The suspension part of the bridge is silly symbolism. Oakland wanted an architectural statement about what a great city it is (stop snickering!)
A couple of more pylons under the roadway would have worked fine.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com http://www.highlandtechnology.com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser drivers and controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
Think of it as technology transfer. Sure, the Chinese get to build a bridge or two, but the US can then steal their technical know-how, and soon the bridges will be being built by US companies.
Your idea of "leftie" is a joke.
So much for the "leftie" media. If we really had dissident journalists worth their salt these lies would be exposed. Instead they are used to attract viewers/sell newspapers, i.e. for profit. Those damned capitalist lefties!
Jeez, what a duckwit! I'm amazed at how many duckwits inhabit this newsgroup. I used to think EEs were quite clever.
I believe you are confusing this with the new Bay Bridge, which was built in China. Actually the Chinese welding was so bad that much of it was repaired locally. You can thank Arnold for the Chinese contract.
The California high speed rail hasn't awarded any Chinese contracts as far as I can tell. The engineering went to URS, which is no surprise. They are politically connected, but they are also quite competent.
This rail project will never be completed. It is simply too riddled with political decisions. If you study it, there were too options. One along route 580, and one over the Pacheco Pass. The Pacheco Pass route won because San Jose had significant political influence. But the route passes through a sensitive ecological area and it also screws with homes along the peninsula.
If they just ran it from the end of the metroliner to the end of BART, it might stand a chance. That eliminates the expensive underground construction. But LA, San Jose, and San Francisco don't want that.
The funny thing is in the metro areas, these train will be no faster than BART, so it makes zero sense to run them to San Francisco when you could just get off the train and then get on BART in Livermore.
Actually, you are.
From what I'm reading on the subject, high speed rail is being sabotaged by conservative politicians simply because it is an Obama administration initiative, and most of the so-called problems with it are manufactured.
se.
Some of them are. AlwaysWrong isn't one of them.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
..
.ese? I really don't see a problem with any of this, the work should go to t he people most capable of completing the job. The nationalists here might r ecall the US turned to Chinese labor to build the transcontinental railroad s because the homebrew laborers here were worthless drunken thieving riffra ff, mostly Irish. The same is happening now.
American riffraff who think they're entitled to the work simply because of an accident of birth?
Or, we could subsidize them AND send the work offshore. That's today.
our prosperity is competition.
Indeed it is. It keeps us honest, drives innovations and improvements.
The main thing bugging people here is that, instinctively, they know America should be able to compete on this kind of work, and are shocked when they find we can't. The people who heap expense on employment, are surprised when that reduces employment.
I was in Ohio getting screamed at by union steelworkers last Thursday. One insisted the ARRA stimulus was good, productive, because it made "good, Davis-Bacon work" for his guys. "Yeah, but that wasn't your money. You took that from *other people* who needed it."
Funny--they think wealth is zero-sum, and redistribution is a multiplier.
-- Cheers, James Arthur
I really don't see a problem with any of this, the work should go to the people most capable of completing the job. The nationalists here might recall the US turned to Chinese labor to build the transcontinental railroads because the homebrew laborers here were worthless drunken thieving riffraff, mostly Irish. The same is happening now.
American riffraff who think they're entitled to the work simply because of an accident of birth?
prosperity is competition.
It depends. Competition has its place, but it's hardly worth the sacrifices we've made to it. A lot of the big things we take for granted now were developed in a protected way.
I respectfully submit that competition is weird, as an economic entity, and we don't have a good grasp of it.
Competition is great for small-error feedback correction; it's *lousy* for large amplitude errors. And the things that make big differences - the real game-changers - have larger perturbations.
It's not just expense on employment, though - there are locations costs/rents, opportunity costs, what not.
The marginal product of ... textile work is around $0.25 per hour. You just can't *do* that here any more. At the peak of the textile boom in Britain, a normalized-$0.25 an hour was more money than a yeoman farmer could have dreamed of.
So that's China, going through what Britain did in 200 years and we did in fiftyish in a decade.
If, as Liberals say, what they are doing is normalizing in actual market failure-negative externalites, then it's not really raising the cost of labor - it's correcting the price. underneath all the yelling, that's what they think. And frankly, we think that too, but we dunno.
My Grandfather's generation made money on farms *long* after making money on farms was extremely difficult. They did it by "hacking" - they made the old Ford 40 horse work for twenty times its natural life by learning basic machining.
They probably wasted all the effort, no matter how awesome it looked. My Dad did not do that, and had a natural gift for understanding what he was doing, and was able to explain all this to me. I can't tell you how lucky I was to have those examples and those discussions.
I don't mean to be... mean, but there's a good shot it's nobody's money, really. It's all fictional, until some money-wavefunction collapses and somebody has to reconcile asset price with the offered value of liquidation.
These people are doing exactly what Grandpa and his brothers were trying to do - protect their way of life - in a way that probably did not meet their ultimate self interest.
In that way, you and I are like Phil Sheridan meeting Crazy Horse* on the field of battle, every day.
*this, SFAIK, never happened but I think it's an awesome metaphor.For what it is worth, every time I hear "No More Buffalo" by James McMurtry, this is what it makes me think of. We are all simultaneously Ghost Soldiers and Sheridan's Cavalry. Or we know somebody who is.
Left alone and not shown the ( IMO difficult ) facts of the case, all people think that. That is what they see. It's what human beings lived with for tens of thousands of years. This system of highly organized, interdependent production dates back to about 1820 at the earliest.
And as it emerged in Britain, it was massively disruptive. We got off easy in America because some things, mainly land and especially arable land, were cheap.
We *all* limit the scope of what we want to think about, out of self-defense. It's only natural.
-- Les Cargill
The only foreign money in this election is from the so-called US Chamber of Commerce, which has foreign companies as members.
"Corporations are people my friend."
It must be pretty hard to avoid, considering contractor and subcontractor habits. Charge domestic prices for imported work and pocket the difference. That's just 'business'.
I doubt that this was the intention of ANY government official tendering the contract. Must have neglected the domestic content clauses.
RL
Then why are there news reports of foreign credit card donations to Obama.com?
I understand that the CofC is careful to prevent that.
I wonder if any illegal immigrants are donating to O's campaign.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
With his stand on illegal immigration? You can bet on it!
I really don't see a problem with any of this, the work should go to the people most capable of completing the job.
transcontinental railroads because the homebrew laborers here were worthless drunken thieving riffraff, mostly Irish.
American riffraff who think they're entitled to the work simply because of an accident of birth? Is this a reference to the unionized workers? Mikek
Hint: If you are a foreigner trying to donate to a US political party, you launder the money so it looks domestic. Thus I doubt there are foreign donations from foreign credit cards. I noticed you provided no links.
Then again, Romney might use one of his Swiss or Grand Cayman cards to donate money.
Probably not every single one of the 3-6,000,000 ex-pat Americans chooses to support Romney's campaign financially.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
-- "it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward" speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
A foreign journalist claimed to have made two small donations to Obama, and both went through. Both he tried for Romney were rejected.
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