You’re just describing vampires/peter theil, except flesh now.

Yeah, and a lot of the 56% college grad rate is boomers who were educated before the fall and are now dying off. We will see it drop precipitously in the next 20 years or so, and the quality of the education of the newly graduated decline.

China currently churns out more college graduates than any other country, and the rate is increasing.

And they had a hell of a way to go given that it was less than 1% when they took over.

America is still slightly ahead of Russia there, due to the legacy of the USSR. Not that Russia’s billionaires aren’t doing their best to privatize education and keep it out of reach of the peasantry since the fall of communism.

Japan still runs trains to areas where there’s 1 village every 15-20 miles. Single track, that splits at the odd unmanned platform so people can board and trains can pass each other, and they have a train like every 10-15 minutes.

The USSR didn’t even bother with the platforms sometimes, just had a guy driving a locomotive by a bunch of villages every few hours, stopping any time he saw a farmer who had to take some cows to market or whatever.

Roads are expensive to build and maintain, cars are expensive to build and maintain. Every trip taken on a train or bike instead of a car saves the tax payers money.

What do you mean given up? They’re still laying more rails and running more trains than ever. Even running dozens of trains a day, like 95% of the time the trains are fully booked, or it’s just soft sleepers and maybe standing available if you try to book the day of, or even a few days in advance for longer routes.