The Glade 4.0

Actually, customers already pay employers to hire more people. Obama is confused about this new "economy thing."

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Clearly, unemployment is up. We can go by the official 10% and change number, or we can go by the much higher unemployment figures that get bandied about by the opposition when their team is not in power. Democrats did this with Bush, as well, so it's not like it's a new tactic.

The proof, as I said before, will be in the pudding. The economy is getting better, and as it gets better, jobs will follow. It will take time. Job creation efforts are important. We learned from Bush that tax cuts do not in fact lead to job creation. The wealth saved on tax cuts simply gets transferred up the ladder. So that route is out.

I have a feeling that a jobs package (assuming it doesn't get made useless in our Senate. Fat chance, I know) will put Americans back to work. We need to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. Those jobs stay right here in the US, and that's key.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

What part of our "infrastructure" is "crumbling?"

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

If you live in Maryland the answer is "all of it"

That's a state problem, though, not a federal one.

Interestingly I just finished the unit on Rapid Bridge Classification in the Engineer Captain's Career Course. They didn't say anything about bridges "crumbling", just to look for "more than mild" deterioration before performing your calculations.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Bridges, roads, schools, waterways, natural bulwarks against natural disaster (wetlands around New Orleans, for example), the energy grid, alternative energy resources (nuclear, wind, solar, natural gas), health care, and other arenas are all in varying states of deterioration. Those investments pay off in the long run, and provide good-paying domestic job opportunities and business opportunities here in America.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Clearly, Montegue has forgotten which forum he is frequenting. I've been arguing that real unemployment exceeded 10% since Bush the Elder was in office.

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If by detoriatoring you mean become worn due to normal use, then obviously the answer is yes and I have to ask, what exactly the ****, if anything, is your point?

You don't know the first thing about half of those enterprises (and many of them are privately owned, anyway) but you are just listing them to make the situation sound near post apocalyptic and dystopian, hoping your pathetic appeal to emotion will make your case more valid. It won't.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Yes yes. You are always the exception. I thought that went without saying?

Raf - What is my point? Pretty simple. We need these infrastructure projects to go forward. We have needed to work on them for a very long time. We have lots of people out there looking for good jobs. We can employ them in theses ways, and lower our unemployment rate.

More so, those jobs will lead to long term improvements overall. Our bridges and highways improve, so too does commerce. If we build high speed light rail, more people have access to more places, meaning they can work outside their normal area. Furthermore, more people are working on building and repairing that infrastructure. Those people now take their paycheck and put it right back into the economy, largely here at home.

We have needed to do these things for some time, in some cases. In other cases, the ideas are sound investments in our future. Part of economic growth is infrastructure, and increasing our infrastructure in terms of education, energy use and efficiency, natural resource management, roads and bridges, etc, will give us an overall boost in the economy.

It's a win-win. People go back to work. The economy improves as more people spend more money. Businesses grow, and hire more people. Our infrastructure improves, making more room for growth - what, exactly, is your problem with that?

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

You don't have a point, because you have no way to substantiate your claim of "deteriorating infrastructure". There are very specfiic metrics and monitoring methods used to determine the adequacy of a given component to provide its service function. You have not demonstrated where and to what degree (using said metrics) the "infrastructure" is "deteriorating".

Therefore, there is no reason (since you have no presented me one) for me to believe it is in dire need of repair. Common public misconception and rhetoric about the matter, you driving over a bumpy road, or whatever bloggers have posted recently are not substantial evidence.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Rafael:

Actually, he has a valid point, if only because our road construction technology is nearly a century out of date that this point. Certain states, Kentucky and Tennessee in particular, have horrible maintenance standards for their road structures.

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Texas roads suck, too.

From personal experience, I spent 8 weeks and something like 30,000 miles or more on the road over the course of the last year. The trip went from Houston to Maryland to New Mexico, back to the East coast (new york, new jersy), then across the country to the midwest (MN, Wisconsin, Kansas), then to Montana, Then Utah, then California, then Aaaaaaall the way the **** back across the map to the east coast and then back to Texas.

Our roads need help. Our bridges need help. Our infrastructure needs help.

Our infrastructure includes how our energy is distributed (the grid), our education, our sustainable use of natural resources, our reliance on foreign oil, our energy efficiency, our civil engineering, and countless other factors.

As an example, the wetlands around New Orleans were allowed to deteriorate over the course of many years. Had we spent the money and invested in the preservation of those wetlands, the economic disaster that was Hurricane Katrina may have been abated or even eliminated. Wetlands serve as a bulwark against hurricanes.

Our problem in this country is one of short sightedness. We don't look at the long term as worth investing in because it generally requires short term pain in terms of taxes and slower immediate economic growth.

We need to get past that. We all benefit from infrastructure investment. So too do our children, and their children.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

That's a problem with those states then. Morever, there are no strong cases or studies to demonstrate (through quantitative empericism) that newer construction technologies provide better quality or durable roads.

Even if we surmise they are better, you still have to deal with the fact that start-up capital to construct highways is not cheap and many of the construction methods require virgin soil that would necessitate abandoning many current roadways in place.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

It's interstate highways and bridges, Raf. Not just state roads. Yes, states need to invest, too. But so too does the federal government.

No, the investment is not cheap. Investment always carries a cost, and risk. That being said, it will pay off, and not just for a few people.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Our infactructure does not include our "energy effeciency". That's just an attribute of different distribution and transportation systems that comprise the infrastructure. I'm not sure what "our civil engineering" means. Or supposed to mean. It's not very convincing in any case.



Demonstrate that this is the case other than just asserting it. I'd lend you more credibility if you would have claimed man-made bulwarks such as dykes or levee, since that's actually the case. What you asserted was just the equivalent of a liberal one-two combination: you can make a fashionable, eco-friendly defense for the poor wetlands while at the same time lamenting our inaction to prevent a hurricane from destroying a sub-oceanic, coastal city.



Are you kidding? That's the exact strategy the Federal Reserve has taken - rather than allowing economic restructuring so desperately required, they sacrifice it to perserve consumerism to inflate flawed economic indicators. I can't even begin to believe your defense of such a strategy given this knowledge.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

**** repeating myself is getting tiring. You have to quantiatively demonstrate that the investment is greater than the cost of replacement, loss of service for the original roadways, and service life left in the original road that is being decomissioned.

You don't personally have to do this, but someone needs to. You can't just assert building a new road always saves money, otherwise to save money we could just constantly build new roads. Like I already said, you driving over a bumpy road is not indication that it is cost effecient to decomission the road.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

We can save money over the long haul by innovating with regard to roadway infrastructure, but the U.S. faces problems fairly unique to it as a nation. Namely, we have a very low population density and spread out urban centers. The other problem is that urban centers themselves have no easy way to maintain/reconstruct their own roads using newer technology. That said, our existing roadway infrastructure was not designed for current use; we need to adapt.

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Bridges and roads suffer to some degree from too many hands touching the money, and the fact that federal government collects money from the states, to give back to the states to maintain those edifices, in which some states get less than they paid, and the federal government has taken to using the funds the states turned over as a bludgeon to keep the states in check with federal laws (see Louisiana, who has the worst roads in the nation by a long shot), which should be unconstitutional.

Schools are, again, a local matter of the districts or private organizations, and I also feel a problem of too many people touching the money and taking their cut before it gets put to use. Either you don't need school districts, or you don't need state education departments, and you certainly don't need federal agencies getting involved in school building.

I'm curious as to which waterways you think are crumbing.. Inter-coastal? Some other instance? Of course, as with the "natural" bulwarks (which are anything but natural...), I question whether the Corp should be trying to protect private interests in areas that shouldn't be inhabitated.... NO being a perfect example.

Energy grid is reasonable, but I would put that towards incentives to the different regions/power companies to implement upgrades.

Alternative energy is a non-issue if the Federal would start approving the designs for nuclear plants gummed up in the works. Not that that will happen, since politically there is a dominant party in power that doesn't like nuclear and would rather pursue more expensive and less developed energy.

Healthcare is private business...

Sigh.

I never asserted that building new roads always saves more money. And I just want to point out that at least on the issue of roads, Khross and I are actually in agreement. You might want to think about that before reacting in such a knee-jerk fashion to my points.

Our roads are in bad repair, and need to be brought up to snuff. So too, our education. So too, our energy infrastructure. That includes the efficient use of power, alternate sources of energy, and everything related to that issue.

Your fundamental misunderstanding of all the factors that make up our infrastructure is not my fault, nor my responsibility to correct.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Are you responding to Rafael or me?

You're the one making bare assertions without quantiatively demonstrating that repairs would indeed save money. So how is that misunderstanding on my part? Khross's assertions are macroscopic and qualitative in nature, so it really doesn't concern me that he agrees with you. Lots of people agreed W. Bush was a great president, so does that make them correct in your eyes?

The fact that my rejection of your arbitrary assertion is not paddingly worded does not make it knee-jerk; you want to call it knee-jerk so you have some sort of argument against its validity which is just another form of a strawman.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

it was my understanding (and I'll preface this by saying I have zero knowledge of the subject) that roads were a secondary concern. The real places that need shoring up are things like the power grid. Water systems too are far more antiquated (and have changed more dramatically) in the last 100 years than roads. Road technology has been around for 2000+ years, and while improvements are made, the efficency gained is not necessarily so great as say, improving the power systems that are 50 years out of date.

TheRiov:

Power Systems are a far harder problem to qualify and quantify than roads. Good power system infrastructure is a combination of new technology and established mechanical failsafe measures. That said, the biggest problem with power delivery in the United States is above ground delivery lines. You can't really solve the transmission line problems at all right now. There's no easy answer to miles upon miles of air insulated carrier lines and the inefficiency required to transmit across them.

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Raf.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Right. We bleed a ridiculous amount of electricity as a result of outdated grid structure. I don't know that I agree that it *can't* be done. Perhaps we cannot make it perfect, but that doesn't mean an investment in improving it would not pay off.

Raf - how do you not see how such improvements would save money? That's what's baffling me about your position. When we built the roadways and invested in that infrastructure, commerce took off. We were able to more easily ship goods across state lines and even across the borders of our nation. That infrastructure has to be maintained, or that benefit will begin to decline. Maintaining it is part of having it. Like any investment, you need to work with it to keep it healthy.

As for cost-benefit analysis -







That **** ain't free.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show