Animats on July 1, parent next [β]. Hyperloop is a joke. Japan's maglev is a reality. Japan is building a maglev line from Tokyo to Nagoya. The first 42km section is running right now. Train sets have been delivered. Stations are under construction.
Tunnels are being bored. Opening TulliusCicero on July 1, root parent next [β]. Isn't it, like, super expensive though? Also as an aside. Japan is this weird example of a country with a good education system, hard workers, excellent infrastructure, and yet a totally stagnant economy.
I mean I understand a lot of the reasons, but it's still weird. Its a bit improper to call Japan stagnant. Effectively all global populations use GDP as a measure of success, but GDP is a pyramid scheme - growth relies on the population getting bigger, often to such a degree that stagnant per-capitas can still look like a "growing" economy just from new bodies taking up space in them.
That isn't the real kind of growth that makes peoples lives better. Look at per-capita instead. They have problems, but none of the end of the world nonsense economists have been throwing around since the 80s in response to Japan not continuing the global fiction that we can just keep adding more people to fake growth numbers like that is guaranteed to lead to real quality of life improvements, especially in the information age when it is much more important to have the resources to educate and maximize the potential of the people you do have rather than try to spread resources out over more people who can possibly outright lose access to the higher degrees of technical knowledge needed to truly advance society at this point.
Totally explainable by the fact that Japan has the world's fastest aging and now shrinking population. Yes, the problem with ageing population is that a lot of your GDP growth which would otherwise go into disposable incomes etc instead goes to care for a lot of old people. The only spurts of growth seem to be either sudden windfalls from resource extraction booms or big credit runups that tend to leave a big hangover.
