Posted on 08/10/2022 4:46:15 AM PDT by sushiman
Would you dare enter the New York subway?
Look up Lying Flat
Look up Let it Rot
China is in trouble, big trouble
Bullet trains are over rated.
Too much track to rip up, if the population changes.
American airports are much better and that is ideal for the US.
Thanks for a reality check.
I admire the train system in Japan. It works for them both economically and culturally.
Japan has 3.9% as much surface area as the United States.
3.9%.
You are spot on in your observation. It works well in Japan because it is more in line culturally, and more appropriate physically.
You are too kind. You didn’t even mentioned the public toilets…..
Those squat pots are barely one step above defecating on the street…..
Fair point. I didn’t want to bore people and I don’t crap outside of the bathroom in my 5* hotel room. Which would be a 3* anywhere else in the world.
Understood and agree. At the same time, as a “stand-and-pee” person, I quickly realized I may as well have been urinating on the sidewalk. It splattered everywhere!
The standard of living there is better than you think. What might be considered slaves are residents of their prison system. The subways were not built with slave labor.
The US did the same thing in 1929. We even had troops kill veterans for protesting their post-WWI conditions. Governments are all pretty terrible to their people. Our Nation is becoming a totalitarian regime as we speak.
I believe you, but I bet the subways are still nice.
I think a lot of this is Xi. In 2013, when I visited, he had just come into power. His "thing" was supposedly corruption cleanup. At that time, the Social Score was a concept, rather than an overwhelming reality.
Only a few years later, in 2018 or so, I was talking to someone who had toured China, and he said that his guides were so afraid of the government and its cameras, that they would only speak frankly several hundred yard out in a park, where they knew they couldn't be overheard, video'ed, or lip-read. It's only gotten worse.
Yeah. Xi has busted through any and all treaties and agreements with the UK handover.
HK is just another shithole Chinese city full of corrupt toadies looting the place for the motherland.
The exodus of expats and Chinese with foreign passports is crazy. People are just leaving everything and hopping on a plane out of here.
I feel terrible for the people who are stuck here. I still have a few friends left who are sticking it out.
Basically China is collapsing and looting HK is their last ditch effort to put off the inevitable collapse.
Invade Taiwan? Please. They’re broke.
.
I disagree that traffic circles, in general, are a nightmare.
They’re far superior to a 4-way stop for moderate traffic. Also, I’ve never seen a 5-way stop, but a traffic circle works very well for those. The trouble is, in the U.S. we’ve screwed it up. Some, maybe all, in the U.S. even have lanes marked INSIDE the circles. That goes against the very idea of a traffic circle, which is to merge as needed, not go round and round in a painted lane.
The French system is screwed up as well. They give the right-of-way to cars ENTERING the circle. This just guarantees the circle will become gridlocked if traffic is heavy, instead of letting the traffic backup naturally on the streets that feed the circle.
The British Roundabouts (traffic circles) work very, very well. I encountered thousands of them when I was stationed in England for 3 years, and they worked. The right-of-way goes to the vehicles INSIDE the circle. And there are no stupid marked lanes inside the Roundabout. Don’t quite know which road to take going to your destination? Get in the Roundabout, merge to the center, and drive around several times, if need be, looking at the signage to your destination, then take that road.
The downside is that they take up a lot of real estate compared to a 4-way stop, so in a city a traffic light often is needed because there’s just not enough room for a Roundabout.
One big problem here in the U.S. is that nobody, including me, knows what the local rules are supposed to be. And I’ve encountered very few of them here (and they were all screwed up). In England, EVERY driver knows the rules, and they work!
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