Infrastructure

[exploited]

[John Galt]

a discussion on infrastructure is fine. the rule's purpose is to stop spam, and directly copying work that is not yours. but you go too far with the personal attacks exploited, too far

china has been laying down infrastructure all over the world with it's One Road campaign. in the end, its so they can get cheap chinese goods to market, and they can make use of all of the construction equipment they have made (i think from like 2007-2010 China used something like 50% more concrete than the US did from 1901-2000). north america should get similar treatment

i disagree that mass transit is the answer. autonomous electric vehicles are the answer for transportation. ground based regional transport... hyperloop seems like a disaster waiting to happen

the ITER project is 50% to completion of its task of showing it works. within a few years we'll have the ultimate goal in power, fusion, running in a plant in france. this is the way forward for power

clean water will take a lot of work. we've got a lot of the major pieces out of the way, and so most water treatment gets most things, but because of shit like yoga pants out water has little tiny pieces of plastic everywhere. we need to clean that up. not to mention the environmental disaster that is invasive species such as zebra mussels that have invaded the great lakes to a point where superior is no longer the clearest lake; others have had increased water clarity which you might think is a good thing only the native species are being destroyed

the government can spur development of things by incentives for things like power generation, but will have to do things like water treatment itself. there's pushback on clean water act not because people like dirty water, but because they feel government overreach makes it so you can't damn a creek on your own property for some fish or whatever. this is debatable if the government should have the power, but instead what it needs to focus on is city water management and industrial waste and forcing companies to have to account of that in their bottom line. in minnesota they want to open a copper mine and in that the company has to set aside a bunch of money that is shielded from bankruptcy protections so the state will always have it in order to clean water in perpetuity if needed after the mine is closed, although they think only several generations. still, this is a long time. making sure companies don't just let everyone else pay for the costs of their environmental damage is an important action for government when we know what X will cause

[Saz]

[Philly]

NYC also needs some kind of express public transit from JFK/Laguardia into Manhattan. It takes like an hour on the train and close to that in a cab. I know NYC is NYC and it will always have its draw, but I have to think that's the kind of thing that might dissuade some convention or corporate conference from choosing NYC as their destination for a large group.

[Saz]

[spacemonkey]

If we spent on infrastructure what we spend on war, the streets would literally be paved with gold. But we don't, so they ain't.

[John Galt]

a cubic foot of gold is 1,203.74 lbs.
400 million tons of asphalt is used per year in the US
crush alsphalt is 45lbs/ cubic foot while concrete asphalt is 140lbs/cubic foot

so it's somewhere between 2.857 and 8.88 (repeating) million cubic feet per year used

one cubic foot of gold costs $22,124,970. you can multiply that by 2.857 million and you get 63,211,039,000,000. we've spent roughly 5 trillion in middle east wars all together, which is at least 12 times less than using gold to repair the roads for one year.

so no, they wouldn't be actually paved with gold at all

not to mention 363,762,732 lbs of gold have been mined in all of human history, which is an order of magnitude less than the amount of gold needed for one year of repairs

[Spider]

lol slow day at work, galt?

[John Galt]

i'm really checked out. i have 2 days left for the year

[Kane]

After the tax cuts it's hard for me to see how anybody could take the proposition of infrastructure spending seriously. I guess they could work to "reform" (remove) some entitlements and then use that to fund it? Public/Private sponsorship programs?

But it's all looking like a huge afterthought.