Comments by "Doncarlo" (@doujinflip) on "The B1M" channel.

  1. Right, China already depends on imports for food because so much of its land is already polluted by industry and urban development. It's arguably why China isn't being even more aggressive against its neighbors, because a downturn of free trade caused by a shooting conflict would cause food prices to skyrocket and quality to collapse -- no amount of Party patriotism will overcome the feelings of an empty stomach especially after decades of prosperity.
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  2. They can just keep stacking jacks. Adding structure from underneath is how construction cranes can reach incredible heights. As long as the load bearing structure underneath remains vertical enough there's not a definite limit to how high they can adjust.
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  3. Big problem with CAHSR was that Valley politicians wanted their much smaller cities to be part of the main line, causing a detour through farmers' fields that need to be bought out instead of taking advantage of all the open space along existing I-5.
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  4. That is until their leasable space fails to sell. Oil-rich Abu Dhabi had to bail out the Burj Khalifa (hence why it’s no longer named the Burj Dubai), and the even taller Dubai Creek Tower which began construction almost a decade ago is currently just a hole in the ground.
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  5. No, Dubai has since dug in their piped sewage network. The remaining pump trucks nowadays empty flood water and sand-clogged drainage.
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  6. Not necessarily. Slogging through the more minor and more hostile communities first risks the entire project stalling and orphaning service from the prime customer bases of the LA and SF areas. The Valley should have been a future branch of a completed I5-aligned backbone once it's overall utility gets demonstrated and opposition subsequently wanes.
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  7. Well yeah, the Bandung HSR is also a Chinese build. With all the technical issues its been having, it'll be interesting to see if they get chosen again to complete the rest of the line to Surabaya.
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  8. It helps that in China the state owns all the land, you just lease it. Plus they have to provide a hard product because the people's tolerance for continued unchallenged rule rides on its delivery, so the state builds quickly to the point that their structures show clear signs of rot shortly after completion and threatens to collapse halfway through its intended lifespan.
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  9. Or arguably not enough. Government was stronger back then and not as cowed by private interests.
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  10. America does like to make sure what it builds actually stays standing despite extreme conditions and neglect. Like the US has bridges expected to last 30 years pushing 100, whereas China builds bridges said to last 100 years falling apart by 30.
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  11. What I don't understand is why it didn't use the existing wide empty median on I-5. There'd be a lot less land seizures needed, allow for cheaper at-grade rail instead of building and maintaining all those viaducts, and it would constantly market itself as the faster ride for all the drivers it blows past.
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  12. It wouldn't be "no stops", more like intermediate stops in places that car drivers often fuel up on the I-5 drive already. Places like Buttonwillow, Kettleman, Panoche, and Los Banos could serve as park-and-ride locations for Valley customers who might appreciate the significantly shorter drive until they get direct service from said future branch.
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  13. Thing is where the sun is shining and where the water is over a whole mountain range (coastal May Gray and June Gloom are famous here). Plus there's limited options to affordably dispose of the hypersaline brine that results, there'd need to develop industrial applications for super-salty seawater so that not all of the RO waste has to be rediluted for dumping.
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  14.  @themiddlekingdom9121  It might not be the exact variant, but precursors to the Spanish Flu were noticed in China the year before its global outbreak and China itself wasn't hit as hard with it likely due to preexisting immunity. Even to this day data from China drives the choice of variants to vaccinate for in yearly flu shots (there's generally only room for 3 or 4 variants before they start interfering with each other).
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  15. Cloud seeding requires clouds saturated enough to rain coming by, and even then it's not reliable, and even if successful that means someplace downwind doesn't get the rain/snow it expects. Desalination generates a massive amount of sealife-killing hypersaline brine, and is costly to dilute back to normal levels for dumping. The solutions aren't so simple and inexpensive, otherwise they'd be more common by now.
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  16.  @brkbtjunkie It was way worse before, there was legal pervasive racism especially against Asians. Being still preferable to (usually) go into deep debt for a transpacific ticket shows how bad things had become across the ocean.
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  17. Back then the government granted the rail companies a huge right of way (something like 50 miles wide, and taken without compensation from the local Native Americans) which they could sell and develop to fund construction and operation of the line itself. That doesn't exist anymore.
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  18. Firing the boreholes would only affect a thin layer of the clay, likely making it brittle and vulnerable to cracking and water intrusion from the immense pressures down there. Ceramic sealants are likewise subject to degradation and eventual perforation by the water tables.
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  19. It makes sense considering North America is basically the world’s supplier of lumber 🌲🌲🌲
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  20. Wouldn't be the first, I know the Beijing embassy has fish ponds dug around its buildings 🐠
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  21. ​ @hikarikaguraenjoyer9918 Practically all profitable passenger rail uses the real estate scheme, even back to the days when railroad tycoons became tycoons by exploiting the sometimes miles-wide right of way granted to them by the US Government. Today the most profitable passenger rail network is the Hong Kong MTR, who also extract rent from real estate they own near their stations to subsidize train operations.
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  22. I'd imagine actually dangerous countries require more concrete on the facilities and more mobile convoys, including splitting off assistants and press on separate advance movements instead of rolling as one massive unwieldy block.
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  23. ​ @invinciblemode Singapore is an extremely new society, it doesn't have old interests from a pre-atomic era to cater to.
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  24. Dams are damaging and expensive to properly build and upkeep. What we'd need are underground cisterns. But even then that doesn't solve the lack of water in general. We'd need like 5 more years of above-average rain -- plus active injection back into the aquifers -- to return CA to the water levels its current Republican-biased agriculture-dominated water rights scheme was designed to consume.
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