Not so friendly reminder that musk specifically came up with, and pushed, for hyperloop knowing that it would never be made, as an effort to stop the development of highspeed rail in America and shift all political discussions of it because “something better is around the corner”:
As I’ve written in my book, Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it. Several years ago, Musk said that public transit was “a pain in the ass” where you were surrounded by strangers, including possible serial killers, to justify his opposition.
Also: 2024 update, the total length of China’s high-speed rail tracks has now reached well over 45,000 km, or 28,000 miles, by the end of 2023.
They are additionally five years ahead of schedule and expect to double the total number within ten years. And, before someone inevitably complains about “how expensive it is”, they are turning over a net-profit of over $600M USD a year.
To be fair, China doesn’t have to deal with eminent domain.
On the “good on China” side, they standardized their train sets and rails to very few models for efficient and consistent systems, have the largest manufacturing base in the world, and the constant building of rail is training generations of chinese engineers how to build and run it efficiently.
The US builds rail infrequently to random specifications, generally with outsourced labor and engineering. Every single project is different, with different voltages, trainsets, tracks, on and on. Hell, we toss in diesel trains still for fun, like the Florida HSR brightline.
It’s a big part why we suck at it. As an example, the east coast Amtrak line that runs through NYC/Boston/etc has like 3 different voltages. The “single line” is actually 3 lines, with one of them nearly 100 years old with constant maintenance issues. They have been trying to replace it for decades, but we never fully fund it enough to do so.
We are just doing this the stupid way possible.
The problem with the buildout of Chinese high speed rail, that the US won’t really have should it start investing into it, is that China already had a very robust passenger rail system
They WAY overbuilt their high speed system, and now tons of lines are hemorrhaging money because people are opting for the slower, but significantly cheaper, traditional rail system that the high speed one has to compete against
Well, you don’t get better at it without doing it, so.
Still, about all these “China has built N M-units of P”, remember those of them about China building whole new cities? They are now demolishing whole districts of many-story residential buildings nobody has ever lived in, cause nobody wants to live there and buildings without maintenance will be dangerous.
And I think it’s not only that nobody will live there (China still has lots of poor rural population that would like some improvement), but also the fact that probably many things in those exist only on paper. Chinese corruption is enormous, despite what people here may want to believe, and it also involves oligarchy.
That’s why the US didn’t build high-speed rail?
Come on bro. What human rights violations are the Chinese specifically violating to build high-speed rail?
Last I checked, you don’t have to drive to a different state to get an abortion in China either, btw. So nice job cherrypicking “human rights” bullshit.
It’s so obvious when we’re dealing with people whose brains are rotted from propaganda as a result of the trade war.
The US does? The black neighborhoods they destroyed to build highways would like to speak to you
Except they can’t, because their residents are mostly dead. From old age.
We don’t do that anymore, for good fucking reason.
We still do it, it’s just that the voices are louder now when we try. My city was wanting to run a new bridge to replace an old, failing bridge, and SURPRISE, most of the neighborhoods that would’ve been impacted were historically nonwhite. Thanks to the Internet, it got a lot wider dispersal, and a lot more people were able to rally against it.
That’s the real reason yes. Not sure if hyperloop being underground avoids that problem or one still has to deal with property owners
That’s why the US didn’t build high-speed rail?
Come on bro. What human rights violations are the Chinese specifically violating to build high-speed rail?
Last I checked, you don’t have to drive to a different state to get an abortion in China either, btw. So nice job cherrypicking “human rights” bullshit.
It’s so obvious when we’re dealing with people whose brains are rotted from propaganda as a result of the trade war.
I hope people realize that the issue isn’t musk but California’s reliance on the private sector to do public good.
To nitpick, does that imply that it’s being both funded and constructed by government employees? Or is the funding public, but the companies that are supposed to be performing the work private? Because that’s how the telco industry works, and well… we all know how that went.
There really doesn’t exist a government workforce large enough to do the construction. But it’s bid out to construction firms directly overseen by the government, so there’s no big potential for just diverting funds like in the case of telecoms. Construction is all these companies do. There’s nowhere else to shift the money to. They have deliberables and metrics to meet.
Of course the potential for fraud exists but it’s no bigger risk than a project with solely government employees.
It gets worse, for the national HSR they’ve doubled down with a privatized high-end train line (think first class, private lobbies for premium etc) with a horrible “track” record in Florida.
Dubbed the deadliest train per mile in America by the Associated Press, Brightline has killed dozens of people (link)
New York-based Fortress Investment Group, which owns Brightline via its Florida East Coast Industries (FECI) unit, has pursued a strategy of mixing its infrastructure play with large-scale, real estate investments. Coral Gables-based FECI has developed multifamily and office buildings near Brightline stations and sold most of these projects to institutional investors at nine-figure prices. It also has a sizable portfolio of land and real estate holdings along the train line… “I think Brightline was a real estate play. I think it always has been,” said Bradley Arendt (link)
So a deadly company that refuses safety precautions (forced the government to fund further safety regulations), and is managed and owned by huge financial companies that own the real estate making their own government funded mini-monopoly rail line and estates! Oh yeah, they’re way over budget and losing money fast, but if they can just get that sweet “build back America” funding they can squeeze the company for a few more years before the high priced investors can cut ties and run with their profits.
I could go on for days probably talking about Brightline, might have to do a complete write up one of these days to show how nasty and deep all the crap goes with our politics and influences. Just make it a national service, this “private” sector for public utilities has got to be moved on from.
Unfortunately, that “real estate play” that you’re complaining about is the oldest and perhaps the only way to build a public transportation network that isn’t a net loss financially for the owner/operator. In many Asian nations with great public transportation systems, such as Singapore, the majority of housing is public and so the government is effectively using the same play. Part of the reason good systems are so difficult to get past the conceptual stages here in the US is that transportation and land use planning functions are separated administratively with responsibilities housed in totality different agecies at different levels of government, so the parties involved are forces to at best “coordinate” and at worst basically guess what the other will actually do or build, which makes it almost impossible to put together the kind of land use pattern that supports public transport with good ridership potential.
The problem with your premise is that it’s a private company who’s goal is profit structure not community support and is also being funded with public funds from the government to remain “Private”. Brightline from orlando to boca raton costs 100$ for the basic fare, or 309$ for the premium ride. That’s the same cost for a train between Paris and London. The same trip on bus is 30$ or 36$ taking amtrak (another train service that’s a public service). Can’t wait for the new pricing for the california-vegas run.
I was told that we can’t have a public rail infrastructure without doing a Tiananmen Square, and a Tibet colonialism, and killing all the Uighurs. You need a robust private sector to protect the people from tyrannical authoritarian socialist government. Elon Musk is the bollard between Tank Man and the tank, saving us from far-left extremism and blood dictatorship by soaking up a few billion dollars in state and federal subsidies to deliver kickbacks to neighboring politicians and finance his takeover of Twitter.
Y’all should be grateful we’re not living in the hellscape that is HSR China right now.
Fuck Elon Musk. He’s a piece of shit that has damaged the fabric of our society.
Is damaging the fabric of our society.
Read a very interesting column in Dutch recently, I’ll push it through translate:
*You thought it couldn’t get any worse than Trump? Think again Donald Trump has no idea who Elon Musk really is, writes Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer.
If Donald Trump wins the American presidential election and Elon Musk joins his government, that will be a playful stepping stone for Musk to a compelling power grab, writes Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer in an essay. Because Musk is a god in the depths of his mind. Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer August 24, 2024, 03:00
Last Monday, August 12, a conversation took place between the most dangerous and the second most dangerous man in America. It was broadcast live.
“The world is full of villains,” the second most dangerous man said at one point during that conversation. “If they think the president of the United States is a softie, they will do whatever they want and that is a danger to the world.”
The most dangerous man agreed, but he felt the need to be a bit more specific: “I think it is good to emphasize to the listeners how important it is that the president of the United States inspires fear. Global security depends on it.”
Although both men agreed with each other’s positions throughout the rest of the conversation, the meeting was marked by a fundamental misunderstanding that was not addressed or clarified. The second most dangerous man was under the impression that the whole show revolved around him, because he was running for president. The most dangerous man allowed this misconception to persist and settled into his role as a subservient interviewer, knowing that his time would come. ‘Citizen Kane’
The media magnate who gains disproportionate political influence through his empire is an archetype in modern Western mythology. Charles Foster Kane, the titular hero of Orson Welles’s 1941 film Citizen Kane, is a cross between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Rupert Murdoch can be held at least partly responsible for Brexit, the rise of Trump and many other political developments in the Anglo-Saxon world. Murdoch, his family and his empire have been mythologised by Jesse Armstrong’s HBO series Succession, which aired between June 2018 and May 2023. Silvio Berlusconi had built his political power on the commercial television channels of Mediaset, which he owned. The unforgettable opening scene of the first part of Paolo Sorrentino’s 2018 diptych Loro, in which a sheep freezes to death in a room in Villa Certosa, where the air conditioning is set much too high because it cannot tear its gaze away from a television screen, is a metaphor for Berlusconi’s influence.
Elon Musk could be considered a modern incarnation of this archetype. Instead of investing in presses, printing ink, and television antennas, he bought the social media platform Twitter in 2022, which he renamed X in July 2023. Musk has a fetish for the letter X. He named one of his twelve children, a four-year-old son who is called X Æ A-Xii, by name. But that’s beside the point. The platform X, which Musk now controls, is a powerhouse. It is one of the five most visited websites in the world. I should put the figures next to it about the growing percentage of global citizens, especially young people, who consider social media their primary source of news, but I don’t think that’s necessary. We know that. The situation is that Elon Musk has acquired control over a substantial part of the global news supply.
Musk has shared a meme of a man watching a Javier Milei speech on his laptop in his white satin bed while being ridden by a prototypical hottie: that’s how horny Musk gets from neoliberal extremism.
The main reform Musk has implemented at the former Twitter is the abolition of content moderation. Previously, deliberate disinformation and hate speech were blocked as best he could, but Musk presents himself as a paladin of free speech and allows everything. Instead of top-down moderation, he has implemented a system of so-called ‘Community Notes’, where users can indicate that certain messages are misleading, but research by The New York Times has shown that this seemingly democratic self-regulation is a farce. Apart from the fact that users are so polarized that they can no longer agree on anything, only a mere four percent of all Community Notes make it through the algorithms, and even in this small minority of cases, the warning does not prevent mass distribution.
Anyone with nfar-right agitators and conspirators are taking advantage of the new freedom on the former Twitter, especially since Elon Musk regularly shares their messages on his personal account, which is followed by more than 195 million people. At the same time, there are increasing indications that users with a left-wing, woke signature are systematically disadvantaged in the opaque black box of the almighty algorithms. It has now become clear that Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is part of a pronounced political project. Since his two-hour interview with Donald Trump on August 12, which was broadcast live on X and in which Musk gave his interviewee, whom he also generously supports financially, all the space to profile himself, this is no longer a secret. Horny about extremism
The advantage of Musk’s exhibitionism on his own platform is that his political position leaves nothing to the imagination. He is ultra-liberal in economic terms, opposed to taxes, leveling or any form of state intervention. In that respect, he is a fan of Argentine President Javier Milei. He shared a video of himself watching a speech by Milei on his laptop in his white satin bed, while being ridden by a prototypical hottie: that’s how horny he got from neoliberal extremism. He is a supporter of the White Supremacy Movement, a racist, an anti-Semite and an outspoken anti-woke. He no longer recognizes one of his own sons as his own since she wants to be his daughter.
The fact that Elon Musk is spreading and helping to spread far-right propaganda on one of the most-viewed social media platforms in the world, over which he has complete control, makes him dangerous, but there are other circumstances that make him even more dangerous. He is the owner of Starlink, which provides internet via satellite in parts of the world where there are no fiber optics or other cables. The extent to which this gives him power was demonstrated during an episode in 2022 when he shut down the internet along the Crimean coast to sabotage a Ukrainian surprise attack on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. While there are different versions of these events, it increasingly seems that Musk was personally involved in the decision to deny Ukraine a decisive advantage. On this basis, Jeet Heer of The Nation concludes that “Musk is now so powerful that he has his own foreign policy.”
When European Commissioner Thierry Breton asked Musk about his responsibility to stop the spread of unfounded hatred, he responded with characteristic diplomatic sophistication: ‘Go fuck your own face’
But the most dangerous quality of Elon Musk is his attitude, which is aptly illustrated by a recent incident. While Britain was being torn by race riots, after three girls were stabbed to death in Southport and after far-right influencers spread fake news that the perpetrator was an asylum seeker and a Muslim, Musk actively contributed to the hatred of Muslims and foreigners, even after the authorities revealed that the arrested suspect was a 17-year-old boy from Lancashire, born in Cardiff, who had no affinity with Islam. He responded approvingly to reports that mass immigration and open borders were the real cause of the unrest, commenting on them by saying that civil war was inevitable. When confronted by European Commissioner Thierry Breton, who reminded him of his responsibility to stop the spread of unfounded hatred, he responded with characteristic diplomatic sophistication: “Go fuck your own face.”
Elon Musk is obsessed with chaos and destruction and he doesn’t care about rules, laws or decency. He also doesn’t care about the truth. In running his own companies, he has a habit of flouting laws and often gets away with it because governments consider his companies too big to chase away. He recognizes no authority in the world other than his own self-proclaimed genius and his whims. He is a god in his deepest thoughts. That makes him dangerous. A gripping power grab
In gratitude to the most dangerous man in America for the pleasant conversation, the second most dangerous man in America yesterday promised him a cabinet position if he is elected president of the United States in November. Musk responded that he is ready to serve his country.
But Trump has no idea who Elon Musk really is. Trump thinks he is rich, popular, smart and powerful, but Musk is many times richer, more influential, more intelligent and more powerful. If the scenario comes true that Trump wins the election and Musk joins his government, then for Musk that is not the crowning achievement of his career, as Trump thinks, but a playful stepping stone to a truly grand and compelling power grab.
We need to realize that our democratic constitutional state is ill-equipped to stop someone like Musk
Who did Musk have in mind when he said that a president should be scary? The archetype of the influential media magnate deceives us. Musk is not the man to impress in the background and manipulate behind the scenes in anticipation of the ruthless film adaptation of his life story. It cannot be ruled out that Musk harbors the ambition to become president himself one day, and it cannot be ruled out either that his ambitions extend beyond the United States and that he is already dreaming of world domination in his white satin bed with his laptop on *
https://www.demorgen.be/meningen/u-dacht-dat-het-niet-erger-kon-dan-trump-think-again~b5cf8e56/
Union Pacific’s profits over the last 20 years would have paid for a high speed rail line from Chicago to Los Angeles
The existence of that entity as a private owner of critical American infrastructure, which uses it to extract rents from the American economy, has cost us at least one trans-continental high speed rail line worth of value.
The cult of musk is fucking disgusting.
It’s abhorrent how much influence he has on public decisions.
The man is a monster and his sycophantic followers are incapable of critical thought.
