For example, China built 14,000 miles of high-speed rail in about 15 years, with another 10,000 on the way. In America we still haven't built our first line. Every time the discussion comes up, it degenerates into people explaining all the places it won't work.
Not to worry for India, in 50 years it will be better off than today. It might even pass the US.
It's not that we can't get it accomplished reasonably, you'd be amazed at how fast and cheaply major projects can be developed if funding is properly structured. It's rather that we've wasted our treasure on other things. Jack Ma had an interesting comment at Davos[1] - what would the US be like if we had spent the $14 trillion we've wasted on war and wall street bailouts on infrastructure, research, and education in the Midwest?
[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/18/chinese-billionaire-jack-ma-s...
Source? The Congressional Research Service published a report in 2014 stating $1.6 trillion as the cost of war. Every other article I could find suggests this number is far too low and estimates $2-6 trillion.
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-war-anniversary-idUSB...
https://www.brown.edu/web/documents/nosearch/2016CostsofWar....
For perspective:
* Hillary Clinton's campaign platform included a decent infrastructure bill - allocating $250 billion over 10 years.
* NIH is estimated to spend $8 billion this year on cancer and cardiovascular research - the leading causes of death in America, killing over 1 million people each year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
Accounting is a creative endeavor.
Even moderate estimates put it at about $5 Trillion, the most conservative at $3 trillion, with the high end (reality) at $8+.
One huge cost people completely ignore is the cost of health care for the vets we bring back who suffer from a huge number of physical and mental issues. It's also one we'll be paying for the next 40-50 years.
As I said, you can project all sorts of future costs, or costs to the broader economy. But $14T is a nutty figure to claim was available to spend in lieu of wars and bailouts.
Additionally, to ignore future costs is absolutely how we end up spending incredible amounts war mongering and passing the deficit to future administrations and people. If we correctly calculated the costs it would've been seen as outrageous. What you're saying is analogous to buying a car but not factoring in the cost of interest, when that interest payment is 25%, and the cost of maintenance and repair.
You provide zero proof to backup your claim as well. Show me something to change my mind, or read the linked book and educate yourself. Spouting lies does nothing valuable for society or yourself. Let it be known my degree is in economics, I'm not spouting off some list of bullshit facts from a "documentary" video on Youtube.
Given that the entire war(s) have been funded off-budget I'm not sure I would accept a budgetary figure as given.
The military industrial complex is so out of control and bloated, we can't help but keep fighting wars to feed all these thousands of jobs going.
Very worrying state of affairs.
The money went to friends of corrupt US administrations and military contractors. That is 14,000 billion dollars stolen from American workers and shoved into the pockets of filthy rich white men.
I just don't think you can lament the state of inter regional transportation in the US without talking about our country's very unique obsession and history with the auto industry.
More specifically, CEO's of American corporations with a time horizon of at most 5 years.
Contrary to most western audience's belief, Democracy is also a value promoted by CPP , at least literally. But the meaning of democracy is quite different. The one in India focus on equal voting from everybody , in China such practice is only gradually implemented in some area recently, but what CPP emphasize more is collective decision making by a group of participants not a dominant chief officer.
As to select policy maker/politician , Chinese system evolved to a very different systematic procedure with some democracy factors (i.e. selected by vote, but not by average people). See a TED speech:
https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_x_li_a_tale_of_two_political_...
The consequence of the difference is "democratically elected" policy makers are good story tellers finally win the voters . Usually they are former Lawyer, Journalist who are very good at articulating and performing to gain higher votes, live in their own alternative reality sometime lead to war. As a comparison, typical Chinese officials are usually not so good looking , even can not speak fluently without a speech note, more likely trained as engineers with better understanding facts , less influenced by ideology. But they are in that position for a better reason: They have some track record of accomplishment.
From Machine learning point of view, India democracy looks like a simple one layer Perceptron with equal weights on all inputs, Chinese "democracy" is a forward feed neural network with a very small hidden layer with the weights somehow adjusted.
Good luck to India people.
> As to select policy maker/politician , Chinese system evolved to a very different systematic procedure with some democracy factors (i.e. selected by vote, but not by average people)
What you are describing is some kind of collegial governance, but absolutely not a democratic government. Contrary to what you are saying, voting systems that exclude the "average people" are literally undemocratic.
Now, you can very well argue that democracy isn't the best or most efficient system, but the Chinese system just isn't democratic, and is not really leaning towards it either.
Well that's somewhat of a moving goal post. Was the US not a democracy at it's inception because only land owners were allowed to vote? What about before black people and women were allowed to vote? Were Britain and Germany not democracies at the outbreak of WW2?
Most importantly of all, were the ancient Athenians not democratic? The average person was a slave, but the did define what democracy meant.
China is a classic communist dictatorship with a few Democratic elements.
China actually has several other parties than Communist party, for example Chinese Kuomintang, China Democratic League etc. But they are small meritocratic ally selected (only 100,000 members and must be intellectual) support parties. Communist party still rules.
In principle people outside the system can be elected. If I remember only one person has been able to get trough in 20 years and all independent candidates are harassed ruthlessly.
The Chinese people work wonders because they believe they can work wonders if they work hard. This is pretty much the American Dream as I understood it. That's why I always imagined that the Chinese government has much in common, and thus can work well with a GOP government. People are urged to work hard for a better life, not relying (too much) on social securities.
It's hard to tell if democracy is fundamentally better than whatever its alternative is. You know, no offense, DT can be elected. With enough manipulation, all Chinese government heads can be elected as well, even under a democratic system.
tl;dr: Planned to open in 2011, it's still in construction with some say it won't open before 2020.
That smoke exhaust system seems absurd - I don't know how the architectural plans even left the design phase. It should have been isolated and designed such that it could be replaced with a conventional approach cheaply.
The rest of the project sounds like a deadline-driven fixed-resource software project with incompetent management - hacks and cut corners everywhere.
Chenab bridge, touted as soon-to-be world's tallest railway bridge, for instance, was scheduled to completed by 2009. Work halted due to safety concerns, but began again an year later. The date was, then, shifted to 2015 and now, the newer estimate suggest it will be completed by 2019 [1]. I am not sure if we'll be able to abide by that too.
Democracy might give people something to cheer about, but, for a country fraught with inefficiencies, it does make progress awfully slow.
[1]: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/transportation/...