I love trains but the issue with them is not money, it’s NIMBYs. China can build all the railroads they want because the government can just toss people out of their homes to build the tracks. In the west we can’t do that because of property rights etc.
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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With enough money you could just tunnel under/bridge over/buy up the densely populated areas
You can’t though. People have the right to refuse to sell. See the whole saga with trying to get Mr Acker (played by Barry Corbin) to sell his house in Better Call Saul. If you don’t have the legal power to force someone to sell then they can hold out as long as they want.
There’s also the issue of supply and demand. If you’ve got a ton of money and you’re willing to spend above market prices for many different properties you need to buy along a route then the market price will skyrocket as people learn and start to hold out for more and more money. The usual way developers get around this is to quietly acquire the land at market prices without drawing attention to it but that can take years and years because most properties are not up for sale at a given time. Try to make an offer to someone who isn’t actively selling and you risk them going public and exposing your whole scheme.
But then no one would buy cars and fuel anymore and we can not allow that. /i
Trains and bicycle infrastructure
Holy shit
The auto industry:
We wouldnt ever get to Safe space travel
"We don't even need all of these trains!?"
Shhhh, you're gonna love it. We put a train on your phone. Windows is now powered by trains.
trAIn
Coincidence?
AI models are usually train ed. Even more of a coincidence?
Maybe someone mistook trains for AI.
Getting on board, but as I'm looking for my seat a giant anthropomorphic paper clip starts shoving me and shouting that I'm using the train wrong
Can’t spell train without AI
Autism >9000.
(Actually autistic btw, so I can make that joke).
Can we please give everyone Tylenol so we can get a better passenger rail network?
And we'll need it then too, with all the bone rot.
I don't think you need the disclaimer. This is Lemmy. We're all autistic here.
So I'm starting to notice.
Though... we don''t all like trains. So some may not have appreciated that whimsical comment.
No you can't, it's a spectrum. You're gatekeeping. (I'm joking)
That or he's a Father who finally hit their retirement phase.
Or the post office. Or consumer protections. Or wage increases. Or UBI. Or housing. Or food distribution. Or infrastructure maintenance. Or nuclear. Or teacher pay.
Or anything else has that a proven track record of being beneficial to our country.
all of those solutions are based except nuclear. nuclear reactors rely on colonial acquisition of nuclear ore in order to keep their prices competitive with the other energy solutions. and even then, they can't compete since they're more expensive and risky than solar.
there's no way to keep a nuclear reactor going without also feeding into Russia's nuclear markets and funding their war effort. https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/russias-global-grip-on-nuclear-energy/
AI investment is expected to reach $1.5 trillion dollars in just this year alone.
Housing every single homeless person in the entirety of America would cost anywhere from $11B to $30B, per year.
That's anywhere from 50 to 136 years of housing, full paid for, for every single person currently homeless in the USA, at current market rates without any investment in affordable non-profit federal/state/city housing.
You could do so much fucking good with this money, and yet they choose to throw it all away on things that when they are successful in delivering value, deliver much less than the value that could otherwise be gained from that money, and at worst, create their own problems, like actual, direct deaths.
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Or things beneficial to the whole world.
But it is being used for train
-ing AI models.
Trains are not profitable or generate an Ai bubble of investments. Duhhhh
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AI trains that are never on time and derail constantly? 🤔
For some reason, I think the most likely bad parts of AI trains will be that some of the cars will be misshapen (some won't even have seats), and you will have to pay a subscription to even take the train.
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It would be great, but it could never happen. All the marketing of AI is around speculation of what it could do.
Investors know what a train is, what it does and how much it costs. They don't know any of those things when it comes to AI, so they're willing to spend a lot, because they were promised a lot.
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No need to imagine, that has already happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania
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