zifnab25

It's a little bit more complicated than "Government bad!!" but if you can get one person to walk away from a discussion about this with the message "Business gives money to the government in order to get the government to give them more money so that they can give more money to the government so they will give more money to business..." and they start seeing it in their own lives - maybe it's Tesla, maybe it's Boeing, maybe it's Lehman Brothers - then I think that will help inoculate that person against the lopsided narrative that the problem is just "too much government" or "government corruption" and so therefore the solution is hyper-capitalism.

Sure, you can see it. But there's nothing you can really do about it at a national level.

At a more local level, we see that kind of graft, but the best any locality can really do is just "Say No!" to everything offered up by the municipal government. That doesn't get you a healthy economy or a functional government, it just gets people finding elaborate back-doors for funneling money outside democratic institutions. Case in point, the Texas takeover of HISD after over a decade of failing to take it over and privatize it through well-financed conservatives running in local elections. Rather than deal with a bunch of intransigent locals who refuse to see their education system carved up and sold off, the state just seizes the entire school district and staffs it with industry flaks of the Governor's choosing.

two years is about how long it takes to get all that done in prep of any actual construction

This isn't a revolutionary new idea. We've had charging stations since the Obama Administration, we don't need to invent them from first principles.

Maybe they scrapped it all (or lost it) and started over. But if you look at the history of other big national projects (Mitt Romney's Big Dig, the current state of the NYC subway system, the California HSR project) you'll notice how you've got layer after layer of consultancy that saps all this money away doing busy work, while actual physical construction projects stall out for decades.

Seven stations over two years isn't even a pilot program. I'm curious to know where they even got the number seven from, as it seems abnormally high for a project that's still supposed to be in a planning stage. But, broadly speaking, we already have a large network of refueling stations distributed across the country. We just have an entirely privatized model that's openly hostile to EVs as competition.

Japan is famous for building shit and then tearing it down again every 10-20 years. Its lucrative, but also enormously wasteful.

Had the opportunity to throw some time at the FF7 Rebirth on my friend's PS5. I'll have to wait until June before I can expect to see it on PC, but its been a lot of fun to date. Eager to see more of it.

Meanwhile, Unicorn Overlord on the Switch has been a great travel game.

Its staggering how intransigent the modern economy has become. You can assign vast fortunes to the goal of requisitioning materials and manpower for a given project, and it all just gets swallowed up by finance capitalism.

I'm old enough to remember watching the suburbs build out during the 80s, 90s, and 00s. Seven gas stations inside a few miles could go up in a couple of years. In fact, you'd typically see three or four gas stations competing on every major intersection. I could drive you around Sugar Land, TX and point you to a dozen gas stations that were built just during my time in High School. And for hundreds of thousands of dollars, not thousands of millions.

But that was an era of Growth Capitalism, where we couldn't possibly leave a single bare patch of dirt between Rosenberg and The Woodlands. Everything had to be paved. And we unleashed phenomenal human labor and material resources to accomplish it all. By contrast, we can't seem to build shit for shit now. Money just falls into some bottomless pit of bureaucracy and graft.

Nick Nigro, founder of Atlas Public Policy, said that some of the delays are to be expected. “State transportation agencies are the recipients of the money,” he said. “Nearly all of them had no experience deploying electric vehicle charging stations before this law was enacted.”

Nigro says that the process — states have to submit plans to the Biden administration for approval, solicit bids on the work, and then award funds — has taken much of the first two years since the funding was approved. “I expect it to go much faster in 2024,” he added.

We've got to pay a guy to pay a guy to pay a guy to pay a guy to do a thing.

Swiggly lines are natural. They come from the Earth.

Oh man! Havana Syndrome is back and its in Pog form!

So excited to see where we go with this.

We did the Meiji Shrine the next day.

I liked them both. Do agree its bullshit to charge, but 500 yen ($3) isn't outrageous.

If I told you I had a 300 bod, would you hold it against me?

Can confirm. Was very hot this morning

Carrying the cross was supposed to be a form of torture, as you'd be whipped and tormented any time you fell.

So less "strong" and more "terrified" and "in significant pain"

Can be streamers

No. No. No. No. No.