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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (77280)	1/18/2010 12:18:14 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 224718

You fly back to America and you think, "Where are the bullet trains, automated customs, and man-made snowstorms?" Bullet trains are flashy, and even useful, but not very economical. We could have them if we where going to toss money around on to money losing projects. (Well our government already do that as well, so perhaps that should be "toss more money around in to new types of money losing projects".) Automated customs - Well I'm not really familiar with that. I see from your link "no need to wait in line if you're a resident", I imagine that for good or ill that wouldn't work in the US because of concerns about terrorism, also it would be expensive, Hong Kong is one city, the US has a lot of airports. If it wasn't for the concerns about this not providing enough security (since citizens and legal US residents can perform terrorist acts), then we could at least set up a demonstration project in an American city, or perhaps several. Man made snowstorms sounds more like flash, than something that really improves people's lives. OTOH other countries do have some benefits in terms of cell phones, and the traffic map road signs sound useful. Some countries have better broad band than us as well (typically more densely populated countries where it costs less to lay out all the fiber). Some things are better in some Asian countries than in the US, OTOH their cherry picking from all of Asia, without looking for advantages here. Overall Americans are wealthier than Asians (even if you exclude the poor Asian countries, in fact only Japan is really close), and for all the flashy and interesting things they have in Japan or Korea, they have to deal with a lot of inconveniences that we don't.