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> There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago Where in the US can one find the secre

> There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago Where in the US can one find the secret, cross-country high-speed rail built in the roaring twenties?! There's also a type of western mind that automatically dismisses the odds of a different country succeeding, based on nothing but the fact that they are using a different approach (on the surface). It's a kind if circular reasoning: our system is the best because we're the best, because of the system we have. To subvert the Simpsons - "the best so far" Edit: I'm far from a Sinophile, but there's a certain willful blindness, concerning an almost religious belief that the west will prevail because it's the west, regardless of all the systemic weaknesses that show up again and again. It would suck for a dictator-for-life leading the biggest economy in the world, but healthy minds would introspect to see how we can do better, like we should, right? I have no doubt out leaders will pick the wrong lessons, like social credit scores and pervasive surveillance

refulgentis 2y ago
Asking why we don't have a high speed cross country railroad in a nation that had most of its airports build out 60 years ago is an excellent pattern match for odd complaints.* Thinking whether you're a Sinophile is a subject of discussion, and then most damningly, your closing thought being whether other people think "the west will prevail" shows there's a lot more going on here than the idea that maybe overcapacity is good. Way more than I expected, so I'll leave it at "overcapacity is bad". :) * n.b. for future arguments I'd avoid this, a map shows china's is cross country in that you can piece together, exactly one route that is high speed only, requires multiple transfers, and leaves you about 20% short of a full horizontal trip cross country while taking a winding route that wasn't designed for it.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  If you're going to disagree, can you do us all a favor by not misrepresenting my words? > Asking why we don't have a high speed cross country railroad I asked where the high speed rail is, because parent claimed China is building out infrastructure "we built a 100 years ago" - which is patently untrue. I even quoted parent, so you can't have missed that. > damningly, your closing thought being whether other people think "the west will prevail" Bravo! That's a tabloid-worthy recontextualization hit-job - you cut off the part I considered so important I originally added emphasis to it, and added your commentary to give my surviving words an unflattering meaning of your choosing that was never there. I said "...an almost religious belief that the west will prevail because it's the west" A good day to you.
- deadfoxygrandpa 2y ago
  "cross country" doesn't mean east-west. china doesn't have a straight east-west high speed line that goes across the entire country because the population is overwhelmingly concentrated in the east, and there are routes that cross north-south and all through all the major population centers. china also had many airports before they built the high speed system.
coliveira 2y ago
This is a systemic issue with the Western way of thinking. The West always consider itself to be the most evolved culture in history. First, by way of Christianity, later, by way of markets, democracy, and science. This way of thinking is self-deceiving because they cannot understand that other cultures can offer something equal or better. So, when faced with the advance of other cultures they necessarily have to dismiss them as inferior.
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  This isn't really unique to any particular culture. China spent a good couple millenia referring to anyone outside its borders as 'barbarians.'
  - coliveira 2y ago
    Well, they clearly don't have that issue anymore. Maybe that's why they're now where they are.
hbarka 2y ago
You don’t have to apologize, man. I was on a Pullman train once but it wasn’t quite a bullet train. I also rode a Western train named Orient Express.
Yeul 2y ago
People forget that China existed before communism. Hell only Mao's idiotic experiment only lasted a few decades. China has always been capitalist. It's why you can find a store run by Chinese expats in the middle of the Suriname jungle.
- deadfoxygrandpa 2y ago
  that cant possibly be true because capitalism has only existed for a small portion of the thousands of years of chinese history. capitalism doesn't just mean having stores, or having markets
corimaith 2y ago
From an East Asian perspective what China is doing really isn't anything new and with the same pitfalls as the former Asian tigers. >our system is the best because we're the best, because of the system we have. This isn't what's happening at all. The causes and reasons why infrastructure and Western cities are so bad have been studied for decades and are well known, just as we've been studying what makes Tokyo or Hong Kong work so well. People are constantly critiquing the underlying system of incentives and entangled interests, you can hundreds of popular threads on HN, Reddit, MSM, hell even with Elon Musk's DOGE. The only time when I see the mythical self-convinced westerner evoked is precisely when critique of other cultures come in, often from cultures that feel a need to constantly defend themselves.
mike_hearn 2y ago
> Where in the US can one find the secret, cross-country high-speed rail built in the roaring twenties?! Nowhere because the USA has an excellent internal flight and interstate highway system instead. Railways were already becoming uncompetitive by the 1920s and now live on mostly in parts of the world where they already exist, where land is at a premium. The reason people think China will crash is that their system isn't unique, has been tried many times before and eventually always fails. That isn't circular reasoning, it's reasoning based on prior experience. China is still a communist country: we know how that story ends and why. Remember that for much of the history of the USSR people in the west were dazzled by its rapid industrialization and apparent achievements. First country to put a man in space! Many people in that era genuinely wondered if central planning was just a superior way to do things. In hindsight we can say that it wasn't: with enormous focus such economies were able to pull off heavy engineering projects at scale, but at the cost of ignoring consumer goods and with a dysfunctional economy that was brittle to its core. End result: when Yeltsin visited NASA in the 1980s he demanded a surprise inspection of a local supermarket. NASA didn't impress him, but the 30,000+ products for sale in a mundane shop blew him away. He was shaken to his core and cried on the flight home, asking himself what they had done to Russia's poor people. The USSR collapsed just a few years later, Yeltsin became president and moved Russia in the direction of a market economy.
- simgt 2y ago
  > Nowhere because the USA has an excellent internal flight and interstate highway system instead Both being impossible to decouple from fossil fuels consumption at current scale, essentially. > End result: when Yeltsin visited NASA in the 1980s he demanded a surprise inspection of a local supermarket. NASA didn't impress him, but the 30,000+ products for sale in a mundane shop blew him away I have no idea whether this anecdote is true, but it wouldn't be surprise me one bit for an always-drank dude who made the army shell the parliament of his own country.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
  > Nowhere because the USA has an excellent internal flight and interstate highway system instead. Railways were already becoming uncompetitive by the 1920s and now live on mostly in parts of the world where they already exist, where land is at a premium. The fact that railways were becoming uncompetitive in the mid-1900s is why high-speed rail was developed. The Japanese pioneered high-speed rail in the 1960s, dramatically increasing the speed that passenger trains could run. That not only made trains competitive again, but hands-down the best mode of transportation for distances of a few hundred kilometers. The result is that new high-speed rail networks are being built around the world, not just in places where rail is already prominent. In places where high-speed rail exists, it has taken most of the market share away from short-haul flights. If you want to get from Paris to Brussels (300 km), or from Beijing to Shanghai (1200 km), you take the train. This is despite the fact that Western Europe and China have excellent highway networks (China's highway network is now superior to the US interstate system) and plenty of airports. > China is still a communist country: we know how that story ends and why. China is not at all like the USSR. > NASA didn't impress him, but the 30,000+ products for sale in a mundane shop blew him away. China has an absolutely crazy abundance of consumer products. These days, Americans turn to Ali Express to get random widgets or knick-knacks of any kind. China is the place where you can pull out your smartphone, order pretty much anything, and have it arrive by courier 15 minutes later (okay, that's a slight exaggeration, but not much of one).
latentcall 2y ago
I agree and see it all the time just the general attitude towards China is disdain when they’re arguably way ahead of us and we just don’t want to admit it. They are full speed EV and we are attempting to roll it back.
JackFr 2y ago
For those old enough to remember, we heard it all before in the 1980's about Japan so experience has made us circumspect. But even more so, markets enforce discipline on capital that state directed firms don't have. Everyone decries executives who "only look as far as next quarter's profits", and while admittedly at the margins that can have perverse incentives, in the large it demands that management put capital to work at profitable enterprises selling goods and services the public actually want.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  Japan was different in that it never became the world's factory, and then, manufacturing skills hadn't atrophied in the west, so it's a little different now. Even so, past performance is no guarantee for future results. > But even more so, markets enforce discipline on capital that state directed firms don't have I struggle to reconcile this with stock buy-backs. Also, China seems to have deployed a hybrid strategy: the national and regional governments provide incentives to industries, but the individual companies compete against each other. Product-wise, US defense contractors have done surprisingly well under a more extreme version of this regime (cost-plus contracts) for decades.
  - JackFr 2y ago
    > I struggle to reconcile this with stock buy-backs. Would it offend your sensibilities less if they paid dividends with that money? Buybacks are simply a more tax advantageous means of returning profits to share holders. Similarly debt financed buybacks are a morally neutral way to change the capital structure of the firm by replacing equity with debt.
- coliveira 2y ago
  This "market discipline" also requires that companies only look for their immediate future and next quarter profits. This makes it hard to do anything long term, which is exactly what China is doing. Even companies like Google, that expressly said to make decisions based on a long term view, are pushed by the markets to consider only their current profits, which reflects in the changes we see in the company.

refulgentis 2y ago

Asking why we don't have a high speed cross country railroad in a nation that had most of its airports build out 60 years ago is an excellent pattern match for odd complaints.* Thinking whether you're a Sinophile is a subject of discussion, and then most damningly, your closing thought being whether other people think "the west will prevail" shows there's a lot more going on here than the idea that maybe overcapacity is good. Way more than I expected, so I'll leave it at "overcapacity is bad". :) * n.b. for future arguments I'd avoid this, a map shows china's is cross country in that you can piece together, exactly one route that is high speed only, requires multiple transfers, and leaves you about 20% short of a full horizontal trip cross country while taking a winding route that wasn't designed for it.

sangnoir 2y ago
If you're going to disagree, can you do us all a favor by not misrepresenting my words? > Asking why we don't have a high speed cross country railroad I asked where the high speed rail is, because parent claimed China is building out infrastructure "we built a 100 years ago" - which is patently untrue. I even quoted parent, so you can't have missed that. > damningly, your closing thought being whether other people think "the west will prevail" Bravo! That's a tabloid-worthy recontextualization hit-job - you cut off the part I considered so important I originally added emphasis to it, and added your commentary to give my surviving words an unflattering meaning of your choosing that was never there. I said "...an almost religious belief that the west will prevail because it's the west" A good day to you.
deadfoxygrandpa 2y ago
"cross country" doesn't mean east-west. china doesn't have a straight east-west high speed line that goes across the entire country because the population is overwhelmingly concentrated in the east, and there are routes that cross north-south and all through all the major population centers. china also had many airports before they built the high speed system.

coliveira 2y ago

This is a systemic issue with the Western way of thinking. The West always consider itself to be the most evolved culture in history. First, by way of Christianity, later, by way of markets, democracy, and science. This way of thinking is self-deceiving because they cannot understand that other cultures can offer something equal or better. So, when faced with the advance of other cultures they necessarily have to dismiss them as inferior.

bobthepanda 2y ago
This isn't really unique to any particular culture. China spent a good couple millenia referring to anyone outside its borders as 'barbarians.'
- coliveira 2y ago
  Well, they clearly don't have that issue anymore. Maybe that's why they're now where they are.

hbarka 2y ago

You don’t have to apologize, man. I was on a Pullman train once but it wasn’t quite a bullet train. I also rode a Western train named Orient Express.

Yeul 2y ago

People forget that China existed before communism. Hell only Mao's idiotic experiment only lasted a few decades. China has always been capitalist. It's why you can find a store run by Chinese expats in the middle of the Suriname jungle.

deadfoxygrandpa 2y ago
that cant possibly be true because capitalism has only existed for a small portion of the thousands of years of chinese history. capitalism doesn't just mean having stores, or having markets

corimaith 2y ago

From an East Asian perspective what China is doing really isn't anything new and with the same pitfalls as the former Asian tigers. >our system is the best because we're the best, because of the system we have. This isn't what's happening at all. The causes and reasons why infrastructure and Western cities are so bad have been studied for decades and are well known, just as we've been studying what makes Tokyo or Hong Kong work so well. People are constantly critiquing the underlying system of incentives and entangled interests, you can hundreds of popular threads on HN, Reddit, MSM, hell even with Elon Musk's DOGE. The only time when I see the mythical self-convinced westerner evoked is precisely when critique of other cultures come in, often from cultures that feel a need to constantly defend themselves.

mike_hearn 2y ago

> Where in the US can one find the secret, cross-country high-speed rail built in the roaring twenties?! Nowhere because the USA has an excellent internal flight and interstate highway system instead. Railways were already becoming uncompetitive by the 1920s and now live on mostly in parts of the world where they already exist, where land is at a premium. The reason people think China will crash is that their system isn't unique, has been tried many times before and eventually always fails. That isn't circular reasoning, it's reasoning based on prior experience. China is still a communist country: we know how that story ends and why. Remember that for much of the history of the USSR people in the west were dazzled by its rapid industrialization and apparent achievements. First country to put a man in space! Many people in that era genuinely wondered if central planning was just a superior way to do things. In hindsight we can say that it wasn't: with enormous focus such economies were able to pull off heavy engineering projects at scale, but at the cost of ignoring consumer goods and with a dysfunctional economy that was brittle to its core. End result: when Yeltsin visited NASA in the 1980s he demanded a surprise inspection of a local supermarket. NASA didn't impress him, but the 30,000+ products for sale in a mundane shop blew him away. He was shaken to his core and cried on the flight home, asking himself what they had done to Russia's poor people. The USSR collapsed just a few years later, Yeltsin became president and moved Russia in the direction of a market economy.

simgt 2y ago
> Nowhere because the USA has an excellent internal flight and interstate highway system instead Both being impossible to decouple from fossil fuels consumption at current scale, essentially. > End result: when Yeltsin visited NASA in the 1980s he demanded a surprise inspection of a local supermarket. NASA didn't impress him, but the 30,000+ products for sale in a mundane shop blew him away I have no idea whether this anecdote is true, but it wouldn't be surprise me one bit for an always-drank dude who made the army shell the parliament of his own country.
DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
> Nowhere because the USA has an excellent internal flight and interstate highway system instead. Railways were already becoming uncompetitive by the 1920s and now live on mostly in parts of the world where they already exist, where land is at a premium. The fact that railways were becoming uncompetitive in the mid-1900s is why high-speed rail was developed. The Japanese pioneered high-speed rail in the 1960s, dramatically increasing the speed that passenger trains could run. That not only made trains competitive again, but hands-down the best mode of transportation for distances of a few hundred kilometers. The result is that new high-speed rail networks are being built around the world, not just in places where rail is already prominent. In places where high-speed rail exists, it has taken most of the market share away from short-haul flights. If you want to get from Paris to Brussels (300 km), or from Beijing to Shanghai (1200 km), you take the train. This is despite the fact that Western Europe and China have excellent highway networks (China's highway network is now superior to the US interstate system) and plenty of airports. > China is still a communist country: we know how that story ends and why. China is not at all like the USSR. > NASA didn't impress him, but the 30,000+ products for sale in a mundane shop blew him away. China has an absolutely crazy abundance of consumer products. These days, Americans turn to Ali Express to get random widgets or knick-knacks of any kind. China is the place where you can pull out your smartphone, order pretty much anything, and have it arrive by courier 15 minutes later (okay, that's a slight exaggeration, but not much of one).

latentcall 2y ago

I agree and see it all the time just the general attitude towards China is disdain when they’re arguably way ahead of us and we just don’t want to admit it. They are full speed EV and we are attempting to roll it back.

JackFr 2y ago

For those old enough to remember, we heard it all before in the 1980's about Japan so experience has made us circumspect. But even more so, markets enforce discipline on capital that state directed firms don't have. Everyone decries executives who "only look as far as next quarter's profits", and while admittedly at the margins that can have perverse incentives, in the large it demands that management put capital to work at profitable enterprises selling goods and services the public actually want.

sangnoir 2y ago
Japan was different in that it never became the world's factory, and then, manufacturing skills hadn't atrophied in the west, so it's a little different now. Even so, past performance is no guarantee for future results. > But even more so, markets enforce discipline on capital that state directed firms don't have I struggle to reconcile this with stock buy-backs. Also, China seems to have deployed a hybrid strategy: the national and regional governments provide incentives to industries, but the individual companies compete against each other. Product-wise, US defense contractors have done surprisingly well under a more extreme version of this regime (cost-plus contracts) for decades.
- JackFr 2y ago
  > I struggle to reconcile this with stock buy-backs. Would it offend your sensibilities less if they paid dividends with that money? Buybacks are simply a more tax advantageous means of returning profits to share holders. Similarly debt financed buybacks are a morally neutral way to change the capital structure of the firm by replacing equity with debt.
coliveira 2y ago
This "market discipline" also requires that companies only look for their immediate future and next quarter profits. This makes it hard to do anything long term, which is exactly what China is doing. Even companies like Google, that expressly said to make decisions based on a long term view, are pushed by the markets to consider only their current profits, which reflects in the changes we see in the company.