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In 1995 China and the U.S. both had essentially zero miles of high speed rail. Today China has tens of thousands of miles of high speed rail and the U.S. still
by syops 5y ago
In 1995 China and the U.S. both had essentially zero miles of high speed rail. Today China has tens of thousands of miles of high speed rail and the U.S. still has essentially zero miles of high speed rail. We did invest $6 trillion in 20 years of most less pointless warfare.
- wonnage 5y agoPeople argue about how the demographics of china make this possible, america is too spread out, blah blah blah... I would rather have a thousand miles of pointless HSR than pointlessly bombing a bunch of taliban who are now back and no worse for wear
- 8note 5y agoChina's high speed rail is going to places where they want to increase the Han population.
- wonnage 5y agothanks for the vaguely xenophobic and mostly meaningless comment
- dang 5y ago"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mushbino 5y agoYou mean the only ethnicity targeted by the one child program?
- dang 5y agoPlease don't take HN threads further into flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- thatfrenchguy 5y agoLike between Beijing and Shanghai?
- dang 5y agoPlease don't take HN threads on flamewar tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- syops 5y agoYeah, the demographic density argument fails to hold up to the fact that spending $6 trillion on high speed rail would have been much more beneficial to society than spending it on Iraq/Afghanistan.
- blahblahblogger 5y agoI'm not trying to be a troll with this, but is that true? I don't mean the fact that Iraq and Afghanistan were failed missions. But I've heard that 90% of the money spent on those wars went to Americans in some way or another, military contractors, suppliers, etc. all the way down the line to people like me in tech who may work on software used by the military.
- MiddleEndian 5y agoRight now, the money went to Americans and the result was we blew up countries the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia. Imagine instead if the money went to Americans anyway, AND we had much better national infrastructure. You could even pitch it as necessary for national defense anyway.
- dastbe 5y agoyou could make sure 90% of the money spent on high speed rail went to americans. that’s orthogonal to what the outcome of paying those americans is.
- iluvcommunism 5y agoThat goes back to the Milton Friedman quote I love: “what’s good for me is good for the country.”
- blargarg 5y agoYou could spend all that money employing contractors producing weapons and weapons research. Or you could spent that money employing contractors producing high speed rail.
- 5y ago
- ews 5y agoI think this is the core of it, we have moved most of our resources to foreign wars and let our infrastructure to rot. That this is not even part of the public discourse shows the decay of the US as a country.
- whatshisface 5y agoIt is very much a part of public discourse, the military industrial complex has been discussed since the 70s. The problem is that - well, I don't know what the problem is. Maybe it is that everyone is too busy with the meaningless stuff that they show on cable news to be too concerned with things that affect their lives.
- cogman10 5y agoThe problem is far too many americans take pride in how big and tough our military is. They equate military spending to might. You propose "Hey, maybe 700 billion dollars on the military is excessive" and you get "But then china/russia/the terrorists/etc can invade us!"
- cheschire 5y ago2.1m service members, over 700k civilians employed by the military directly [0]. Then you have the endless stream of military contractors, and you're looking at almost 1 out of every 50 working age people in America benefits directly from the federal military activity. So yeah, of course people are taking pride in a big military since it provides so much of their community income. 0: https://www.governing.com/archive/military-civilian-active-duty-employee-workforce-numbers-by-state.html https://www.governing.com/archive/military-civilian-active-d...
- Tostino 5y agoThat budget could still go to supporting their communities if we employed them doing more meaningful work rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, etc.
- scottLobster 5y agoTo be fair a lot of Chinese rail is extremely wasteful and more of a government run full employment program than a direct economic benefit. But I'll agree it would have probably been better to spend the Iraq/Afghanistan war money domestically on any number of things.
- brailsafe 5y agoWhat's wasteful about that?
- iluvcommunism 5y agoWhat’s wasteful about paying millions of people to shovel dirt? Now take your answer and apply it to your question.
- praestigiare 5y agoNothing, if you need dirt shoveled...
- missedthecue 5y agoJobs programs make us poorer on net.
- sumedh 5y agoIts not black and white some of these jobs might be shitty but atleast someone gets a paycheque, the other alternative is that these people depend on unemployment benefits and then vote for demagogues who promise to bring back jobs and drive out immigrants who stole those jobs.
- brailsafe 5y agoI can't see how it would be better than if huge swaths of people didn't do anything and lived in squalor. Who cares how much it affects the GDP. Honestly I'd probably find it more rewarding to operate a train for some people than all of the professional programming work I've done.
- rufus_foreman 5y agoPublic transportation is (almost always) an inferior good. If one country is consuming more of an inferior good than another country, it means that they are poorer than that other country.
- zeotroph 5y ago"A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation." -Gustavo Petro See London or Paris or even New York City. Just getting everyone a car only creates cities which are contain more parking lots than buildings and green spaces.
- rufus_foreman 5y agoThe richer you are in New York City, the less you spend on public transportation. That's an inferior good.
- Bilal_io 5y agoLook at the "Park & Ride" concept in the Seattle area (I am sure it exists in other cities). I've seen a lot of people that are very comfortable financially take the bus to work. Public transportation only becomes inferior when its infrastructure is horrible, and it is humiliating to take a bus because of the wait time, delays or how packed they get.
- rufus_foreman 5y agoIf someone in Seattle goes from 200,000 a year in income to 2,000,000 a year in income, do they spend more or less money on Park & Ride?
- babyshake 5y agoIn San Francisco and New York at least, one important reason public transportation is inferior is you are regularly confronted with mental illness, disgusting sights and smells, and sometimes violence.
- forinti 5y ago1995 is an interesting year, because China's GDP overtook Brazil's then. It is now ~10x larger.
- southerntofu 5y ago> We did invest $6 trillion in 20 years of most less pointless warfare. Where does this 6 trillion dollars figure come from? It is my understanding that budget of the military is higher (not accounting for hidden/secret budgets), and that according there's (potentially dozens of) trillions of dollars that are just unaccounted for, as the Pentagon is the only federal service that hasn't passed an audit ever.