An example of what is behind the belief High Speed Rail is good for the world

Yesterday I wrote a post on the topic of whether Obama's High Speed Rail was on the ropes and it would be better to put the money into high speed internet connectivity.

With Obama's train initiative on the rope, why don't they take the money and build Internet Infrastructure instead of rail lines

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2011 AT 9:34AM

MSNBC.com has an article on the dire straights of Obama's high speed rail line.

Is Obama's rail initiative a 'train to nowhere'?

High-speed train plan draws little enthusiasm as California costs soar

One the points I made was the reason high speed rail was popular is because of lobbyists.  An example of the response due to the negative PR is this Research ;-) from Worldwatch Institute.

Global Expansion of High-Speed Rail Gains Steam

Washington, D.C.----As interest in high-speed rail (HSR) surges around the world, the number of countries running these trains is expected to nearly double over the next few years, according to new research by the Worldwatch Institute for Vital Signs Online. By 2014, high-speed trains will be operating in nearly 24 countries, including China, France, Italy, Japan, Spain, and the United States, up from only 14 countries today. The increase in HSR is due largely to its reliability and ability to cover vast geographic distances in a short time, to investments aimed at connecting once-isolated regions, and to the diminishing appeal of air travel, which is becoming more cumbersome because of security concerns.

"The rise in HSR has been very rapid," said Worldwatch Senior Researcher Michael Renner, who conducted the research. "In just three years, between January 2008 and January 2011, the operational fleet grew from 1,737 high-speed trainsets worldwide to 2,517. Two-thirds of this fleet is found in just five countries: France, China, Japan, Germany, and Spain. By 2014, the global fleet is expected to total more than 3,700 units."

Is the alternative to cars and planes a train?  Or traveling through a virtual presence?  What is the carbon footprint for grams of carbon dioxide per passenger-kilometer for a WebEX on Skype meeting?

Not only is HSR reliable, but it also can be more friendly than cars or airplanes. A 2006 comparison of greenhouse gas emissions by travel mode, released by the Center for Neighborhood Technologies, found that HSR lines in Europe and Japan released 30-70 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger-kilometer, versus 150 grams for automobiles and 170 grams for airplanes.

China has even cut its budget.

China considers shrinking railway investment goal -report

Nov 8 (Reuters) - China's annual investment on railway construction could fall to about 500 billion yuan ($78.7 billion) a year, retreating from ambitious heights mapped out in a plan for the sector that has struggled with high debts, an official Chinese newspaper said on Tuesday.

The China Securities Journal cited an unnamed source who said yearly spending on rail construction for the remainder of the current five-year plan (2011-15) could shrink from the 800 billion yuan a year proposed in a long-term plan.

My vote is to stay home and have a virtual presence in real-time anywhere in the data center world when they need you there.

In fact, that is part of what I am working on with some data center experts.

High speed presence means minutes if not seconds.  As products like Skype get integrated into Microsoft will be the biggest threat to travel be video and audio communications?  (Disclosure: I have good friends who work at Skype and use the product regularly)

 

With Obama's train initiative on the rope, why don't they take the money and build Internet Infrastructure instead of rail lines

MSNBC.com has an article on the dire straights of Obama's high speed rail line.

Is Obama's rail initiative a 'train to nowhere'?

High-speed train plan draws little enthusiasm as California costs soar

President Barack Obama's high-speed rail initiative is in danger of turning into the Big Engine That Couldn't.

As part of the economic stimulus plan of 2009, Obama pushed through more than $8 billion in initial funding to extend high-speed intercity rail service to 10 major U.S. rail corridors by 2034. The idea is to create superfast rail service — like Japan's futuristic bullet trains — that would be available to 80 percent of the U.S. population.

Image: Railroad mapFederal Railroad Administration

Red lines in this map show planned high-speed rail corridors across the U.S.

Now you know there a bunch of lobbyists somewhere - construction, rail, manufacturers who have said the high speed railway is the future of the country.  I don't know about you, but I would much prefer ways to eliminate travel than an alternative to driving or flying.

That 2020 ribbon-cutting? It's now projected to be no earlier than 2033 — at least 13 years late. That $33 billion price tag? It's been recalculated at $98.5 billion — nearly three times the original estimate.

The news came from the state's High Speed Rail Authority, which issued an updated "business plan" (.pdf) last week at the direction of California Gov. Jerry Brown. The good news, said Tom Umberg, chairman of the authority, is that "we understand the project better." The bad news is that "as time goes by, things get more expensive."

Google selected Kansas City for its broadband project, and people are asking where this goes.

Kansas City’s Google superhighway has unclear destinations

By SCOTT CANON

The Kansas City Star

OK, Kansas City. You’ve been promised special Google goodies.

Now, whatcha gonna do when the search engine company finally hooks you up to an oh-so-fast Internet?

Short answer: Nobody knows.

Last week, Kansas City may have gotten a hint that Google will bundle its plan to include a cablelike television package with the Internet service. That might get more homes to sign up for the search giant’s offerings, but it doesn’t say how the ultrafast Internet might change other aspects of our lives.

What would happen if Obama funded a gigabit Internet in the US?  The lobbyists behind the high speed rail project would through a fit, but don't you think the future is better with gigabit ethernet than 200 mph trains?

Watch your Future Taxes, Facebook keeps an eye on Oregon

What few know is one of the biggest factors that influences data center locations for the the Web2.0 companies is their tax bills.  Washington Post publishes an AP article about Facebook and the State of Oregon.

After luring Facebook data center, Oregon pokes social media giant with confusion over taxes

By Associated Press, Published: October 31

SALEM, Ore. — The promise of lucrative tax breaks helped persuade Facebook to build a data center in one of Oregon’s most economically depressed counties. Now, the state and the company are in a dispute over how much Facebook may owe in property taxes, and the social networking giant fears it could be taxed on intangible assets like the value of its powerful brand.

It is interesting how Facebook's industry classification potentially influences its future tax bill.

Oregon lumps Facebook with 75 other corporations classified as cable and Internet companies. Many of them are television and Internet access providers, but the list includes technology companies including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo Inc. and AOL Inc.

State officials say their decision doesn’t change Facebook’s tax bill — about $26,000 this year — and the money still goes to local governments in Crook County. But Facebook is concerned that the state will someday try to tax the company based on the value of its intangible assets, perhaps including computer files, patents, its labor force and goodwill.

How many Data Center Experts are confident, but wrong?

I missed Daniel Kahneman speaking in Seattle by a day, so I am going back and looking at videos and articles.  The Seattletimes has an article on his talk.

Exploring how we truly think

I had a feeling Daniel Kahneman was going to be interesting. My gut was right, but it isn't always, and that was the point of his talk. A lot of our thinking is messed up, but we don't know it unless we slow down and examine what our brains are doing. That's not easy to do. Kahneman is a Princeton psychologist (emeritus), who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics for pioneering work showing that people don't always make rational financial decisions.

Jerry Large

Seattle Times staff columnist

I had a feeling Daniel Kahneman was going to be interesting.

My gut was right, but it isn't always, and that was the point of his talk. A lot of our thinking is messed up, but we don't know it unless we slow down and examine what our brains are doing.

That's not easy to do.

Kahneman is a Princeton psychologist (emeritus), who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics for pioneering work showing that people don't always make rational financial decisions.

Economists thought we did, that we weighed the facts and acted in our own best interests, but people are more complicated than that.

How familiar does this sound to a potential problem that gets swept under the rug?

When he was a young psychologist, Kahneman was put in charge of evaluating officer candidates in the Israeli Defense Force. He and his team put candidates through an exercise and saw immediately who was a leader, who was lazy, who was a team player and so on.

Much later, they got data from the soldiers' actual performance, and it turned out his team's predictions were all wrong. The experts were absolutely confident, but wrong.

Even experts take a bit of information and believe it can predict more about a person than is possible.

System 1, he said, "is a machine for jumping to conclusions." System 2 is supposed to monitor System 1 and make corrections, but System 2 is lazy.

We think we are actively evaluating then acting, but most of the time we act on unexamined input from System 1.

What is an example, think about the assumptions made on hardware purchases and how often do people go back and evaluate the true performance of the hardware after deployment?