Its staggering how intransigent the modern economy has become. You can assign vast fortunes to the goal of requisitioning materials and manpower for a given project, and it all just gets swallowed up by finance capitalism.
I'm old enough to remember watching the suburbs build out during the 80s, 90s, and 00s. Seven gas stations inside a few miles could go up in a couple of years. In fact, you'd typically see three or four gas stations competing on every major intersection. I could drive you around Sugar Land, TX and point you to a dozen gas stations that were built just during my time in High School. And for hundreds of thousands of dollars, not thousands of millions.
But that was an era of Growth Capitalism, where we couldn't possibly leave a single bare patch of dirt between Rosenberg and The Woodlands. Everything had to be paved. And we unleashed phenomenal human labor and material resources to accomplish it all. By contrast, we can't seem to build shit for shit now. Money just falls into some bottomless pit of bureaucracy and graft.
Nick Nigro, founder of Atlas Public Policy, said that some of the delays are to be expected. “State transportation agencies are the recipients of the money,” he said. “Nearly all of them had no experience deploying electric vehicle charging stations before this law was enacted.”
Nigro says that the process — states have to submit plans to the Biden administration for approval, solicit bids on the work, and then award funds — has taken much of the first two years since the funding was approved. “I expect it to go much faster in 2024,” he added.
We've got to pay a guy to pay a guy to pay a guy to pay a guy to do a thing.
But that was an era of Growth Capitalism, where we couldn't possibly leave a single bare patch of dirt between Rosenberg and The Woodlands. Everything had to be paved. And we unleashed phenomenal human labor and material resources to accomplish it all. By contrast, we can't seem to build shit for shit now. Money just falls into some bottomless pit of bureaucracy and graft.
Yeah, the reason that sprawl was able to work is that it was built around a Ponzi scheme.
"Behold the marvels of a so-called 'service' economy!!"
Btw this is a tangent but I think that the left, whatever the fuck that is, could do a whole lot better at redirecting that anarcho-capitalist/Reaganomics urge in westerners who blame government graft and arrive at the solution of "getting rid of government".
It's not particularly tricky to trace out a little mental network where you have [Big Business/Big Industry of choice], the government, and how they interact in a fairly vulgar way:
Big Business X uses their money to lobby the government for tax breaks, contracts, regulations that benefit their interests, subsidies and bailouts etc.
The government receives this money and provides a whole lot of kickbacks to Big Business X
Big Business X now has more money to spend on lobbying the government to get them to cough up more money
Wash, rinse, repeat.
It's a little bit more complicated than "Government bad!!" but if you can get one person to walk away from a discussion about this with the message "Business gives money to the government in order to get the government to give them more money so that they can give more money to the government so they will give more money to business..." and they start seeing it in their own lives - maybe it's Tesla, maybe it's Boeing, maybe it's Lehman Brothers - then I think that will help inoculate that person against the lopsided narrative that the problem is just "too much government" or "government corruption" and so therefore the solution is hyper-capitalism.
It's a little bit more complicated than "Government bad!!" but if you can get one person to walk away from a discussion about this with the message "Business gives money to the government in order to get the government to give them more money so that they can give more money to the government so they will give more money to business..." and they start seeing it in their own lives - maybe it's Tesla, maybe it's Boeing, maybe it's Lehman Brothers - then I think that will help inoculate that person against the lopsided narrative that the problem is just "too much government" or "government corruption" and so therefore the solution is hyper-capitalism.
Sure, you can see it. But there's nothing you can really do about it at a national level.
At a more local level, we see that kind of graft, but the best any locality can really do is just "Say No!" to everything offered up by the municipal government. That doesn't get you a healthy economy or a functional government, it just gets people finding elaborate back-doors for funneling money outside democratic institutions. Case in point, the Texas takeover of HISD after over a decade of failing to take it over and privatize it through well-financed conservatives running in local elections. Rather than deal with a bunch of intransigent locals who refuse to see their education system carved up and sold off, the state just seizes the entire school district and staffs it with industry flaks of the Governor's choosing.
"fed govt creates framework for doing [x], tells states to make rules about [x], state distributes funds to local agencies (counties, cities, etc) to implement [x] while following rules". two years is about how long it takes to get all that done in prep of any actual construction.
two years is about how long it takes to get all that done in prep of any actual construction
This isn't a revolutionary new idea. We've had charging stations since the Obama Administration, we don't need to invent them from first principles.
Maybe they scrapped it all (or lost it) and started over. But if you look at the history of other big national projects (Mitt Romney's Big Dig, the current state of the NYC subway system, the California HSR project) you'll notice how you've got layer after layer of consultancy that saps all this money away doing busy work, while actual physical construction projects stall out for decades.
Seven stations over two years isn't even a pilot program. I'm curious to know where they even got the number seven from, as it seems abnormally high for a project that's still supposed to be in a planning stage. But, broadly speaking, we already have a large network of refueling stations distributed across the country. We just have an entirely privatized model that's openly hostile to EVs as competition.
Imagine you're Elon Musk at the peak of his wealth and clout. The government is literally throwing cash at you constantly.
You need to expand the Tesla brand and capture the US EV market before it gets away from under you in a few short years.
What do you do?
You go to somewhere in San Francisco and buy an old gas station to turn it into a charging station. You hype the shit out of it and do all the techbro aesthetics and Tesla branding. You turn the gas station into a "tEsLa LiFeStYlE dEsTiNaTiOn" where you offer overpriced trendy food, rentable WeWork style office spaces, and fucking sleeping pods or VR rooms idk. If Tesla managed to get their tech sorted (lmao) you could offer some sort of seamless transition where whatever you were doing on your stupid Tesla tablet when you were supposed to be focusing on the road can be transmitted to the office that you rented or your pod or whatever. (Shit, you just promise that you'll roll this feature out "within the next 18-24 months" and never come through with it, if you want to be the Biblically-accurate Elon.)
I guess you do something about offering drycleaning too? Rich techbros don't like doing menial labour and it feels like something they'd pay lots of money for someone else to do idk...
Anyway, you have some sort of slick one-stop shop that you build around your chargers. Maybe you do shit like screw around with having lower cost/free throttled recharging so you can milk people for their cash in your glorified roadside carnival sideshow while making them feel like they're getting the better deal by saving a few bucks on charging while they're being part of something visionary and futuristic and lifestyle-y.
It gets hyped (it's Tesla 🙄) The exclusivity makes those early-adopter marks who are Tesla's key market go wild. You take some senators for a tour of your operation and you wow those shmucks with pretty lighting and sleek, minimalist (and inherently bougie) interior design.
Then you hit the government up for funding to roll out this model across the country with some agreement that you'll allow non-Tesla EVs permission to use the throttled charging rate to make it satisfy the lowest level that the anti-competition regulations have sunk to in the US by this point.
You buy up more defunct gas stations, do the same shit, sell overpriced "services" and all on the government's dime while effectively capturing the US EV market by sidelining the competition.
Start offering a feature with your drycleaning service so that you can dictate which charging station you want to pick your stuff up from via your car's tablet to make mahogany suite types feel like they're really getting their money's worth because of all the "convenience" (you're going to get it sent to the exact same location every time except when you're on a business trip, you clowns) and the sense of control it provides them. That sort of shit.
Then you go one step bigger and make a Tesla Supercharger Centre or whatever. I guess it needs more of the letter x in the name, like Tesla Supercharger Xentre or something. Build a gym onto the station to really lean into the lifestyle nonsense and you do the usual marketing gimmicks to hook people - offer to pay people out of their current gym membership if you sign up to the Tesla one or give them a 50% discount for a year upon the purchase of a new Tesla or whatever. (I guess you'd probably need to provide a valet service to make it truly viable so that people aren't clogging up the charging spots while they're taking a conference call or in the middle of a workout though...)
I have absolutely zero faith that Tesla's production capacity would be able to handle the increase in demand that such a plan might be able induce. But that's beside the point. If you made the right manoeuvres you could charge non-Tesla owners a premium rate... I mean you could "offer a significant discount" to Tesla owners, stitch up the market, maybe run the gym as a loss-leader in the knowledge that you would be luring people in to buy some food or some microgreens health smoothie thing on their way back to their cars, and do pretty much the whole thing on the taxpayer dollar.
To begin with, you just outsource all the extraneous sides of the new venture via contracts but if you get big enough on some elements of the model then you start doing bean-counter shit and you start buying up a drycleaning business or a gym chain or you launch a health supplement subsidiary or a company that makes premium ready-meals which you offer in-store (or whatever it happens to be) which you already know will turn a good profit because you can measure this from within your current operations - and you have just diversified your company and its revenue streams without pissing capital up the wall on a stupid venture like The Boring Company.
If all of this sounds like something you could turn into an absurdist sci-fi short film about the near-future becoming a banal hellscape, it's because that's exactly what it is.
But what it really boils down to, in classic silicon valley-style "innovation", is a glorified airport lounge except Tesla-branded and for charging your car instead. Or just a glorified truck stop for rich techbros. In any case, there wouldn't be anything new about it, it would just be reconfiguring what already exists, combining a few existing things together into one, and slapping a dumb logo on the whole thing so you can charge a premium from an existing customer base that you know isn't just willing to pay but that is genuinely excited about it too. If there's any kernel of an actual good idea in all of this it's that this would be a way of turning the wait-time for EV recharging from being a downside into an exciting money trap that extends the Tesla experience and brand prestige while convincing people that they're being productive (you are being charged to use a desk that's in a different location), being healthy (you don't need a gym membership to exercise), or doing self-care (you can nap in your car, you don't need a sleep pod).
I guess I'm just glad that Elon missed this opportunity because he was too preoccupied with berating his underpaid workers on the factory floor or demanding that his engineers redesign his rockets so the shape "looks cooler", and I hope that one day he comes across this idea when it's already far too late and his business empire is in ruins so he can be constantly plagued by the thoughts of what could have been until the earth is finally free of his wretched existence.
You turn the gas station into a "tEsLa LiFeStYlE dEsTiNaTiOn" where you offer overpriced trendy food, rentable WeWork style office spaces, and fucking sleeping pods or VR rooms idk.
The problem with so much of this Bazinga shit is that as soon as it's in practice it looks like dog shit.
The Cybertruck, the Twitter overhaul, the failed Solar City Business, the failed Boering Company, his stupid automatons...
Yeah, in theory you can brainstorm all sorts of "good ideas". But then you actually have to do them, even if you're just doing a Disneyfied demo version.
Elon can't deliver any of it. All he can do is buy other companies and hype their stocks.
I guess I'm just glad that Elon missed this opportunity because he was too preoccupied with berating his underpaid workers on the factory floor or demanding that his engineers redesign his rockets so the shape "looks cooler"
I think it's easy to overlook how many failed businesses this man has had. He's tried (or at least promised) a lot of the stuff you suggested. It's just all died out so long ago that we've forgotten about it.
Its staggering how intransigent the modern economy has become. You can assign vast fortunes to the goal of requisitioning materials and manpower for a given project, and it all just gets swallowed up by finance capitalism.
I'm old enough to remember watching the suburbs build out during the 80s, 90s, and 00s. Seven gas stations inside a few miles could go up in a couple of years. In fact, you'd typically see three or four gas stations competing on every major intersection. I could drive you around Sugar Land, TX and point you to a dozen gas stations that were built just during my time in High School. And for hundreds of thousands of dollars, not thousands of millions.
But that was an era of Growth Capitalism, where we couldn't possibly leave a single bare patch of dirt between Rosenberg and The Woodlands. Everything had to be paved. And we unleashed phenomenal human labor and material resources to accomplish it all. By contrast, we can't seem to build shit for shit now. Money just falls into some bottomless pit of bureaucracy and graft.
We've got to pay a guy to pay a guy to pay a guy to pay a guy to do a thing.
Yeah, the reason that sprawl was able to work is that it was built around a Ponzi scheme.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
fixed that for you
I see now why the mafia likes construction so much. At least in Japan they build shit
Japan is famous for building shit and then tearing it down again every 10-20 years. Its lucrative, but also enormously wasteful.
oh so that's why Kamurocho is always changing every game
One year during the bubble economy of the 1980s - Japan poured more concrete than the entire US. And Japan is the size of California.
"Behold the marvels of a so-called 'service' economy!!"
Btw this is a tangent but I think that the left, whatever the fuck that is, could do a whole lot better at redirecting that anarcho-capitalist/Reaganomics urge in westerners who blame government graft and arrive at the solution of "getting rid of government".
It's not particularly tricky to trace out a little mental network where you have [Big Business/Big Industry of choice], the government, and how they interact in a fairly vulgar way:
Big Business X uses their money to lobby the government for tax breaks, contracts, regulations that benefit their interests, subsidies and bailouts etc.
The government receives this money and provides a whole lot of kickbacks to Big Business X
Big Business X now has more money to spend on lobbying the government to get them to cough up more money
Wash, rinse, repeat.
It's a little bit more complicated than "Government bad!!" but if you can get one person to walk away from a discussion about this with the message "Business gives money to the government in order to get the government to give them more money so that they can give more money to the government so they will give more money to business..." and they start seeing it in their own lives - maybe it's Tesla, maybe it's Boeing, maybe it's Lehman Brothers - then I think that will help inoculate that person against the lopsided narrative that the problem is just "too much government" or "government corruption" and so therefore the solution is hyper-capitalism.
This is a cursed video that was recorded at a cursed conference by a cursed speaker from a cursed lineage with cursed politics but this kind of thought experiment can really shake people up and get them to start thinking about things systemically when it comes to politics and economics, and it fits into the angle for agitation which I'm describing.
Sure, you can see it. But there's nothing you can really do about it at a national level.
At a more local level, we see that kind of graft, but the best any locality can really do is just "Say No!" to everything offered up by the municipal government. That doesn't get you a healthy economy or a functional government, it just gets people finding elaborate back-doors for funneling money outside democratic institutions. Case in point, the Texas takeover of HISD after over a decade of failing to take it over and privatize it through well-financed conservatives running in local elections. Rather than deal with a bunch of intransigent locals who refuse to see their education system carved up and sold off, the state just seizes the entire school district and staffs it with industry flaks of the Governor's choosing.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
"fed govt creates framework for doing [x], tells states to make rules about [x], state distributes funds to local agencies (counties, cities, etc) to implement [x] while following rules". two years is about how long it takes to get all that done in prep of any actual construction.
also, what an unfortunate last name for that guy
This isn't a revolutionary new idea. We've had charging stations since the Obama Administration, we don't need to invent them from first principles.
Maybe they scrapped it all (or lost it) and started over. But if you look at the history of other big national projects (Mitt Romney's Big Dig, the current state of the NYC subway system, the California HSR project) you'll notice how you've got layer after layer of consultancy that saps all this money away doing busy work, while actual physical construction projects stall out for decades.
Seven stations over two years isn't even a pilot program. I'm curious to know where they even got the number seven from, as it seems abnormally high for a project that's still supposed to be in a planning stage. But, broadly speaking, we already have a large network of refueling stations distributed across the country. We just have an entirely privatized model that's openly hostile to EVs as competition.
So this is massive bazinga-brain shit but...
Imagine you're Elon Musk at the peak of his wealth and clout. The government is literally throwing cash at you constantly.
You need to expand the Tesla brand and capture the US EV market before it gets away from under you in a few short years.
What do you do?
You go to somewhere in San Francisco and buy an old gas station to turn it into a charging station. You hype the shit out of it and do all the techbro aesthetics and Tesla branding. You turn the gas station into a "tEsLa LiFeStYlE dEsTiNaTiOn" where you offer overpriced trendy food, rentable WeWork style office spaces, and fucking sleeping pods or VR rooms idk. If Tesla managed to get their tech sorted (lmao) you could offer some sort of seamless transition where whatever you were doing on your stupid Tesla tablet when you were supposed to be focusing on the road can be transmitted to the office that you rented or your pod or whatever. (Shit, you just promise that you'll roll this feature out "within the next 18-24 months" and never come through with it, if you want to be the Biblically-accurate Elon.)
I guess you do something about offering drycleaning too? Rich techbros don't like doing menial labour and it feels like something they'd pay lots of money for someone else to do idk...
Anyway, you have some sort of slick one-stop shop that you build around your chargers. Maybe you do shit like screw around with having lower cost/free throttled recharging so you can milk people for their cash in your glorified roadside carnival sideshow while making them feel like they're getting the better deal by saving a few bucks on charging while they're being part of something visionary and futuristic and lifestyle-y.
It gets hyped (it's Tesla 🙄) The exclusivity makes those early-adopter marks who are Tesla's key market go wild. You take some senators for a tour of your operation and you wow those shmucks with pretty lighting and sleek, minimalist (and inherently bougie) interior design.
Then you hit the government up for funding to roll out this model across the country with some agreement that you'll allow non-Tesla EVs permission to use the throttled charging rate to make it satisfy the lowest level that the anti-competition regulations have sunk to in the US by this point.
You buy up more defunct gas stations, do the same shit, sell overpriced "services" and all on the government's dime while effectively capturing the US EV market by sidelining the competition.
Start offering a feature with your drycleaning service so that you can dictate which charging station you want to pick your stuff up from via your car's tablet to make mahogany suite types feel like they're really getting their money's worth because of all the "convenience" (you're going to get it sent to the exact same location every time except when you're on a business trip, you clowns) and the sense of control it provides them. That sort of shit.
Then you go one step bigger and make a Tesla Supercharger Centre or whatever. I guess it needs more of the letter x in the name, like Tesla Supercharger Xentre or something. Build a gym onto the station to really lean into the lifestyle nonsense and you do the usual marketing gimmicks to hook people - offer to pay people out of their current gym membership if you sign up to the Tesla one or give them a 50% discount for a year upon the purchase of a new Tesla or whatever. (I guess you'd probably need to provide a valet service to make it truly viable so that people aren't clogging up the charging spots while they're taking a conference call or in the middle of a workout though...)
I have absolutely zero faith that Tesla's production capacity would be able to handle the increase in demand that such a plan might be able induce. But that's beside the point. If you made the right manoeuvres you could charge non-Tesla owners a premium rate... I mean you could "offer a significant discount" to Tesla owners, stitch up the market, maybe run the gym as a loss-leader in the knowledge that you would be luring people in to buy some food or some microgreens health smoothie thing on their way back to their cars, and do pretty much the whole thing on the taxpayer dollar.
To begin with, you just outsource all the extraneous sides of the new venture via contracts but if you get big enough on some elements of the model then you start doing bean-counter shit and you start buying up a drycleaning business or a gym chain or you launch a health supplement subsidiary or a company that makes premium ready-meals which you offer in-store (or whatever it happens to be) which you already know will turn a good profit because you can measure this from within your current operations - and you have just diversified your company and its revenue streams without pissing capital up the wall on a stupid venture like The Boring Company.
If all of this sounds like something you could turn into an absurdist sci-fi short film about the near-future becoming a banal hellscape, it's because that's exactly what it is.
But what it really boils down to, in classic silicon valley-style "innovation", is a glorified airport lounge except Tesla-branded and for charging your car instead. Or just a glorified truck stop for rich techbros. In any case, there wouldn't be anything new about it, it would just be reconfiguring what already exists, combining a few existing things together into one, and slapping a dumb logo on the whole thing so you can charge a premium from an existing customer base that you know isn't just willing to pay but that is genuinely excited about it too. If there's any kernel of an actual good idea in all of this it's that this would be a way of turning the wait-time for EV recharging from being a downside into an exciting money trap that extends the Tesla experience and brand prestige while convincing people that they're being productive (you are being charged to use a desk that's in a different location), being healthy (you don't need a gym membership to exercise), or doing self-care (you can nap in your car, you don't need a sleep pod).
I guess I'm just glad that Elon missed this opportunity because he was too preoccupied with berating his underpaid workers on the factory floor or demanding that his engineers redesign his rockets so the shape "looks cooler", and I hope that one day he comes across this idea when it's already far too late and his business empire is in ruins so he can be constantly plagued by the thoughts of what could have been until the earth is finally free of his wretched existence.
The problem with so much of this Bazinga shit is that as soon as it's in practice it looks like dog shit.
The Cybertruck, the Twitter overhaul, the failed Solar City Business, the failed Boering Company, his stupid automatons...
Yeah, in theory you can brainstorm all sorts of "good ideas". But then you actually have to do them, even if you're just doing a Disneyfied demo version.
Elon can't deliver any of it. All he can do is buy other companies and hype their stocks.
I think it's easy to overlook how many failed businesses this man has had. He's tried (or at least promised) a lot of the stuff you suggested. It's just all died out so long ago that we've forgotten about it.
Just look at that smile
gommulism