Independence Institute

It’s Still Dead 0
- TRANSPORTATION - Miscellaneous
- March 11, 2011
Sometimes I feel like Chevy Chase proclaiming, week after week, that Franco, by which I mean Florida’s high-speed rail, is still dead. Yet people are still trying to revive Florida’s high-speed boondoggle. The latest is a just-released ridership projection showing that the rail line, if built, would earn an operating profit as soon as it […]
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Why Do Reporters Love Trains So Much?0
- TRANSPORTATION - Miscellaneous
- March 10, 2011
As C.P. Zilliacus noted in one of his comments yesterday, Slate published an article subtitled, Why Do Conservatives Hate Trains So Much?. The writer, David Weigel, covered most of the bases, but a couple of clarifications are in order. First but not foremost, Weigel seems to confuse passengers with passenger miles when he writes, “Amtrak […]
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The Chinese Have a Phrase for It 0
- TRANSPORTATION - Miscellaneous
- March 9, 2011
A new trend in Chinese is to turn an active verb into a passive verb–usually with a sinister context–by prefixing the character “bei” (pronounced “bay”). For example, bloggers who have been censored will say they’ve been bei huh-shyeh, or “harmonized”–a reference to the Chinese government’s efforts to create a “harmonious society.” This new, and formerly […]
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Antiplanner’s Library: Too Big to Fail 0
- TRANSPORTATION - Miscellaneous
- March 8, 2011
The Antiplanner finished reading Too Big to Fail, a 539-page tome describing the events of the financial crisis from the Bear Stearns collapse in March, 2008 to the Treasury’s forced purchase of billions of dollars worth of shares in nine major banks in October, 2008. New York Times reporter Sorkin says the book is based […]
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