A Boring Dystopia

You're so right.

This is only a Republican problem.

Reminder that the US Congress gave AT&T and Verizon BILLIONS of dollars to build out a national broadband network decades ago. They pocketed that money and didn't lay a single ~~meter~~ foot of fiber with zero consequences.

Don't forget the "fast attack" ships that cost twice what they were bid at, and have hulls that crack when you exceed a slow crawl.

I wish we'd have a similar moment when it came to China and infrastructure

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.)

But what do we see from that legacy now?

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?

politicians suddenly got very worried about actual scientific competitiveness and winning a competitive race on something other than bombs.

They just feared possible military applications and didn't want to fall behind.

We have backlogged projects, let alone maintenance on existing infrastructure, not even getting to the costs of upgrading ancient infrastructure - a lot of municipalities still use clay pipes.

Right now deferred maintenance is roughly a trillion dollars.

Except the US hasn't been spending on infrastructure for a long time. Obama wanted a similar sum and that was almost a decade ago. We're not improving, we're barely maintaining.

You're right, investment in infrastructure has rebounded, but its easy to ignore the hard fought battles and just be cynical. But also things aren't perfect and our priorities can be better. For me that's investments in health care for all and making higher ed cheaper.

Two years ago, President Biden signed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (“BIL”) into law. The BIL directs $1.2 trillion of federal funds towards transportation, energy, and climate infrastructure projects, most of which is distributed via state and local governments

I wanna stress, im not in any way supporting authoritarian regimes. But that is one of the very very few advantages of a 1 party system, that the people in charge actually look at the long term impacts, because they will still be in power in 10-20 years. So they cant just bleed the country dry and then hand their mess over to the other party at the next election and have them deal with all the problems you created.

In 1982, a Chinese delegation reached Turin for a joint venture. FIAT, the major Italian car maker (with a long and nefarious history), answered that in China there were no roads, and bicycles crowded the few there were.

The delegation went to Munich, signed a deal with Volkswagen and that's the story of how German car makers gained a foothold in the Chinese market.

Not sure why you're getting down-voted:

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/15/1055841358/biden-signs-1t-bipartisan-infrastructure-bill-into-law

And

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/10/1026486578/senate-republican-votes-infrastructure-bill

In the Senate, 100% of Party A voted for it. Party B saw 38% of their members vote for it and 62% voted against it.

https://www.axios.com/2021/11/06/house-republicans-votes-infrastructure-biden

In the House, Party A saw nearly all their members vote to pass the bill with the opposers wanting a bigger investment in infrastructure than what was offered.

Party B saw 100s of their members vote against it while 19 voted for. Most of those opposed said it was not worth the cost. The bill could add 256 Billion to the deficit over 10 years (25.6 Billion per year). Note 25.6 Billion in a year would represent less than 3% of our annual deficit:

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/national-deficit/

But yeah, Party A = Party B /s

FTA:

The bill includes:

$351 billion for highways and bridges

$107 billion for transit

$73 billion for electric grid infrastructure

$66 billion for passenger rail

$55 billion for drinking water infrastructure

$42 billion for broadband deployment

$25 billion for airports

$17 billion for ports

$7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations

$7.5 billion for electric buses and ferries

'What do you mean you joined a gun club?'

• grabs barrel and swings violently *

There was that Big News Derailment a while back - but what they didn't bother telling us at the time was that there are derailments on like a daily basis. It's incredibly common. They're not always hugely toxic, but is that required for us to care?