between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/HAN159060.htm
No comment.
Here is my predictable rant which I am growing tired of but I feel better for having spewed my frustrations onto my keyboard… This is a really pathetic indirect commentary on our own transportation policies which are so tangled in cross purposes and politics as to be absurdly non existant beyond rhetoric, What do we have…the perenially basket case operations of Amtrak to hold up to the world?..ugh…I think the momentum that we have been coasting on from past glories is slowing down…and the transportation accomplishments of rest of the world makes us look like boastful rubes…polishing our model T…I am sure alot of the rest of the world now says, "Look at what they do, not what they say… Having gone through the trauma of the Viet Nam war this is specifically as galling as it gets…and the Japanese are getting the profits from this contract.?..I won’t even go there…
33 billion?! Yikes! Talk about your long-range planning and investing…
I forget, do the Vietanmese have running water yet?
How 'bout electricity?
Seems to me that a fancy new high-speed rail line next to a mud hut in a rice paddy is a bit of an oxy-moron, don’t you think? But hey, if the Vietnamese are doing it, it must be the way to go. Maybe we should go communist while we are at it and kill off all of our political dissidents?
Unlike some supremely confident rhetoric unsupported by anything other than bluster, they are making progress in transportation issues…If there is a need for a laundry list of problems this country has outside of jingoistic cheerleading, I am rather tired of self examination and particularly looking into the muddy crystal ball of the belt line…We don’t have the spine anymore to go beyond our own self delusions of superiority…whose hot air we can’t harness to make one clear consensus decision regarding transportation policy in regard to rail…I could care less if they have indoor plumbing or poop in the woods…are Marxist hold outs or vegetarian moon beam worshipping hippies, or that matter, closet nazi’s … I care what goes on here and by comparison my thought is simple…not much…
[#ditto]
Maybe the U.S. should ask the world for financial aid; after all, we are going broke “protecting democracy” in so many countries, while our own infrastructure continues to crumble…
http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182
The administration released a $2.9 trillion budget request for fiscal year 2008 on Monday February 5. Along with the budget request, it submitted supplementary materials for additional war spending.
The budget request released by the administration proposes cuts in non-security related discretionary spending. Compared to fiscal year 2006, $13 billion would be cut from these programs, or 3 percent, once inflation is taken into account.
At the same time, the administration is requesting another $100 billio
I think it goes much deeper and further than war. In one form or another, as I rapidly approach 60, we have been in one war or another in one form or another long before I was born and will continue long after I am in the ground. We simply do not have the money nor the will to reverse the reality that we can no longer afford "Panama Canal " epic projects let alone reliably fund the reconstruction of New Orleans. We would’nt know a peace time economy if it bit us in the posterior. It’s a pyramid scheme that is undergoing a soft collapse and a slow transformation into entropy. As long as the middle class was healthy at the base of the pyramid, we paid and continue to pay the bills. We produced actual goods, had real jobs, accomplished real accomplishments. Someone legalized the brilliant idea that you could make goods more cheaply where the folks who produce them have to poop in the woods. Problem is that multinational corporations eat their young in this case the geese that laid the golden eggs, the middle class. We consume more than we produce. As a nation, we live literally on credit. We have increased costs of living and wages have not kept par. Increasingly, you either are Donald Trump or work\ shop at Walmart for shoddy goods from China that are an illusion placed on endcaps…Look at the amount of tourist economys that have replaced real world factories. Workless work is an illusion that will collapse…
HSR may make more sense for Vietnam, especially at this point in their history.
Seems like rail was established in this country well before our asphalt network was fully functional, why should other countries be any different? The fact that they are able to pick from an already mature technology, while we had to invent as we went along, seems to me to be the most noteworthy difference.
AS far as technology speak goes, we were the early adopters, whereas they are selecting from the crest of the developement curve. Being early adopters has certain benefits and certain drawbacks, and this seems to be fully applicable in the instance of our experience.
Add to that Viet Nam’s long and slender physical layout, where every tax payer is but a short jaunt from the proposed service…and it might actually make more sense for them than trying to con US taxpayers with promises of bus rides to distant connections.
Japan’s $23Billion investment is what puzzles me. Is there some means of recovery in this for Japan, or is this strictly pork in humanitarian’s clothing? If the Japanese taxpayers are paying 70% of the cost of this project simply to fatten the wallets of Japanese contractors intended to build the thing, well that says a lot.
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Jesuit Christmastrees! tell me… Do they still use two sticks to make fire also? When was the last time you actually visited Vietnam? It HAS managed to keep pace with the rest of SE Asia, its not Singapore or Japan, but its not ‘Quest for Fire’ either…
Ahhhh…its called foresight, and planning…
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Ya know…the things we used to do in this country before we became a government of the highest bidder…
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And yes! if the formerly bombed-into-the-stone-age-once-sanctioned-to-death-Viet-freakin-nam can plan and build an HST but we can’t because between the idiots in this country who cant think beyond the next election or beyond the special interest lobbiests of the airline industry idiots or the no-taxes-for-anything idiots, or the NIMBY BANANA idiots, maybe we SHOULD think about some changes here.
How about we let the PRIVATE airlines sink or swim without ANY Federal funding just like the critics keep insisting that Amtrak do and see how long before your on a Greyhound and while were at that, how about we take away ALL highway funding as well and lets see how long it takes for the roads to grind to a halt. We can just make everything a toll road run by the private sector, they did that here in the OC for a bunch of new highways, works great! Guess what the toll charge is to bypass the clogged freeway and run the toll lane on
…Wow, I’m still trying to digest all of the above…Guess I’m speechless.
Pretty wild stuff. Sure some excellent comments of the direction we’re headed and have been for some time. I hope someone soon grabs hold of the steering wheel and does something with it.
Speak for yourself…[:D]
But you have no problem saying that if Vietnam is doing it then why can’t we? If you don’t care what they are up to then what’s the big deal? Let them build high-speed rail. I’m not jealous. We should be thankful that we have free speech, running water, free press, 4 star prisons, food, family, cars and all kinds of other things. This is not the case in Vietnam. I don’t think that we will bring our country over the ‘threshold’ to perfection if we get high speed rail. If anything, it as the ability to become a massive spending whole. Besides, doesn’t the NEC constitute high speed rail already? And where else in the country would you put high speed rail so that it would actually benefit people?
Please tell me what the proper priorities of government are if it isn’t defense of the nation?
Is it providing high speed rail? Is it furthering society through massive social programs?
You have visited Vietnam?
I never said we couldn’t. I am saying we shouldn’t. We have airplanes that get from point A to point B faster than any high speed rail network. Why would we want to duplicate that current mode of transportation with one that is slower, even if it is high speed rail, and even if the mecca of technology - Vietnam - is doing it?
If you feel that you aren’t paying enough taxes, are you willing to give an additional 10 percent of your income to Amtrak, in the interest of furthering our technologically stagnant society? How about 5 percent? Maybe 1 percent?
[quote]
How about we let the PRIVATE airlines sink or swim without ANY Federal funding just like the critics keep insisting that Amtrak do and see how long before your on a Greyhound and while were at that, how about we take away ALL highway funding as well
Hear, hear!!!
I thought speaking for myself was the point of the exercise…thankfulness in a Pollyanna universe where you can’t discriminate between material comfort and political will is an exercise akin to kissing the ground after the neighborhood dogs aka political professionals have used your backyard to feritilize your lawn. If you think the NEC is the solution for transportation policy, I have an optomitrist I can recomend. Corridors are self evident…one in your backyard is apt…the Midwest High Speed Rail, while a pale shadow of what could be done if we had the money and will to take it up a notch, is an apt project outside of the East Coast. Long range solutions instead of expediant ad hoc political floundering is obviously not your cup of tea…
From Alexander Solzhenitsyn;
"But the persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most attractive in practice; that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction. But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development bears little resemblance to all this."
How is Veitnam Communist? What makes them a communist country again?
What domestic policys define them as such? other then the lable…
Heck what makes the US a capilitsic country?
I wasn’t expressing an opinion; I was just quoting the facts.
Perhaps we (meaning many of the posters to this thread) should be more aware of Bergie’s new posting regarding politics…
[quote user=“solzrules”]
You have visited Vietnam?
I never said we couldn’t. I am saying we shouldn’t. We have airplanes that get from point A to point B faster than any high speed rail network. Why would we want to duplicate that current mode of transportation with one that is slower, even if it is high speed rail, and even if the mecca of technology - Vietnam - is doing it?
If you feel that you aren’t paying enough taxes, are you willing to give an additional 10 percent of your income to Amtrak, in the interest of furthering our technologically stagnant society? How about 5 percent? Maybe 1 percent?
[quote]
How about we let the PRIVATE airlines sink or swim without ANY Federal funding just like the critics keep insisting that Amtrak do and see how long before your on a Greyhound and while were at that, how about we take away ALL