From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

On Apr 29, 2026 at 12:33:39 PM PDT, "Rhino" <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:

On 2026-04-28 1:33 p.m., BTR1701 wrote:

Things that happened faster than California's high-speed rail project (390 >> miles/32 years):

--China's entire high speed rail system (30,000 miles) took 15 years from >> breaking ground to passengers riding trains

--The entire city of Dubai went from barren desert to gleaming metropolis in
30 years

--Timothy Chalamet's entire life (30 years)

--iPhone 1 through iPhone 17 (18 years)

--The Internet (32 years)


For what Newsom is spending on this ridiculous train to nowhere, he could: >>
--Pay for 200 L.A.-to-San Francisco limousine rides for every person in
California.

--Give a replica of his $9 million Marin County mansion to every homeless >> vagrant on Skid Row. Twice.

--Give an average one-bedroom house to one million people.

--Pay for Spain's entire high speed rail system. And Germany's. And
France's.
Combined.

--Give every Californian 18 round-trip flights from L.A. to San Francisco. >>
--Give $10,000 cash to every California household.

For all that money and time, we don't have even one inch of train track to >> show for it and the Democrats in Sacramento just voted to spend another
massive pile of money on it.

That quibble aside, that's a great way to present how wasteful this
project has been. It's incredible that the taxpayers haven't shown up at
the legislature with pitchforks and torches, ready to hang their
legislators after all this expenditure with so little to show for it.

I just read this comparison between Elon Musk's SpaceX and Gavin Newsom's High-Speed Rail Authority.

This is how criminally inefficient California's bureaucracy has become:

- The California High-Speed Rail Authority is 6 years older than SpaceX

- Total private funding for SpaceX was $12 billion, whereas California's high-speed rail is projected to cost $231 billion of public money by the time it's completed. (That's 2,000% more funding than SpaceX had and is using taxpayer money instead of private funds.)

- In the same amount of time, California has laid zero miles of high-speed
rail while SpaceX has developed a reusable rocket that recovers itself and auto-docks back with its launch tower after descending from space, delivered astronauts and saved astronauts from the International Space Station, and as
of today has a $2.5 trillion market cap.

Elon Musk will literally send people to Mars at a fraction of the cost and in
a fraction of the amount of time that it's taken Gavin Newsom just to send Californians up the Central Valley on a train.


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