Trains benefit people, those other things benefit billionaires.
And billionaires only care about one thing.
Control.
*nods in understanding
High resolution images of everyone's buttholes
The future of humanity!
Where humanity is defined as billionaires, everybody else are just NPC.
California high speed rail was something my parents voted on when I was a child.
I had this friend who was a year under me in school. Her kid voted for it too.
It still doesn't exist. California can't build something as modern and cutting edge as a train.
If you want to build a train in empty space I'm sure you could get that approved pretty quickly. Of course, it'd be useless. The biggest problem with trains is getting land for it since they are most useful where there's a lot of people.
I hate these data centers and flock cameras as much as the next guy, but they aren't really comparable. Flock cameras don't even take up much space and they are put up on land the government already has. It's like asking why it's so easy to put stop lights.
Sorry, I'm Mr Buzzkill.
The USA has no problem bulldozing housing to build highways.
Yeah, but only because that land belonged to blacks and cut prospering communities in half to drown them in traffic hell. You wouldn't want a repeat of that.
Rip out the extra lanes of the damn roads and highways that induced demand, and we got all the space we need without destroying much in the way of existing buildings. A double track is only about as wide as one lane of our surface stroads.
Not sure how true that is. New highways aren't that common and all the ones I know about took forever to actually get built.
None of this is written in stone. Critical infrastructure should always be prioritized. We see how China did it. In the end it’s all about political will.
We all know that China prioritizes critical infrastructure like flocks of cameras and the associated data centres to closely monitor its population. Hence they are built quickly, whereas trains take way longer then a month to be set up.
If you'll allow me to nerd out a little. I love trains as much as the next guy. I also love arriving at the next station alive. Every single time. And i also want my grandchild to arrive at the station Alive. Every single time.
But by the time we start to actually lay down the tracks, a whole lot of work has already been done. Ground has to be sampled along the way. The ground has to be prepared, large boulders has to be cut/blown apart. Engineers and geologist must have had time to calculate that the ground will hold, perhaps certain areas needs to be reinforced more than others The ground has to be owned by an entity that can authorise the use of it.
Signal cables has to be drawn. There has to be space for trains to pass eachother. And then there are probably solutions to things we didn't even know was a problem.
What's my point? Of course trains take a lot longer than setting up a bunch of cameras on poles... I'd be more concerned if it was the opposite. And yes, I'm hillarious at parties.
And the Chinese build a 50000 km high speed railway network in 18 years. The first high speed train was in 2008. If there is a will, there is a way. Infrastructure benefits the people.
In California for example the high speed railway was authorized in 2008 for only 795 kilometers long. The project is expected to be completed between 2031 and 2033. So in the same time frame, China build 49205 additional kilometers of track.
In western countries, everything and everyone needs to be consulted and 99% of the time a court case follows because of some animal found or it is too close to houses or whatever shit people think of, causing massive delays. Than of course there are the changes in government. Think about the Biden infrastructure bill that got scraped like the second day the current regime took over.
I mean... yeah. Trains have had a lot of articulate obstacles out in their place. And it goes without saying that Flock and AI datacenters can fuck right off
But trains also are much, much more complicated projects. A flock camera needs like 4 square get of space next to the road that's already in the ROW, and data centers are built a single piece of land.
Trains, and especially high-speed trains require securing of land and grade separation/fencing that makes their installation very difficult from an engineering and property-ownership stance.
Roads can just be routed between property lines as much as possible because cars can make pretty sharp turns. High-speed trains have to cut properties in half, build off grade, and put up a fence.
Imagine you're a farmer and they put a trail line android your property. Now to get between the house and the barn that was 100 yards away you have to travel 2 miles down the track to the nearest crossing, so you've made a 200 yards round to 8 miles. Yeah, you'll get paid"fair market value" for the 50-ft wide strip of land their treasure from you, but with half your land cut off from the rest the damages are much higher.
You don't want that, so you sue to stop it. And so do thousands of other property owners in the same situation. And the business owners of the roasts that will be bypassed, cut off, or simply used less. And the cities and counties who now have their existing transportation infrastructure fucked.
It's a huge impact, and even if it's a net good, there's severe collateral damage and those imitated will fight to stop it.
The time to secure rail rights was 150 years ago. And that's what they did and why that's where pretty much where all the rails are.
you're ignoring the spirit of the post.
when the wealthy want something done, it gets done.
nothing you're talking about is outside the power of government.... do you want someone's land? then you just take it. nobody is going to put up a fuss for longer than a few months.
and when they do put up a fight, you crush them or pay them off.
we don't have anything good because nobody in power is interested.
All of that is correct however I am also currently watching my government fail to be able to construct a train station along an existing track. So far the process has been going on for about six years and no one has so much has dug a hole yet. It's barely even a construction project, they just need to pour some concrete into a rectangle and then add some stairs and call it a station. But apparently even that requires six years worth of committees.
Meanwhile in Scotland, somewhere with similarish land and planning laws. We're electrifying the whole network, dualing large sections that were single track, removing peak fares, upgrading the rolling stock, and opening brand new stations.
Having a decent rail service is entirely a political choice. Whether those in power want to make it happen or not.
Everyone is talking about obtaining land and eminent domain and whatnot. ..We have streets. 🤷
Flock cams don't even need a power connection because they run on solar+battery, and wireless data connection. You can put one practically everywhere without any preparation - even the post it sits on is pretty optional, could use cable binders to hang them on a tree.
Data centers often get built where land is cheap, and at least in the US there is a (horrifying and stupid) trend to design them to run off-grid with gas turbines, so you don't even need utilities there, just data connections that you can run underground.
Trains take up a lot of space, and if you want them to be useful, they need to be where the population density is high enough. That means high cost for land, often buying up big amounts of smaller lots where you have to work something out with a multitude of land owners who might not want to part with their - often prime location, because it's in the city - land. A single land owner not selling their land can grind a project like this to a halt, at least if there is hesitancy using eminent domain, which is a crowbar approach and leads to resistance to your project.
Don't get me wrong, i really think the USA would benefit greatly from modernizing and expanding their rail network! But realistically, refitting a train line into a city center where you preferably want the station to be is a hard task, doubly hard if you want to actually pass through the city because its not the head end of the line - it doubles the land acquisition woes. A possibility would be going underground, but underground construction is an expensive endeavor, and the US would probably need to get outside expertise from Switzerland or Austria where we construct tunnels through mountains and below cities on the regular to make it work.
The US famously bulldozes whole districts for their stupid highways, to build a whole highway junction inside cities (or whatever is left inbetween highway and parking lot).
Sure both train tracks and highways are harder than flock cameras or data centers, but the US certainly has no issue with building highways. All the issues are home-made. We have the same fucking issues here in Germany, it just so happened that more of our rail network (relative to size & population) survived the neolibertarian onslaught of the past ~60 years.
At the end of the day train networks primarily serve people, not capital.
You're noticing a bit too well citizen....
Well of course. Billionaires are motivated to keep an eye on their livestock, but aren't motivated to make sure their livestock has a good quality of life. I mean how else can they hunt down a woman trying to have an abortion? That's their future worker after all....
The fascists weren't the ones trying to build high speed rail, the decorum folks were. In fact, elmo's entire role was to suck out budget/enthusiasm for the promised future, fail like he's best suited to do and say oh well, too late.
The Chinese build a 50000 km high speed railway network in 18 years. The first high speed train was in 2008. If there is a will, there is a way. Infrastructure benefits the people.
In California for example the high speed railway was authorized in 2008 for only 795 kilometers long. The project is expected to be completed between 2031 and 2033. So in the same time frame, China build 49205 additional kilometers of track.
In western countries, everything and everyone needs to be consulted and 99% of the time a court case follows because of some animal found or it is too close to houses or whatever shit people think of, causing massive delays. Than of course there are the changes in government. Think about the Biden infrastructure bill that got scraped like the second day the current regime took over.
Ok, and not to defend it, but it is easier to install a flock camera or build a new building than to redo a logistics network.
We should do reasons instead of ai and flock, but yeah, rebuilding a train system in the US is way more complicated and harder to do.
it is easier to install a flock camera or build a new building
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(data_center)
785,000 sq ft (72,900 m^2)
422 MW of power.
Over five million gallons of water consumed daily
I can't imagine how that would have an impact on local logistics or civil planning.
in March 2025, xAI purchased a 1,000,000-square-foot (93,000 m2) site in the Whitehaven area of Memphis... Plans for the expansion were initially revealed by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation when preliminary plans for the facility were filed on September 18, 2024, for the project "...between xAI, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and Nucor Steel..."
Wonder why they need proximity to the nation's largest state-operated power generation.
So what would happen if I went to Home Depot and rented one of their trucks, added full accident coverage, and then immediately crashed into and knocked over, one of the lamp posts with the flock cameras on it?
A dropship would come flying overhead and combine soldiers would drop down and arrest you, if you're lucky.
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