I don't disagree with some of your points, but some of your premises are wrong. I take it you don't commute to work from the suburbs? I know plenty of people who commute 4 hours a day to their jobs, in snarling 10 lane freeways, 1 person per polluting vehicle, just for the luxury to live in the suburbs. HSR has a key benefit other than moving far more people than airplanes on short haul flights of 2 hours or so (6-8 hours driving distance). If you measure distances in time instead of miles, you find that within an hour, an HSR takes you a distance much further than commuting by vehicle and too short for flights, something around 150-200 miles. This could be a huge boom for the economic development of smaller towns out of existing commuting reach when an HSR stop is built there. In the case of California, for example, San Diego to Sacramento would take 2.5 hrs, with stops in Bakersfield, Fresno and Stockton on the way, something neither car nore airplane can do. These 3 cities would see a huge economic boom from the influx of people moving there because commutes are shrunk to sub 1 hour. And this is not speculation; it's been demonstrated wherever HSR has been built. From a political perspective I can see why Republicans would be against HSR development, because cities vote Democratic in large majority and thus these Republican country towns would eventually turn blue over a couple decades as influx of people create urban diversity.
I was thinking about the same thing when I was talking about improving the existing highway infrastructure. LOL We need to upgrade our road structure to accommodate flying cars!! We don't need to reinvent the wheels to build some freaking high-speed rails. Why ride with ten thousand idiot strangers in some crowded rail cars when I can ride in the privacy of my own flying car!!
If commuting is really such a huge problem, perhaps a better solution would be telecommuting or remote working. We were able to do it during the pandemic we can certainly do it when the pandemic is over. And this solution would require far less investment and would be even more environmentally friendly with very minimal impact on land use and the ecosystem than building a dedicated rail system that would be extremely expensive especially given the special terrain of California which has so many mountain ranges and bodies of water that would require bridges and tunnels to be built. It would be far more economically efficient as well as environmentally friendly for people to just work from home and then just commute once in a while to the office for any obligatory in-person meetings using the existing road structure. To me, the need to have the expensive high-speed rail is just not there and it has nothing to do with political affiliations or urban diversity or whatever. It has to do with cost/benefit. The cost to connect some sleepy small towns over some rail system is just not justified for the possible potential benefits it could bring. You can't rely solely on the "if you build it, they will come" notion for all projects. You need to have a reasonable expected cost-recovery date in order to justify the high cost of large projects like the high-speed rail. Like I said, for the same amount of money, it might be much more worthwhile to spend them on other more urgently needed infrastructures such as public education and health, curtailing organized crime, substance abuse control, affordable housing... just to name a few.
U.S., China Near Deal to Allow Audit Inspection of N.Y.-Listed Chinese Companies https://www.wsj.com/articles/deal-n...rds-in-hong-kong-11661435886?mod=hp_lead_pos3
This is based on your judgement, not fact. Reread my previous post on the impact of HSR on towns within 100-200 miles of major urban centers in which stations are built. The newly available flexibility brings huge relief to congestion in existing urban centers while promoting dynamic development elsewhere. California is particularly well suited as the land between LA and the Bay Area is mostly flat and sparsely inhabited except for the towns I noted before.
What about telecommuting where people won't need to commute to go to work except for the occasional visits to the office for in-person meetings? Seems to me still a waste of resources to just construct one line when there are currently 17 scheduled train trips going between LA and the Bay Area. And as @Overnight has mentioned, where are the flying cars? What's going to happen to this expensive high-speed rail when we finally get flying cars and hovercraft? It's going to go to waste. And there are already personal charter flights that serve these two cities.
Paywall. Can't read it. Why can't those Chinese companies just report their financial results according to accounting standards like everyone else? Why is there have to be deals? What about the rest of the countries? Do they get to have special deals for listing with the United States? I dunno what those deals cover cuz of the paywall which prevents me from reading the article, but if it allows special provisions that exempt Chinese companies from reporting certain aspects of their financial statements, it sounds to me to be utterly unfair to companies from the rest of the countries that choose to comply without those "deals".
And another one: https://mynorthwest.com/3609104/after-22-years-1-4-billion-new-i-5-hov-lanes-open-tacoma/