Nonsense. Rail 2035 is already planning on moving to 15min frequency. That increases capacity and makes connectivity better. 30 minute beats are not a law of nature. That's already planned for on the most important lines and could be done for more lines as well. Clearly you have not even spent 5min researching Swiss rail policy. Switzerland literally planning rail policy 20+ years ahead of time.
Rail 2050 plan has many improvements beyond that, and is still in discussion, and we could have many more if politicians were not afraid of large projects. And if parties like SVP would endlessly prevent good projects and instead want more money spend on idiotic highway expansions.
We literally just voted on blocking highway expansion only for the SVP to say 'sure we voted but all these projects should go ahead anyway'. Fucking insane.
They are blaming immigration for the problems their policy causes.
I could continue and give you a long list of bad choices they make that literally make everything worse, only for them to blame immigration. All the buses are full, but we wont allow any bus lanes to exist because car drivers need priority. City is full of cars but can't have people on bikes and use less space because that could mean subsidized parking would go away in a city where few people own cars. The list goes on and on.
Our problems are dumb polices, not immigration. These polices would be fucking dumb even if we did not have migration.
I've always wondered why they've been so generally unsuccessful; conventional elevated rail works fairly well, and at least in theory they should be much cheaper and less obtrusive.
Sure, but there's no reason that _has_ to be the case. Like, there've been attempts at standards; the volume is just never really there to make any of them _the_ standard.
Underground metro systems mostly started off as deeply weird and proprietary, as well (look at this one, weird gauge, tiny little trains, originally _cable_ operated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_Subway), but nowadays they're _fairly_ standard, say.
Sure but they aren't and even if there was, for anything but single lines they are worse. Most cities already have a rail system and extending that is better.
Monorail operations aren't cheaper, at best their construction is cheaper. But if you need interchanges it gets more expensive again.
Its simple really they over very few actual advantages while having many disadvantages, so when they are built its usually because some monorail builder managed to convince some local politicians despite most experts saying they should just build normal rail.
Yes they work but not better then normal trains and worse in some ways. Qnd in terms of sharing infrastructure maintaince, signaling and so on its worse.
Yeah lets compare the world now to a world pre rise of Japan, East Asia and China. Im sure less European imtegration would have resulted in Euro dominance continuing.
I agree more bilateral agreements are good but having even more fragmented markets is not and was not a long term model of sucess.
Canada is really bad with housing and inftrastructure. Blame immigrants not crack head white politicans who see bike lanes as the devil take car and oil money whole worshiping Trump and far right parties all over the world.
Immigrants not worth their economic value are the problem. That's not blaming "immigrants" but "immigration policy", which like housing policy - failure of politicians. But ultimately immigrants, who are not citizens are the going to be the scape goat. And reducing/denying/removing immigrants is short term more feasible than solving political sclerosis that require longer timelines, if can be fixed by system at all.
The overwhelming majority of immigrants are worth it and long term they all are because they have more kids. Every immigrant who comes grown up with minimal education is a huge benefit.
Also its acceptable to have some immigrants who are not 'worth it', because it is something that is literally good to do, you are improving peoples lives.
> who are not citizens are the going to be the scape goat
Mostly because of far right misinformation.
> And reducing/denying/removing immigrants is short term more feasible than solving political sclerosis that require longer timelines, if can be fixed by system at all.
Its a falls believe that removing immigrants is somehow easy. Its not, its politically as hard as building new transit.
The difference is that building new transit is going to be great for everybody, specially Canadians who already own property or just live in the region, while focusing on removing immigrants will hurt everybody on net.
So the right solution is to focus on solving the fundamental problems you have no matter if immigrants or not.
Unlikely with Canadian exploding diploma mill immigration patterns post covid i.e. the 100k increase in Indians. That's not some, i.e. a few 1000 refugee/asylum charity to make feel good headlines. That's structurally unsustainable. Hence new cap reduction and strict field of study rules. Reality is Canada was importing fuckload of low skill hoping to juice economy short term with international tuition injections, but having students fill service and gig jobs driving up rent / suppressing wages / straining infra / services is bad short term politics and bad long term ROI. These generally aren't turnkey high skilled immigrants that boost economy long term. These aren't even wealthy economic immigrants dump $$$ into economy, these are bluntly marginal immigrants from poor households that goes into debt/leverage and have to take low end jobs with high remittance culture to payback - the give/take ratio is not great. They are no where nearly as "worth it" as a rich PRC international students dropping $$$ into economy and trying to capital flight $$$ into Canadian economy. And removing them is easy... a few signatures to cap study permits, change crs and pgwp requirements, already down ~70% from peak, much easier to building. Of course building is great for everybody, but Canada ain't building.
The right solution is move back to sustainable high-value immigration patterns. 60k to 160k Indians is unprecedented. Like 2nd/3rd largest cohort is PRC and PH at ~40k. 160k per year from any country is stupid policy, only justifiable if the plan is basically to steal their tuition and kick them out of the country after making PR/citizenship harder, i.e. Canada bait-switch (scammed) a bunch of Indian villagers pooling their limited resources together, and it's looking likely that's how this saga will end. Again, it's not Indian immigrants fault, but they don't vote so they're the one's whose going to get screwed because bad policy screwed Canadians who vote.
If you take everything, direct EU money plus other money from governments, foreign investments by companies, remittances from Romanians working in the EU, other aid money that flows in large amounts, not to mention market access and so on.
Anybody who rationally without nationalistic blinders evaluates that will come to the same conclusion. The idea that a Romania independent of Europe, with its shitty Post-Communist economy and the shitty companies it had could have done massively better is frankly delusional.
The idea that all foreign investment and foreign companies operating in other country is negative and explorative is simply wrong. That is the case both for individual works, company productivity and the countries economy. This has been shown to be true in tons of management studies. Insofar as Romania had issues, it its own internal corruption and other issues that they handled less well then Poland or the Baltic's.
> Why doesn't US, China or Russia want that type of help?
Russia did want the economic integration, foreign investments and so on, they just wanted it less then being an imperial power lead by a dictatorship.
If you think that is a better path for Romania then integration with the EU you are utterly braindead.
As for the US and China. The US already has its own set of alliances and cooperative agreements. It also is geographically very different and its so rich that if it was part of the EU it would be a net contributor.
China is again a dictatorship with like 1 billion people that believe they can build a system like US or the EU has themselves. And they of course did take at least large part of that package when they opened to the US and integrated the economy far more. They had foreign investment, much loser capital markets and so on.
To compare Romania Post-Communist situation with any of these, is laughable. And non of those paths are even remotely even an options.
Romania could be more like Poland, the Baltics or more like Ukraine or maybe like the Post-Soviet 'stans' just with less gas.
And of those options its perfectly clear what the right plan is.
If you have some brilliant alternative plan for Romania please share because apparently you are smarter then literally every other post Communist leader in any of those small countries. Or better yet, try to get elected on that platform. Just be aware that the massive amount of direct money and other benefits will go away, and then go watch how many people will still vote for you.
Realistic best case for that plan is that you become Belarus.
Please don't go on lengthy off-topic rants just to put words in my mouth to disprove things I never claimed.
I never claimed Romania would have been better under Russian than the EU. I just asked you to show me that your claimed "help" they gave to Romania came from a selfless position without any financial strings attached in return for said help, because it wasn't.
Corporations in US, Germany, Austria, France, profited immensely, and still do from their operation in Romania they bought with cents on the Euro/Dollar. In fact, they often make higher profits fleecing consumers and customers in Romania than those in their home countries. EU and NATO accepted Romania because they could profit from them, that's it. I know, I worked for German and Dutch MNCs and saw the numbers coming from their offices across the world. Their offices in Asia and Eastern Europe were bringing in significantly more revenue per worker than those in NL simply because the consumers and workers in those countries get much worse deals than those in NL and Germany. It's basically neocolonialism with extra steps.
That was my point, that EU and NATO orgs are purely business transactional and nothing you get from them ever comes for free, and nothing in your follow-up comments disproved this, you just went on offtopic rants throwing accusations in my direction.
Later edit: also, on the NATO side, many Romanian troops died protecting US interest in Afghanistan, because I guess that's where America's borders are somehow, when they invoked Article 5 after Osama hit NY with two planes. Well in that case, a Russian drone hit us last week. Can US troops now please go die for us by invading Russia? Thanks. No? Well then that's the double standards I was referring to, that we only exist to serve their interests, buy their shit, die for them and that's it. Where is that mythical benevolent "help" you talked about?
> I just asked you to show me that your claimed "help" they gave to Romania came from a selfless position without any financial strings attached in return for said help, because it wasn't.
And I told you that huge parts of the Romanian government budget came from the EU and that has been going on for decades. And what they had to 'pay' for it was to a agree to a set of rules that are beneficial for it as well.
At this point your defense is basically just denial and I can't take you seriously anymore.
Not having Romania would arguably be better for the EU no matter if some companies make ok business in Romania.
And Its also funny how you say 'I never claimed X' when the reality is you claim nothing because if you did you would have to propose an actual alternative, and any alternative you could come up with would be worse. Yes foreign companies are going to make money operating in your country, but that is not neocolonialism other then in your fantasy.
> nothing you get from them ever comes for free
Its almost certain the EU could have received much of the same trade and business benefits without cross-funding such an outrages amount of Romania's government and infrastructure for decades. The EU did that because it is an ideology and not just 'business'. There is a reason people in Germany and Britain were angry at EU, they have been funding much of Eastern European governments for decades. This is a simple fact that is undeniable.
> Later edit:
Romania sent troops to Afghanistan before they were part of NATO.
And NATO Artical 5 does not force you to send troops either. So please stop embracing yourself.
And you can dislike NATO and the American response to a single drone attack, but the US is giving you a nuclear umbrella that many countries would kill to have and many country spend huge parts of their budget on.
The GP provided the examples of free help Romania got from EU. The reason the response is long is because you asked more questions.
Here is something you did not bring up: nobody is forcing Romanians to buy EU goods. Romanians also buy a lot of Chinese and Korean goods. EU companies who make money off Romanian consumers compete with Chinese companies.
The fact that there are very few things made in Romania is not due to EU neo-colonialism- is it due to Romanians. There are one or two bright spots in Romania (Dacia, UIPath) but when the best educated young Romanians still cannot wait to leave the country you will not see local champions. And this is 37 years after the fall of Communism.
maybe you are a Romanian living in Romania. Maybe you will be able to convince Romanians to separate from EU and NATO. If that happens, I can’t wait to see the sequel.
Im sure the ecology is much improved by letting people stay where they are and be poorer. In fact we should start to remove people from all rich places so the can live in sustainable poverty.
The answer to immigration, for those that view it as a problem, is to make the places people are leaving more desirable to stay: social welfare, sustainable energy, affordable food and housing, and security - both physical and financial. The US has been trying hard to make itself undesirable for immigrants (suddenly, after decades of turning a blind eye in exchange for cheap labor), instead of focusing on helping to make the living situation in south America more tenable.
It’s kind of what we get for completely wrecking the global south tbh - the number of democracies we overthrew, the drug cartels we propped up, the damage we did is finally coming to bear fruit and it’s just as sour as the soil we tilled.
Leaving those climate refugees where they are wouldn't mean they were poor, it would mean they were dead. There are all kinds of irrational extreme positions that would maximize environmental protection. Certainly the best thing we could do for the environment would be to kill ourselves off, but very few people would argue for that. Instead it's better to go for something more balanced and limiting the number of people coming in your country to an amount the land can sustainably support seems pretty reasonable.
> to an amount the land can sustainably support seems pretty reasonable
Is the land in refugees home countries better able to sustainably support the populations on average, whether moving because of climate, lack of a way to support the people, etc?
Gromer gangs were white just as often, but instead of addressing the problem evaluating it correctly and responding right wing extremists instead focused only the immigrants didnt give a single shit about the actual abuse and made it all about leaving the EU and in general promoting ethnic violence against all braun people. Literal riots.
And of course never talk about immigrant woman that get abused who gives a fuck about them.
"
Child sexual exploitation is horrendous whoever commits it, but there have been enough convictions across the country of groups of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds to have warranted closer examination
...
Ethnicity is shied away from despite being a question for many years and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators.
Rates of collection and accuracy of ethnicity data were much higher in police data from Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire. Their data shows there has been a disproportionality of group-based child sexual exploitation offending by men of Asian ethnicity in these police force areas."
> If the population exceeds 10M then the current rail and road infrastructure will not handle it well.
Actually it will do just fine. Maybe if the very party who is proposing this wouldn't have spent 20 years preventing infrastructure improvements it would handle it even better. Maybe if this very same party wouldn't continue to fight sensible transportation choices at every turn. Maybe if this party wouldn't spend endless time and energy trying to put as much money as possible in unpopular and irrational highway expansion projects.
There are lots of easy upgrades we can do to our transportation infrastructure. For example, Zimmerbergtunnel 2. This was known to be needed since the early 90s, and was planned. But was not done and is now in planning. We did it in 2 stages, making it much, much more expensive. But in the same period we spend as much as we did on Zimmerbergtunnel 2 on highway expansions that have lesser returns.
> And it's almost impossible to significantly improve the throughput of rail and autobahn without extreme projects.
Well we should get moving on some extreme projects then, or maybe not have the party that proposing this constantly stand in the way of sensible polices.
Anybody who seriously thinks about this will realize having new high speed line across the country would be great. But they would never let that happen.
NEAT was an extreme project, and it will provide benefits for centuries.
There are so many other leavers to pull than this weird and random initiative: stop urban sprawl, extend public transport, curb automobile traffic, extend public spaces, reduce private property rights (Stichwort "Seeanschluss") to name some.
I'm still kind of hoping we're going this way instead of something like this initiative.
Rail 2050 plan has many improvements beyond that, and is still in discussion, and we could have many more if politicians were not afraid of large projects. And if parties like SVP would endlessly prevent good projects and instead want more money spend on idiotic highway expansions.
We literally just voted on blocking highway expansion only for the SVP to say 'sure we voted but all these projects should go ahead anyway'. Fucking insane.
They are blaming immigration for the problems their policy causes.
I could continue and give you a long list of bad choices they make that literally make everything worse, only for them to blame immigration. All the buses are full, but we wont allow any bus lanes to exist because car drivers need priority. City is full of cars but can't have people on bikes and use less space because that could mean subsidized parking would go away in a city where few people own cars. The list goes on and on.
Our problems are dumb polices, not immigration. These polices would be fucking dumb even if we did not have migration.
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