this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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It feels like one of the few positive outcomes of the Cold War was the Sputnik shock.
The public and politicians suddenly got very worried about actual scientific competitiveness and winning a competitive race on something other than bombs.
I wish we'd have a similar moment when it came to China and infrastructure.
This is a country that was built by railroads. Even today, you can see the strings of towns spaced to the size of a steam locomotive's water capacity. But what do we see from that legacy now? The Acela, an effort that would barely be competitive in the 1970s, on a minimal set of routes. Meanwhile, the Chinese are laughing from the windows of their 300kph trains.
(Yes, I'm aware that American freight rail is efficient and impressive, but somehow almost every other industrialized country has figured this one out)
It's a shame that the culture in mainland China is so isolated because otherwise some Americans might have bit of an existential crisis about this right now if they knew.
In the top tier Chinese cities, people board the train by scanning a qr code on their phone, which is linked to a wallet in their chat app. The subway system is extensive, well though out, clean and fast. Most of the private cars are electric, and when a car isn't the right choice, the sidewalks are often smooth and suitable for an electric scooter or bicycle. Food and transportation is cheap, even when ordering food to your apartment or house. 5G mobile internet is smoking fast and cheap. The local equivalent to Amazon.com delivers just about anything in a day or two. Over the course of a year I watched the city building an entirely new subway line - they just decided it was needed and bam! They built it and it didn't take 10 years. Most importantly, the younger generations have a real chance to do better than mom and dad, which is what every generation needs, and the last couple American generations seem to have been robbed of.
I'm an American and was surprised and impressed on my first few trips. Why don't American's have anything like this yet? Why is the US so bogged down in the little things that it can't dream anymore? It can hardly solve it's most basic problems at the moment. I wish more Americans could see how far it's slipped.
(Just because this is Lemmy, no, I'm no Chinese shill. There are other issues there and I wouldn't wish their system of control or surveillance on anybody.)
It bothers me so much. I wanted to pay for a friend's ticket to visit us. By train, it was $200, a 16hr trip, of which 2/3rds was by bus thanks to Amtrack's garbage infrastructure/system.
By plane for the same trip, it was a $180, 2hr direct flight.
It's so god damn ass backwards. Trains produce a fraction of the emissions of planes, so why are we ok with trains being uncompetitive?
They just feared possible military applications and didn't want to fall behind.
Aye. Was a dick wagging competition, but the subtext was "we can do this with ICBMs and their countermeasures".
Point completely taken, but they at least managed to provide some window-dressing that they were advancing the state of science and knowledge.
I mean they did, and then they used it to build arms.
You are fucking high if you think that sputnik was a "scientific endeavour".
The only reason the Soviet Union agreed to launch sputnik was because of the perceived threat it made to the west in the dominance of Soviet rocket technology.
And the only reason the US took up the challenge was because of the "missile gap" that was spun by the military industrial complex.
TIL rocket science isn't science.
By that logic the atomic bomb wasn't nuclear physics because its purpose was as a weapon and not for the advancement of scientific knowledge.