Well, it is eventually.
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Thatās a pity. I donāt want to be smug - because I know this isnāt because of some collective American decision for things to be that way - but we have trains and pretty great public transportation here in Europe. Itās not perfect, but it sure as hell is more sustainable. All we need now is to make everything run on renewable energy.
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In the United States, large scale government projects and programs are viewed as a way for the politically connected to get and keep long term (sometimes lifetime) sinecures with little accountability and minimal pressure for results.
See the āUnited Space Allianceā above for a great example.
Also note that the NASA Orion spacecraft is planned to launch something like 3-4 times in the next twelve years. How much do you think Musk would sink into a project with that sort of timetable?
So, itāll be like HS2 then (except nearly no-one outside the 0.1% wants HS2)?
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Quite a story.
With all the major political parties behind it, I have to think that someone stands to make some serious money in the usual way.
And with a quote thatās so delicious I have to think that Health and Safety must require a posted calorie count:
If we used financial accounting we would never have any public spending, we would build nothing ... Financial accounting would strike a dagger through the whole case for public sector investment.
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Both Ukip and the Green Party oppose it, and, although I donāt have evidence of it, I doubt that itās popular with Corbyn supporters.
I donāt know how they plan on getting the proposed Manchester/Carlisle/Glasgow line built though. Drilling tunnels through several fells in the Lake District is the sort of thing that will condemn whichever political party is in government to oblivion. Maybe thatās the point.
Honestly, for my this is the thing I find kind of silly. Heās rich and ambitious and smarter than the average bear in some ways, so of course people build this cult of personality around him. In all probability heās neither hero nor villain, just a flawed human being who does some things right and other things wrong. Maybe itās because of our religious traditions, which always somehow manage to be about saviors and shamans instead of the fictional deities and paths to enlightenment that they claim to be about, or maybe itās how our popular fiction has always tended to be black-and-white from Heracles to Superman, or maybe theyāre the same tradition.
Kennedy wasnāt a saint or a demigod or a demon or a monster; he was a flawed human being like the rest of us whose grooming and family wealth put him a position to change the world, and hopefully he did more good (space race, school integration) than harm (Vietnam, Bay of Pigs), and probably even he never knew whether some of his choices were good ones.
Nor is Musk another Kennedy. Thatās another stupid human trick, the compulsion to rank every last thing on the planet.
Now look, Musk might be doing more harm than good. I donāt pretend to know. But this human cultishness does bother me. So Iāll take @anon61221983ās pragmatic meh over Muskās cheerleadersā and detractorsā reductive narratives any day. And look, I have no problem with simplistic morality in fiction. One of fictionās functions is to act as a distillate of our insights and beliefs. But real people arenāt distillates. Well, except for Princess Pricklepants, but sheās no mere human.
Sorry for the longish rant. Not trying to lecture people. Just had this stuff rattling around in my brain and wanted to see if I could express it.
ETA: Personal heroes are healthy, and maybe personal villains have a role too, just as long as we donāt mistake our perceptions and understanding of them with the real people we almost never get to personally know.
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Band name? Album name? T-shirts?
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Lead singer in the seminally forgettable Pragmatic Meh and the Whatevs.
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