…some of the best engineers in the world trying to build an impossible thing.
Something tells me that these were not in fact, the best engineers in the world if they knew a project was impossible and tried to make it anyway. I feel like the “best” engineers in the world would try and make things that are actually practical and possible in our reality.
Rather than looking at trains and thinking, if we build those we can sell tickets, they looked at shareholders and the government and thought, I bet we could fleece them. We’re seeing the military effects of this, too, with neoliberales looking shocked as to why more and more funding doesn’t automatically equal more and more armaments. Commodity production detached from anything with the use value that makes the commodity a commodity.
I think the practical is the most important factor, here. It’s hard to know how one of the world’s richest billionaires can get so deep into a project that has an exchange value but no use value. This is what happens when imperialists dismiss productive capital, and become parasitic on government grants, defrauded shareholders, and asset stripping. It was the same with crypto and nfts.
it is because as Vijay Prashad said US billionaires hid their monies in illicit tax havens in UK and EU. And there is no state control to put those monies back into infrastructure but Elon musk sure have his pet projects like Mars colonization and Hyperloopy , I mean why not Elon and military industrial complex don’t get why ordinary people need food and stuff.
Musk’s “Mars colonization” project will end up the exact same way as his “hyperloop”. One day it will simply and quietly be declared dead and everyone will forget about it. (Meanwhile China and Russia will be building a moon base together.)
“Poor economic choices” is building functioning railways that people use.
As opposed to the good economic choice of HS2 where you plan to build a London to Manchester rail in 12 years, and then proceed to spend 6 years building nothing before announcing your rail-line that doesn’t exist is actually only going to go to Birmingham now.
No, I’m not envious of china being able to actually build railways while TERF island just plans to spend ~a decade imagining how cool it’d be if they hypothetically had a railway. /s
“No rail-less nations are building rails” shows the infantile level at which this guy’s brain operates. Global north countries are steadily showing a decline in living conditions while most global south countries don’t have the economic sovereignty to invest in public infrastructure. Rail-less nations are not building rails because of neoliberal austerity not because it is not a sound investment.
The real reason why no one builds railroads (except for china) is because of automobile industry lobbying. For instance, Brazil used to have a functioning rail system until around the 60s, until a bunch of car factories moved in and started pressuring the government to not only invest more on roads, but to abandon passenger trains altogether as an “incentive” for people to buy cars. It’s also the reason why so many right wingers are so against walkable cities, they pretty much just gobble up corporate propaganda and think cars are freedom machines.
until around the 60s, until a bunch of car factories moved in and started pressuring the government to not only invest more on roads, but to abandon passenger trains altogether as an “incentive” for people to buy cars.
Is there any connection to the military dictatorship here?
“China doesn’t count because I don’t consider nonwhite nations to be successful”
If you put PhD in your username I will not care about what you have to say
People that put that sort of stuff give me insecurity vibes. Same with Dr., Engineer, etc…
Billions of dollars essentially gone to shit only to come up with trains but in tunnels and failing drastically
Wasn’t the hyperloop supposed to be pod based in some far back concept iteration? It’s not even train in tunnel, that’s just a subway, it’s gadgetbahn in tunnels
Isambard Brunel, one of history’s great engineers, tried to make one in the 1800s.
The project failed due to materials science limits of the day (leather seals for high vacuum)
So he went back to building normal, non-silly railways.
So it’s fair to say “maybe we didn’t have the technology 150 years ago” but that also means you know exactly what mistakes to not repeat. Of course, this assumes a good-faith operation, not a placebo promised to keep people from demanding normal, non-silly railways in thr first place.
