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Elon has all but admitted that the hyperloop was just a distraction to derail California’s public rail plans, and now that that ship has sailed he doesnt give a shit about hyperloop anymore. The Hyperloop concept is literally just a tool that Elon uses to prevent development of public transport in California so that people will buy more teslas instead.
The Hyperloop seemed impossible form the get go. It had so many issues that are easily solved by… Not putting people in vacuum tubes
Here let me try to solve all of it’s issues:
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Get rid of the vacuum idea to reduce complexity and points of failure.
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Move track above ground to reduce manufacture/maintenance costs.
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Make the “pods” longer and chain multiple pods together to increase efficiency.
Wait a minute… 🤔 🚉
now go check out who’s got the best rail services around the world. with the possible exception of japan, who’s still got some measure of trouble with some of their private operators, nearly all of the rail operators who are consistently good are state owned.
Nah, we can’t have that, it’s boring and works. We need exciting and impossible
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A major flaw in our societies is that we allow jackasses like that to come into positions like the one Musk has. Fuck Phony Stark!
Literally all I want is for my government to manage capitalism instead of capitalism managing my government.
I am certain that Elon will try to co-opt Trump’s cult following and be his political successor when Trump finally kicks the bucket, and that legitimately terrifies me. Elon will run for pres in the next 20 years I’d bet on it.
Literally all I want is for my government to manage capitalism instead of capitalism managing my government.
But that’s socialism
Shhhh if you say it like that people’s heads will explode
That’s literally socialism with Chinese characteristics
China is more USA than USA.
I dont know what you’re trying to say.
I would love a source for this to pull up in future discussions
There’s this but musk shills will discard it like anything that doesn’t praise musk
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/elon-musk-hyperloop-rail-17486877.php
I live in a national park and the Govt just awarded a contract to a private company to build a fiber line to the villages for high speed internet, and the company building the thing will own the network while the govt is stuck paying the bill forever. So stupid imho. No private company should own a network that exists entirely on federal land, and everyone depends on .
Wait, you live IN a national park?
God damn that sounds awesome. But yeah, the private fiber line sucks. Same happening in my country with most “last mile” connections belonging to exactly one private company. Whereas our neighbours to the south (Latvia) nationalized the entire network and everyone benefits from having competition (same company, Telia, has their prices like 80% lower there than here - claiming that Estonians don’t care about price)
Whereas our neighbours to the south (Latvia) nationalized the entire network
Adding this to my wish list for Russia of the Future. Not Latvia, nationalization.
I think Latvia is already on the wish list for Russia unfortunately, just not yours
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Its not stupid when its bribery
The fact that private companies work on public infrastructure must be one of the wildest cultural shock to anyone who is a non-American.
This happens in Europe as well.
This happens in most European countries as well, I believe?
It works fine as long as the private companies are held accountable for their shit and the high-level planning is done by public offices.
It breaks down when there are no consequences for budget or deadline overruns, or the actual deliverable failing to meet requirements, because obviously private companies are gonna fleece the tax payer.
Well since the privatisation of germanies public transport systems everything went downhill.
We have less lines and lots of late trains. Funny thing is that the private company “Deutsche Bahn” was doing so bad it is now 100%owned by the state but still a “profit orientated” private company that does weird shit in order to fake the numbers.
I’m not a fan of privatisation of existing systems either. Nor a fan of private companies providing public transport, but in Estonia that works because they have to adhere to strict terms.
What I meant was specifically in the context of private companies building infrastructure that’s specced out by the government and will be owned by the government - that it works in Europe.
In the US a large problem is that the private companies can own the infrastructure they build and then deny other companies usage
There is also an example of this happening here in Estonia too - Telia (which acquired Elion) owns way too much of the fiber optic networks, particularly the last mile connections and now you have relatively little competition - if you want an Internet connection at home, depending on where you live, you may only be able to get broadband from Telia.
But at the same time - we also have private companies build our roads and that works fine for us, because the roads still belong to the country and everyone can use them all the same. Our rail network is owned by the government and while there’s only one (state-owned) company running people transport on it, many companies can use it for transportation of goods.
As long as the product is owned by the government it works. You can pay a contractor to build it, maybe even manage it, but you can’t give the infrastructure to the private company that then has a monopoly
Exactly.
Public money spent = public owns the end result
Should be exactly this simple.
This CAN actually make sense… if done right… which it is often not due to corruption.
lemmings stop idolising China challenge (impossible)
libs stop seething over China challenge (impossible)
Are you really saying that Elon is the reason America doesn’t have high speed rail?
I’d say Elon is a symptom of an underlying problem which is relying on private capital to provide infrastructure.
he is indeed a part of a problem. Car manufacturers have been quite responsible for dismantling America’s public transportation infrastructure.
Sounds ridiculous to me. If politicians didn’t decide on the rail system because of elon, it’s still a problem caused by the politicians
@yogthos
I didn’t know California is a private companyCalifornia isn’t a private company, but it relies on private capital to do infrastructure development. Hope that clears things up for you.
@yogthos
But the decision-making process is supposed to be done by the state, right?When your whole economy is organized around private ownership then the role of the state is to primarily mediate between different capitalist interests. It’s not like California has public sector capacity to deliver large scale projects that way state owned enterprise does in China.
@yogthos
I asked about the decision-maker; is the state of California responsible for making the decisions regarding building speed railroads, cancelling it, switching to hyperloops, again cancelling it, etc? (yes or no)You’ve asked a loaded question, and I gave you a response that includes important context. The scope of the decisions a government can make is inherently limited by the options the government has. Not sure why that’s difficult to understand.
Because they do not have money due to too expensive road maintenance?
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Tbf California doesn’t use slave labor
Tbf California, unlike China, does use slave labor https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e
Very good point and one that people often forget. It’s literally impossible to build high speed rail without first becoming an authoritarian dictatorship.
TIL Germany, Belgium, Austria, France and Portugal are authoritarian dictatorships
They are, but that’s not actually relevant to this discussion.
Don’t forget Taiwan as well. They have HSR although to be fair it’s also a very small country.
US is the authoritarian dictatorship here, and it can’t build shit. Meanwhile, worker democracy in China is able to build infrastructure at scale. Don’t take my word for it though, every western study admits this
- https://web.archive.org/web/20230511041927/https://6389062.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6389062/Canva images/Democracy Perception Index 2023.pdf
- https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-26/which-nations-are-democracies-some-citizens-might-disagree
- https://www.tbsnews.net/world/china-more-democratic-america-say-people-98686
- https://web.archive.org/web/20201229132410/https://en.news-front.info/2020/06/27/studies-have-shown-that-china-is-more-democratic-than-the-united-states-russia-is-nearby-and-ukraine-is-at-the-bottom/
- https://ash.harvard.edu/publications/understanding-ccp-resilience-surveying-chinese-public-opinion-through-time
I don’t know, man. This sounds like some “the enemy is both strong and weak” BS to me. When they can’t build a HSR in California they are an unplanned economy but when I point out the cost of China’s flavour of government suddenly the US is a dictatorship?
I’ve got no issues acknowledging when China does some good things but come on. I was rightfully making fun of the implication of your meme here and you come back with doublespeak. There’s really no need to pick a side and defend it at all costs, we can acknowledge the positive and negative things.
but when I point out the cost of China’s flavour of government suddenly the US is a dictatorship?
I mean I linked you a whole bunch of western studies showing that people living in China see their country as being more democratic than people living in US see theirs. Furthermore, a study analyzing decades of US policy has found the following:
That certainly does sound like US is a dictatorship of capital to me where regular working class people have little say in the running of the system.
My argument is based on the empirical evidence available, meanwhile I have no idea what you base your position on.
an unplanned economy
a dictatorship
These ideas are not in nearly as much tension as you think. California is a bourgeois dictatorship (like all other capitalist nations), and the bourgeoisie require the government to forgo centrally planning the economy in order to maximize their exploitation of the people (and therefore profit margins).
I’m confused by this, because it looks like China is proving you wrong right now?
Now I’m confused, what do you mean? I never said they didn’t have a great high speed rail network. I think they’ve done a great job and I’ve got no problem acknowledging that. I was just poking fun at the implication of the meme.
Well, China, a participatory democracy with a 95 percent approval rating according to a Harvard study, is in the meme building high speed rail, and you’re claiming you have to be an authoritarian dictatorship to build high speed rail?
Oh right I see what you mean. If you pretend China is a democracy my point is automatically disproven, that is true.
Why would I pretend China is a democracy when it empirically is according to any useful measure?
High government approval
Bottom up representation
Policies benefit the masses
Wide range of public opinion represented in government
That all may be true, but have you considered the fact that they’re savage mongoloids who need enlightened white people to come and bring democracy to them?
Looks at downvotes
sees number of called out liberals
China managed to overbuild high speed rail, they got so good at it. Their whole system is built to incentive huge infrastructure projects. Which has been good, but now they’re getting way into the diminishing returns.
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They’re so good at it and got addicted to it they want to build it on other countries too!
Ontario did the same thing
Course there’s the downside of China too. Consider the Ghost cities, built in anticipation of an influx of people that never came: Yujiapu, Yujiapu, and Meixi Lake.
That’s an article all right! But it’s from 5 years before the article I posted, and it’s just detailing what China THOUGHT was going to happen.
Here it is 9 years later and it turned out they were wrong.
It’s okay for countries to make mistakes. We err on the side of not wasting money. They err on the side of preparation. They have more money to waste than we do so good for them.
What happened is that vast majority of these ghost cities have been filling up, and as a result of massive investment into housing 90% of the population in China owns their homes now. Meanwhile, US wastes billions on its constant invasions of other countries. Iraq alone cost over 3 trillion. Your regime errs on side of wasting absurd amounts of money on crimes against humanity while ignoring the needs of the people living in burgerland.
