Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 63: Infrastructure Week

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

can't believe we're over four years into infrastructure week also if you are mad about the poop building for any reason and want to take it out on us i would like to remind you that this is a "shall-issue" state Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod​ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp we are working on international shipping Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 YOU ALREADY SENT US ANTHRAX so please don't bother in the future thanks

OK, so. Excuse me. All right, everyone's sneezing. Everyone's sneezing, everyone's sniffing. You know, yeah, that's the thing. We've we've been recording previously and people were always saying, why aren't you making more sniffing noises? But my immune system is focused 100 percent at eliminating every piece of pollen in my body right now.

I don't know if eliminating is the right word. Learning to live with your case might be the correct phrase. You poor thing. You have the worst allergies. You got it. It was so bad yesterday. I was like, do I have covid? Did I catch covid from somewhere? No, it's fucking pollen. Do you want me to send you one of my many gas masks?

That would I don't. I yeah, that might help. Yeah, the beard's probably not going to be great. But you know, I was about to say, yeah, that's not going to work. So anyway, what do you see on the screen here? Is a screenshot that Alice stole from the transport fever to steam screenshots page? Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Oh, wait, we're supposed to introduce the podcast

before I describe that, right? Oh, my God. All right. Well, welcome to Well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters. Steel slides. Slides. Yeah. Slides. Sometimes stolen, sometimes not. Yeah, it's all about balance, baby. Yes, exactly.

We do crimes, but not too many. Yes, a moderate amount of crimes. We are enlightened centrists. Yes. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who is talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. OK, go. I am Alice Koldor Kelly. I am the person who liberate slides

in a somewhat less than legal manner when we need slides done. My pronouns are she and her. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. Hey, Liam. Hey, Liam. My pronouns are he and him. OK, OK, we did it. So anyway, what we see here is a funny picture of an evergreen container blocking a road.

And that's not because we're going to be talking about the ever given. No, it's because we're going to talk today about infrastructure week. This is an example of some infrastructure. Yes. Oh, by what's a week? Oh, we're about four years into infrastructure week and it looks like Biden is finally going to get it rolling. That's what we're going to talk about. Infrastructure week is like Ramadan.

It runs on a lunar calendar, so you can't always predict where it's going to land on the solar calendar. Yes. I see Alice has put a quote here. You or I travel by road or train, but economists arrive by infrastructure, says noted idiot. Margaret Thatcher, she did say that it's in the quotes for like civilization six when they ran out of good ones for civilization five. Didn't she also say anyone over the age of 30 who finds themselves

on a bus can be deemed a failure? Yes. Just a tremendously normal woman all around. I was about to say, yeah. All right. So but first we have to do the goddamn news. Oh, that's a bad one. That's a bad one. Yeah. A train has crashed in Taiwan. Into a truck that wasn't supposed to be on the train tracks.

No, it was a construction site that was like up a hill above the tracks and somebody left there. I don't even know what it was. Might have been a truck. Might have been some other piece of construction machinery. And of course, it rolled down the hill and it blocked the tracks at the entrance to a train tunnel. The worst place to do that.

Well, yeah. So, you know, I think it wrecked into the wrecked into the truck at about 80 miles an hour, went into the tunnel, it derailed in the tunnel, I believe. I thought at first this was a Shinkansen derivative train or derived train, in which case this would be the first fatal accident on one. But it seems not to be. It seems to be a regular sort of, I don't know,

maybe Taiwanese designed train of some kind. Yeah, it was pretty busy because I think people were going back home for the holidays from Taipei to like a smaller city on Taiwan. So it's going to do it. Yeah. Packed train derailing inside a tunnel, just kind of vibrating around. Not good. Terrify. Yeah, terrifying.

Killed. There's like 50 people. Not good. Not good. And it's like as I put in the car on, it's the great heck train crash again. Again, don't don't have a road next to a railway line. Don't have a car next to a railway line. Banned cars. Get banned cars. Yeah. Easy. Ban cars so we can have more trains.

That's right. We'll talk about that later. That's right. But we also have in lighter news. OK, we have to talk about the poop building. The poop building. The poop building. I saw you writing this up on the slides and I was like, the poop thing, which is the first line of the nose.

And I was like, the what? I don't want to talk about West Philly anymore. OK, OK. I was I was I used to live, ladies and gentlemen, and non-binary pals. Many years ago, I lived with my ex on essentially the block where this is being proposed and I at this point, I'm in favor of just keeping the fucking dog park. I I want to I want to I was resisting talking about this for a while

because I don't talking about housing is too tiring. But once the poop thing happened, I was like, all right, we got to talk about this. So here's here's the here's the basic situation. This is going up about three blocks from where I live. There is a guy he owns a rehab center and some of the land around it, right, including a dog park, right? And it is a private dog park.

You have to be part of the Cedar Park Dog Association to use the dog park. How did they check that? I guess they asked the dog. What? What? What? Stopping, stopping your dog for your ID. I at Cedar Park Dog Association sounds like some kind of rotary club that the dog joins, not the only. Yeah.

It sounds like a mob front. That's the Cedar Park Dog Association, if you know what I mean. Cedar Park Dogging Association. Well, no, I'm hard as hell. So the guy who owns the dog park was like, you know, I want to he's he was like, I want to get I want to put an apartment building here instead of a dog park, right? So once word got out that the private dog park was being replaced, with an apartment building, everyone got up in arms because, you know,

the apartment was there, something I'd say. Yes. Very funny. Everyone got very mad that an apartment building was going to go up in this community, despite the fact that, you know, there's there's a taller apartment building on the other four corners of the slot. And up until the nineties, there was an apartment building on this lot. But this is beside the point. Where are you going to walk a dog?

There there's a real park two blocks over. That one's open to the public, though. So I don't want my dog with just anybody. So a lot of anti gentrification folks have have been, you know, up in arms about this three storey apartment building going up. And, you know, all the horrible things it's going to cause, because, you know, there'll be an apartment building there, which I've never quite figured out how that follows.

I mean, I could see, you know, maybe if it were replacing something other than a private dog park, I might be mad. But this is kind of whatever. This is kind of standard, you know, bullshit until last week, a man asked for poop samples for a study he was conducting to show the effects of gentrification on on people's. What's the word?

I guess lower digestive system. So poop samples from people, not from dogs. Yes. Yes. How was he collecting them? Were you just going to build them to Mark's house of turns? Yeah, I mean, I he was going to he was asking people to mail them in. Isn't that legal box next to ours?

Isn't that like a box? Yeah, you have to mark in a bio hazard, isn't that like a federal crime? Well, apparently he he he does this research at Temple University. So I guess he knows how to do it. OK. But I'm I was like, I I don't know. I don't know why I don't know why we have to go through this whole rigmarole to do this.

I mean, the one thing is this building requires a zoning variance to be put up. And I'm like, there's no way in hell this guy is getting his variants. I don't know why he tried. I think it's because he wants a parking lot instead of a building. I think that's the real gambit here, because he demolished a couple houses 10 years ago so I could use that space for a parking lot. And then L and I told him to L and I let him demolish the houses, but they wouldn't let him build the parking lot.

So he's just been using this illegally as a parking lot ever since. And an illegal parking lot is a lot less fun than, say, an illegal dog park. But it's an illegal. I guess it's like it's like a speakeasy dog park. We live in a very disease. You like you knock on the door and a little slot opens and there's just like something that is clearly a golden retriever there. Yeah.

Rough, rough, rough, rough. Password. The password is bark. Bark bark. That's not for whom the dog barks. It barks for the. I don't know this whole thing. This whole thing's been like embarrassing for all involved sides.

I've just been I've been watching this with just sort of disbelief for the past two weeks. Just like I don't I don't understand why everyone is so this mad about a quarantine. Everyone's been saying for the last six months, minimum. That's what I'm thinking. Yeah, just just yeah, we've all we've all succumbed to lockdown madness. And now as a consequence, we're just like, yeah, no, fuck it. Send send send me a poop. Send me a poop.

I want to see. Yeah, I want to see that poop. A friendly reminder to not mail us your poop. No, yes. Don't mail us anything that's a funny joke on the idea of mailing it. Don't mail us any. No, don't no. Don't no, no, no, no, no.

No more dried foods of any kind. No, don't don't don't don't do that. So anyway, that's my that that's the that's the poop building. Cool. Yes. Hey, I was here two weeks ago. Hey, you just doxed yourself in the segment, just like, hey, here's my street address is where I live. No, no, unless unless they can search those three blocks for the correct house.

There's a lot of houses there. Yeah, fairly dense area. I gave away myself there. I used to live on that block. Well, if they went back in time, then they could go to your house and murder you. I mean, honestly, at that point in my life, I probably would have welcomed it. You just have like a good period for it. If they try and murder you, Justin, you just have like a concentrated spray

of mucus in their direction from out. Say, yeah, I can become some kind of like mucus man. That's my shout out. Shout out to University City, Mini Mart. Shout out to Shane's old porch, Bud's old porch. Shout out to, oh, salt and pepper, but not shout out to my ex unlike the TikTok trend right now. I've always been confused because it's salt and pepper three, right?

You don't want to know what happened to one and two. I don't know what I do want to know what happened to one and two. That is unspeakable and unknowable. That is above your clearance, sir. I thought they might be in other parts of the city for you to ask another question. All right, I shall remain a mystery. Anyway, so I guess our first question as we talk about infrastructure weeks, we have to ask, what is infrastructure, right?

Buildings and roads and highways. Yes, when you use it, it's a whole tab in SimCity or city skylines. This thing is the thing to move stuff. I would say sometimes buildings are infrastructure. Um, so, you know, but infrastructure is like stuff that helps you get around, you know, like roads, railroads, bridges, airports and seaports, you know, it's stuff that provides you with services like, you know, water pipes, gas pipes, electricity, the internet, you know, the stuff that helps your stuff get around.

Oil pipelines, gas pipelines, stuff like that. You know, it's the physical stuff that makes industrial civilization possible, right? Yes. Yeah, I'm trying, I'm trying to interrupt you. Like people are bitching at me for it. So I'm just like, those people are wrong. Like get fucked. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, and most a lot of infrastructure is public, you know, stuff like roads, water lines, sewer lines, stuff like that is usually public.

Some of it's private and regulated, you know, like railroads or electricity distribution that's usually private and regulated. Some of it's, you know, private and kind of unregulated, like oil pipelines. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, the Chapo to Fash Pipeline, right? That's unregulated as far as I know. That's a good question. We must have direct and meaningful government intervention

on the Chapo to Fash Pipeline. The school to prison pipeline is actually extremely regulated. Oh, yeah. And it's about to say now, infrastructure has been around for a very long time, you know, like publicly funded infrastructure in particular, you know, of course, famously, you know, like the Roman Empire, they built like aqueducts, you know, they built like roads. These weren't the first people to do it, of course.

But, you know, a lot of those roads and aqueducts are still around. Are the pyramids infrastructure? No, that's a vanity project. Disagree. They help. They help. Another Gulf State vanity project, I know it's not on the Gulf. Shut up. They help the pharaohs come move about the afterlife. Therefore, that's an infrastructure project.

I would I would sort of describe it as just painting a 14 lane superhighway of the day. That's a Keynesian like make work project. That's like the ultimate example. And it's not a digging a hole and filling it back in, but it is digging a hole and then making the reverse of that hole. You sound like a guy very jealous. He doesn't have an obelisk plan for what he shuffles off the oil. Jealousy is a disease. Get well soon, Ross.

How are you going to navigate the sea of reeds without something to, like, entomb both your mortal remains and the statue in which you're you're sort of animating? I'll just go with him. Yeah, I'll get a GPS. Well, we'll use the buddy system, too. It's across the whatever the river sticks. So, you know, the stuff like, you know, aqueducts improve public health.

They made life in cities more convenient, you know, stuff like Roman roads. You know, they make long distance commerce and communication more convenient, which, of course, makes controlling a huge empire more possible and easy. Yeah. So, you know, is infrastructure imperialist? Sure. I mean, yeah, basically. In that it's something that, like, makes a single cohesive society possible. And like, whether you want to argue the toss about whether those are inherently imperialists.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, whatever. Can't win them all, I suppose. Can't win them all. It's nice having roads. Yeah. It's nice having drinking water. I would take having these things over, not having it. It's nice to have things be someone else's problem so I can focus on podcasting. At some point, you anti-imperialist your way into anarcho-primitivism.

You get to that conclusion shockingly quick. Listen, once again, you know what? No, I'm not even going to make the joke. He had some points is what I'm saying. And do not mail bombs to our PO box. I like having both my hands. Thank you. I respect the mail bombing. I do not respect the anarcho-primitivism.

Well, you know, I'll be kind of close to that in the middle. That's fine. Anyway, so. Hey, Alice, what's your address? Yeah, it's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. Yeah, this is my roommate, Joe. Yeah, you're going to have to address this in my roommate, Joe, otherwise, like, you might not get it.

That's the whole thing, you know, Alice is just like gritty, limited, the basement of the White House, Joe, down and feed you like two or three times a day. You're like, what's up, Joe Biden, opening a package with 20 pounds of rejected jelly beans on the on the. Yes, thank you for that. Whichever one of you said that, just like what the fuck am I doing? Those were intended for a previous president.

I don't even like jelly beans. I have found a use for the 10 pounds of chickpea. Stop sending me food is what I'm saying. They just recognize that we're hungry people and they want to reward us. Not that I've said stop sending me food. If you're going to send me food, beef jerky, please. Thank you. Oh, travels well. OK, anyway, so now in the United States, you know, when the colonists

come over to do imperialism, you know, there's there's some early questions about, you know, internal improvements is what they called it back then, right? You know, should the public funds should public funds be used to improve transportation in the colonies and in the early Republic, right? No, that's communism. Well, we're just we're just back to Franklin again. Do we want to like do this as a public good or do we want to have

the richest weirdest dude just funded as a pet project? Well, the other thing is there's not a clear distinction between like public and private projects at this point, right? Sure. Yeah, the government still just dudes. Yeah, the government's still just a bunch of dudes, just guys being dudes. What's going on in this? You know, the legislature has you can't like today you can just incorporate a business back then.

You know, the legislature had to charter the business, right? We should have gotten the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to charge us. We should petition them. Hmm. Oh, God. You know, so they eventually I think it was that it was the federalists who were big into internal improvements. They get stuff rolling like, you know, the Erie Canal. Here's the main line of public works, which is sort of the way across

Pennsylvania as it started was a combination of canals and railroads. Yeah, I don't love the federalists, but you do have to you have to hand it to them this much that it was a better idea that the United States be an industrial society that functioned rather than everybody being a pastoral slave owner. Yeah, I think I think I would rather have this than the slaves. Here's a fun one with your noble man, Roz. Here's a fun one with the main line of public works on this picture, right?

You can see that this this locomotive carrying three train cars, right? And what this is is a sectional canal boat. Huh. The idea is that when when the canal boat reaches the inclined plane or the railroad section, they they take the canal boat out of the water. They split it in three pieces. They put them on railroad cars and the train portages it to the next section of canal. More than meets the eye.

Yes, how honestly? Just to go with a gramophone there. Oh, you're a record. I'm going to see how many I'm going to see how many consecutive episodes I can get a Fitzgerald reference into. OK, for those of you wondering, Pittsburgh has changed spelling between with an age at the end and without an age at the end.

Like as far as I know, at least three or four times. That is Pittsburgh, i.e. where Sidney Crosby lives. I kind of I kind of like it without the age with the age. At the age, then they took the age away, then they added the age back. I say it makes me want to pronounce it like a Scottish town and call it Pittsburgh, if it's got an age on it. Yeah, then we'll do a live show in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. So anyway, later, America starts, you know,

financing major internal improvements, like say the Transcontinental Railroad. Do that using land grants. Essentially, they bought, you know, we bought the Louisiana Purchase. That's all federal land. What we'll do is as the railroad builds west, you just give a certain amount of land to the railroad who can then sell it off in order to finance the railroad. What this resulted in is railroads just racing across the continent,

right, and doing a whole shitload of money laundering, right. But luckily, in addition to the money laundering, these railroads had a secondary purpose, which was doing genocide to Native Americans. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just like a process of wealth transfer between different dudes with waistcoats, with pocket watches on them. Some genocide and some genocide.

That's basically bank transfer fee, but involving, you know, human lives. It's fine. Now, although in addition to genociding Native Americans, the railroads could also be used to transport goods that that took a while because, you know, that they for the first the first go over with the Transcontinental Railroad, the tracks were basically unusable. Still better than shipping it all the way around South America. It actually wasn't when it first opened. It was still a lot cheaper to ship it either around Cape Horn.

I think it's Cape Horn. Yes, Cape Horn. Cape Horn or shipping it to Panama and portaging it. And then shipping it the other way. Do some kind of canal, maybe. Yeah, well, I figured that out later. That's it. Yeah, it's pronounced C-A-N-O. Fantastic. Thank you. OK, so so there's not a lot of public money going into infrastructure

really until the mid 20th century, right? Most infrastructure is private, save for some early parkways and highways, right? Then, however, we get to the 20th century and all its terror and glory. Here are many presidents in their favorite cars. I paid 11 pounds and ninety nine pence for a stock image of Richard Nixon driving a golf cart because it was the only photo I could find of Nixon driving himself. Wow. That is the most miserable son of a bitch I've ever seen.

And he's in a golf cart. No, he looks pretty happy. It's a great that's happy, Nixon. Yeah, I guess happy. It's a great time. Yeah, I will say whatever the few opportunities I've ever had to drive a golf cart, I become more or less deranged. And I become like like I become the equivalent of a dude

like driving an F three fifty who just rolled up and like to a kindergarten for the first time. And I'm just like, how many of these tiny people can I crush under foot? Liam's vehicular now. Yeah, you start playing the Simpsons hit and run when you get into a golf cart. I basically do. Yeah, great game. I need to reboot it. I like the photo of LBJ with his

with his kids and a dog in a sweet high door sales fear. Five hundred like an early one. That's fun. I think it was fun as shit to drive. I went back and forth between that and the other car that Lyndon Barnes Johnson used to drive around. Barnes, Johnson, Banes, whatever. Banes. Fine. What LBJ used to drive around his ranch on,

which was he had an aqua car. Yes. And he would drive it into the lake to scare people. Yeah, he would be like, oh, she breaks around. Yeah. Yeah. America's greatest president, Lyndon Banes Johnson, ladies and gentlemen, killed a lot of kids in Vietnam, did also have a terrified cruise ship. Good with the bad, good with the bad, terrified cruise ship with an aqua car.

We got we got FDR there. We are, of course, Biden in the Corvette and we have Donald Trump, America's funniest president pretending to drive a fire truck. I was really mad that he didn't actually like drive it. Yeah. And like, lead the Secret Service on what was basically a five mile an hour low speed chase through Anacostia. I was just like, come on, you big, wet diaper baby. Yeah, do the end sequence of Con Air.

I wonder if Trump can drive a car. I think it's probably no. I don't think he's driven himself in like decades, if he can. I think he can. I will say I miss the dead cast Trump question of the week. I think he probably can in that I assume once or twice he's chosen to drive from Midtown Manhattan to Bedminster himself. I don't know. I think he has a guy for that.

He probably has a guy. He does, but I believe that once it's like. Do you think he likes being chauffeured because it feels fancy boy? Yeah, yeah, 100 percent. And like Trump was Trump was photographed a lot in the 80s. And in the course of my Googling, I could not find a picture of him driving himself. Oh, at all? No. No, that's why I went with the fire truck and not the thing, not just

because it's funny, although it is, but because that's one of the photos. I like one of the few photos of him at a steering wheel. Yeah, I mean, I, I, you know, now that now that you guys have mentioned that, I'm going to reverse my guess to pause in the sort of the Roz thing where he holds a driver's license, but cannot drive. Yes. Well, you know, here's an interesting one. We know, we know, you know, that Biden is M-track Joe, right? Yeah. But apparently that man when when Trump was in college

at University of Pennsylvania, rather than moving to Philly, he took the metro liner down from New York every day, which moves. At least I don't have to pass his house every time I see it. And then someone points out that's Elon Musk's house. That's right. Elon Musk's house for some inexplicable reason. It's in between like two large office buildings, but this one row house is still there about the same time that he got

the Korean restaurant to Star Trek Discovery. But it's like Zephyrm Cochran, Albert Einstein, Elon Musk. Good. Anyway, so now there were towards the middle of the 20th century, we started to get big federal infrastructure packages of certain kinds. I mean, the first one, of course, is the New Deal. And the New Deal doesn't invest so much in things like roads or railroads. It doesn't invest in things like the the TVA,

you know, Tennessee Valley Authority for power generation, rural electrification, you know, lots of public buildings, you know, and so this is like your first big federal infusion of cash into America's infrastructure. Socialism, socialism, socialism. After after World War Two, noted socialist Dwight the Eisenhower, of course, signs the Interstate and Defense Highway Act, right, which really kicks off the process of developing,

you know, America's interstate highway system, right? And that was sort of its original mission was sort of altered over time from, you know, providing good roads over long distances to demolishing black people's neighborhoods. Um, but, you know, a lot of a lot of a lot of federal programs were used. It's weird how a lot of American infrastructure just turns into ethnic cleansing. You know, I mean, don't look at don't look at it too hard. Lyndon Johnson.

Well, it creates the Department of Transportation because at this point, there's so much money going into things like interstate highways and stuff like that, that, you know, it needs like a cabinet level department to manage that, right? And he signs into a bunch of great society things. He signs into law during his administration, one of which is the Urban Mass Transit Administration. Lyndon Johnson's administration plows loads of money, not only into highways,

but also to mass transit, you know, so that's how we got things like the Washington Metro, the Baltimore Subway, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Marta in Atlanta, the Miami Metro, you know, all that stuff came out of one period. There's massive build out and then just nothing, right? Yeah, indeed. The idea of like a democratic quasi socialism of doing massive infrastructure stuff was then sort of ground to a bloody husk in Vietnam. And we stopped wanting to do that anymore.

After that, we get a couple of like really panicked and reactive infrastructure packages or laws, right? One of which was the creation of M-Track on May 1st, 1971 by Richard Nixon, right? There's going to be an M-Track episode at some point. Stop emailing me about it. You know, this was supposed to Nixon's idea here is like this is a bill which sort of allows passenger rail to quietly fade into non-existence because it's, of course, totally irrelevant, right?

And instead, of course, that didn't happen. We still have M-Track. Another one of them. Soldier of God, yes. Yes. Another one of that era, of course, is Conrail, right? Which was a sort of reorganization of a bunch of failing Northeast railroads into the sort of quasi-nationalized corporation, right? Because the railroads in the Northeast, the United States

were not doing very well at the time. Yeah, nationalization was still sort of on the table, even under a Republican, which is very funny. Yeah, because they were doing that badly. And there is a sort of understanding that if we just let all these railroads fail, then we won't have railroads in the most densely populated part of the United States. Genius.

Another interesting one is essential air services, right? Like right after the airlines were deregulated, I forget in what year. That's a program that's still around today, which, you know, sort of funds airline service to like small towns like Altoona or Plasberg, New York. That's why everywhere has like a regional airport that's like gateway to the Poconos or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Oh, my God. Yes, Grant Airport, Alice.

Hi. I've been to the truck stop near there. It has a pinball machine. We were there with each other. Where's the pinball machine? There were like a half there. There were like two or three pinball machines. There was a little arcade there. Why didn't you tell me I did you?

Yeah, I said, there's a pinball machine here. What did I do? You'd said, let's keep going. Oh, fuck, I'm sorry, man. My bad. Yeah. All right. So the most recent infrastructure package we got was, of course, Obama's American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, right?

Aura. The Aura. How my grandfather in law from Texas pronounces the letter Aura. Aura. Aura. The Aura. Thank you. That would be Mary and Williamson's infrastructure package. The Aura. All the trains are floating.

It's not maglev. We don't really know what's happening, actually. They just use the power of vibes. Look, get in the crystal orb. The the Aura. You know, this is this is definitely like a very much in Obama era, a piece of legislation, right? That was terrible.

You know, the idea here is, I mean, Obama is a true believer in, you know, neoliberal economics, right? You know, and his his advisors sort of tell him, listen, the most efficient and quickest way to provide economic stimulus is to bail out the banks and do tax credits, right? Pee-pee. Yes. That's actually what Tim Geithner said to him at the time. And so, you know, most of that, most of the act went into that.

What little went into infrastructure only funded projects which were, quote, shovel ready, unquote, right? I hear that phrase one more time. Yeah. So if you had a project that was in the planning stages, you couldn't get money for it. But if you had a project that was through the planning stages and just needed money, you could theoretically get money for it. Now, in practice, a lot of the money just kind of went in a hole.

Like there weren't a huge amount of projects funded under this bill. And, you know, the stuff that it did fund a lot of times, like especially the Republican governors started a bulk at the funding, right? So like famously, there was a big there was a chunk of high speed rail funding in there, $9.8 billion. Some of it was supposed to go to Florida. Some of it was supposed to go to Wisconsin. Some of it was supposed to go to Ohio.

All three of those governors said, we'll only take the money if we can spend it on roads. Sco-loker, everybody. Yeah. So it all went to California instead to fund high speed rail, which still hasn't turned a wheel. And then I guess they started the Trump infrastructure package, which was, you know, never happened because turns out the Republicans aren't very interested in spending money on things other than F-35s.

Yeah, I mean, the Republicans spend a lot of money, but how if I know what it what it what it's on? Nothing themselves, more or less. Basically, yeah. So, you know, it's it's so I guess we got to talk about, you know, we talked about all these infrastructure packages. What is Biden trying to do? Corvettes for everybody.

But like electric Corvettes. Oh, yeah. Rockets of Oakley. Yeah. Electric Corvette, I'm sure, will be a crossover, just like the electric Mustang. I like this photo that I found because it looks like a tiny man is riding pillion on Pete Booth's judge's bike. I like the I he's got a lime bike. Yeah, right.

He's also one of the nerds who wears a helmet on Bikeshare. Got to protect that big, beautiful centrist brain. It looks like his chin strap is a little loose. So that's not actually going to protect them. I mean, he's he's got the worst of both worlds there. So the Biden infrastructure package is interesting, number one, because a lot of it is not infrastructure. But it's it's supposed to be two trillion bucks, right?

A lot of money. That's that's a lot of money. Yes. It is the biggest investment in American infrastructure ever. That's almost three years of the Department of Defense budget. But it's going to be invested over a lot more than three years. So it's actually significantly less than the Department of Defense budget. Yeah.

Can I just, you know, cancel the F-35 at any time? Don't worry about that. I think the F-35 is too far along to cancel at this point. Defense contractors always say that and it's never true. Call their bluff once in a while. Well, every time they're like, oh, well, it costs. It's going to cost us eight trillion to like to keep doing. But eight point one trillion to stop at some point,

you have to be like, no, don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. You know, this this infrastructure package, I will say this before we start, it has a lot of good stuff in it. But probably not. How did that happen? Probably I wasn't even touching the mouse.

It flips what slides. You know, it has a lot of good stuff in it, but probably not enough good stuff for the historical moment, which, you know, is sort of a hallmark of the whole Biden saga over the past year and a half or whatever. Love thinking he's fucking JFK, too, because he's like not as useless as the most pessimistic people predicted, but it's still not enough.

Yeah. No. I did. People really love like inadequate solutions. You know, it's it's well, again, as as the whole year of 2020 showed, you know, if you give someone something which is nowhere near enough, they're like fucking hell. Thank you so much. I'm going to blow your pants so I can suck your dick.

Yeah, I love to have a go from me. It's another and so as we overview this infrastructure package, keep in mind that mostly high level details are what's come out. Not a lot of specifics so far. One of the one of the things that's kind of weird is it's very much that not like framed as like improving Americans' lives, but framed around competing with China. China, China, China, nothing's changed.

Mm hmm. Anyway, so I thought we'd sort of take a look here. I love to do a new Cold War and by this simultaneously doing a bunch of hate crimes against any Asian people who happen to live in our cities and also funding like line bikes. Yeah. So I thought we'd start with some of the stuff that's not infrastructure

that's in there. At first off, there's like four hundred billion dollars for home care and elderly care. I think that's probably a good thing. I have no frame of reference for how much home care and elderly care that buys cannot fun things in an orderly manner. It's all got to go through this process where it's attached to other things. Yeah, I do like the newspaper column,

the newspaper columnist cartoon I put on here because it was just the first thing that came up when I searched pork barrel. Well, I don't think the home care and the elderly care is pork barrel. I did fuck them all. Fuck them all. You're getting a lot of old people in my districts. Mostly, I just included it because I love that sort of labelling madness that required the guy's jacket to say public officials.

Pork barrel spending is good. Another another big chunk of this is three hundred billion dollars for assorted manufacturing investments and job training. And I can tell you that's all that is just going into a hole. You're never going to see anything from that. Well, you could just make trade school free with that money. Good point. Yeah. Not going to do that.

I know we got to thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We got to put it in this hole. Yeah, just put the money in my hole, Daddy. Next jamming dollar bills up there. Oh, 300 billion or something. Yeah. Oh, my colon's going to have a bad time. Another hundred and seventy four billion dollars

goes to buying electric vehicles for the federal government. Finally, we're going to have Grumman LLVs that catch fire out of service sometime in the 2030s. And I was about to say, I mean, this is this is sort of infrastructure, right? You know, this funds stuff like charging stations, replacing the federal vehicle fleet with electric vehicles that includes stuff like mail trucks, but also school buses, some transit vehicles, any any other vehicles

the federal government owns, like pick up trucks, you know, for like fleet vehicles or whatever. FBI cars that are all prices CIA cars. Yeah. And as far as I can tell, this is not like tax credits or anything. They're just buying the shit, right? Good. So I think thank God for that. This does not include the Department of Defense, though. We're not seeing any electric tanks or two and a half ton trucks or anything like that.

No, we're going to run those off of off of JP one JP one. Bunker C oil. Yeah. Man, I don't like I'm sure it's much better, but I really think the the model for the new post office thing looks like shit. I don't like it. I kind of like it. I actually I actually kind of like it. You know, it's got a big lots of visibility. If you run into a pedestrian, it won't, you know, kill them.

But like what if you're going to do that, which I'm not against, right? Why not make it look more futuristic than just like it's a truck but drawn by a child? That's a good point. I think they should have just kept the old LLV body and just put some put some batteries in there. That would have been cool. Like the bodies weren't the problem.

Those were those are still running. Those are fine. Yeah. Um, I bet the frame is beat the shit, especially if you're in somewhere with road salt now. Yeah. Another portion of this is, of course, a fix it first plan for roads and bridges, right? It's one hundred and fifteen billion dollars. Now, I guess we got an idea here is we're fixing roads,

but not providing lots of money for building new ones, right? Which leads us to an interesting question, which is what's the definition of fixing roads, right? Make not fall down, build pothole. Well, road more rigid. Yeah, make road more rigid. Well, I mean, I think in an ideal situation, it would be, you know, filling potholes, stuff like that, right?

But, you know, we got to think about stuff like, especially your fixing bridges. Does this involve like replacing bridges with larger ones? This is involved like widening highway approaches, fix fixing interchanges, stuff like that. Right. I think, you know, a case in point for, you know, what this money might be spent on, you know, rather than fixing existing roads. This is the Brent Spence Bridge in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Brent Spence Bridge.

It connects Cincinnati to Colvington, Kentucky, right? Colvington is where you remember the Colvington Catholic kids? Oh, yeah. Nicholas Sandman. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Weird ass restorationist Vatican II rejecting trad cats. Yeah, they're basically a set of vacaness. Oh, those are some fucking weirdos. Yeah. And they yelled at the Native American man. Yeah.

That's where they're from is Colvington, Kentucky. So, you know, this bridge caught fire recently. They shut it down for a while. It's back in service, right? Or there was there was an accident on it that caught fire. But now, like the DOT has said, listen, we need to replace the bridge with a new bridge. But actually, we're also going to keep the old bridge as well. Right. And so this is going from, you know, a double-decker bridge with four lanes on each deck, which carries I-71 and I-75.

They want to go from that to two double-decker bridges. Oh, boy. Right. One of which is carrying I-75, I-71 southbound, I-75 northbound, I-71 northbound on the other span. Then there's local traffic southbound and northbound spread between the two spans. Right. And you go from eight lanes total to 16. What did we say on the traffic engineering episode about adding more lanes? It creates more traffic.

Don't tell DOTs that. They won't believe you. Especially since you're feeding all this traffic into Cincinnati, right? Which is an old city, got lots of narrow streets. Like there's not a lot of room to shove 16 lanes of traffic in there. It's going to back up regardless. I'd say no matter how wide you make this re-way, it's just going to back up. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know...

The traffic is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding traffic. Yeah. So this is some of the stuff you might see. Some of this $115 billion to fixed roads spent on. And I mean, a better solution, I think, would be something like demolish every freeway inside the I-275 loop around Cincinnati, and just get inner city traffic outside of the city. Maybe finish the damn subway, but I digress there. So these fixes probably will wind up being capacity expansions and, you know,

sort of reproduce and ingrain existing failures at highway infrastructure, right? Now, there is some glimmer of hope in that the bill includes $20 billion to, quote, reconnect communities disturbed by historic investments. So I mean, hopefully that means stuff like urban freeway tear downs or relocations or something like that. That would be nice. They're probably just going to build like a private dog park over those freeways, though. Probably, yeah.

It's just going to be... We have reconnected your ribbon community here by creating a 40-foot death strip of cops. We're going to spend all of that money on one third of one big dig. And then they got $20 billion for road safety, which is supposed to be, you know, road safety for all users, you know, cyclists and pedestrians and stuff like that. And that stuff's good, but getting the state and local DOTs on board with this stuff is going to be really tough. They're not huge fans of like the idea of less roads, not more.

Federalism, folks. I've said it before, said it again, doesn't work. Doesn't work. It's better than Jeffersonian democracy, but not by much. Not by much, yeah. Now, I got another one. Public transportation is getting $85 billion, right? Yay?

What is this unfamiliar sensation of good news, I'm experiencing. Oh, I don't know what's that. So, you know, according to WhiteHouse.gov, this is doubling federal funding for public transit over some period of time. I don't know what it is because I couldn't find that in there. You know, quote, this investment will double federal funding for public transit, spend down the repair backlog and bring bus rapid transit and rail service to communities and neighborhoods across the country.

It will ultimately reduce traffic congestion for everyone. Which is, of course, you know, that's another fun one is, of course, they're trying to direct to the drivers, not at public transit users. I mean, it does have the advantage of being true, but... Actually, public transit doesn't really reduce traffic congestion. Really? Yeah, because the extra road space that, you know, you free up by taking the bus, you know, to another asshole is just going to come out on the road and drive in.

It's telling to feel like nothing reduces traffic congestion. Bus lanes reduce traffic congestion because that particular lane is now not congestion because, you know... Only buses. Only buses are on there, yeah. So, you know, 85 billion dollars. How much does this buy us, right? And where does it go?

I mean, there's a very... The policy so far again... Six miles of track in South Philly. Oh, good. This is a very high-level overview right now. And, you know, this could be spent on stuff like, you know, if I had 85 billion dollars to spend on public transportation, you know, I think you spend it on frequent and reliable bus services for every small to medium metro area in the United States, you know,

get like fast buses every 10 minutes, get like high-quality bus shelters, get some Americans with Disability Act style upgrades to infrastructure. Everybody in like a small city, like fucking, I don't know, pick one at random, Avaline, Texas, gets like a kneeling bus every 10 minutes. That'd be cool. That'd be pretty good, yeah. And then, or even, you know, you have a bus network set up so the bus doesn't have to kneel, you're just already at a level boarding.

You know, that's another option. And, of course, this means hundreds or thousands of good high-paying union jobs in almost every city in America, right? Yeah, step one, we do this. Step two, bus driving union, the largest in America. Step three, general strike, step four, for communism. Yeah, I know. Hail Satan.

Hail Satan, yeah. But, you know, it's sort of like, you know, one of the things about like, you know, these public transit jobs like this, and they're completely transformative, you know, the people that certainly like here in Philadelphia, like if people get a set the job, they're set for life, right? You know, so this is, if nothing else, it's a really good jobs program, right? It'd be good if one of those avenues to like a job for life with like generous guaranteed benefits and pension wasn't being a cop.

Yeah, exactly, right? 00:51:42,680 --> 00:51:44,120 It could be a bus driver. It could be a bus driver, it could be a firefighter, you can be an EMT. Yeah. Actually, we don't really do that for EMTs either. No, we don't. No, we don't, yeah.

It could be a firefighter, you can be a bus driver, and that's it. You'd be a garbage worker. Yeah, you'd be a garbage man, yeah, garbage person. Garbage technician. Somebody got mad at me for not saying sanitation technician a while back, and it's like, okay, fine, but like, come on, how much did you really care about that? I don't know that like garbage men are like the world's most woke people who demand that you use the correct terminology every single time.

This guy was, was not himself a sanitation technician or whatever, but like, was strongly in favor of me not dead naming them, so. So that's one option for how they could spend this public transit money, but the other option is, you know, maybe it goes into like four subway lines in major metro areas. And I think it's going to be closer to the latter than the former, if I'm honest with you. You're saying that like the MTA or Bar or whatever else is just going to eat this? I wouldn't be surprised, honestly, if they like, you know, just dump $40 billion of this into like extending the second Avenue subway up to 125th Street.

I think these benefits would be much better if they were more diffused across the country, but I don't know that that's what's going to happen. And it's like, again, if you had to pick an organization that had the ability to do that, the federal government would be it, but once you start getting into like the politics of, you know, who has the sort of organizational pull to get access to that money? Turns out it's Andrew Cuomo. You get the voice instead of a local bus service. Yeah, you get one unprotected bike lane.

Yeah, it's an exhausting voice to do, apart from anything else. So I don't know how he manages it. It's because years. It's the cocaine. Yeah, it's cocaine. It is. It's it's like a raw size lump of cocaine every morning. And I don't mean like the kind of dosing that Ross would take.

I literally mean a lump of cocaine, like when you're in wait in cocaine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So now he gets to the part we all want to hear about, which is Intercity Rail. To trains. Train good.

You should have just put that tweet from that guy that was busy having a total fucking meltdown this weekend. Christ, the train people. Yeah, that's us. We are the train people. It's us. Yes. We are here to destroy your mentions.

I am half man, half train. He's become more train than man. So President Biden is calling on Congress to invest $80 billion to address M-Track's repair backlog, modernize the high traffic northeast corridor, improve existing corridors, and connect new city pairs, and enhance grant and loan programs that support passenger and freight rail safety, efficiency, and electrification. Finally got that third one on there. Only took us, you know, 100 years.

For electric. Well, we almost got to electrification in the 70s during the oil crisis and that just didn't happen. So this is fun because now we get to look at maps. Somebody, this is where all of this is arising from is somebody fucking showed Pete Buttigieg this map, and then Buttigieg showed Biden the map. It's time for bold action. Yes, my fellow Americans.

Imagine if imagine if Buttigieg had shown him that one map that did the rounds a couple of years ago that was like cities of the world linked by rail that made no fucking sense. Oh, yeah. The one that goes from Philadelphia to Baltimore via Pittsburgh. Yeah, that one. We've gone to Pittsburgh from Philadelphia via Baltimore. Yeah, we're doing high speed rail from Los Angeles. Welcome to Slingshot service.

We're doing high speed rail from Los Angeles to Hokkaido via Pyongyang. You come out of just an absolute hairpin turn somewhere near PNC Field in Pittsburgh and it slingshots you back to Camden Yards 230 miles an hour. That's the way I want to get into a town is by a von Neumann transfer. So, good news is $80 billion, of course, buys us this entire high speed rail network, right? Sure, it does. No, no, it doesn't do that. Yeah.

Hey, 220 miles an hour, though. It's a good amount of miles an hour. Yeah, does not bias Alfred Twizz United States high speed rail system. But, of course, it can bias this fragmented high speed rail system according to Elon Levy. Who hates trains now, apparently. Oh, he's about to say they've kind of a little austerity for my tastes, yeah, recently. No, we actually don't get this either. Here's M-Track's proposal over what to do with about $80 billion.

Skip it, you work for no good goddamn reason. Yes, I mean, there's some problems with this, yeah. Before we kind of start here, I do want to drive into people's heads that when you look at this map, this is not every stop on the system, right? But, you know, like you have the Empire Builder up here, it makes a lot more stops than just Minot and Haver between this area, right? But, you know, this is kind of a good start for expanded M-Track, but, you know, it needs work, right? It's supposed to be $80 billion in service improvements.

I'm a little bit confused because this doesn't seem like $80 billion worth, although I could sort of see it maybe going that expensive if they do certain things like electrification or infrastructure improvements, right? Where are my 220 mile an hour trains? You're not getting it. You know what, Alice, you get high speed too. That is actually going to go 220 miles an hour. Lots of people who really like trees get your way first. Yeah, we're cutting down like five ancient trees, sorry.

Yeah, damn. Good luck, Gareth. Yeah, there's some interesting emissions in this system, like you see here, Louisville, Kentucky does not connect to Nashville, Tennessee. Yeah, you know. Oklahoma City to Little Rock, Little Rock to Memphis. Baker's Field to Los Angeles, M-Track seems to have given up on trying to gain access to Cajon Pass there. A big fuck you to South Dakota.

Although that's normal. Would you go to Eau Claire, at least? Sunset Limited still suspended down here for some reason. I don't know, because they seem, they've been making noises about reactivating it. I don't know why they didn't show it as... They've been making noises for like five years about reactivating this. Yes, but a track is now trying to adversely reinstate service. Like they're trying to say fuck you to CSX, let us run the trains. You know, and this is kind of, there's some, one service I would sort of highlight here

is something called the North Coast Hiawatha, which Montana lawmakers are trying to get reactivated, right? It sort of follows the existing empire builder up to Fargo, and then it sort of takes a more southerly route here. Oh, that's sick, right through to Eugene or so. Yeah, that goes through all the parts of Montana where people actually live. So, Bozeman and Helena. And Billings and Missoula. There we go, I have a Zoula.

I got two out of four, that's 50%, that rounds up to 100. Yeah. And Whitefish, there we go. No, Whitefish is on the empire builder. Oh, that's right, my bad, my bad. So, there's some omissions here, which I think are kind of weird. There's some open questions here, like what is, you know, these light blue lines are new service. The yellow lines are enhanced service, right?

And I don't know what that means. Enhanced, not 212 miles an hour. A lecturefication in an ideal world, yes, but I don't know. So, like something like say, and enhanced could mean, so like for example, right here between Pittsburgh and Philly, there's a train called the Pennsylvania, it runs once a day. It's inexcusably slow and terrible. Yeah. And I'm wondering like, what is enhanced here?

Does it run two times a day now? Yeah, twice a day, I don't know. It runs once a day at 220 miles an hour. You miss it, fuck you. I think if you ran 220 miles an hour over horseshoe curve, I think you would. Hold on, let me fire up train simulator. Drifting. Even though it's only one track as well, it's tail foot.

I think it is also an open question, like what is powering these trains, you know, could it be electrification? I think on some of these corridors, but I think that the reality is these are going to be diesel trains mostly. I mean, I think I saw an M-track procurement slide show this morning, which seemed to indicate that they are, in fact, replacing the old Amfleet cars with fixed diesel train sets. So you miss that opportunity. Five years of climate left.

Yeah. I'd like to see you enhance the service to Miami when there is no Miami. And put up a big wall or something, you know. One thing people have been making a thing on Twitter is, how does this affect indigenous people, right? Um, you know, and a lot of these railroad lines do go through reservations. And, you know, I, you know, obviously the answer here is ask indigenous people. But, you know, I, I, judging by like off season traffic on some of these long distance trains,

I think indigenous people will be pretty happy about more train service because they use it a lot. Yeah. What was the Canadian First Nations community that ran their own railroad? Yeah, the Toshuin rail transportation. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, that's, that's the really, that's the really progressive answer is fuck Amtrak, give it to them.

Have them run it. To them. Yeah. Well, that's another option. Yeah. I mean, well, you know, there's a lot of these, a lot of these reservations have lost rail service since, um, you know, over the past 50 years or so, you know, it's very highly agricultural, right?

And you see these sort of orphaned grain elevators out there with no rail service whatsoever. I mean, if you, if you reactivated passenger service, presumably you also reactivate freight service and that means you can get, you can get your grain to market for like half the price of trucking it, um, you know, it's kind of like, you know, a railroad's not a pipeline, right? It confers the benefits to the communities it passes through, you know, Difficult to spell a train.

Possible, but difficult. CSX is going to do their damn best. No, it's actually relatively easy to spill a train. Um, and I, again, there's, there's, we don't know if they're sharing tracks with freight railroads. They might be adding tracks. This whole thing could be a giveaway to the class one railroads. I don't know.

And of course, there's not really any high speed rail here. No. Could difficult for a train to poison your groundwater. Um, not possible though. It's too strange, baby. I mean, if you, if you de-rail, if you put a back and crude oil train on the ground, you know, you can have some problems. Difficult for a passenger train to poison your groundwater.

Okay. 01:04:41,880 --> 01:04:42,840 Close enough. Yeah. Um, you know, and another open question here, I think is how much of this money is going to be dumped in this segment here between Washington DC and Boston. Amtrak Joe, all of it, 100%. I honestly think it's going to be pretty close to like most of the money goes

into the Northeast corridor. I mean, you're going to go like, I'm kind of happy if we just go back to patronage and we're just like, yeah, no, you get amazing service to Delaware. Nothing else, but nothing else. Just just Delaware. Yeah. 220 miles an hour, like Wilmington to DC. Delaware gets fucked too, because there's no rail service on the entire Del Marva peninsula.

Those people are better off left undisturbed. So, you know, this is $80 billion, I guess, because this map was released the sort of the day, the day of the infrastructure package. I thought this is actually from a previous proposal, but I guess not. You know, there's another couple of weird ones like Ohio only has one line going through it. That seems wrong. And, you know, there's some other proposals floating around out there, but like this is something that Rail Magazine posted a while back, which is, you know, sort of a $700 billion

plan for rail transportation in the United States. This one also fucks South Dakota. Actually, all the maps I've posted except Alfred Twos map fuck over South Dakota. So, what you're saying is there's not an economic reason to build a railroad through South Dakota? I guess. It would kind of be cool to have that seat of North by Northwest with a giant train instead of the fight on Mount Rushmore.

I'd be into that. Yeah, just have a train go in and out of like the mouths on Mount Rushmore. That'd be sick. That cornering wouldn't be fun, but. So, you know, this is something like this. This involves like lots of high speed rail corridors, lots of medium speed rail corridors, you know, it's a little bit more fleshed out, I think, at least, you know, from my perspective, because I haven't seen any detail on M-Tracks plan.

They haven't published very much, but this is a national link to Monterey down there. Oh, yeah, I do like because there's no passenger trains in Mexico. None whatsoever. So, yeah, you get some links up to Canada as well, of course. But again, this is like 10 times the amount that, you know, is actually in the bill. This is about where I start, you know. So, now, this is historic because this is the first time the federal government has actually invested in intercity rail at a national level in this Biden infrastructure package.

But I don't think it's enough money. No, what you want to be doing is essentially an interstate railway program. Like, basically, yeah. Something on a sort of comparable level. Well, I mean, then again, part of the reason why the interstate highway system was built was the Cold War. So, maybe the fucking doing the Cold War with China is going to, ah, I don't think it's terrible. Listen, everything is terrible.

Propaganda of the deed, but by that, I mean a train to York. We have to, like, it's such a fucking cursed monkey's paw thing that, like, you can get a train between Nashville and, like, New Orleans. But, like, in order to do that, we have to do the race war. And it's like, no, can't we just do the good thing? Clean some loose some, Alice. Can't we just do the public good? It lightens the centrism, Alice.

You know you want it, Alice. I know this is, like, NatSex people's way of trying to, like, get back on the horse after, like, taking a bunch of L's with small wars in Central Asia. But, like, come on, guys. There's no way we lose this one, baby. USA number one, baby. Look, I mean, you know, at least if we fight China, it'll be a large conventional war, which we're supposed to be able to win.

Shout out to the United States Navy surface fleet. Nice knowing you, boys. Peasy peasy, baby. Oh, good. It will be a Democrat who starts the war with China. I'm your watch. Yeah, and President Buttigieg 2035 putting that marker down right now. Yeah, thanks for lading that into existence, Alice.

Look, it's either going to be that or it's going to be President AOC fires the missiles to defend Taiwanese sovereignty. And I don't. Yeah, I could see that. Yeah, it's... As you go down is another three-letter president. Yeah, we can only do initials now. Yeah.

What is FDR, LBJ, AOC? JFK. JFK as well, yeah. Um, all right. So, you know, a long story short is this inner city rail plan is... It's better than what we got, but it's not necessarily good, right? And I don't think it's going to put a huge dent into like inner city transportation mode share.

Like I seriously doubt you're going to see a lot of traffic. You know, especially road traffic is not going to switch the trains. What about the like intangible benefits of the sort of cultural leadership and the bully pulpit of the presidency? Aren't people going to... It's going to be like Camelot with JFK. Every, every person in the States is going to want to be like Joe Biden, a famously attractive man.

Again, getting the train. He was the all right looking dude in his 20s to his credit. I guess. I've seen that picture. Another, you know, situation here is, you know, GOP governors and state legislatures may just decide to reject by responding again. It's like the same show with Medicare expansion. Yeah.

I mean, I guess it's a real question of if this money is going directly to M-Track, who of course are a quasi-private public corporation thing. They're a corporation, but the stock is owned 100% by the US government. So maybe M-Track can just act with impunity. I don't know. It would be nice. Yeah. So that's the trains.

What else do we got? Uh, $111 billion for water infrastructure. Huh. Okay. Here we see Obama doing this. Obama doing the devil's milkshake. This is where he was pretending to drink the water in Flint, where he like was like, yeah, no, trust your, your, your new filtered water.

It's totally safe and like takes the tiniest possible set. Either commit to get irreversible brain damage or don't, you fucking pussy. Well, he committed to don't, but, um, yeah. He's about to say, yeah. He's about to say, yeah. So, yeah, this is, this is an interesting one because I don't think there's been this huge federal investment in water infrastructure before. They're pledging $45 billion to replace every lead pipe in the country.

Cool. And they said lead, uh, lead service pipe. And I was wondering if that includes the laterals, which are the actual problem. Probably not. Yeah. That's, that's my thing because that's one of the problems with Flint, especially is that, you know, they've, they've replaced the main pipes, but the laterals that bring the water into your house.

So that's the homeowner's responsibility. And all those are made of lead. So, oh, good. That's good. So, you know, if this does include the laterals, it's good. If not, you know, fuck you, Flint, Michigan. And there's $56 billion for other water, water infrastructure in there. And like, you know,

that's, that's going to like, uh, the greater Chicago sanitary district police, the like, my favorite police agency in the U S, the water cops. Oh my God. It's just, it's a do nothing job. Everybody's there because they're like somebody's cousin rules. Well, it's like those, uh, the Chicago, uh, the O'Hare cops. Yeah. That forced that guy off the plane.

And then it came out that they weren't real cops, but they had been putting police on the back there, uniformed sort of for years. Uh, and then they had to get, uh, broke it up because they got sued for whatever, $111 million. Being a cop, being a police department is mostly about believing in yourself. Yeah. A little too much, unfortunately. I was fucking self-esteem shit created a generation of cops.

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely intolerable people. Yeah. You guys got to learn to hate yourself a little better. Um, you know, I think this other water infrastructure is supposed to be, you know, providing clean water and sanitation to, you know, places in this United States of America

that do not have any sort of clean water infrastructure and like really rural Alabama places like that, you know, places that, you know, you look like a third world country. Um, but again, yeah, it could just be spent on sanitation district police. I don't know. It'll be spent on cop store. They will figure out a way to spend a lot of this money on cops. Yeah. All of the, all of the Amtrak money goes to like at the Amtrak cops.

Yeah. I mean, those guys are scary. Yeah. Terrifying. I've seen a lot of photos of them walking around like New York terminals looking very tactical. MP5 straps their chests. Yeah. I mean, they just cruise around like everywhere.

Like I've seen Amtrak police like drive by the house up here. I see Amtrak police up here sometimes. There's no reason. Liam, there's no reason for Amtrak police to be anywhere close to where you are. Okay, well, I don't want to tell you, man. I think they just, they've just decided that all of the city is within their jurisdiction. I believe that to be true. I can see you once again being caught mostly about believing in yourself.

Ross, the only thing I can think of is like coming down sort of from North Philadelphia. No, they're watching you, buddy. Yeah. Liam Anderson here to steal the train. Yeah, no, it's happening. Bonus episode. Liam steals the train. Bonus bonus episode.

Liam's train. Liam calls his lawyer from jail. Liam's train and why it's such a piece of shit. New shirt with my train on it. Okay, so according to Vladimir Ilyich Biden, communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country. Got it there in Russian too. This is another one.

Alice, you paid money for this one too. I paid £11.99 for this Soviet poster. I am out 24. Never let it be said we don't do anything for you. I am out 24 GVP to make this episode. Also, I'm very into the insulators on that tower which look very much like it's just strung with razor blades. I was about to say we'd savings.

Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country. So Soviet power is the electrification of the whole country plus communism. And the electrification of the whole country is communism minus Soviet power. Oh, well, there you go. So you solved this. That's the math for you. Yeah. So there's a whole bunch in the bill which I didn't get to because we put a lot of this

together right before we started because I was unable to function due to allergies yesterday. There's a bunch of stuff in the bill about modernizing the electrical grid and providing rural broadband, which I think that's good stuff. There's a whole bunch of money which is going into that. I mean, hopefully that actually does something. But I do question the competence of the government to do rural broadband now as opposed to rural electrification then. I get the feeling this is all going to go to telecommunications companies.

I'm generally in favor of rural broadband both as a public good and also because I'm so sick of living in a city that I want to move out into the middle of nowhere, but I want to continue podcasting. To GBPS fiber, yes. No, they'll give you DSL. No, they'll give you two GBPS fiber. No, I want to move out to the countryside, but only if I can spool out a thing of fiber optic cable behind me like it's fucking communication wire and style.

Like I'm the great Eastern lay in the transatlantic cable. Just hooking it to my backpack and walking until I get to a cottage somewhere I can rent. They want to do a bunch of housing by which they mean two million affordable homes, build or retrofit or preserve. Two million seems a little bit low. I'm going to be honest. Another thing is this act. This may or may not include the pro act.

This is the one that makes unionization easier and makes unions more powerful. I hate to give Joe Biden credit. I really do. But the one thing on which he's consistently good is organized labor. And I don't know why that is. Other than like some of the Irishman shit. I think that's the one area where he seems to actually sort of have it together. I will give him the minor credit where the minor credit is due.

I guess it's because he's like he's such an like an establishment Democrat guy. And what's more establishment Democrat than organized labor? Just in a way that's often kind of divorced from stuff. But also also why did the Communist Party have the DOT logo on their billboard? Maybe the DOT stole it from the Communist. They probably do. Of course, the Communist stole it from GE. Another question is, but how do we pay for it?

Just print the money. Who cares? Just print the money. No, Biden wants to raise the corporate tax to slightly lower than what it was before the Trump tax cuts, but still higher than what it is. Manchin wants it to be 25 percent because he loves being a performer douchebag. Oh my God. It's so cool that that one guy is now the fulcrum of all federal legislation.

I just want to kick him right in the nuts. The Democrats just love to negotiate against themselves. Oh, they sure do there, bud. What do we want? Incrementalism. When do we want it after a period of detailed study? If it's not too much trouble and so on. There are some other ideas that were floated.

I mean, one that people got really mad about online was a vehicle mileage tax. Pete Butchug said. Pete Buttigieg. You comment on that because I don't even want to fucking deal with these people. The basic idea is you would charge people a mileage fee on their personal vehicles, right? And that is in lieu of the federal gas tax, is the general idea is you'd be paying this mileage fee instead of the gas tax. One of the problems is right now, you got lots of people with hybrid vehicles,

electric vehicles, so on and so forth. They're not paying the gas tax and the gas tax is sort of like the user fee for using the road. And I mean, if you're like, I don't think the road should be paid for by user fees, okay, whatever. I am kind of okay with the idea of user fees in general. I think at some point. Pete Butchug beats tolls, which is the other option.

Pete Buttigieg does beat tolls, yeah. I think this is something that you're going to eventually have to move to. I mean, here in Pennsylvania, we're already moving to vehicle mileage tax, I think, because at least Governor Wolf said he's phasing out the gas tax, which is definitely better political messaging than what Pete Buttigieg did. So, you know, it's kind of like, and I think for most people, it would be a tax cut. You know, not like a huge, huge burden. I mean, one thing which is an issue is that if you're like a gig worker,

right, and you're driving a shitload of miles every day, actually, that probably will hurt you. Yeah, because you're not an employee either, and you're driving your own car. Right. Yeah, you're not in a sane and sensible system where, you know, you would either have a company vehicle or you would, you know, be reimbursed for mileage by the company. You're in this insane gig worker system, which we allow to exist for some reason. But I don't know, I think VMT is probably something they're going to do eventually, but not in this bill.

Well, I think it's probably not the worst thing to happen. It's probably, it's probably, it's not, it's not like a super progressive tax, but it is more progressive than the gas tax. Because right now, you get a discount if you own an expensive vehicle. Yeah, but I guess the idea there is they're incentivizing you, switching to something that is destroying slightly less of the planet. Yeah. There's other ways to incentivize that you can do.

I hate to say that it's turning me into a Democrat. You could do tax credits. Well, I already do tax credits, and I think they're about as, they're about as effective as they're ever going to be. Oh, no, you people meddle or something. And you give them a dollar. Give them a pin. That'd be cool.

I do that. Congratulations. You have been taxed $1,000. You got a nice little song and cheer for you. I think the issue is that electric vehicles are just going to be better than gasoline-powered vehicles fairly soon. And you won't need to incentivize people to buy them. So long the oil industry can keep them down.

I think we're already at the point where you basically don't have to incentivize people. And hopefully at that point, you get rid of some of the more ridiculous stuff. If you have a high-occupancy vehicle lane, which is supposed to be, if you have three people in your car, you can use this special lane. But right now, a lot of those lanes are like, if you have three people in your car, or you drive a hybrid, or you drive an electric vehicle, you can use this special lane. Hopefully we can get rid of those exemptions.

What the IRS should do is, if you get taxed so much in a year, you should be allowed to commit one vehicular crime. You're already allowed to do that. No, but like another, you should get a get out of jail free card for one traffic offense. People get away with traffic offenses all the time. I think people would like the extra insurance of a thing. It would look like an Uno reverse card, but stamped with the federal seal.

And you could just give it to a cop and he'd be like, yep, okay. You could be like those people with diplomatic plates who just run over pedestrians. And those pedestrians just happen to be people they don't like. Man, I wish I could get diplomatic plates. That'd be cool. Can we form a country? It's a good question. No, you can't. It's very difficult.

Shit. You need to get a couple governments to recognize you. All right, we're going to go see Steadig. Can we get the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to secede from the United States? That'd be pretty good. I'd be in favor of that. Maybe just the city of Philadelphia. Yes, we're going to be our own state, God damn it. First statehood, then the world.

I think this is another question you have to kind of consider with this bill. Are they actually going to pass this thing? And I think the short answer is maybe. And the long answer is, well, so far they're putting off the vote until like July, right? So they can start whipping votes in the Senate. What are the midterms? Midterms are a year and a half from now, probably, something like that. So really trying to rush this through the time they have, huh?

I know, right? I mean, the shovels aren't going to be in the ground until like well after 2022. Maybe they're going to get those contracts awarded quick. So, you know, there's a good chance some like Neil Libg, Ghoul, is going to vote no. And of course, you're unrelated, picture unrelated, picture unrelated. Yeah, the Republicans, of course, actually vote as a party, right? So they're not going to vote yes on this regardless of how much. Hashtag girl boss here is killed it.

I will say that with the silver boots. Yeah. And then, of course, if they don't pass this thing, then, you know, they're not going to get another chance until probably after 2022. And of course, no, in 2022, the Democrats are going to get slaughtered because they will have passed exactly one bill in two years, which I think is where we're headed. Yeah. Plus, whatever, like wedge issue, the right can dream up, which I guess is probably going to be like transgender athletes.

I think, yeah, it's going to be something like something like that. It's going to be like, I don't know, maybe maybe Joe Biden has transgendered your kid. It's a side effect of the vaccine. Your kid is wearing. Can share Nazi means we stole from the Daily Stormer. Yeah. On our supposedly left wing Twitter page. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.

What was that? Who? Someone who's historically been mean to Alice. But once again, I'm not going to give the credit to you. You can find the. The old enough publicity. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much unironically shared a Daily Stormer meme. Yeah. And then framed it as criticism of Israel.

Sure. Oh boy. Well, I mean, if there's one thing the Daily Stormer loves it is criticizing Israel. Yeah. Not for the good reasons. No, for the bad reasons, but it's okay because, you know, I'm doing it ironically or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm I'm I'm goose stepping and putting people on cattle cars is a bit. Yeah. So Joe Biden has put cassias on all of your children. And the only way to remove them is to vote. Ask this infrastructure bill. Vote for MAGA chud to fucking go to Congress, to take their glock to Congress and represent you and do kid pull ups. Oh my God. Jesus Christ.

Do you see that? Do you see Marjorie Taylor Greene's workout routine? Yes, I saw it. No, I don't want to think about it. I don't like that. I don't. That just looks so bad for like so many parts of your body. The thing is right.

What you've got to do is to get that explosive power. The real gain is destroy your entire spine. That's that. 01:28:14,040 --> 01:28:18,040 I thought like the point of a pull up is you get arm strength rather than use the rest of your body to compensate for your lack of arm strength. Crossfit, baby. It's so fucking good for you.

I don't I don't get it. All right. So anyway, that's Biden's infrastructure, Bill. We got through it. It might happen. It might not. It's okay. It's not great.

It's better than anything we've had before. Yep. But it's still like not not adequate. President AOC defends Taiwanese sovereignty. Mark that one down at home. Yeah. Yeah. Put that put that in your predictions book.

So there's a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Oh, shit. Yeah. We have a drop to use for that, which is we as opposed to I person responsible. Could be worse. One above it is the Seinfeld thing. You just you just call in Milo's.

Is it Milo who has the Seinfeld show? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Masters Fat Main. Yeah. Call into his show to do the theme every single time. We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Thank you. Yeah. No worries. God, that's so loud, too. Yeah. I was about to say a little louder than the other ones. Hello, WTYP. After hearing the recent Safety Third about explosives,

I thought you might be interested in a Safety Third about rockets. Yes, very much. I am interested in the Safety Third about rockets. I'm a quality engineer with a material science background. And until recently, I worked in the aerospace industry. Sorry. Now that I have left that world for good, I feel a little more free to share these stories with hopefully just enough technical detail removed to avoid legal ramifications.

Either way, hopefully it will be worth it. The way that you said legal ramifications was bordering on the Cuomo. The tale below has been proof read by my partner and a slide of reference images is attached for your convenience. I see that. Early on in my career, I worked for an aerospace manufacturer that has since been absorbed into Lockheed Martin. There, that should narrow it down.

The aerospace version of I live within three blocks of this dog park. There was a book aside. We were once watching House Hunters while we were drunk. And they wouldn't say what the husband did. They lived, and there's two massive Lockheed plants outside Philly. There's one in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, and there's one in King of Pressure. And there was a guy and his wife. And the guy was like, yeah, I work as an engineer in suburban New Jersey.

And it's just like, so you can just say it, I do, I do spook shit for the federal government under the guise of Lockheed Martin. And my budget is $500,000. I personally give each drone a little kiss before they send it out of the factory. And for this, I am paid $500,000 a month. Part of my role was to travel all across the country visiting factories to inspect parts and processes. One such facility was a large shop where, among many other things, they would fill the missile cases with propellant and install the nozzles.

For anyone not familiar with rocket and motor anatomy, see image one. Do you see the propellant goes in here and then there's a nozzle? The nozzle. Yes, but in summary, the nozzle is the spicy end. I mean, show. After discussing some of the challenges they were having with the nozzle assembly, my contact thought it would be a good idea to show me the live area where the rocket motors were assembled.

This was not something I normally had the opportunity to see since I worked almost exclusively with inert products. Though I was familiar with a variety of explosive chemicals from my time at Think School. Think School, I guess it's university. I did not have any formal training in PPE for this particular hazard. I was experienced enough to know that electrostatic discharge was a big safety consideration since any sort of spark could set off the propellant. To mitigate this risk, my tour guide grabbed me a standard issue, ESD lab coat.

That's number two here. Very fetching smurf collar. Yes, and we headed out to his pickup to drive out to the live area. After driving past the empty lots where they used to dump excess propellant chemicals, we turned a corner and came across another pickup driving slowly just ahead of us. It was towing a small trailer with a stout metal container on back, notably lacking any signage or hazard indicators other than standard brake lights. My guide turned to me and said, see that trailer?

We use those to haul propellant around after we mix it. You know it's empty though because he doesn't have his hazards on. I guess that is technically a word hazard. I suddenly recalled the videos I've seen of other live propellant transfers, which involved flashing lights, red flags, and of course plenty of fire safety diamonds, right? This operation by comparison did not inspire confidence. We got to the assembly building and entered the door where a couple dozen live rocket boosters sat on carts.

One of the issues we were troubleshooting had to do with the nozzle assembly, and so naturally this problem had to be inspected by looking into the aft end of the rockets. You just sort of stare into the nozzle. Rocket chronology. Yes. It was a bit spooky that this thing could theoretically blow my face off, but I was assured that it was all grounded and perfectly safe. I figured if this guy said it was cool, there couldn't be that much to worry about. Besides, how many chances would I get to stare up the ass of a live rocket?

I like that thinking. That's that's that's that Lea Vanerson, good, good. After my contact dropped me back off at the main building, I went to go chat with one of the senior engineers and he asked how the tour was. I mentioned that so-and-so had taken me out to the line. He gave a sort of concerned squint, looked down at my shoes and said, are those shoes ESD? It had not occurred to me that my steel-toed shoes also had to be ESD rated. He took me over to the ESD footwear tester, that's number three, and had me stand on each foot and press the test button. Both shoes failed miserably with no electrical connection between my body and the ground.

This would mean that my body had been generating static charge during my whole tour, which could have sparked if I had touched something. Needless to say, I was shocked. I hope not. Yeah. Now, I was about to say, I hope you weren't shocked. That would have caused problems. Now, it turns out that after casting, most solid rocket propellants are generally pretty stable and my non-ESD footwear fell into the, it's probably fine if we only do it once category. My favorite category.

Yes. And with that, my second most infamous safety blunder was swept neatly under the rug. I'd like to say I should have known better and should have asked more questions, but honestly, I didn't know better. At this point in my career, though, I do regret not reporting the gaps in chaining and safety procedures, since it could have ended up much worse for someone else. Wearing my big nylon sweater to go and inspect the rockets, and I'm just sort of nervously like rubbing my hands together. I'm rubbing a balloon. I'm covered in cats. However, I want to go, I suppose.

I've got one of those like electrified tennis rackets people use to swap bugs, and I'm just sparking one of those up. However, I am a firm believer that it is never too late to do the right thing. So finally, I'm owning up to my mistake and emailing this Godforsaken podcast about it. Hey, I've been on Godforsaken. No, we're kind of Godforsaken. Yeah, we kind of are. If you read this far, thank you. I've been listening in for a long time, and I've grown to appreciate spending time with you all through the magic of podcasting.

The world needs more engineering-minded folks who not only want to know how things are built, but also why things are built. Okay, I might not be Godforsaken, but I'm definitely not an engineering-minded folks. I guess I can be. I have a degree from an actual university. Yes. It's not my fault those idiots gave it to me. The why question is inherently political, and by exploring this, you are challenging future generations of engineers to ask this question from a radical perspective.

By understanding our history, we are not doomed to repeat it, and a better world is possible. Thank you so much for helping to build that better world with your dumb podcast. Thank you. You're welcome. God, I can't wait till some dumb idiot undergrad son of a bitch emails us from whatever rose home, and it was like, your podcast is part of our curriculum now. If you are being taught this, why, first of all, and by whom? All right, that was a nice one.

Anyway, our next episode is, that was Safety Third. Hold on. You're cut it before we get a copyright strike. Okay, our next episode is on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster. Yeah. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Kill James Bond, other podcasts that I do. It's very funny.

Listen to it. Give us money. Give us money. I need money. Give us your money. We have new shirts. Yeah, we do. International shipping, still, not yet.

Working on it, God damn it. Yeah, I'm yelling at Liam, and Liam is yelling at the guy, and the guy is, I don't know who he's yelling at, but he's yelling at somebody. He's talking to his USPS rep. Yeah. And the USPS rep is yelling at somebody, and like at the end of that long chain of yelling is like you and Europe and me getting a shirt. But if you don't live in Europe, if you live in the United Snakes of America,

you can get a shirt with train goods, car bad that I designed myself on it. You can get a shirt with old-timey NTSB guys on it, the Matlab Czanski Drew. It's very good. I imagine, because I can't get one, because guess which country I don't live in? It sucks. Living in a foreign state code FN. Yeah. We don't even ship abroad to like AFPO, so if you're a troop, you're also fucked.

You can't like wear this under your multi-cam. Yeah, we gotta figure that out. But anyway, I guess that was the podcast. Yes, it was. Okay. Under two hours, once again. We're two hours. Yeah, two hours.

All right, all right. Bye, everybody. Bye, everyone.