China wants to build a 200km-long undersea tunnel to America

Re: Well, allright

Probably missed the reference but shouldn't it be marmalade?

Re: america to china on train

Why stop there (WW2)? That thing was largely brought on as a direct result of the unfair settlement after the first WW.

Greece OTOH, AFAICT, brought it all upon themselves. A ridiculous low retirement age coupled with a rather broken tax system. All propped up by politicians voted in by the Greeks.

They need to at least raise the retirement age to be more in line with other European countries. It is not fair that the rest of Europe has to work more so that Greece can continue their retirement.

Re: america to china on train

>but I'm actually very angry at the German government at the moment at their treatment of Greece

How dare they not let Greek voters vote themselves German taxpayer money. Patronage is a great political system until you run out of other people's money.

Re: The Chinese and Russians are going to build it??

"That is just the way of doing business for them in Mexico, for anybody. I would have been surprised if they did not."

Nah, for what I've read, China has far worse corruption problems than Mexico. As bad as some corruption scandals may be, contracts actually have legal binding and deals don't require becoming spunk-brothers with contractors.

Re: @Chris Miller

There will be no private sector investment in HS2.....Once bitten, twice shy.

I doubt that. We have serial bubbles in property, equities, bonds, commodities, government debt. Billions get wasted, money is lost. And a few short years later the same investors and lenders form a queue to invest in the next sure-fire "investment opportunity". You remember that global financial crisis caused by the syndication of US sub-prime lending? Well US banks are again busy lending to sub-prime customers, and syndication tranches of debt to other institutions. As an example, "asset backed securities" from US sub prime car loans amounted to over $7bn in the first four or five months of this year. What could possibly go wrong?

The UK government will never have the money to "invest" in HS2, so they will have to come up with some fiddle to persuade the gullible to put the money in, but somebody is then going to take the hit when it (surprise, suprise) turns out to be an uneconomic investment. Unfortunately all the mandatory pension enrolment funds will be looking for a home by then, so chances are it will be private sector pension savers involuntarily shouldering the risk of HS2.

Re: The Chinese and Russians are going to build it??

"

What happened to all the designs for modern wind-powered ships? Some had computer controlled sails - others were towed by a large kite.

"

They would be a logistical nightmare. Routes would have to be longer in most cases to favour the best wind strengths and direction, and IIRC their average cruising speed was slower than conventional ships, making journey times many times longer (longer times = more ships needed for the same volume of goods). Individual transit times could not be accurately predicted. Much of the goods carried by ship has been ordered so as to arrive on or near a particular date and would cause problems if it arrived much earlier or later than planned for. Some ports are so busy that berths must be allocated weeks or even months in advance. Shipping companies also need to have reasonable advance knowledge of when & where each of its ships will be in order to plan its allocation of consignments, and a journey time of "anywhere between 4 to 10 weeks" makes such planning very difficult, if not impossible.

Re: The Chinese and Russians are going to build it??

WRT modern sailing ships...

Problem 1 has already been mentioned (weather-dependent journey times make the logistics of running a business tricky.).

Problem 2 is why sailing ships went out of fashion in the first place. In actual transit, tall ships were more efficient than powered ships (because a twx lot of a powered ship's capacity is dedicated to engines and fuel) but they took an awful lot longer to load and unload because of rigging etc. And that was before he invention of the modern container ship, which is the easiest thing in the world to load and unload, given that everything is stored in lorry-sized containers and piled on deck.

Sails mean surface use, which is unacceptable, even without the need for all the ropes and cables of traditional rigs, so no-one's interested.

The high altitude kite idea, IIRC, was targeted specifically at supertankers. They have nothing on deck anyway, and they travel between specialist locations where there's not as much competition for berths.

Re: "...you could put a (small) nuke plant onboard.."

A power distribution network that spans several time zones would indeed have a big advantage insofar that peak load times would vary along the route, thus presenting power stations with a more constant load.