Hyperloop was invented to try to kill light rail. It succeeded at killing Maryland’s new venture and Illinois’. Neither were built because Hyperloop promised bullshit. Elon hates public transport.
Elon’s main thing is selling cars, of course he actively opposes whatever would let people not buy a car.
He says the only public transit he would support is individual capsules running in a tunnel.
Essentially literal echo chambers where you never have to interact with anyone who might expand your horizons.
I’m as liberal as it gets, but public transit that mimics private cars would absolutely be a game changer.
I don’t want to have to interact with others using public transit. It’s not the time nor place to “expand your horizons”.
High speed rail with private cubes wouid absolutely get people using public transport.
No matter what everyone liberal / green / progressive claims, the main drawback of public transport is the public part. Listening to others bullshit and smells just sucks compared to the privacy of your own car.
Everyone wastes effort arguing about the scale at which different strategies can succeed, losing sight of the need for answers at every scale. I’m tired of people saying rail will never work because people also live in lower population areas, and now I don’t want to hear that car-like transit won’t work because people also live in cities. We need both. We need options for cities and suburbs and towns, and even rural areas, and they won’t be the same answer
Absolutely.
I personally feel that you can push people to public transit via 2 methods.
-
You make non public transit transportation very expensive
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You make public transportation actually better than driving yourself.
Option 1,you’ll have resistance all the way, plus it kind of sucks that in 2023, for all the effort the working class has made we’re being asked to pack in while the rich will continue to use personal transportation. They’ll get all the benefits while we are making the sacrifice.
Option 2, would be the best because you tax the rich HARD to build public transport with private compartments. Push the cost to the rich and reward the working class, not the other way around.
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I’m as liberal as it gets, but public transit that mimics private cars would absolutely be a game changer.
I don’t see any contradiction. That’s an extremely liberal thing to say.
It’s just that some people shit on cars, as though being in your own space / smell / music isn’t infinitely better than being packed in with a bunch of people.
We can’t get change and adoption if the option you are offering is objectively worse.
Hey man no one wants it as is now. Public transport with personal space is totally possible. As it is, it’s engineered to be cheap and space efficient for maximum passengers in minimum space, to maximise revenue. It doesn’t have to be that way!
some people shit on cars, as though being in your own space / smell / music isn’t infinitely better than being packed in with a bunch of people.
That’s obviously not the reason people dislike cars. Mostly, they suck for everyone outside cars. Secondly, they suck for everyone, since they are a wasteful use of limited resources, including carbon budgets.
The second argument can also be made about pods on rails; it’s much more inefficient than regular trains.
I get your point (“public transit that mimics private cars would absolutely be a game changer”) and agree to it. The question is how much is that worth. Are we willing to pay the opportunity cost?
The problem is that PRT systems are never as good as proper rail. Show me a full scale system way out in the desert running simulated rush hour operations and maybe I’ll consider it. Otherwise let’s not waste our cash. No one with tour attitude would take transit under any circumstances anyways so there’s no point appealing to them.
Yep. And if our ultra-capitalism system didn’t turn masses to homelessness and the middle class to tired/poor; public transit could have been dope 😕🤔. They could have really made it amazing 😍🤩. But the ruling class cares more about… other stuff.
I mean I imagine celebrates, super wealthy 🤑 people, gov Officials , cops and ETC, I imagine they don’t ride the tubes / trains / subways ?
Sure, it just happens to be the most expensive option and thus least likely to actually get funded and he created a company specifically to derail (pun absolutely intended) public transit plans.
It’s never the time or place until it is. I can almost guarantee 90% of your friends are likely just the weirdos that decided to start a conversation.
100% but that’s another reason it’s the worst option.
Yes the worst part of public transport is it being public… You don’t want public transport, you want private transport you don’t have to think about or pay for.
“Eww, peasants” ~Elon probably
He didn’t even invent it.
guy who sells cars spreads FUD about competition to cars
One would think that these Atlas Shrugged -cultist would love railways.
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Wait, what did Hyperloop kill in MD? It looks like the proposed route was from DC to Baltimore underneath MD 295 – we already have Amtrak and MARC serving that corridor.
Hyperloop is against high speed rail, which is for transport between cities.
Light rail is nicer trams so meant for transport within cities.
It’s worth pointing out that a pneumatic railway was not invented by him, we already tried 150 years ago and couldn’t get it to scale up then either.
Remember the tunnel in Ghost Busters 2?
I think you’re giving the guy too much credit for being conniving. Is there actual evidence?
He admitted it to the person writing his memoirs iirc
The mistake is thinking Elon is a moron screwing everything up on accident. He isn’t. He’s an Afrikaner white supremacist Nazi who is causing all this damage on purpose.
Starlink and SpaceX should be nationalized before he gets a chance to weaponize those companies against the western world as well.
He literally came up with the hyperloop because he was afraid of a high speed rail hurting Tesla sales.
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People who buy Teslas don’t want to take public transportation
People also like to get places fast. High speed rail does that. Why drive 3-6 hours myself when I can relax and read a book and something for a fraction of that on a train and dodge the headache that is air travel?
Ye, Fuck that Guy! ( fuck Eelon Mux)
I have a feeling the boards will try to maneuver him out before he gets too stupid with Starlink and/or SpaceX, but maybe not…
Musk is great for bringing in that sweet venture capital, and and Starlink (and thus SpaceX) are running a pretty major defecit. They need venture capital to operate, so they won’t work him out publically. Internally, I’m pretty sure they’re happy he’s busy destroying Twitter.
Since when is he an Afrikaner? I doubt he can even speak a full sentence of Afrikaans. It’s slightly offensive that you just used an entire demographic group as an insult.
The Musks are of Anglo-Canadian, English, Swiss, and Afrikaner descent His family owned a sapphire mine in South Africa during apartheid. That’s where his money came from.
That’s where his money came from.
And PayPal I suspect
Then you might as well call him Swiss. He was even in an English school. And I thought the mine was in Zambia.
Since he was born in South Africa and got his education there.
They speak more Afrikaans in South Africa than English.
Chill bro , they’re not dissing Africans, they’re dissing Eelon Mux Yo!
I do believe he’s a moron screwing Twitter up by
accidentincompetence.
Giant infrastructure projects are a weakness of democracies. It’s tough to get everyone to agree and pay for huge projects that take long term vision and planning.
Or you could call it a strength because it’s stable and can’t be changed too fast by one guy with a short term bad idea.
Mainly in the US, though. The automobile lobby successfully undermined many attempts at mass transit infrastructure. And the existing rail network is privatized into oblivion.
Roosevelt showed that there is a way of tackling infrastructure in the US. Only his approach has a minute slither of what can be framed to be socialist, so it’ll never happen again…
minute slither
snek president
see NEOM
It’s an unbelievably stupid idea that’s really going to happen. The prince of Saudi Arabia knows that their oil economy is going to wither away soon, so he’s trying to make SA appealing to people with money and have them move there. How? By building a city that’s a line 160 km (110 mi) long and 200 m (660 ft) wide…in the middle of fucking nowhere. The whole idea is based on technology that we don’t have and is just terrible city planning. Look into it to get a laugh.
Hahaha yes you’re right. This is an example of ill-advised big infrastructure.
No, you don’t get it.
It’s blessed by god so it’ll be good no matter what. God is good to his faithful. Lamborghini Akbar.
At least the rail line serving it can be a rail line
Pronounced “neeeeeee… yyoooommmm”
Did you completely ignore the US highway system built in the 50s, that created a car dependant infrastructure?
Highways were constructed in regions with sparse populations or in urban areas with little political power (primarily black and Latino neighborhoods). Basically, areas where democracy didn’t have to function because there was no democratic power to block it. Whereas nowadays, with higher levels of democracy (unequivocally good) and local control (more of a mixed bag), massive infrastructure projects are harder to accomplish. Plus, the 50s had the benefit of a booming postwar economy and the national cohesion (at least among enfranchised Americans).
Cool and what has been done lately? Infrastructure seems to just be crumbling cause nobody wants to pay to fix anything.
Infrastructure is crumbling because highways and roads are fucking expensive to maintain and suburban sprawl doesn’t bring in the tax revenue to fund it.
Look up the growth ponzi scheme by Strong Towns. North Americans were duped and scammed into an untenable situation and we’re going to spend the next half century reversing all the damage done.
Nobody does maintenance in authoritarian regimes, either. It’s not a priority under any governance system
Ain’t that the truth. The UKs HS2 project has just collapsed. Was supposed to a big Y shaped “network” linking London (and Europe) to Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and a laughably out the way part of the East Midlands, with a new high capacity rail link.
Now it’s been whittled away to just “I suppose we can link London to Birmingham then”, and only then because they’d already started work on it.
I always suspected the second part would be cancelled because we never do anything that might benefit the North.
Got to be honest, after 3 years of working from home, I’d rather have faster internet than faster trains. Shame there’s no timetable for that either…
I bet they managed to spend all the money that was allotted despite not actually getting anything much built though. They are fucking pros at “spending” money on stuff that either never materialises, or ends up requiring double the amount of money initially quoted to actually end up in a finished state. There should be so many more investigations into where all the public money is going in these kinds of situations.
I think it has more to do with the lack of democracy, especially in the US. I guarantee you could get 100 regular Joes in a room to come up with a high speed rail project. You could never get that to happen with politicians at the mercy of the ruling class.
German train network? US Highways?
Lack of education is a weakness.
You can do it through democracies. Taiwan has two sets of high speed rail systems.
Are they expensive to maintain? Absolutely. In fact they bankrupted 2+ companies until the government decided to step in and foot part of the bill. But then again, if the government isn’t willing to pay for basic infrastructure, what are taxes for?
(Also as a tangent, the Taiwan high speed rail bentos are to die for. I had it 5+ years back and I still remember it. Super cheap meal in a disposable bamboo lunch box. Usually there are 1-2 choices per day. I had chicken thighs, pickled veggies, steamed pumpkin, and half a marinated tea egg. The bottom half of the lunch box was filled with rice. 10/10 would eat at a busy train station during rush hour again)
I go to China for business fairly often and there is this one area where the government decided a new subway line should be installed, so I watched it get built over several trips. The property owners in the way were, as far as I understand it, booted off the land but compensated. And boom. A year later the subway line was done and hooked up to the rest of the existing subway infrastructure with completed stations, entries/exits, and even retail shops in the stations. It blew my mind.
The city definitely needed the subway line, but I was amazed at the efficiency. In my American home town that idea’s been debated for decades and is yet to be finished because at first it was getting voted against and then finally after the public supported and approved it, the NIMBY experience began and it took a decade of land use planning to choose the route. If it actually runs efficiently before the 2020’s are finished I’ll be impressed.
iirc. in China property is not owned but leased from the state. That makes it easier legally to get people away.
On the other hand in the alledgly property protecting and valueing democracies in Europe it is no problem to kick people off their land to build highways and expand lignite mines.
Not quite. The way property is leased is such that you can indefinitely renew it for free until you are dead. The standard base lease is 70 years so you’ll probably never run into problems. Even if you do exceed it it’s simply showing up at an administrative location and talking to a clerk.
This came up about a decade ago since a bunch of people were panicking about their properties due to some older houses having only 20 years leases. The government then clarified that the difference is the management of the property (e.g. apartment complex) goes from the developer to the government at the end of the lease. Nothing else can force individual buyers out (except for “illegal” housing modifications).
In reality, when public works require demolishion, the government usually provides substitute housing instead of money. My understanding is that most people take the new house/apartment since they are actually new (less than 3 years old), in nice locations (most I’ve seen are near bus stops/subway stations with reasonable school districts and nearby supermarkets), and worth more than their old place. That being said Asian societal pressure definitely is a thing. So even if you don’t want the new property you’ll probably take it just to avoid the side eye.
Source: lived in Shanghai for 16 years. Still have my name on a deed somewhere.
I see this in Thailand too. Lived in the bay for a decade. There’s posters in every bart showing the future and expansion of it. Afaik, none ever happened.
In Bangkok I see a few new stations open every year basically.
You can do it through democracies
Other examples with well known high speed rail might be Japan, or many EU countries
Meanwhile here in the US, we have Acela, which is higher speed than we have before, is continually (very slowly) improving, so it may eventually become high speed rail
No one is saying that you can’t do it, just that it’s a lot more difficult and contentious and time consuming.
Has no one on Lemmy ever taken an intro political science course? This is really basic stuff.
How do you explain the highways scarring every major north American city that isn’t named Vancouver? How do you explain the billions of dollars spent on highway expansions every year? Rail isn’t hard it just doesn’t benefit the right people.
Giant infrastructure projects are a weakness of democracies.
What about the high-speed networks in France, Japan, Spain and Germany?
France is smaller than Texas. Every nation you mention was not a democracy during most of their rail construction. It is vastly easier to engage in large construction projects in authoritarian states because you don’t have to care about a voting populace.
Sorry to bust your bubble but first high speed line in Spain started in 1992. Democracy in Spain started in 1977. And in Germany or France I’m pretty sure high speed trains where made when they were also democracies.
Normal speed rail can handle high speed. They have to build new ones.
All of them were democracies when they built their high speed rail networks.
Id argue that people have no concept of how much money we waste arguing about what to do and how to do it.
In my city they wanted to cut down 10 huge and really old trees in a park in the center of town. They were constantly clogging the drains, tearing up footpaths with their roots, clogging the drains with their roots, dropped big fucking branches during storms and a few other minor issues. Sure they were pretty and allCutting down the trees, fixing the sidewalks and all was estimated at half a million. Well once they stalled on the project because of the protests and the money spent answering legal challenges from well meaning hippies, hiring security and fencing them off so nobody could climb up one and chain themselves there then finally got the trees cut down the city spent 3.1 million.
Couldn’t you guys have just… Trimmed the roots?
I know a guy who works for the council, I wasnt involved. I know the numbers because one of his projects got axed to help cover the costs.
But they did make a huge fucking mess. Point is that 2.6 million dollars is about the annual cost of 25 council employees and 1000 replacement trees.
Did you replace the trees with concrete?
I wasnt involved, I know a guy who works for the council. They actually did a great job, the park doesnt look any worse for it and has more usable space.
The fact is they could have planted thousands of replacement trees or built another park with the cost difference between just cutting them down and cutting them down with all the back and forth that you have to have in a democracy.
What exactly do you think the Interstate project was?
The Interstate system was sold as a means to allow rapid military deployment. This allowed tapping of infinite defense resources to make it happen.
That’s exactly it. That’s also why US interstates are so wide compared to major highways in most other countries. They were originally built so that they could also be used as makeshift runways durring any potential invasion scenario. Of course that hasn’t been a consideration since the cold war so newer or reworked sections don’t necissarily have as much open space around them.
It’s not about the democracy it’s the fact that the “democratically elected” officials prefer to funnel taxpayer money towards fascists.
This is misleadingly reductionist. California high speed rail has made consistant progess in that time. That progress has been slower than ourslowest expectations. It demonstrates the void of expertise the US has in rail megaprojects. However, that expertise is being built, slowly and painfully. Its still forward progress for a nation which tore up half its rail overthe last 50 years.
America invented rail megaprojects.
America still has the largest rail network by far. It’s well more than twice the size of China’s.
The only interesting note is that it’s almost all freight compared to other nations’ use of passenger rail.
Hehehehe
With 0.92% of electrified rail it’s a joke to say that NGL. Absolute numbers are meaningless.
You have to see it into perspective per area then you’ll get to feel how dense and therefore useful the rail network actually is. Because what good is a rail network if you can’t reach your desired location.
And then you’ll see that swiss, Germany and Luxembourg for example end up with less than 10 square km per km of rail while the usa has around 40.
Okay, but the comment implied America doesn’t have the expertise to build a passenger network when it actually doesn’t have the political willpower. It has the expertise to spare, but no one in power actually cares.
That still is not correct.
Planning a high speed high throughput flexible passenger rail network is a whole different beast than laying non-electrified single track lines in a straight line through the middle of nowhere that basically only serves the occasional 2miles long freight train.
The parameters are vastly different and almost incomparable. And America has decidedly no expertise left in the former.
Other than the fact that there are several American firms who have already done it, and even if there was a knowledge deficit it’s the easiest thing in the world for an American company to headhunt foreign talent. Too easy in most industries.
Opposition to new railways is political, be it from establishment organizations or private owners, like in California. That’s all there is to it.
Which ones? Which company actually has put out a consistent, significant, structurally sound high speed rail network including stations and the trains themselves that is based in the US?
And headhunting foreign talent tells me that you have not worked in the rail planning sector. These companies are extraordinarily protective of their high value who are the executive “talent” behind their stuff. And the biggest rail tech companies are multinational conglomerates (Alstombardier, Siemens, CRRC, Hitachi) who have no desire or need to outsource to America.
There is noone currently who has both intimate knowledge of American geodetic planning and high stress track planning. And building that knowledge takes a lot of trial and error.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_the_United_States
While their current average speed isn’t great compared to the highest speed rails in Europe and Asia, it is comparable to the average high speed services, and Amtrak seems confident in their claims for Acela in 2024.
Absolute numbers are meaningless.
You have to see it into perspective per area then you’ll get to feel how dense and therefore useful the rail network actually is
Same goes for the meme tbqh
Thats true. And then America stopped. And then the people who had actual on-the-ground experiance died of old age. Its really another effect of the slow tragedy that is the auto industry
Yeah, but who BUILT our rail system?
Like many other things, we don’t like to talk about it…
According to the documentary Hell on Wheels it was mostly built by a man named Cullen Bohannon with his own hands. When he got tired, he used some Chinamen and I think maybe a woman dressed as a man for a stretch.
Also, Dude, Chinamen is not the preferred nomenclature.
It was when Cullen Bohannon single handedly constructed the Union Pacific Railroad in 1865.
Misleadingly reductionist is what /c/memes should be renamed to.
Indeed. We’re fixing the great car mistake at a glacialy slow pace
What evidence is there for you to assert that expertise is being built?
Yep. All while getting resistance the entire way in spite of the fact that the US regularly funds without question the expansion of highways and building of interstates. Slowly but surely there does seem to be a growing appetite for rail transit throughout the nation and it is possible for more upgraded corridors to be built and if the US can keep momentum up the lessons learned in california can be applied in building rail elswherre
California HSR expansion is going to get cancelled the moment the minimum viable route finishes, they’re going to lose the ROW and the expertise, then 10 years later the next leg will get approved.
This is what happens to transit projects in America, so there’s no reason to expect anything different for rail.
China has the advantage of not having to care about the citizens’ desires in regards to be relocated to make the rail possible.
They also provide apartments to live in permanently for those displaced in the development.
Meanwhile, the US has not built high speed rail and has tent cities.
In the case of national infrastructure, China wins hands down.
Although it’s kind of ridiculous to compare California with an entire country…
Honestly not that ridiculous of a comparison considering California’s size and GDP, we could be doing a lot better
That’s a fair assessment.
Except it is considered “unamerican” for government to help people, and tue generosity of billionaires is hoped for instead
I don’t think America gives any shits either. They let the world’s most useless CEO dictate their future
Kelo v. City of New London. That’s all you need to know about the US’ “care” for citizens’ desires as far as eminent domain is concerned.
The US still has things like reelection to consider with these things. China doesnt. And if someone speaks up against the government they just get arrested
Oh is reelection a threat here? Which gerrymandered district are you from?
Spain wants to have a little chat with you
It’s much easier to build rail in places that weren’t designed around cars. Even in rural China people live in condos and apartments with parks between. This helps with NIMBYism and combined with the already large amount of green space left in Chinese cities such systems can be built with the only real concern being the engineering itself. But China is also in a good position for that, as their workforce is incredibly well educated with more engineering talent than they can even fully employ domestically. All that PLUS the political will of a single party state meant it was a very different situation than California.
And that’s before you even consider ridership, where even the best possible SF to LA route would still pretty much require you to get a car or taxi once you get to LA (because LA was basically torn down and redesigned for cars).
In LA it is supposed to end at Union Station, which amazing access to commuter rail, a metro system, which admitly is small, but still can take you to a lot of places, bus rapid transit and it is right next to downtown. Obviously it is not comparable to NY, London or Paris, which are of a similar size, but you should be able to go to a lot of intressting places, without needing a car once you arrive in LA.
LA is slowly working on good rail transit. You can already get to Union station (where CA HSR will stop) from just about everywhere served by the rail and busway network
Another good practice china makes is building transit before/at the same time as expanding urban areas, making sure that even new developments are transit oriented
I finally found one in the wild!
If you’re gonna call someone a name, go ahead and say it
Urbanist?
One what?
A delusional fetishist. I wonder how much time they’ve spent in China.
Are you saying China didn’t build that rail?
I don’t see where I typed that.
So, what’s the delusion? Are you saying California has built comparable levels of HSR?
Thinking “even in rural China people live in condos and apartments with parks between” is hilarious. Tons of rural Chinese still use outhouses and only have communal water sources, no indoor plumbing. They live in simple wooden shacks and cook over an open fire.
I have absolutely no idea where they 're getting the ideas they have but they’re laughable.
edit: though to be clear, their high-speed rail system between cities is great and an example the US should look.
How much time have you spent in China?
About six months, prior to covid. Enough to know the commenter is full of shit.
China is a wonderful country but basically the entire first paragraph is wrong.
He’s not entirely accurate with his definition of “apartment and condo,” but if you’ve actually lived in a rural village you’d know that they have remarkable density compared to even Western suburban development.
Ya all looking at this like it’s a conspiracy. It’s just a guy looking to sell more cars. Shame on anyone who thought it’s a real thing.
I’m looking at China like this-
China wants unity, even in places where it doesn’t make economic sense.
edit: 100% downvotes are coming from people that don’t know the situation. The CCP wants fast travel to major population centers even when the rail line isn’t profitable.
Isn’t that a good thing? sounds like the rail is being run as a public utility rather than a business. And its still likely profitable if you average the cost over all the lines.
I never said it was a good/bad thing. I’m saying the Chinese gov. isn’t as concerned with profit. Which explains the difference between California and China
It makes economic sense but not financial sense. Railways are almost always profitable once considering second and third order effects.
It’s the same story with Amtrak, so I’m not sure why people are so confused. Amtrak loses money on every train that’s not the NEC.
Are they siding with the hunter or the emissary this time?
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did you mean to say utility instead of unity?
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Musk has the weirdest relationship with trains.
Maybe too close to Trans, he don’t like them either.
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You’re allowed to swear on the internet. You won’t get in trouble for it.
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Cussing? Not on my Christian Minecraft server!
This isn’t Minecraft
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Excuse me sir this is a Christian TF2 server
And not allowed to not swear?
LOL 🤣
comparing CCP China to California…
Noice 👍👌
What’s your point? What is the GDP of California? The population density of the Bay area? California not having any high speed rail is straight up embarrassing. Same thing applies to the eastern corridors in both the states and Canada.
Canada is opting for HFR and claims that the harsh weather and at-grade crossings makes HSR impractical in the near future. It’s not the best excuse, but at least VIA’s new trains top out at around 200kmh.
Maybe compare California with Spain (4000 km of high speed rails).
I like that better… Spain probably has a full democracy to boot…
And doesn’t feel the need to make fake videos about their rail.
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No, it’s authoritarianism vs democracy. It’s a very well-known concept in political science that authoritarian regimes can make decisions and execute on them far faster than democracies. The problem is that autocratic decision making ultimately creates instability by implementing policies and decisions that don’t have a broad base of stakeholder support. Why should any citizen support a decision that was made without their input or consent?
It’s also a reflection of how much power money still holds even in the US’s democratic system. The decision to not build high speed rail in California was heavily influenced by a single billionaire, it wasn’t voted on.
America isn’t a democracy. It’s a democracy of the rich and always has been, the rest us were begrudgingly allowed a vote over centuries but our influence is still very limited
A plutocracy, you might say.
And yet the Titans of Industry tended to support Clinton over Trump: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2016/10/25/donald-trump-a-billionaire-shunned-by-the-very-rich
In this case I would have preferred the outcome of the billionaire-backed candidate winning.
Do you understand how the Chinese political system works? I’d recommend that you learn a bit more about it from the Chinese perspective because Western generalizations of it miss a lot of details.
I’d recommend that you start from the bottom (how people can join the party and take office, how rural collectives work, how protests influence local policy) and make your way up to the municipal, provincial, and national level.
You’ll see how each level has checks and balances to make sure that they make good decisions, and you’ll see how the incentive structure rewards “good” decisions. You’ll also see where a lot of the corruption comes from (in rural collectives) and why efforts to fix that haven’t worked as well as they could.
So same as the US democracy then. All that matters is money and nothing else. Musk did the Hyperloop bullshit just so it would delay the train and people would be more Tesla’s.
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What a fancy way to avoid acknowledging the hard truth. Western democracies have failed their “stakeholders” by shunning rail in favour of car centric infrastructure. In doing so they have benefited the auto and oil industries at the expense of the health, safety, and quality of life of everyone.
North America’s lack of high speed rail is an absolute embarrassment.
That shows your misunderstanding of who the Western governments think the stakeholders really are. It’s the auto and oil industries. The governments are serving them just fine
China has also built tons of car infrastructure. Gone are the days where millions of Chinese rode bicycles, dominating the streets. Now, millions of bicycles are second to the mighty Chinese car.
If you know anything about China, you’ll know it barely reflects communism. It’s largely structured around capitalist goals and the government reflects more of a corporate structure than anything.
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Google leans towards standardized/compatible features while Apple leans towards proprietary/incompatible features. Two competing corporate structures can go about things in very different ways.
What capitalist goals are China structured around?
Their 5 year growth plans.
Mainly high tech chips manufacturing, space technology, weapons technology (hypersonic weapons, nuclear weapons, stealth fighters, aircraft carriers, ballistic missiles), high speed rail, and automotive and electric vehicle technology. To name the major ones.
But these goals aren’t inherently or exclusively capitalistic in nature, are they? Capitalism and Communism are both described as a means to an end - that is to say they both make prescriptions on how the means of production should be owned and controlled, but they don’t make much suggestion as to what production that refers to. So, in theory, there’s no reason to believe any of these goals are capitalist or communist in nature, because people have reason to want these things regardless of their preference of economic structure.
It can be shown in practice that these are not capitalist inherently either. The “5 year plan” is actually a trope amongst Socialist/Communist leaders. Stalin had a 5 year plan that sounded very similar to Xi’s, and Xi adopted this type of state planning from Mao himself.
China’s weapons are manufactured by China North Industries Group Corporation, which is a state owned corporation, not a private company. China’s tech chips are manufactured by SMIC, also a state controlled corporation. The high speed railway is being built by the China Railway Corporation, also state run.
I think people get confused by the idea of “exchanging capital” when referring to trade, because it leads them to believe that capitalism means something that profits from capital, but a state can profit from capital just like how a private unit can. Capitalism is NOT the exchange of capital, it’s the private ownership of the means of production. If a state (ie: China) participates in trade, that is not an example of capitalism, because the means of trade are not owned by a private unit.
You’re actually wrong, has China does have official 5-year plans that it develops every 5 years, and they have done so since world War II. So, it is not a trope at all:
“The Five-Year Plans (simplified Chinese: 五年计划; traditional Chinese: 五年計劃; pinyin: Wǔnián Jìhuà) are a series of social and economic development initiatives issued by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 1953 in the People’s Republic of China. Since 1949, the CCP has shaped the Chinese economy through the plenums of its Central Committee and national party congresses.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China
China is currently undergoing their 14th 5-year plan:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_five-year_plan_(China)
I didn’t say they had no 5 year plan, I said the 5 year plan isn’t inherently capitalist
China is a state capitalist country. So was Lenin’s and Stalin’s USSR.
State capitalism is an oxymoron, if the state controls the means of trade, then it’s not private.
Economic growth and efficiency in the form of a consumer economy, which dovetails with a capitalism-oriented promotion of individual accumulation of private property–this has become a larger part of the Chinese economy not smaller
Along side this, there’s been a greater profit motive for developing productivity as well as through market competition.
The communist goals they’ve gradually abandoned has been things like economic equality, where their income inequality is similar to the US now and represents a highly unequal distribution of resources. Collective ownership is more of a mixed bag. Social justice is also fractured along socioeconomic lines with a high level of labor exploitation of the poorer classes by the wealthy classes. The way these problems manifest are characteristically quite similar to late capitalism in the west. Obviously there are differences and no system is entirely one or the other.
https://www.eurasiantimes.com/a-whopping-900b-debt-chinas-once-profitable-high-speed-railways/?amp
It’d be good to have high speed rail but not at any cost.
Queue tankies going crazy to defend the absurd cost…
Less than 9x the cost of California HSR or the UK’s HS2. With that money, California HSR aims to build 840km and HS2 aims to build 230km. China, with 42000km, built 50x the rail of California HSR and 180x the rail of HS2 and is delivering economic and social mobility benefits today.
Either way, infrastructure doesn’t need to be profitable at a first-order level to be profitable to the country as a whole. The increase in economic mobility, social mobility, consumer spending, travel, and logistical efficiencies typically have returns that far exceed that of fares: in typical North American transit systems, although they operate at a loss on paper, it’s estimated that each dollar put into transit returns $4-$5 in economic returns.
Going to guess the workers in CA are paid slightly better…
yeah but how does their cost of living stack up against that paycheck?
It is higher but they are still doing better even with the higher COL.
Then let’s talk about Spanish HVT (AVE), shall we?
No. Lets not do whataboutism.
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