Hey now, that’s a misrepresentation of both the US and China.
China had way nicer locomotives in 96. It wasn’t 1896.
And in the US, that guy would have either been replaced by a machine, or replaced by someone younger who won’t be expecting the seniority and pay raises that being there for over 20 years usually gets you.
Replaced by machines that can’t transport humans or even freight for that matter
now I want to watch an entire playlist of Adam Something videos about dumbass tech bros trying to invent the train over and over again
this is kind of an exaggeration, but still crazy to think about. in a way similar to when we think of space exploration in the 60s today.
we can achieve so much so fast when we actually put some effort into caring about it.
It’s exaggerated and massively understated depending on location.
There are several metro areas in the US with over 1 million people that has zero metro/subway or light rail, some of them don’t even have a passenger train connections or stations, or at most it stops by once or twice a day. Places like Columbus Ohio that has literally zero rail passenger rail for over 2m people in the metro area. If you want to take the train from there to NYC you’ll have to spend a couple of hours on a bus to a different city first. And it’s not like they never had it, they razed the train station in the 70s.
Other places that lack light rail or metro and have 1m+ people in the metro area: Tampa, San Antonio, Indianapolis, Oklahoma, Memphis, Richmond, Louisville, Rochester, etc. with many of them having a very bad outside passenger train connections. There are also a bunch of others that almost slipped by or did stay off the list over technicalities like having a single tram line going up and down main street or similar. Places like Orlando, Cincinatti, etc.
I recently planned out a trip to Chicago using trains. The fastest and most cost efficient route was to drive 3 hrs to Indianapolis and then take a 3 hr train to Chicago from there. Literally, the passenger rail network in the US is so bad that the fastest and cheapest way to travel by train is to do it as little as possible.
when we care
Yeah but who would get to skim off the top of that?
Oh, you dont think Lockheed skimmed off the top of the Apollo program?
Sure by loke 60s standards. That would be like saying a cave that doesn’t get too damp when it rains is luxury, because cave people thought so.
That requires political will to achieve objectives other than wealth maximization, or in other words a political philosophy other than Capitalism which, at least sometimes, is dominant over Capitalism.
The whole point of Neoliberalism from the beginning was eliminate those and make Capitalism the dominant political philosophy rather than just a trade philosophy, so almost 50 years into it the effects are all around us and painful to see.
What hypercapitalism lobbied by big oil does to your country.
This is because public transportation is socialism and we can’t have tax dollars going to that pretext for communism. Capitalism is far superior which is why we are instead spending over $150 billion on deporting immigrants, which will help promote a free and open capitalist market.
as much as I’d like to call this a win for socialism, I don’t think socialism is actually necessary for good transit. Japan is very capitalist and has private rail networks which are comparable in quality and extent to China’s.
yeah, anti public transit has several motivations, the most American is racism. if we have robust public transit, they can’t be “whites only” and you can’t force the not-whites to sit in the back. so right there. Then you have white land owning hegemony. Why do the busses only go downtown and not to the shopping center half way to the suburbs? because they don’t want the filthy poors mucking up their white fort, if you let busses go up to the suburbs then THEY can get there and do all the things they get blamed for!! Lastly, profit motive. mass transit means people can choose to have a car or not. the powers that be are making a lot of money off cars and mass transit will upset the apple cart.
You know, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And your comment reminds me of it. The aesthetics of evil. Racist segregation is an obvious evil. So if you tell black people to stand at the back of the bus because they’re not allowed to mix with the whites, that’s rather obvious and a horrific picture to have. But, if you handicap them, make sure they can only live in the cheapest communities and then limit the mobility of them. Same result. But because you didn’t see it, and the enforced segregation is rather subtle… Well, looks better, doesn’t it? So people are more likely to accept it. And if you say things like “The city has marked this black community unfit for investment.” then it sounds already like a conspiracy theory. Making you the weirdo for speaking out. Horrid, but an elegant and efficient system for censorship, isn’t it?
And to be absolutely clear: I reject racial segregation and censorship, obviously.
China 2060: … a space elevator
USA 2060: … still the same rail service
a space elevator
You’d have to harness carbon nanotubes first… then deal with all the debris in LEO, then come up with an elevator that doesn’t take days to reach GEO (granted the counterweight can rest there and the cab can stop sooner).
Easy, just attach a huge rocket to the bottom of the elevator, problem solved. Oh, use AI to design the rocket, make the ticketing system use block chain, and when you get to orbit, a robot remotely operated by a human on the ground (but prentends to be fully autonomous) takes a picture of you and generates an NFT of it that you can purchase for 35000 USD in the gift shop.
I’ll be over here swimming in my money pool.
This is a joke meme that doesn’t mean anything … just like the American public transport system.
What’s the problem? The rich have private planes.
US Train travel has actually gotten worse since 1996.
Yeah, the only reason we still have tracks most places is for freight.
In Capitalist nations, the further we are from the era of peak Unions and in general civil society movements (which was just after WWII) the slower infrastructure improves from one year to the next, something visible not just in trains but at all levels (even National Health Services for those countries which have them).
The same thing will happen in China now that they’re getting more Capitalist than Socialist.
It was never the Capitalist part doing the kind of improvements that benefit most people, it was the stuff outside Capitalism (that used it as a Trade Philosophy only) constraining it and guiding it for policy ends which were independent of Capitalism.
This of course accelerated with Neoliberalism, since that stuff is mainly about making Capitalism the sole definer of policy, or in other words make Capitalism the entirety of politics, hence unconstrained and unguided by interests other than those of Money.
Capitalism is reasonably decent at optimizing Trade in the short and mid-term, but is completelly shit for non-Trade interests such as Quality Of Life, as well as for anything which doesn’t have direct and reasonably immediate action-consequence links such as situations where negative effects are very delayed in time (for example, companies enshittifying their products but keeping on going for years on the inertia of brand name) or emergent in nature (i.e. things that appear due to the accumulation of the actions of many actors, such as Global Warming).
The same thing will happen in China now that they’re getting more Capitalist than Socialist.
China: “We’re working on our next five year plan, as part of a grand fifty year plan for full national modernization. We haven’t had a recession in 40 years and we’ve functionally eliminated poverty within our borders. We’re currently working on a network of trans-continental railroads and global shipping lanes to bring our modern industrial capacity to the planetary scale. As we slough off the productive surge of capitalism and turn state owned enterprises into the foundation of our economic model, we are enjoying an era of wealth and social stability not enjoyed by any country on earth in human history. This is just as Karl Marx predicted, two-hundred years ago.”
American: “No, that’s just capitalism. You’re doing capitalism right now.”
Also American: “We invested another trillion dollars in VR that hosts an AI that makes bitcoins. Our GDP is up to 15 digits. No, we don’t care about our measles epidemic, it builds character.”
American: “We invested another trillion dollars in VR that hosts an AI that makes bitcoins.”
China: “Sounds great, we’ll gladly make and supply 90% of all bitcoin hardware to make a quick buck off of your global ecological crisis machine (100% not capitalism I promise)”
100% not capitalism
Capitalism is when you… produce low cost surplus for general consumption?
What happens when you ban crypto trading and mining because its exploiting the SOE low cost electricity?
Capitalism is when there’s an owner-class controlling production via capital. It doesn’t really matter what they’re producing or at what cost or who’s consuming.
Capitalism is when there’s an owner-class controlling production via capital.
It’s funny, because I’ve seen more than a few libertarians assert that Communism is the Worst Form Of Capitalism because any kind of regulation is just Government Ownership of Production. The only true path to socialism is a fully devolved privatization of all territory and commodities.
So you have people go out into the woods to create this ultra-orthodox free market absent any kind of iron grip of Big Government. They spend millions on marketing their liberal utopia to attract a large base of like-minded people. They take over the local government, abolish the regulations, end the tyranny of the Woke Government Leftists, and finally unleash the power of individualist John Galt style ingenuity. And then their city fills up with bears.
So long as the workers’ pockets are being filled, being the number one producer of literal trash, propping up global consumerism and burning the planet is irrelevant.
After all, it’s those dirty capitalists that forced us to pillage our own country and disregard our worker’s health and safety. But at the same time don’t forget that we’re the #1 shining world leader and those capitalist pigs can’t boss us around! 🇨🇳💪🇨🇳
those dirty capitalists that forced us to pillage our own country
My man, what are you even on? You seem to have China confused with West Virginia.
You might ask if capitalism is the sole definer of policy, what’s the purpose of our elected parasites? If they can’t define a reason for their existence, they too need to be replaced with ai.
Well, the point of Neoliberalism is to de facto destroy Democracy by making the powers controlled by voters (the State) be secondary to the power of Money.
I guess the end stage will be something similar to Feudalism, or maybe just Fascism (a number of very Neoliberal nations have of late become a lot more Fascist).
In the transition stage, the politicians are needed keep up the Theatre Of Democracy and distract the masses with ever louder shows of conflict around things which Money doesn’t really care about (hence the Identity Politics Wars).
I don’t know if this analysis is true generally, Japan is pretty fucking capitalist.
I would argue it’s more a matter of what wing of the capitalist oligarchy has the upper hand. In the US and Canada, it’s the extractive fossil capital and that ultimately holds power. In Japan, or the Netherlands it’s more the manufacturing.
Don’t extrapolate from the US to capitalism in general. It’s more nuanced than that.
Whilst I can’t speak in an informed way about Japan, I can about The Netherlands and they have been degrading in terms of quality of public services during the Neoliberal era.
Certainly by the time I left (about 15 years ago) the trend was well establish in that country of having Scandinavian levels of tax (but only for people, not for companies) and ever more American-level of public services. For example, they don’t have a National Health Service (instead they have Health Insurance) even though taxes there for individuals are significantly higher than in countries which do have one such as Britain or Portugal.
They also use to have a high level of public housing but haven’t been building much of it in the last few decades and now have a giant realestate bubble.
The Netherlands is a great example of how even countries which started with a higher level of policies geared towards the good of the many, have a decay of those over time as we get further and further away from the post-War era, especially during the Neoliberal years.
Yabbut somebody think of the car companies!!!
While continuing to produce the worst cars imaginable
Every three years China pours more concrete than the US has since WWII.
Just a reminder that concrete releases huge amounts of CO2 as it cures. Empty cities don’t help anyone.
Another reason good urbanism and walkability is super important: the emissions don’t just come from the cars, they come from the excess roads themselves, too.
i don’t think their intention is to keep them empty. not the worst thing to spend co2 on.
Their intention was to bolster the economy with busy work, but that’s not a long term solution.
busywork making houses ahead of time is pretty good tbh.
id take that over ai or some shit.
That’s comparing Apples to Shampoo. To completely different concepts and it’s not an either/or situation.
it really isn’t. both give out emissions, one of them is housing.
its like complaining wind farms are ugly.
Houses don’t stand long on their own. It takes a significant amount of time and money to keep these things from filling up with mold or collapsing.
Bragging about encasing the natural world in a synthetic crust and displacing wildlife… Great flex
I wonder if the early proliferation of rural cars / mega expressways kinda fucked us. When your transportation network grows around trains, upgrading the trains/rails makes good economic sense. We just kind of spread out everywhere quickly and made the train locations somewhat irrelevant.
No the auto industry has lobbied against trains and similar projects. It’s not about the science but more about how our politicians have been selling their souls for centuries.
People choose those politicians, too sensitive for fear of even slightly bigger government. Paired with racism, nowadays.
Pretty much part of the plot from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
I definitely think this is the case. Something akin to tragedy of the commons (or maybe Braese’s paradox?) where small investments for short term gain trumps bigger investments for, comparatively, bigger gains.
Sweden, where I live, is in this situation too where the rail network is 50 years in reparation debt but it’s easier for politicians to budget for small road repairs and say that they make meaningful infrastructure work
If anything, shouldn’t that make it easier? The US has quite open and wide streets/roads. You have more space to build stations and rail tracks than for example Europe with much narrower streets/roads.
No, because cross-country trains and heavy use of them to move goods and people predates cars by quite a bit. Trains were a key component of the North winning the Civil War, for example.
Lots of existing train infrastructure needed to be torn out to make room for car infrastructure.
America: if ain’t broke don’t fix it Every other country: yah it’s time, what are our new requirements?
I mean this is sorta one of the things an autocracy does well. You might get substandard work and a lot of graft but when the order comes down no one gets to complain when they run a train line through your house.
actually, they do get to complain
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/gallery/chinas-extraordinary-nail-houses-show-5727566
And then turn a blind eye to all the broken stuff because “we have been living with it so it’s not broken”
That conductor is a total hottie tho
https://www.pekingnology.com/p/china-massively-overbuilt-high-speed
Good luck dealing with that financial bomb.
so? even if that’s true, that doesn’t mean high speed rail is bad. it means you should be more careful with the planning, not “don’t try new shit for the next forever years”
Given that we here in the US are still trying g to work out from under 150 year old rail infrastructure, I don’t think they need to worry about it for a while.
Rail generally lasts longer than roads even if you don’t maintain it. We’ve proven that
A feature of rail is very high building costs. If they wasted money on building HSR on a lot of places where it’s not needed, this means there’s gonna be a debt that never gets paid by the utilization of the rail. Bad investment.
So it’s not about maintenance, but the up-front cost.
Not doing an investment where an investment would make a lot of money is of course a kind of reverse of this, but which leads to a similar outcome.
You could say the same about pretty much any infrastructure. It’s hideously expensive and will never get paid back by utilization.
- highways
- local roads
- bridges
- air traffic control
- utilities of most kinds
- canals
- flood control
- erosion mitigation
All are hideously expensive and will never get paid back by utilization.
Are they all bad investments?
I claim they all are critical for their indirect benefits to an economy, a society, and rail is exactly the same.
I would say that there’s quite a lot of reason to believe that infrastructure investments can be one of the best ways to help poor people rise economically. Which has obvious paybacks.
This still requires creating infrastructure that is actually needed, otherwise it’s just wasting money (which ultimately is just an abstraction over wealth, opportunity, materials, workers’ finite time and energy, etc etc).
infrastructure investments can be one of the best ways to help poor people rise economically
And specifically consider how much we can help by not requiring all the expenses of owning a car. Transit and intercity rail could be among the best investments when you consider those indirect benefits. Such a shame that short sighted people want them to be profitable in utilization
I read half the article and i strongly disagree with a lot of its points.
First, it lists corruption as a reason to halt the HSR (high speed rail) program. Corruption is however not specific to rail and exists in every branch of the economy, including car and road construction. So that’s not a reason to target HSR.
Secondly, it says that HSR is not “economical”, which completely ignoring that HSR does not have to be economical, at least not in the classical sense. To a political party, the cost of a project is the popularity or unpopularity of the project; i.e. to the party, the actual cost is the cost of voters who dislike projects. However, the Chinese people are overwhelmingly looking at HSR as a positive thing and an excellent idea. So it has a very positive benefit for the state. Also, note that good transportation facility is valuable for all the other branches of economy, and therefore has positive economic by-products.
These considerations make me wonder whether actually the article is paid for by the oil lobby, trying to perpetuate outdated and expensive airlines and car transport methods.
