The original cost estimate was $33 billion in 2008 dollars. The current estimate is the equivalent of $51.1 billion in 2008 dollars. If you'll do the math, you'll notice that $51.1 billion is not double $33 billion.

Very good. Now let's discuss how "opportunity costs" mean this should be completed as soon as possible and why it doesn't make sense financially to have airports close to downtowns.

Voters were told in 2008 that the project would cost $39 billion. Now Gov. Brown says it will cost $69 billion.

The rising cost due largely to inflation is why it needs to be built as quickly as possible.

Personally I feel the rates for the mass-transit system should be raised to meet the financial demands of running that service.

That would increase demand for parking, making it even more of a nightmare than it is today.

No, just raise the price of parking to market equilibrium. Besides fixing the parking problem without the need to build more parking garages, it would also increase demand for alternatives, making mass transit more cost-effective.

The problem with the townhouses is...that too many of them get build without parking...

Don't worry, developers will always build as much parking as their customers want and are willing to pay for. Or should we also dictate to restaurants how many tables and chairs they must put out? Exactly where should a government's meddling in the market end?

City planners seem to think that the only way to solve a shortage (where demand exceeds supply) is to increase supply, but eBay for example proves otherwise.

Show me the math for both ICE cars and Tesla, from well-head to road.

The math is here, showing that where you drive is as important as what you drive. But as a sibling post notes, even this math doesn't count the energy required to produce gasoline from scratch.

1) Fossil fuels are a limited supply. Maybe enough for another 50 years. Maybe 100. But still limited.

That's not a problem because science will find a replacement. Not the same science that discovered that global warming is caused by human activity, of course, a different science. So let's just kick the can down the road like we always do and let our children and grandchildren deal with the problem.

And so ends the American Dream.

Taken to the logical extreme, if you are correct that latency has exactly zero effect on the viewing experience as long as it's reasonably consistent, then bandwidth is irrelevant because you can simply download the entire movie before watching it and it would not impact the viewing experience.

No, I think every additional second between the time you press "play" and the time the movie starts, downgrades the viewing experience slightly, no matter how repeatable that latency is.

with Netflix, you can have 5 second ping and still have a good video watching experience.

That's correct when the buffer is more than 5 seconds long and you don't mind the >5 second delay before the video begins.

So in real life, a faster data connection really does create a better viewing experience, so Verizon is technically correct, but each additional megabit per second provides less and less of an improvement over the previous megabit per second.

Asked if the decision to fail every one of the 30-plus enrollees was fair to every student, Horwitz said that "a few" students had not engaged in misbehavior, and he said that those students were also the best academic performers. Horwitz said he offered to the university that he would continue to teach just those students, but was told that wasn't possible, so he felt he had no choice but to fail everyone and leave the course.

Instead of patching what they call our "antiquated" power grid, perhaps we should actually rethink it... Allowing people to generate power using solar and wind, use it what they want and sell the rest to utilities sounds very good, but it does not reduce the peak capacity that the utilities must have...

That goal is achieved by dynamically pricing electricity always just above market equilibrium to create a small, permanent buffer of excess capacity in order to prevent brownouts and blackouts. That means we need to upgrade our antiquated power grid in order to allow the price to rise and fall in accordance with supply and demand.