I also regret the general waste of time the article was, but it wasn't totally content-free. Just, as you note, it says nothing about HSR. Just garden-variety transportation projects.

Didn't see the lithium reference, but that's also typical political hyperbole. California's also not unusually well-endowed, in reality, compared to other desert-y places, in lithium resources. The main difference is that there's the potential (GM has invested in one of the companies there) for recovering lithium, among other things, from geothermal brines used for electric power production, in modest quantities. Hardly worth a "Saudi Arabia" label, or even "Texas."

Finally, if you're worried about the cookies, why don't you have your browser set up to dump everything whenever you shut it down? Granted, the setting for that is kind of buried in Edge or Chrome, but it exists. Easier to find in Firefox. And you use some kind of ad blocking extension (many are available)? If not, why not?