• Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    So…what if the railroad companies take the money and then do absolutely nothing, like what happened every single time this has been tried? What is there to hold them accountable this time?

    • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Add telcoms to that list as well… almost a trillion was given to them to get broadband in all homes in the USA…poof

      • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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        11 months ago

        Broadband is getting better! My in-laws who live in the boonies a few miles outside of a tiny town of 400 are jumping from ~2-4mbit/s download speed to fiber to the home, and I’ve seen broadband expansion in my extremely rural area by multiple telecom companies! It’s obviously slow going but it is happening

        • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          That’s surprising…only way we are getting it here is from our power company which is a coop. They’re basically running it to all the homes they supply power to. Only another 2-3 years for us.

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Good to hear. We had a quick expansion of fiber a couple decades ago and it seemed like it just stopped there. You never hear about more fiber rollout

    • Adalast@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      In fairness, last time this was tried we had Husky Musky employing a fraud with the explicit intent of killing the high-speed rail. Toss on a host of republican opposition and undermining in 2013± and you have the reason why it failed. It has nothing to do with the rail companies. It has everything you do with political dysfunction and not wanting to “let liberals win”.

      • nutsack@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        what would be the point in killing the high speed rail project? to defend tesla sales?

        • Adalast@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Generally, also pompous-ass disease. As the other user mentioned, Musk has pretty systematically worked against the 99% for his entire adult life. The idea that a normal everyday person could afford a ticket from LA to San Francisco that would get them there in roughly the same amount of time as his private jet would probably have infuriated him beyond compare. Just look at how he reacted to a college student forwarding publicly available information about the movements of that very same jet.

          • nutsack@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            I don’t like musk at all but this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard and probably isn’t true

            • Adalast@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              Really? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63978323 It is 100% real. Just to be clear, in early 2022 Husky Musky got butt-hurt about the account and attempted fo give the kid $5,000 to shut it down, thinking he would just take the money and comply. He refused and laughed at him. A couple of months later, we start hearing talk of him buying twitter. About a month after buying twitter he bans the account after making some retarded changes to the ToS to justify it. Yes, I am literally saying he spent 44billion dollars because some 19-year-old in Florida pissed him off and there was nothing he could do about it because the kid was 100% within his rights and didn’t violate any rules of twitter. I’m sure he had additional motivations, like having control of a cesspool of pro-conservative nutbags that he thought he would be able to milk for power and money, but short of Elon Musk pulling up in front of my house and showing genuine human emotion besides anger to tell me that it is not the case, the primary reason he bought twitter is because a peon had the audacity to tell him no and he was impotent to do anything about it.

              • nutsack@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                that has nothing to do with high speed rail. why are people upvoting this toilet garbage comment i hate reddit

                • Adalast@lemmy.world
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                  11 months ago

                  Lol, I am supporting my assertion of the underlying reasoning for his decisions based on real and factual evidence. It is an inductive argument. Look at a problem, find a pattern, find a general description for the pattern, then execute the general description on further instances of the system.

                  I asserted that Elon Musk was a pompous assclown who looks down on normal people and thinks they don’t deserve to be capable of the same things as him. You challenged that assessment, so I found a pattern of behavior and was able to support it with evidence that validates it, then generalizing the pattern of behavior and applying that generalization to my original assertion still yields a true output, so therefore 'ole Husky Musky is a pompous assclown who sees fit to punish the little guy and make sure we are all kept in our place. QED ∎

                  (to my math literate comrades, the redundancy is a joke)

        • natebluehooves@pawb.social
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          11 months ago

          The general theory is that musk dislikes any public transit that decreases car dependency. My personal feelings are more along the lines of “rich dumbass doesn’t like ideas that help the poors”, but obviously that may very well be cynicism on my part.

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      In the one hand, most of these allocations are to fund planning studies, so that’s exactly what will happen

      In the other hand this is not like the telecom situation where we hand money to private companies promising to provide service. It’s generally infrastructure improvements and I believe project ownership is Amtrak or local DOT