4 ms·

Is 25B in interest expenses extreme here? Edit: oh just for the rail costs

• Etherlord87 2y ago
  jmyeet mentioned building rails, and baserev makes a counterargument, that it isn't necessarily a good "investment".
  • maxglute 2y ago
    Counterargument based on retarded data. There's only ~1000 HSR stations with ~30 considered ghost, ~3%. It's not a good investment, it's a great investment. It's already profitable. Utilization is increasing YoY. All for ~1T over 20 years. Put it this way, US excessive health spending (~5% over OECD average works out to 2T/5T per year), PRC got entire HSR network for 6 months of excessive US health care spending that still delivers less life expectancy than PRC. This isn't even mentioning the 100s of billions PRC is saving not buying US/EU aviation or importing fuel. It's literally converting steel and concrete into forever import savings, and it's doing on the cheap while labour prices were (are) low - that blue collar cohort is only going to decrease with time. Better to build as much as possible now. This is not to mention HSR is basically ONLY option for mass fast intercity travel within PRC... 1.3B people squeezed in populated area 1/3 size of CONUS = too much air cooridor congestion. There's literally no other option than HSR. Like air travel isn't going to make Chinese New Year happen.
    • DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
      For context, 1 trillion US Dollars is about 50% of the cost of the Iraq War.
    • baserev 2y ago
      Citations please