… at the Flamingo Las Vegas pool area, last Saturday. One is a beach ball and the other two belong to Absinthe headliner Angel Porrino. Thank you, Caesars Entertainment, for giving me nightmares. My wife thinks the bikini top is a size too small. I say it’s the implants that should have been taken down a notch.
High-speed rail. It looks more and more like a chimera for Las Vegas. And, as The Economist points out, the Obama administration’s notion of “high-speed rail” is another of its half-a-loaf policy nostrums (passenger trains jostling for space on existing freight lines). However, a proposed Gulf Coast high-speed line connecting Mobile with Houston could be a boon to the casino industry, given its potential proximity to the Biloxi, Gulfport, Bay St. Louis, New Orleans and Lake Charles markets. Bring that on!
It takes forever for regular speed Amtrak to get anywhere because it keeps having to go onto spurs and wait for freight trains to get by. As a result of this slowness, nobody ever rides Amtrak because they can’t get anywhere in any reasonable time, and then conservatives call for the end of Amtrak because the market has spoken.
The real problem is that our country actually sold the rails to freight firms instead of putting them in control of Amtrak. Japan’s rails are privately held, the government-owned company split into six regional passenger companies and one freight company. JR Freight only owns ~30 miles of track, it buys access to the other JR group’s rails and travels on the same tracks as passenger trains.
We put a higher priority on moving goods instead of moving people, and now the freight companies are spoiled children who bemoan that they even have to share any track at all.
Isn’t Japan about the size of California and one of the most densly populated countries on Earth? That makes comparisons with the US useless.
If that’s the headliner at Absinthe, why do they use promos of a guy that looks like a pimp from N’awlins?