Noah Smith seems to be perpetually wrong about pretty much everything.

Some ideas are bad. You have to update your priors at some point. The politicians in charge can also be bad. He isn’t wrong about that. But swapping out Newsom for some new guy isn’t going to fix hsr. The state will vote in someone who is basically the same.

There’s a lot of “foolish consistency” when it comes to hsr. Update your priors, admit you were wrong and move on. There are better ways to spend those billions.