Hope is not a plan

In October, our governor requested $4.7 billion in Federal stimulus money. This week, we learn that we've received about half of that amount, with $2.25 billion of it marked for California's much-debated high-speed rail project.

In case you've lost track, the high-speed rail project was authorized by California voters in the form of Prop 1A in the November, 2008 elections. This prop authorized taking out bonds on the order of $10 billion, which equates to $20 billion in debt over thirty years, to build high-speed rail connecting the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. The main constraint on the project as written into the proposition was a requirement for matching Federal money.

With $2.25 billion coming in, that means the High-Speed Rail Authority is now authorized to issue $2.25 billion in bonds to start work on the project. What will that get us?

If you refer back to my original analysis I estimated that the full $9 billion for high-speed rail plus full matching Federal funding would yield a high-speed rail route from San Francisco to Paso Robles. Notably, not Los Angeles. If I extend this same analysis to having just $4.5 billion total to work with, we should expect to be able to generate some 60-70 miles of track.

That's roughly the distance from San Francisco to Morgan Hill (just south of San Jose), or from Los Angeles to Oxnard or Ventura.

That's a significant state debt to take on in exchange for trying to exchange, say, the Peninsula's Caltrain rail system for a high-speed rail system on the same right of way.

Right now, I can't cleanly and quickly make my way around the entire SF Bay Area using public transit. I take Caltrain to and from work, and can exchange from Caltrain to BART or VTA and beyond, but each transfer slows the trip tremendously. It seems as if it would have been rational to seek Federal funding to support metropolitan public transit improvements, as these would in turn directly generate jobs as well as facilitating job growth by connecting commuting employees to employers they could not otherwise reasonably reach.

$2.25 billion in Federal money would buy a lot of trains and buses. Or 60 miles of high-speed rail.

Mountain View Voice

Posted by parakkum at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the brightest trends of our new millennium is the ongoing demonstration that there is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. The latest reaffirmation of this trend is the decision by a Spanish court to extradite an airline pilot who is alleged to have been involved in piloting "disappearance" flights during the time of military rule in Argentina.

If you're unfamiliar, these flights were used to "disappear" people who had in some way bothered the military junta in charge at the time. Individuals were taken, often drugged, and literally thrown out of aircraft over the open ocean.

Mr Poch was held during a short stopover at Valencia's Manises airport on 22 September, while flying an aircraft for Dutch Transavia airlines, a subsidiary of Air France-KLM.

This is the power of modern international awareness of these crimes -- those who are alleged to have committed them find themselves increasingly penned in if they want to avoid potential prosecution.

BBC article

Posted by parakkum at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The news coverage following Google's announcement that it may be forced to leave the Chinese market has focused heavily on the declaration by Google that they will no longer censor search results for users in China. This is a convenient point of focus, and makes for easier story writing, but it doesn't cover the scope of the issues Google currently faces in China.

Or, briefly, there is a strong business case to disengage from the Chinese market if attacks on Google-hosted information are going to continue, possibly powered by the PRC government itself. Google is currently in the process of expanding its business beyond majority advertising (currently about 97% of its income) to enterprise and cloud computing style solutions. If a significant national entity is accessing Google's IP and the hosted content of Google users, this may damage the trust of current and future Google customers in the company's ability to provide safe, reliable, and most of all secure tools for their business and other needs.

Moving away from the ceding of censorship rights to the PRC is good, but Google's potential decision to leave the market altogether will necessarily be a consequence of their desire to ensure that they can provide secure services for customers in the rest of the world. Although a 30% market share in search in the PRC is impressive, that may well be worth trading off for the ability to expand their business in the rest of the world.

BBC article

Posted by parakkum at 09:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So what happens if a group of evangelicals travel to an already homophobic country and tell tall tales about a gay "agenda," and the forced rape and recruiting of young men by "the gays?"

A Ugandan politician puts forth a law calling for the death penalty for homosexuals.

Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge, and Don Schmierer had no idea that teaching about how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity" might lead to negative consequences.

Genius.

Threatened with the loss of much of its foreign aid, the Ugandan government has indicated it might scale things back and only jail homosexuals for life.

Double genius.

Here in the States, our structure of government mitigates the damage caused by this horrendous, anti-Christian nonsense, but out there in the world, your donation of hate pays off with massive returns.

New York Times article.

Posted by parakkum at 08:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sonangol, the state petrochemical company of Angola, has received a contract to manage the Qayara and Najmah fields in Iraq. These fields are the riskiest in Iraq, a risk reflected in relatively high per-barrel fees awarded to Sonangol.

At the same time, a Dutch court has ruled that it has jurisdiction to take a contamination case from the Nigerian delta that is being leveled at Royal Dutch Shell. Shell was naturally displeased:

"We believe there are good arguments on the basis of which the district court could have concluded that it lacks jurisdiction in respect of these purely Nigerian matters."

Although it's unsurprising that Shell made no comment on the actual allegations, it does feel just so intrinsically dodgy that they mainly just want to keep things out of a European court.

Finally, PetroChina has invested $1.7 billion in a 60% stake in two major Canadian oil sands projects. This comes a little over a year after a deal that gave PetroChina's parent company a management contract for other Iraqi oil fields.

BBC article about the Nineveh fields
BBC article about the Shell suit
BBC article about the PetroChina deal

Posted by parakkum at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the wake of the disastrous Georgia-Russia Summer war of 2008, Russia and Georgia have finally reached an agreement to re-open one of their few remaining border points. I say "one of their few remainings" as the de even-more facto independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia has now limited the amount of direct contact between Russia and Georgia.

The Upper Lars checkpoint has been closed since 2006, most likely in retaliation over Georgian attempts to join NATO.

At the same time, Russian president Medvedev has announced that Russia will update its nuclear weapons. The plan is to develop new missiles while remaining in accord with current nuclear weapons treaties between Russia and the United States. As a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor reports, this is an important update inasmuch as "it is all it has got to defend itself with because its armed forces in general are a shambles."

Referring back to the Russian-Georgian war highlights the generalized failure of the Russian military, with some half of Russian air losses coming from their own ground forces. Russian military doctrine and equipment has fared similarly poorly in client states such as Iraq, where the U.S. military has reliably rolled them up in short order. Given that analysts attribute the Russian victory in South Ossetia to the Ossetian irregulars, it's not surprising that Medvedev is looking for an enhancement to the Russian military that will bring prestige at the very least by dint of never, ever being tested.

Posted by parakkum at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The government of Iran has announced that it will, in early January, invalidate all money with revolutionary slogans written on it. Given the cash-only nature of Iran's economy, writing protest messages on paper money is quite clever.

BBC article

Posted by parakkum at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)