Weird to compare a brutal dictatorship which violates human rights on the regular vs a democracy which violates human rights a little less.
a brutal dictatorship which violates human rights on the regular
Don’t you think you’re a little harsh on the US?
So far…give Trump time and he’ll catch right up.
Well, the most efficient form of government is a dictatorship, which nobody want except the dictator.
An inefficient government has groups investigating other groups to see if what they are doing is correct. This process takes time, so things move much slower. But is generally a much better protection against corruption.
You say that, but… Iraq was a dictatorship, and they weren’t all that efficient at anything other than killing Kurds.
That’s because they’re politically illiterate. The important difference is the economic model and its end goal. Is it to make a small elite super rich? Is it to meet the peoples’ needs? The US is extremely efficient in creating a small class of super rich people (and by that I mean corporations too) while China is extremely efficient in switching to renewable energy and expanding high speed rail.
Well, the most efficient form of government is a dictatorship, which nobody want except the dictator.
I mean… some people do, but they’re weird.
i mean from what i read there is only one country with more ppl die in traffic which is india https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Länder_nach_Verkehrstoten but good they have a few trains for 1 billion ppl. sure thats going to help. LOL.
Congratulations, you figured out that China is a large country! It would be ridiculous to think that a country with 1.4 billion people would have less people dieing in traffic than a country with a smaller population.
If you just go by absolute numbers, a large country will have more of absolutely everything than a small country.
Now go back to your link and sort by “Je 100.000 Einwohner” and see how that changes the list.
Now do aircraft carriers!
Aircraft carriers don’t let me travel to my destinations
Your fault that you weren’t born as an aircraft!
Setting that cash on fire would be more practical use of tax payer money
Hyperloop any day now!
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 slowing of improvements of course itself 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, so ever less policy was done for the greater good.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
the “Socialism” is in quotes as were aren’t really talking about actual socialism. Its now a boogeyman dogwhistle used by rich people to steal public property and convert it into private capital.
Not just trains but all transportation services and systems is severely lacking in this country. Along with crumbling infrastructure and terrible build quality of cars and trucks and you got a recipe for disaster. But no one will care cuz Merica!
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.
Id argue the northeast corridor is effectively the only place we have intercity rail.
While there are other routes, it’s mainly just keeping the lights on. How can rail be useful at 1-2 trips/day, travelling at glacial speeds? We shouldn’t even count it. If we ever start funding rail seriously, we’ll save a crap load of money where Amtrak kept the right of way sort of in use but that’s the only benefit.
The 2022 infrastructure bill would have made a huge difference increasing several routes to “plan to be useful” or even “sort of useful”, but even then a decent rail system would be a century out until we actually start spending. It doesn’t even have to be much, compared to road spending, but it has to be a lot more than we do now, in percentages more similar to road spending, and it needs to be consistent, long term. It can’t just disappear every time a Regressive is in office.
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.
America: if ain’t broke don’t fix it Every other country: yah it’s time, what are our new requirements?
Then there’s “if it ain’t broke… how can we break it to extract a few extra bucks from it?”
And then turn a blind eye to all the broken stuff because “we have been living with it so it’s not broken”
Right now, the Chinese government has effective eminent domain powers which allows them to acquire property for which to build public infrastructure, both expressways and high-speed railways. That the Chinese people have no questions about the positives regarding HSTs, especially crunchtime during holidays where railway stations would be jampacked. That they’re rolling their HSTs to show their technological prowess.
Why the US HST programs and passenger rail transport in general are at glacial pace is partly because of the usual car lobby, because of NIMBYs, because of cheap air transport, and some people now on online gambling instead of touching grass and tossing dice in Vegas.
Right now, the Chinese government has effective eminent domain powers which allows them to acquire property for which to build public infrastructure, both expressways and high-speed railways
I’ve heard people claim as much, but at the same time, Stuck Nail Houses exist, I’m not sure how to reconcile the two. I think it’s that their eminent domain is limited to property that was purchased after a certain point, so if it’s property your parents owned since the 80s, it’s literally easier for developers to route the highway around your home than win that lawsuit, but if they bought in like 2010, they can just give you a similar or better property, or the cash to buy one, and that’s that.
There do exist stubborn nail houses but those are very rare occurrences in China where they do indeed fight to hold onto the land they consider their birthright property or believing to be much more valuable than their government tries to buy from them, the only few outbursts of dissent in a country that quashes dissent.
stuck nail houses 釘子戶 may apply in limited situations but there is no such thing as land ownership in China. When you purchase real estate in China you are buying the right to use the land for a period of time (I think it’s 80 years but don’t quote me on that number, I’m going off memory here) but the state owns the land. When the party wants to build something they are going to build it.
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.
we
Is this some sort of US problem that I’m too not-US to understand?
Public transportation in USA sucks, and people from USA often use we on social media platforms, assuming they are the majority :P
It’s because US companies dominate the internet, plus English is the de facto language of discussion. I’m not sure how to deal with this since we probably are the majority.
You’re third, after China and India. Now tell me how those don’t count ;)
Your moral and intellectual superior was not talking about literal population, but that wasn’t the point. I was saying that US citizens most likely predominate US sites that are written in US English.
That was number of online users, not total population. And 50% of internet companies are Chinese, only 6% are American. I’m sure you’ll twist that fact to suit you too :)
Number of online users has nothing to do with what your superior was talking about. This is like saying most of the world speaks mandarin or something. Maybe you should learn how to think before being an obnoxious prick to your masters.
They don’t speak English, so they’re just not present in these forums. Way to needlessly start ab argument tho
India has a billion english speakers. But they do tend to their own sites/fb
And now wait for five years and see if the Chinese one is still there.
It seems pretty improbable to me that this infrastructure will be replaced in China in just five years.
Didn’t mean replaced. I meant collapse. Rotted away. Tofu dreg.
Well I don’t really have any reason to doubt the quality of the rail system. It’s one thing to go over-budget on transit (which they apparently did); it’s quite another to go over-budget and build the whole system to a poor standard where it won’t even last.
I hope that you are right but I doubt it.
It’s been 16 years and counting.
This one is from 2024 Let that sink in Home not alone, just unfinished
One swallow does not make it summer. Shall we continue this path to see which one runs out first of resources?
Sorry, what do developers abandoning large housing projects have to do with longevity of train infrastructure?
Americans: “Nice infrastructure. Would be a shame if we had to come over there and liberate it.”
I am as American as Pancetta. It is just the glorification of China that is rubbing me the wrong way.
Their buildings are collapsing. Yes, it is built fast, cheap and looks nice. And then it fails.
And the Chinese peope themselves. They suffer.
the glorification of China
The Chinese government has definitely run ahead of the pack on domestic investment. But you could play the same game with Spain or Japan or Turkiye. The numbers simply would not have been as impressive.
Their buildings are collapsing.
This is a meme from 2008. You won’t find any more crumbling buildings in China than you’d find in the UK or Korea.
And the Chinese peope themselves. They suffer.
They’ll never know the joys of bumper to bumper traffic
Explain the sinking just finished metro. The ghost towns. The buildings collapsing. The bridges decaying because of concrete rot. There are so many current projects going bad because of the use of bad materials and dodgy practices. Skipping a geo research before building etc.
The Chinese are surpressed by the CCP. More than 90% of the drinking water is not fit for consumption. Aside from the AI cleaned up videos and pictures, there isn’t much of a clear sky with the smog.
And where are the birds?
… Also have you seen China. They too have traffic jams.
No country is a wonderland. And if someone is really really really trying to convince me they are that magnificent, and better than everyone else. I. Do. Not. Trust. Them.
Actions say more than words. And the actions have spoken.
Source: it came to me in a dream.
Source. Straight out of mainland China. Not all does get stopped by the Firewall.
So still no source
