Friday, October 29, 2010

I know we're trying but we really have a LONG LONG way to go...

A White House blog post this week talked about the Department of Transportation awarding $2.4 Billion as part of its efforts to develop high-speed rail in the United States. Now everyone that’s reading this knows how I feel about high-speed rail. What solidified it much more for me was what a colleague of mine from our Shanghai office told me. He’s working out of the New York office for two weeks and he said his hometown of SuZhou is roughly 74 km (46 miles) from Shanghai. He said the new high-speed line cuts the 45 minute ride of the older trains down to 25 minutes.

Someone show me a new train anywhere in the United States that covers roughly 50 miles between two major cities in under an hour, let alone 45 minutes or 25 minutes?

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Yeah, that sounds about right...

CLASSIC!


This just gets better and better the more you watch it...

Say it with me now: THE. RENT. IS. TOO. DAMN. HIGH!!!


Is there a reason the red line is so far north of the others?


A Wall Street Journal article today focuses on the White House initiative to boost Latino achievement in colleges. However, the report it cites states that Latino college-completion rates are depressed due to “language barriers and obstacles caused by immigration status”, which would also be the case with Asians too but the graph included in the article does not show that.

Now, in my lifetime I’ve known many people across every race, religion, and ethnic background and realized that intelligence is strictly an individual thing and nothing that can be attributed to a person’s race, background, upbringing, etc. In fact, the biggest factor I’ve seen is work ethic and it’s hard to argue that any particular group is inherently lazy or more likely to work harder and/or smarter than any other group. So what’s really happening here?

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

This is what high-speed rail really looks like...

Why is this hard for people to understand?

"...passengers would be able to travel from London to Frankfurt in five hours, Deutsche Bahn said. That compares to an almost two-hour flight — not counting time getting to and from the airports and going through security and check-in. A trip from London to Amsterdam, which takes just over one hour by plane, would be a four-hour train ride." {emphasis mine}


Now compare that to the proposed "high-speed" rail for Ohio, which will go a whopping 79 miles per hour, or roughly 121 mph slower than the trains discussed in the New York Times article.

Monday, October 11, 2010

President {insert name here} wants to destroy the Constitution!

Interesting op-ed by Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’S “Morning Joe” in Politico last Monday. This is remarkably, and sadly, a very accurate passage:

“For eight grim years, Democrats worked to delegitimize Bush. Opinion leaders on the left relentlessly bashed the 43rd president on national TV and online, accusing him of being a fascist and war criminal who worked in tandem with Vice President Dick Cheney to destroy the Constitution.

Eight years before Bush entered the White House, Republicans (like myself) glared at Bill Clinton as he was being sworn in as president, immediately declaring him unfit for office. Soon after he was sworn in, extremists began claiming that the 42nd president was a Marxist and fascist who sought to destroy the Constitution.

The ugliness that followed set a dangerous precedent that fed into the shrillness of the Bush era. And as the Age of Bush mercifully came to a close, a cacophony of enraged right-wing voices welcomed Obama to the White House by accusing him of being a Marxist, a fascist, a Nazi and a racist who hated America and was — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — trying to destroy the Constitution.”

“Self-drive, activated”

I have to admit, this is just really, really cool.

Friday, October 8, 2010

"WTF C.C.?" (No, not C.C. Sabathia, the bigger C.C.)

Short-sighted, misguided, and downright insanely ludicrous. There are no ways to even give Gov. Chris Christie the benefit of the doubt on finding other alternatives to the THE Tunnel. Though he seems like he would be a nice guy in person, the reality is he represents the 'Old' New Jersey, where the automobile was king, rather than the 'New' New Jersey that has to deal with scarce parking, high gas prices (even with the lowest gasoline tax in the country), and pothole infested roads that you don’t have to worry about while you’re listening to your iPod and reading your Kindle while riding NJ Transit.

Paul Krugman takes a more political and economic perspective but still explains it pretty straightforwardly in his column today, where he says:

“So, about that tunnel: with almost 1,200 people per square mile, New Jersey is the most densely populated state in America, more densely populated than any major European nation. {emphasis mine} Add in the fact that many residents work in New York, and you have a state that can’t function without adequate public transportation. There just isn’t enough space for everyone to drive to work.”

"Okay big boss man; time to put your money where your mouth is..."

I have to say that I really, really like this idea from William D. Cohan, author of "House of Cards". He suggests that Wall Street worked well for everyone in the past mainly because in the days of partnerships, firm management had a personal stake in the profits and losses of the overall firm. About how the industry works today, he writes:

"Over the past generation, this business model has worked well for one group in particular: the bankers, traders and honchos who work on Wall Street. These days on Wall Street, around 50 percent of every dollar of revenue generated is paid out to its employees in the form of compensation. What other business on earth does this? None."

What gets lost in this last statement is that while $0.50 of every $1.00 of revenue is spent on compensation, I wonder what how many cents on that $0.50 goes to the rank-and-file staff that make their firms run day-to-day in thankless jobs? I'd say no more than $0.02 of $0.50 go to the people that give up much of their own personal lives only to be overlooked in good times and be the first ones booted out in bad times.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Pearlstein and Miller This Week

As I stated in a recent blog post, Steven Pearlstein and Matt Miller of The Washington Post are becoming my regular weekly must-read columns. Here are some excerpts:

From Matt Miller’s column today:

“The mother of all inconvenient truths is this: Global capitalism's ability to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in China, India and other developing countries comes partly at the expense of tens of millions of workers in wealthy nations. This awful, inexorable fact will soon pose an enormous moral and intellectual challenge for the American left.”

From Steven Pearlstein’s column yesterday:

“If you asked Americans how much of the nation's pretax income goes to the top 10 percent of households, it is unlikely they would come anywhere close to 50 percent, which is where it was just before the bubble burst in 2007… From World War II until 1976, considered by many as the "golden years" for the U.S. economy, the top 10 percent of the population took home less than a third of the income generated by the private economy.”

Please enjoy both reads and let me know what you think.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

“India and China, China and India; Elaine and Susie, Susie and Elaine”

(In case you didn’t get the Seinfeld reference.)

A couple of articles about India and China recently, related to population growth, economic growth, and issues related to economic growth. A few passages that stand out:

“The Indian government recognises the need to tackle the infrastructure crisis, and is getting better at persuading private firms to stump up the capital. But the process is slow and infected with corruption. It is hard to measure these things, but many observers think China has done a better job than India of curbing corruption, with its usual brutal methods, such as shooting people.” {emphasis mine}

“Many universities turn out graduates who are good at exams but unaccustomed to thinking about real-world problems.”

I have many personal anecdotes that corroborate this 2nd statement but will not make them here openly. I have a feeling that the people that will be offended by this statement are exactly the people I’m thinking about.

"If you build it, they will come."

A number of Republican Gubernatorial candidates claim to be opposed to construction of high-speed rail networks in their states. The reality is it’s going to get built anyway and these candidates are simply using it as an election issue to show their opposition to President Obama than any actual opposition to building high-speed rail. To understand why the lines will get built, look no further than:

1) The money set aside in the stimulus is strictly for high-speed rail construction and if it’s not used for that purpose it must be returned to the federal government.
2) The article cites many Republicans supporting high-speed rail construction projects, such as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA), Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood (R-IL), and former Medirian, MS mayor and Reconnecting America President John Robert Smith (R-MS).
3) Alaska’s At-Large Member of the House, Don Young (R-AK) wrote an op-ed piece that I blogged about on the need for high-speed rail.

So long story short, this is just election posturing and nothing more. And sadly, Democrats voting against these candidates will call them hypocrites while the Republicans voting for these candidates will forget they ever opposed the projects in the first place. Hopefully the country will not lose out from all of this superficial bickering.

Is this the Military-Industrial Complex Ike warned us about 50 years ago?

A blog post at The Economist offers a counterpoint to a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece authored by AEI's Arthur Brooks, Heritage's Ed Feulner, and the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol. One key point that jumped out at me was:

"The reality is that much of the world is free-riding off the security provided by American military dominance. Were American taxpayers to refuse to bear so much of the burden of keeping the world safe for Danish container ships, other countries would surely step up. Furthermore, considerations of basic distributive fairness suggest they should."

The blog posting also cites another great column at The Washington Post by Linda J. Bilmes and Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, which breaks down the actual direct and indirect costs of the Iraq War.