Why the PNW Will Never Have High Speed Rail

 I live near Seattle, and I love it here.  We're a little isolated from the rest of the country, which is both good and bad.  One of the bad things is that it takes frustratingly long to get to any other part of the country.  If you want to get there in less than a day, you need to go by air.   It takes 24 hours to get to the nearest other region, the San Francisco Bay Area, by rail, or 13 hours by road, but only if you're lucky with traffic and break the speed limit a lot.

Lots of people advocate for High Speed Rail, and I am very much one of them.  An imaginary 200 MPH (300KPH) HSR system could get us from Seattle to San Francisco in 3.5 hours.  If the stations are near to your destinations, it would be practical to get to a meeting and back in a work day.  This isn't really practical by air unless you fly private--Airports are half an hour or more outside of town, and TSA adds 90 minutes or more.  Add that to 2 hours in the air each way and it adds up to 4.5-5 hours travel time each way.   Add that to the meeting itself and it's a 12 hour day or more.   Private Jets are slower, but not that much, and they subtract all of TSA, and they can be precisely scheduled--it makes the one day round trip possible, which it just isn't on scheduled flights.  So the people who can afford it, do so.

The Northwest has three big cities: Vancouver, Seattle and Portland.  Metro Vancouver has about 3.4M, Seattle, 4.2M and Portland 2.5M.  But those three cities are in a geographic island:  There's a huge mountain range between central Oregon and the Central Valley of California, and two even bigger mountain ranges to the east.  It's over 600 miles from Portland to San Francisco, and about 300 of them are really rugged terrain.  The SF Bay area has only about 8 million people: less than the PNW.  To make a High Speed Rail Corridor really practical, LA/San Diego, about 20 million people need to be added.  And once you've done that, you need to connect to the rest of the country.  Spokane, Boise, Helena and the other northwest cities are tiny.   You need to go down to Salt Lake City and Denver, or up to Calgary/Edmonton, to reach many folks.  

 There is already rail through all of these routes, but a lot of it is very far from being able to handle High Speeds.  Through the Siskiyous, it's barely able to handle moderate speeds and there are some radical twists and turns.  Making this capable of even 200KPH, will be incredibly expensive, much less 300.   A bunch of the existing route is comfortably able to do 80MPH--but less than half.  All the terrain north of Eugene will need to be moved into the Willamette/Cowlitz/Nooksak Corridor, and rebuilt to HSR standards.  The construction cost to do this is at least $100M/mile for the 700 miles from Eugene to Vancouver--$700B, and that doesn't factor in the cost to obtain the land and get other political clearances. Figure $2T.  Redding to San Diego is about the same: 700 miles/$2T.  Finally, you've got to do the mountains: Eugene to Redding is about 300 very mountainous miles.   That'll probably cost at least $2T, maybe even more.  

 Would it be worth it?   Perhaps.   The roadbed that's already in the various flat corridors will be cheaper to obtain than the portion that's not.  Near Seattle runs along the Puget Sound Coastline, and will be useless for our purposes--Everett to Olympia, well over 100 miles, and apart from the cities themselves, that's probably the most expensive land on the route.  Such a system will stimulate business enormously--but $6T is a lot of money: about 2 years GDP from the entire affected region.  

----

 In the long term--surely not in my lifetime, we will have some form of VacTrain.  Hyperloop or maybe something even better.  Many pundits argue that this will be quite a bit cheaper than HSR, and I see their point: Hyperloop takes a tiny amount of space, and tunnels and bridges are much less substantial than for trains.  A Tunnel Boring Machine through the Sikiyous would solve a mess of problems.  Not sure it's possible, but it's an appealing thought.  Not just 200MPH.  1000 MPH.  Seattle to SF in 45 minutes, no waiting anywhere. 

Firefly's Most Important Speech

 The story of the movie Serenity so far:   River Tam is now recognized as a Psychic, and she apparently took in what the Alliance had done 12 years ago when "in a room" with "leading members of Parliament".  She doesn't recognize what she knows, but the Alliance is terrified that people will find out.  She is accidentally triggered to remember, and what she remembers is the single word "Miranda".  The crew figures out how to go to Miranda, which is a planet in "Reaver Space", and when they get there, what they find is weird devastation.  The people have just laid down and let themselves die.  They find a recording of a scientist, who explains what happened--they'd been experimenting with an Aerosol drug that was supposed to calm down the population, but it went too far, and they quit living.  Except for a tiny number, who lost all self control and became exceptionally violent.  The scientist is killed by Reavers on the video, and the crew, with several interactions with Reavers, realize who the Reavers are and how they came to be, and why the Alliance so desperately wants this secret kept.

 Malcolm Reynolds, who despite his rural background has read quite a bit, knows the history of previous efforts to improve the species, such as the Nazi Eugenics programs, and realizes that though well intended, they are nearly always a really bad idea.   And he gives this speech:

 

 

He doesn't hold to that.  And he is right to.  Trying to overpower natural selection is risky at best.   It's hard to know what motivation led the scientists to try planet-level distribution before they did a pretty thorough small scale experiment at a level that would surely have shown both bad responses, but there may have been some unknown factor.

 

I think the Alliance chose the wrong response: they tried to keep the thing a secret, and they did a fairly good job.  But secrets eventually do find their way out, especially one this big.  They probably should have told the truth and sent the navy to exterminate the Reavers as soon as they realized what happened.  Most of the guilty died on Miranda, so they can put the blame there--even if the important member of Parliament actually was responsible.

 

I am sympathetic to the urge to Eugenics.   We've done it with our farm animals, with our vegetables, etc., etc.  And by and large it has worked.  But the successful efforts have taken hundreds or thousands of years to perfect, and there are lots of "errors" that have needed to be culled.   We cannot cull humans, although the Nazis did think we could.  

Progressive Taxation vs Monopoly

I think I'm what could be called a "Market Socialist".  I strongly believe that free, competitive markets drive innovation and successful response to changing circumstances.  I also believe regulation is strongly necessary for markets to be truly competitive and not subject to a variety of "market failures".  This include monopoly and various forms of near monopoly, "race to the bottom" enshitification, and several more.   This regulation has a cost and unfortunately, some of the solutions require replacement of an entire market area by government-operated business, which of course costs some money.

There are a few areas that history has shown the free market cannot work:  The first is the military.   Some humans are prone to aggressive acts, and occasionally are charismatic enough to get others to support them.   We need military and police forces to keep these in check, and history has shown, over and over, that if these things are operated by private enterprise, societal collapse is inevitable.   The cops and soldiers must be strongly controlled by highly democratic institutions that are only motivated by the public good: something, whether it's strong ethics rules, public transparency, or something else, keeps them from using the power that these agencies give them for selfish or destructive goals. 

 The list of these necessarily public services is long: the court system, the roads, the postal service, communications networks, health care, many more.  We can argue about exactly how to nationalize these systems: for example, the Bell System was a for-profit company that held a virtual monopoly on phone service in the US from early in the 20th century until 1984, and it worked.  Bell was strongly regulated, both that their prices and services they were required to provide were publicly regulated, and that they were required to keep advancing the technology.    Changing technologies, many of which had been created by Bell Labs, convinced regulators and the courts that it was no longer possible to do this.  This was a disaster for society, in many ways.  It created a bunch of new billionaires, but it created lots of what could be called "parallel monopolies", each of which has all the bad properties of the old monopolies, but there are more of them that we must deal with.

 We must fix this.  Ultimately, we need to set things up so that no functional monopoly is allowed to exist without regulation that prevents enshitification.    As a fan of markets, I believe the best way would be to enforce rules that prevent any market from having too few competitors to keep it really free.  I cannot think of a circumstance where this is fewer than a dozen roughly equal competitors,  and probably more.  There are also circumstances--and the phone company of old is a perfect example, where there are huge structural advantages to having a monopoly.  That monopoly needs to be regulated so that it provides a comfortable income for its workers and shareholders, but its growth is limited.  This would not inherently disallow competition: GTE competed with Bell in the old days.  I think the modern version would be a small number of tightly regulated collaborating companies providing the coax, optical fiber, microwave and cellular networks, with service providers licensing these carriers to provide specific services.  The carrier companies would be required to cover every place and everybody for the same price and service quality, and allow "roaming" at no cost--you shouldn't need to know which carrier you're using, or need to be in some special place.

 Of course, doing this massive regulation, and in many cases, massive government-run operations, would require taxation.  During the time that most people think America was at its greatest: 1933-1980, taxation was extremely progressive, and the same attitude that led to that led to competent monopoly enforcement.   Income over $400K was taxed at 91% marginal rate for much of the 1950s, and it worked extremely well.  Today, the top marginal rate is about 1/3rd of that.  And the billionaires are running amok--the worst of them are monopolies (including the host of this blog...).  We must stop this.

 I say: we need a progressive tax rate that creates a lot of revenue for public sector without hurting people who can't afford it.  Here;s my thinking:

income less than 2/3rds of median income ($50K):  0% tax

income between 2/3ds and double median ($150K): 10% marginal tax

various rates in the middle here, which I'll leave blank for the moment.

income over 25M: 70% marginal tax

income over $1B: 95% marginal tax

All income should be taxed, with NO mechanism for diverting income into lower-taxed brackets, such as carried interest, borrowing against assets, dividends, long term capital gains, allowed.  The top brackets may seem punitive, and to some degree they are.  Billionaires hurt society.  There are a few who do good things with their money, but too many use their money for bad.

There are ways for $billion earners to avoid taxes:  put large dollar values into actual charitable causes, like building schools, subsidizing food programs, etc, and they deserve a deduction for this. 

  

 

Recession and Inflation by president

This data is from St Louis Federal Reserve's "FRED" data.  Numbers are computed annually. 

Nixon1  1 recession 5.8%  peak inflation, 4.7% average, inherited 4.3%

Nixon2 1 recession, 11.1% peak inflation, 8.6% average, inherited 3.3%

Ford    0 recessions, 7.6% peak inflation 7.4% average, inherited 5.7%

Carter    1 recession, 13.5% peak inflation, 9.7% average, inherited 5.7%

Reagan11 recession  10.3% peak inflation, 5.7% average, inherited 13.5 

Reagan2 0 recessions 4.1% peak inflation, 3.3% average inherited 3.5%

Bush    1 recession, 5.4% peak inflation, 4.4% average, inherited 4.0

Clinton1    0 recessions, 2.9% peak inflation, 2.8% average, inherited 3.0%

Clinton2 0 recessions, 3.4% peak inflation, 2.4% average, inherited 2.9%

Bush1    1 recession, 3.4% peak inflation, 2.4% average, inherited 3.8%

Bush2    1 recession, 3.8% peak inflation, 3.3% average, inherited 2.6%

Obama1    0 recessions, 3.1% peak inflation, 1.4% average, inherited 3.8%

Obama2    0 recessions, 1.6% inflation, 1.1% average, inherited 2%

Trump1    1 recession, 2.4% peak inflation, 1.9% average, inherited 1.2%

Biden    0 recessions, 8% peak inflation, 4.9% average, inherited 4.6%

The Nixon, Carter, Reagan inflation was all very directly related to the OPEC crisis:
In October 1973, several Arab countries did a surprise attack on Israel, which, unlike the '67 attack, took a few months for Israel to push back.  Nixon threw his support wholeheartedly behind Israel, and the Arab countries formed an organization they called "the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries" and sharply reduced supplies to the US and other countries that had supported Israel.  OPEC continued to blockade oil until well into the 1980s, with the result of 3 recessions and a decade of high inflation.   All US presidents carefully kowtowed to OPEC since then.

 

 

Serenity Lies to Us.

My favorite TV show is 2002's martyred Firefly.  It was presented out-of-order, in the Friday Night Death Slot, by a network that clearly didn't understand what it had, but did let the show's writers and producers do a competent job.  Nearly all of the actors have gone on to have long and successful careers.  It was killed just as it was beginning to develop a following in spite of the horrible support the network had given, and that following quickly grew--sufficiently that the showrunners were given a chance to make a feature film 3 years later.   My thesis is that feature film, as likeable as it is, does not make sense in the context of the rest of the show.

 Almost everything in here is a spoiler.  If you haven't watched the show or the movie, and I urge that you do, don't read this essay until you have.

 There are a number of big screwups--killing off two of the main characters being the least of it.  Another is that the writers seemed to feel that a lot of the movie's viewers would not have seen the TV show.   That resulted in a lot of valuable movie time being spent in exposition.  But the most important is that the central plot element--the origin story of the Reavers and River Tam's connection to it, makes no sense.   As two separate stories, it makes perfect sense, but tying them together as they tried to was simply a mistake.

 I regard the entire movie as Retcon: Retroactive Continuity, meaning, in this case, significantly rewriting the story so that two unrelated back stories share a single plotline.  This was a mistake. 

The alliance, and most likely their corporate benefactors, especially the Blue Sun Corporation, have done and will continue to do a lot of shady things, and they have a staff of secret agents to defend them.   Some version of this is likely true of most powerful governments in our world too, and lots of good stories can be written about them.  They need talented operatives to do this work, and the unnamed "operative" is one of them.  I am virtually certain that River was being recruited and trained to be one too.  I'm pretty sure that Reverend Book was also an operative during the war, although perhaps not as high-level as the Chiwetel or River characters are.

 Similarly, I am comfortable with the story that the Alliance accidentally created the Reavers.    It makes sense, especially since we're aware that they've been learning how to fiddle with people's attitudes and self control with chemistry.  I find it profoundly unlikely that River had anything to do with this, or that The Operative did either.  It does make sense that those who are guilty of creating the Reavers would like to cover up their involvement, and might even use an operative or two to interfere with word getting out.   But I am profoundly skeptical that they would have gone so far as to bury a secret codeword into a trainee operative.

Why do they want River so much?  This secret is sold to us as the central premise of the movie.  They don't want the secret leaking.  Why would they give the secret to a not-yet-fully-trained operative?   I can't think of a single reason, and I can think of lots not to.  If you need for her to know for some reason, there's no reason not to wait until she's been sufficiently brainwashed to be as loyal as the Chiwetel character.   It's mission-specific info.  When the Chiwetel character learns the truth and realizes that he's been brainwashed, he flips.  "No longer their man" as he puts it.   

The answer is that they accidentally put a senior member of the Alliance in a room with River, and she apparently read his mind and found out about Miranda.

That said, central to the show is the message that the Alliance is incompetent.  They are massive, powerful, and most of all boring, and over and over they prove that one part of the administrative state has no idea what other parts are doing.   The operative has figured this out.  But he is

It is tragic that the show was cancelled when it was.  A decade later, the internet was advanced enough that rebooting a show like this would have been easy.  I put forth the example of "The Expanse", which was cancelled by SciFi, but brought back to life a few years later because Jeff Bezos personally liked it.  The actors were mostly all still available and pretty much looked as they had earlier.  Similarly, Serenity was released only 4 years after the show was cancelled.  They had to build a new set, and improved CG and budget made a real difference--and Summer and Jewell were both under 25.  But ten years after the movie, one of the actors had died, and the two that were purportedly teen-agers could no longer pull that off.    The story would have to explain the passage of so much time.

 Animation makes it much more possible to play these games.  Voices change almost as much as physical appearance, but AI voices are getting so good I think this could be faked now.   I hope the new show can pull it off.  I say: put it into the timeline between the show and the movie.  I think there are as many as three plausible years in there. 

Ranking Episodes of Firefly

 My favorite TV show is 2002's martyred "Firefly".  They did 14 episodes, one of them a double-length Pilot, and a feature movie.  The movie was good, albeit disappointing.

 If you haven't watched the show, do it.  Watch the episodes in order, most importantly the Pilot first.  Fox aired them out of order, and that was one of the things that damaged the show's popularity.  There are several spoilers in here.

 

Best Episode: Out of Gas.  This episode was full of flashbacks, many of which explained who members of the crew are and how they came to be part of Serenity's crew.  It's only best by a tiny bit.   The one real error is that Wash set up a call back button, but Mal never uses it.  The plot would make more sense if he had pressed it, and only a few lines would have to change.

Pilot: The initial, double-length episode is only in second place by a nose: it's also one of the best.   It's actual name is the same as the ship: Serentity.  It has several scenes from the battle that gave the ship its name.  We meet everybody, including several of the baddies.  Reverend Book, now aware that he's on a pirate ship rather than the Tramp Steamer that he thought he was boarding, expresses misgivings, which are completely gone by the next episode.

Ariel: Inara needs to go to a central planet for her annual medical certification, and Doctor Tam comes up with a job for the crew to do at that site.   We learn a lot about Jayne, a really lot about River and "The hands of blue".

Objects in Space: a Bounty Hunter attempts to capture River, but River turns the tables on him.  The bounty hunter was a terrific character, and River and Simon are at their best.  River goes from being a character that made the rest of the crew nervous, to being a full fledged part of the crew, that everybody loves--almost as much as they all love Kaylee.

 

The Train Job.   The "second pilot".  It was written quickly, over a weekend, and the network foolishly ran it instead of the real pilot.  It's a pretty good episode, but it fails to do a lot of the exposition that the pilot did so brilliant.  It has a bunch of very likable scenes, such as when the goon is pushed into the running engine and when the captain realizes that he's doing his theft right under the noses of a whole troop of Alliance soldiers.

Safe.   The doctor and River are kidnapped by hill people, who need a doctor.  I really like the world building that this episode does.   It almost ranks with the best episodes.

 Shindig.  while trying to make a deal for some goods to transport, Captain Reynolds gets crosswise with a local oligarch and is forced to fight him.  There's a lot to like about this episode, but it's in the bottom half only because there are others that are significantly better.

Jaynestown.  We learn a little about Jayne and his history.  While he is mostly a crude, money grubbing thug, he does care about things.   We see a lot of the character of various characters.

War Stories.  A great episode in a lot of ways.  Niska, from the earlier Train Job episode, is back and he's angry.  River is starting to recover, presumably with the aid of the treatment the Doctor was able to devise following the episode in Ariel, and we start seeing a little of what the alliance wanted to turn her into. 

Our Mrs Reynolds.  Christina Hendricks plays an interesting character--who seems like an incredibly naive young woman but turns out to be a highly cynical and skilled thief.

Trash.  Christina Hendrick's character is back.   It's a more straightforward episode and it does a little world-building, and it is a great episode overall, but it's definitely in the bottom half.

The Message: Mal and Zoey's army buddy shows up with a secret.    It's got a fulfilling but very sad ending, compounded with the fact that the actors had just been informed that the show had been cancelled

Heart of Gold:  Inara's old friend hires the crew to deal with a thug.   The plot shares a lot with the Clint Eastwood movie "Unforgiven".   It's the archetypical horses and spaceships in the same scene episode, although there are others.  Mal goes full Indiana Jones and chases down a hovercar with a horse.  

Bushwacked.  This is probably the most disappointing episode.   The crew comes upon a colony ship that had been attacked by Reavers, leaving behind a virus that infects the Serenity and the only survivor.  

----

 I rank the movie in the bottom half of this list.  It's a good movie, and it explains some important stuff, but I regard a lot of the plot as inappropriate Retcon.  I'd rank it above "The Message" and below the YoSaffBridge episodes.   I wish they had told more or less the same story with three or four regular episodes, and not tried to do the exposition: most of the audience were already fans, and at least 1/3rd of the movie was wasted on that.  River is now almost a human being, as well as being something considerably more, Simon and Kaylee end up together, and it looks like the Captain and Inara are right on the edge of the same thing.   Wash and the Preacher were killed, only because the authors felt the movie needed the weight of that, not because it added to the story.  Mr Universe is a character that should have either been left out, or had a stronger story arc.  The Operative is a great character and I think his arc was just about right--but should have been spread over three or four episodes.

 

Bison and the Dust Bowl

Did the massacre of the American Bison Cause the dust bowl?   It doesn't appear to be the only cause, but it's clearly a contributing factor.

 The Dust Bowl was an ecological disaster in the early 20th century that devastated American agriculture, and was one of the major causes of the Great Depression.  Millions of new settlers flooded into the Great Plains states after the Civil War, using farming techniques that were appropriate for smaller farms in wetter climates.  Where they had come from, they had not needed to irrigate their fields, and they arrived in the Plains ignorant of the methods.  To some extent, they benefited from a rare wet spell, and to a larger degree, from the immense Aquifer (the Ogallala Aquifer) reaches from South Dakota to Texas.  They drilled thousands of wells into the aquifer and captured much of the few rivers that flowed across it.  They believed a widespread myth that "Rain follows the plow", which was promoted by land speculators and others that profited from their settlement, but did not pay for the consequences of being wrong.   When the wet spell ended in the 1920s, a lot of the land dried up and blew away.  A lot of the landholders had mortgaged their farms, to buy equipment or other advances, which were now in arrears--a million or more "Okies" were forced to give up their farms, which had become the property of the bankers that had lended to them, and which were sold to Agribusinesses for very little.

At the same time, there was an effort to suppress the previous inhabitants of the land, called "Indians" and force them to live on reservations, leaving the best land for the new settlers.  The army killed a lot of indians directly, but probably more indirectly, largely by the mass slaughter of their primary food source, the American Bison.  Around 60 million Bison (sometimes called Buffalo) were killed and by 1889, there were just 541 bison left in the US.  Active conservation has allowed these numbers to rebound to as many as 500,000 today, but the giant herds are gone, and existing agriculture is unlikely to allow them to return.

The Bison, it turns out, do a bunch of unique things that other large Ruminants do not.  They tend to not stay in one place--they eat their favorite grasses down to where they're a little harder to reach, and then move on.  One of the consequences of this is that the seeds from these preferred grasses adhere to the animals fur, and often pass through their guts, but survive and with a nice dollop of fresh fertilizer, are replanted in the new place that the Bison is feeding.  This causes the preferred grasses to spread, and where possible, interbreed with whatever was already there, improving the quality of both.  The great herds would trample the grass...this broke up the ground, and drove the seed below the surface where it was most likely to germinate.  And perhaps most importantly, the Bison like to "Wallow", where they lie on their side and roll around, which digs great pits.   This apparently helps to clean their fur, and helps them scratch itches.  They also like to scratch against trees--they are huge animals and it's amazing to see a tree with the bark missing from one side, up to 9 feet high.

But the wallows have a wonderful secondary effect in the plains.  They catch rainfall.  Left to its own devices, or to regular cattle, any irregularities will tend to get flattened, and rainfall will flow downstream.  Since a lot of this land is clay, it doesn't percolate well, and the water quickly runs off.  But if millions of bison are creating millions of wallow pits every day, a lot of this water catches in the pits, and stays there until it evaporates or percolates in.  That is probably a big part of how the Ogallala got to be there, and we almost completely removed this source in the late 1800s.

 Can the the restoration of the Bison restore the Ogallala?  Since the present population is less than 1% of what it was before the great slaughter, probably not.  But it might go a long way toward helping.