Equipment World

P eter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire, and about the only guy in his neighbor- hood who's OK with Donald Trump being president, made an interesting comment to the New York Times recently. He said "Cellphones distract us from the fact that the subways are 100 years old." A lot of people don't like Thiel. He is a real iconoclast in a state full of fake ones. And per- haps because of his upbringing in Cleveland, Ohio, he sees things the rest of our West Coast tech overlords don't. What I like about Thiel's comment is that it brackets one of the central shortcomings of our age. And that is that most people are will- ing to let the public sphere (and our public re- sponsibilities) go to hell as long as they have shiny new electronic toys to distract them. Nowhere does that cultural conundrum show up better than in the way we allocate our money. Take our roadways, for example. Everybody needs them, but the federal gov- ernment only allocates $45 billion a year to maintain those roads and bridges with the states kicking in roughly an equal amount. Compare that with the kind of money they play with in the technology sector: • Apple's cash reserves total $237 billion. This isn't the total value of the company; this is the cash they have stashed under the mattress overseas to avoid the taxman. They don't do anything with this money. They've already saturated the market with their products, paid their executives and shareholders fabulous salaries and divi- dends. They're building a $5 billion space- ship campus. Yet Apple's $237 billion in mad money is enough to fund the entire federal transportation infrastructure budget for more than five years. • Facebook's market cap today sits at about $350 billion. That's enough to pay for more than seven years of federal highway build- ing. Some say Facebook may reach $1 tril- lion in value soon. I like cute cat videos as much as the next guy, but we could sure fix a lot of potholes with this kind of money. • Elon Musk, billionaire tech entrepreneur and founder of Tesla Motors (market cap $42 billion) and SpaceX (market cap $12 billion) is getting mighty peeved sitting in traffic. He plans to go underground and dig his own private tunnel under the streets of Los An- geles to shorten his commute. The guy who wants to put tourists up in space has tremen- dous reservoirs of money, engineering talent and brains, none of which will ever be used to help his neighbors get a mile down the road in a decent amount of time. • California's Governor Jerry Brown wants to spend $60 billion on a bullet train linking Los Angeles to San Francisco. It is gener- ally thought that the Silicon Valley types are pushing him for the bullet train. I mean, it looks all sleek and shiny, just like an iPhone. And it's just dang cool, right? Had Brown spent a hundredth of that on the Oroville Dam, 200,000 people might not have fled in fear of their lives in February when the dam threatened to collapse. Note to the governor: California already has a bullet train linking those cities. It's called Southwest Airlines. I grant you it's not fair to compare private enterprise with public funding. And I'm not one of those communists who think we ought to tax the rich until they're as poor as every- body else. It's just that this great gulf between what we do as individuals and what we do as citizens has never been wider. We're not a poor country, but by the choices we make in how we spend our money, we sure look like one. March 2017 | EquipmentWorld.com 82 final word | by Tom Jackson Fun with numbers TJackson@randallreilly.com

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