Everyone should have seen this coming from a mile away. There is nothing Congress and Trump can agree more on than handing out money to cronies. I’d like to see this blocked in the senate, which seems like a possibility.
Yes AI is a buzzword for operations research now, but I doubt that either will be used to optimize a government project that needs Congressional funding. The route will be optimized to maximize cronyism, not utility.
It will be blocked by the actual power brokers in the country … Fox n Friends.
I realize what Trump was thinking. And I realize that, inside his excuse for a brain, he performed some sort of string of free association that led to the comment. But when you blurt it out without giving anyone else a ticket to the train of thought that got you there, it makes you look like an idiot,
That’s fine by me.
Ah, but what if it wasn’t? What if the plan were written in such a way that the project was optimized to the highest objective standards?
I can’t say I know how a project like this would actually play out. I just want you to recognize that the maximally cynical view of government action is a POV you are Choosing. There is nothing inevitable about it, no matter how much an article if faith it may be of Fox.
I honestly have no idea how Fox News is in the age of Trump. I lost track of them when I stopped watching The Daily Show many years ago.
As long as you know you are Choosing the maximally naive view of government, and you know there is no way anything like that will take place in a large country with a powerful central government. Maybe a city or town could manage such a project. Not the US govt. it simply has never been done because the US is too large.
The government did get us to the moon, and defeat the Nazis. Government projects can be utter crap, or they can be successful. Neither is inevitable, no matter how big or ambitious the project is.
Even if by some miracle, there is general agreement between both houses of Congress, and the whitehouse, and a bill passes the House and gets enough bi-partisan support in the senate to overcome a filibuster, and send to to Trumps desk to sign, you know that he’s going to see that as a moment of maximum leverage and refuse to sign it unless some pet project of his (wall, golf course, prison camp, 50 foot statue of himself) is included. And even if they modify the bill to include that he’ll just come up with something even more egregious.
Trump doesn’t think a deal is good for him unless the other side hates it.
Sorry to pigeonhole you as a Foxhead. Everyone in my world who takes it as an article of faith that the government can only bungle are conservative Fox watchers. I guess I feel like I am arguing with Fox, and not individual thinkers, a lot of the time. But that’s not the case with you, and I retract that suggestion.
To say that the US government simply can’t have positive achievements, premised on its size of all things, is demonstrably not maximally naive, and therefore you are totally off-base to say you or I “know” nothing “like that will take place in a large country with a powerful central government.” Look at the interstate highway system. We’ve had that for almost 70 years. It makes sense* because* the US is so large, and it is so useful in large part because the US is so big.
A (single!) federal interstate high speed rail network along the Northeast Corridor certainly is within the realm of possibility in the technical sense- such things already exist. China is big, arguably bigger than the US, yet they have them. And they are way closer to a powerful, authoritarian central government than the US. Face it, they aren’t exactly a democracy over there. So to say the big ol’ US can’t build it because… Too. Big., well, it sounds like a faith-y pronouncement rather than a reasoned, evidence-based argument.
Are you witnessing? Do you have a strong and specific political identity, like anti-Statist or Libertarian or Rock Ribbed Conservative or something? If you are meh about it, forget it, but if you have a strong conviction in some faith or political philosophy and that is informing this, yanno, belief of yours, tell me what it is so I can understand where you are coming from.
Apparently this edition of Infrastructure Week is DPTA* in the Senate.
I know y’all are absolutely shocked by this news. 
*That’s “Dead Prior To Arrival” because it was nowhere close to actually arriving in the Senate.
What a shock that Trump’s words in public are pretty much meaningless in terms of what he actually intends to do in terms of policy.
When is the next scheduled “infrastructure week”?
I would imagine that Senate Republicans could get behind a big infrastructure bill if one of the following three criteria were met: 1) the bulk of the funding went towards things in red states, and/or 2) the bill was paid for by things like sales of federal lands, taxes on remittances to Mexico and Central America, or taxes paid mostly by blue ‘tax donor’ states, or 3) it contained funding for a border wall.
That’s not how the current Republican party works. There is no more give a little to get a little. It’s do what we want or do nothing at all.
And even if Trump was poised to sign it, he’ll drop the pen if Ann Coulter calls him a pussy.
Looks like infrastructure week got postponed. Again. Shocker.
Look at this knucklehead. In an unplanned, totally spontaneous press conference held after the unplanned storming out of the meeting about the infrastructure bill, Mr. Spontaneous is standing behind a sign that says: NO COLLUSION.
Good grief, y’all.
Even the sign layout is inept at conveying the message:
NO COLLUSION NO OBSTRUCTION
I suppose it could have been worse:
NO COLLUSION NO OBSTRUCTION
Well what do you expect? They only had the 30 seconds between the time he spontaneously walked out of the meeting and the time he reached the reporters who just happened to be standing there to make up the signs!