https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/05/politics/house-votes-infrastr...
Am I being shallow? Does it make bad sense to cut a $100bn slice for something epic? A hypersonic monorail perhaps?
The MSM uses that number when their corporate masters want you to be against the spending. They actually explain why it is a fairly meaningless number when they want the spending.
Even factoring that I will have to cover for several other people who can't pay, all I say is, well we have an astronomical amount of infrastructure and it's been neglected for decades, and, as long as I get something for it.
I don't care that it's 100bn, that was going to be collected and spent on something regardless. I care far more about what it's spent on.
Maybe it will add incentive down the road to close the loopholes on the Bezos's of the world a little.
For 330 million people: no.
To compare: the US occupation of Afghanistan cost about this much per year, but that budget has been freed up.
I live in Europe and I see the same lack of basic understanding of finance. People claim the EU costs a lot of money. And it does. But not per person. Not at all.
And any reporter that talks about macro economic numbers like this without normalizing it per capita is either an idiot or is intentionally manipulating.
But it's still a trillion dollars.
A country running out of money and going into hyperinflation via money printing ?
Exciting enough for you ?
But this bill may help reduce longer term inflation if it's actually spent wisely.
e.g. if port throughput/efficiency increases, we could process imports more cheaply.
I'm not an expert on the bill, but the skew in the numbers seem a bit strange. Personally I think the cost should have been weighted much more heavily towards logistics/energy aspect of infrastructure, rather than repairs.
I'll have to read the fine print, but the money for "bridges" seems kind of wasteful unless they're actually building net new bridges.
Are the bridges in poor condition actually on the verge of structurally failing? Or just older but serviceable.
E.g. a second bridge connecting VA and MD over the Potomac would be pretty awesome, and greatly alleviate congestion.
Precisely.
A spending bill is like any other kind of investment: for it to pay back, it has to be made carefully and thoughtfully, and must be watched over like milk on fire until it actually bears fruit.
That's what the private sector and private capital does best, because in that space, failure spells death.
For a govt, failure means nothing - to quote PT barnum - there's a sucker (or taxpayer in that case) born every minute. All you have to do is survive the next election cycle, and doing that these days has pretty much nothing to do with how well you actually invest taxpayer dollars and everything to do with how good a PR firm you hire.
Sadly, the US govt (like most govts) are neither good at investing nor at babysitting their investments: they are one of the most wasteful human organization on the planet, both unwittingly (bureaucracy and thousands of federal employees who serve no actual purpose whatsoever) and willingly (corruption and pork).
The trillion dollar that is being spent in this bill will neither improve the infrastructure of the country, nor go to the pockets of people who need it to help them lift themselves out of poverty.
It will just be wasted, like most of the rest of your tax money.
Oh, and - minor detail - it's a trillion dollar the government doesn't have.
It is therefore going to take on additional debt.
But, I mean, at this point who's counting anymore?
Absolutely! And it's a shame that the USG is using this type of cash-based accounting instead of depreciating long term assets like any other business.
At the same time, anything to do with infrastructure is so wasteful that I am always a little afraid whenever these infrastructure bills come up.
Good discussion here: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2021/08/02/why-does-infrastruct...
https://time.com/6086981/bipartisan-infrastructure-bill-brea...
This builds on an NHTSA-funded pilot program called Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety (DADDS; https://www.dadss.org/).
DADDS advanced two technologies for passive impaired driving detection: non-contact breath sensors (exhaled EtOH near the driver), and touch sensors (embedded into the steering wheel).
The bill adds this as a requirement on top of existing distracted driving prevention systems, which have been expanding but don't always get much press (e.g. Subaru's driver-facing cameras).
It specifically requires non-contact sensors that can “accurately” detect blood alcohol level of the driver. It may be possible to detect trace exhaled alcohol in the air, but you’re never going to get accurate blood alcohol measurements from proximity alone.
In the unlikely event that such a system made it to market, it would quickly become common knowledge among alcoholics that it could be defeated by rolling down your window to get more airflow through the cabin. More airflow means trace alcohol in the air is diluted and blown away. Reading goes to zero.
The bill also requires that the technology limit the operation of a vehicle after impairment is detected. There’s no way a system that suddenly causes a vehicle to slow down to pedestrian speeds could be considered safe for use on freeways. Can you imagine someone’s car slowing to a crawl on the freeway and forcing them to move at low speeds on the shoulder because their distraction detection system had a false positive? Even a false positive rate of 0.001% would mean a lot of us would pass a car experiencing a false positive on our commute every week. Awful.
Can't tell if sarcasm.
This is an exciting win for them.
I would have liked to see spending on bike and pedestrian safety projects as a percentage of any money spend on car infrastructure.
It didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but I just got the impression that for whatever reason, they were deeply opposed to the idea of people being able to safely bike down country roads. After living in San Francisco and Indianapolis in the years before, it was definitely weird seeing people being opposed to bike paths, especially when it would not interfere with their country life almost at all. Maybe they thought it would start them down a path of changing their way of life? I don't know.
Maintained or decomissioned.
Roads are still needed inside cities and between them. The Ancient Romans (famously) had roads.
Roads used to be for people:
> Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers."
> In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2924825-fighting-traffic
It's their current focus—basically only personal automobiles—that is the problem, and not the technology itself.
You might enjoy notjustbikes on youtube.
Making these trucks electric won't help.
You can also improve public transport, build bikelanes and sidewalk, while updating roads to help the parts of the community that will inevitable live outside the inner city limits.
Anecdotally, I live in a suburban area in a "developing" country. It was definitely not designed for people to live in - there are no small shops just a huge big chain store, barely any sidewalks and I havent seen any people just walking about. Every house seems to have about two cars. Outside the suburbs its the complete opposite. Roads are full of people milling about and kids playing cricket or soccer. Cars are second class citizens on the townships. First class citizens in the suburbs. Crazy.
It is compatible with our goal of getting from point A to point B safely. Climate goals are not the only goals, and if you look at this bill carefully, you'll see that they are quite secondary to other goals, which reflects the underlying political reality.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
If you add up the numbers at the bottom of the article, it is only about 500B. Is the rest already already allocated infrastructure spending?
I don't know what the $450B is though, all the media focus and interest is on the new shiny stuff.
As Warren Buffet once said “there has been class warfare and my class won.”
Biden should man-up and issue executive orders to satisfy at least a few of his campaign promises to the non-elite class.
It is an open question whether massive spending is appropriate right now.
Tl;dr it will be a felony offense to receive >$10k of any digital asset without filing a report including KYC information on the sender.
Much ink gets spilled over the machinations leading up to legislation. But the machinations being in the open as they were give us normies a chance express our opinions on it in real time to our representatives. It’s actually the opposite of lobbyists and crony capitalism. Granted, two things can be true and lobbyists and “well funded interests” get their say all throughout the process. Still a world of difference from a bill coming out from closed door meetings with nobody outside even seeing it.
