Welcome to Axis ProRata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech, business, and politics.

I'm Dan Premack. On today's show, Silicon Valley gives Saudi Arabia a pass and a 145-year-old company files to go public.

But first, California's big infrastructure fail. So California often ignores the rest of America when it comes to issues of climate change,

and one of the biggest examples has been its plan for a high-speed rail line that would connect

Los Angeles to San Francisco.

But yesterday, California became a bit more like the rest of America by essentially deciding

that the project had become too expensive,

with Governor Gavin Newsom instead saying he'll scale the project way back to just an initial

leg in California Central Valley.

Now, Newsom still wants the whole thing to get done, eventually, but it sounds like that'll

become some future governor's problem.

Now, why it matters in part is tied to climate change. High-speed rail is viewed by

environmentalists and others as a way to significantly cut carbon emissions, which indeed does raise

some questions as to how California now plans to hit its long-range goals in that regard. But much more

broadly, this is further evidence that America is just quite awful at building large-scale infrastructure.

Railroads, regular roads, new airports, tunnels, bridges, and basically everything else

just ends up costing too much and taking too long.

We either don't have the budgetary know-how, the financial willpower, or some combination of the two.

And it's certainly putting us at a competitive disadvantage with

the rest of the world, meaning that the economic mess kind of feeds on itself and causes new problems.

Remember, President Trump talked about a massive trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, but there is

no indication that's actually coming despite apparent bipartisan interest. In fact, one administration official said to me that it's the sort of thing that now gets

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