After months of delay, the House passes infrastructure bill
npr.orgFor me, this article was quite confusing and hard to follow. In contrast, CNN’s article was easier for me to understand:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/05/politics/house-votes-infrastr...
The $1trn headline makes me expect something to excite the imagination... A roman aquaduct wow factor. Something to marvel at.
Am I being shallow? Does it make bad sense to cut a $100bn slice for something epic? A hypersonic monorail perhaps?
The headline price is an artifact of congressional accounting. It is an estimate of the 10-year cost.
The MSM uses that number when their corporate masters want you to be against the spending. They actually explain why it is a fairly meaningless number when they want the spending.
$100bn/year is still an astronomical amount of money.
It's $300 per person per year.
Even factoring that I will have to cover for several other people who can't pay, all I say is, well we have an astronomical amount of infrastructure and it's been neglected for decades, and, as long as I get something for it.
I don't care that it's 100bn, that was going to be collected and spent on something regardless. I care far more about what it's spent on.
Maybe it will add incentive down the road to close the loopholes on the Bezos's of the world a little.
I like your optimism that it was going to be covered anyways and that you'll get something out of it
For a person: yes.
For 330 million people: no.
To compare: the US occupation of Afghanistan cost about this much per year, but that budget has been freed up.
I live in Europe and I see the same lack of basic understanding of finance. People claim the EU costs a lot of money. And it does. But not per person. Not at all.
And any reporter that talks about macro economic numbers like this without normalizing it per capita is either an idiot or is intentionally manipulating.
> To compare: the US occupation of Afghanistan cost about this much per year, but that budget has been freed up.
It has not. Do you think we downsized our military after leaving?
100E9/300E6~=333 that's ~2 netflix subscriptions per US citizen. Outlandish!
Yes, everything at the scale of 300+ million people all seeking a comfortable modern living standard is outlandish. That's my point!
It's still a bill authorizing a trillion dollars in spending. Of course it's spread out over time as it's for things that will need money over time rather than all at once.
But it's still a trillion dollars.
It gives the DOE secretary a mandate and budget to commission projects for new, smaller nuclear plants (300MW). Unless that got removed…
This would be really cool! Unfortunately I have no idea how to even tell what's in this bill -- do you?
Discussed and linked here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28047538
You can read it. It is a public document.
California high speed rail will run $100bn. If we're lucky. Is that sexy enough?
Depends. How fast? How cool?
> The $1trn headline makes me expect something to excite the imagination
A country running out of money and going into hyperinflation via money printing ?
Exciting enough for you ?
The dollar is incredibly unlikely to hyper inflate. There is a big middle ground of damaging inflation that is not hyperinflation though
I'm definitely personally on the more hawkish side, re inflation.
But this bill may help reduce longer term inflation if it's actually spent wisely.
e.g. if port throughput/efficiency increases, we could process imports more cheaply.
I'm not an expert on the bill, but the skew in the numbers seem a bit strange. Personally I think the cost should have been weighted much more heavily towards logistics/energy aspect of infrastructure, rather than repairs.
I'll have to read the fine print, but the money for "bridges" seems kind of wasteful unless they're actually building net new bridges.
Are the bridges in poor condition actually on the verge of structurally failing? Or just older but serviceable.
E.g. a second bridge connecting VA and MD over the Potomac would be pretty awesome, and greatly alleviate congestion.
> if it's actually spent wisely.
Precisely.
A spending bill is like any other kind of investment: for it to pay back, it has to be made carefully and thoughtfully, and must be watched over like milk on fire until it actually bears fruit.
That's what the private sector and private capital does best, because in that space, failure spells death.
For a govt, failure means nothing - to quote PT barnum - there's a sucker (or taxpayer in that case) born every minute. All you have to do is survive the next election cycle, and doing that these days has pretty much nothing to do with how well you actually invest taxpayer dollars and everything to do with how good a PR firm you hire.
Sadly, the US govt (like most govts) are neither good at investing nor at babysitting their investments: they are one of the most wasteful human organization on the planet, both unwittingly (bureaucracy and thousands of federal employees who serve no actual purpose whatsoever) and willingly (corruption and pork).
The trillion dollar that is being spent in this bill will neither improve the infrastructure of the country, nor go to the pockets of people who need it to help them lift themselves out of poverty.
It will just be wasted, like most of the rest of your tax money.
Oh, and - minor detail - it's a trillion dollar the government doesn't have.
It is therefore going to take on additional debt.
But, I mean, at this point who's counting anymore?
> But this bill may help reduce longer term inflation if it's actually spent wisely.
Absolutely! And it's a shame that the USG is using this type of cash-based accounting instead of depreciating long term assets like any other business.
At the same time, anything to do with infrastructure is so wasteful that I am always a little afraid whenever these infrastructure bills come up.
Good discussion here: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2021/08/02/why-does-infrastruct...
They're really working on making automobiles a lot safer by installing breathalyzers in every car. Exciting times!
https://time.com/6086981/bipartisan-infrastructure-bill-brea...
Apparently this is real — fascinating! ( The relevant text of the bill is here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3684... )
This builds on an NHTSA-funded pilot program called Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety (DADDS; https://www.dadss.org/).
DADDS advanced two technologies for passive impaired driving detection: non-contact breath sensors (exhaled EtOH near the driver), and touch sensors (embedded into the steering wheel).
The bill adds this as a requirement on top of existing distracted driving prevention systems, which have been expanding but don't always get much press (e.g. Subaru's driver-facing cameras).
Seems like a little hand sanitizer would fool both.
The wording in the actual bill looks vague enough that I hope this is more for show than for actual implementation.
It specifically requires non-contact sensors that can “accurately” detect blood alcohol level of the driver. It may be possible to detect trace exhaled alcohol in the air, but you’re never going to get accurate blood alcohol measurements from proximity alone.
In the unlikely event that such a system made it to market, it would quickly become common knowledge among alcoholics that it could be defeated by rolling down your window to get more airflow through the cabin. More airflow means trace alcohol in the air is diluted and blown away. Reading goes to zero.
The bill also requires that the technology limit the operation of a vehicle after impairment is detected. There’s no way a system that suddenly causes a vehicle to slow down to pedestrian speeds could be considered safe for use on freeways. Can you imagine someone’s car slowing to a crawl on the freeway and forcing them to move at low speeds on the shoulder because their distraction detection system had a false positive? Even a false positive rate of 0.001% would mean a lot of us would pass a car experiencing a false positive on our commute every week. Awful.
About your last paragraph: the goal of these measurements would of course be to prefect you from driving at all when alcohol is detected. Suggesting that the idea is that people are slowed down on a freeway because of this seems absurd.
failing to project that this would happen all day every day everywhere, is absurd
No it's not. Car manufacturers and regulators have been trying to make cars safer for decades and won't just (require to) add some feature that is as unsafe as your proposed "solution" And the solution here is simple: do the check when the car is starting and don't drive when alcohol is detected. That's how current alcohol locks work. Nobody is suggesting to test when the car is already driving and nobody is suggesting to slow cars down.
>They're really working on making automobiles a lot safer by installing breathalyzers in every car. Exciting times!
Can't tell if sarcasm.
Some groups are huge fans of making everything as safe as possible.
This is an exciting win for them.
Still can't tell...
This whole time I've been confused how investing more money in roads is compatible with our climate goals. Should we not trying to decommission roads and encourage people to move to denser, walkable and cyclable city centers?
That’s probably a reductive take. This bill is massive, over 2000 pages. It has funding for all kinds of transportation, green, energy and digital infrastructure. Roads are a part of that because once they are built, they need to be maintained or else people will die. There are several examples of bridges and overpasses collapsing and leading to deaths and badly maintained road surface leads to fatal accidents as well. Also, talking about this bill in terms of what it does for roads and bridges is going to be the best way to talk to the public as that is the thing they experience every day. Talking about the esoterics of the energy grid isn’t going to land for most people.
An area that I didn’t see talk about was investment in pedestrian and bicycle safety infrastructure. That’s generally a much smaller investment with significant gains in reducing car travel, to the GP’s point.
I would have liked to see spending on bike and pedestrian safety projects as a percentage of any money spend on car infrastructure.
I live in a fairly rural, but affluent, part of Michigan now, and at one of the township board meetings, they were discussing a proposed bike lane. The reason they didn't want it? Only one person (on the board) really said anything at all, and his reasoning was that he imagined a scenario in which there would be some sort of biking event where lots of people would be biking the trail, and his driveway could somehow end up getting blocked. Keep in mind, this is a rural area where most properties sit on 5-10+ acres at least, and the driveways are very far apart generally.
It didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but I just got the impression that for whatever reason, they were deeply opposed to the idea of people being able to safely bike down country roads. After living in San Francisco and Indianapolis in the years before, it was definitely weird seeing people being opposed to bike paths, especially when it would not interfere with their country life almost at all. Maybe they thought it would start them down a path of changing their way of life? I don't know.
I think another part is that cycling is a culture war signifier, because it's associated with environmentalism and urbanism.
"they need to be maintained or else people will die. "
Maintained or decomissioned.
> Should we not trying to decommission roads and encourage people to move to denser, walkable and cyclable city centers?
Roads are still needed inside cities and between them. The Ancient Romans (famously) had roads.
Roads used to be for people:
> Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers."
> In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2924825-fighting-traffic
It's their current focus—basically only personal automobiles—that is the problem, and not the technology itself.
The loss of our streets was a great tragedy.
You might enjoy notjustbikes on youtube.
Roads act more like veins transporting resources to parts of civilization. Decrease efficiency, increase emissions. But the critical thing is infrastructure being in disrepair can and has killed people.
I can't find a source, but I have read that it is trucks which do the bulk of the wear and tear of roads.
Making these trucks electric won't help.
I read that piece too and it is not surprising. I imagine the 18 wheelers going through cities aren’t doing a lot of good either. I drive one of those trucks and trying to get out of the cycle.
The US is huge, and people are already migrating to the cities (a bad move in the light of COVID). The remaining cities still need to be connected by roads, even if you’re closing down small communities.
You can also improve public transport, build bikelanes and sidewalk, while updating roads to help the parts of the community that will inevitable live outside the inner city limits.
I dont have the data but it seems transportation is something that exponentially gets harder to solve the more resources you have.
Anecdotally, I live in a suburban area in a "developing" country. It was definitely not designed for people to live in - there are no small shops just a huge big chain store, barely any sidewalks and I havent seen any people just walking about. Every house seems to have about two cars. Outside the suburbs its the complete opposite. Roads are full of people milling about and kids playing cricket or soccer. Cars are second class citizens on the townships. First class citizens in the suburbs. Crazy.
Hasn’t the trend been the opposite during covid, people have actually been moving out of large city centers? I think generally people like to have the space, especially with a family, and it’s just cheaper in the suburbs.
> This whole time I've been confused how investing more money in roads is compatible with our climate goals.
It is compatible with our goal of getting from point A to point B safely. Climate goals are not the only goals, and if you look at this bill carefully, you'll see that they are quite secondary to other goals, which reflects the underlying political reality.
You'd still need most of the roads for logistical reasons. Cities need food, a whole lot of food, and it has to come from somewhere it can actually be grown.
Railways can be used for that, quite efficiently (much more so than trucks).
Only about 10% of the money is for actual infrastructure like roads.
Looking at the breakdown numbers posted by the White House, seems like a lot more than 10%:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
It’s not really about infrastructure like roads and stuff. It’s about “infrastructure.”
I’m confused what you mean with the scare quotes. It seems from the article at least what they passed has a lot of money for roads and stuff. Or do you mean that money will just sort of evaporate with nothing getting done?
What exactly is in it?
If you add up the numbers at the bottom of the article, it is only about 500B. Is the rest already already allocated infrastructure spending?
good catch; it's $550B in new spending and $450B of renewing infrastructure programs that were going to expire (or have expired since the bill has dragged on)
I don't know what the $450B is though, all the media focus and interest is on the new shiny stuff.
Ha! Just as I expected, a bill that mostly builds infrastructure that corporations/Wall Street wanted, not much for the slave class (also known as the “middle class”).
As Warren Buffet once said “there has been class warfare and my class won.”
Biden should man-up and issue executive orders to satisfy at least a few of his campaign promises to the non-elite class.
You have to be more specific and explain why the middle class slaves don’t benefit from power lines, airports, fixed water pipes, flood protections etc.
We benefit somewhat by increased employment but I believe that the reconciliation bill had the good stuff for non-elites, not this bill.
It is an open question whether massive spending is appropriate right now.
Fiber to the basement, 1 to 10 gigabyte internet speeds?
Bad news for crypto.
I’d be interested to know the implications if you have time to share.
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/11/06/house-sends-inf...
Tl;dr it will be a felony offense to receive >$10k of any digital asset without filing a report including KYC information on the sender.
10k i which time frame? a crypto can in worth from 9k to 10k and back to 9k in one day.
Sounds like maybe a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) banks have always had to file.
Similar, but this applies to individuals and non-financial companies.
The exact time of transaction.
They were loosing the grip on things?
Everything Biden does is very short sighted....
Thank you
Good
What is good?
The comment I responded to consisted of one sentence that communicated one idea. Where’s the ambiguity in what I think is good?
Ok, so I assume you are saying it's good crypto is having bad news. May I ask why?
I think there’s enough info out there on what’s bad about crypto, I don’t have a particularly unique take on it. I suggest Googling it.
Why? Would it not be worse if the bill had not passed?
The 6050l provisions in this bill are impossible to comply with, and carry criminal charges of you don’t. It would be far better if this bill didn’t pass.
Previous upload and convo of the senate bill text for reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28047538
Much ink gets spilled over the machinations leading up to legislation. But the machinations being in the open as they were give us normies a chance express our opinions on it in real time to our representatives. It’s actually the opposite of lobbyists and crony capitalism. Granted, two things can be true and lobbyists and “well funded interests” get their say all throughout the process. Still a world of difference from a bill coming out from closed door meetings with nobody outside even seeing it.
Tesla stock will explode! Plus the hertz order was confirmed!