It is beyond boondoggle:
they build a boondoggle to nowhere in the middle of a sparsely populated area and expect people to ride just for the thrill of it?
The politicians responsible for this disaster — including Governor Jerry Brown — should go to jail for misuse of taxpayer funds.
Instead, they’ll be reelected, because idiots now have a majority among California voters.
Globull warming – the all purpose taxing, spending and money laundering ingredient. If it didn’t already exist, someone would be inventing it.
I know many of us predicted this would be the result before the first dollar was spent.
It’s so horrible that it even ruined season 2 of True Detective. It actually wasn’t that bad but it was a bit of a downer. The people responsible for the high speed rail project got away with it.
We should make a constitutional amendment that if a state files for bankruptcy then ALL state employees are fired. All state funded retirements are canceled and all elected state politicians are barred from ever holding office again. Just a thought. 🙂
Some of this might be possible under a convention of states.
Pretty much anything is possible under a convention of states. That’s one of the reasons some people fear such a thing.
True. There are ways to guarantee that our current amendments won’t be touched during the process.
Let’s say “torched” not “touched”.
I still say California should instead build a canal linking LA to San Francisco so people could travel between them by boat. A canal is just a big ditch filled with water, so it should be cheaper than building a steel railroad, thus saving taxpayers billions of dollars.
Plus California can’t even keep the BART system running, whereas their skill at water projects is renowned. Unlike other states, they even visually inspect the bottoms of their reservoirs and irrigation channels for damage and debris.
A big enough canal could also create high priced land along it, better than just a few stops on a train line. It would also be great for the bass fishers. But what would happen, is that the environmentalists demand salmon introduced to it, the shoreline turned into a forested buffer zone, and that there be no boat traffic to disturb the invertebrates that live under the concrete.
As with the SLS, we must always remember that politicians use different metrics to evaluate the success of a program. While we mere taxpayers look at things like cost effectiveness and efficiency, politicians look at money funneled to their districts, campaign contributions received, votes bought, cronies enriched, and reelections won. To them, virtually nothing else matters. This is true of both sides. It’s a true bipartisan form of corruption.
So, Elon Musk is now going to be responsible for sinking TWO major government agencies? 🙂
There’s a similar “light rail” project to link the sleepy little college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan with the seventy square miles of ripe and festering Third World slums that make up Detroit, being pushed by all the usual suspects. Millions and millions of dollars have been shoveled at consultants for “feasibility studies” that produce nothing but “a need for further study.”
No one is able to say how this would benefit Ann Arbor, and inconvenient questions about such matters are angrily shouted down with ranting about “investment in the future” and “sustainability” and “sustainable alternative transit” for “underserved populations” in need of “economic justice,” translation: “gimme gimme gimme.” Perhaps Google has been begging the city to bring them more illiterate IQ-55 crackhead violent felons to help them write search engine code.
Strangely, environmental effects are never a problem when it’s a project the Left wants. Of course, the likely effects on Ann Arbor’s environment by connecting it with Port-au-Prince-on-the-Rouge are predictable, and have been predicted. Bringing up the extremely predictable vast increase in violent crime is the surest way, of course, to get denounced for “racism” and other forms of badthink and thoughtcrime by people who don’t live near the plnned terminals.
Certainly land speculators who stand to profit are in favor of helping turn Ann Arbor indistinguishable from Inkster or Redford or Flint or Dearborn Heights at the modest cost to Michigan taxpayers of only one hundred million dollars, no, only half a billion dollars, no, a billion, no, ten billion, no, fifty billion and rising. Attending a public meeting and noting that the only thing Ann Arbor has left going for it since Pfizer packed up and left is that it’s NOT Detroit will draw some educational responses. (“‘Shut up,’ he explained”)