Jacob Shell

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Jacob Shell@JacobAShell·4m

Boston's Big Dig highway tunnel project during 1990s-2000s -- widely criticized for cost overruns which ultimately gave the project a 16 billion dollar price tag -- would have cost over a trillion dollars if it had been 0.1 billion dollars per overpass.

Jacob Shell@JacobAShell

I've seen defenders repeat this, that Annenberg Wildlife bridge is expensive because it's somehow "extra complicated and ambitious"...but defenders never explain what they mean, they just repeat these adjectives. In the proposal rendering it does not look that elaborate

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Jacob Shell@JacobAShell·12m

@InlandCaGuy @BalderdashianLA Theyre all around this length! They go over highways and highways are around this wide. True in Europe too. The "longest in the world" excuse, as if this is some futuristic superbridge over the Pacific or something, is outrageous.

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daeveningglow@InlandCaGuy·14m

@BalderdashianLA @JacobAShell Looks like $15 million. So you may be correct. I'd like to hear an actual engineer talk about these projects though. If I was a journalist like I used to be, that's what I would have done. But we never bother with this kind of thing anymore.

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California Natural Resources Agency@CalNatResources

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Jacob Shell@JacobAShell·1h

I've seen defenders repeat this, that Annenberg Wildlife bridge is expensive because it's somehow "extra complicated and ambitious"...but defenders never explain what they mean, they just repeat these adjectives. In the proposal rendering it does not look that elaborate

Just last year, California completed four wildlife crossings with an average price tag of $16 million – and 37 more are in progress across the state at an average cost of $15 million. The Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is the most ambitious project of its kind in the world with a much larger scale – it does not represent the average cost of our work to build more wildlife connectivity.

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Jacob Shell@JacobAShell·15m

Actually with infrastructure you're supposed to start getting economy of scale benefits once there's repetition. If the kind of things you're saying were true, the US would have no railroads, highways or airports. Bridges would only exist in luxury resorts. None of it would exist in the public realm, anywhere in the world. 0% of modernity would have happened.

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daeveningglow@InlandCaGuy·18m

@JacobAShell It's a broader issue of thinking the costs of expanding a project are linear and they aren't. It doesn't matter if it's a bridge or anything else. You are just building a whole concept of engineering based on your politics. And for what? The CAHSR exists no matter what...

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Jacob Shell@JacobAShell·18m

Like you, I can't tell exactly what the path/rock features are for. Unlike you I am not assuming theyre what turned what should have been a 10 mil project into a 114 mil project. If you're right then they were an insane feature and taxpayers ought to be upset. Might as well have made the bridge out of solid gold or something.

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Againandagain@Againandag19819·24m

@JacobAShell I can't find a better one at work but you can see the water course and rocks for drainage. If they assume there will be water (stagnant or running) this will require a lot more reinforcement and work. If this was a project change that nearly guarantees a budget blowout

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Jacob Shell@JacobAShell·20m

@InlandCaGuy Wait a minute, this is assuming a single span dude. The CA wildlife bridge is not a single span! Come on. Use AI only once you've used your head a bit first

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daeveningglow@InlandCaGuy·23m

@JacobAShell Oh no, absolutely not. I know very little about engineering but even I know that your premise here is badly wrong. Here I let AI take a crack at explaining why:

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daeveningglow@InlandCaGuy

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Jacob Shell@JacobAShell·22m

These seem like valid reasons why it would be say 3x the price of a normal rural wildlife bridge. Not 10x-25x (and it was probably going to balloon even more until the negative press finally kicked into gear).

@JacobAShell Additionally, because it has steep slopes on each side it requires some sort of soil build up and more complicated engineering. It might well still be overpriced but there are very clear reasons it's not being done for $5 million.

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Jacob Shell@JacobAShell·31m

@InlandCaGuy I note you avoid numbers. Lets say its twice as long as a normal wildlife bridge. Then it should be twice as expensive (or hopefully less)—not 10x as expensive (and counting)

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daeveningglow@InlandCaGuy·33m

@JacobAShell It's the longest wildlife bridge in the world

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Jacob Shell@JacobAShell·34m

@poiThePoi It’s not like every time an overpass has been built over an urban highway in America it’s cost 0.1 billion dollars!! Cmon use your head

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Poi@poiThePoi·42m

@JacobAShell It's a little bigger than normal because it's on a giant urban freeway as opposed to a 2-3 lane rural one. There's probably additional issues with construction because you can't impact the nearby neighborhood and do major lane closures but also 3AM construction. Beyond that?

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Jacob Shell@JacobAShell·35m

@Againandag19819 What water features are you referring to? Be specific. Use visuals

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Againandagain@Againandag19819·38m

@JacobAShell Just by looking at the completed sections my guess is the water features on the bridge + earthquake mitigation+ not closing the highway during build. Also given that the renders don't have them these where probably change request mid project which balloon cost

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Jacob Shell@JacobAShell·1h

This is why “activist scholarship” is the natural enemy of scholarship…even when the scholarship is pretty left wing as Cronons and Crosby’s is

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Jacob Shell@JacobAShell·1h

The funny thing is "Farmer's" way of talking here is basically William Cronon or Alfred Crosby's way of doing environmental history writing. The cow as "technology" for capturing rainwater, making unfarmable slopes useful, converting inedible weeds into caloric value.

Sama Hoole@SamaHoole

Activist: "The water usage for beef is obscene. Thousands of litres per kilogram." Farmer: "That's rainfall." Activist: "What?" Farmer: "The figure includes all the rain that falls on the pasture. The cows drink from the stream. The rain falls whether there's a cow here or not." Activist: "It's still water consumption." Farmer: "Should I stop the rain falling on my field?" Activist: "Grow crops instead. More efficient." Farmer: "This is a 35-degree slope in the Welsh hills. Show me the crop." Activist: "Technology..." Farmer: "To make tractors climb mountains?" Activist: "There must be a solution." Farmer: "There is. It's called a cow." Activist: [checks phone]

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Jacob Shell@JacobAShell·1h

@CalNatResources "The Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is the most ambitious project of its kind in the world with a much larger scale" Could you be more specific? In the rendering it doesn't look that complicated or "ambitious" compared to other wildlife bridges.

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California Natural Resources Agency@CalNatResources·13h

Just last year, California completed four wildlife crossings with an average price tag of $16 million – and 37 more are in progress across the state at an average cost of $15 million. The Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is the most ambitious project of its kind in the world with a much larger scale – it does not represent the average cost of our work to build more wildlife connectivity.

Benji Backer@BenjiBacker

Colorado built this wildlife overpass last year for $15 million. It’ll pay for itself within five years from the avoided collisions. California spending $114 million on a failed wildlife overpass is absurd.

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Jacob Shell@JacobAShell·1h

@robbertleusink Agree but was there such a thing as a "Medieval city planner"?

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Robbert Leusink@robbertleusink·3h

Medieval city planners built streets that curved, narrowed, and wound without logic Le Corbusier called them donkey paths and spent his career trying to replace them with straight lines Those streets survived a thousand years of war, plague, and fire His buildings are already being demolished

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Jacob Shell@JacobAShell·15h

@feelsdesperate Im just burned out on movies like this man.

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Coddled Affluent Professional@feelsdesperate·16h

OBAA is a fever dream where all sorts of exhausted tropes are imposed onto the current political moment without being able to provide any narrative coherence. Viewed ironically, as a disorienting spasm of the post war lib ideological order that points to its breakdown and imminent senescence, the film is effective. I thought it had an almost elegiac quality to it and that it was affectionate towards a once dominant type of cultural programming that is now very close to being formally decommissioned.

Ann Coulter@AnnCoulter

Liel Leibovitz in the Free Press: "As a work of art, One Battle After Another is irredeemable. It feels like the sort of thing written by a committee of socialist college sophomores cracking each other up ... "Paul Thomas Anderson seems interested more in purring for his fellow progressives than in making interesting movies ..."

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Jacob Shell@JacobAShell·15h

@benryanwriter @AnnCoulter Phantom Thread II where the guy discovers Imodium and it breaks their marriage

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Benjamin Ryan@benryanwriter·17h

@AnnCoulter I can barely remember what happened in the movie. The only decent part was the visual effect on the big screen when they were scaling those vertiginous hills toward the end. Where is the Phantom Thread sequel I demanded???

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Ann Coulter@AnnCoulter·17h

Liel Leibovitz in the Free Press: "As a work of art, One Battle After Another is irredeemable. It feels like the sort of thing written by a committee of socialist college sophomores cracking each other up ... "Paul Thomas Anderson seems interested more in purring for his fellow progressives than in making interesting movies ..."

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Jacob Shell@JacobAShell·16h

@Tom_Rowsell OK fair enough. But the "racial stakes" still don't make sense. Is it as petty as "Anatolia is in Asia, not Europe"? So it's just about disassociating this history from "Europe"?

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Tom Rowsell@Tom_Rowsell·1d

@JacobAShell Bad choice of words. Estonian comes from a migration of Siberians much later, and Armenian comes from a migration of Europeans into Armenia. CHG and EHG are not proto-anything from today. But WSH are without doubt a European racial type

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Tom Rowsell@Tom_Rowsell·1d

Remembering in 2022 when I politely pushed back on the Southern Arc hypothesis, and suggested Harvard didn't have proper evidence of the alleged sub-Caucasian source of PIE and that they had ignored Sredny Stog. Then loads of brown people said I was "coping" or "crashing out". Then in 2024 when the same authors published a paper debunking their own claims and showing Sredny Stog was indeed, as I had suggested, the original PIE culture, there was not one among my detractors decent enough to admit "Rowsell was right".

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Jacob Shell@JacobAShell·17h

I mean of course nothing like this can be built if it costs the entire GDP of California just to get one line

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🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️free maduro🇵🇸🇻🇪@TheNotoriousHRT

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Jacob Shell@JacobAShell·17h

As I recall, this plan involved straightening out the Acela route by digging an Amtrak tunnel under Broad St in Philadelphia and having Amtrak stop at PHL City Hall rather than PHL 30th.

there are plans

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