Avid Amoeba

  • 183 Posts
  • 4.85K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • They’re permanently bent over backward to their shareholders’ need for ever increasing profits. The Trump dance is just a special case of that. If tomorrow Trump needs some new detention centers built to put some people in, our banks will lend money for construction, if there’s no regulation against it. Democracy is not good for business, if most of business is owned by a limited few. It only increases costs.









  • 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:

    Amtrak’s network includes over 500 stations along 21,400 miles (34,000 km) of track. It directly owns approximately 623 miles (1,003 km) of this track and operates an additional 132 miles of track; the remaining mileage is over rail lines owned by other railroad companies. While most track speeds are limited to 79 mph (127 km/h) or less, several lines have been upgraded to support top speeds of 110 mph (180 km/h), and parts of the Northeast Corridor support top speeds of 160 mph (260 km/h).

    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.


  • Avid AmoebatoCanadaHome prices rose 3.8% in Q4
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    2 days ago

    … calculated using a weighted average of the median value of all housing types – rose 3.8 per cent year-over-year in the fourth quarter to $819,600. That’s above Royal LePage’s previous estimates for Q4. On a quarterly basis, the increase was a more modest 0.5 per cent.

    On a yearly basis. Not that it’s great but 3.8% quarterly would be dramatically bad.


  • Other than repetitions of “I will fight, we will fight, we will win, because Canadian” I heard:

    • Strong retaliation against tariffs
      • Cool
    • Treat government finances like private citizens treat theirs
      • Red flag for austerity
    • Liberal party must listen more to what voters tell them
    • Consumer carbon tax gone
    • Disagreements with PM on spending (for a long time), she wanted less spending. Fiscal responsibility is very important to her, that’s why she broke from PM. Doesn’t commit to balanced budged.

    I didn’t hear much about how she plans to tackle the economic issues facing us.









  • It would be interesting to see what the effects are. I’ve heard that TikTok is the only mainstream social media where leftist content isn’t attenuated by the algorithm. Don’t know if that’s true or not, but if it is, and if we assume Red Note is similar in that regard, and if you bet right, they’ll keep getting exposed to leftism without corpo platforms being able to stop it. Unless they do another ban. I’m curious whether there would be a point when the TikTok > Red Note users would realize that and refuse to go back to the corpo propaganda machines.