Lefty standups Bill Maher and Lewis Black and lefty economist Paul Krugman all have shocking news from the lands of universal health care: The trains in Europe are as bad as they are here! Seriously, we’re talking Amtrak bad!
Whatever happened to those magical trains that always seemed to be going nonstop from wherever you happened to be to wherever you wanted to go, that allowed you to dine on rack of lamb and hericots verts1 while the landscape zipped by at 250 kph? According to Bill and Lewis, the trains in Scandinavia are just like here—dirty, noisy, lots of stops. It’s practically the C train! And Paul Krugman, reporting from London, says the UK is even worse! Whatever happened to socialism!
Afterwords
Instead of moaning about the decline of rail, Paul in particular, who’s been wondering when the economic payoff from the computerization of the world will occur, could explore the possibility of self-driving cars, already under testing by the likes of Elon Musk, who figures that computer-driven cars won’t be good to go until they’re 10 times safer than the human variety—really, not that high a bar. So, freeing America’s millions from the task of actually driving their cars, while cutting road fatalities by 90 percent—not as exciting, perhaps, as wasting hundreds of billions of public dollars trying to upgrade a nineteenth-century technology to the point that it travels half as fast as a 50-year-old airplane—but definitely worth a shot!2
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And for dessert, a charming blancmange with fresh strawberries! ↩︎
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And Musk is also pumping for a speed-of-sound tube train that would be right up the K-Man’s alley. So it’s all good! ↩︎
