SFGate: Senate votes to ban smoking in cars carrying young kids

[JohnLockesGhost]

And every time that subject gets brought up, I feel obligated to point out: The reason the court gave for their decision is that it's been going on for over 100 years. It's how the railroads got built. A city would force the sale of land specifically for the purpose of giving that land to a railroad.

OH NO, Larry! I thought you were such a good guy too.

Don't get me started on the railroads. Not ALL of them were pork-barreled subdized boondoggles, abusing eminent domain. There were actually guys like James J. Hill who actually PAID for the property needed to build his Great Northern. He didn't take the subsidies the others did that led to tremendous waste and poor quality.

[Larry]

I thought that, Out West, the way the government "encouraged" (read: subsidised) the railroads was by land grants. I seem to remember that the deal was that for every mile of rail laid, they'd get a square mile of land (in "alternating sections", or some such). From what I've heard, the smart railroads never sold the mineral rights to the land they got for free, and some of the railroads, today, make more money from renting their mineral rights than they get from the railroad business.

But I'd suspect that the western railroads didn't need emminent domain as much as the eastern ones did, simply because Out West, the railroads preceeded the towns. (Whereas, say, if Cleveland couldn't force people to sell, then the town died from "lack of railroaditis".)

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Remembering scene from For a Few Dollars More(?): Eastwood is talking to old codger who's telling him about how he stood strong and wouldn't sell his land to the railroad. Aparantly, the railroad's solution was to build the railroad about a foot away from the guy's shack.

[cadets08]

I hope it makes it through.

[portisizzle]

I hope it makes it through.

why?

[Larry]

And I'm not saying that I'm a big fan of the government deciding that Big Business doesn't have enough power, so the government will get on their side, too. And yes, I'm aware of the verb "railroaded".

OTOH, to use the example of, say, Cleveland. It's a big city, and they need a railroad to keep growing. but the railroad is just like a road (or the interstate). It needs a strip of land yards wide running completely through town, in a relatively straight line. If the only way the deal gets done is to find a group of sellers who are unanimously willing to sell, then the deal doesn't get done.

And if the deal doesn't get done, then the entire city dies.

(Although maybe there could have been another method. Maybe the city could build a railroad out to the city limits (to Dulles, so to speak). Any railroad that wants to serve Cleveland can build a rail line to "Dulles", and then use the city's rail to get downtown. The city can make their rail available to all commers at a fixed fee. That way, the city's not using domain to sieze land for a private company.

(Problem with that method is: I don't see any of the railroad barrons being willing to run trains on rails they don't own. The railroads would've simply refused to deliver to Cleveland.)

To me, one requirement that has to be met to have a government project is that it has to be impossible to do at any lower level. And I suspect that the railroads might fit in that category. (Getting a Wal-Mart supercenter does not.)

[JohnLockesGhost]

Unfortunately, the government's "encouragement" led to railroad builders throwing up track as fast as possible (poor quality) with no regard to land usage(meandering routes), since they were paid PER MILE. The conventional wisdom dictates that railroads to the West would never have been built without these subsidies, but reality would suggest otherwise.

[DeanCollins]

DAMN. Better keep my kids in the closet. They will be safer.

you wouldn't want them to come out of the closet, would you?

:laugh::rotflmao::laugh::rotflmao: