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People 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 point
by wonnage 5y ago
People 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