News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Can't say anything about quality issues.
I can say a few things about the economics. It doesn't matter whether some or all of this rail is economical or not. Countless infrastructure projects around the world are built without them being economical. The half-a-trillion US interstate highway network was likely not economical either. Infrastructure like that has two important purposes. One's to support future use. Given the speed with which cities have appeared and filled with people in China, or expanded in the US, a rail line or a large highway corridor support this urbanization. Urbanization creates significant economic growth. The other purpose is finding work for people who then spend their wages in the rest of the economy. So long as there isn't shortage in real resources - people, concrete, iron, etc. - spending money for this increases domestic consumption and therefore economic growth. Functionally doesn't matter if the money was created via debt or printed. You can cancel or pay that debt by printing the amount. The debt is typically created out of thin air anyways. Western counties used to this too prior to the neoliberal era when there was slack in the economy. These days we have a lot of bullshit jobs that serve a similar purpose. I think both things considered, HSR buildout in China is solid long term planning, despite of its growing pains.
On what's high speed rail, I'm thinking ETR500/1000 like the Frecciarossa 1000 in Italy. Those regularly go at 300kph. Looking at Amtrak's wiki:
It seems only parts of the Northeast Corridor get close to that. There's plenty of geographic high speed rail opportunity in the US that would eliminate short haul flights which have the worst carbon footprint of all flights. There's no public investment appetite for it. There's barely enough public funding to maintain the existing roadway infrastructure. Plus I'm sure airlines donate good money to government officials to ensure HSR isn't a threat to their profits.