Yeah, we also fail on large projects like HS rail too.

Those AI servers are probably a discounted cost of around 3-5k per U (I’m probably low in this estimate but I have a really hard time believing they’re actually paying $20k+ per GPU),

They’re arranging 72 Blackwell GPUs into each server rack, at around a price of $3 million, in a cabinet that is 2236mm x 600 mm x 1068mm. That’s approximately a 7 square foot footprint, so about $430,000 per square foot of server. There’s obviously a need for spacing between servers, but you’re basically underestimating by an order of magnitude.

ICE doesn’t give two shits about humanely housing anyone. As long as it’s got four walls and a bucket, they’re satisfied. Bucket is optional.

Bruh, let me introduce you to civil asset forfeiture

Yup, large automakers bought up a lot of rail lines, especially local inter- and intracities, and tore out the tracks as part of the highway program.

Not quite! Railroads were built using land grants, so they’d literally build cities along their lines to sell the real estate they got for free at inflated prices. Privately owned and maintained right of way is unsustainably expensive, so once the land grants ran out railroads had to continuously scramble to find a way to operate profitably. At the second half of the 19th century they began consolidating and building trunk lines for increasingly massive locomotives, in the mid 20th century they began using diesels to further reduce costs and in the late 20th century they found technologies and advanced freight routing techniques to further squeeze costs. Now in the 21st century they haven’t yet found the next way to remain profitable so we shall see what they do.

The auto industry spent until about the end of the Great Depression selling farmers and ruralites on cars, partnering with cycling advocacy groups to lobby governments to pave existing public roads (passing the infrastructure cost to the government instead of themselves). Then as they sold more vehicles they turned their customers into their lobbyists through auto clubs like the AAA to encourage better infrastructure for cars in cities, and by the time the Federal Highway Act was passed everyone involved had already grown up with automobiles everywhere on publicly funded roads.

There were a handful of documented instances of the auto industry buying and mismanaging interurban and trolley routes, but trolleys were already on the decline before the auto industry even got their feet under them because they also were built via land grants and real estate speculation the exact same way that railroads were built! This stopped being viable not long after it stopped being viable for the railroads. Trolley services were built to share the streets with pedestrians, cyclists and horse carriages, and the streets were simply not built to separate the incompatible traffic of automobiles and trolleys, so once automobiles outnumbered trolleys the traffic became too much to be able to run reliable trolley service and the death spiral was unstoppable

The final nail in the coffin for rail passenger service was in 1968 when the US Postal Service ended mail contracts with the railroads, daily passenger service to every city ceased to be financially viable. Before that point, railroads would run at least one train a day with an RPO, and if they’re already running a crew out there why not also bring some freight and passengers along too?

Then of course in the 1970s the ill-fated Penn Central collapsed in the second largest bankruptcy in US history (and nearly collapsed the entire North American rail system in the process!) which is where Conrail and Amtrak came in, federally owned entities to keep vital rail service operating. Conrail was eventually sold off into what’s now CSX and Norfolk Southern and Amtrak remains, constantly kneecapped by competing private interests (like remember that time Amtrak ran profitable freight service? Yeah the private railroads really didn’t like being outshined by Amtrak!)

Americans aren’t car brained, they’re trapped in a system they didn’t build and can’t control.

Who framed Roger rabbit?

Not to mention that they were able to run the new interstate highways right through Black neighborhoods.

large automakers bought up a lot of rail lines, especially local inter- and intracities, and tore out the tracks as part of the highway program

Large automakers built privately-funded highways? I didn’t know that.

That’s atrocious.

I think we all know who.

Until you make the old a source of pride. “I will continue the great legacy of protecting our cherished subway system and strive to make it more accessible to all” is great.

Yeah, I meant we don’t have a vaccine.

And those prophylactics have a lot of negative side effect’s. We’re certainly better than before, but Malaria still kills a lot of people today

The US has so many large natural waterways and so much coastal land that canals were largely unnecessary and only really dug where it would be beneficial to avoid detours and dangerous areas like rapids or shoals. Plus much of the early US economy (in the colonial era, at least) was focused on the export of exotic goods to Europe, so colonies that became major cities like NYC were often built at the mouth of a river where river barges could unload valuable goods like beaver pelts right next to boats getting ready to make their way across the Atlantic.

The Mississippi River, the second largest river in the US, is over 3,765 km long, stretching almost from Canada all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Why build a canal when nature has already done the work for you?

Canals were really the technology of the 18th century. In 1827 the Baltimore and Ohio was opened as the first passenger and freight railroad and railroads started popping up extrenely rapidly, initially chartered by basically every city to be built along existing roads, then later built with their own right of way.

West of Appalachia, the land is relatively flat and the existing permanent native American settlements were sparse since their population had collapsed from disease brought by colonists centuries earlier. Railroads engaged in real estate speculation platting out and selling land in cities every 10-20 miles (because the early steam locomotives needed water every 10-20 miles, so might as well have them take on passengers/freight too!) and the federal government was practically paying railroads to take land to better establish the United States’ claim to the land. This rail building boom peaked around the 1860s around which point consolidation started reducing the quantity of rails as railroads consolidated and began building more focused trunks out of their existing right of way.

In fact, because of how the land grants were written most railroads built a single track in a straight line as fast as possible between their start and end, then once they’d secured the grant for connecting the two points by the extremely aggressive deadline, only then would they start actually rebuilding the track so that it would actually be usable for real rail service.

So in short, it was a combination of lack of existing (white) cities, land grants by a new government trying to secure its land claims that it believed were it’s manifest destiny, plus innovations in steam engines to make steam locomotives truly viable right at the time when the flegling nation had its feet under it and was ready to start investing heavily into itself.

TL;DR Right place, right time, right legal environment and right technology