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Reply to @toast@donotsta.re
Ignas Kiela@ignaloidas@not.acu.lt (2026-07-23 20:57:15)
@toast@donotsta.re My problem with this is that it is incredibly dumb to duplicate infrastructure. Stuff like roads, railways, electricity grids, etc. The benefits you can get from decentralizing those is tiny in comparison to the cost. The usage of the infrastructure should very much be decentralized, but IMO, at least regionally, the building, maintenance, and general management of infrastructure should very much be centralized (and arguably, for some stuff the regions should be as big as politically viable, e.g. for trains, having a border in the route makes the planing process like 10x more difficult because now you have to coordinate between multiple different entities who don't have insights into each other that's needed for efficient operations).
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(eval 'Toast)@toast@donotsta.re (2026-07-23 21:02:16)
@ignaloidas I'm not sure how you would "centralize" a railway per se
rail, roads, etc go from point A to point B
you could centralize construction of those, but as it turns out, people halfway across the world do not know what roads your area needs, what rail your area needs
so they either trust you to tell them (this never works out) or they decide for you (poor results)
germany is one of those countries that has multiple tiers, i.e. some roads are built and paid for by the state, while others by the region
there's a lot of politics going on to have the state build and maintain the roads that are in the interest of the region, all to have a single road that goes across many many regions, instead of two regions collaborating at a time and having a web (closer to the german rail network in some ways)
as for having to coordinate between many different entities : you have to anyway! they're just hidden from you. for example, france is well-known for having a star-shaped rail network, with a single state-ish operator (SNCF), but as it turns out they just divide themselves up internally
that's why (for example) Alsace SNCF (Fluo) is decent, while a lot of the rest is... not
the consequence is you get the worst of both worlds : people that have nothing to do with the region make decisions for it, but you also end up with decentralized handling

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Blurry Moon@sun@shitposter.world (2026-07-23 21:03:54)
@toast @ignaloidas japan re-privatized its railways and it seems to work fine fwiw, way better in fact than before. obviously not going to be the same everywhere but seems to indicate it's not an inherently bad idea