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Comment by adwn | Hacker News Reader

> But it's not confusing or strange at all: a homogenous society is easy to make work.

What has being a homogeneous society to do with building a proper public transport system? Maybe you could argue that having only "John Johnssons" makes being nice to each other easier, but it's not a necessary condition for making a decent schedule or building trains.

Besides, Berlin has probably the least homogeneous population of all of Germany.

> On the other hand, we invented jazz and stuck a flag on the moon, so we've got that going for us - which is nice.

Resting on one's past laurels won't help solving today's problems. How well did that work out for the Roman Empire? Case in point: The US actually lost its ability to send a person to space, and hasn't been able to send people to the Moon for 44 years now.

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"What has being a homogeneous society to do with building a proper public transport system?"

A public transport system is a very expensive public good that needs to be paid for by everyone for the good of everyone.

Like fully socialized medicine, that is easy to pay for when you self-identify with the recipients. That's what I mean by the Handt Hansons working together with the John Johnssons. Or the Hiro Nakamuras.

The United States' diversity predates our development of these things - unlike trains and welfare in Zurich[1] and Berlin - all of which predate their diversity. Yes, I have been to Berlin and had a doner kebob. How many doner kebobs were for sale in 1902, when the U-Bahn opened ?

"Resting on one's past laurels won't help solving today's problems."

Agreed. I just wanted to make a caddyshack joke.

[1] And honestly, while Zurich is very diverse on paper, almost all of those foreign born residents of Zurich have one very important thing in common - they have very high incomes and are quite wealthy.

The median income is $4000 in Switzerland. What matters is that they have less income inequality and a good welfare safety net. When you let people with mental illness become homeless because everyone should fend for themselves, of course they're gonna occupy and piss where they can. When you help them become productive members of society, they don't. That's quite simple and has nothing to do with ethnicity like you're trying to imply.

Switzerland has some "fend for yourself" dimension where stuff like health insurance or childcare is largely private (and expensive), but they have a super strong safety net too. You are never being let down to the point that you have no choice but to be homeless.

When the bulk of the Berlin transit system was built, the city had the diversity of New Hampshire, and was being run by autocratic governments that were big on central planning and large public works projects.

The last autocratic government in Berlin threw the towel 26 years ago. I'm pretty sure that not everything stayed totally static since then.

Besides, central planning and large public works projects might actually be a good approach when it comes to the public transport of a large city.

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