Yes.
Jeff
Ironic that the “Frisco” and the “Louie” got their nicknames from cities they never reached.
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Was just shortening the word to make subject line briefer.
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I’d have used ‘Calif.’ for that, which is about as short and doesn’t have the breezy/dismissive tone…
You probably shouldn’t speak in absolutes .
“In South Central, Cali is commonly used.”
“I’m from [Long Beach], and I’ve said ‘Cali’ my whole life,”
Its sounds like it is love or hate it kind of nickname, but hardly “dismissive”.
I would not worry about it.
LL Cool J used “Cali” in a song.
As did 2Pac. I am guessing the west coast didn’t call them “tourists”, or found it dismissive.
Who knows? Tupac was West Coast and LL Cool J was East Coast.
For what it’s worth:
AI Overview
+7
Yes, “Cali” is a common, informal nickname for California, widely understood and used, especially by people outside the state or in media, though many native Californians dislike it, finding it overly casual or dismissive, preferring “California” or the postal code “CA”.
California (if it was a country) is the 4th largest world economy, only behind the US, China, Germany, and tied with Japan. All those foreign countries plus many others have built HSR, so I guess Cal should be able to afford it.
Yeah, a lot of them old time railroads were pretty ambitious sounding with their names. I think it was to give would customers and passengers a rough idea of where they run and also to piggyback off the name of the nearest big city. Like I know here in western Pennsylvania people and businesses still say they’re from Pittsburgh even if they’re 50 miles out in the boonies.
The naming was not done for customers…it was done to attract investors.
Interesting. While watching a Lakers game on NBA League Pass the other day, I saw a Carls Jr. ad for a “Cali XL Burger.” I have my doubts that Carls Jr., which does a lot of its business in California, would choose a burger name that insulted some Californians.
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As politics change over time - this will rise from the ashes like the Phoenix.
As I recall it took nearly 10 years of politics for the B&O Railroad to get past Point of Rock, MD with the C & O Canal working to defeat the B&O. As time moved on the economics of both positions changed and the politics changed too.
I don’t think there is any likelihood it will not be ‘completed’ in some fashion – the carbon-tax financing has been assured, and eventually they will get to running something.
What it won’t be, in any way, shape, or form, is a model for how to provide actual HSR that runs and serves actual peoples’ needs. Even if they find some excuse to discount the construction expense when determining the fares to be charged…
That was a significant consideration regarding the Federal billions that were forfeited by missing deadlines. That was not free money to be reallocated as state government chose.
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Speaking of Phoenix…still no direct Amtrak service (ha-ha).
Though I agree with you on California, they could have skipped Federal involvement all together just by using their very large state budget. What will likely happen is they will wait around for a sympathetic Presidential administration and start the grant process up again.
I think a small part of the issue for California was they look at Federal money as candy from Uncle Sugar vs taxpayer money which they have to be careful spending. A lot of states do that and it always leads to a project with rapidly escalating costs at some point. Texas went through that with the Super Collider project.
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It’s reported that California state deficit is about 18 bil., forming a 35 bil structural debt to come. State and local is about 1.6 trillion when unfunded liabilities included. Doesn’t sound state is flush to me.
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Plenty of money in that budget. Are you kidding? They have more money to spend than Texas does. Not only that look at what they have built with Amtrak California and local transit concerns in the state.
The above quoted text in a lot of cases is mis-prioritized spending. It is true they are not spending in the right areas. Which is why you have situations where they run out of water in a major fire and not enough reservoir capacity to handle a drought (that has been an issue for decades running now). There was an article on Lake Mead being so low a while back and poster after poster from California posted it was not their fault for drawing substantial amounts of water from that reservoir…it was the fault of Nevada because it did not rain enough there. So just an example of the type of thinking that the state needs to work on changing. We have droughts in Texas but it seems we get through most droughts OK with water restrictions and one reason why is we continue to build water reservoirs.
Spending on the HSR program eventually will increase mobility which will add to California GDP. Increased mobility = Increase in GDP as overall economic velocity increases. So I pose the question as to why they are NOT spending so much money on a HSR program which will contribute to their own state GDP? Why do they need a Federal input?
I’ve seen this said many times but I sorta wonder. Would California have as big of an economy if it wasn’t part of the US? What I mean is, if it was a foreign country, would it have as much trade with the rest of the US. Think of the huge defense industry. I don’t know the answer, I was just wondering.