Comments by "buddermonger2000" (@buddermonger2000) on "The Myth of Chinese Efficiency" video.

  1. Not quite. It's not so much that it's just unprofitable so much that it's just not useful. No-one there uses it, and so it's still largely disconnected from the east. Not to mention, if it truly wanted to connect it, traditional rail with less energy usage would've done the job fine. More than anything else, it's pride and for trying to keep up its economy through vast construction. Idle hands cause rebellion. It uses its state growth as ways to inflate their own statistics more than anything else. It's much like it's ghost cities which are used to keep afloat their housing bubble rather than it popping.
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  2. @Emma aka VolVol  The reason we try to keep things profitable is that even 1% profits means it can keep running without issue. Profits also mean you recoup the costs over time as if you never break even you'll never be able to do another. Once it goes into the red, it's a net loss and requires extra money forcefully taken from the people to keep it afloat. And if it's not providing a critical utility, you're effectively increasing people's burden by wasting their money making something more expensive than it needs to be and potentially preventing it from keeping itself afloat. Basically, unless it's critical to life in terms of staying alive or keeping people working, usually there's a reason for assessing whether or not it's profitable.
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  3. @Luke Cheuk  800 million were brought out of poverty not by any specific policies of integration but instead just the phenomenon of industrialization which brings EVERYONE out of poverty. For China this is effectively their roaring twenties. You're trying to compare a country having already finished its process compared to a country which is on the tail end and has huge numbers simply due to population. Fundamentally, this is used more as economic stimulus by vast construction projects (as it's like 30% of their economy), and for pride more than anything else. The reason I can say this confidently is because normal rail and airport infrastructure could do much of this same work for integration with the rest of the country as HSR with likely far less cost.
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  4. @Zeth  You might need to redo your definition of western here. Not to mention... to list off: USA, France, The Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Spain, UK, Australia, Canada, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Dermark, Belgium. Almost all of them have ethnic minorities with pockets to live in speaking only that minority language or are federations made of people who already speak different languages and have active protections for minority languages. And of course only 4 of them has English as a native language which means all of them you can be in without using English. Oh and if you really want to add we can go into the rest of the Americas and pull out all of the Spanish speaking countries there. Anyway your comment was effectively saying "tell me you know nothing about Europe without telling me you know nothing about Europe"
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  5. @Frank Ng  How accessible do you need to make it, though?? I'm sure there are a fair few different ways to connect to the outside provinces without HSR. They'd all be less expensive and do the job reasonably well. I'm more inclined to believe that this is more akin to economic stimulus and pride than actual economic utility given a few things: A: Chinese economy is like 30% kept up by construction which gives rise to ghost cities and projects like this (those ghost city houses are owned btw but they're an investment asset and not a place to live). B: HSR is kind of a meme in that it's kept alive by being "high speed" and extremely expensive with intense infrastructure upkeep making it a money sink for all but incredibly dense urban areas with no actual infrastructure for delivering the necessary business inputs like capital. C: My final point here is that in real terms, the same thing could be done with conventional rail and maybe an airport. Given the amount of people who will actually be traveling to these areas, air travel will be plenty fine for getting people quickly to and from and even conventional rail can deliver people as well as things. You'd reduce the cost on everyone and still accomplish the goal without much issue. You just wouldn't be able to call it HSR. On another note: you say this is something capital fundamentally cannot do. This is nonsense as this isn't even very difficult. All you need to do to make it profitable for a company is for a government to tell them they'll pay the people to build it and the government will continue to manage it. Profitability is a soft cap keeping people from making stupid economic decisions and over extending beyond what their finances can support. Profitable means it doesn't go under or pull hard on the population to support it. For anything other than critical inputs for life, this is incredibly important for staying within your own financial means and growing at a sustainable rate. Otherwise, what happens is you have to borrow and borrow a lot. Up until you can't borrow anymore, at which you have a collapse from going completely broke.
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  6. @sumyamchi  Okay well you've admitted yourself normal rail is in places where HSR can't be built but said isolated mountainous areas are the exact areas where it is difficult to build and having an extra few hours of travel isn't going to affect that much in terms of economic integration to such remote locations.
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