if the federal government just hands over money with inadequate oversight it will just enrich the companies.

The worst part of this is that that money is not just wasted, it’s used to lobby politicians to make it worse.

And to be clear, the railroads don’t need more money, back when Biden banned Warren Buffet’s railroad from striking, I did the math, they could afford to double their work force, giving them all half the year off, and pay each one of them 100K/year, and still give the shareholders multiple billions a year.

Yes, there’s a monochrome display in the middle. It’s kinda like a TI-86 calculator aimed at children.

It’s weird that they call them knock-offs, they’re the same drug, just made by a different company with a different name.

This is bad because it will increase prices for these drugs.

Honestly it seems crazy that companies that are so focused on short-term profits in 2024 would be able to make nuclear work.

What does it express?

The AI one looks neat, but it lacks expression.

Korea

The Korean War included the greatest retreat in US history, which was only stopped because we were fighting an enemy with barely any industrial capacity to resupply troops, or even supply them with enough radios, and we failed to achieve the objective of a unified Korea (letalone the bloodthirsty moron MacArthur’s objective of invading China and becoming the “ceasar of the east”).

Kosovo, Yugoslavia

We bombed a bunch of civilians, showed the world that our B2 stealth bomber could be shot down by 30 year old, man-portable AA. I’m still unsure what strategic use bombing embassies and apartments was.

Greek civil war, Afghanistan Russian war, Arabian Israel wars

America didn’t didn’t directly fight any of those.

the war of 1812

We lost that one, our objective was to take Spanish America, and we failed that. They also burned the whitehouse.

WWI, WWII, Spanish American war

Those the US did manage to achieve some of it’s objectives, but WWII was 80 years ago.

American civil war, and the American revolution

Those were primarily against other Americans.

If successful means achieving none of your strategic objectives, but wasting trillions killing a whole bunch of civilians, sure.

What is the count of those vs. the number of surrendered Russians being treated well?

There is no credible data.

Which one is more likely to be in the news?

Neither, I live in America, the news only intentionally covers Russian war crimes. I say intentionally, since I remember a CNN segment near the start of the invasion where armed Ukrainian soldiers jumped out of an ambulance in the background.

The opposite would probably be true if I lived in Russia.

Which one is more likely to be spread around by Russian bots?

I assume it’s not Russian bots posting Ukrainian drone footage to the combat footage sub.

Which will be more likely to be suppressed?

Well I haven’t seen any news covering Ukrainian war crimes and I’ve seen plenty of news covering Russian war crimes, and I know it’s not because Ukraine isn’t doing any war crimes.

The reverse would probably be true for someone living in Russia.

Maybe, but I’ve seen plenty of videos of Russians attempting to surrender to drones, and getting killed anyway.

The point of these laws is to protect civilians from weapons that can’t be used to target just military targets. Do you give a shit about the people in Ukraine beyond their use as cannon fodder?

It’s because of their indiscriminate nature.

The US use of napalm on cities in Korea contributed to the nearly 20% of their population that was wiped out.

Modern science is, but there’s plenty of old journals from the 80s and earlier that use degrees Rankine and gallons.

Well we should get some when the AI craze finally dies.

You said “the network that is barely used in most parts.”

I looked it up and showed you that it’s used so much they’re continuing to expand capacity along most routes.

I didn’t bother to address the railroads being run at a deficit because the neoliberal brainrot it requires to think that mass transit must extract a profit is painful to even imagine.

Do you think public roads, buses, and subways should be run for profit too?

China isn’t doing that. China has had access to older fab equipment for years but still fails to truly innovate

Don’t you remember all the articles about how China had made unexpected advances last year?

Did you just make that up? According to wikipedia (it cites a chinese-language source I can’t read), average occupancy was increasing until 2016, where the statistics end.

But we can infer later occupancy from other statistics:

Passenger trips per year increase every year, with a drop in 2020, but it went back up to 3.68 billion in 2023, 1.6x what it was in 2019 and 3x what it was when occupancy had increased to 72%

There’s issues, such as that it tends not to run through city centers, but lack of occupancy doesn’t seem like one. In any case, cheap intercity transit is a public good that benefits the whole country. Being able to travel 800 miles in 4 hours for 40 bucks is incredibly convenient.

What next, are you going to claim China is full of ghost cities because building enough housing that everyone can afford it is bad actually?

If it’s as simple as high-speed rail, the US can and will do it by themselves.

It’s been decades, if the US was capable of building a high speed rail network, they would have done it. We tried and failed. There’s 3 HSR lines, one of which doesn’t even average 60 miles an hour, but theoretically could do 180 if it wasn’t for the highways and NIMBYs.

Edit: There is 1 HSR line, the one in California is still being planned, and the brightline isn’t HSR.

China has no chance of winning against the US by this way

Every year they close the gap by spending hundreds of billions on schools and infrastructure, while we spend hundreds of billions on prisons and bombs.

TSMC didn’t start by building current nodes, they started out 10 years behind and caught up, and eventually surpassed over decades.

China started their high-speed rail network by buying German trains, today their trains are faster than Germany’s and their rail network is more extensive and cheaper.

They’re investing in education, every step of the supply chain, and their chip companies, and bringing in foreign experts and equipment to fill in any gaps. That’s how you get an advanced semiconductor industry.