141–150 of 158 posts
The U.S had the greatest rail network and then we built the Interstate Highway system and abandoned rail. Truth is that nobody funds multiple competing transportation network. Japan chose rail, we chose highways.
Road is much more difficult to destroy than rail
If you had to choose one or the other, especially in a time of war/aggression, road seems to be the clear choice
It reads like fucking science fiction about an improbable alternate universe where everybody grows up into intelliegent well adjusted indivuals that can express themselves in a group without focusing on conflict and meaningless competition. Any where else in the "universe" this has lead to corporate standoffs and litigation that has fall out for generations, and even killings and corporate subsidised wars in the deve…
It's taboo to speak about, but both Japan and China are homogenous societies and enjoy the benefits that brings. China a bit less so than Japan, but still much more than the US or Western Europe. Plus even the minorities are still phenotypically more or less similar looking to the majorities. China also enjoys the benefits of being an autocratic nation.
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It's taboo to speak about, but both Japan and China are homogenous societies and enjoy the benefits that brings. China a bit less so than Japan, but still much more than the US or Western Europe. Plus even the minorities are still phenotypically more or less similar looking to the majorities. China also enjoys the benefits of being an autocratic nation.
Japan is still a mono culture, living on islands, China is anything but, though they have exactly one rule for everybody, which is "dont mess with the brand", ie : you can have a sub culture as long as nobody else notices. And WOW do they have a bunch of subcultures nobody notices, because they dont want any attention, that bieng realy bad mojo and so survial is to not exist in any overt or competitive way.
Like you said, the fact that China is authoritarian is a big factor in all of this.
The "melting pot" West does have numerous phenotypically similar caucasian subcultures, but also many non-caucasian ones that do not look phenotypically alike at all.
The U.S had the greatest rail network and then we built the Interstate Highway system and abandoned rail. Truth is that nobody funds multiple competing transportation network. Japan chose rail, we chose highways.
This decision makes a lot of sense from a strategic point of view, right? Road is much more difficult to destroy than rail If you had to choose one or the other, especially in a time of war/aggression, road seems to be the clear choice
For those of you planning to go to Japan, please make sure you actually calculate how much JR train trips would cost you. They upped the price a few years ago and, since then, it's basically impossible for the JR Pass to be more affordable than single tickets. For one of my recent trips, I was actually more better served with a local pass (Kansai Wide Pass) than the JR Pass. Too bad because it used to be a really goo…
> it's basically impossible for the JR Pass to be more affordable than single tickets Not true. It really depends on your use case and blanket statements like this aren't helpful. Yes, the pass has doubled in price since few years ago but it still does make sense in many cases, especially in multi-week multi-city Japan trips
This is not a blanket statement as my first sentence is recommending people to make calculations based on their planned trip.
A factor not mentioned is Japan's cultural sense of duty and honour. I don't think employees in the West generally feel such dedication or perfectionism towards their company but in Japan it helped make all these efficient and meticulous changes possible, and avoids issues of privatisation like neglecting maintenance / short term profit maximisation.
In the west the employee / employer social contract died sometime in the 80s. It's rare, especially in tech, to have employees with decades of tenure. You see Microsoft trying to buyout older employees recently.
But it is also true that I do not work in tech, I work and am exposed mostly to industrial companies. I have very little experience with "tech" companies.
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This is exactly the reason why in germany we have now a broad ticket for short distance trains. Government realized they fail to meet EU regulations in reducing CO2, so they rushed to implement a cheap german wide ticket. Initially just 10€, now 60€ a month. Still a bargain, you can go anywhere as mich forth and back as you want (just not the dedicated long distance trains, so going through all of germany takes a bit…
You can tell this is a true success in Germany because 95% of local passengers now use it. It also caused a significant increase in ridership, putting the already overloaded rail system under a lot more pressure while taking away income from the rail companies (after making it cheaper).
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> it's basically impossible for the JR Pass to be more affordable than single tickets Not true. It really depends on your use case and blanket statements like this aren't helpful. Yes, the pass has doubled in price since few years ago but it still does make sense in many cases, especially in multi-week multi-city Japan trips
From what I calculated, you need to use the Shinkansen every day and for long distances which is not how many tourists spend time in Japan IME. This is not a blanket statement as my first sentence is recommending people to make calculations based on their planned trip.
These are all "long" but really not that time-long distances. Shinkansen and regional trains work pretty well for these. And yes, a lot of tourists move between the cities quite often, even some metros accept the JR pass.
I was there twice in last 3 years and for our calculation it took 5-6 return shinkansen trips to justify new jr pass price (2 weeks jr pass). And let me tell you shinkansen are experience on their own so there was no lack of will to find daytrips using them
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> Too bad because it used to be a really good deal... Considering the environmental woes & collapses coming down the pike, I'd like to see a trans-border effort to drive down the price of mass transit _everywhere_. Put it on the G7 agenda, the OECD agenda, the UN General Assembly agenda, ...
The Netherlands have implemented unlimited off-peak rail travel for €49/month: https://www.ns.nl/en/season-tickets/dal-vrij > HN discussion 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543872 > Given that many commuter-rail (and frankly, other) transport systems operate well below capacity during off-peak times and in counterflow directions, such pricing could well increase ridership and revenue.
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You can tell this is a true success in Germany because 95% of local passengers now use it. It also caused a significant increase in ridership, putting the already overloaded rail system under a lot more pressure while taking away income from the rail companies (after making it cheaper).
Inconvenient truth: It is a bad use of taxpayers' money to highly subsidise train tickets when (1) people can afford to pay more (2) huge structural investments are needed in the country, (3) economic growth has stalled for years.
The D-Ticket is completely independent of any (rail) infrastructure financing, those have distinct budges on federal level, since any project has to be approved by the legislature individually. The D-Ticket is eating away the budget of the states and their transit authorities, causing a reduction of services..