54 points

President Xi, My name is Sleve McDichael. I am 12 years old. I live in America where we have no high speed rail. My country yearns for freedom. Please send Chengdu J-20 Multirole Stealth Fighter Aircraft.

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15 points

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14 points

what if they send armored 4000kp/h trains. Bet you no one in the US is prepared for that

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Jokes on them, our rail is probably only capable of 140km/h in sections

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Sir, a second train has hit the Pentagon

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5 points
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Funny enough there was some American middle school that wrote letters to Xi and he wrote back to them wishing them well

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31 points

Meanwhile in Canada we’re still using diesel trains, but don’t worry! In another decade or so they will be scheduled more frequently!

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15 points
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I love how half the lines in Toronto still dont have weekend service

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13 points

Canadian rail is so depressing…

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9 points

Just give me 300kph trains from Windsor to Montreal. Get that stretch, then we can talk about everywhere else. Most of the infrastructure, and population is on that corridor. It would literally transform the country… But it would require government with vision

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7 points

Well we can’t make trains affordable and convenient how else would we make local domestics flights cost more than international flights across a damn ocean?

Such capitalist efficiency!

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See what is possible when you arn’t focusing your economy on blowing the rest of the world up for manufactured scarcity and exploitation?

This is the type of leaps and bounds I was expecting from the US coming out of high school 20 some odd years ago.

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20 points
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during the cold war they told us that they wished they could spend money on schools and healthcare, but those darn Soviets would overrun us if we didn’t spend it all on guns and bombs. “peace dividend” my ass

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21 points

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies—in the final sense—a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities.

It is: two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population.

It is: two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is: some fifty miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.

This—I repeat—is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Eisenhower

Would be such a good speech over all of he didn’t spend the bit right before this blaming the mistrustful Soviets for not just like taking their word that “the free nations” 🙄 are not aggressive

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11 points

This speech drives me particularly insane. It’s like if Hitler gave the speech from the Chaplin movie the Great Dictator right before Kristallnacht.

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It’s a great speech, but this fucker was a hypocrite. So that’s all it is imo, pretty words.

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3 points
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Japanese anti semites believe that the reason Jews controlled the world was because they invested in infrastructure and transportation. And they wanted to usurp this supposed Jewish cabal with a Japanese cabal. I don’t know if this ideology influenced their decision to go ham on trains and other tech, but lmao

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2 points

Except they haven’t actually demonstrated anything, there were a bunch of startups and others in the west who have done this same ‘demonstration’ before concluding (rightly) that it wasn’t worth pursuing. Socialism doesn’t change physics, it’s still a stupid idea. Just because some group in China is now on the grift doesn’t change that fact.

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3 points
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3 points

Okay fair I missed that part. Still doesn’t change the physics though.

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2 points

China can have some gadgetbahn, as a treat.

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26 points

I can’t wait for the vactrain future.

Faster than airplanes (which are crazy fast, although we are accustomed to them) and wayyyy lower on energy-use.

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14 points

Yeah, this is strictly superior to air travel. Also, just from sheer convenience perspective, these could have stations right in the city, so you don’t have to go to the airport, wait to check in, etc. for like an hour before you even get moving. Just hop on and hop off in a different city.

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People have been blinded by a level of understandable Elon hate until China started working on it. The talking point was that it would be a larger evacuated space than the largest vacuum chamber ever built by NASA and therefore impossible, not considering that a very long tube is not comparable to a huge dome. You dunked on me before but I am vindicated!

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2 points

People have been blinded by a level of understandable Elon hate until China started working on it.

Nah it’s been kicking around since maybe 1904: https://web.archive.org/web/20140630081422/https://black-cat-studios.com/goddardstory.pdf

Gerard K. O’Neill really popularised the idea in the 1970s

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26 points
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13 points

So what’s the safe distance to trainwatch either of those babys?

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12 points

Bit idea: build political power by infiltrating boomer foamer groups and get them to be loudly pro-CPC

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14 points

I don’t think that’s necessarily a bit. I’m not a train watcher guy but I can relate from the bicycle sphere.

Bicycle drivetrain parts were an oligarchy at best, a duopoly between SRAM and Shimano at worst for the past 20 years or so - discounting the really high end or the oddball stuff with nigh 0 market share. Everything from china was obviously decried as a cheap shitty knockoff of those parts - having no experience with any of it, I can’t tell you how true it was.

But more and more I see people using shit ordered of AliExpress, Temu and such because prices have dropped so much even if you have to buy two because the QA is kind of ass you still come out ahead. Fuck I see people recommending carbon frames by now and those fail fucking catastrophically if they fail. Real vibe shift going on there.

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Behind the sound barrier that will hopefully be built around the tracks.

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5 points

mindblowing

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1 point
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