Olivia
Online
Nice Things and Why You Can't Have Them
@NiceThingsBen
"Nice Things and Why You Can’t Have Them" is a Substack about culture, books, booze, and perhaps a bit of politics by Ben Boychuk. Day job: Opinions @theblaze
Joined July 2022
2.6K Following
463 Followers
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My latest at Substack: This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Decades. https://t.co/cg3wnBNUrp
Brit absolutely losing it over England vs USA possibly happening in Philadelphia on July 4th 😂
Americans will get a kick out of this video.
Europeans in America for the first time for the World Cup is my absolute favorite content right now!
This Frenchman is hilarious!
@SenWarren Senator, this will not work.
Barney Frank’s dying warning should worry conservatives
via @NiceThingsBen
The right needs to study the late Massachusetts congressman not to praise him, but to understand him.
@theblaze
https://t.co/9Y4n8n0SP4
@WitchesBrew88 @dissidentwest The Rebel Alliance was meant to be the Viet Cong and the Empire was the United States. But don't take my word for it. https://t.co/Io6CGLBk7M
This post is satire. It is also the truest thing you will read about California's high-speed rail boondoggle . . . maybe ever.
I am the Director of Strategic Planning at the California High-Speed Rail Authority.
I have held this position for seventeen years. In that time I have written four business plans, overseen six revisions, and authored eleven methodology updates. The train has not moved.
There is a hard hat on the shelf behind my desk. It was given to me at the Fresno groundbreaking ceremony in 2015. It is still in the cellophane. I use it as a bookend for the business plan binders. There are four binders. They are substantial. The hat holds them upright.
In 2008, California voters approved Proposition 1A. San Francisco to Los Angeles. Two hours and forty minutes. Fifty-five dollars per ticket. Ninety-five million annual riders by 2030. Total cost: $33.5 billion. Fifty-three percent said yes.
The current cost estimate is $231 billion.
I am sometimes asked to provide context for that figure. The state housing shortage is 2.5 million units. At the California median home price, $231 billion would produce 577,000 of them. The average public school teacher in California earns $95,000. $231 billion is every one of their salaries for eight years. The state has a documented wildfire suppression staffing gap. $231 billion would fund 6,400 additional fire crews for a century. I include these comparisons for context. They are not relevant to my work.
We have built 119 miles of infrastructure. Columns. Viaducts. Grade separations. You can see them from Highway 99 between Madera and Bakersfield. They stand in rows across land that used to grow things. No track runs on them. No train has touched them. Some of them have graffiti now. I have seen the photographs in the quarterly progress reports. I have not visited.
There was an almond grower outside Hanford. She is in our files as Parcel 417, Hanford East. The Authority acquired twelve acres of her property through eminent domain in 2016 for right-of-way clearance. The trees were removed. The soil was graded flat. The right-of-way has been clear for nine years. Nothing has been built on Parcel 417. Her file notes that she attended three public comment hearings between 2014 and 2016. I do not know what she said at those hearings. I know what we said. We called the acquisition "a critical milestone in the project's advancement." I wrote those words for the 2016 Annual Report. They were well-received. Her contact information has been flagged in the Phase 2 preliminary assessment, in case additional right-of-way is required. Phase 2 does not yet exist. Her contact information does.
The original completion date was 2020. The current target is 2032. The route has been revised from San Francisco-to-Los Angeles to Merced-to-Bakersfield. One hundred seventy-one miles. I refer to this as Phase 1.
The French national rail company, SNCF, joined the project as a consulting partner in 2010. They left in 2011. They used the phrase "political dysfunction," which is diplomatic language for a country that built the Eiffel Tower in two years telling you it cannot build your train. SNCF then went to Morocco and built a high-speed rail line from Tangier to Casablanca. Two hundred miles. Operational by 2018. Seven years.
We are in year eighteen. I included the SNCF departure in the 2022 business plan as a "comparative international case study." The lesson I drew was that Morocco has simpler permitting requirements. This is accurate. I did not draw other lessons.
The $9.95 billion bond that voters approved costs the state $647 million per year for thirty years. Roughly $20 billion in total repayment. The bond is being serviced on schedule. $647 million leaves the state treasury every year and arrives in accounts associated with a train that does not carry passengers. It has done this since 2010. The bond repayment is the most functional transit system we have built. It moves $647 million a year. On time. Every time.
In 2019, Governor Newsom said the project "would cost too much and, respectfully, take too long." He then continued funding it. I appreciated the word "respectfully." It acknowledged the problem without producing an obligation to solve it. My team delivered the 2020 business plan revision the following quarter. It was well-received.
The Governor also supported legislation to shield certain cost details from public disclosure. That same year, thousands of pages were removed from the Authority's website. I was not involved in that decision. I was involved in the pages.
Last Friday, a television host told the Governor on camera that the project now costs $231 billion. The Governor said, "No, it's not. It's not." The $231 billion figure is from the 2026 draft business plan. Page 47. I wrote page 47. The Governor then said we had gotten the project "back on track." I noted the phrasing. A rail project that has not yet laid operational track is not, in a strict sense, on one. I did not raise this.
The ridership projection has been revised from 95 million annual riders by 2030 to 36 million by 2060. I updated that figure personally during the 2024 planning cycle. The ticket price has been revised from $55 to $105. Both figures describe a service that does not yet exist.
The State Auditor published a report. The title is: "Flawed Decision Making and Poor Contract Management Have Contributed to Billions in Cost Overruns and Delays in the System's Construction." That is twenty words. We have 119 miles of columns that carry nothing. I read the report carefully. It was thorough. We incorporated its findings into the next business plan revision.
The board was scheduled to vote on the latest business plan on April 29th. The vote was delayed. Additional review was requested. I support additional review.
My pension vests in 2034. The project's current completion target is 2032. If the train is finished on schedule, my position becomes unnecessary two years before my pension matures. The completion date is determined by the business plan. I write the business plan.
The plan says the project should continue. It has always said this. I have never written one that recommended otherwise.
Yes, but they meant well… or something. 🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️
Four legs good, two legs better, amirite?
Dear Senator Sanders,
Oh, this is RICH. This is so perfectly, exquisitely, weapons-grade rich that I had to put down my anatomy exams and just... appreciate it for a moment.
The man who got thrown out of a SOCIALIST HIPPIE COMMUNE in Vermont in 1971 — after THREE DAYS — for refusing to do any actual work while everyone else planted, harvested, and hauled water, is out here telling me the OLIGARCHS want to control everything.
Three. Days. The communists gave you a longer trial period than most employers give to someone who steals from the register.
Here is what Jim Quinn's Law Number Two says, and I want every single person reading this to tattoo it somewhere useful: "If you want to know what liberals are up to, pay attention to what they accuse conservatives of doing."
Senator, you OWN THREE HOMES. A Burlington residence. A D.C. townhouse. A $575,000 vacation lake house in North Hero, Vermont — purchased in 2016, the same year you were touring the country telling college students the system is rigged. Your net worth sits somewhere between $2.5 and $3 million. You have pocketed over $2.5 MILLION in book royalties since 2011. That elevator is clearly not stuck between floors for you, is it.
And then — THEN — during your "Fighting Oligarchy Tour" with AOC, you spent over $550,000 in CAMPAIGN FUNDS on PRIVATE JET TRAVEL. Half a million dollars on luxury jets to lecture working Americans about the dangers of wealth.
When Fox News caught you boarding a Bombardier Challenger 604 — a jet that runs up to $15,000 PER HOUR — you did not apologize. You did not even blink. You looked directly into the camera and said, and I am quoting this verbatim because it is the most accidentally honest thing you have ever said: "You think I'm gonna be sitting on a waiting line at United?"
Senator. THAT IS OLIGARCHIC THINKING. That is TEXTBOOK "the rules apply to you people, not to me." That is the elevator music of every single billionaire you have spent 35 years pretending to oppose. In a battle of wits with your own stated beliefs, you showed up completely unarmed.
Thirty-five years in Congress. You know what your personal legislative output looks like? Eight bills passed. EIGHT. In three and a half DECADES. That works out to 0.23 bills per year. I have produced more graded anatomy exams in a single semester. Your two greatest solo legislative achievements — the ones with your name on top, the thing YOU actually DID — are the naming of a post office in Danville, Vermont, and the naming of a post office in Fair Haven, Vermont.
You named. Two. Post offices.
You are as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to actually passing legislation, but you want me to believe you are the vanguard of the working class. That sounds like a YOU problem.
Quinn's Law #25: "Liberals are great at giving away other people's money." You have been living PROOF of that law for 35 years. You give away everyone else's money — from a vacation home on a lake — while spending half a million on jets because you are far too important to wait in line with the taxpayers funding your lifestyle.
You want to talk about oligarchs controlling the media? You have been IN the media for four decades. You just finished a $75 million documentary. You have a book deal. You have a podcast. You HAVE the megaphone and you are using it to tell people that other people have the megaphone. The gene pool really needed a lifeguard for THAT particular reasoning.
I am a high school science teacher in Northeast Ohio. I support a family of six on a teacher's salary. I am not particularly impressed by a man with three houses, $550,000 in jet receipts, and 0.23 bills per year telling me he stands with the working class. More famous than wise, Senator. More famous than wise.
The hippie commune knew it in 72 hours. How long is it going to take everyone else?
IF you agree: LIKE this post so the algorithm shows it to people who need to read it. SHARE this.
COMMENT below — do YOU think a man with three homes and a half-million dollar private jet habit speaks for working Americans? Tell me.
And if you want MORE of this — the data, the history, the science, the stories — JOIN Bski's Classroom community on X or YouTube.
But what do I know — I am only a science teacher who can actually do math, a retired Army combat medic who knows what genuine sacrifice looks like, and apparently one of the few people left who finds it suspicious that the most vocal enemy of oligarchy just cannot bring himself to wait in line at the airport with the rest of us.
@JoJoFromJerz @GuntherEagleman @catturd2
#MAGA #Veterans #Trump
@TomSteyer Money can buy you a lot of things. Brains, evidently, aren’t among them.
Anti-billionaire group endorses billionaire. Perfect. No notes.
@Oilfield_Rando https://t.co/vjYD8bf9oT
Under Biden, we would have called this....
@TBC_on_X @mapleblooded @savethewestnow4 Fuck you. It's terrible. Engagement farming isn't art. I think one day artists will be able to use the tool for some exceptional storytelling. This isn't it and you know it. And if you don't know it, fuck you.
@TBC_on_X Sucks. Goddammit, do better.
America was built by people chasing the next frontier. Do we still believe in that… or did we trade it for comfort?
@JessicaLBurbank I'm a few days late to this party. Have you retracted this yet? Or does your religion not allow it?
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