▪️You can have the same experience in the US with the new Brightline trains that run from Miami to Orlando. Comfy seats, great service, Starlink internet, top speed of over 200 km/hr, fares starting at $79, but privately run.
https://www.afar.com/magazine/brightline-train-review-riding-floridas-high-speed-rail
▪️Brightline has other projects in the works, like a route between LA and Vegas, which is breaking ground this year and ambitiously projected to be completed by the Summer Olympics in 2028. It’s partially subsidized by the govt, but mostly private funds.
https://www.dot.nv.gov/projects-programs/transportation-projects/brightline-west-high-speed-rail-project
▪️Unfortunately, Brightline’s Florida ridership has been below forecast, and they are issuing junk bonds for new funding. Whether or not it succeeds will depend on the market, perhaps high speed rail just doesn’t make sense in the US, but they’ve shown how a privately run railroad can be built quick and efficiently. And if it fails, it’s primarily a loss for investors, not taxpayers.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-26/brightline-florida-s-high-speed-railroad-slashes-2024-ridership-forecast?embedded-checkout=true
▪️Meanwhile, the “nationalized” high speed rail boondoggle in CA drags on. In 2008 it was pitched to taxpayers as a high speed rail connecting LA to SF, completed by 2020 at a cost of $33B. As of 2024, no rail exists and no estimates are given for completion.
▪️Now, they estimate it will cost $35B just for the “train to nowhere” route from Merced to Bakersfield, which might be completed by 2030-33. The rest of the track will now cost an additional $100B! If it ever gets completed. A private project would have smartly been abandoned long ago, but “nationalized” projects can burn through endless money and timetables.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-03-21/high-speed-rail
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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