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Russian Official Proposes Road That Could Connect London To NYC
An anonymous reader writes There's great news coming out of Russia for epic road trip lovers. Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin has proposed building a highway that would reach from London to Alaska via Russia, a 13,000-mile stretch of road. "This is an inter-state, inter-civilization, project," the Siberian Times quoted Yakunin. "The project should be turned into a world 'future zone,' and it must be based on leading, not catching, technologies."
It's a nifty idea, but the major problem is that it would have to go through Russia.
Actually, they may even have the money. They just have to put Yakunin in jail and get back what he stole -- for himself, and for his boss. http://navalny-en.livejournal....
The US would of course have to block the road where it hits NYC to prevent trade with them... leading to a 13-thousand mile traffic jam ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
So...a train company president is suggesting a road be built...
Couldn't be that he's waiting for someone to suggest that it would be better to build, oh I don't know...a train line instead?
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
a 13,000-mile stretch of road
The article:
A theoretical drive (as fancifully calculated by CNN) from London to Alaska via Moscow might cover about 12,978 kilometers (8,064 miles).
do {print "Mini-Geek Rules!\n";}
until ($TheEndOfTheWorld);
Now I know where the movie inspiration came from.
I can imagine my kids sitting in the back at mile 500 asking 'are we there yet'... no kids, only 12,500 f*ck'n miles to go
In the plus column:
It does mention Yakunin is considered a likely successor to Putin, so if you consider the excursions of the current Russian leader, perhaps this dreamer is still an improvement.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The headline says NYC, the summary says Alaska, but even that's not another 5k miles. And there might already be a road there.
I think I'm almost as confused as the author.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Russian roads across the bulk of the country are shit. And they haven't even built a decent interstate system going across the country. And they can't even properly maintain the shit roads they already have. And the country is NOTORIOUS for intentional accident scams (why do you think that they have those dash cams?). And a sizable percentage of drivers there are drunk and/or crazy.
In short, who the fuck would want to drive across Russia if the alternative of even a slow boat is available?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
... and they're talking about bridging Alaska and Siberia....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Siberian_Highway
The Russian's don't give a damn about connecting London to North America.
What would be of more importance to them is better transport infrastructure between European Russia and the Russian Far East. Across much of thet route, roads are simply non-existant even today. If you drive from Moscow to Vladivostok then you're not taking a journey, you're mounting an expedition
Why would they want this infrastructure? Well large numbers of Chinese are moving north to settle in Russia. There's speculation that Chinese will be a majority in the Russian Far East few decades. See:
http://abcnews.go.com/Internat... http://newobserveronline.com/r...
Better commincations across Russia will help them counter this and help tie the country together.
While still ridiculously expensive, a high-speed (or even regular-speed) rail line linking Asia and North America would at least be a little more practical. No need to build (and man, and resupply) gas stations/rest stops/etc every 50 miles or so across thousands of miles of frozen tundra. I'm not sure how far a train can go without needing to refuel, but they never have to stop to pee.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Great idea. We definitely need 13,000 miles of this.
some things we may not have considered:
1. Having to learn the phrase "can i have the key to the bathroom" in 7 languages.
2. understanding, yet never being entirely certain, when left or right lane driving applies but being totally sure your wife is probably wrong.
3. switching road trip snacks from potato chips, to Kotlety, to pea pats, to landjager, and finally back to potato chips but now you have to call them crisps while youre stuck in gridlock piccadilly traffic.
4. having to keep multiple bribe currencies for various checkpoints and rolling infractions.
5. The phrasebook doesnt have anything to get hungarian insurance scammers off the bonnet of your car at 3 am
6. GPS may not be capable of routing you safely around a drunken and somewhat bloated Jeremy Clarkson as he hurls homophobic remarks at you from the doorway of a run down pub in leeds.
Good people go to bed earlier.
No one is going to get involved in a big project like that unless they're comfortable with the Russians remaining reasonable.
We're not seeing that. So... yet again, russia is fucking themselves out of fiancial opportunities.
Think of where Russia is... the land. It is extremely valuable. And do they use it effectively? Are trains running from China to Europe over Russian rail? Not really. Everyone bypasses them because they're too crazy and stupid to realize that their behavior damns them to being a backwater even though they're in the fucking middle of everything.
We trust the fucking Saudis more than we trust the Russians... and they are basically funding most of the crazy terrorism we're dealing with. That's how little we trust the Russians.
And amongst that, the Russians want to know if we want to build an expensive road through their territory? Why would we do that? That would just give them leverage. They already give us shit about the generally meaningless space launches. They try and exert leverage everywhere. Especially where it is extremely stupid to do it.
I'd love for the Russians to not be fucking retards. I really would. I'd love for us all to be happy hands across the universe. But who is holding their breath for that to happen?
Till then... what evhs.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Generally, this is exactly what Russians really propose: pay us to fix our roads so you can, sometimes, having a lot of money and time, drive on them. The whole "proposal" consists of roads that currently exist. Outside Russia, they are even in a good state.
Has this guy not seen the Russian dash cam videos?
https://www.youtube.com/result...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I see you never heard of us Russians drinking eau de cologne. My American friend traveled from Khabarovsk to Irkutsk by train and was quite shocked to see Russians drinking cosmetics.
Mind you - a good chunk of this would be across Siberia and another chunk through Alaska and a sparsely populated chunk of Canada. Can't imagine the Irkutz - Fairbanks stretch being all that popular and there's really not a lot between them - about the same distance as London-NY.
Essentially our big problem with going the short way round is that silly puddle between Europe and America.
Every one color revolution begins from requests to punish corruption and ends in total chaos. I don't need a color revolution in Soviet Russia.
I personally traveled from Nizhneudinsk to Kabansk in 90-th and the car road was satisfactory. There was some bad place between Chita and Khabarovsk but the railway there was and is OK.
I think they played way too much Ticket to Ride. There's no bonus points for the longest route in real life.
Never before has everyone on /. agreed that a proposal couldn't possibly be any good. When do the shovels hit the ground?
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
I thought it was actually eau de toilette...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I don't have a map of them in front of me, but I'm fairly sure that it crosses plate boundaries. That might be a little difficult to achieve in an in-ground tunnel, and I can't deny that the thought of a suspended-in-water tunnel is a bit nerve-wracking given the possibility of maritime accidents...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I didn't realize putting thieves and liars in prison for their crimes is 'revolution'. In my dictionary this is called 'due process' and is a function of a properly functioning government.
It was NOT Russia who began a Donbass war.
Yes, it was Russia. The war in Eastern Ukraine was started by a Mr. Igor Girkin, a Russian, allegedly ex-military, a war criminal from the Yugoslavia wars, who also participated in several of Russia's armed conflicts (Chechnya, Georgia, etc.), and who entered into Ukraine across a Russian border, on orders from Russia.
He had done the same thing just two months before that, in Crimea. The only difference between his first and second marches was the changed attitude of the international community, which made Putin reconsider and change his plans.
Along with him came a group of Russian soldiers and officers, allegedly 'on leave' and a lot of serious firepower: large guns, tanks, armored vehicles. The Russian regime has tried to deny this, but the evidence that a huge amount of Russian military equipment and military are pouring through the border is overwhelming, the confessions of Girkin notwithstanding.
Girkin's activities in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine were financed with Russian money, partly by a Mr. Malofeev, a Russian oligarch with ties to the regime, who got his initial capital from state banks.
Mr. Girkin himself addressed your theory about this non-existing local Russian movement long ago. Here are the relevant quotes from his interview in the Zavtra newspaper:
Q: What about the phases of war: A: At first, nobody [neither Ukraine's armed forces nor the separatists] wanted to fight. The first weeks went with the two sides talking to each other, trying to get the other side to change views. In Slovyansk, the separatists and the army were very careful using arms... The Ukrainian army wasn't eager to fight at all.
Q: Your role wasn't only military, you were the source of ideas for establishing a government, right? A: At the time, I understood well that the [regions of] Donetsk and Lohansk can't fight on their own. We went in with the understanding that the Crimea situation will be repeated, and the Russian army will enter [openly]... My task there was not to take the power, my task was to guard the [separatist] republic
Still, it was me who squeezed the trigger of war. If our team hasn't crossed the border [to go into Ukraine], it would have ended like it did in Kharkiv or Odessa, a few people shot, burned or imprisoned. It would have stopped there. The pendulum of war, which is still going was released by us.