Borners
16.1K posts
@Borners1
You can find me at @borners.bsky.social too given what's happening. 英国基進主義者
Japan has the world’s best railway system. 28% of Japanese passenger-kilometers are by rail. Germany manages 6.4%, and the USA manages 0.25%. Just one Japanese company, JR East, carries more passengers than China’s entire railway system, and four times as many than Britain’s. What is the secret of its success? worksinprogress.co/issue/why-japa… Part of the answer is that Japanese railway companies don't just operate trains. They run hospitals, supermarkets, department stores, amusement parks, office complexes, and retirement homes around their railway stations. One of them co-built Tokyo Disneyland. Another owns a baseball team. A third created its own all-women musical theater in 1914, which is still running today. The logic is elegant: a railway increases the developable value of land around its stations, but normally that value accrues to landowners, not the railway operator. Japanese railway companies captured this value by owning and developing the land themselves. About half of the revenue of Japanese railway companies comes from ‘side businesses’ like these. Allowing railway operators to capture more of the value they created meant that more lines were profitable, making a far larger system financially viable. This may sound like a radically novel approach. But in fact, an exactly similar system existed in nineteenth-century America. The success of Japanese railways does not lie in some unreplicable feature of Japanese culture: it lies in good policy. If they learnt the right lessons from it, many countries could replicate Japan’s success. Read more (much more) in @Borners1's & @carto_graph's new piece for @WorksInProgMag Issue 23.
I think it’s immensely fascinating that in all the centuries following Augustus, Egypt - arguably the wealthiest province of the empire for most of its history - never produced an emperor, or even a pretender Is it because of precedents set by Augustus? Limits of “Romanization”?
A genuinely wild thing how some talk of Smart Casualty Averse warfare while the casualties in truth just keep growing to kinda insane levels Guess its because they are just this daily grind, while the human brain is conditioned to think in terms of individual "battles"
In Hungary, a striking scene: during Viktor Orbán’s campaign stop in Szombathely, citizens gathered not in applause but in protest, chanting “Russians go home”. It’s more than a moment of dissent—it reflects a deeper European divide between those who stand for democratic sovereignty and those who flirt with authoritarian influence. Europe must remain firm: our future cannot be shaped by fear, nor by those who look East for inspiration instead of forward for progress.
According to two sources that spoke on condition of anonymity to @RFI, around ~200 Ukrainian personnel are deployed in West Libya - spread between Misrata's Air Academy, the 111 Brigade HQ under Deputy MoD Abdelsalam al-Zobi, & in Zawiya. rfi.fr/fr/afrique/202…
“If you remove names and show these conversations to any case officer, he will swear that this is a transcript of an intelligence officer working his asset,” one senior European intelligence officer said after reviewing a printout of the conversations.
The Iran war will cement China’s superpower status ft.trib.al/Dfjn7XQ
There are many forms of NIMBYism: -Classic "protect the trees" -Architectural Heritage -Brasov mayor doing racial science telling immigrants (Romanians from Wallachia and Moldova) to fck out of his town -Timisoara mayor implying all real estate projects are run by Gypsy mafia
Poles hate Russians more than Roma people💀💀💀
"“MBS [Mohammed bin Salman] has lost the bet on all his investments over the last several years,” Ellie Geranmayeh, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations said. “He financially invested in Trump and Trump’s family and his corporation and his White House, but at the end of the day the views of the Saudis and of the whole Gulf have been sidelined by the wishes of Benjamin Netanyahu.”" theguardian.com/world/2026/mar…
Which side do you even support in this war if you are anti AI slop?
@ThomasPierret @TitusMichaeleus A time being is measured in decades at best. You need a proper real army, the state in Syria just ended conscription. Equipment that costs money you don't have in an int environment were nobody can give you the mass quantities in short periods that USSR had to rebuild the SAA
