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.
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.
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Literally all I want is for my government to manage capitalism instead of capitalism managing my government.
But that's socialism
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)
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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.
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 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
Public employees are almost always not the highest quality and tend to be overpaid, why is it bad to have private companies do the work?
I work in a large corporation, I can assure you that the same kind of people in the same proportions in corporations as in governments. You really should not let low resolution ideologies impose their make beliefs on your world.
I used to also, and I understand the issue, but the mega corps will still be more efficient than the government. This brings up the other issue of how the government funds all the tax dollars to large corporations and also props them up with regulatory protections.
It really depends what you mean by "efficient". But even if you go with "profit maximizer" that's still an ideological truth that falls apart easily for most human endeavor. Since both organizations are made of the same kind of humans, have the same basic technology and access to resources (when not crippled in some way). When you add on top non monetary social goals, task more complex than "deliver commodity at lowest cost and max profit", especially if you consider externalities, tgen saying " corporation are more efficient" as a blanket statement for use in all cases by default, it seems to me this is an ideological statement, really, an article of faith more then anything else.
Its not an ideological statement, it is a comment on the structure of the organizations and how they have to work to survive. Corporations need to do things efficiently or they disappear, the reason large companies are able to be so inefficient is that they are propped up by the government. But the big corporations still have to be more efficient than the other giant companies or their business gets taken.
When it comes to the government they can have irrational requirements and ways of doing things, and since they allegedly are beholden only to the voters (who dont have a clue what is happening) then they can be as inefficient as they want. An example that is non monetary is how the police will investigate themselves and find they did nothing wrong, they only have an incentive to protect themselves and their own people.
Basically because every time this happens the burden of debt is passed towards the tax payers. They just built a long toll lane in my city in what was a 2 lane highway. Adding another lane or two would have alleviated traffic immensely. The company that built it owns all profits for approx 50 years. What could have been a 5 lane highway is still two except now you have the option of paying a ridiculous amount of money to not have to deal with the traffic. This is money that could have been spent on improving the city's other methods of transportation, trains, bicycles, etc.
It doesn't affect me personally. I ride a motorcycle every day. It's just painful to see how private interests are almost never in line with what's best for constituents
This is slightly off topic but adding lanes does not alleviate traffic in the long term at all. The effect diminishes quickly and vanishes after just five years.
I think this is a seperate issue when private corporations build and own roads. I dont know enough about that sort of thing, I was more referring to how the government hires out private companies to create infrastructure instead of having government employees do it.
Doesn't sound like they avoided adding or widening a highway, just that what they did add is only accessible if you pay a toll.
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
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.
yeah about that https://www.reuters.com/article/opinion/the-myth-of-chinas-ghost-cities-idUS1704458002/
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.
Very good point and one that people often forget. It's literally impossible to build high speed rail without first becoming an authoritarian dictatorship.
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%20images/Democracy%20Perception%20Index%202023.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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
They're so good at it and got addicted to it they want to build it on other countries too!
Tbf California, unlike China, does use slave labor https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e
Yeah you might want to read the 13th amendment again if you think the US isn't using slave labor
California isn't a private company, but it relies on private capital to do infrastructure development. Hope that clears things up for you.
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.