Private Capital vs Central Planning

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:
  Get rid of the vacuum idea to reduce complexity and points of failure.
  Move track above ground to reduce manufacture/maintenance costs.
  Make the "pods" longer and chain multiple pods together to increase efficiency.
  Wait a minute... 🤔 🚉
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.
I would love a source for this to pull up in future discussions
- 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)
- 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.
Its not stupid when its bribery

This happens in Europe as well.
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.
This CAN actually make sense… if done right… which it is often not due to corruption.
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.
- 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

Are you really saying that Elon is the reason America doesn’t have high speed rail?

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.
He's a reason, but not a total one by any stretch
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

Ontario did the same thing

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.

A complete waste of money and resources

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.

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
- Don't forget Taiwan as well. They have HSR although to be fair it's also a very small country.
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.
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.

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!

lemmings stop idolising China challenge (impossible)

libs stop seething over China challenge (impossible)

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

@yogthos
I didn't know California is a private company

California isn't a private company, but it relies on private capital to do infrastructure development. Hope that clears things up for you.
- @yogthos
  But the decision-making process is supposed to be done by the state, right?
- Because they do not have money due to too expensive road maintenance?