What an incredible achievement. Every time I see China's engineering marvels, or any visible statistics of its progress, I feel a slight tinge sadness as an Indian citizen. In India, such feats are few and far between and if you account the time taken to complete them, the scenario is even more depressing.
Chenab bridge, touted as soon-to-be world's tallest railway bridge, for instance, was scheduled to completed by 2009. Work halted due to safety concerns, but began again an year later. The date was, then, shifted to 2015 and now, the newer estimate suggest it will be completed by 2019 [1]. I am not sure if we'll be able to abide by that too.
Democracy might give people something to cheer about, but, for a country fraught with inefficiencies, it does make progress awfully slow.
I'm an American and I understand too. We are living through the decades where America gave away its leadership in the world. We can't get anything accomplished at a reasonable price in reasonable time.
For example, China built 14,000 miles of high-speed rail in about 15 years, with another 10,000 on the way. In America we still haven't built our first line. Every time the discussion comes up, it degenerates into people explaining all the places it won't work.
Not to worry for India, in 50 years it will be better off than today. It might even pass the US.
> I'm an American and I understand too. We are living through the decades where America gave away its leadership in the world. We can't get anything accomplished at a reasonable price in reasonable time
It's not that we can't get it accomplished reasonably, you'd be amazed at how fast and cheaply major projects can be developed if funding is properly structured. It's rather that we've wasted our treasure on other things. Jack Ma had an interesting comment at Davos[1] - what would the US be like if we had spent the $14 trillion we've wasted on war and wall street bailouts on infrastructure, research, and education in the Midwest?
$14T is an absurd exaggeration of the budgetary costs of post-9/11 wars and post-2008 bailouts.
The entire Iraq war/post-war cost $800B, most of the TARP bailout money was paid back. You can claim there were huge knock-on costs to the economy for either if you like, but skipping either or both would not have given the US Government trillions to spend on Midwestern infrastructure.
Source? The Congressional Research Service published a report in 2014 stating $1.6 trillion as the cost of war. Every other article I could find suggests this number is far too low and estimates $2-6 trillion.
I've encountered the Brown article before. Averaging the $3.6 trillion spent to-date since 2001, we're spending $240 billion per year on war in the Middle East.
For perspective:
* Hillary Clinton's campaign platform included a decent infrastructure bill - allocating $250 billion over 10 years.
* NIH is estimated to spend $8 billion this year on cancer and cardiovascular research - the leading causes of death in America, killing over 1 million people each year.
Even moderate estimates put it at about $5 Trillion, the most conservative at $3 trillion, with the high end (reality) at $8+.
One huge cost people completely ignore is the cost of health care for the vets we bring back who suffer from a huge number of physical and mental issues. It's also one we'll be paying for the next 40-50 years.
It isn't bullshit. It's the actual budgetary cost of the war to date, and it's nowhere near $14T.
As I said, you can project all sorts of future costs, or costs to the broader economy. But $14T is a nutty figure to claim was available to spend in lieu of wars and bailouts.
It is bullshit even at current costs, $800bn is no where close to accurate, 14 trilion is by several factors a much closer number, considering most of the budget has been appropriated off budget as another person said. But if you read my comment, you'll see I have more accurate numbers.
Additionally, to ignore future costs is absolutely how we end up spending incredible amounts war mongering and passing the deficit to future administrations and people. If we correctly calculated the costs it would've been seen as outrageous. What you're saying is analogous to buying a car but not factoring in the cost of interest, when that interest payment is 25%, and the cost of maintenance and repair.
You provide zero proof to backup your claim as well. Show me something to change my mind, or read the linked book and educate yourself. Spouting lies does nothing valuable for society or yourself. Let it be known my degree is in economics, I'm not spouting off some list of bullshit facts from a "documentary" video on Youtube.
Wall Street bailouts were necessary to keep our country and economy intact. Most if not all of the money has been paid back. Agree on the war part though, it sucks that we spent so much on it.
And this will never change. I live in the DC area and when you live here, you see how much of our economy in America is dependent on our ability to continue fighting wars.
The military industrial complex is so out of control and bloated, we can't help but keep fighting wars to feed all these thousands of jobs going.
I don't think Iraq or Afghanistan got those $14 trillion. Iraqi infrastructure is worse than it was under Saddam, and society is much poorer... and in civil war.
The money went to friends of corrupt US administrations and military contractors. That is 14,000 billion dollars stolen from American workers and shoved into the pockets of filthy rich white men.
It's also a problem that our culture is so damn obsessed with cars, which we have in part to thank the auto industry shoving itself down consumers throats, lobbying, and running into the dirt other viable modes of transportation for almost a century. I'd take sophisticated, public transportation and efficient inter regional lines any day over American Car Culture.
I just don't think you can lament the state of inter regional transportation in the US without talking about our country's very unique obsession and history with the auto industry.
Maybe it's more likely a competition between 2 different democracies as opposed to authoritarian vs democracy which main stream media often sell to public. Let me explain.
Contrary to most western audience's belief, Democracy is also a value promoted by CPP , at least literally. But the meaning of democracy is quite different. The one in India focus on equal voting from everybody , in China such practice is only gradually implemented in some area recently, but what CPP emphasize more is collective decision making by a group of participants not a dominant chief officer.
As to select policy maker/politician , Chinese system evolved to a very different systematic procedure with some democracy factors (i.e. selected by vote, but not by average people). See a TED speech:
The consequence of the difference is "democratically elected" policy makers are good story tellers finally win the voters . Usually they are former Lawyer, Journalist who are very good at articulating and performing to gain higher votes, live in their own alternative reality sometime lead to war. As a comparison, typical Chinese officials are usually not so good looking , even can not speak fluently without a speech note, more likely trained as engineers with better understanding facts , less influenced by ideology. But they are in that position for a better reason: They have some track record of accomplishment.
From Machine learning point of view, India democracy looks like a simple one layer Perceptron with equal weights on all inputs, Chinese "democracy" is a forward feed neural network with a very small hidden layer with the weights somehow adjusted.
> Democracy is also a value promoted by CPP , at least literally. But the meaning of democracy is quite different. The one in India focus on equal voting from everybody , in China such practice is only gradually implemented in some area recently, but what CPP emphasize more is collective decision making by a group of participants not a dominant chief officer.
> As to select policy maker/politician , Chinese system evolved to a very different systematic procedure with some democracy factors (i.e. selected by vote, but not by average people)
What you are describing is some kind of collegial governance, but absolutely not a democratic government. Contrary to what you are saying, voting systems that exclude the "average people" are literally undemocratic.
Now, you can very well argue that democracy isn't the best or most efficient system, but the Chinese system just isn't democratic, and is not really leaning towards it either.
> Contrary to what you are saying, voting systems that exclude the "average people" are literally undemocratic.
Well that's somewhat of a moving goal post. Was the US not a democracy at it's inception because only land owners were allowed to vote? What about before black people and women were allowed to vote? Were Britain and Germany not democracies at the outbreak of WW2?
Most importantly of all, were the ancient Athenians not democratic? The average person was a slave, but the did define what democracy meant.
The CPP is a one party system and anything but Democratic. To dissent or attempt to form another political party is illegal. Whether the election process within the CPP is Democratic doesn't matter, the vast majority of citizens have no vote.
China is a classic communist dictatorship with a few Democratic elements.
China is de facto aristocratic class system. You have 80 million strong communist 'noble' families. Well performing people from lower class can get 'the title' and become part of ruling class, but mostly the status is inherited.
China actually has several other parties than Communist party, for example Chinese Kuomintang, China Democratic League etc. But they are small meritocratic ally selected (only 100,000 members and must be intellectual) support parties. Communist party still rules.
In principle people outside the system can be elected. If I remember only one person has been able to get trough in 20 years and all independent candidates are harassed ruthlessly.
Party members are definitely not noble families. When the country's mass lay off happened at the turn of the century, the party members are the first to be laid off, as examples for other people. And planned birth is more strictly enforced on party members. The party membership doesn't really bring any good unless you're already well connected.
The Chinese people work wonders because they believe they can work wonders if they work hard. This is pretty much the American Dream as I understood it. That's why I always imagined that the Chinese government has much in common, and thus can work well with a GOP government. People are urged to work hard for a better life, not relying (too much) on social securities.
It's hard to tell if democracy is fundamentally better than whatever its alternative is. You know, no offense, DT can be elected. With enough manipulation, all Chinese government heads can be elected as well, even under a democratic system.
It seemed like the project was started with unclear/unvetted requirements, led by bureaucracy and image instead of engineering. China tends to do things the other way around.
That smoke exhaust system seems absurd - I don't know how the architectural plans even left the design phase. It should have been isolated and designed such that it could be replaced with a conventional approach cheaply.
The rest of the project sounds like a deadline-driven fixed-resource software project with incompetent management - hacks and cut corners everywhere.
Heh, funny but not that long time (started in 2006, planned to be finished by 2020), while Sagrada Familia (here in Barcelona) started at 1882 and after stopping/starting/stopping forever, it's not estimated to be finished by 2026–2028 (so about 140 years, if accurate).
Chenab bridge, touted as soon-to-be world's tallest railway bridge, for instance, was scheduled to completed by 2009. Work halted due to safety concerns, but began again an year later. The date was, then, shifted to 2015 and now, the newer estimate suggest it will be completed by 2019 [1]. I am not sure if we'll be able to abide by that too.
Democracy might give people something to cheer about, but, for a country fraught with inefficiencies, it does make progress awfully slow.
[1]: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/transportation/...