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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… 🤔 🚉
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.
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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.
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.
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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 air on the side of not wasting money. They air 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.
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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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.
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.
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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
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
