Oh Yeah - We're #1

[Jackalope]

Here in Los Angeles the police shoot you in the back in lieu of a ticket if you tried that.

Fixed that for you.

[Jacob(smooth)]

Seems Ironic that Japan, which you could drop and lose in America, has trains to get people long long distances quickly cheaply and with minimal environmental impact while America, which is feckin huge, still doesn't!

[Anomalocaris]

On the flip side, the Japanese airlines also fly jumbo jets packed like sardine cans on short commuter routes within their own little country. Considering how much of a plane's emissions occur during takeoff, flying jumbo jets on 200 mile long routes has to be some of the most environmentally damaging means of commuting ever devised.

[Minimalist]

Don't forget the time it takes to get through "security."

Yeah, and the arrive 90 minutes early shit.

With high speed trains in china you can buy tickets on line and arrive 10 minutes before the train departs if you want. The train stations are usually not far from down town financial or commercial district.

That's labor mobility.

But here free enterprise would appearently happily say fuck you to the overall economical and social benefit of labor mobility so long as the particular party doesn't see direct personal benefit from facilitating labor mobility.

If, by all that, you mean the Upper 1% doesn't give a flying fuck....I agree.

[Anomalocaris]

Yeah, I think the aim of the upper 1% has gradually shifted over the last 30 years from simply making themselves richer, to protecting the income gap between themselves and most others.

[bladevalant546]

Yeah, I think the aim of the upper 1% has gradually shifted over the last 30 years from simply making themselves richer, to protecting the income gap between themselves and most others.

And yet americans just eat it all up. Also, the income equality is highly underestimated by the US too.

[Chas]

And even if there are trains....
Case in point, I know from painful experience that going from the middle of Long Island to Manhattan takes 2 hours, and if you're lucky the train doesn't derail and send you to a fiery death on a front lawn in Huntington. It would take less than 30 mins with a modern high speed train.

People were definitely negligent when it comes to building up that type of infrastructure, but in America's defense, distances are huge and population is mostly sparse, so this makes it very expensive to have good quality infrastructure compared to western europe, japan or korea.

So they still make you change trains at Huntington?

China is a tad larger than the US. China interconnected all of its major cities with high speed rail in a little less than 8 years, or about 2/3 the time and 1/3 the cost of the war in Iraq. In fact they connected their whole country with about 7000 miles of high speed rail trackage at only about three times what california estimated would cost to connect Los Angeles with San Francisco using just 400 miles of tracks.

I took the train from Shanghai to Beijing, equivalent to New York to Chicago, it took just 3 hours from near city center to city center. Flight from New York to Chacago would take an hour 30 minutes, which when added to commute time to and from the airports, would have taken longer than 3 hours in total.

In backwards socialist china it is just possible to live in Shanghai and commute to work in Beijing. In the US good luck with living in New York and commuting to work in Chicago.

What happened to labor mobility in the land of the free and home of captialism?

Would one of the resident Libretardians like to tell us why the market hasn't responded to the demand for inter-city rail transport in the U.S.?

[Minimalist]

It occurred to me several years ago that 1973's Soylent Green captured exactly the vision that the super rich are striving to attain.

Richard Fleischer directed this nightmarish science fiction vision of an over-populated world, based on the novel by Harry Harrison. In 2022, New York City is a town bursting at the seams with a 40-million-plus population. Food is in short supply, and most of the population's food source comes from synthetics manufactured in local factories -- the dinner selections being a choice between Soylent Blue, Soylent Yellow, or Soylent Green. When William Simonson (Joseph Cotten), an upper-echelon executive in the Soylent Company, is found murdered, police detective Thorn (Charlton Heston) is sent in to investigate the case. Helping him out researching the case is Thorn's old friend Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson, in his final film role). As they investigate the environs of a succession of mad-from-hunger New Yorkers and the luxuriously rich digs of the lucky few, Thorn uncovers the terrible truth about the real ingredients of Soylent Green.

One of the most amazing scenes involved the use of "scoops:" Front loading garbage trucks to pick up protesters and dump them into the truck....like so much human garbage.

The contrast between the rich and poor is vivid. Worth watching.