Can you provide any evidence that $10 billion can solve homelessness in CA or build a vast network of public light rail? I think you’re off by at least a zero.

I don't know about homelessness (which is a much more difficult issue which can't be solved by just throwing money at it), but most developed countries built high speed rail lines and/or urban light rail transit systems for much less than 10,000,000,000$.

I'd much rather have my tax dollars go to science and space exploration rather than giving away free stuff to people.

I'd much rather give free stuff to people. Given those people are citizens and it allows their reinsertion into society. Space exploration supposed benefits are far more remote and as of now, not very useful.

I'd rather invest in space to live there one day than staying on this floating rock with people that give stuff for free.

I

None of us alive today will be living in space one day.

All of us alive today can benefit from assistance given to the least of us.

I want the space future too. However, I also want my time here to be better.

I won't see the space future. Sadly.

I could easily see a cleaner, more harmonious world.

Being human can suck. These discussions are one of the ways it does.

Ignoring the "free stuff" straw man but it's fascinating how someone can be so cruel to not want society to solve the homelessness problem. If this becomes a "mainstream" opinion, we've truly failed as homo sapiens.

Adding more money to "the homelessness problem" seems unlikely to actually solve the problem. It's (politically) difficult to address the underlying root causes, but easy to show how compassionate we are while subsidizing homelessness, and you get more of what you pay for, so.

You might not be able to solve the crisis with money alone but you need lots of money to solve it is my gut feeling.

Giving free stuff to people will in many cases free up resources that are currently being wasted on solving the same problem. Then there actually would be more money available for science and technology.

Spending money on third party development of tools to get to space is giving away free stuff to people (notably the part of the spend that is the profits of those third parties).

Agree 100%. I worked at Kennedy Space Center for a government contractor in the early 2000's. While I was there, NASA cancelled a software re-write of the launch control system. By then, they had already spent something like $800M and had nothing to show for it.

I can't think of a single piece of software that exists in the world today that couldn't be rewritten with $800M in capital.

10 billion can't do any of those things. If it could, we'd have them. California's gdp is 3,000 billion. They make that every year. This is 10 billion over a decade.

> 10 billion can't do any of those things

Has CA actually spent that money on those problems and shown that it couldn't solve them? If not I don't think that statement is true?

The (current) upper bound on the cost of building a high-speed rail line from SF to LA is nearly $100 billion.

https://hsr.ca.gov/about/capital-costs-funding/

A statewide light rail system would probably run closer to a trillion dollars.

They could probably do the statewide light rail for $100 billion if private property rights were ignored. But $10 billion doesn't sound plausible. Maybe just the single already planned line could be built for $10 billion, if private property were ignored and the state did good planning.

To be fair, light rail is cheaper to build than high-speed rail. And if we are going to fantasy-land where the government can do things for the public good without caring about who it inconveniences right now, they could build light rail on land "the government" already owns: in cities dedicate lanes to public transit (as in light rail + bus), to go between cities take some highway space. Rail has much higher capacity than cars, so if you get public transit right this should actually decrease traffic after it's built.

Of course this makes it obvious why California can't do it for $10 billion, $100 billion or even $10 trillion: wherever you put your rail network it will inconvenience someone, and that causes massive delays and cost overruns, or makes the project politically untenable from the start. Even if you put the rail underground you would get massive protests from nearby residents because "poor people" can now get there easier.

$10 billion is roughly $6 per homeless person per year in California. How much are you expecting this one free cup of coffee per quarter to accomplish?

Wow, there are 1.7 billion homeless people in California?!

Are you saying that there are 42 million homeless people in California?

(10B / $6 / 4 quarters / 10 years)

Oops, yeah, that was a calculator fail. It should have been about $6k/year, but I dropped a factor of 1k. Which is still not much, but a bit more sensible.

They have a billion homeless people?

> 10 billion can't do any of those things. If it could, we'd have them.

How does that follow? There's plenty of reasons why there's no high speed rail in the US, none of them have to do with lack of money.

Good point, there are many reasons on top of the lack of money. Especially for the homeless issue.

> Starting in 1942, 1,700 miles of military roadway were built over the course of 234 days, connecting eastern British Columbia with Fairbanks, Alaska.

Color me dubious on this one. 1700 miles / 234 days = 7.26 miles/day = 0.444 feet/second, every second of every day for about 8 months straight.

Even if you had 10 teams working in parallel the entire time, that’s a lot of road.

You might be right that NASA and other government agencies have inefficient cultures, but so does IBM. I think it's hugely problematic to privatize space research. As far as I know, every photo NASA has ever taken is in the public domain. Who would own what SpaceX learn on Mars?

That's not such a big issue, if NASA pays them, they can have stipulations about ownership of the resulting data. If NASA doesn't pay them and they do it on their own dime, then they get to do whatever they want with the data.