This is a common misconception because Brightline’s parent company Florida East Coast Industries shares heritage with Florida East Coast Railway, but the companies were split in 2007.

What Italy has done is open the rails to access by private companies in addition to the public one, most notably high speed operator NTV/Italo.

Arguably this competition has helped spur on the public operator to greater heights. But it’s not the same at all as what Britain did (privatizing the public operator itself).

Why are you for this? What problem does this solve, and how?

Seems to me we have made it 250 years without an official language and that this has caused approximately 0 problems.

China doesn’t allow US social media companies to operate there—why should the US unilaterally allow Chinese social media companies to operate here with no reciprocity?

Continuing to play cooperate over and over when the other player keeps playing defect is not smart.

Of course the US is far larger than any single EU country, but the cities aren’t evenly distributed. There are many clusters of decently-close cities, and vast areas with very few large cities at all. Salt Lake or Denver may never have much useful intercity rail, but lots of regions could have it if we chose to build it (and learn from those who build it well, unlike California HSR).

As others have said, Vietnamese coffee was traditionally cheaper robusta beans, tended to be lower-quality, and was dark-roasted as a result. More recently, as Vietnam has gotten wealthier, there has been a craft coffee scene developing. I had great coffee in growing regions like Da Lat and Khe Sanh, and in specialty coffee shops in Hanoi like Dream Beans.

Nor is the problem “bureaucracy” as a sibling comment said—actually the opposite is true, we need more “bureaucrats” with technical expertise to oversee contractors so the taxpayers don’t get our lunch eaten. We have gutted all technical expertise from government and now we often outsource the oversight to even more contractors (sometimes the same ones doing the designing and building!). Results are predictable.

We also have a huge problem with litigation and “regulation by litigation” as a replacement for actual “bureaucratic” oversight. Agencies conduct insanely expensive years-long public feedback programs and environmental studies (never mind that electric rail is innately good for the environment) for fear of lawsuits, which happen anyway and delay things even more. Instead of regulation by litigation, the government should step up and provide a clear set of achievable regulations, and if agencies/companies meet them, they can start building.

The countries that do rail infrastructure really well and really cheaply are not always the ones you expect—some are stereotyped as lazy and bureaucratic (Italy, Spain) and some are thought to be places where everything is expensive (Switzerland, Norway). We have a lot to learn, but often we tell ourselves that it just can’t apply to us because we’re so exceptional.

For details on the specific problems and solutions: https://transitcosts.com/

Regardless, there’s no excuse for the remaining freight (which operates in off-peak hours) to use diesel. Electric freight locomotives are perfectly common in countries where railroading isn’t still stuck in the 1800s.

You especially see this bias with North American public transit. Most of our transit is greatly deficient compared to much of the rest of the world, and vastly more expensive to build (even controlling for wages). But most NA transit leadership is almost aggressively incurious about learning from other countries, because we are very unique and special and exceptional, so their far better engineering and project management solutions just wouldn’t work here and aren’t even worth considering.

He says Britain doesn’t have a housing shortage because the ratio of homes to households hasn’t changed even as prices have gone up—but treating Britain as one big housing market is ridiculous, there have been massive shifts in economic geography over the last 5 decades. There is a housing shortage in the areas with well paying jobs and a housing surplus in the areas with no jobs. People should get to choose to move to a place where they can make a living!

He also says London’s population hasn’t changed in the last 50 years as prices have gone up without new housing being built—uhh no shit! If very little new housing was built in that period, how could the area’s population go up significantly? What happened instead is that, because demand rose and supply didn’t, the population stayed the same and the static supply went to the highest bidder. This is just mind-numbing economic illiteracy. Where does he think a population increase would go in London if London doesn’t increase housing supply?? The static supply is WHY the population didn’t grow! Literally exact same issue as NYC and the expensive parts of California.

He says developers would never build enough housing because it would drive down the price they can command—has this guy ever heard of the tragedy of the commons?? This is literally how markets work when there’s adequate competition. Econ 101. (And I’m not talking about fringy free-market-absolutist econ; Marx understood perfectly well that market competition drives down prices.) For a couple examples, Austin and Minneapolis have generated enough new supply to tank the price of rent. And imagine how ridiculous this argument sounds about anything but housing. “TV companies would never produce more TVs because that would bring down the price they can charge.” Oh wait…

It’s also totally left out (because there is no answer) how overall affordability would get better by getting rid of renting and only having owner-occupied housing. It’s the same amount of demand for the same amount of supply!

Finally, please just don’t take away my ability to rent! At my current place in life I don’t want to lock up a ton of money in real estate and be stuck in one place (much harder to move frequently due to transaction costs). Maybe later in life I’ll buy, but right now I want to rent (and invest my money in other things instead of a home). We need both kinds.

Ughhh. This author’s way of thinking is exactly why many of the most productive and ostensibly progressive cities (London, SF, NYC…) are prohibitively expensive, denying everyone but the rich the ability to live there. It’s easy to understand the right’s desire to send property values to the stratosphere (“fuck the poor, and fuck you too, I got mine”). But the left ties itself in these crazy knots to bring about the same result, hurting the working class we claim to care about, and it’s baffling.

Don’t overthink it, just build a fuckton of housing where there’s the most economic opportunity, both private sector (because central planning is notoriously not the best at creating enough supply) and social housing (because the market never works for literally everyone, and also because why not, more housing is good).

Or maybe I’m one of the deep state cutouts. One never knows for sure.

You don’t need a shadowy government cabal to explain Alexa persisting too long in the strategy described in the article. Just a powerful chief executive with an attachment to the product, the sunk cost fallacy, a company with too much revenue to know what to do with, some gameable downstream impact metrics, the inertia of large institutions, and empire building.

It still could’ve become an incredible product if they’d gotten on the LLM chat/agent train early enough, but alas. I mostly use mine to set timers when my hands are full in the kitchen.