I hate the attitude that professor exhibits. "Well we might've wasted years of work, billions of dollars, millions of man-hours, burned up large stockpiles of limited resources, arrested development of national infrastructure doing something we knew was impossible and in this process we've created absolutely nothing worthwhile, but at least I learned a lot! Gotta look on the bright side!"
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.
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.
"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 "
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.
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
"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!"
If everyone in the US who supported the Ansar Allah at this point was a "tankie" we'd have the 3.5% of the population needed to overthrow this fascist state.
China doesn't count because you can't trust whatever they report to be true.
An example would be their "China made" microchips for the new Huawei or their new laptops, that were supposed to be proof that China didn't need western chips, but then the chips say "Taiwan" for some reason, and you realize they were still using western or older chips, but lying about them being manufactured in China.
When it comes to trains, we've all seen the horribly photoshopped gifs of the trains running on their empty rails.