I love crumbling infrastructure, it’s my favorite.
Thank you government
Thank you wealthy capitalists and oligarchs who bought control of government.
And thank you government for allowing the continued sale of all power to the highest bidder because of your refusal to punish open bribery.
Government is us. We’ve got no one to blame for this but ourselves. I mean people like you and myself might see this as the obvious problem. But far too many people are oblivious or simply don’t have a problem with it. Or have been made to feel that we have little resource for it and simply must accept it.
tl;dr:
COLUMBUS, Mont. - A bridge that crosses the Yellowstone River in Montana collapsed early Saturday, plunging portions of a freight train carrying hazardous materials into the rushing water below. David Stamey, the county’s chief of emergency services, said there was no immediate danger for the crews working at the site, and the hazardous material was being diluted by the swollen river. The area is in a sparsely populated section of the Yellowstone River Valley, surrounded by ranch and farmland. The river there flows away from Yellowstone National Park, which is about 110 miles southwest. ADVERTISEMENT. The Yellowstone saw record flooding in 2022 that caused extensive damage to Yellowstone National Park and adjacent towns in Montana.
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Cut it some slack, it’s a trainee.
It’s just a spike it’ll soon stabilize!
Can this country stop falling apart for one week please?
We’ve been warning about dangerous infrastructure for years now. It’ll only get worse until we start building for the next millennium.
Sure, and that future likely involves a lot of trains.
I want super high speed rail instead of airplanes. I want regular high speed rail instead of highways. I want medium speed rail instead of roads. And so on. The technology is there, and we already have the land for most of it, we just need to stop building so many roads and actually build solid rail infrastructure.
Agreed.
I live in the Bay Area and because of my anxiety I can’t drive, but I can get to most places I need to be by BART/light rail.
it’s just one mode of transportation. In Japan also have a comprehensive bus system as well as small towns you can only get by car which rail trains use to service in the 1900s.
People will still have cars. We’ll still have roads and their big dick trucks. I don’t understand how this is a bad idea. LA to Vegas high speed would have been amazing. I lived in oak hills by the 15 seeing the traffic and how many people die on the pass due to car accidents was just horrifying.
I’d rather fly.
Sure, that should be an option too!
If you visit Europe or Japan, you’ll find that trains and airplanes both exist, and both are popular and inexpensive. That’s what I’d like to see happen elsewhere in the world as well, rely less on personal vehicles and more on mass transit, though preserve each as an option.
It’ll only get worse until we start building for the next millennium.
I guess we’re fucked then
Yeah, I agree. It’s not hard to build infrastructure that lasts forever, it’s just no one wants to pay for it.
I would gladly pay for it. Unfortunately most of us that would gladly pay for it can’t afford to pay for it. And the people that could afford to pay for it don’t get rich by spending their own money. They want everyone else to spend their money on it so they can use it for free.
What is the reason why no one wants pay for it?
To build that infrastructure, an increase in taxes will be needed. The middle and lower tax brackets can’t afford any additional taxes at this time, so that leaves corporations and the upper tax brackets that will need to foot the bill. They don’t want that, so they pay to have campaigns of ignorance blasted at the masses to induce fear of any tax reform.
At the end of the day, nothing gets fixed and the wealthy keep their money.
Or things get fixed at 10x what the actual costs should be because the people who award the contract are paid with part of that excess and it helps them keep the seat that allows them to continue funneling money.
Average Usonian democracy working as intended.
Funny seeing you here! Can you explain the “Usonian” thing?
I get it refers to the US, but not past that…
Well, I’m a Latinamerican, and we kind of hate people from the US are called American, but that term is kind of shitty since everyone in the Americas are American, so they are appropriating of something it’s not only theirs. In Spanish that word doesn’t even exist, we use “Estadounidense” which translates to something as “Statesian”, but in my opinion it’s not that good of a term. In Esperanto there’s the word “Usono” which means the same, so I adapted it more to an English style “Usonian”. There’s a really good song by Residente, who previously was part of Calle 13, that talks about this, and he did it as a response to Childish Gambino’s “This is America”. Its English subtitles are pretty decent, so you can listen to it that way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK87AKIPyZY
Thanks for the explanation! I agree that it would be nice to have a word for estadounidense in English too.
Also, can you explain “encabronao” at 0:45 in the video? Why wouldn’t it be “encabronado”?
I liked the song, thanks for sharing it!
As far as I know, it’s a Frank Lloyd Wright thing about radical decentralization/individualism.
Most sources on the web are unhelpful because they only talk about it as applied to architecture, but he had a bunch of ideas about urban planning (or rather, anti-urban planning) that are much less well known and get drowned out in the noise.
Here’s one half-decent article I’ve managed to find about it
The TL;DR is that Wright liked the idea of basically replacing cities with endless suburbia/Jeffersonian hobby farms interspersed with small towns, such that everything would be self-contained/self-sufficient. Or something like that, anyway. (In hindsight, the legacy of Wright’s idea is that American society took the “spread everything out” part without the “and get rid of cities” part and invented disastrous suburban sprawl.)
Anyway, I think “usonian” is being used here to allude to the idea of failing to provide sufficient Federal funding for infrastructure because of misguided individualism, maybe?
Check my comment, I explained better.
We love our infrastructure, but we don’t want to pay for the upkeep.
A huge infrastructure bill got passed recently. Of course, that doesn’t mean it all gets fixed right away.
