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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12219 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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I don't want to go too far into China stronk memes. But a lot of this does seem like a bit of cope the HSR to nowhere certainly feels so as most of the Subway stations to nowhere now have bustling new development around them and most of the ghost citeies have filled up. HSR isn't profitable but neither are American freeways. And China built a whole network of them too.

In general Chinese factory jobs suck but pay decent wages for Chinese standards. Chinese factory workers are not destitute child slaves but people working shit jobs to save money. Like the equivalent of oilfield workers. They can blow that on booze and hookers and many do. But many also use the decent wage and shitty dorm to save money and go back to their hometowns to buy a house and get married after 5/10 years of working.

Living in China feels to me what I imagine life in the 50s was like in the US with new prosperity industrialization . It's definitely not perfect but looking around at my surroundings I just don't think the China doomers have the right of it. The Party fucked up a bunch of shit during COVID but the post COVID norm seems to be a return to reasonably competent government and corruption has significantly declined since Xi took power.

HSR isn't profitable but neither are American freeways.

The difference is that freeways are reasonably versatile. You can have passenger cars, busses, and eighteen wheelers on them. HSR is stuck in its particular niche.

I think mass transit stans, despite sharing some sympathies that we could actually build better public transit, really tend to miss that (paved) roads are a really configurable system. Roads are switched packet networks to the broad/multicast media of rail and such. I can drive point-to-point at a time of my choosing (or stream a TV episode) rather than wait for sufficient demand to justify a bus and professional driver (or watch new episodes Wednesdays at 7:00 Eastern! But I'm busy then!). And this is from someone that generally hates driving. The same network delivers all but the heaviest freight to nearly anywhere and is relatively cheap to build and maintain (rail is much more specific about grade requirements, for example).

than wait for sufficient demand to justify a bus and professional driver

And this is the whole point. Privately-owned cars just work better than any kind of scheduled or on-demand transit at low enough population densities, or at off-peak times (noting that in a major city, only the middle of the night is off-peak). But something like London's Victoria Line or Paris's Metro 1 have enough demand to justify a train and professional driver every two minutes and then some, from 6am to after midnight. Roads for private cars don't scale to that level of demand. Autonomous cars help a little bit (because of faster reaction times) but not enough to turn London, Paris or Manhattan into DFW or Atlanta. Centrally co-ordinated autonomous cars can do a lot better, but the kind of person who really wants to live a car-based lifestyle is exactly the kind of person who doesn't want their car controlled by someone else's computer.

(noting that in a major city, only the middle of the night is off-peak)

That's still enough to suck. I recently got stuck in Philly after missing the last train after a concert because I didn't realize there was a last train. Luckily I had a nightowl friend who answered an SOS and picked me up... in his car. And then drove me to my car, parked at a transit station outside the city, where I drove home. Sure as hell beat sleeping at the train station with the fent zombies.

I've never missed the last train while sober enough to drive.

I have jogged miles through Shanghai late at night because I missed the last train. Eventually came across a taxi and the smoking teenager driving it who was not the guy on the taxi license took me the rest of the way to the hotel.

in a major city, only the middle of the night is off-peak

Source (approximately 22:30 to 5:30)

But a lot of this does seem like a bit of cope the HSR to nowhere certainly feels so as most of the Subway stations to nowhere now have bustling new development around them and most of the ghost citeies have filled up.

There is a difference between within city transit and between city transit. There have been tons of railway overbuilds historically but within city public transit is rarely meaningfully overbuilt. The economic case for between city HSR is generally very poor, there just isn't enough potential transit to justify the massive costs.

Between city travel should generally either be slower trains, cars or air traffic. It isn't that transit or even rail transit is bad, it's just that the economic case for HSR in particular is very narrow.

I'd agree if the rail was constructed solely to serve an area that doesn't currently pencil out. But in my experience HSR serving less populated areas are simply stops between the densely populated areas. The present-day cost is the capital outlay for a small station and an additional few minutes for the trains that stop there. And then you've given some amount of people easier access to the bigger cities for things like jobs, medical care, kids coming home to visit parents, etc.

Keep in mind that tier three cities in China are still millions of people.

additional few minutes for the trains that stop there

That's a very large cost for a successful HSR route. You are potentially delaying 1000 people by 4 minutes (for a Shinkansen) or 6-8 minutes (for a TGV, which has worse acceleration) to allow a single digit number of people to get on or off.

To get full benefit, you also have to route the high-speed line through the intermediate city you want to stop at, which adds a lot of construction cost and NIMBY-aggravation. There is a reason why the TGV tends to make intermediate stops at out-of-town park-and-ride stations.

Those are good arguments for expanded road, rail and air access, not HSR.

Yeah it's not perfect but there's a sense of optimization and that things are being built towards some sort of developed future. Plus cost of living's reasonable and there's recent memory of things being much much worse in most of those regions.

I'd much rather be born in a Chinese low-tier city than like Detroit or Hull, more chance of upward mobility.

Chinese low tier cities are actually really bad. All the young people are leaving for the big cities and there are blighted and abandoned neighborhoods as well. The biggest difference is the lack of a racially distinct criminal underclass that completely ruins places like detroit.

The biggest difference is the lack of a racially distinct criminal underclass that completely ruins places like detroit.

I mean this plus lack of drugs/homeless plus actual occasional infrastructure investment plus a sense from the government that the local variety of underclass isn't totally subordinate to the economic hack of importing in new underclasses plus manufacturing roles plus affordable cost of living.

I'm not gonna pretend I've been through every part of China and personally inspected the most remote parts but I've been through sub top-100 cities in China and they tend to be generally fine.

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