No, China doesn’t count because that would challenge my worldview. I know I’m right, I just haven’t figured out how yet.
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...
(context)
If China did the same thing with state resources this dude would have a half chub for the rest of his life
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.
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.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-rail-operator-deutsche-bahn-admits-major-drop-in-punctuality/a-60338352
https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/2023-deutsche-bahn-delays-already-worse-expected
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?
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 honestly think that the significance difference would be related more to the individual temperament than the perceived v.s. actual material value. The problem is that both of those things influence each other, so the randomness.
The statement (in words) would be like this, the weighted significance between perceived v.s. actual material value is a variable that is tied towards the individual's temperament, up to a point where actual material value reaches some arbitrary threshold of say 100 million dollars, where it then becomes negligible, but then it is entirely a factor of the individual's temperament. However, I also believe that one's temperament is also affected as a variable of one's actual wealth, however this is then a classic nature v.s. nurture problem, and while we can get it into set theory, we cannot solve which comes first, we just have to start taking data and testing our weighted categories against actual material results.
Ah yeah, thanks for the response and discussion. Your final sentence, yeah, conjecture & hypothesizing w/o data can only get you so far. I was honestly on that rationalist train for a while and it still bleeds through with fantastical imaginary models. Need to touch grass every so often (i.e. deal with real world data).
I'm always super astonished though how some people, like Popper, Hayek, Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Marx/Engels; managed to have such elaborate and interesting models and conceptions without the kind of like data available now. I put in Hayek and Popper, they really were off the mark on some spots I think (I'm trying to go through their work to see what libs/neocons like about it, whatever they self-report on what they like is really not helpful and a bit incomprehensible to me) and it really seems, as a consequence of their material conditions & environment, what these economists/thinkers thought actually did make sense from their POV. It really wracks my brain.
Most neocons and libs haven't actually read Popper, Jevons or Hayek. And even if theu did, most of them are pretty reductive modelers, Popper intentionally so. Ultimately, they are just intellectual veneers for arguing for the continuation of things, Hayek and Jevons in particular the maximization of the creation of Money in the Money-Commodity-Money cycle, even going so far as a M-M cycle, because in their mind money is commodity value, even though we know that money that cannot translate into commodities is useless, power lies in the ability to marshall productive labor and control commodity production, which currency is pretty good at, but you can absolutely bypass it. Which is why no current national economic model actually follows Austrian economics, even if certain companies do.
Yeah that's fair. I was looking at it because I am working on a genealogy of economic & sociological thought. It's necessary to drudge through the mud and see what I can get. Hayek really didn't like the over-reliance on statistics or comprehensive models... imaginary stuff seemed to be the best for him.
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
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.
Don't wanna dox myself with details, but no, significantly smaller city
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
you could tell them that at least they had the right to fight it in court.
What liberal education does to a mf.
The liberal notion that you have the "right" to do something when some politician sign a paper that say you can do something even when you'll never be able to actually do it is dogshit.
What good is on paper having the "right" to do something if you don't have the material capability to exert that right? They could just be honnest and pass a law forbiding anyone worth bellow 1M$ to fight construction companies in court and litteraly almost nothing would be different.
Also, I'd like you to show to me proof that the chinese peoples are forbiden from fighting the HSR constuctors in court.
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
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.
You're almost there. The problem is not that power corrupts, by this logic there's nothing you can do and every country is doomed. The issue is not individual, but collective.
The problem is that the whole structure of the system is made for the interests of the wealthy that detain all the power and not for the hard working majority of people. Lobbying is the perfect example of that.
And it's not about good or bad, but simply colliding antagonic class interests where the class that holds the power always wins.
It's easy to get doomerish and think that people or power is the problem, that's precisely the position the ruling class wants you to take because it keeps then safe and keeps us under their capitalistic boots.
I invite you to read Marx. Once you understand the systemic root cause of the issues we see everyday, it's truly freeing. I suggest the Communist Manifesto since it is really short and can get you the general grasp, just be aware that it's language is very dated.
Here are other good entry points:
Why You Should be a Socialist in 2024 by Second Thought
Will Life be Better Under Socialism? by Hakim
How Capitalism sells poverty as modesty & why equality isn't a practical goal. by Yugopnik
Unless there is someone to patiently walk them through it, they will not understand Marx trying to read it themselves. It's pretty clear from their lazy reading, sloppy replies and fall back on cliches they are either taking the piss or mildly literate at best.
No progress will be made from self-education on this one imo, particularly with something as not completely modern as Marx. Maybe ABC's of Socialism.
I get what you're saying but I don't think this person is just trying to take the piss on us, from what I read here they look like just another misinformed liberal.
You're completely right about the rest tho, I usually suggest easier entry points like some stuff by the Deprogram boys, I don't know why I didn't do that this time.
When I suggested Marx I was more thinking about the manifesto since, while it's language is very dated, it is still good enough to start and get a grasp while being extremely short, but I should have said that in the comment too.
Power over others represents a problem, power with and through others (collective power) represents a solution.
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).
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.
"Our government is slow and inefficient can't take decisions in a timely manner (especially if it's decisions that benefit everyone at the expence of a fingernail of the bottomline of some rich dickhead for some reason
), that's how you know it's truely democratic" Unfortunately it's not democratic...It's a representative democracy where the representation is horrible. Yes, I'm no fan of the way the country is.
Well, glad you at least halfway recognise that the US is not a democracy
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?
don’t you think that there are others that want to stay but didn’t get a chance to?
Making a supposition that maybe there was doesn't make it true. If you think there is you need to prove it, a claim made without proof can be rejected without proof.
"I don't really care," states person who can't stop replying to comments.
"I don't really care anyway, I'm not trying to opt out of an argument I'm losing because I have no comeback and nothing to back what I'm saying"
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The point isn't "freedom of belief", you are "free" to be as delusional as you want. What they are saying is that good epistemic practice dictates that you have some sort of inference from evidence that actually supports your claim rather than "I made it the fuck up".
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?
So...it's a good thing when someone can torpedo a massive infrastructure project that will benefit millions just because they don't feel like selling "their" land? Because they have a slip of paper that says they own a bunch of land, they can personally decide whether or not millions of people have access to public transport? Is that the argument you're making? That capitalism is a superior system because someone who is rich and powerful enough can inconvenience or even destroy the lives of millions just cause they can?
It's not a good thing in the long run if someone can do that. I'd have loved the HSR from NCAL to SCAL, would have avoided all those hours on the 5.
There are pros and cons basically, there isn't a system that is perfect.
Yes, you're absolutely right, there's no such thing as a perfect system (and us communists aren't trying to pretend our system is perfect either, that's a common misunderstanding. The goal is "better" than what we currently have, not "perfect.")
But in the case of this example I would say the cons far outweigh the pros. A system that focuses on the people first and doesn't give the rich special priority and privileges would be a better society in general, wouldn't you?
For the greater good is definitely a good way to go. But I'd be careful about who decides what is good and what isn't.
In this case, I'd love HSR.
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 proof that someone was forcibly moved to make way for a maglev
Doubt they have that in China, if your home is in the way of a planned development…it won’t be soon.
[citation needed]
In fact there are many exemples of the opposite happening, China having to build around something because the person(s) refused to move and China didn't force them to.
IIRC, you can say no to private development but not to the state. Either way you're well compensated if you give up your land.
Yeah, technically the state owns all land, including the land that holds both personal and private property, so they are free to use that ownership, but they are also required to compensate the people who own property on the land. This is basically just a rephrasing of Eminent Domain.
Yes I can flip a coin and half the time it lands on heads I can then claim that heads is always going to be the outcome of all coin flips.
I worked with a guy back in the day who was a dual citizen and owned homes back there. They were far ahead of us in terms of transportation, payments and conveniences. He went back every year for a month to party, even taking a few of us along.
All those nail houses you see are homes near roads, do you see one in the way of a HSR? You can't build a HSR around a home like you can with a road.
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.
why are there those famous pictures from china of a huge construction site with one old house in the middle? must be because china can just force people to sell their homes when they want to develop something...
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
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.
Seems like standard capitalism apologia to me. Just absurd statements about how helping people is actually bad somehow and that society is better off if everyone is suffering. And it's so far off base from things like basic empathy that it sounds unbelievable, especially when it comes out of people we care about.
And all of a sudden my brain said "flamey-o hotman"
I may be broken. LOL
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.
Hospitals use tubes all the time. Whole buildings networked with tubes! Next time ask a nurse to see one. Or go to the lab, they give less of a shit lol
Well, you're on the internet. And it's pretty much just a series of tubes.
Can’t wait to get Byford Dolphin’d and have it all recorded on CCTV.
Byford Dolphin
read this as BYD Dolphin at first
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it's a Chinese electric hatchback that can now be bought in Europe, Australia, and Thailand
and before that, too
China's GNP grew an average of 6.2% annually over the period 1952–1978.
"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!"
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 
/sDomestically produced would be pretty close but I get what they're saying, just a translation quirk.
or whatever you got lying around
