Weird to compare a brutal dictatorship which violates human rights on the regular vs a democracy which violates human rights a little less.
So far…give Trump time and he’ll catch right up.
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.
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.
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.
Hyperloop any day now!
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
That conductor is a total hottie tho
US Train travel has actually gotten worse since 1996.
Came to say this. If it had literally remained unchanged they’d still be doing pretty good.
Yeah, the only reason we still have tracks most places is for freight.
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.
Pretty much part of the plot from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
People choose those politicians, too sensitive for fear of even slightly bigger government. Paired with racism, nowadays.
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.
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
Its so naive to think that this was the cause lmao
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
deleted by creator
That’s nature in general.
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”
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
What hypercapitalism lobbied by big oil does to your country.
it’s not even capitalism at this point. there’s various definitions of capitalism out there, which makes it blurry and difficult-to-talk-about, but most of them feature some element of wealth maximization. in the current trajectory, nobody’s wealth is increased.
trump’s policies hurt not only the common people, but also the economy. if the common people have less money, they spend less on consumerism and that cripples the economy. that is actually what’s already happening rn. and it’s only going to get worse. we need handouts, so people can spend money.
