail nerd. I gotta speak up here too.

It's expensive but we have to start somewhere. HSR and rail in general is critical for our future.

1. The roads and cities can only fit so many cars. The geometry just isn't there. You can make a highway 20 lanes wide, but it will still be clogged by the weakest bottleneck. The highway may be wide but the destinations are not. The only cure for traffic is to get cars off the roads.
2. Climate disaster isn't slowing down. We are selling off our future. Even if you "don't believe" in climate change eventually oil will run out. We need the infrastructure in place sooner than later.
3. Long term expense. Private automobiles is by far the most energy inefficient and expensive way to transport people. This is a burden not just on individuals but the their economy. The cost is not just the energy but also the destruction of material and human life, and ultimately pointless industries like auto insurance and litigation. They are leeches on our economy. Rail has a up front cost but pays off over time.
4. I believe as we build more rail cost will come down over time. It's expensive because we don't know how. We haven't done any rail building since... The 40s. We outsource every single little thing and hire consultants for everything. Everyone takes their cut. In other countries they do their work "in house".
5. Our political system is structured to make it difficult to build things. There are too many legal challenges, years of studies, and general nimbyism that may be too politically powerful. This can be changed with enough political will and consensus.
6. America doesn't view rail as actual infrastructure. We see rail as a toy or luxury, like it's a Disney ride or something to splurge on. We don't see it as actual critical infrastructure the way we look at highways. No one is worried about continually expanding highways because of course it's critical infrastructure. But somehow, rail is not. Same thing with airports. We've just built our world centered so heavily on the car for so long that our brains cannot comprehend anything else. We got to start somewhere and the time is now.
7. Related to #3, but rail is BY FAR the most energy efficient to move anything long distance. It is by far the most frictionless method of propulsion known to man. We should be moving as much as we can on it for the long term economics. It creates wealth like all useful infrastructure.
8. Rail is undisputably the most convenient and comfortable method of travel for distances around 300-1000 miles. I would argue for longer distances if trains are fast and cheap enough. They can be located in the center of a city, do not require security, can be boarded and debated in less than a minute, they have 20+ doors instead of 1, they have more space, bigger windows, they don't have to worry about weather, atc delays, turbulence, or traffic, and they can have lounge and dining cars. Nothing can hold a candle to good HSR, especially when it has a expansive network or low speed rail to connect it to more areas.

Anyways, thanks for listening. Rail is the future. It was a mistake to over build for cars. It was a mistake to rip up 90% of our old rail lines. Thanks for listening to my nerdy rant. Peace

And what's the track record of those corporations?

I appreciated the rail commentary thank you.

Chapeau from a fellow rain nerd.

If one is of a cynical mindset, consider the following.

From US Energy Information Agency (EIA)
Countries proven oil reserves by ranking:
#1. Venezuela
#3 Canada
#4 Iran
#5 Iraq.
Russia, USA, China rank 8th, 11th, and 14th respectively.
(It is suspected that Venezuela, Iran and Iraq can partially attribute their large amount of reserves to many years of turmoil, which has limited the amount of oil they could extract and sell.Hence much of their oil is still in the ground)

Did you know that if a tiger has his fur shaved off, the stripes are still visible on his shaved skin?
I suspect the same is true regarding politicians who promise to shave off the "fur" of their evil predecessors.
The stripes that an industrial economy requires will still be present.

Regarding highways and 20 lanes, see Jevon's Paradox.

Regarding inflation.
Last 4 months of 2024:
2.4
2.6
2.7
2.9
Last 4 months ending in August.
2.4
2.7
2.7
2.9
Essentially identical.

If AI data center related inputs are removed, GDP growth the first 6 months of 2025 was 0.1%. (on an annualized basis)
From April to July the USA shed over 10,000 manufacturing jobs.
The prelim numbers for August that caused such a stir had a significant item. 148% of the job growth came from Health Care. In other words, the economy is losing jobs, other than health care. Though profoundly important, health care drains money from the rest of the economy. This isn't where a nation wants to spend its money.

The chicken littles are the only ones who have a clue.

There is not a business or organization that doesn't depend on some degree of government subsidy.
Collective investment into all the complex webs that make complex societies function is a requirement for daily life.
Without these subsidies everything would grind to a halt pretty quickly.

In fairness I know you are speaking of the egregious excesses. But where and how to rein them in isn't as straightforward as we think.
Example: a public company is awarded a no bid open ended contract during the Iraq war. Their stock soars. You, or your 401K , owns some of that stock. You become richer, without doing a thing.
The money for that no bid contract came from govt 10 year TBills. It's borrowed.
The large number of people who have zero stake in the market are negatively affected by this debt, as are you. But you also made money from this act of borrowing. Your 401K, or stock portfolio pockets a subsidy that was granted in a borderline corrupt fashion. A crackdown on this would generate howls from those with political power. Those who buy stocks have political power.
They (and that includes your economic group) don't want the egregious excesses reined in.

The philosophy of acting for the greater good was essentially killed by the 1980 Presidential election, and then put into practical application with Newt Gingrich becoming Speaker of the House.
Ending egregious excesses would take a sea change of political philosophy that has reigned for 45 years.

Agree with your post and add that on my car podcast this week Motor Trend and the rest of the nerds are taking a helicopter to the track day because it is too damn hard to get there in a car.

Anecdotally, some nerd “scratched my back and I took my foot off the brake pedal” to smash into the rear of my car this week and it is getting almost impossible to get to the Atlanta Airport from the North side of town regardless of how much time you allocated to the task. Our freeways are impassible for two thirds of the diurnal cycle.

There's something truly American about driving. A Tesla esque FSD on the highway would probably allow us to drastically increase capacity/highway speeds while decreasing ridiculous traffic snares caused by lookie lous. But, there will be a non-zero number of people who will refuse to use it because it's their right to do 15 over the speed limit, weaving in and out of traffic and making it worse for the rest of us. Being "forced" to take a train with the rest of us, even if it gets there faster, is too collective for them

you can build it, but they won’t come. Dallas tried light rail years ago and very few ride it for a number of reasons, the least of which is trying to take away the keys to the suburban for a house wife with one kid.

I live in the area with arguably the best public transit in the US. (NYC metro)

I'm not super far out of town. 25 out of Newark and 35 to Manhattan.

Just for me to go downtown, to Penn Station is 1+30, with hourly trains. Granted it's Sunday but the time is the same on weekdays, just more trains. Then I have to get to the Denville station which is 4.5 miles from my house.

I took the train once to work because I deviated to Philly and drove back from Philly with my wife. It took 3 hours door to door. NJT to Penn, LIRR to Jamaica and Airtrain to JFK.

One way it was $38 just in fares. So $76 round trip. If I drove it would be $30 in tolls, $20 in diesel round trip. And less time.

The "last mile" (or 5 in my case) is often what kills mass transit reliably replacing cars and urban and suburban design play into that and it's not going to easily be changed.

If we wanted to build an efficient passenger rail system for max use in the states, we'd have to suspend a metric ton of laws at every level of government, exercise a serious amount of eminent domain and essentially tell every lawyer in the nation to get bent. Personally, I'd love to see it happen. But given the extreme cost and snails pace of most large infrastructure projects we have, I won't hold my breath. Last I read, just to rebuild a bridge that was already there (F Scott Key), it's going to cost $2B and take another four years. Of course that's before any budget increases and delays due to whatever litigation can be dreamed up.

People often hold up Europe as a model of what to do.

Two big things they have that we dont:
They started with more or less a clean sheet post WWII rebuild with a lot of it funded under the Marshall plan or it's Soviet equivalent.

Their cities and villages were mainly laid out pre vehicular transport and only the rich had horses. By the time the US expanded off the east coast, even a ever family usually had a mule, horse, or other beast of burden.

Also, population density. People forget how empty a lot of the US is. I drive from NJ to CA and back most years and once you get west of the Mississippi it gets pretty sparse outside of a large town every 20 miles.

https://i.postimg.cc/15hJHJMf/us-europe-size.png

*china’s high speed rail network bigger than this that was basically all built in the last 20 years has entered the chat*

I would reference crewdawgs post above. The Chinese government does whatever it wants, with total control, and zero regard for eminent domain, environmental concerns, or lawsuits.

Not to mention cheaper cost to build, largely due to labor costs in China. CXT hit on some great points, but the last mile (or 10), is what makes it tough. A vast majority of America isn't walkable. Also, the bulk of their rail network encompasses an area that mostly fits east of the Mississippi. I'd love to see an amazing rail network in the states, but we should have hitched our horse to that wagon a long time ago.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JDoll8OEFE

There are certainly challenges, but the whole definition of insanity and all.

The Dutch, at first, actually rejected the move toward cycling infrastructure and better walk-ability in the 70s. Now obviously they've been quite successful and estimated healthcare savings are in the billions annually. Something like 3% of their GDP. Not to mention the intangibles of better QOL and lifestyle. Plus of course a great rail network and the last mile is often not an issue. Not too late for us to achieve a bit of that, but not going to be easy or cheap.

when is the second best time to plant a tree/start good infrastructure?

America actually does have an amazing rail network.

You just need to be a hog or a cattle.

People train goes out of Stubbville.

I'm all for that, Americans could all use a bit more exercise. Used to love my rides up through the country side to places like Hoorn, Volendam, etc... They've done that to a small extent in my part of the country and I'd like to see it expanded. But the distances involved are still on a vastly different scale. My suburb alone is wider than most of the small cities in the Netherlands. Amsterdam itself is small than most of the "small" cities in the U.S.



Problem is, aside from ownership/priority of those tracks, they're generally not suited for the high speed trains we'd need to make transit times somewhat reasonable.

Okay Owen. 🤣🤣

It's amazing what you can accomplish when you don't care about human rights...or humans in general.

and how many cheap slave laborers died while building said rail in chyna?

His wife is a real trooper. I heard her first baby came out sideways.

Yes. That is because if all you build is a couple measly tiny lines, embedded in a huge landscape that is accommodating to cars but hostile to pedestrians, it won't be useful to that many people. You need to build out the system so that it actually takes you places. A transit system is only useful if it takes you where you need to go. A classic example is Detroit. Its a huge joke. They build their people mover and the Q line that literally goes nowhere and they point at the low ridership and say "seeeee! nobody uses transit. our American blood is just different." and it becomes a self defeating negative feedback loop. Yet in NYC there are 4 million daily riders and its the only city in the USA where car ownership is below 50%. As ****ty and old as the MTA system is, it takes people where they need to go, so they use it.

Usually making enough lines and stations is enough. I argue that should come first. But pedestrianizing and densifying the urban landscape needs to happen fist. Transit needs to connect walkable areas because you wont have a car. On top of that, car infrastructure, ESPECIALLY parking, makes everything farther apart. The parking makes everything farther apart, which then reinforces the need for cars.