• miz [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    President Xi, My name is Sleve McDichael. I am 12 years old. I live in America where we have no high speed rail. My country yearns for freedom. Please send Chengdu J-20 Multirole Stealth Fighter Aircraft.

  • Edamamebean [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    Meanwhile in Canada we’re still using diesel trains, but don’t worry! In another decade or so they will be scheduled more frequently!

      • JayTreeman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        4 months ago

        Just give me 300kph trains from Windsor to Montreal. Get that stretch, then we can talk about everywhere else. Most of the infrastructure, and population is on that corridor. It would literally transform the country… But it would require government with vision

      • ryepunk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        4 months ago

        Well we can’t make trains affordable and convenient how else would we make local domestics flights cost more than international flights across a damn ocean?

        Such capitalist efficiency!

  • Evilphd666 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    See what is possible when you arn’t focusing your economy on blowing the rest of the world up for manufactured scarcity and exploitation?

    This is the type of leaps and bounds I was expecting from the US coming out of high school 20 some odd years ago.

    • miz [any, any]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      during the cold war they told us that they wished they could spend money on schools and healthcare, but those darn Soviets would overrun us if we didn’t spend it all on guns and bombs. “peace dividend” my ass

      • Black_Mald_Futures [any]@hexbear.net
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        4 months ago

        Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies—in the final sense—a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

        This world in arms is not spending money alone.

        It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

        The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities.

        It is: two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population.

        It is: two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

        It is: some fifty miles of concrete highway.

        We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

        We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.

        This—I repeat—is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

        This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

        Eisenhower

        Would be such a good speech over all of he didn’t spend the bit right before this blaming the mistrustful Soviets for not just like taking their word that “the free nations” 🙄 are not aggressive

      • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        4 months ago

        Japanese anti semites believe that the reason Jews controlled the world was because they invested in infrastructure and transportation. And they wanted to usurp this supposed Jewish cabal with a Japanese cabal. I don’t know if this ideology influenced their decision to go ham on trains and other tech, but lmao

    • impartial_fanboy [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      Except they haven’t actually demonstrated anything, there were a bunch of startups and others in the west who have done this same ‘demonstration’ before concluding (rightly) that it wasn’t worth pursuing. Socialism doesn’t change physics, it’s still a stupid idea. Just because some group in China is now on the grift doesn’t change that fact.

        • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          4 months ago

          I don’t think that’s necessarily a bit. I’m not a train watcher guy but I can relate from the bicycle sphere.

          Bicycle drivetrain parts were an oligarchy at best, a duopoly between SRAM and Shimano at worst for the past 20 years or so - discounting the really high end or the oddball stuff with nigh 0 market share. Everything from china was obviously decried as a cheap shitty knockoff of those parts - having no experience with any of it, I can’t tell you how true it was.

          But more and more I see people using shit ordered of AliExpress, Temu and such because prices have dropped so much even if you have to buy two because the QA is kind of ass you still come out ahead. Fuck I see people recommending carbon frames by now and those fail fucking catastrophically if they fail. Real vibe shift going on there.

  • Vampire [any]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    I can’t wait for the vactrain future.

    Faster than airplanes (which are crazy fast, although we are accustomed to them) and wayyyy lower on energy-use.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      4 months ago

      Yeah, this is strictly superior to air travel. Also, just from sheer convenience perspective, these could have stations right in the city, so you don’t have to go to the airport, wait to check in, etc. for like an hour before you even get moving. Just hop on and hop off in a different city.

    • The_sleepy_woke_dialectic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      People have been blinded by a level of understandable Elon hate until China started working on it. The talking point was that it would be a larger evacuated space than the largest vacuum chamber ever built by NASA and therefore impossible, not considering that a very long tube is not comparable to a huge dome. You dunked on me before but I am vindicated!

  • Jacobo_Villa_Lobos [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    The concept of a transportation system in a low-pressure tube was proposed in 2013 by Elon Musk, who called it Hyperloop, but his company focusing on developing the system - Hyperloop One - was shut down at the end of 2023, Reuters has reported.

    The official website of UK-based Virgin showed that its Virgin Hyperloop made its first successful passenger test in 2020.

    Is this hy🅱️er🅱️🅾️🅾️🅱️ but better and real?

    • fox [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      A transport system in a low pressure tube has been a concept since 1799 and the only thing Elon did was slap an epic bacon name on the idea

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      4 months ago

      I mean it’s not like China is pursuing it in favor of proven HSR. They already built out a really efficient rail system all across the country, so now they have room to experiment with this sort of tech.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      4 months ago

      G-forces are a product of acceleration, they have nothing to do with speed. Sounds like somebody failed their basic physics in school. 😂

        • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
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          4 months ago

          The way you avoid having high G-forces is by accelerating over a longer period of time. These kinds of trains would be used for fast transit between cities that are many hundreds of kilometres apart, not for short hops like a subway. This is precisely why China has different types of trains for different situations.