- Buh-bye AkiIwa
- It’s empty since LB left
- Dahlia on the Roberts court’s sekrit radicalism
- An honest timeline
- Local fauna update: our Cooper’s hawk is back
- Happy birthday, JP!
TWO YEARS! 60
60 thoughts on “TWO YEARS!”
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I have juice with him
Happy Birthday JP! Two is a big number.
We just had birthday celebration number three for pico. We made too much pizza and cake, so guess what I had for lunch today?
Garlic Fries?
As the Lonely Island would say, I find this news exciting. Sexually.
Well, you see, dust from 9/11 entered the atmosphere where winds dispersed it over a wide area…
The rare direct-to-sullivan link.
Happy Birthday JP!
Jennifer/Poppy slashfic
JP is older than FK. And cuter, too.
He’ll always be older than FK.
Annual US Government-Sponsored Toddler Nap Eradication Program returns!
Thanks for the heads up.
The first practice run can give about 50% of my office a heart attack without notice
more opportunity for promotion!
Naptime. I miss it so much.
It always used to coincide with HSB. Any idea when/why it moved?
today’s random wiki-surfing led me to this picture:
the image from an 12th century illuminated manuscript and is believed to be the first depiction of a pretzel.
I’m quite fascinated by the 12th century.
Does not constitute civilization unless served with mustard.
the king is clearly pointing to the mustard and asking the archduke to pass it down UPON PAIN OF DEATH.
THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS
it is not clear to me at all that high speed rail is a good infrastructure investment.
Particularly in places other than the Eastern seaboard.
right, i can see, at least qualitatively, why a high speed rail network connecting bos-ny-phi-dc might make sense.
Why not?
It’s a lot faster than driving or flying. I’d love to be in LA that quickly/easily.
And you would use that…how often? The ridership projections I’ve seen in the past for SF to LA have been way too rosy, to say the least.
The high-speed rail line that should be built is LA to Las Vegas. Use existing RR ROW from LA to San Bernardino with just a couple of stops, then nonstop from San Bernardino to Las Vegas (also existing RR ROW) and ram that thing right into the middle of the Strip. I believe that would be fabulously successful.
Fine with me.
Also the pan-Florida one seems smart.
Obviously we won’t have rail criss-crossing the country for a long time (if ever), but there’s a lot of places it makes a ton of sense.
Yep. $45 Billion just to build it (more than $1000 for each resident of the state), and then a pretty significant operating deficit as well, unless you believe the crazy ridership estimates (90 million passengers yearly!).
While it’s certainly true, as its proponents point out, that other forms of transportation are subsidized also, that just doesn’t make any economic sense to me.
Check back when gas is $5 a gallon and jetfuel is twice as much.
United Airlines alone probably shuttles 500 people a day each way, and a train would be faster/cheaper/more convenient.
Also, it’s as cheap to build now as ever (given recession) and stimulative.
2. I can’ vouch for hte ridership estimates that andeux quotes, but even 1 MM people a year would require ~2800 passengers daily. How many people is this train supposed to hold?
3. By the time the environmental impact reports are completed, we’ll be way out of this recession.
Knock on wood. Furiously.
In a world where every single successful anti-recession policy is unpopular, and the Fed is worried about INflation, we could be here awhile.
I still think that stimulative projects, especially infrastructure, should have an accelerated EIR process. Also, A’s stadium.
Makes sense
2800 people/day?
A’S STADIUM ON RAILS!!!
Talk about being run out of town on a rail…
Great, only 249,500 to go!
Not according to their projections.
If more of it were federally funded or if the state were in better shape financially I would probably support it for those reasons.
I suspect nm’s comment about speed was trip-comprehensive: yes, the touchdown-to-touchdown times of air will be faster than rail, but the combination of travel to/from airports, luggage wait/retrieval, National Security Theater, ingress/egress, etc all likely work in favor of rail, timewise.
travel to/from airports
I imagine that for HSR would have one centralized depot, so I don’t know how this is a priori an advantage for train.
National Security Theater
I think there is a decent chance that security on rails will grow to be just as expansive and all-encompassing as soon as the first crazy tries to light his shoe on fire.
MB is, of course, right.
Train hubs are almost always downtown (as trains don’t need anywhere near the real estate), whereas SFO and LAX are both $50+ cab rides and a ton of time.
Trains don’t have anything like the same security as there is no hijacking risk. The UK is/was the most uptight pre-9/11 and they’ve never done anything for trains.
Re: National Security Theater
1. A captured German-Afghan al-Qaeda henchman spills the beans about a “multi-city plot against Europe”1.
2. The national security (theater) apparatus revs into action. From Homeland Security headquarters, concentric circles of terror-averting vigilence bloom outward and across the globe, my personal experience of which was several burly guys in “DHS Police” polo shirts leading a bomb-sniffing dog through the Portland Amtrak station on Friday morning.
I have to say, I’m doubtful that it has occurred to the terrorists to target the Portland to Seattle commuter train. Also, I don’t want to criticize the dog, who I’m sure was giving the task his all, but his sniffing was sort of crazed and haphazard. I got the sense that he was mainly concerned with finding a way to surreptitiously pee on one of the waiting area pews.
1 Reminiscent of classic 24 sequences where the President agonizes that if Jack Bauer doesn’t secure a recording/capture a bad guy/foil a plot in time, we’ll have no choice but to go to war with “the Middle East”.
No, silly: it was a plot against Swedish hair-metal
as opposed to Finnish cello-metal
They’re actually pretty good.
Read all about it
They estimate SF to LA as 3 1/2 hours all in, by either train or plane.
Just to be clear, if I needed to get to LA and this train actually existed, I would probably choose it over flying. But I’m not convinced that the utility justifies the huge capital costs.
I’d much rather pour the money into mass transit than new roads.
At this point, I’d prefer to pour the money into whichever pot(hole)s are most ready to be filled.
I’m with Atrios, Krugman, Klein, Yglesias, De Long et al: money needs to be spent, immediately. On short-term, medium-term, and long-term projects. All/both ideally, but “shovel-ready” (to nt’s point, expedite as many review processes as possible) first.
Oh I think we should to both, funded by the proceeds of letting all tax cuts expire.
I think 100 years from now our country’s demolition of its rail and failure to rebuild will be seen as one of the more puzzling infrastructure decisions.
Really? I would think that the advent of teleportation would make all that rail infrastructure seem kind of silly.
I’m not holding my breath on that one
You won’t have to, once we artificially engineer external gills.
… to accommodate the risen sea level that we weren’t able to control.
Feh. We’ll terraform Mars. See, Science! solves everything.
Well, we’ve already terrorformed the political landscape …
I wouldn’t even fund them. My understanding is that (a) the immediate need trumps the consequences, and (b) if done right/big enough, the stimulative effect will basically pay for itself down the road.
But, yes, political reality means having to demonstrate a way to “pay for it.”
Stimulus does not pay for itself. It’s like tax cuts that way, but less so.
Right. It partially pays for itself by helping the economy, but the rest ultimately must be paid for with higher taxes either now or later. With interest rates for government borrowing near 0, paying for it later makes the most sense. That’s why the Keynesian formula is for the government to run a deficit during recessions, and a surplus during booms.
Yep.
Which is, you know, proven. Unlike austerity which is a myth that wouldn’t work anyway.
That Baseball Oakland chronology leaves room for no conclusion but that Lew has the South Bay in mind long before he joined the A’s (which, as I’ve said often before, I do not fault him for as a business decision).
apparently, reprinting dubiously sourced chain emails does pass for blogging for Ezra Klein.
snopes clarifies.
but speaking of fast good, the board of supervisors has a stupid. there is some evidence that obesity (and indeed disease prevalance) is not a key driver of excess health costs in the US. I wonder if that would change the calculus surrounding taking toys away from children.
1. Those are awesome pictures of Florida. I’m glad I left.
2. Happy Birthday, JP!
Happy Birthday young simian.
(Now go to bed and let your folks get some sleep!)