Look up a video in Shenzhen or Chongqing. Everything looks 2 decades out, and the giant crystal skyscrapers light up different colors. Sometimes the whole thing is a TV.
China surpassed USAmerica in GDP already, but it doesn’t look close to tied in development and advanced technologies.
The trains there go hundreds of miles in less than an hour, you could commute across the country every day.
Meanwhile in America the “middle class” is struggling to have some walls and a roof. Record debt and crumbling infrastructure. How is all of this ignored and not talked about everywhere?
Here in Europe we don’t build new buildings, but instead reuse ones from around the 1960s (Marshall Plan and all that). To me it’s always screamed “we’re too poor to build new stuff”. And you know, old buildings can only get older, at some point you’re gonna have to make new ones…
it’s like we like living in the past it’s so unreal.
That’s how I feel about transit infrastructure in North America. We can’t be bothered to spend the required money or effort to solve transit issues properly, but we accept ever-higher costs for constantly having to maintain and build car infrastructure because you can always kick that can down the road, so to speak.
It’s pathetic. I was in Minneapolis when the I-35 bridge just up and collapsed. Majorish city, population of millions, I-35 is one of the country’s major transit cooridors, and this giant fucking bridge just folds one day.