No, China doesn’t count because that would challenge my worldview. I know I’m right, I just haven’t figured out how yet.
huh that’s quite an elegant way to put it
Truths are complicated and challenging. We don’t have to take sides or teams; although I know it’s difficult given then times we live in, where we feel the pressure to take sides given how fast we are bombarded with information. Join me and others in the effort to be comfortable with cognitive dissonance…
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I hate the attitude that professor exhibits. “Well we might’ve wasted years of work, billions of dollars, millions of man-hours, burned up large stockpiles of limited resources, arrested development of national infrastructure doing something we knew was impossible and in this process we’ve created absolutely nothing worthwhile, but at least I learned a lot! Gotta look on the bright side!”
If China did the same thing with state resources this dude would have a half chub for the rest of his life
I doubt it, he’d probably find some reason why it was bad
I meant the wasting billions of dollars for nothing part
He probably feels that way about China’s poverty alleviation and rural revitalization programs.
He was a physics phd with a focus in gravitational waves, never a professor. His phd thesis has 0 citations.
You’re right, but I feel like even without the hyperloop, the government (or other rich fucks) would find some way to avoid building a train line. Trying and failing to build a hyperloop was just a convenient excuse.
Oh yeah for sure, but that’s because they’re rich dickheads. This guy is just an idiot engineer with his head up his ass going
for “knawledge”
He’s not into this because of geopolitics, he’s just a useful idiot
I know this is the second time this shit has been posted, but most rail-less nations are not building railroads because they do not have the nessecery capital intensive industry to build railroads, let alone build a poor man’s railroad and then redevelop it, because the world is being purposefully choked of development funds by the IMF and World Bank. God forbid demand gets fulfilled.
that’s fair, prior to the current in-progress de-industrialization of germany, do you think they had the capacity or could have reasonably built up the capacity for high-speed rail?
I went to Germany in '96, and was amazed how on time the trains were. If the schedule said “7:52 arrival” then set your watch by it.
Now? Not so much.
At this point, it’s startlingly clear that de-industrialization is wide scale corporate raiding.
Can anyone point to a country that de-industrialized and maintained infrastructure?
It’s such a shame :/ Imagine what the GDR could have been…
The entirety of Europe had the industrial capacity and know-how to transition towards both High Speed Rail and entire light rail system in the 80’s and 90’s, even after the chaos of the collapse of the USSR. It’s honestly shocking that they didn’t given the seriousness that the 80’s oil crisis caused, but I have to assume at this point they were banking on the balkanization of Russia and were basically doing a test run in the former Yugoslavia.
The problem is that the whole of elite European liberal intellectualism is completely wound up in essentially emulating what they perceive to be “American freedom”, you’ll still run into this with exchange students all the time. The problem is that ‘American freedom’ will ultimately completely destroy your infrastructural integrity and thus degrade your industrial capacity.
Ok thanks for sharing that makes things make a bit more sense. So like auto is a big industry in like Germany, maybe Italy? and Amerika, Klanada. For like the UK though, was it the bourgeois had financial interests in auto succeeding and then also oil doing well? It just seems weird that some people in the UK now drive pickup trucks when they don’t even have the carbrained infrastructure that a place like Amerika has.
What you are seeing is the value of social ideology rationally taking precedence over material considerations. It doesn’t matter what makes the most sense in terms of actual efficiency, it is about what makes sense to appeal to your elite social peers, who don’t have to make decisions based on material considerations.
Ok, that makes sense. Do you think it’s possible to have an idea of what sort of arbitrary criterion would affect elite social peers for a given phenomena? Like to know specifically on a case-by-case basis. I don’t think it’d be particularly useful, just curious.
I think the ‘objective’ methodology for figuring that out would be either a marketing study, ethnography or something else. My rule of thumb is to see where the majority of advertising money is going. The rich and elite are usually more susceptible to advertising schemes because they have the ability to replicate the lives that marketing portrays. That is the beauty of owning massive amounts of private capital, while it is selling an unattainable material lie to us proles, it is only selling an unattainable spiritual lie (that if you are unhappy despite money and success, consumption will solve that unhappiness) to the wealthy and elite. They can actually attain the material reality portrayed in advertising, so it is just a matter of getting their eyeballs on it.
Also, within capitalism, isolation is usually the rule of thumb. The elite of capitalism wish to stand apart from the mass of humanity, as titans and utilitarian betters.
Yeah that makes sense. Would you say that rich/elite can be more susceptible due to their lack of like ‘risk’? Which is just another way of describing material their wealth/resources?
Sorry for the wall of text, I’m just a bit curious about your thoughts.
I’m thinking to calculate susceptibility in a superficial way, for like success of marketing of the kind you mentioned; you get a person’s susceptibility by using their 1. temperament (individual/group/cultural differences), 2. their perceived material resources say abstracted with dollars, 3. their actual material resources again with dollars for convenience, 4. randomness/pseudo-randomness to account for uh whatever stuff we don’t know (if economists and population geneticists and sociologists can use it I will too!!)
There’d be another set of variables/factors based on like how much money was poured into a marketing campaign, relevance maybe, etc.
What I wanted to ask you actually, was, do you think that given this back-of-the-napkin model, would 2. be like, more often than not, the determining factor? Like would the perceived or actual resource of in terms of fiat money (so like an abstraction which can be adjusted when needed…) be more ‘significant’? Where significance is like a relative weighting of the two terms…
What really gets me is the “It’s a banana, how much could it cost?” and like recently when the Brtsh PM tried to buy stuff from a grocery checkout; the level of disconnect is just so much more that I think I could have imagined. If you gave a prize to like how out of touch, they are, I’m sure I’d be completely off the mark. So I’m trying to bridge that gap in understanding
Yeah, what do you think?
I do not understand how you can seriously look at china and go “Nothing but terrible economic choices here
”because you believe that everything china does is a lie or is a scam somehow even though all of that is true about your own country.
honestly just thinking about it, megachurches and fucking mlms are fucking legitimate things to do here and we’re pointing fingers at china for being sneaky and corrupt
even thoughbecauseIf you think we got it bad just look at the conditions other countries live in. It must be because their liars and scammers in government are even worse. That was how I used to view these things anyway.
Yup, it’s recognizing that things here suck but somehow still holding onto American exceptionalism
Not american in my case but your point still stands.
Jordan Belfort is a glorified figure in the US, pure ideology
I have to ask him, are we living in the same country? Because everywhere here feels so fake.
- Fake jobs
- fake hiring process
- HSR in California is vaporware thanks to NIMBYism
- fake high property values
- fake value of college degrees
Because every word out of an American’s mouth regarding China is a lie. At least, any AVERAGE American.
Why?
Because Americans are very, very, VERY stupid.
Lol, high-speed rail in the US is a joke. California’s HSR program started in 1996 and hasn’t produced anything substantial in nearly 30 years. They might be able to get 1/3 of Phase 1 into operation by 2030. It’s not even in discussion unless it’s bundled with some kind of meme shit like depressurized train tunnels and eliminating safety measures.
In China, Deng started the Chinese HSR program around the same time and went from virtually none to being the world leader in kilometers of HSR with ~45,000 Km of operational HSR. To put that into perspective, that’s double the rest of the world combined. In fact, China has more HSR in construction than the rest of the world has active HSR today.
There’s this thing called land ownership which is a right…the state can eminent domain them but they’d have to fight it in court.
Doubt they have that in China, if your home is in the way of a planned development…it won’t be soon. You don’t buy land from the government there, it’s on a lease basis.
That and everyone in politics has to be aligned. If the top down order is to build a HSR, no cog in the system can just slow shit down for the hell of it. Doesn’t work that way in the US, as witnessed by the myriad times that the government can never approve the budget before it’s due.
What is hilarious about your argument is that it takes far more land to build and maintain a highway, and yet we somehow never had any problems with forcing land sales with eminent domain clauses doing that.
It’s almost as if the government is owned by a series of interests that are not actually interested in investing and maintaining efficient consumption minimum and economical modes of transportation, and instead focused on making a system that is efficient at creating profit for it’s ownership class. It’s almost as if, instead of a focus on the money to commodity cycle, there is a perverse incentive for a money to commodity to money cycle that means there is no real incentive to ever substantially invest to improve your commodity production.
Weird.
How many new highways do you see being built?? I’ve lived in California all my life and I’ve never seen a brand new highway being built. I’ve seen lanes expanded a few feet…But never a new one built.
Also, you can’t just put rail tracks anywhere as you can with land.
The politicians clearly work for reelection. Unfortunately, when a human being is placed in a position of power you usually get this kind of thing. Power corrupts.
The highways weren’t just magically placed there by the grace of God, they were built and expanded by the government using eminent domain. A highspeed rail system could be built using the same legal precedents, and would likely keep the highways from having to be expanded (ever).
What you are saying is that we could never build a new system in the same way that we built the old system, which is patently false, which is still different from your claim that China can avoid red-tape when the U.S. does not which is also false. The U.S. picks and chooses when it decides to uphold ‘private property’ because it only cares about the private property of those that buy the political system, it demonstrably does not care about general private property rights of those that inconvenience whatever the agenda is. Which means that the agenda COULD be High Speed rail, and it is not ‘the law’ or ‘the government’ getting in the way but private companies.
Also, for someone with a tenuous grasp on legal reality, I don’t think you should be discussing the realities of rail-based civil engineering. Highways aren’t particularly known for being good to work with on complex landscapes.
I am saying that the literal incentives of a profit-driven capitalist economy will always inevitably degrade the commodity process, incentivizing profit generation and rent seeking over industrialization and economizing commodity processes. It has nothing to do with ‘corruption’, ‘power’ or ‘politicians’, nor did I ever indicate that is what we were talking about. It is the system working as intended.
Oh I’ll just tell the poor Americans I know whose homes were bulldozed for transportation infrastructure that it didn’t happen because they could have fought it in court. Dumbass.
Nah, you could tell them that at least they had the right to fight it in court.
Well, shit for brains, if you’d read my post you’d know they were poor, so they didn’t have money for all the attorney’s fees that are necessary for that plan.
Cool cool cool cool cool. They can afford a home in California but they’re dirt poor to afford an attorney?
trains only run through expensive urban areas? people living in rented apartments deserve no protections?
What the fuck are you talking about California for, eminent domain is done across the whole country
When some chud court tells them to go fuck themselves because building a boarder wall as a symbolic gesture of fascism is more important, at least they can remember China Bad
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Don’t wanna dox myself with details, but no, significantly smaller city
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Damn, it feels like your hypothetical system is designed to protect the interests of the rich and screw over the poor masses, and over time, increase the power the rich already have and further screw over the poor. I have some notes.
Like can you imagine if such a system existed in the real world. If, say, they wanted to violate the “right” of land ownership for poor people to segregate cities by, idk, skin colour. They could separate them with massive, uncrossavle highways. The people that make cars and people who own oil fields will love that! The issue is that there may or may not be some poor people that live there. But even the ones that own land, well, they can be removed because of the system of eminent domain. Theoretically it’d also apply to the wealthy, so it looks like a fair system to the layman. But the rich can afford to take time off work and better lawyers. So on paper it sounds fair, but in practice, it favours those who are already wealthy!
And it would feedback into even more advantages for the wealthy. All those highways will require cars, which is good, but cars need fuel. The fuel will need to be moved vast distances, your need a line of pipes from the oil fields! But that would once again require you to build a… “Line of pipes” across vast distances. But there are natives living along where those lines would go! And they theoretically benefit from the right to own land as well! And they’re disadvantaged due to being survivors of a genocide. Treaties or no, the lines will get out through their land, they can fight back but obviously they’re unlikely to win.
This doesn’t seem like a well thought out system. The only other thing the rich would have to do is to own media and education. Then they can pump out articles and curriculum one after the other saying this system is the only system that works! They can even tell people, over multiple generations, that this the only way, that the right to land is a human right (not food or water though, that would cut into the profits of some other rich people, obviously). And make it legal for the rich to have a stranglehold on the government, call it something other than corruption, make it sound less harmful. Eventually you can erode the political structure to consist only of 2 groups of people who both agree with your “right” to land ownership, so even if the masses wanted to (which they don’t, thanks to media and education ;)), they literally can never change it
Yeah imagine if this system existed irl. It’s a dystopia disguised as a normal country. And basically everyone in it would believe theres no other way, since any alternative has been demonized since before their grandparents were born.
Genius, and evil
You could have saved the wall of text and just said America is also bad…It is.
When someone has power, power corrupts. It’s a tale as old as time.
It’s a tale as old as time.
Liberals trying not to essentialize political systems into supposed “common” human culture in order to retroactively justify their own decaying societies impossible challenge.
American exceptionalism brain mf (and that’s me being nice).
Power over others represents a problem, power with and through others (collective power) represents a solution.
America: bulldozes entire neighborhoods to build highways, displacing everyone with minimal compensation.
China: Nail house.
And everyone is free to fight you in court and sue the shit out of you if they find a flaw in your design.
Btw, don’t you think that there are others that want to stay but didn’t get a chance to? It’s just the one dude who gets no water or electricity? No one else wanted to stay in the whole neighborhood?
What do you think happened before nail houses?
And everyone is free to fight you in court and sue the shit out of you if they find a flaw in your design.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
Wonder how wealth plays into the material reality of going to court.
How many of those lawsuits against eminent domain in the USA were successful btw?
There’s this thing called tribal sovereignty, which is a right. Doubt they have that in the US; if your tribe is in the way of a planned settlement… it won’t be soon.
Doubt they have that in China
hey genious, what’s a nail house?
no investigation, no right to speak
Find a nail house in the way of a magalev.
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Yeah you can’t get in the way of public development in China. If they want to run a rail through your house they’ll give you a fat stack of cash and move you into a nice new apartment. The system works.
Paragon of poor economic choices
“I mean its economics 101! If you always actually complete things instead of just throwing money at rich assholes, eventually you’re gonna run out of projects that need doing. And where is your economy going to be then? That’s right 
”throwing money at rich people is good as long as it’s in the form of coins moving at several kilometers per second
or whatever you got lying around
It was less smug, but I basically received this argument from one of my brothers when I tried to explain that China is (probably) striving towards a future where it’s good enough for capital to do things people need instead of making financial profits.
Edit: I’m always open to the possibility that I’m an idiot, but it really seemed like he had never considered the possibility that resources could be used to directly meet needs. I’m not feeling like I was the one being stupid.
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ok can you do mediumly and hotly and flamin’ hotly?
And all of a sudden my brain said “flamey-o hotman”
I may be broken. LOL
“Top o t’flamin Mercury morning toya”
I’d say the word is “stupid” but with a touch of evil
This guy’s Twitter is the definition of bazinga: just endless posts of how everything can be solved with cool magic future tech. I’m shocked he actually admitted the Hyperloop is a failure.
He didn’t admit that it’s a failure, just that they failed. They “got close.” The hyperloop cannot fail, it can only be failed
It sounds like he’s saying the hyperloop failed because of drama and external reasons. Not because it was, in essence, a fictional project never meant to worm.
The vacuum train thing is honestly a waste and is incredibly dangerous, but the fact that China has progressed further than Musk at the testing phase, all the while improving their public train transportation network to be the best in the world, is just
I wonder if you could do one purely for cargo on a limited scale the way pneumatic tube systems used to work in office buildings?
I was so disappointed when I found out a lot of the old office buildings in my city had those tubes and they tore them all out
I always wanted to send something in a tube and I never got a chance
I wonder if you could even get tubes installed nowadays. You would probably have to spin up a bespoke company to install them, hiring a bunch of people who’ve never done it before and training as you go, and then everyone would lose their job at the end of the process.
Just like building railcars in the US.
Founding a tube-based startup with a silly name missing a letter in it like Tubr or something, and you’ve gotta pay a subscription to keep access to your tubes, but you can send packages through them to other Tubr subscribers
You and a friend have to change your names so you can make the spunky new mail tube startup, 2-Bueller
Nah. Hospitals and certain labs still build new tube systems to move samples or radioactive material around, and some stadiums actually use them to do money drops. They’ve just largely been replaced in most office buildings by email, since the things usually sent in office towers were usually just papers.
Fewer people would die
Probably
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I have used the tubes, it is even cooler than you think!
Tubes
Well, you’re on the internet. And it’s pretty much just a series of tubes.
Meh, you could just build more cargo lines
Can’t wait to get Byford Dolphin’d and have it all recorded on CCTV.
Byford Dolphin
read this as BYD Dolphin at first
it’s a Chinese electric hatchback that can now be bought in Europe, Australia, and Thailand
“My tech evangelism job failed so now please buy my story as book, streaming show, or straight-to-streaming movie about the wacky inner workings of Hyperloop!”
more like diaper poop lmao gottem
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Hasn’t China vastly improved its economic lot since the 80s?
and before that, too
China’s GNP grew an average of 6.2% annually over the period 1952–1978.
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Yeah, but China told porky what to do, so it doesn’t count.
usians are the most propagandized people on earth
When you shake his head you can probably hear it rattle inside.
I know they mean it was all done domestically but I still think the use of the word homemade is funny.
Just some random Chinese bros hanging out in their garage tinkering with their maglev hypertrain.
but don’t you know, the Chinese still live under Mao Zedong thought
, they still have those makeshift backyard furnaces and push trains, when they don’t have enough coal 
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perhaps indigenous would be a better term?
Domestically produced would be pretty close but I get what they’re saying, just a translation quirk.
If anyone can prove me wrong and build a viable vacuum train, it’ll be CRCC.
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They did it at CERN, but the maximum passenger size is a few dozen femtometers, and collisions are common
and collisions are common
aren’t collisions kind of the point?
I am deeply skeptical as well. But again, if anyone can do it, it’ll be CRCC.
I also think it will be incredibly difficult and maintenance intensive to keep any structure that size at near vacuum.
I think there may be a break even point between cost and effect where removing enough air to reduce (but not even close to eliminate) drag is worth the trouble though. Very large clean zone manufacturing facilities are routinely kept slightly above outside ambient pressure to prevent dust/moisture/insects from getting in.
