Whether to be Discouraged or Angry, that is the question.
It may be of interest that Chongqing – a city in China that almost none of us could find on a map – now has the world’s largest train station … five times larger than NYC’s Grand Central Station … serving multiple high speed rail lines connecting across a country which is about the same size as the Continental US.
But Chongqing has to play second fiddle to Wuhan – we all remember Wuhan, don’t we – downriver from Chongqing. Wuhan has Dream Plaza, the largest building on earth – a kind of shopping mall cum theme park cum entertainment center.
Obviously there is more to life than having the latest, greatest, fastest, biggest. But there is no doubt that within living memory those adjectives characterized the USA. No more!
And it is not as if the Political Class that threw all that away did so in the interests of giving us something more meaningful – unless one counts the freedom to crap on the sidewalks of San Francisco while shooting up one’s favorite drug as the epitome of human aspiration.
Synecdoche! Such acts - shitting on the sidewalk or getting high - subsume much of the present US cultural ethos. Among the things frequently said to be “unsustainable”, these head the list (or should, if there were any actual journalists in the MSM).
But regarding transportation infrastructure I should interject that the year after I set forth the necessary political economy reforms, I consulted with SAIC to found what is now the largest toll collection automation company. This was sort of like The Simulation winking at me saying: “See? If only they’d replace government with market democracy’s citizen’s dividends, the system you’re building wouldn’t be deployed into a world where the demand for high quality transportation infrastructure was crippled by ‘supply-side economics’.”
All of the “influencers” in the age of AI exponential growth think they can continue down the path of what I (thanks to Alexander Wissner-Gross’s characterization of market democracy as “privatized socialism”) call “capital socialism”, ie: pay for the protection of property rights by taxing the labor of the very men that sacrifice their flesh blood and bone upholding property rights – and sometimes their wives sacrifice their unborn sons and daughters to pay more gold into the rentier hoards – but also, crucially, into the Federal government to which these idiots now turn:
They call for stringent Federal reaction to “AI extremism” as though they aren’t fooling themselves about the fact that what they’re doing is importing military aged men EXACTLY as John Robb described happened to Rome.
