No, China doesn’t count because that would challenge my worldview. I know I’m right, I just haven’t figured out how yet.
Truths are complicated and challenging. We don’t have to take sides or teams; although I know it’s difficult given then times we live in, where we feel the pressure to take sides given how fast we are bombarded with information. Join me and others in the effort to be comfortable with cognitive dissonance…
(context)
I know this is the second time this shit has been posted, but most rail-less nations are not building railroads because they do not have the nessecery capital intensive industry to build railroads, let alone build a poor man’s railroad and then redevelop it, because the world is being purposefully choked of development funds by the IMF and World Bank. God forbid demand gets fulfilled.
that’s fair, prior to the current in-progress de-industrialization of germany, do you think they had the capacity or could have reasonably built up the capacity for high-speed rail?
I went to Germany in '96, and was amazed how on time the trains were. If the schedule said “7:52 arrival” then set your watch by it.
Now? Not so much.
At this point, it’s startlingly clear that de-industrialization is wide scale corporate raiding.
Can anyone point to a country that de-industrialized and maintained infrastructure?
The entirety of Europe had the industrial capacity and know-how to transition towards both High Speed Rail and entire light rail system in the 80’s and 90’s, even after the chaos of the collapse of the USSR. It’s honestly shocking that they didn’t given the seriousness that the 80’s oil crisis caused, but I have to assume at this point they were banking on the balkanization of Russia and were basically doing a test run in the former Yugoslavia.
The problem is that the whole of elite European liberal intellectualism is completely wound up in essentially emulating what they perceive to be “American freedom”, you’ll still run into this with exchange students all the time. The problem is that ‘American freedom’ will ultimately completely destroy your infrastructural integrity and thus degrade your industrial capacity.
I do not understand how you can seriously look at china and go “Nothing but terrible economic choices here ”
because you believe that everything china does is a lie or is a scam somehow even though all of that is true about your own country.
honestly just thinking about it, megachurches and fucking mlms are fucking legitimate things to do here and we’re pointing fingers at china for being sneaky and corrupt
even though because
If you think we got it bad just look at the conditions other countries live in. It must be because their liars and scammers in government are even worse. That was how I used to view these things anyway.
Yup, it’s recognizing that things here suck but somehow still holding onto American exceptionalism
Lol, high-speed rail in the US is a joke. California’s HSR program started in 1996 and hasn’t produced anything substantial in nearly 30 years. They might be able to get 1/3 of Phase 1 into operation by 2030. It’s not even in discussion unless it’s bundled with some kind of meme shit like depressurized train tunnels and eliminating safety measures.
In China, Deng started the Chinese HSR program around the same time and went from virtually none to being the world leader in kilometers of HSR with ~45,000 Km of operational HSR. To put that into perspective, that’s double the rest of the world combined. In fact, China has more HSR in construction than the rest of the world has active HSR today.
There’s this thing called land ownership which is a right…the state can eminent domain them but they’d have to fight it in court.
Doubt they have that in China, if your home is in the way of a planned development…it won’t be soon. You don’t buy land from the government there, it’s on a lease basis.
That and everyone in politics has to be aligned. If the top down order is to build a HSR, no cog in the system can just slow shit down for the hell of it. Doesn’t work that way in the US, as witnessed by the myriad times that the government can never approve the budget before it’s due.
What is hilarious about your argument is that it takes far more land to build and maintain a highway, and yet we somehow never had any problems with forcing land sales with eminent domain clauses doing that.
It’s almost as if the government is owned by a series of interests that are not actually interested in investing and maintaining efficient consumption minimum and economical modes of transportation, and instead focused on making a system that is efficient at creating profit for it’s ownership class. It’s almost as if, instead of a focus on the money to commodity cycle, there is a perverse incentive for a money to commodity to money cycle that means there is no real incentive to ever substantially invest to improve your commodity production.
Weird.
How many new highways do you see being built?? I’ve lived in California all my life and I’ve never seen a brand new highway being built. I’ve seen lanes expanded a few feet…But never a new one built.
Also, you can’t just put rail tracks anywhere as you can with land.
The politicians clearly work for reelection. Unfortunately, when a human being is placed in a position of power you usually get this kind of thing. Power corrupts.
Oh I’ll just tell the poor Americans I know whose homes were bulldozed for transportation infrastructure that it didn’t happen because they could have fought it in court. Dumbass.
Nah, you could tell them that at least they had the right to fight it in court.
Damn, it feels like your hypothetical system is designed to protect the interests of the rich and screw over the poor masses, and over time, increase the power the rich already have and further screw over the poor. I have some notes.
Like can you imagine if such a system existed in the real world. If, say, they wanted to violate the “right” of land ownership for poor people to segregate cities by, idk, skin colour. They could separate them with massive, uncrossavle highways. The people that make cars and people who own oil fields will love that! The issue is that there may or may not be some poor people that live there. But even the ones that own land, well, they can be removed because of the system of eminent domain. Theoretically it’d also apply to the wealthy, so it looks like a fair system to the layman. But the rich can afford to take time off work and better lawyers. So on paper it sounds fair, but in practice, it favours those who are already wealthy!
And it would feedback into even more advantages for the wealthy. All those highways will require cars, which is good, but cars need fuel. The fuel will need to be moved vast distances, your need a line of pipes from the oil fields! But that would once again require you to build a… “Line of pipes” across vast distances. But there are natives living along where those lines would go! And they theoretically benefit from the right to own land as well! And they’re disadvantaged due to being survivors of a genocide. Treaties or no, the lines will get out through their land, they can fight back but obviously they’re unlikely to win.
This doesn’t seem like a well thought out system. The only other thing the rich would have to do is to own media and education. Then they can pump out articles and curriculum one after the other saying this system is the only system that works! They can even tell people, over multiple generations, that this the only way, that the right to land is a human right (not food or water though, that would cut into the profits of some other rich people, obviously). And make it legal for the rich to have a stranglehold on the government, call it something other than corruption, make it sound less harmful. Eventually you can erode the political structure to consist only of 2 groups of people who both agree with your “right” to land ownership, so even if the masses wanted to (which they don’t, thanks to media and education ;)), they literally can never change it
Yeah imagine if this system existed irl. It’s a dystopia disguised as a normal country. And basically everyone in it would believe theres no other way, since any alternative has been demonized since before their grandparents were born.
Genius, and evil
You could have saved the wall of text and just said America is also bad…It is.
When someone has power, power corrupts. It’s a tale as old as time.
Doesn’t work that way in the US, as witnessed by the myriad times that the government can never approve the budget before it’s due.
“Our government is slow and inefficient can’t take decisions in a timely manner (especially if it’s decisions that benefit everyone at the expence of a fingernail of the bottomline of some rich dickhead for some reason
Unfortunately it’s not democratic…It’s a representative democracy where the representation is horrible. Yes, I’m no fan of the way the country is.
America: bulldozes entire neighborhoods to build highways, displacing everyone with minimal compensation.
China: Nail house.
And everyone is free to fight you in court and sue the shit out of you if they find a flaw in your design.
Btw, don’t you think that there are others that want to stay but didn’t get a chance to? It’s just the one dude who gets no water or electricity? No one else wanted to stay in the whole neighborhood?
What do you think happened before nail houses?
So…it’s a good thing when someone can torpedo a massive infrastructure project that will benefit millions just because they don’t feel like selling “their” land? Because they have a slip of paper that says they own a bunch of land, they can personally decide whether or not millions of people have access to public transport? Is that the argument you’re making? That capitalism is a superior system because someone who is rich and powerful enough can inconvenience or even destroy the lives of millions just cause they can?
It’s not a good thing in the long run if someone can do that. I’d have loved the HSR from NCAL to SCAL, would have avoided all those hours on the 5.
There are pros and cons basically, there isn’t a system that is perfect.
Doubt they have that in China
hey genious, what’s a nail house?
no investigation, no right to speak
Doubt they have that in China, if your home is in the way of a planned development…it won’t be soon.
[citation needed]
In fact there are many exemples of the opposite happening, China having to build around something because the person(s) refused to move and China didn’t force them to.
IIRC, you can say no to private development but not to the state. Either way you’re well compensated if you give up your land.
Yes I can flip a coin and half the time it lands on heads I can then claim that heads is always going to be the outcome of all coin flips.
I worked with a guy back in the day who was a dual citizen and owned homes back there. They were far ahead of us in terms of transportation, payments and conveniences. He went back every year for a month to party, even taking a few of us along.
All those nail houses you see are homes near roads, do you see one in the way of a HSR? You can’t build a HSR around a home like you can with a road.
Paragon of poor economic choices
”
throwing money at rich people is good as long as it’s in the form of coins moving at several kilometers per second
It was less smug, but I basically received this argument from one of my brothers when I tried to explain that China is (probably) striving towards a future where it’s good enough for capital to do things people need instead of making financial profits.
Edit: I’m always open to the possibility that I’m an idiot, but it really seemed like he had never considered the possibility that resources could be used to directly meet needs. I’m not feeling like I was the one being stupid.
Seems like standard capitalism apologia to me. Just absurd statements about how helping people is actually bad somehow and that society is better off if everyone is suffering. And it’s so far off base from things like basic empathy that it sounds unbelievable, especially when it comes out of people we care about.
