Does it really take 30 years to make a modest improvement?

"...the Next-Gen High Speed Rail line would reduce the travel time between Washington, D.C., and New York City from 162 minutes to 96 minutes. The travel time between New York and Boston would go from 215 minutes to 84 minutes."

So if you do the math, Washington, D.C. to Boston currently takes 6 hours and 17 minutes, not counting delays due to MARC, SEPTA, NJ Transit, Metro-North, and the MBTA Commuter Rail clogging up the tracks. The vision is to reduce this travel time to 3 hours to cover the same 440 miles by the year 2040. So instead of covering a maximum 70 miles per hour, we'll have trains that can go a maximum of 147 miles per hour 30 years from now. A nice improvement but, the Chinese already have a line in existence today that covers the 75 miles from Beijing to Tianjin in 25 minutes (or, 180 miles per hour. TODAY!)

So, in other words, is our vision to become today's China in the next 30 years? Not really, but why should it take us 30 years to do what's best for commuters (faster trips), the environment (fewer cars on the road), and national security (reduced usage of petrodictator's oil and you can't fly a train into a building unless there are tracks that lead to one)?

Be very careful what you wish for...

I'm adding Steven Pearlstein to my list of essential weekly reading, which currently includes Matt Miller, also of The Washington Post. My favorite line in today's column:

"Here is the hard political reality: You can't expect to support and finance political candidates who preach that government is menacing and wasteful, that public employees are incompetent and corrupt, that taxes are always too high and destroy jobs, and then turn around and expect that the government will respond to your demands to hold down the cost of health care, or fund basic research, or provide good schools, efficient courts and reliable transportation systems."

Again, be very careful what you wish for...

The efficient Germans: Less Talk, More Action

I came across this post earlier today on American Express Open Forum that I thought was very interesting.

"...Americans view time as a currency in the workplace, as opposed to output. Meanwhile, Germans view results as the biggest indicator of results."

The redundancy of that second line aside, there are too many employers in the United States (*cough* Goldman Sachs *cough*) that are highly focused on face-time and think they are making up for it by assuming money is a better motivator than actually allowing their employees to see their families once in a while.

Columns like this one validate what I've always felt about people that routinely put in 10-, 12-, or 14-hour workdays, five-to-six days a week in the office: it's not a badge of honor as much as it's a mark of inefficiency. Get over yourself.

"Ben Stein, the guy who got rich because when he talks it sounds so boring it's actually funny."

Bill Maher gives a sneak preview of one of his new rules that will be on tonight's episode of "Real Time with Bill Maher". I'd be curious to see the next Christine O'Donnell clip but unfortunately the HBO/Cinemax free preview was last weekend and someone manages to post it on YouTube anyway (before HBO makes them take it down.)

Einstein's Relativity Affects Aging on Earth (Slightly)

I have to admit, even though it has nothing to do with politics or sports I am posting this just for the awesome geekiness of this article. ENJOY!!!

Volcker puts the smack-down on, well, pretty much everyone that makes money from money

Check out the WSJ link while you can because it gets locked down for paid subscribers only after a few days. This was my personal favorite:

“We had all our best business schools in the United States pouring out financial engineers, every smart young mathematician and physicist said ‘I don’t want to be a civil engineer, a mechanical engineer. I’m a smart guy, I want to go to Wall Street.’ And then you know all the risks were going to be sliced and diced and [people thought] the market would be resilient and not face any crises. We took care of all that stuff, and I think that was the general philosophy that markets are efficient and self correcting and we don’t have to worry about them too much."

The Economist: "There's rich, and then there's rich"

This is totally mind-boggling:

"...the top twenty-five hedge fund managers combined appear to have earned more than all five hundred S&P 500 CEOs combined (both realized and ex ante)."

Yet another awesome Matt Miller column...

I have to admit, I'm becoming a huge fan of Washington Post columnist Matt Miller solely for his independence of thought. He is neither a cheerleader nor an antagonist like other Washington Post columnists on the left or the right, respectively. Today's column is another excellent piece about things that need to be better about the Obama administration's economic policies related to healthcare and education.

CFL player pulls a Leon Lett

This is why this guy is a defensive lineman in the Canadian Football League and not someone that's responsible for actually holding the ball in the National Football League.



On a totally unrelated note, I'm headed to the Jets vs. Patriots game today at the New Meadowlands Stadium. I can't wait to see the new stadium.

J! E! T! S! JETS! JETS!! JETS!!!

This is the way wealthy nations become poor.

Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein wrote a chilling column titled "So goes the center, so goes the economy" about our nation's political polarization and how the results of primaries earlier this week could be a harbinger of things to come. The part that stood out for me was:

"This is the way wealthy nations become poor. There are no vibrant economies without effective political systems, and there are no effective political systems without a vibrant center."

Something to think about if you're considering voting for a hyper-partisan candidate on the left or the right this year...

"He may well be too ambitious and narcissistic to be able to comprehend how much damage he is doing to our country."

The Onion gets it right once again...

"...nowadays instant gratification isn't quick enough for some people."

An excellent column today by Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum about why austerity has become so popular with the British public and yet is just a buzzword without any real substance behind it in the United States. According to Applebaum, a lot of it is politics but a lot of it is rooted in the personal histories of politicians in power today.

Definitely worth reading and hopefully it'll do more than just motivate you to add Postcards from the Edge to your Netflix queue.

"...and I am a Giants fan."

One of the Washington Post blogs has a post on Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Not to make light of an issue that is profoundly sensitive to many people but I have to point out this quote from the Imam:

"I belong to this neighborhood. I am a devout Muslim, I pray five times a day...and I am also a proud American citizen. Let no one forget that. I vote in elections, I pay taxes, I pledge allegiance to the flag, and I am a Giants fan."

I'm sure he wasn't disappointed by yesterday's result.

Please welcome to the stage, a very funny guy...

I liked the appointment of Austan Goolsbee already, but this line in the article makes me like him even more:

"...Mr. Goolsbee, an amateur comic as well as an economist..."

It's definitely a better post-comedy career choice than becoming a human target, like this guy. Either way, both of them give me hope.

Climbing aboard my soapbox again for high-speed rail...

Yes, I'm on that high-speed rail bandwagon yet again. This time even the Economist weighs in on high-speed rail as part of its commentary on American infrastructure overall, stating:

"America's rail system is inadequate and in need of repair and expansion." and "America could probably use a new high-speed rail network..."

At least the Infrastructure Bank proposed by the Obama Administration is a start but it will not be enough and, as The New York Times and Huffington Post point out, we are already far, far behind not just the rest of the world but even our own-country compared to 70-plus years ago.

Reich: How to End the Great Recession

Former Clinton Administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote a very informative op-ed in the New York Times. One passage that initially seemed like a partisan argument but proved to be an insightful observation was:

In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income.

It’s no coincidence that the last time income was this concentrated was in 1928. I do not mean to suggest that such astonishing consolidations of income at the top directly cause sharp economic declines. The connection is more subtle.

The rich spend a much smaller proportion of their incomes than the rest of us. So when they get a disproportionate share of total income, the economy is robbed of the demand it needs to keep growing and creating jobs.

The Onion: Man Already Knows Everything He Needs To Know About Muslims

The scary part is there are probably a ton of people actually like this…