#High-Speed Rail Projects

[nnctales]

India's Ambitious Mega Projects: Shaping the Future of Infrastructure and Economic Growth

India, with its burgeoning economy and visionary approach to infrastructure development, is embarking on a remarkable journey through numerous mega projects. These ambitious undertakings span various sectors, from transportation and energy to maritime infrastructure and urban development. These projects not only showcase India’s commitment to innovation and progress but also have the potential to…

[ookaookaooka]

just had a thought that universal healthcare would be better for the environment because if there’s more people like me who want to live out in the countryside or who want to try homesteading or living off the grid but are tied to the city because of their job benefits, giving everyone free healthcare would free them up to live wherever they choose and something something less people in cities the better

[afrotumble]

Africa's First High-Speed Rail System| Gautrain: Africa's Golden Train |...

[suetravelblog]

Chinse President Xi Jinping Visits Belgrade Serbia

Belgrade Budapest Railway – ZAWYA Belgrade has been buzzing in anticipation of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s arrival yesterday for a two-day visit. It’s Xi’s second state visit to Serbia, amid “high expectations that the ironclad friendship between the two nations will be further enriched and strengthened”. Xi’s visit was also said to be “on the occasion of Serbia marking the 25th anniversary of…

[techmarkethunter]

A Closer Look at Rail Vikas Nigam Limited (RVNL)

Title: Revolutionizing Rail Infrastructure: A Closer Look at Rail Vikas Nigam Limited (RVNL) Introduction: Railways have long been the backbone of transportation infrastructure, connecting cities and fostering economic growth. In the vast landscape of rail development in India, one entity stands out for its significant contributions – Rail Vikas Nigam Limited (RVNL). Established in 2003, RVNL…

[rodspurethoughts]

Federal Railroad Administration Selects Pacific Northwest Rail Projects

Amtrak. (2023, December 11). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak_Cascades The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has announced the selection of several projects for its Corridor ID program, which aims to enhance rail infrastructure across the United States. Among the chosen corridors are three in the Pacific Northwest, including proposals by the Washington State Department of…

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #26

July 5-12 2024

The IRS announced it had managed to collect $1 billion in back taxes from high-wealth tax cheats. The program focused on persons with more than $1 million in yearly income who owned more than $250,000 in unpaid taxes. Thanks to money in Biden's 2022 Inflation Reduction Act the IRS is able to undertake more enforcement against rich tax cheats after years of Republicans cutting the agency's budget, which they hope to do again if they win power again.

The Biden administration announced a $244 million dollar investment in the federal government’s registered apprenticeship program. This marks the largest investment in the program's history with grants going out to 52 programs in 32 states. The President is focused on getting well paying blue collar opportunities to people and more people are taking part in the apprenticeship program than ever before. Republican pledge to cut it, even as employers struggle to find qualified workers.

The Department of Transportation announced the largest single project in the department's history, $11 billion dollars in grants for the The Hudson River Tunnel. Part of the $66 billion the Biden Administration has invested in our rail system the tunnel, the most complex Infrastructure project in the nation would link New York and New Jersey by rail under the Hudson. Once finished it's believed it'll impact 20% of the American economy by improving and speeding connection throughout the Northeast.

The Department of Energy announced $1.7 billion to save auto worker's jobs and convert factories to electronic vehicles. The Biden administration will used the money to save or reopen factories in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, and Virginia and retool them to make electric cars. The project will save 15,000 skilled union worker jobs, and created 2,900 new high-quality jobs.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development reached a settlement with The Appraisal Foundation over racial discrimination. TAF is the organization responsible for setting standards and qualifications for real estate appraisers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics last year found that TAF was 94.7% White and 0.6% Black, making it the least racially diverse of the 800 occupations surveyed. Black and Latino home owners are far more likely to have their houses under valued than whites. Under the settlement with HUD TAF will have to take serious steps to increase diversity and remove structural barriers to diversity.

The Department of Justice disrupted an effort by the Russian government to influence public opinion through AI bots. The DoJ shut down nearly 1,000 twitter accounts that were linked to a Russian Bot farm. The bots used AI technology to not only generate tweets but also AI image faces for profile pictures. The effort seemed focused on boosting support for Russia's war against Ukraine and spread negative stories/impressions about Ukraine.

The Department of Transportation announces $1.5 billion to help local authorities buy made in America buses. 80% of the funding will go toward zero or low-emission technology, a part of the President's goal of reaching zero emissions by 2050. This is part of the $5 billion the DOT has spent over the last 3 years replacing aging buses with new cleaner technology.

President Biden with Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau and Finnish President Alexander Stubb signed a new agreement on the arctic. The new trilateral agreement between the 3 NATO partners, known as the ICE Pact, will boost production of ice breaking ships, the 3 plan to build as many as 90 between them in the coming years. The alliance hopes to be a counter weight to China's current dominance in the ice breaker market and help western allies respond to Russia's aggressive push into the arctic waters.

The Department of Transportation announced $1.1 billion for greater rail safety. The program seeks to, where ever possible, eliminate rail crossings, thus removing the dangers and inconvenience to communities divided by rail lines. It will also help update and improve safety measures at rail crossings.

The Department of the Interior announced $120 million to help tribal communities prepare for climate disasters. This funding is part of half a billion dollars the Biden administration has spent to help tribes build climate resilience, which itself is part of a $50 billion dollar effort to build climate resilience across the nation. This funding will help support drought measures, wildland fire mitigation, community-driven relocation, managed retreat, protect-in-place efforts, and ocean and coastal management.

The USDA announced $100 million in additional funds to help feed low income kids over the summer. Known as "SUN Bucks" or "Summer EBT" the new Biden program grants the families of kids who qualify for free meals at school $120 dollars pre-child for groceries. This comes on top of the traditional SUN Meals program which offers school meals to qualifying children over the summer, as well as the new under President Biden SUN Meals To-Go program which is now offering delivery of meals to low-income children in rural areas. This grant is meant to help local governments build up the Infrastructure to support and distribute SUN Bucks. If fully implemented SUN Bucks could help 30 million kids, but many Republican governors have refused the funding.

USAID announced its giving $100 million to the UN World Food Program to deliver urgently needed food assistance in Gaza. This will bring the total humanitarian aid given by the US to the Palestinian people since the war started in October 2023 to $774 million, the single largest donor nation. President Biden at his press conference last night said that Israel and Hamas have agreed in principle to a ceasefire deal that will end the war and release the hostages. US negotiators are working to close the final gaps between the two sides and end the war.

The Senate confirmed Nancy Maldonado to serve as a Judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Maldonado is the 202nd federal Judge appointed by President Biden to be confirmed. She will the first Latino judge to ever serve on the 7th Circuit which covers Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin.

Bonus: At the NATO summit in Washington DC President Biden joined 32 allies in the Ukraine compact. Allies from Japan to Iceland confirmed their support for Ukraine and deepening their commitments to building Ukraine's forces and keeping a free and Democratic Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression. World leaders such as British Prime Minster Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, praised President Biden's experience and leadership during the NATO summit

[loveerran]

I am reblogging @amtrak-official for the Mormon interest angle. Not actually a sentence I thought I would write today. But seriously, there has never been a location more specifically begging for public transit and instead they want to widen the existing interstate problem.

Almost the entire state population lives along the ~2hr long I-15 corridor between Ogden in the North and Provo in the South, and it seems like everything is (aptly) within 15 minutes of I-15. Source: I drove it.

I have never seen a situation begging for public transit harder than this one. Too bad there isn't a strong, powerful, rich organization and its people in the area - all of whom claim to care about stewardship of the earth.

I did a map of a workable rail system supported by strong bus routes (feel free to do your own - see link):

[transit-fag]

So uh

You do realize construction is going on with the California High-speed Rail

Like it's actively under construction and a massive amount of work has been done on it.

This viaduct isn't the only construction project they have done

The CAHSR Authority literally posts updates constantly

[probablyasocialecologist]

Musk never had any intention of building the Hyperloop. He only needed it to help kill or substantially delay the high-speed rail project and the alternate vision of sustainable collective transportation it offered. It threatened his interests as an automaker and his elite vision of “individualized” mobility that simply worked better for him.

[...]

In the time since California started talking about high-speed rail and Elon Musk interjected with his fantasy to help sidetrack it, China moved ahead and built a network consisting of 42,000 kilometres (26,000 miles) of track. Europe is continuing to expand its own network, and Japan is building a maglev line that will run at speeds of over 500 km/h (310 mph). The first segment from Tokyo to Nagoya could open by 2027. Not to be outdone, China is working on a maglev of its own to beat its Japanese rivals. While the Hyperloop deception spread far and wide, nowhere was it stronger than in the United States. As countries around the world moved forward with real transport improvements, North Americans were distracted by the fantasies of clueless, but self-confident tech moguls. They left people trapped in their cars and denied better options to get around that people in many other parts of the world — even those that are quite a bit poorer — take for granted. Now all they can do is shovel money at automakers to try to power cars with batteries instead of internal combustion engines. They have no vision for a better, less car dependent alternative.

[mapsontheweb]

The state of high-speed rail projects in the United States

[centrally-unplanned]

Adam Tooze giving some pitch-perfect pornography targeted at me specifically with Israel's "Gaza 2035: A three-step master plan to build what they call the Gaza-Arish-Sderot Free Trade Zone", capped with an AI generated Gaza-Dubai:

I'm in love, this is so glorious. "The world if Israel could play around with Gaza like a little set of Legos" tell me this is not identical energy:

Except its not a shitpost its an actual report from the Office of the Prime Minister. And folks we have got it all! The most convoluted administration system you could possibly imagine for no reason:

The new free trade zone would be administered by Israel, Egypt, and what the Israeli Prime Minister calls the Gaza Rehabilitation Authority (GRA)—a proposed Palestinian-run agency that would oversee reconstruction in Gaza and “manage the Strip’s finances.”

A cutesy little minimalist graphic of all the brand new industries that will magically become globally competitive in export markets because Israel says so:

The beach resorts are in my beloved!! But what are the little factories you ask? Oh nothing, just electric car production facilities!

Remember, before building your first factory, you need 18 Burj Khalifas. We economists call this "infrastructure development", take notes.

It will have high-speed rail through its center, oil projects on the coast, and of course, I'm saving the best for last - a rail project to NEOM:

 🥳The 🥳Line 🥳Mentioned 🥳

The legend on the map literally just says "a mega project" like, oh yeah, one of those! See em all the time.

Now, you might be asking - Ash, if this is your goal wouldn't you have not destroyed every square inch of habitable urban infrastructure in Gaza and shredded their economy into scraps of paper soaked in blood if your plan was to Singapore-on-the-Sea the place? You sweet summer child, those apartments? They are apartments of the past, darling, you don't need organically developed urban ecologies built over time to compliment human habitation. That is for fucking libs. All of this "war" thing was just set-up to create a blank slate for the construction of The Line 2: Its Definitely Real This Time!

I am going to murder James C Scott myself just so I can hover this plan over his corpse and watch the sheer hubris of this monument to the state's desire for legibility and technocratic solutionism resurrect him from the goddamn grave.

"Well....at least after all this they would have to recognize Palestine as a stat-" Woah woah woah woah, hold on:

The final stage would be when Palestine signs the Abraham Accords signaling “Palestinian self-rule,” albeit without statehood

Lets not...lets not get overambitious here. Baby steps, you know? We have to be careful.

Anyway this is the most ludicrously ill-considered and ill-presented reconstruction plan I have ever seen in my life and I shudder to think that, instead of it being an off-hand drip of propaganda intended solely to brush off nosey reporters and diplomats, it might actually be serious. Bibi hasn't let me down yet on the "thinking things through" front!

But tbc if this was fiction - instead of a ruthlessly grim reality - the Regional Deputy Minister of Trade charged with implementing this technocratic abortion would be my precious little blorbo and I would stan her to hell and back.

[trainsinanime]

LIMAX

I’m tired, I’m bored, let’s talk about the RE18, also sometimes known as LiMAX or Drielandentrein (three countries train).

Euregio

This international regional train connects the region known as Euregio Maas-Rhine, the area around the point where Netherlands, Belgium and Germany meet. The region has a long shared and sometimes weird history. The main cities are Aachen (Germany, about 260,000 inhabitants), Liège (Belgium, about 200,000 people) and Maastricht (Netherlands, about 120,000 folks). A cluster of smaller towns around Heerlen (Netherlands, 86,000 citizens) forms a fourth major pole. Each of the regions gets roughly around half a million inhabitants each, but with a lot of green space in between. Here's a very crude map:

Blue are borders, black are relevant passenger rail lines, red is the one high speed line I'll talk about later.

This region is either right in the centre of Europe, or at the periphery of each of its respective countries, depending on what aspect you look at. Centre of Europe is undeniably better, but it requires international cooperation to work out. For me, living in Aachen, it’s great. My nearest Ikea is in the Netherlands, and I can watch French movies in cinemas in Liège.

But a lot of things aren't perfect, and the regional rail connections are a good example. Differing ticketing systems mean that it's not only expensive to cross the border, it's often very difficult to figure out what it costs at all. In a lot of places, trains only did short hops over the border, and then you had to change to a different train to get anywhere interesting. Some lines weren't even electrified yet. But in 2018, that was all about to change.

LIMAX

The Liège-Maastricht-Aachen express, in short LIMAX, was meant to change all that. The train is officially known as RE 18, which comes from the numbering scheme in the German state of Northrhine-Westphalia but is used for the entire route. It was supposed to run from Liège via Maastricht and Heerlen to Aachen, connecting all the major cities of the Euregio.

This particular train is a dutch project, and connecting Aachen with Liège only happens incidentally. There is a direct Aachen-Liège railway line, actually the oldest international line that’s still in use, including the oldest surviving German railway tunnel, and there is even a high-speed line that bypasses around 90% of the historic line. You can get from Aachen to Liège in less than half an hour on high speed trains (though regional trains are weird and impractical at the moment). This train line is really more about getting people in Heerlen a direct link to Liège, and people in Maastricht a direct link to Aachen.

The train

The train is operated by Arriva Netherlands Limburg, an independent subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn, who also operate all other rail and bus lines in the southern half of the dutch province of Limburg. They were actually placed second in the tender for this, but got promoted after it turned out that the actual winner Abellio (a daughter of the dutch state railroads NS) had illegal access to internal documents of previous operator and third-place scorer Veolia from France. To their credit, this came out because Abellio management learned of it and made it public, but rules are rules, so they still got disqualified. This is barely in the top three most interesting stories with Abellio, but we don’t have time for that here.

The service uses Stadler FLIRT 3 electric multiple units. FLIRT is an abbreviation, but nobody bothers remembering what it stands for. The manufacturer also offers or used to offer the TANGO (streetcar), the WINK (smaller version of the FLIRT), KISS (double-decker) and their newest high-speed train, the… SMILE. Cowards.

The FLIRTs for this service are specially equipped for the line, supporting all the different voltages in the overhead lines and all the other necessary support systems… almost. That’s going to become important later.

(Arriva Nederland Limburgs also has other trains, including other FLIRTs, that are only equipped for the Netherlands. I'll ignore them here.)

Services started in December 2018, theoretically. In practice the German leg of the service didn’t work yet. The problem was that the line from Heerlen to Herzogenrath (and then further to Aachen) used to be one of the few non-electrified lines in the region. It was electrified specifically for the RE18, and the work wasn’t quite finished yet. That got resolved, though, and the train is now working mostly well between Germany and the Netherlands. There are still some issues, like how it consistently announces that the doors will open on the left when they will open on the right and vice versa, but those are minor issues. The main problem for me is that it bypasses the Ikea station instead of stopping there.

The much bigger problem was the Belgian line, from (south of) Maastricht to Liège. The Belgian railway authorities were never that enthusiastic about the project to begin with, seeing how it was a private dutch company (though owned by the German government), and the platforms in the intermediate station of Visé were too low for step-free access and needed to be rebuilt. But the real main issue lay elsewhere: The new trains did not have ETCS.

Train control systems

We need a detour here about train control systems. Trains are controlled by signals. If a train passes a red signal, an accident usually follows, so over time every country developed different systems to make sure that doesn’t happen. The specific features of these vary widely. Some just warn the engineer that a red signal is ahead, and stop the train if the engineer doesn’t react. Some activate the emergency brake when the engineer passes a red signal, or when they don’t brake enough. More advanced ones for high speed lines tell the engineer the current allowed speed, upcoming speed changes and how far away they are, like a mini-GPS system, and constantly check that the engineer is driving within these limits. Many systems do a combination of different things.

Almost every country has its own of these systems, generally known by a cryptic abbrevation, and many countries have several. For example, Germany has PZB for all lines and additionally LZB for high-speed lines. The Netherlands have different versions of ATB, Belgium has TBL1+ and so on. The differences between them aren’t relevant for this post, but they’re all very different in what they do and how they do it. The RE 18 trains support all of them, except LZB because they’re not used on lines that make it necessary.

That’s expensive and annoying, so the European Union and European rail industries have developed a new system to replace all of them, the European Train Control System or ETCS. You will also hear the term ERTMS (European rail traffic management system), which includes ETCS and some other things, but in common parlance it usually means the same thing. Despite the name, it is also heavily used outside of Europe, e.g. on China’s high speed rail network.

And yes, that is very much a situation like the classic XKCD comic:

Source: XKCD 927, CC-BY-NC 2.5

(For americans reading this and wondering about PTC: That is a whole mess and almost everyone, including Wikipedia, explains it wrong, but for the purposes of this post we can just say that these systems and in particular ETCS are all something „like“ PTC.)

ETCS will only make sense once all European mainlines are equipped with it, which is still several decades away. But some countries are working harder than others to implement it. In particular, Belgium demands that all new trains since about 2015 have ETCS. Including the Stadler FLIRT for the RE 18.

In this case

The operator protested, because that requirement apparently came in while the trains were in production, and the line in question didn’t even have ETCS at the time (according to the latest Belgian maps it does now). To this day, the trains actually running there, as a Liège-Maastricht shuttle, do not have ETCS. So clearly it's not that essential… yet. Still, Belgian authorities refused to budge, so the trains had to be sent back to the manufacturer to get ETCS installed.

(Aside: ETCS is an open standard, and you can get ETCS equipment both for the tracks and for the trains from many different companies. Stadler, the manufacturer of these trains, only recently got into making ETCS equipment. Before that they had to buy it from competing train makers. These trains are among the first equipped with Stadler’s ETCS solution.)

The first train got it installed, returned to the line, and started tests. It worked well in the Netherlands, it worked well in Germany, it ran into Aachen station and worked well there, it ran back out of Aachen station and it stopped. Full emergency stop. After some testing it was determined that it always does an emergency stop when running out of Aachen station. And nobody is really sure why.

The low-down

We can make some vague guesses, though, because Aachen main station does have some ETCS equipment.

ETCS works partially with radio, but also with what are functionally giant RFID tags, the same basic concept like what you’ll find on a wireless credit card. They’re working at different frequencies and they’re designed for reliable reading at 450 km/h, but the basic idea is pretty much the same. These tags, known as „Balise“ (French for beacon) or Eurobalise, are mounted in the middle of the track, and are often yellow, at least when new. They can either send the same data every time, or be controlled with a cable from a computer.

Not everybody loves ETCS, but everybody seems to like the Eurobalise. It’s simple technology that can transmit a lot of information, and so there are a number of non-ETCS uses for it.

One such use case is transmitting the information of an older train control system. That is what the Belgians do with their TBL1+ system. It’s the same system as TBL1 (there is also a TBL2, but that was a bad idea and is gone now), but it transmits its information with Eurobalises. The idea is that you update these balises later to also transmit ETCS signals. Older trains can just get a balise reader, newer trains can just get ETCS, and you have only a single type of thing in the track instead of two. Switzerland is the first country that is fully ETCS equipped thanks to such a strategy, and Belgium is following suit.

The other use case is the "ETCS-based class B transition". Sounds tough but really isn’t: ETCS has a mechanism to tell the train, "hey, ETCS is ending, switch to ATB/PZB/TBL/…". In this context "Class B" means any system that isn’t ETCS (and that is on the list of things that ETCS knows about, for this purpose). The system ensures that the train really does switch to the other system, and that it stops if the switch doesn’t work. That is very useful and so most border crossings at least in Germany use it these days, even if no other part of ETCS is seen anywhere.

Both of these use cases are well established and ETCS specifically allows for them. Aachen central station is particularly fun because here you will find both of them combined. It is the border station for (passenger) trains to Belgium, so several tracks can be switched to Belgium mode, with Belgian electricity, and with Belgian TBL1+ train control system. The Eurobalises in these tracks pull double duty: They tell trains whether to switch to Belgian or German train control systems, depending on where the route is set, and if the Belgian system is to be used, they also transmit the information from that.

This isn’t new, and has worked well for years. The only other two types of passenger trains approved for the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany (and in one case also France), the Thalys PBKA and the ICE 3M high speed trains, also run through this station and they also have ETCS equipment and it all works.

But something about the combination together with the ETCS equipment in the new trains just doesn’t mesh well. It’s possible that there’s a bug in the software of the train. It’s possible that there’s a bug in the coding of the balises. Maybe it's something else; ETCS is a complex standard with a lot of updates, and the equipment in Aachen hasn't been touched in a while.

A theory I read on a dutch forum said that these balises tell the train to switch to combined PZB+LZB mode, but the train only has PZB mode and gets confused. I don’t know enough about ETCS to know whether this is plausible (and I know way too much about this stupid system already). All we really know for sure is that there are people working on this, and they're not telling us any of the details.

But after a few days where the train just didn’t run to Aachen at all, they found a solution. You know how I said that some tracks can be switched to Belgium mode? The others can’t, so why not just run the train into those?

That was actually easier said than done. Aachen has a lot of tracks, but most of them are used for parking trains. Most German regional trains to Aachen end in Aachen, and then wait here for half an hour or so until they return to where they came from. This isn’t required by the track layout or anything, it’s just convenient because that way, delays don’t build up quite as much. And the best location for that pause is, of course, right at the edge of the country. Centre of Europe? Yeah, sure, whatever…

So the solution is now that the RE18 runs into track 3 and stops in the middle of the platform, where it unloads all passengers. Then it drives forward to the end of the platform, and stays there. Another train, the RB33, pulls in behind it (there’s a red signal between them, don’t worry), and waits for its time to depart. Eventually it does, and shortly thereafter, the RE18 runs back to the middle of the platform, and then a few minutes later, back out again. It’s a silly little dance, but so far nobody has found a better solution.

(Before you start, the end of platform 3 is very narrow and at a non-accessible height, so the train can't just load and unload there.)

As for the Belgian side of things, through-services to Liège will start this December! Woohoo! It seems this thing is finally working.

The Future

The long-term hope is to turn this from an hourly to a half-hourly service. It already is for most of its length, but right now the trains stop in Herzogenrath, just after the German border, because there is no space in the schedule to run them to Aachen yet.

Another hope is to create a completely new service from Aachen to Eindhoven, also using the same trains. Eindhoven wants to be connected to the German ICE network, Aachen wants to be connected to the dutch train network, so this sounds all great. Personally, I have doubt that these trains have enough capacity, but they are currently the only ones that would work. An issue with that is the actual line over the border. This used to be double-tracked, then got single-tracked. Now they want to double-track it again, but when it was electrified, they put the power poles right where the second track used to be. Not sure what they were thinking there.

All of these projects will take years, if not decades, and have in fact already taken years or decades. I’ve been in Aachen since 2007, and things like electrifying the line over the german-dutch border or creating a direct train from Aachen to the center of the Netherlands (or at least Eindhoven) have been in discussion for at least since then. On the one hand, it’s frustrating how slowly all these things are going. On the other, they are happening at all, and looking back ten years or so, it’s quite nice to see what has been accomplished.

I guess my one wish is that they’d finally let the train stop in Heerlen Woonboulevard, I’m tired of changing trains to get to Ikea.

[st-just]

Got a write up on high modernism, or someone else's you would recommend?

I think James C. Scott is the one to coin the term? Where I got it from anyway. You can probably best understand as a) a deep abiding faith capital-P Progress and a teleological view of history and civilization, b) a cult of experts and technocracy, with academic/technical knowledge prized over custom and tradition and 'uneducated' popular opinion and c) a program of using technology and scientific organization to improve the world (which as a necessary precondition requires the world been rationalized and made legible to bureaucratic understanding and scientific optimization.

Though really I use the tag a) with a wildly variable amount of irony depending on what I'm tagging and b) mostly as, like, a vibe.

Uh, think, aesthetically: Brasilia, the Aswan Dam, the Turkestan-Siberian Railway and the Interstate Highway System - overmighty civil services and fordist/state capitalist economics - mass electrification and literacy programs as wholesale national missions - 'towers and flowers' urban design and high speed rail as prestige project - 'measuring the marigolds' and skepticism/demystification as ideological project - land reform but the type that ends up empowering technical experts and state managers as much/more than the peasant farmers - the heroic age of science - the Green Revolution - Better Living Through Chemistry - your first reaction to someone talking about 'the good old days' being infant mortality/forced marriage/smallpox/blood feuds - thinking a world where everything about the world is legible and rationally ordered as an impossible utopia and not a depressive nightmare.

[mightyflamethrower]

California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly.

How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?

The symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.

Governor Gavin Newsom enjoyed a recent $98 billion budget surplus—gifted from multibillion-dollar federal COVID-19 subsidies, the highest income and gas taxes in the nation, and among the country’s steepest sales and property taxes.

Yet in a year, he turned it into a growing $45 billion budget deficit.

At a time of an over-regulated, overtaxed, and sputtering economy, Newsom spent lavishly on new entitlements, illegal immigrants, and untried and inefficient green projects.

Newsom was endowed with two of the wettest years in recent California history. Yet he and radical environmentalists squandered the water bounty—as snowmelts and runoff long designated for agricultural irrigation were drained from aqueducts and reservoirs to flow out to sea.

Newsom transferred millions of dollars designated by a voter referendum to build dams and aqueducts for water storage and instead blew up four historic dams on the Klamath River. For decades, these now-destroyed scenic lakes provided clean, green hydroelectric power, irrigation storage, flood control, and recreation.

California hosts one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients. Over a fifth of the population lives below the property line. Nearly half the nation’s homeless sleep on the streets of its major cities.

The state’s downtowns are dirty, dangerous, and increasingly abandoned by businesses—most recently Google—that cannot rely on a defunded and shackled police.

Newsom’s California has spent billions on homeless relief and subsidizing millions of new illegal migrant arrivals across the state’s porous southern border.

The result was predictably even more homeless and more illegal immigrants, all front-loaded onto the state’s already overtaxed and broken healthcare, housing, and welfare entitlements.

Newsome raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $22 an hour. The result was wage inflation rippling out to all service areas, unaffordable food for the poor, and massive shut-downs and bankruptcies of fast food outlets.

Twenty-seven percent of Californians were born outside of the United States. It is a minority-majority state. Yet California has long dropped unifying civic education, while the bankrupt state funds exploratory commissions to consider divisive racial reparations.

California’s universities are hotbeds of ethnic, religious, and racial chauvinism and infighting. State officials, however, did little as its campuses were plagued for months by rampant and violent anti-Semitism.

Almost nightly, the nation watches mass smash-and-grab attacks on California retail stores. Carjackers and thieves own the night. They are rarely caught, even more rarely arrested—and almost never convicted.

Currently, Newsom is fighting in the courts to stop the people’s constitutional right to place on the ballot initiatives to restore penalties for violent crime and theft.

Gas prices are the highest in the continental United States, given green mandate formulas and the nation’s highest, and still raising, gasoline taxes—and are scheduled to go well over $6 a gallon.

Yet its ossified roads and highways are among the nation’s most dangerous, as vast sums of transportation funding were siphoned off to the multibillion-dollar high-speed rail boondoggle.

The state imports almost all the costly vitals of modern life, mostly because it prohibits using California’s own vast petroleum, natural gas, timber, and mineral resources.

As California implodes, its embarrassed government turns to the irrelevant, if not ludicrous.

It now outlaws natural gas stoves in new homes. It is adding new income-based surcharges for those who dutifully pay their power bills—to help subsidize the 2.5 million Californians who simply default on their energy bill with impunity.

What happened to the once-beautiful California paradise?

Millions of productive but frustrated, overtaxed, and underserved middle-class residents have fled to low-crime, low-tax, and well-served red states in disgust

In turn, millions of illegal migrants have swarmed the state, given its sanctuary-city policies, refusal to enforce the law, and generous entitlements.

Meanwhile, a tiny coastal elite, empowered by $9 trillion in Silicon Valley market capitalization, fiddled while their state burned.

California became a medieval society of plutocratic barons, subsidized peasants, and a shrinking and fleeing middle class. It is now home to a few rich estates, subsidized apartments, and unaffordable middle-class houses.

California suffers from poorly ranked public schools—but brags about its prestigious private academies. Its highways are lethal—but it hosts the most private jets in the nation.

The fantasies of a protected enclave of Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi, and the masters of the Silicon Valley universe have become the abject nightmares of everyone else.

In sum, a privileged Bay Area elite inherited a California paradise and turned it into purgatory.

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #36

September 27-October 4 2024

President Biden and Vice-President Harris have lead the federal response to Hurricane Helene. President Biden's leadership earned praise from the Republican Governors of South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia, as well as the Democratic Governor of North Carolina and local leaders. Thousands of federal workers are on the ground in effected communities having given out to date over 8 million meals, over 7 million letters of water. Both President Biden and Vice-President Harris have been on the ground in resent days meeting with effected families. During her trip to Georgia Vice-President Harris announced that the federal government will reimburse state and local government 100% of the costs from Hurricane Helene.

A strike by the International Longshoremen’s Association that briefly shut down ports on the East Cost and Gulf ended in a tentative deal. Both sides thanked Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg for helping push the deal through. President Biden and Vice-President Harris had expressed solidarity with the works when the strike was announced and President Biden directed Secretary Buttigieg to take the lead in pressuring management to make a deal with the Longshoremen. The ILA got a 62% raise as part of the agreement.

Vice President Harris announced new actions to help those struggling with medical debt. This actions include new standards from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on debt collection. the CFPB plans on requiring debt collectors to confirm debts are valid and accurate before engaging in collection actions. As well as cracking down on debt collectors that collect on debt that is not owed by patients. Other actions included an announcement by the DoD that it was reducing pricing for civilians who get medical treatment at DoD hospitals and a track down on tax-exempt hospitals who are required by law to offer financial assistance but often do not. These steps come after Vice President Harris in June announced plans to remove medical debt from credit scores. Following the Vice President's call to action North Carolina moved forward a plan to eliminate medical debt for 2 million people in the state. President Biden's American Rescue Plan funds have been used by state and local Democrats to eliminate $7 billion dollars in medical debt.

The Department of Transportation announced $62 Billion in infrastructure funding for 2025. Thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed by President Biden this will be $18 billion dollars more than was spent in 2021. The Biden-Harris Admin has helped support over 60,000 infrastructure projects across all 50 states, rebuilding roads and bridges, breaking ground on America's first high speed rail, updating ports and airports, and breaking high speed internet to rural communities.

The Department of Transportation announced $1 Billion dollars of investment in America's passenger rail future. This comes on top of $8.2 billion in investments announced in December 2023. The funds will help expand and modernize intercity passenger rail nationwide.

The Departments of Energy and Agriculture announced a $2.8 billion joint project to bring 100% carbon pollution-free energy to the rural midwest. The DoE is investing $1.5 billion into helping bring the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan back on-line. Shut down in 2022 plans to refit and reopen it to allow the plant to keep generating clean energy till 2051. Once back online the Palisades Nuclear Plant will help stop an anticipated 4.47 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year, or 111 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions over its lifetime. The USDA is investing $1.3 billion in two rural electric cooperatives, Wolverine Power Cooperative and Hoosier Energy, which cover rural communities in Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana. This investment will help Wolverine and Hoosier connect to the Palisades Plant, reduce prices for customers, and reduce climate pollution, putting Wolverine Power on the path to be 100 percent carbon-free energy before 2030.

The Treasury and the IRS announced that 30 million Americans, across 24 states will qualify for free direct filing of their taxes in 2025. The IRS says that the average American spends $270 dollars and 13 hours filing their taxes. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, passed by President Biden with Vice President Harris' tie breaking vote, Americans will be able to file their taxes quickly and for free directly with the IRS. Tax payers in Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming will in 2025 be able to use direct file.

The USDA announced $7.7 billion in funding for Climate-Smart Practices on Agricultural Lands. This represents the single biggest investment in these programs in USDA history. Since implementation began in 2023 this conservation assistance has helped over 28,500 farmers and ranchers apply conservation to 361 million acres of land.

The Department of Energy announced $1.5 billion in investments in transmission infrastructure to help ensure our grid is reliable and resilient. This will help support nearly 1,000 miles of new transmission lines across Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. These lines will bring 7,100 MW of new capacity and create 9,000 good paying union jobs. Studies find to keep up with growth and meet our climate goals of carbon free energy the US will need to triple the 2020 transmission capacity by 2050. This is an important step to meeting that goal.