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Comment by justinzollars | Hacker News Reader

China is very well managed. San Francisco, where I live is perhaps the worst managed place on earth. The way the Chinese are able to complete infrastructure is something we should seriously study, in addition to how they operate their government to support such projects.

In San Francisco for example, we are undertaking a street repair of 19th street that will take an estimated 2 years. My best guess is that it will actually take a decade to complete, like the van ness project. This is simply a modification of a sewer system and a street re-pavement - nothing new. China could complete this in a week.

The west is slow and we are in decline. China is growing fast.

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The west is slow and we are in decline. China is growing fast.

The West and China have different goals.

China's goal is to grow fast at all costs.

To use your street example, the West makes a great effort to listen to the views of all the people affected by the project, including people who live near and work near the project. The West will also do a study to make sure the environmental impact is acceptable. The West will also do a survey to make sure nothing of any historical or archaeological importance isn't affected. The West will put the project out to multiple bidders and make sure that minority-owned companies are represented in the project. Depending on the project, there may also be other studies and considerations.

China just does the project, and if it's done wrong or harms anyone, too bad. Get out of the way.

Different systems. Different philosophies.

One isn't better because it's "fast."

I'd invite you to travel to China and experience their high speed rail system. Its a huge accomplishment that our society isn't capable of producing. That question is worth exploration.

I'll never question whether I should give up my freedom for a train.

Have you ever considered what freedoms we already lack due to our barbaric car-centric society?

> Have you ever considered what freedoms we already lack due to our barbaric car-centric society?

Barbaric is a fun word, but one that would be easy to twist the other way. In one system you get to be crammed into a little train car with dozens of other people, in the other system you have some privacy and personal space and a seat...

Again, pros and cons all over the place... the US doesn't have good trains because it built other systems instead due to the point in time in which many of its cities developed, and they are "good enough" that most people would see little benefit from ripping it all up to replace it with trains.

It's worth noting too that "they make the trains run on time" is literally a cliche about certain types of government at this point, not some unique accomplishment.

> In one system you get to be crammed into a little train car with dozens of other people, in the other system you have some privacy and personal space and a seat...

If you have enough money for both options, then it's not surprising that the option which costs at least an order of magnitude more provides a slightly more comfortable seat.

I'd hazard to guess there's no way to, "by your logic," someone who's already crossed the threshold of equating a working train system to slavery.

our barbaric car-centric society?

If you consider car-centric society barbaric, you've never experience barbarism, or understand what the word even means. Hyperbole is not helpful.

A society where in many regions every adult must wield a 3000 pound death machine to simply participate is indeed barbaric. I'm not sure what other term I should be using to describe a society that almost openly celebrates the way it is destroying the planet.

If the only words in your toolbox are "barbaric," "death machine," and "destroying," don't be surprised when people don't take you seriously and stop engaging with you.

Being factual and a little more subtle goes a long way.

We call this society "Thunderdome"

I've been very surprised about the vitrol on HN towards cars, which I also experienced recently when I posted some very basic facts about deaths caused by cars vs other means and have seen in some other threads.

I live in an urban area and enjoy not having to drive long distances (or at all) to run errands, but I don't see them as an extenstential threat to humanity as many posters here apparently do.

I still haven't figured it out.

Fortunately, there are many non-authoritarian countries with working train systems. It is funny how Americans choose the worst countries to look up to for relatively mild accomplishments. Maybe because it would hurt our pride to talk about the successes of other countries without the safety blanket of thinking that we still wouldn't want to live there. Maybe out of a perverse sense of intellectual stimulation ("bad yet good, mmm how sophisticated."). It might also be that everyone imagines themselves as the powerful, decisive officials, without realizing that only a few people can occupy those spots; statistically, they should expect to be the peons. But whatever the reason it is funny whenever it happens.

China built 16,000 miles of High Speed Rail in 10 years. California in the same period of time completed about 35 miles of high speed rail. I want to know how they could do this.

Maybe you could look at other countries with high per-capita rail building projects. Japan has an okay system. The UK is better in that way than the US. Europe is filled with rail. The US is really the only rich country I can think of that doesn't have a workable passenger rail system.

The original article, is on China Governance. I pointed out how well they do infrastructure, related to the article.

> I pointed out how well they do infrastructure, related to the article.

And then you projected that all of western civilization is in decline because the US hasn't prioritized high speed rail. Among other things, this completely ignores the countries within the "West" that have high speed rail as well.

That's what people are taking issue with, not that you pointed out that China has high speed rail.

It is certainly in relative decline. This is a matter of fact not opinion.

"Relative decline" is like saying, "my parents are half as tall as they were when I was eight."

How exactly are you measuring this decline?

Please provide these facts.

You could read a number of books on this subject. The China Dream, On China, or Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’ Trap? The Economist is a good magazine, with almost weekly updates on this topic.

We've been surpassed in PPP, Global Trade, Industrial Output etc. China's steel production is 1 billion tons a year, the US 80 million tons. They poured as much concrete in the last 10 years as we poured in the 20th century. In just a few years we will be surpassed by GDP and witin 25 years China's GDP will be double the United States.

China's rise is not disputed.

Okay, that's not decline, and not all of those figures are facts. Also, you seem obsessed with quantity of infrastructure built, which isn't really a great metric for measuring what you're claiming is happening.

The other poster with the analogy about a child's height is 100% accurate.

Australia certainly doesn't.

They made it a priority, unlike the US. Whether it should be a priority of the US is separate from whether it's possible to accomplish or not.

And the USSR went from a poor, agrarian society to the first spacefaring nation on Earth in less than 4 decades.

China has 20 times the land area and 35 times the population of California, and you're comparing apples to oranges comparing a nation-state entity with a sub-nation-state entity that was stymied by conflict with the superior government. And you are comparing actual construction time in China with something else in California (but what, I'm not sure, because 10 years is too short if you are looking at it from public project initial very-partial financing approval with Prop 1A, and too long of you are looking at start of construction in 2015.)

Once upon a time, the American consensus was also generally comfortable with destroying neighborhoods wholesale to build freeways and other infrastructure in the name of progress. Now it takes forever or never for fear of triggering a voter uprising. But, these rules came from a place: there are vast swaths of major cities that have been destroyed. Some are not a meaningful loss and others came at the cost of people who lacked the funding and support to effectively pushback. Why Dodger Stadium is in Chavez Ravine is a sad story and is part of the reason why there's a literal school buried under the parking lot.

China doesn't care. You do what you're told. If you complain too much, you disappear; if the project has an atrocious safety record, they are not reported and no such records exist (or blame a low-level official); if an entire neighborhood was destroyed without compensation, shut up and deal with it. You can get what you want, just how many bodies are you willing to bury to get it?

You really don't need to destroy neighborhoods to build trains.

You need to destroy neighborhoods to built road infrastructure, though. This is because "I/O operations" on high-speed roads with massive bandwidth à-la-USA requires ungodly amounts of space.

Here is the infrastructure needed for high-speed rail : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/FXD1-J00..., plus one train station per city. The switches can be built outside.

Here is the infrastructure needed for traditional highways: https://i0.wp.com/usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sit...

If the infrastructure that was built was not horribly inefficient due to an almost ideological opposition to mass transit, there wouldn't have been neighbourhoods destroyed wholesale, and the precedent leading to the gargantuan opposition we see right now would simply not be present.

I censor myself on wechat just so I can take high speed trains lol

Its actually not that hard and Chinese content platforms are a breath of fresh air

Me thinks you would be surprised at what works

The state there takes a paternal approach, like a literal parent, or teacher or school principle (or unit commander, or HR department). It isn’t that unrelatable, we all grew up in similar restrictions. When everyone agrees that is what the role of the state is, nobody is trying to be a freedom fighter to alter that

>Its actually not that hard and Chinese content platforms are a breath of fresh air

That's sort of like saying Chinese politics is a breath of fresh air because you don't have to worry about picking a side and hearing the various parties arguing with each other.

shrug

they have a heavily neutered internet and it is a pleasant experience

its a walled garden, at the country level, do you want a sticker because of your awareness of Beijing?

there is simply a life beyond imagining it as oppressive all the time, when the reality is that you just hang out in communities in your niche and you dont have to worry about it being randomly politicized. A large part of the mindshare in the west is trying to figure out how to do that, checking out the other internet is probably good for your mental health

At the same time it's worth it to consider why they manage to get it done quickly and efficiently, and we struggle to get it done at all. I don't believe a free society would (or should) fundamentally be completely incapable of building a high-speed train.

Right.

I guess Hong Kong's problem is they just haven't experienced China's rail system yet. /s

Freedom is not a binary variable. The First Amendment protects the freedom of speech, but how many people feel comfortable to freely speak their mind at one of the corporate training courses on diversity and inclusion for example? People everywhere are smart and learn that if if you know what's good for you, there are some things you should say and some things you shouldn't. The set of things you should or shouldn't say may be different in China than in the US, but the curtailment of freedom is present in both places and different only in a matter of degree.

>The First Amendment protects the freedom of speech, but how many people feel comfortable to freely speak their mind at one of the corporate training courses on diversity and inclusion for example?

You clearly misunderstand what the First Amendment is about. It's a restraint on government, not a restraint on everyone else.

I know, but what difference does it make?

Around 1865 we reached the conclusion that it is the duty of the Government to protect some people from having their freedom taken away by some other people. Since then the Constitution started imposing restraints not only on the ability of the Government to curtail your freedom, but also the ability of your fellow citizens to do so. And this is a good thing.

But lately we started regressing. I'm talking about the cancel culture.

Do you think that if one day a person were to be physically tarred and feathered by a crowd of puritans because of some perceived transgression, that is ok? But then if the tarring and feathering is in the digital world, and much more permanent (nothing is forgotten on the internet), is that ok?

The end result is that people learn there are some things you can say, some things you can't, and some things you must say.

Freedom goes both ways. The decision is really about the 'freedom' of millions of commuters vs. the 'freedom' of home/landowners.

Japan also has a high speed rail system.

Well sure, when you can use Uighur slave labor for your infrastructure and kill their entire family if they speak up, you can have some nice things...I guess...

Rome was very pretty.

Whataboutism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenzhou_train_collision

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/25/chinese-rail-c...

You can also experience the air quality from the decades-long boom in coal plants, which shows no signs of abating: https://www.wired.com/story/china-is-still-building-an-insan...

China executes at scale, but does not necessarily execute good things at scale.

I'd invite you to travel to China and experience their high speed rail system.

Feel free to invite me. But it's not necessary. I've been on China's high speed rail system.

Its a huge accomplishment that our society isn't capable of producing.

I've also been on the one in Japan, Korea, Italy, France, Germany, and Belgium.

The Americans produced the Interstate system 50 years ago, . The problem is that the American system in 2020 has become stuck due to the rise in partisanship and the elimination of pork-barrel horse trading.

The Chinese state can produce projects, but how valuable they are is often up for question; the Urumqi high speed line doesn't even make enough money to pay for the electricity to run the trains. https://www.ft.com/content/ca28f58a-955d-11e8-b747-fb1e803ee...

There's also the question of maintenance.

America's problem isn't with building new roads, it's with maintaining them.

Building new is easy. Let's see how China fares in 50 years when it has to maintain an aging infrastructure.

I'd love to travel to China and check out their high speed rail system and everything they've built in general, but I'm afraid of their police state and being kept from coming back.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-29655466

These are two ends of a very broad spectrum: On one end it's bulldoze everything (including human rights) and get 'er done. On the other end is spend decades and $billions doing endless studies and analyses, barely getting anything done.

There is a middle ground where projects are ethically and considerately done in a reasonable amount of time, at a reasonable cost. This doesn't seem to be happening in either SF or China, but I can imagine it's happening in many places around the world.

>There is a middle ground where projects are ethically and considerately done in a reasonable amount of time, at a reasonable cost.

The middle ground is also the middle between US and China, something like Germany.

Sounds more like a fantasy than truth. Germany is now infamous for nonsensical bureaucracy, see e.g. the Brandenburg airport project, where incompetence and downright corruption was comically rampant.

I do meet Americans who moved to Europe but they also have to contend with various dissatisfaction. A dysfunctional and Kafka-esque bureaucracy is one of them, and the high tax + mediocre income + unfriendly laws on share grants, as well as a way too "socialist" system which doesn't recognize individual contribution much, is another huge factor that have led many people to reconsider their choices. If they have some particular reason, e.g. chronic medical condition, have a family and want more work-life balance etc., then sure, Europe might work better for them. But for a young single person Europe is actually nowhere that good at all.

I think eventually people just have to understand that there is no paradise on earth. Every place has its set of unique strengths and weaknesses and characteristics formed by their culture and history that are not replaceable. Romanticizing an "exotic" place too much will invariably lead to deviation from the reality and disillusionment in the end. Similarly, demonizing a place, be it China or the US, will also be very one-sided and biased. Only clear-headed objectivity will benefit you the most.

Trust me, the reason that it takes two years to do sewer repairs is not because painstaking effort is taken to consult all stakeholders. That's just an excuse.

In my city, the reason why this happens is because municipal officials are corrupt, incompetent, and not held accountable. It has nothing to do with what you said.

I agree with the general point, but let me provide a counter:

Before I moved to San Francisco, I lived in Beijing for 9 years, the last 3 of those in an apartment in the Sanlitun area of Beijing, within 3 mins walk of a Bentley dealership, Lotus dealership, a craft brewery etc.

When we moved in, a school down the street had construction going on, and was surrounded with scaffolding and then some signage or whatever. The sidewalk was completely blocked off, making it difficult for pedestrians to pass.

Over a year later, they finally finished construction and the updated building was revealed. They'd extended the building to take over the sidewalk completely. You'd think that, if this was intended, then they'd build a new sidewalk and narrow the car lanes a bit. But, no, pedestrians have to walk into the road to go around this school.

This construction was both slow and bad. I admit it's not typical: the nearby Holiday Inn went from zero to operational within a few months.

Authoritarian regimes are often highly efficient, whether they are doing the right thing or not. The ability to unilaterally squash any dissent is a very powerful thing.

How you can conclude that the US is in decline because a street repair in a single city takes longer than it probably should is beyond me.

Yeah. The ability to move fast when doing the wrong thing is not a virtue.

>Authoritarian regimes are often highly efficient

I would argue the opposite is usually true. Setting aside China, authoritarian regimes are usually NOT known for being efficient or well-run.

I am not American, but I came back from my visits to China with a similar feeling to the grandparent comment. The West tends to stick their fingers in their ears and yell "Authoritarian regime, I can't hear you!" at the mere suggestion that China does certain things better and there may be something to learn there.

> I would argue the opposite is usually true. Setting aside China, authoritarian regimes are usually NOT known for being efficient or well-run.

well run != efficient

Authoritarian regimes are highly efficient at accomplishing what the people in charge want to do, long term consequences be damned. Frequently, the people in charge are primarily focused on retaining or even acquiring more power and wealth, which is generally not well aligned with what most people would consider a well run nation.

> I am not American, but I came back from my visits to China with a similar feeling to the grandparent comment. The West tends to stick their fingers in their ears and yell "Authoritarian regime, I can't hear you!" at the mere suggestion that China does certain things better and there may be something to learn there.

The issue here is that there isn't an agreement on what "better" means. Social harmony at the expense of individual freedoms isn't better. Technological advancement that is based on IP theft isn't better. Infrastructure improvement that causes long term harm to the global environment isn't better.

I agree with your points about what is and isn't "better", but that is not what I am arguing.

Are you saying there are no lessons the West can learn from China's infrastructure projects without resorting to authoritarianism, IP theft, or environmental harm? That there is no way to pick apart and separate some positive learnings from the negatives?

Are you saying THIS is the best we can do as a Western democracy?

https://torontolife.com/city/transportation/tortured-history...

To me, this kind of paralysis on infrastructure projects is not "better" by any definition you use. It's not an intentional tradeoff between infrastructure and environmental protection, or between public development and property rights. It's just indecision, waste, and stagnation.

Every time a comparison to China's infrastructure comes up, the knee jerk reaction is to point out that it's an authoritarian regime so of course they can force through any infrastructure project they want. Which is fair enough, but it drowns out any discussion asking "Hey, CAN we do any better in the West than we are doing right now? Is what we have good enough?"

> Are you saying there are no lessons the West can learn from China's infrastructure projects without resorting to authoritarianism, IP theft, or environmental harm? That there is no way to pick apart and separate some positive learnings from the negatives?

Not at all. Every nation can always learn from others, or at least be motivated by the accomplishments of others to improve internally.

> Are you saying THIS is the best we can do as a Western democracy?

Maybe? Again, it depends on what your definition of "best" is. If not enough people in Toronto think it's important enough to have a robust public transit system, then it doesn't happen. I'm very confident Toronto has the resources required to complete an ambitious project if desired.

> To me, this kind of paralysis on infrastructure projects is not "better" by any definition you use. It's not an intentional tradeoff between infrastructure and environmental protection, or between public development and property rights. It's just indecision, waste, and stagnation.

If the project isn't a good use of resources, indecision and inaction is the better outcome.

> Every time a comparison to China's infrastructure comes up, the knee jerk reaction is to point out that it's an authoritarian regime so of course they can force through any infrastructure project they want. Which is fair enough, but it drowns out any discussion asking "Hey, CAN we do any better in the West than we are doing right now? Is what we have good enough?"

Unlike in China, these discussions already happen regularly, and the key difference between the status quo in China and the West is the decision making process, so that's where the conversation is focused.

>Maybe? Again, it depends on what your definition of "best" is. If not enough people in Toronto think it's important enough to have a robust public transit system, then it doesn't happen. I'm very confident Toronto has the resources required to complete an ambitious project if desired. >If the project isn't a good use of resources, indecision and inaction is the better outcome.

I wish I shared your confidence, but this suggests otherwise:

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2018/09/26/transit-the-number-1-...

I find it difficult to accept that this is the best outcome by any metric I can think of.

>Unlike in China, these discussions already happen regularly, and the key difference between the status quo in China and the West is the decision making process, so that's where the conversation is focused.

Is it? The conversation is focused on how China is authoritarian, not on how the Western (I really should say North American) decision-making process often leads to poor outcomes and stagnation when it comes to public projects.

This IS getting pretty far off-topic from the actual article, so I'll stop here.

> I wish I shared your confidence, but this suggests otherwise:

That's a pretty recent poll (on the timeline you provided in the earlier article), so maybe it's a sign that a more comprehensive transit system will be built soon.

> I find it difficult to accept that this is the best outcome by any metric I can think of.

It's definitely not optimal if you support public transit. The western model is more concerned with preventing tyranny than efficiency or optimal outcomes, for better or worse. This could very easily be one of the times where "worse" is the case. I'd still prefer it over an authoritarian system.

> Is it? The conversation is focused on how China is authoritarian, not on how the Western (I really should say North American) decision-making process often leads to poor outcomes and stagnation when it comes to public projects.

It seems to have expanded quite a bit beyond that (not between you and I, just generally), which seems pretty common for these types of topics.

> This IS getting pretty far off-topic from the actual article, so I'll stop here.

Fair enough, thanks for the discussion.

German fascists were praised for their ingenuity and the structure they imposed upon liberal society, and Germany even got the Autobahn out of them.

I heard that Italian fascists made the trains run on time, too.

This sounds like name calling.

Many people are happy to self-identify as German or Italian.

Wait, do you want to seriously study the way that China is able to do the prestige projects you point to, or do you want to ignore the historical patterns that provide evidence of what the reason is that they are able to do them?

And the US was also able to do some impressive projects in the past. Does that say anything about previous governments?

It says that infrastructure accomplishments shouldn't be the sole metric on which nations are measured.

The comments you have attracted are hilarious. It's not worth even attempting to initiate dialogue with such type of people.

Here is the Chinese high speed rail built in the last decade, it is not propaganda, it's literally something you can buy a ticket for and travel on at 350 km/h right now. I truly worry for Americans incapable of seeing what is happening in the rest of the world.

https://image5.sixthtone.com/image/5/4/861.gif

> Here is the Chinese high speed rail built in the last decade, it is not propaganda, it's literally something you can buy a ticket for and travel on at 350 km/h right now.

Yeah, its nice. Authoritarian regimes usually have some nice prestige projects to show, which is really nice if you are a foreigner they are trying to impress, or a local that is in favor with the regime. Not so much if you are out-of-favor, whether because you opposed the particular approach they took for the prestige project or for some unrelated reason.

But, as much as I like HSR and wish the US would do it, emulating China -- whose ability to do it isn't a mystery needing study, but well-understood -- isn't a cost worth paying for it.

No need to be authoritarian.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/High_Spe...

(op here) Thanks. The idea of not being number one is a difficult notion for people to reconcile.

I don't see anyone claiming China didn't build high speed rail. I do see a number of people questioning the parent poster's metric for evaluating the future of China and the west, when many countries in the west also have high speed rail systems and that focus on one measurement of success is probably at least a little myopic.

> China is very well managed.

LOL. China is able to move very fast, but the idea that it's a well-oiled machine functioning in perfect harmony is a ridiculous fiction.

Construction projects in China cut every corner possible. When something fails catastrophically, they'll throw a low-level official under the bus. At every level, there is total abdication of responsibility. The whole system incentivizes this.

See: "The Chabuduo Mindset" https://www.chinaexpatsociety.com/culture/the-chabuduo-minds...

> The west is slow and we are in decline. China is growing fast.

Yes, and this should terrify everyone.

Here is video of a Chinese ghost city. It was made by a bloggers that were forced to leave the country for fear of their lives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XopSDJq6w8E

> At every level, there is total abdication of responsibility. The whole system incentivizes this.

Exactly like the USSR and Chernobyl.

>Construction projects in China cut every corner possible.

Construction quality satisfies fast, cheap, good like everywhere else. As someone who worked adjacent to construction industry in both China and North America, the difference is China has the "fast" option available, whereas NA is mostly cheap + good, and frequently just cheap. It's less about being well managed, but having all the options and managing appropriately. Tons of capital projects in China and related prestige developments aging well. The latter surprisingly so considering how many retardley ambitious (almost unworkable) starchitect designs were built. Sure, lot's of uninhabited commodity projects falling into disrepair but abandoned bubble subdivisions don't fair much better. Difference is China builds more, so more catastrophic failures. Question is, it worth the cost? Deng wanted poor China to develop fast. So China ChaBuDuo's as deliberate development strategy and manages accordingly.

>When something fails catastrophically, they'll throw a low-level official under the bus. At every level, there is total abdication of responsibility. The whole system incentivizes this.

Chinese Aviation and HSR safety? Public accident -> regulate + execute those responsible = about safest aviation and HSR in the world. Surmise the same with food and vaccination safety, but effects of those scandal stake longer to determine. Regardless, incentives seem to align with state interests to me. On building stock specifically, there's no interest high quality commodity construction. Why would there be? Current 60% urbanization rate, goal 70%, realistically 80-90%. That's 140-420M people who needs apartments. Queue current 65M empty condos and ghost city memes.

Obviously it's not perfect, but it has more tools to address some serious problems that's stumping the west, especially beyond political cycle timescales. Curious if west would try deleveraging or could successfully regulate FAANG. Too many things west can't do, but should. Also too many things CCP can do and shouldn't.

San Francisco builds stadiums when there is a housing shortage and bends over a barrel for the Super Bowl when it's actually held in San Jose.

The city has a lot of difficult problems to solve, but it sure does do some horribly wrong things with the simpler problems.

Yep, you’ve definite hit the nail on the head why the homeless problem hasn’t been solved in SF. /s Anyway, didn’t the 49ers leave SF anyway?

It’s not like the city budget has doubled in the last 10 years.

Regarding those sibling comments that try to explain away Chinas efficiency with its authoritarianism: consider other, democratic Asian nations like Japan, Taiwan, Korea, if you prefer. They offer just as much to learn, e.g. in how they handle infrastructure projects, technological advancements in the public sphere, or pandemic prevention. We westerners would be smart to question our perceived superiority from time to time.

In rural Arkansas, we have the freedom to do a lot of crazy things like criticise our government. We also have blazing fast & stable FTTH for $50/month, some of the cleanest and tastiest water I've ever put in my mouth (which comes from our well), and our food is of excellent quality because there are many local small farmers who are ethical and stable. There is just enough work in the way of tech businesses a short drive away to make this life style possible.

Maybe a change of scenery is in order for you. I can't imaging living in a hellscape like San Fran. I'm in a veritable paradise as far as I can tell. There are problems, but we are working on them, and we generally have the freedom to do so on our own terms without nanny government holding our hand.

Whenever I see complaints of “I live in X, X is a mess”, I’m much more likely to listen than when I hear “I live in X, Y is a mess” — the former implies someone has valid critiques that come from their lived experiences, and yet they still choose to live there, for whatever reason. The latter more often than not just speaks to ignorance — it’s easy to dismiss something on hearsay.

This goes both ways. I’m from Dallas and live in Los Angeles. Both cities have their own share of problems (and their own great qualities) — and yet both are much more likely to quickly dismiss the other as lost causes than take a deep look at their own issues.

It’s fine to have a preference, obviously, but don’t let your preference cloud your judgement: many would say the exact same thing about rural Arkansas — and for many, it probably wouldn’t be a paradise, based on any number of politics, orientations, race, socioeconomic status, or even just where your friends and family are! — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t for you.

You know, I used to think this. Then I discovered how quickly Caltrans was able to fix that tank truck destruction of the highway in the East Bay. And then I looked at the stuff and realized something: America doesn't actually need the infrastructure. It's all a jobs program. Because when America needs it, it comes fast as fuck. But the truth is that America doesn't need it. You don't need high-speed rail (planes are better). You don't need that road to be resurfaced (the loss of life and property over the period in question is minuscule). You don't need the Central Railway. You don't need more interstates. It's okay to allow some bridges to fall killing some people.

Almost all American infrastructure is either a vanity project, a jobs project, or a political quid pro quo operation to an ally to get some other thing done.

The problem is that once you get really used to this mode of operating, you kind of forget that there are sometimes things that really do matter. I think America has a picture of the things she already knows of: crucial highway collapses? gotta fix now! But the ability to recognize new crises goes away without novel crises.

So America can't build ventilators in an emergency, can't train nurses in an emergency, can't do anything new. But I think America can deal with the old things just fine if she wants to.

> This is simply a modification of a sewer system

Any civil engineers here that can explain why “simply” might not apply?

I have watched some sewer modifications[1] here in Christchurch (earthquake damage, Insituform product), and it looked incredibly complicated and I didn’t see how they reconnected each home’s connection to the main.

A typical metaphor for software engineering is rebuilding a plane while it is running. What is an appropriate metaphor when you are fixing old pipes that carry human excrement and the system mostly keeps working while it’s being done...

[1] https://www3.epa.gov/npdes/pubs/rehabl.pdf

> The way the Chinese are able to complete infrastructure is something we should seriously study, in addition to how they operate their government to support such projects.

Why? I mean, its not news that top-down authoritarianism is very good at doing whatever the top decides needs done without considering anyone else's concerns or interests, this isn't something that needs study.

And there are no shortages of places practicing that to decamp to if that is your preference for style of government.

A positive spin on this is that everyday people are so wealthy, savvy, and time-rich that they spontaneously organize and campaign to shut down infrastructure projects they don't like.

When it's keeping the "other" out it's gross, but when they are shutting down pointless vanity projects like a sculpture park no one wants maybe that's democracy as advertised.

because in the US it is all about political power, all projects are not about solving the issue being worked on but how to reward the most people that will contribute to your and your parties political power. the amount of money being directed towards friends and fellow politicians is staggering.

An example in Atlanta was a politician friends with those of the same party works in another county but serves on advisement boards for the city as a sole employee of those boards netting him hundreds of thousands a year. It only came to light because he screwed up the taxes. This is wide spread, as in nation wide. All those committees and such are mostly there to reward each other, family, and friends.

China just eliminated having any competing political power. They have factions within but all serve the same top.

Example of gaming the system https://www.ajc.com/politics/fulton-da-howard-fined-by-state...

China moves fast at the expense of the environment, safety, individual rights, etc. I do agree though, balance is important; The U.S. seems to have excessive regulation and burdensome bureaucracy in many domains (public infra) and regulatory capture in others (Boeing's relationship with FAA/NTSB).

They sacrifice minorities to satisfy majority, and they have the power to determine who is majority without voting. Sometimes the minority eventually get benefit, but most of the time their voice is no where to be heard.

I hear this all the time but is it true? It sounds like saying "we don't want to compete, because we are just better" - meanwhile we are being left in the dust.

When I visited China, China feels like America. I'd argue China has embraced capitalism and we are moving in the opposite direction.

> I'd argue China has embraced capitalism and we are moving in the opposite direction.

The CCP has embraced capitalism when it's convenient for them. What they haven't embraced is a consistent rule of law or anything approaching a democratic government, which are the basis of every other functioning, stable nation on Earth.

China has more people living in it than the US, the EU, the post-Soviet states, and Brazil —- combined. Does it really matter what “every other functioning, stable nation on Earth” does, when it’s patently obvious that China will be calling the shots from here on out, thanks to everything that the Trump presidency did to internationalism?

Yeah, it does matter. Fortunately (for those of us who aren't members of the CCP), control over domestic and international affairs isn't decided by sheer headcount.

Also, I think it's likely that Trump has made leaders in the the West realize how much they rely on each other, and ties will be quickly re-strengthened under Biden.

> China moves fast at the expense of the environment, safety, individual rights, etc.

A dire contrast with the west which since the industrial revolution grew up so fast by respecting human rights, the environment, other nations, international law. The lack of self-awareness of people like you genuinely scares me. You vote people who has the power to erase the planet with nukes and you consider yourselves superior to other races/nations. Truly hair-rising stuff.

You prefer a system where dictators and authoritarians concentrate power and the populace has no means of even airing concerns, much less reigning in dangerous leaders???

> A dire contrast with the west which since the industrial revolution grew up so fast by respecting human rights, the environment, other nations, international law.

Well, no, exactly like the West that did many of the same things as China at a similar stages in their development, with similar results (there's a difference between the hybrid of state capitalism and corporatism with central elites in practical control of "democratic centralism" in modern China and peak private capitalism with capitalist control of notionally democratic institutions in the early industrial West, but there are also lots of similarities), and very much like what lots of Western countries did later under slightly different systems than peak private capitalism that are also similar to China's current system (e.g., fascist corporatism)

Which is exactly why "how China can do what they do" isn't at all a mystery or place the West needs to go to learn lessons. Its not that the West has never done the kind of things that China has done, but that its been there and moved on. Certainly not completely, and certainly with deep remaining problems. But a few pretty prestige projects for the elites and those willing to knuckle under for them aren't worth the cost of reversing progress on those fronts.

"The West wrecked the environment and everything else in the process of industrialization, so we [Chinese] are entitled to do it too," is a truly disturbing line and this isn't the first time I've actually heard before.

Aren't people supposed to do better knowing how much people in the past screwed up? Isn't that what progress is all about? Learning from your mistakes?

> "The West wrecked the environment and everything else in the process of industrialization, so we [Chinese] are entitled to do it too," is a truly disturbing line and this isn't the first time I've actually heard before.

Because it's not terrifying. China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty. What's terrifying is nations like India and continents like Africa haven't followed and developed. Instead there are nearly 1 billion indians and africans without electricity, plumbing, etc.

> Aren't people supposed to do better knowing how much people in the past screwed up?

Well, china didn't invade australia, canada, US, etc and wipe out the people and steal their land and destroy other people's environment to enrich themselves. So maybe they learned something. The hypocritical hubris is not going to do us any good. Over the long term, it's gonna be our undoing.

Or maybe, there is no other option. In order to make an omelette you gotta break some eggs. And in order to develop, you have to suffer through some environmental degradation.

Not only are the chinese entitled to it, so are the indians, africans, middle easterners, etc. Are they all supposed to languish in poverty while they wait for some magic development process to appear.

While a privileged virtue signaler can comfortable whine about the environment, the millions of people living in poverty don't have the luxury.

Well said. All the pretty talk about "human rights", "democracy" and "environment protection" and stuffs, they serve nothing more than nice-sounding justifications/facade for western superiority and the current world order: "We are more developed than you, and you are destined to do cheap manufacturing work or simply export raw materials for us, because you are simply inferior in all those abstract moral aspects. So just stay in your place while we keep reaping the maximum rewards at the top of the food chain".

If one is serious, it isn't hard to take a look at how the industrial revolution happened over the past hundreds of years to understand how the West reached its current status in the first place, going through exactly similar stages. Development is a hard, long-winding process, and one doesn't magically get there overnight. There was an interesting study that looked at the corruption level in the US in the 1800s and found it to be 8 times more than the corruption level of 1990s/2000s China. When countries like Norway were poor before they discovered oil, it was not like they were exactly the model paradise of equality, green economy and "human rights" at all, while China now has the ambition to lead the green economy by 2050.

As you said, one could simply look at a third-world African country. Are people there objectively suffering from more human rights abuses, more poverty, more environmental pollution, than people in China? Is the supposed parliamentary democracy working there?

The West talks all the time about how they're supposed to help those countries develop by implanting all its system, while eventually all it does is to make it easy for the multinational western capitalists to reap the rewards. Nobody helps anybody else develop at its own expense for no reason. This is just how politics naturally works. China took advantage of the manufacturing boom to get out of poverty, which of course benefited the West a lot along the way as well, but China always also had a clear determination to grow out of such a "world factory" role, which the West clearly didn't foresee nor wanted to see. Thus the tension nowadays.

China is pushing a lot of policies in Africa nowadays and of course it's also largely out of China's own geopolitical needs, but maybe some of its infrastructure projects actually benefit the population more than some previous foreign investments, or maybe some of them don't. The point is, in the end you have to look at what actually benefits the common folks the most, instead of all the hypocritical gesturing and varnishing talks on the surface.

Hmm, I'm not sure if the comment you're replying to is the best example of "lack of self-awareness" or "consider yourselves superior" as they also somewhat mentioned "balance is important". Discussions on this topic seem to always descend into inflammable territory. Though I agree that there are definitely tons of people out there who fit your description, that's for sure.

A lot of the "environment, safety, human rights" stuffs originate from official propaganda by western state apparatus which want to contain China/feel threatened by China's progress, so they want to reassure themselves of their superiority and contain every country in their designated place in the food chain with a certain narrative, just like how China does official propaganda to paint the west in a bad light on issues such as COVID containment and affirm its own superiority. But people who unquestioningly gobble up such propaganda are definitely aplenty out there (I would guess the desire to feel superior/justified against an unknown threat/"others" could even be part of human nature, which however is what education and rational thinking are exactly supposed to allow us do better at).

San Francisco has some problems. For a glimpse behind the scenes, check out the ongoing FBI corruption probe: https://sfist.com/2020/07/15/ongoing-fbi-corruption-probe-hi...

However, before we go asking the commies how to run governments, there are perhaps some other, less authoritarian, countries who also get things done that we might look at?

Agreed, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore come to mind. China isn’t unique in being able to build infrastructure at an acceptable pace.

Arguably China is emulating mainly Singapore but also its neighbors. It certainly was not building HSR pre 1980.

There’s an interesting story with Deng Xiaoping and Lee Kwan Yew behind this.

If China is so well managed, why are they so poor [1], so corrupt [2] , have up to 1M people in jail due purely to their ethnicity, and every citizen monitored at all times for a thought or statement tantamount to 'wrongthink'?

China is not 'well managed', rather, they can 'move quickly and build things of questionable quality' in some places, not others.

The ability to build some material things very quickly is definitely useful and creates some utility, but it's not tantamount to 'well managed'.

SF has busses, trains and a subway that run, it's far from perfect, but what they suffer from is 'too much money'.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-per-capita/#:~:text=Gr....

[2] https://www.transparency.org/en/

I'm biased as heck because I'm a westernized Chinese, and I am impressed with the rapid development everytime I visit China. In my mind, being pragmatic wins. When I visited SF recently, I was constantly wary of dangers and mentally ill people, though less as I went to Silicon Valley. There is something that feels immediately wrong and backwards that no amount of whataboutism and armchair debates about the harms of authoritarianism can persuade, because I face reality every time I go outside.

> compares a half continent sized country to a single city

I agree it is amazing how well you can manage things when you can "reconcile" any worker complaints, very quickly. When those who are known to oppose or object to your plans are "reassigned" to a post in the Gobi.

And who of course would object when doing so would ding your "social credit" score and restrict your right to do things like travel, or access the internet.

I agree that single party states run very well, after all when you don't have to worry about pesky freedoms or rights it's amazing what you can accomplish.

Next up President Xi Jinping has a 99% approval rating. How does China produce such beloved politicians?

It baffles me how Americans can say, (paraphrasing), "on one hand it is illegal for Chinese journalists to report on public project failures, but on the other hand, I haven't heard of any public project failures."

That’s not what the parent comment said at all?

Americans know very well that their public sector fails to execute projects on time and on budget. They just don’t think the tradeoffs to convert to the Chinese system are worth it, nor are the benefits of the Chinese system exclusive to that system.

>That’s not what the parent comment said at all?

It was written to agree with the parent, not disagree. Yes, that does break from the normal comment thread cadence of agreement on odd layers and disagreement on even layers. ;)

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