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.
141The Hyperloop seemed impossible form the get go. It had so many issues that are easily solved by... Not putting people in vacuum tubes
30A major flaw in our societies is that we allow jackasses like that to come into positions like the one Musk has. Fuck Phony Stark!
19Literally 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.
10
I would love a source for this to pull up in future discussions
4There'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
13
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 .
68Wait, 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)
10Its not stupid when its bribery
4
- 59
This happens in Europe as well.
24This 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.
18Well 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.
6
This CAN actually make sense… if done right… which it is often not due to corruption.
13Public employees are almost always not the highest quality and tend to be overpaid, why is it bad to have private companies do the work?
-27Basically 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
8
Are you really saying that Elon is the reason America doesn’t have high speed rail?
19I'd say Elon is a symptom of an underlying problem which is relying on private capital to provide infrastructure.
43he is indeed a part of a problem. Car manufacturers have been quite responsible for dismantling America's public transportation infrastructure.
18Sounds ridiculous to me. If politicians didn't decide on the rail system because of elon, it's still a problem caused by the politicians
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“The California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) still has not completed a single segment of the system, the total estimated cost has ballooned to $128 billion and counting, and there is no expected completion date. CHSRA has recently focused its efforts on completing a 171-mile segment between Merced and Bakersfield. May 29, 2024
lol Californians got robbed by their own government.
7Ontario did the same thing
4Course 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.
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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.
1
Very good point and one that people often forget. It's literally impossible to build high speed rail without first becoming an authoritarian dictatorship.
-4TIL Germany, Belgium, Austria, France and Portugal are authoritarian dictatorships
23Permanently Deleted
9Don't forget Taiwan as well. They have HSR although to be fair it's also a very small country.
5
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
9I 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.
-2
I'm confused by this, because it looks like China is proving you wrong right now?
9
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!
13
lemmings stop idolising China challenge (impossible)
-6libs stop seething over China challenge (impossible)
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Tbf California doesn't use slave labor
-8Tbf California, unlike China, does use slave labor https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e
23
@yogthos
I didn't know California is a private company-11California isn't a private company, but it relies on private capital to do infrastructure development. Hope that clears things up for you.
26@yogthos
But the decision-making process is supposed to be done by the state, right?1Because they do not have money due to too expensive road maintenance?
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