• TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    6 months ago

    I know this is the second time this shit has been posted, but most rail-less nations are not building railroads because they do not have the nessecery capital intensive industry to build railroads, let alone build a poor man’s railroad and then redevelop it, because the world is being purposefully choked of development funds by the IMF and World Bank. God forbid demand gets fulfilled.

    • IzyaKatzmann [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      6 months ago

      that’s fair, prior to the current in-progress de-industrialization of germany, do you think they had the capacity or could have reasonably built up the capacity for high-speed rail?

      • reverendz [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        6 months ago

        I went to Germany in '96, and was amazed how on time the trains were. If the schedule said “7:52 arrival” then set your watch by it.

        Now? Not so much.

        https://www.dw.com/en/germany-rail-operator-deutsche-bahn-admits-major-drop-in-punctuality/a-60338352

        https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/2023-deutsche-bahn-delays-already-worse-expected


        At this point, it’s startlingly clear that de-industrialization is wide scale corporate raiding.

        Can anyone point to a country that de-industrialized and maintained infrastructure?

      • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        6 months ago

        The entirety of Europe had the industrial capacity and know-how to transition towards both High Speed Rail and entire light rail system in the 80’s and 90’s, even after the chaos of the collapse of the USSR. It’s honestly shocking that they didn’t given the seriousness that the 80’s oil crisis caused, but I have to assume at this point they were banking on the balkanization of Russia and were basically doing a test run in the former Yugoslavia.

        The problem is that the whole of elite European liberal intellectualism is completely wound up in essentially emulating what they perceive to be “American freedom”, you’ll still run into this with exchange students all the time. The problem is that ‘American freedom’ will ultimately completely destroy your infrastructural integrity and thus degrade your industrial capacity.

        • IzyaKatzmann [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          5 months ago

          Ok thanks for sharing that makes things make a bit more sense. So like auto is a big industry in like Germany, maybe Italy? and Amerika, Klanada. For like the UK though, was it the bourgeois had financial interests in auto succeeding and then also oil doing well? It just seems weird that some people in the UK now drive pickup trucks when they don’t even have the carbrained infrastructure that a place like Amerika has.

          • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            5 months ago

            What you are seeing is the value of social ideology rationally taking precedence over material considerations. It doesn’t matter what makes the most sense in terms of actual efficiency, it is about what makes sense to appeal to your elite social peers, who don’t have to make decisions based on material considerations.

            • IzyaKatzmann [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              5 months ago

              Ok, that makes sense. Do you think it’s possible to have an idea of what sort of arbitrary criterion would affect elite social peers for a given phenomena? Like to know specifically on a case-by-case basis. I don’t think it’d be particularly useful, just curious.

              • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                5 months ago

                I think the ‘objective’ methodology for figuring that out would be either a marketing study, ethnography or something else. My rule of thumb is to see where the majority of advertising money is going. The rich and elite are usually more susceptible to advertising schemes because they have the ability to replicate the lives that marketing portrays. That is the beauty of owning massive amounts of private capital, while it is selling an unattainable material lie to us proles, it is only selling an unattainable spiritual lie (that if you are unhappy despite money and success, consumption will solve that unhappiness) to the wealthy and elite. They can actually attain the material reality portrayed in advertising, so it is just a matter of getting their eyeballs on it.

                Also, within capitalism, isolation is usually the rule of thumb. The elite of capitalism wish to stand apart from the mass of humanity, as titans and utilitarian betters.

                • IzyaKatzmann [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  5 months ago

                  Yeah that makes sense. Would you say that rich/elite can be more susceptible due to their lack of like ‘risk’? Which is just another way of describing material their wealth/resources?


                  Sorry for the wall of text, I’m just a bit curious about your thoughts.

                  I’m thinking to calculate susceptibility in a superficial way, for like success of marketing of the kind you mentioned; you get a person’s susceptibility by using their 1. temperament (individual/group/cultural differences), 2. their perceived material resources say abstracted with dollars, 3. their actual material resources again with dollars for convenience, 4. randomness/pseudo-randomness to account for uh whatever stuff we don’t know (if economists and population geneticists and sociologists can use it I will too!!)

                  There’d be another set of variables/factors based on like how much money was poured into a marketing campaign, relevance maybe, etc.


                  What I wanted to ask you actually, was, do you think that given this back-of-the-napkin model, would 2. be like, more often than not, the determining factor? Like would the perceived or actual resource of in terms of fiat money (so like an abstraction which can be adjusted when needed…) be more ‘significant’? Where significance is like a relative weighting of the two terms…

                  What really gets me is the “It’s a banana, how much could it cost?” and like recently when the Brtsh PM tried to buy stuff from a grocery checkout; the level of disconnect is just so much more that I think I could have imagined. If you gave a prize to like how out of touch, they are, I’m sure I’d be completely off the mark. So I’m trying to bridge that gap in understanding

                  Yeah, what do you think?

                  • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                    5 months ago

                    I honestly think that the significance difference would be related more to the individual temperament than the perceived v.s. actual material value. The problem is that both of those things influence each other, so the randomness.

                    The statement (in words) would be like this, the weighted significance between perceived v.s. actual material value is a variable that is tied towards the individual’s temperament, up to a point where actual material value reaches some arbitrary threshold of say 100 million dollars, where it then becomes negligible, but then it is entirely a factor of the individual’s temperament. However, I also believe that one’s temperament is also affected as a variable of one’s actual wealth, however this is then a classic nature v.s. nurture problem, and while we can get it into set theory, we cannot solve which comes first, we just have to start taking data and testing our weighted categories against actual material results.