• kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    in evil communist china, you can usually just walk to the subway because a stop is within a 10 minutes walk of basically any condo

    its almost like they… planned things

    • the_itsb [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Totally agree. Isn’t this one of the oldest instances? It doesn’t really matter when it federated - that just means it had more time to get distilled into its own special version. But this is an OG strain - whatever else this is, this is Lemmy.

      Edit - and I say this as a pretty new user to the instance. I wasn’t here from the beginning, this is my take as an instance-hopping reddit refugee.

    • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Except that taxes do not fund government spending. This is a neoclassical myth that needs to die.

      The US government can literally give free healthcare to everyone and solve homelessness tomorrow without having to tax for anything, or having to “cut spending elsewhere to pay for it”, because the Federal Government can create whatever amount of currency needed to fund its free healthcare project.

      Taxes come later to remove the excess liquidity from the circulation. Remember, the Federal Government has to spend the dollar first before they can be taxed back.

      • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        ok but public transit in a town is gonna be funded by some grants probably and then operated on rider fees and local taxes. Gary Indiana isn’t sovereign and Mississippi can’t afford shit.

        • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          That’s the point. A country that is not constrained by resources, labor and technology should never have to go through this. There is nothing stopping the Federal Government from handing out generous grants to improve the infrastructure of states/cities/towns.

          Taxes serve the purpose of changing behavior (penalty for smoking, for example, or to encourage the adoption of environmentally friendly technology) and reducing wealth inequality (taxing land, rich people, corporations), but these taxes are not used to pay for the good stuff. You don’t tax billionaires to fund government spending, you tax them because you can and you don’t want a small group of people to hold disproportionate amount of wealth.

          • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            that failure of the federal government has nothing to do with what i was talking about.

            on a local level the local taxes we all pay are directly in the budget for that spending. we literally vote on 0.025% property tax increases to pay for specific local projects.

            “taxes do not fund government spending” is literally false for entities that don’t control the currency or those resources.

            • moujikman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              Modern Monetary Theory. From an purely economic perspective, SimulatedLiberalism is right.

              Think of taxes as an olympic sized swimming pool, a politician may say they are raising taxes to dump a new bucket of water into the pool, but some guy comes around once a month to drain or fill the pool so it always stays level.

      • Surreal@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Even if what you say is true, telling people tax funds the government/public infrastructure incentives people to pay tax. If you go around telling people “I’m taxing you because I can, and the tax will be used to fund my vacation to Dubai” you’re gonna get shit on

    • betelgeuse [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      At one point you could say taxation was balanced. People at the top paid more and people at the bottom got services. Almost immediately after WWII, the bourgeois started rolling back on the services. They really hit their stride in the 70s and just started gutting everything. It got worse in the 80s and the in the 90s, Democrats became just as bad as Republicans. In the 80s you also saw taxes being cut for the top despite increased spending on things that benefited the bourgeois. So the tax burden fell upon the lower class. They saw increases in taxes while seeing fewer services than ever. Plus the libertarian propaganda pumped into education didn’t help. Privatization is always framed as more efficient and cheaper for the public. So the question becomes why tax me for something I’ll never use and if it gets built it’ll be shitty and cost too much over time?

      I guess, to be more succinct, they don’t view it as a benefit to the community. Just a cost to them.

  • Owl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    How is it that train tracks are an ominous tax expense but roads are just a naturally occurring feature???¿??

    • Infamousblt [any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I think libs are under the (false) impression that roads are both completely mandatory in society AND somehow cheaper to build and maintain than public transit. Per person moved public transit is significantly more efficient per dollar but libs just don’t want to know stats when they don’t agree with their worldview

      • I think libs are under the (false) impression that roads are both completely mandatory in society

        They kinda are in local transport to be fair. You can’t transport truck loads of stuff by bike to grocery stores. This necessitates some level of automobile road to get there. What’s unnecessary is regional/national roads for commerce. Most cities would still require road maintenance just for EMS and local commerce even if they had a robust public infrastructure. The good news is that buses can use these roads as well so a post-personal-car future is still viable. Roadless cities are not.

          • Yep, and that’s why most people should ride bikes and then use public infrastructure as needed. But automobiles are still necessary, unless you mean to bike in all the equipment you’d find in an ambulance.

            so a post-personal-car future is still viable

            It takes 160,000 bicycles to incur the road maintenance cost of a single personal car.

            Are we disagreeing here or are you just mentioning a statistic?

            • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.netOP
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              1 year ago

              I think ambulances and firetrucks should be basically the only automobiles. Even most delivery vehicles should be replaced by either cargo bikes or by spur lines off the railroad.

              Also, it’s important to this discussion to draw a clear distinction between streets, roads, and stroads. Streets are destinations and can be made primarily for bikes and pedestrians, roads are routes for cars to go fast from place to place. Stroads are the cursed middle ground common to USAmerican suburbia which combine the width and car friendliness of a road with the density of destinations of a street. I don’t think it’s possible, or even desirable, to get rid of streets, but I think we can and should get rid of most roads and absolutely all stroads. The remaining impermeable surfaces will be drastically cheaper to maintain.

    • zephyreks@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      don’t you know? roads build themselves with the labour of poor illegal immigrants

      FWIW road has similar cost to standard rolling stock, which ends up being substantially cheaper than urban subway tracks… so… it’s not entirely wrong? building a road in the city is cheaper than building a subway because of… tbh I’m not too sure, but it is in practice

      • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Well, it’s a subway, you have to excavate an entire tunnel system for that. But in return you get an entire traffic infrastrucutre that takes up next to no space on the surface, which means a lot in densely built areas. I guess if you’d compare subways to underground roads like that stuff Musk had built in Las Vegas, or if you’d compare roads to cable car tracks, costs would be fairly similar again.

        • Barabas [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          If we are talking about building new roads in cities that is also usually a tunnel these days. The days of Moses tearing down entire city blocks for a highway is largely a thing of the past.

  • adultswim_antifa [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Tens of millions of people live in cities with passable subway systems in the US and have for like a hundred years. And small towns were connected with rail all over. This fantastical scenario was completely normal.

    • rubpoll [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Liberals love describing basic public service concepts as if they’re fantastical utopian fever dreams.

      Things like free public transportation, or public zero-interest banks, or public grocers.

      It’s usually a “well that could never work” and refusal to elaborate on why. If it doesn’t presently exist in America, it must be impossible and ridiculous, especially if there’s no price barrier.

      • Barbariandude [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        At least in Europe, the norm isn’t free public transport, but very cheap subsidized public transport. In Prague, for example, 1 month of unlimited bus & metro use is currently 50 USD.

        I think Prague has an amazing public transport system, it’s really intelligently designed.

    • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      Kind of crazy how these people just accepted public transport as a normal thing until like…3-4 years ago? Now suddenly trains and buses are driven by Lucifer himself apparently.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        I think these kind of liberals were always uncomfortable with public transit but then the magical quackery of EVs as a cure-all let them banish even the reluctant acceptance of mass transit as a good thing.

  • Tidal_Tempest [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Then build me a railroad track fucker.

    Do libs really? Can’t these libs just realize that we live in a car centric society AND that public transport is objectively better? shinji-mug

  • regul [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Battery-electric trains suck outside of very specific circumstances. Any functioning rail operator should be able to build and maintain tracks with electric catenary.

  • NoGodsNoMasters [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Had to do this just earlier this week. Got back by train at like midnight and I had to bike back to my appartment. I was really tired especially in my legs, so you’d think that would maybe be a bit annoying, but it was actually really refreshing. It was nice and quiet, and the air was cool. Definitely wouldn’t have taken a car even if I had the option.

  • Gork@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    A railroad track fucker…

    Like dragons fucking cars, but this time railroad tracks?