They can be, but not when they're over crowded. Then they are extremely uncomfortable, and become ideal spreading grounds for infectious diseases as well as pickpockets. The conditions commuters endure at peak times would be illegal for transporting farm animals in many countries.
Pushing more people into over crowded trains is not the answer, reducing congestion should be the goal.

Only it's not, the focus is always on forcing more people onto public transport which just increases congestion and worsens conditions.

Work remote if you can, if your job can't be done remotely have the workplace in a location that enables people to live nearby and walk to work. Having workplaces bunched together in an area with no housing is harmful.

The massive distortions in the real estate market have stemmed from the wall of money created by decades of near-zero interest rates. This has driven serious malinvestment.

Was that capitalist? Well, the money supply is indirectly controlled by the Fed, which -- due to political pressure -- attempts to iron out the business cycle by creating walls of money every time it looks like things are getting choppy.

One could argue -- and I would agree -- that this is better than the pure unfettered capitalist alternative, which would see bank failures and people's life savings wiped out for no fault of their own. However, as a consequence, we get this absurd malinvestment problem.

There's more to this. You might ask, why doesn't the Fed just set the interest rate higher, so that people really need to have a productive use for money before they go buy up a bunch of houses? That hits at the heart of the stated goal to create persistent low levels of inflation, which allows the government (and debtors everywhere) to debase their debts. Because otherwise people wouldn't borrow as much money to drive economic growth. I find this nonsensical, because we loosening capital requirements creates precisely the malinvestment we want to stop. However, it's the government likes the ability to continuously debase its debt.

So it's not capitalism, and it's absolutely the result of policy choices, and it doesn't have to be this way. But it is because it suits the needs of powerful people in society.

Communists countries found ways to incentivize people to work. It's just that people ended up doing all the wrong things (in aggregate), and the system became hopelessly byzantine and corrupt. They really needed prices as a signalling mechanism for demand and scarcity. There's a great book on this by an economist. Socialism, the failed idea that never dies. Niemietz spends most of the time talking about the history of how people talk about socialism, but there's sections of the book specifically dedicated to a clear explanation of why it always must fail, and why it always must turn authoritarian. There's a short counter-factual story at the end, where East Germany is a non-authoritarian communist state, with precisely zero human rights abuses, and how the system of socialist incentives lead to complete dysfunction.

Indeed, complete with the "lost decade" that turned out to be 30 years of no-growth, and an aging population causing deflation. Except in China the problems are larger in scope, and the gradients are steeper. I'm not saying that China is going away. I mean, Japan is still there. It's just that the narrative changed on Japan, and it will change on China too.

In this video, university professor Patrick Boyle explains how short sighted pension plans destroyed the American auto industry. Once you look at the math, it's pretty obvious.

The misallocation of resources does have some benefits. It's still a misallocation, and thus, by definition, overall a problem.

Housing prices in the USA are set by the rate of interest (which sets mortgage serviceability), and the ability to build. As interest rates go up, housing prices go down. And houses are cheaper in red states that have fewer building restrictions, but still have, nonetheless, good job markets.

People made huge amounts of money off of housing in the USA, because interest rates slowly decreased from the 1980s until just a few years ago. Every time the interest rate was cut, incumbent home owners laughed all the way to the bank.

Those days are _done_. Interest rates bounded off near 0%, and we're staring down the barrel of sustained inflation. Nobody is going to make a fortune off of sitting on real estate for several decades.

If you want to buy a house, move some place where supply meets demand, making houses a little more expensive than the cost to build. There are many such places in the USA.

This is true. It's because China has high skilled and almost-slave labour colocated. And America has labour laws. What China is doing is impressive nonetheless.

It's absurd to compare freedoms in the USA to that of China, where political prisoners are literally chopped up to sell their organs. And Chinese people aren't stupid: about 3-4 million emigrate each year.

Parts of the Chinese economy are "pretty normal capitalism". However the majority of capital is directed by state banks to state industries. This is classical socialism, where the government controls the "commanding heights" of the economy. So pretty far from capitalism which relies on price signalling in the allocation of capital.

It's a brute fact that China's economy is suffering from a lack of price signalling, and that this is causing a massive misallocation of resources. The same thing happened to the USSR and the Eastern block, which certainly succeeded in driving steel production higher than the USA. Just... there wasn't any productive use for the oversupply. In the 1980s, one economist wryly noted that East German heavy machinery was worth less than the raw materials it was made out of.

The CCP is big on selling you on the idea of the inevitable rise of China. It's all optics. The psychological warfare of fear and greed. They are sitting on unprecedented levels of capital misallocation. Great. They can fix all that. But they'd have to change the system that produced the misallocation in the first place, and I certainly don't see that happening.

China isn't going anywhere. It's still going to be here in the future. The CCP has the tools of social control to pick winners and losers, and grind the underclasses to keep the system going. What's going to change is the optics.

If you took the train into the city during peak hours from these locations where you lived, how comfortable was it?

Standing room only with other passengers packed in so you can barely move assuming you can even physically get inside, no air conditioning so it's unbearably hot during the summer... Do you actually like travelling in these conditions? And you believe that *more* people should be travelling on these same trains?

The fact is many journeys are unnecessary, and most travel at peak times is extremely unpleasant wether you're driving a car stuck in traffic, or on a train enduring the conditions above. Getting away from this antiquated mindset of dragging everyone to a workplace at the same time every day solves so many problems.

It's a combination of excessive consumption (sure we've eaten these foods for thousands of years, but not in the same quantities), heavy processing, and artificial ingredients used as replacements for things either because they're cheaper or because the original ingredient is being blamed for obesity/diabetes.

For example, a recent study shows that artificial sweeteners are more dangerous than sugar:
https://www.oncologyrepublic.c...

Multiple governments have been pushing hard to reduce sugar, which resulted in them being replaced with artificial sweeteners making the problem even worse.

The key drivers here are poorly thought out government initiatives to reduce X, and the commercial for-profit food production model which incentivises excessive consumption. The removal of [fat|salt|sugar] being a prime example, they replaced these with artificial junk and now openly promote "now sugar free, you can drink as much as you want!".

Moderate consumption of traditional ingredients is the obvious solution, but no for-profit company is ever going to encourage people to buy less of its product.

Not really, they might make a trip to go shopping instead of picking something up on the way back but that's about it. It's also down to city layout as some people may not have shops nearby where they live. The long commute can also be replaced by a short trip to the shop which will often be a walk.
In many european countries lots of people don't even have cars, and if you don't need to commute every day and have basic essentials within easy walking distance you have very little need for a permanent car and can save the cost. For occasional trips there are rental cars or car clubs.

Those efficiencies depend on packing people in. Transporting livestock in such cramped conditions is actually illegal in many places, and yet you would willingly subject yourself to such conditions twice a day? You know what would be significantly more efficient? Storing you in a coffin sized pod in the office outside of working hours, that way you don't require housing or travel and can be paid significantly less.
Slavery is the most efficient system of work, is that where you want to end up?

I said "their traditions".
Even if some of them have chosen to drop their traditions, that is still a part of the history of their religion. Christians have their share of history and varied degrees of practice too.

So do you embrace and protect historical traditions, or do you force them to change? And if you're forcing them to change to conform to your views what's one tradition vs another?