The European rail network is strongly liberalized, starting with the First Railway Directive 91/440/EEC. The physical infrastructure now usually falls under a state-owned enterprise, which provides access to any company wanting to use it, at a fair and non-discriminatory pricing. In practice this means that the usage fees have to pay for all upkeep and maintenance, with occasional cash injections from the government for things like constructing new railway lines. Importantly, this infrastructure company is expected to either have a neutral result, or run a profit: the railway users have to pay the true costs of operating the railway.
The roads are a different story altogether. They are owned, constructed, and maintained directly by the government itself. Road upkeep comes out of the general budget - just like education or defense. Road users pay via a vehicle tax and/or fuel tax, but there is zero expectation that those taxes pay for the full cost of the road network. After all, you profit from the presence of a road network - even if you don't drive a car yourself.
France has fairly high tolls on roads and Switzerland has that sticker you have to buy to use the expressways.
Japanese rail companies must get some sort of subsidy on tracks, the passenger rail system runs at a loss and only turns a profit on renting space in train stations. Roads are also heavily tolled (similar in China).
I’m not seeing much rail that is under utilized out here int he west, if anything it is over subscribed. The energy savings in having one or two diesel electrics pull a long chain of cars is substantial, I get the feeling that if you just put trucks on rails you’d lose a lot of that.
You also need to be more conservative with elevation changes, right of ways, and turning radiuses, so lots of tunneling and viaducting ala the Chinese HSR network. You are still probably going to have a lot of roads since rubber works better for going up and down, twisty turns, and can deal last mile stuff flexibly. Not everyplace is going to be as simple as the island of sodor.
most of Europe north of the alps is fairly flat in elevation. Railways are oversubscribed because they are not expanded enough, defunded if you like, to expand and fund the highway network.
It is stupid to travel thousands of kilometers by trucks. It's inefficient, expensive and nit scalable. Currently we use mostly huge container ships and empty them with trucks, absolutely insane. There's quite a bit of river boat activity in Europe luckily, which is great if electrified. Though the sorry state of the railways is just human-made and not didtated by economics.
>the sorry state of the railways is just human-made and not dictated by economics
I'm not sure about the world in general but I've followed the HS2 line in the UK and the problems are pretty much economic. We have a couple of north south lines along the UK but they are basically at capacity so the idea was to build another and make it high speed but it's proved incredibly expensive, partly due to property ownership and housing along the line and partly due to environmental regulations leading to £100m shelters to avoid disturbing a few bats. (bat thing https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/25/environment-...)
Most of the value of an iPhone is recorded as American GDP because American IP and software went into it, Apple is keeping a lot of the price for the phone, and only sending a bit off to China for assembly (and a larger bit off to South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan for components that China is assembling). What remains is still a lot of American GDP.
A small business who is contracting China to make the thing that they then sell is also generating a lot of GDP. Yes, they send some percent off to China to make the thing, but a majority is GDP generated here in the USA (the small business does the design, marketing, sales, etc...). If they go belly up because of the trade war (very likely, since no one else can make their thing, and before China developed this capability, making the thing wasn't even possible!), that GDP is gone, the people that small business was employing are unemployed.
The increased purchases should not decrease American GDP, unless consumers are buying directly from China using Temu and are not buying at Walmart.
Yes, selling things contributes to GDP. But importing things does not. If you take money that you would've spent buying something in the US and use it to import something that you haven't sold yet, you've decreased GDP wrt the counterfactual.
Its not just selling things, it is designing those things, marketing those things, writing the software for those things, all of that is high value stuff that Trump is basically ignoring. There is a good reason we got richer after China entered the WTO rather than poorer: we focused on high value goods, IP, and services, which was only possible because we were able to outsource low value assembly to China.
If you take that money you would have spent buying something in the US that has imported parts (like its assembly), and instead say go out and by a DJI drone on TEMU, yes, you've decreased GDP. If you simply have no money to buy anything because DOGE decided to cut your federal job, then that would also decrease GDP.
I see where I got this wrong now: companies are stocking up on imports, but the GDP for those imports don’t go positive until they are sold to consumers (then whatever the sale price differs from the import price).
Oil prices are usually correlated with economic health. The better the economy, the higher oil prices. Trump saying he would lower oil prices sounded more like a threat to me during the campaign: yes, the price of oil went negative during his first term, but mix that wasn’t a good thing at all.
Yea the funny thing about oil prices is that if they go too low there's no longer a reason to pump. The US was the world's largest oil producer in 2024 but prices below about $60 a barrel mean most of that pumping isn't worth doing.
It's very rare that prices going down is good. It usually results in a spiral that is negatively self reinforcing. Price stability is what you generally want.
> It usually results in a spiral that is negatively self reinforcing
In the case of oil, suppliers would stop pumping when it was no longer economically viable to do so, contracting supply and thus raising the price until it reached equilibrium. The same should be true of other goods. Why do you think that decreasing prices tends to create a downward spiral?
The price signal cannot function if it can only move in one direction.
I think you're both right. Prices going low means less incentive to pump, which leads to decreased supply and prices stabilize.
Also prices going low means companies fold, people get laid off, the economy gets weaker, so demand goes down some more.
These things are going to feedback until equilibrium is reached.
A related factor is what part of the ratchet we are in. In the 1800s the ratchet was "ever upward" and if economic factors shutdown some pumps there were plenty of incentives to keep that shutdown temporary and through more capital investment at it to bring back when market forces shifted again. In the 2000s we may truly be in the "downward spiral" ratchet where enough pumping shuts down, those shutdowns are permanent. There's far more competition from increasingly cheap solar and wind and other renewable energy sources than there ever was.
Eventually permanently decreased supply can also drive prices back upward, sometimes faster, as less competition means more supply-side bargaining power.
(Permanently decreased suppliers of oil may be a win for the planet in the long run, hopefully, but breaking the entire economy is perhaps the dumbest way to try to do that.)
Trump’s term ends with a high probability of a Democrat being elected to clean up his mess, as happened in 2020 and 2008. He will almost certainly lose congress in the midterm unless he can somehow suspend the election (all bets are off if the constitution falls).
Or his exec order asserting that the 2020 election was stolen and targeting former CISA head Chris Krebs for not lying to that effect in his security evaluations of the voting systems.
I really don't want MAGA people watching who I vote for. I'm sure you see logic in that? Also, I love vote by mail, I appreciate it as much as the residents of red state Utah who also appreciate that.
lol so you are ok with the party you oppose skipping votes for your party because it happened behind closed doors and poll watchers / challengers are not allowed in.
And yet it democratic voting areas it’s democrats who are blocking poll watchers and challengers or are suspect of voter fraud when they don’t close voting or have suitcases randomly show up and quickly shuffled in.
It’s only democratic areas who don’t want voter id.
AI has made real time translation very feasible, I don’t think Chinese will be much if a language barrier for foreign students and researchers in the near future. You can do it all in a local model with a moderately powerful mobile GPU. We are almost at the point where you put some ear buds in your ear and some glasses could handle reading…etc…
The material engineering for advanced chip and jet turbine production are the two things that China has had to build from scratch, so it will take it a bit longer to reach parity in the west. They get either performance or price down right now, but not both at the same time. Maybe 5 or 10 years? Everything else they have the engineering skill to advance quickly.
reply