Idle complaints of indebtedness and isolation
Comment box Scope: information, explanation of psychological state Tone: neutral, bummed, defeated Opinion: yes Sarcasm/humor: none Hello. I usually talk about trains, except today, I just want to...
Comment box
- Scope: information, explanation of psychological state
- Tone: neutral, bummed, defeated
- Opinion: yes
- Sarcasm/humor: none
Hello. I usually talk about trains, except today, I just want to vent on my finances and my wishes for a less expensive world.
I have found myself in financial straits,as I had amassed debt last year, lost work for months and amassed more debt. It’s in the low tens of thousands. of course I also lost my healthcare because I live in a rich country run by morally destitute anti-intellectuals.
On paper, I will pay off the debt in 18-24 months, if god allows. I have work now.
This city’s transit system has been hobbled in bad faith and will be destroyed come January….Fares have already risen, service cut. My train to work will be cut because the state refuses to provide services for its most productive citizens. It is twice as long by bus, suicide by bicycle on roads built for tanks, so I will have to sacrifice time or life.
It seems the price of electricity has increased. I would generate my own, but it is impractical.
Sadly my possessions are breaking too. This is the way of things, it’s just miserable timing, and each discovery of a failing mechanism or dilapidated object piles onto the defeat. The window frame has rotted and the glass fallen -- the house is frozen. Not a single plant survives. (The landlord will fix it, but not hurriedly…..) Bulbs burnt out, rooms dark. My bicycle needs new brakes, a new chain, my helmet has been destroyed and should be replaced, but for now I have been riding without. The computer has broken after 14 years, admittedly about time…. An expensive thing to replace, so now I only have my phone, whose battery has degraded quite a lot and will not be usable for too much longer, and a small laptop on death’s door too. I had worn my single pair of walking shoes for 5 years until, yesterday, the sole fell off. (Thankfully, I have one more, but it is formal and uncomfortable) A new pair is more costly than I remember… I know a cheap one will disintegrate in a season and do nothing for the snow, and a quality one is beyond financial prudence. My jacket is worn and torn by years and embers, beyond my ability to sew, and I must darn and darn and darn all the socks and gloves with holes, which I hate to do, and i am not good at. The denim jeans are ripped, in a place difficult to patch, and the pockets torn. I cannot bear the cold the same anymore, so I also need an overcoat, which I cannot afford. The fitted sheets are inexplicably torn by some punitive act of god, probably irreparably. The pillows are compressed, worthless, and causing me pain. Even the tent, which I might use to regain some sanity in the woods, has had its elastic poles dried solid and is basically unusable. At least I have a few books.
My lifestyle is structurally cheap. Affordable city, relatively low rent, multiple housemates, no car, only occasional commute, no dog, no wife, no children. Not too much to pay for. I eat simply. I am content with it.
Yet somehow I find myself with hundreds of dollars of credit card purchases this month, more than an entire paycheck, and last was also more. Qualifying for a healthcare plan has reduced my medical costs, but the difference is withheld, and I’m realizing that often it costs more than it would cost out of pocket, so at best it makes no difference. The dental and vision are exorbitant, so I just hope I don’t get a cavity.
I suspect I need glasses, or will soon. I can tell my eyesight is beginning to worsen. But it’ll have to wait a couple years.
The fear of a worse medical emergency persists. The deductible is rather high for a plan that offers no HSA and the co-pay is unremarkable, the coverage limited. Perhaps the least useful healthcare plan I’ve ever had.
I do not gamble. I like to drink beer but have abstained recently. My hobbies are inspecting train and street infrastructure, studying the Holy Bible, moralizing on the internet and persuading the government to institute a better society. I lapse sometimes and make impulsive purchases, but not frequently. I have not even gone to see a game in two years.
It’s a great pain to review your statements and recognize that almost none of the purchases were wasteful, only a few technically unnecessary. There were just too many overall.
What upsets me most is the social distance I have gained from my condition of functional poverty. the agony of refusing visits, trips, games, concerts, shows, dinners, coffees, drinks grinds on me daily. Yes it is still nice to say hello, it is just not the same. The pity, or disgust, the symbolic offers of charity received. Mostly the confusion—the awkwardness, the unsolicited advice (which I don’t normally mind, but it gets old). I prefer to socialize with bourgeois progressives, academics and professionals who care about engineering and mathematics and government policy and theory. It’s what I care about. I do not really resent them, but everything they do costs more money than I possess, so it is difficult to see friends and I cannot hope to keep up with colleagues after work.
I don’t object to work but I resent the fact that I must pay for my own healthcare. I also resent that my government neglects my transportation and my safety. I resent the pollution of the air, the NIMBYism driving up rents and leaving the addicted even more hopeless. I acknowledge the mistakes I’ve made that have led me here. I can’t undo the past, but Congress could socialize all medicine in the next budget if it wanted to…. repeatedly chooses not to.
That’s all. I just wanted to complain. You can give me advice if you want. I’m relatively financially literate, just poor and human.
Comment box
Well, you make good comments, I'm saying:
that this project isn't relatively over-expensive on a micro level compared to benefits from a safety or transportation efficiency perspective. It's expensive but it's in the same class as other big projects FDOT does regularly.
we can do way more TOD and VZ infrastructure on a macro level from a financial perspective. I see why you think this is irrelevant. I am saying this to emphasize that we designed our whole world, and we can re-design it. It's fully possible. The sky is the limit. It's not too hard or too difficult in general. (Building the interstates was harder & more expensive at a time when we were poorer. so this shouldn't FEEL so hard.) I just think it's important to be optimistic. Our culture is often the opposite.
i also talk too much.
I can say with full confidence that the federal DOT and every state DOT allocate excessive funding to highway projects at the expense of passenger rail. In absolute dollars it's something like a 7:1 ratio nationally, and probably more like 14:1 in Florida (from memory, don't cite that). Dollars don't translate to impact, but this tells you at a high level what their priorities are.
A few DOTs do better, like California (because of CAHSR, SF, LA) and New York (because of NYC), but most of the land area in those states continues to receive car-centric capital investment. (Although New York has been removing a few highways, like in Rochester.) You don't actually need to look at the finances to see this: just look at ridership splits by mode: if Florida allocated funds to efficiently move people, it would already have at least one high-speed rail line connecting all its major metros, but it doesn't. (FDOT is only interested in efficiently moving vehicles, which is financially inefficient.) Florida rail ridership is accordingly low.
Some MPOs and RPOs (lol) are more progressive about planning than others, but it hasn't filtered through to the DOTs yet. They're bastions of hardcore traffic pseudoscience. They're extremely insular and are not interested in "activism." MPOs are also scared of that word, but they at least try. (Think of traffic engineers as people who like to solve math problems. In their spare time, they optimize Factorio production lines. They have a different education than urban planners and their priorities are typically these math problems, not societal change per se. Some exceptions, not a lot.)
I have not worked with Florida MPOs personally but I have not heard of them trying visionary things like Denver or Pudget Sound MPOs.
Eliminating and narrowing highways would free up DOT budgets to focus on more efficient transportation infrastructure. So would choosing not to build more highways. Highways have an opportunity cost.
We do have lots of money. Our economy has grown since 1957 and so has our tax base. Quick maths: federal taxes alone collected in 1957 were about $83 billion and about $5.2 trillion in nominal dollars. Per-capita, that's about $487/person in 1957 and $15k/person in 2025. Adjusted for inflation, that's about $5000/person in 1957, so we have 3x the federal tax revenue as then. At the most theoretical level, we managed a staggeringly large, inefficient infrastructure project with 1/3 of the federal budget as present. (Note interstates were built over years.) Obviously budget priorities today include some systems that did not exist in 1957, but it's not like we have less money in absolute terms. And the choice to raise or lower taxes to cover any delta is still a societal decision that we have chosen to neglect.
Big-picture, these are projects on the time frame of a 25-year long-range plan. In the short term, of course Brightline has budget constraints with whatever grant they can obtain for a grade separation. But for how big these population centers are, it's still just not that expensive.
My earlier figure of $12b for the whole route is probably an underestimate. Let's say $20b from Miami to Orlando. FDOT capital budget in 2025 was $15 billion, ~5% of which was for railroads. Practically, it would take at least 5 years to grade-separate Brightline's whole route. If the state government paid for 100% of it, then over 5 years that would be $4b/yr. If they did top-priority separations in the first 5 years and low-priority separations in the following 5 years, then that's $2b/yr for 10 years.
Of course the state DOT will not pay for 100% of the cost. Brightline could finance maybe 1/3 of it. The federal government could chip in a substantial amount, maybe another third. So that means over 5 years the cost to the DOT is closer to $1.3b/yr or $650m for 10 years.
That is a big project. It's just not absurdly big. For context, the NYC Gateway Program is about $16b. Big project for sure! But only a portion of the budget. Meanwhile, FDOT are spending $500 million to add new lanes to I-4, $340 million to widen a small section of I-275, etc., adding up to a supermajority of that $15b budget. (There are more examples of big boondoggles, and the small ones are collectively expensive too.) If FDOT just decided to incentivize a modal shift to rail, it would cost the same amount or less upfront, and have lower maintenance costs. Transit-Oriented Development pre-empts wasteful highway spending. Alternatively, this could be easily paid for with new revenue using a small "cap and trade" tax (like California), small sales tax, small gas tax, or even (self-defeatingly) a small train ticket tax. The kind of person who comes to Tildes will complain about regressive taxes, so OK, a small income tax or property tax or corporate tax or whatever needs to happen. Fine with me. Florida citizens choose their tax system. Any politician could push for a ballot measure or legislature vote to make this happen. If they don't, it's because they choose not to: they ignore the safety benefits, they ignore the maintenance efficiency benefits, they ignore the broader economic development benefits. (They know what Brightline is, it's not obscure.)
They have done most of this, or allocated funding for it:
195 =/= 250, but they have likely focused on urban and suburban segments, or this complements existing protections.
The problem is that these solutions just don't help much. People get onto tracks at grade crossings because they use roads to get to grade crossings. They're legally allowed to cross there. Then they illegally stay in the railroad ROW, and then they get hit by a train.