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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25575 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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The thing I have been noticing recently is, when a project inevitably blows past all budgets and timetables, people are like "we should just finish it, the cost won't matter decades from now".

Given the politics of Anglosphere infrastructure projects, this is a rational defensive measure. The main way special interests block projects is by using one set of proxies to drive up the cost by lobbying for scope creep (particularly through the environmental review process) and then using another set of proxies to blame the project's proponents for uncontrolled cost escalation and demand that the project be killed for cost control reasons.

If project supporters commit to going ahead regardless of cost escalation, then this doesn't work (until the cost reaches macro-economically significant levels like CAHSR of HS2).

Ironically, CAHSR was the project under discussion.

CAHSR should be finished because it would be an embarrassment not to finish it. Those (already built) giant unused bridges and viaducts in the middle of the central California scrubland would stand like a monument to the catastrophic absence of state capacity in the modern US.

And so they shall.

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay.

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare.

Given the cost overruns California will not be finishing the project. In your old age you can visit the ruins like Ozymandias' giant stone head alone in the desert.

My state already has such a monument: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/satsop-nuclear-power-plant

Cooling towers visible from I-5 from a half-finished nuclear power plant.

Those (already built) giant unused bridges and viaducts in the middle of the central California scrubland would stand like a monument to the catastrophic absence of state capacity in the modern US.

Would that actually surprise you?

You know I actually think they’ll finish it, at least unless the state economy collapses. They’re rich enough and the people keep voting through more spending on it.

I always assumed that "finishing" CAHSR from Merced to Bakersfield would be more embarrassing than killing it. Most of the value of LA-SF CAHSR would come from end-to-end journeys.

They’re banking on the Merced to Bakersfield run being ‘impressive’, the president and a bunch of congressmen riding it on the opening day and cutting the ribbons on the stations etc, fawning news coverage, and then dropping another eighty billion or whatever it’ll take to cover the rest. Honestly, it’s not even a ridiculous plan, as long as they frame it as an ‘American’ achievement instead of a California one and talk about beating the Chynese and “world’s best railroad” or whatever regardless of truth they might well get it.

Maybe we need a monument like that to turn things around. Kind of like the end to Planet of the Apes (except there it was obviously too late).

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