Search results

I think you might be eating in the wrong restaurants. It’s not a problem I generally encounter, although I avoid sit-down chains like the plague.

Your point would be valid if my point was an entirely recent phenomenon; it isn't. Amtrak has been threatened with discontinuations and elimination since at least May 1st, 1971. I do not dispute you, at all. Just because I am identifying a empathetic reason for why some at Amtrak are grumpier...

Imagine you work for Amtrak. Positions are being cut left and right. There is a high likelihood the long-distance network will not be here a year from now, and if it is there will be much fewer positions to fill. How positive would your employee attitude be?

Sorry, I misplaced the decimal point. It’s 20 billion/328 million = $60.9756 Per, rounded to the nearest round number, or $60/$11000 (average tax bill) = 0.005454 or 0.5%. 10606/11000 = 0.9641 = 96.4%. I shouldn’t do the math in my head so much and use a calculator more often. @willem

In this circumstance, it would be like having a burning house that we're worried about water damage because a dam just burst and a tsunami is bearing down upon it. It doesn't really matter which one destroys it first.

You can't borrow money by printing a treasury bond and setting an interest rate, and calling it a day. In order to actually borrow that money, somebody has to give you it in exchange for the authorized bond. I can assure you the last place I would put my money is in a US Treasury bond at the...

I am not being paid the big bucks that an economics professor is paid to explain to you where you are mistaken. Money can only be created in a vacuum to a certain extent; when we are talking about $20 billion (~$60 a person, or 0.05% of the average taxpayers tax bill), yeah, that can just be...

What I can say to that is that I wish economic policy was as simple as you seem to think it is. The money doesn't magically appear; it needs to be borrowed or printed, and either way it needs to be created; the debt is real and either needs to be paid through borrowing or by devaluing the...

For money to be appropriated, it must exist. This is going to be something of a problem in the near future.

To drive more ridership, you’d need more people to want to be in Texas. Few are so crazy.

Which, unless the job is specialized, and more in demand than in supply, (ashamed to say this, but as a white, English-as-first-language, specialized house cleaner is why my wife makes a decent living) tends to require one to be in a Union.

Dead on arrival

It would really help the food servers off of the train wouldn’t have to live on artificial wages. Artificial in that they don’t really exist. They quickly learn that they can’t pay their bills, no matter how pleasent they are because old fogies tip only artificially.

Emerging technologies is another way of saying “Snail-darter”. I know all about killing mega projects; I was a minor part of killing a rather large one. Robert Moses was part, primarily, of a dying city he basically almost killed himself. He is not a man I like; but his methodology for forcing...

Well yeah. Who wants to stay on the upper west side? :oops:

Here's a lesson in civil engineering, @Ziv. The Robert Moses method of construction is when you start a project in the simplest and most easily started place (in this case, the Central Valley), with the lowest initial construction costs. That way you can get it moving. Then you let the project...

It's not that they need to be safer than people who text. Its that the need to be safer than people who text, talk on their phones using their hands (EVEN IN CARS EQUIPPED WITH HANDSFREE!), eat, drink coffee, dig around for stuff on the floor, and even when they AREN'T doing all of this, don't...

It depends on whether not any of them were Lloyd Bridges.

You can't. I'm arguing against the asinine criticisms of the particular project, which are unjustified. All of these problems come from a basic lack of understanding of money in ones pocket versus money expended on projects like this. That is, $1 per person per year on a 20 year project in the...

I’m sure he makes good money; it would still give me indigestion. He might be crazy like a fox with the way he runs his business, but still crazy.