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The Smog To Fog Challenge: Settling the High-Speed Rail vs. Hyperloop Debate
waderoush writes "Elon Musk thinks California should kill its $68 billion high-speed rail project and build his $7.5 billion Hyperloop instead. It's a false choice. We should pursue all promising new options for efficient mass transit, and let the chips fall where they may; if it turns out after a few years that Musk's system is truly faster and cheaper, there will still be time to pull the plug on high-speed rail. But why not make things interesting? Today Xconomy proposes a competition in the grand tradition of the Longitude Prize, the Orteig Prize, and the X Prizes: the $10 billion Smog to Fog Challenge. The money, to be donated by big corporations, would go to the first organization that delivers a live human from Los Angeles to San Francisco, over a fixed ground route, in 3 hours or less. Such a prize would incentivize both publicly and privately funded innovation in high-speed transit — and show that we haven't lost the will to think big."
What is the obsession with flinging your sack of water down a track at 300 miles per hour. In a world of diminishing cheap energy, why travel fast? You know, in many cities, the tram systems carried more people everyday than most cities now transport people in cars into the city from the suburbs.
Ding Ding!!
"conventional" high-speed rail is a proven concept in use today in many non-North American countries. Musk's idea, while based on things that are already being studies, contains a lot of unproven technology.
Even if we could do the necessary R&D in a *reasonable* amount of time, the 7+ billion price-tag is way too low.
It's a pipe dream - er, tube dream - to think this is a practical transportation solution right now or even in the near future.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Does that three hours include the TSA screening process?
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
California's high speed rail was originally going to cost $33 billion. (2008's Proposition 1A was a $10 billion bond).
5 years later, the estimate is $68 billion and it won't actually be high speed.
between hyperloop and high speed rail is a false race. YES we need fast trains to move people. What we need MORE is an electrified rail grid to move our stuff around. Most trains run off diesel. The age of cheap oil has been over for quite a while now. We need to shift our infrastructure away from fossil fuels, sector by sector. Moving ALL mass transport (cargo or live, vacuum tube or rail) to electric is of paramount importance, and it needs to start happening now, this way when oil started getting really expensive and scarce in the coming decades, we will be able to transport food and goods. What I think we should see is someone haul 100 boxcars of food from California's central valley to New York City using ONLY electrical engines, no diesel. That would be a landmark moment in history and a real beacon of hope for a future to technical civilisation.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Just build teleporters! By the time they get this hyperloop thing running in like 2020 someone will have invented teleporters and then their business model collapses.
As a test, it might be better to try this out on the LA to Las Vegas route.
This is shorter and land acquisition costs across the desert would be very low.
The route today is currently very heavily traveled so there would be a good market for passengers.
The casinos would love it and would probably fund it.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
They are both a waste of money.
"Musk's" system will not be cheaper and it couldn't be profitable - let alone break even.
Maybe, maybe not.
But 'profitable' in this era of large transit systems isn't a goal. The system that gives politicians the greatest opportunity to play hide the tax revenue will be the one that succeeds. The politicos will see to that. You need to ask the question: Which system will provide the most opportunities to skim funds for projects ranging from save the gay whales to housing for hobos? That will be the winner. The technology doesn't matter.
Have gnu, will travel.
What a truly idiotic proposition. A fixed route implies ground travel, which implies buying up tons of land, which implies god awful levels of politics and zoning, which implies buy in from the state and laws to make it possible, etc. etc. It's impossible to even get started. Any proposal has to be approved by the public. You can't just start digging up pristine forest or people's back yards for your rail.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
It's not a fair test. Railroads could deliver that speed today if not for government regulation. Even today's high speed rail projects only get rail travel speeds up to what was normal 100 years ago. Now, if you remove all of the restrictions imposed by the government facing railroad then you level the playing field. In addition, it shouldn't be about getting 1 person there in 3 hours. What is more efficient, moving 1 or a small group of people from point a to point b in x amount of time or moving a large group of people from point a to point b?
The Concorde was very good at moving a small group of people from point a to b at a high speed, but it wasn't economically sustainable. The slower jumbo jets, because they could carry more passengers were actually more efficient. So, if your goal is to get a single person from point a to be as fast as you can, then neither high speed rail nor hyperloop are the way to go. Both would be a collosal waste of resources.
OTOH, if your goal is to move the most number of people from point a to b in a reasonably fixed period of time, then that is a different problem and would probably call for a different solution.
Basically, before throwing money at a problem, you should be sure you have defined the problem you want solved. Otherwise, you might just pay a lot of money for a solution that you don't really need.
Right of way has always been the problem for transportation. Long narrow corridors intersect many landowners. One of the major reasons the transcontinental railroads were able to be built by private industry is that the US Government owned much of the land, and gave it to them. They didn't have to go buy small strips of land from thousands of land owners.
Follow a small road project in your area. Land acquisition will take years, decades usually. There will always be several people who just don't want to sell, either because they like where they are, or don't like the project. Eminent Domain laws in this country were designed in the early 1800's, and really don't fit a modern society at all. Worse, as we see in California, with long haul transportation there are political objections as well. Whole towns and counties that won't cooperate.
There is no practical way for private industry to obtain the land needed to build rail/road/hyperloop in 99.99% of the cases. That's why most private roads are really "public-private partnerships", government gets the right of way, and then leases it to the company for a hundred years or something. If we want more efficient transportation the thing that needs to be debated is eminent domain and how society as a whole handles these issues. Can the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one?
"Musk's" system will not be cheaper and it couldn't be profitable - let alone break even.
Maybe, maybe not.
But 'profitable' in this era of large transit systems isn't a goal. The system that gives politicians the greatest opportunity to play hide the tax revenue will be the one that succeeds. The politicos will see to that. You need to ask the question: Which system will provide the most opportunities to skim funds for projects ranging from save the gay whales to housing for hobos? That will be the winner. The technology doesn't matter.
Well, then based on your question, the answer would be Musk's system, since it is all new and never been tried, there is ample opportunity to have cost overruns and blame it on the new technology that is paving the way for the future (whether that is true or not). The cost overruns with the high speed rail in California have nothing to do with the technology but everything to do with land acquisition costs and environmental impact studies causing delays. Musk tries to get around the land costs by proposing using the median down the interstate, one could run high speed rail down the median, too, at a significant cost savings. Musk will still have to deal with environmental impact studies and those costs and delays aren't figured in his optomistically low pricing.
High speed rail is not new it has been around for over 50 years in most ot Europe and Japan and is pretty much perfected. It is what the politicians and regulators are doing that are causing the problems with the project in CA. If you want affordable high speed rail, get the politicians out of it. Put differently, if you scrap high speed rail in favor of the hyperloop, there is no reason to expect that the politicians and regulators won't mess it up, either.
68 billion for this thing is madness. So anything that undermines the project and shuts it down is in the public interest.
Further, if we're going to build a silly vanity project, I'd much rather have the hyperloop. The hyperloop is at the very least cutting edge and not something out of the 70s. California is supposed to be cutting edge. We deserve better then an over priced crappy train.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Big-setback-for-California-high-speed-rail-project-4739710.php
"the agency overseeing the bullet train failed to comply with the financial and environmental promises made to voters when they approved initial funding for the project five years ago."
Everyone in California knows that the high speed rail project is crap. Over budget by miles. Will not go to LA or SF. Will not be high speed.
This should never be built.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
This is true.
Nothing beats actual human interaction.
Telecommuting is such a failure.
Nobody wants their human interaction cheapened. If you ever want to build any kind of relationship (sales, groups, fucking, etc..), you actually have to meet people in real life.
Telling someone you want to telecommute is telling someone you aren't worth their time to do something expensive for them
Telecommuting is for people that want to cheapen relationships.
Also, 100% of the population needs to build relationships. It's not a salesman-only thing. You have to build relationships with your boss, your clients, your family, your friends, your neighbors, your government representatives, etc. basically anyone you want to do you good, you need to do good for them.
Only libertarian losers that believe in "freedom" think life shouldn't be about building relationships and think of life as for themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth. You have to kiss ass to those in power if you want power back.
You can find these sorts of self-absorbed losers on computer sites like Slashdot and Reddit. There is a reason geeks are considered awful people.
So what do I get for delivering a dead human?
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
"conventional" high-speed rail is a proven concept in use today in many non-North American countries.
I have used high speed rail in Europe, including Germany.
It's nice but usually slower than planes.
The hyperloop has the chance to be significantly better than airplane travel, at a reduced environmental (and noise) impact compared to a train.
I am totally against the California rail project because even the current high estimates are probably 5x lower than actual cost. But if we build the hyperloop, we advance all kinds of technology and leapfrog the state of the art in ground travel.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you waste money to procure a handshake, you shouldnt be in business.
If you don't understand the true value of a real face to face handshake is at times immeasurable, you DEFINITELY should not be in business.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Google Maps reports LA-->SF at 382 mi, 5 hours 35 minutes.
He said "if it were not for CHP, I could make it in five every time".
Shaving 35 minutes off a five hour trip is really easy if you drive reasonably (i.e. non-dangerously) fast.
In fact pretty much all the time I am somewhere five-ten minutes per hour faster than the Google estimate.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Other than up to $5,000-$10,000 in federal and state tax credits
The point is the Telsa is the first electric car that does not NEED to subsidies to sell, not that they do not exist - people would still be buying the car without those credits.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Even worse the fundamental idea of is deeply flawed - Hyperloop, high speed rail, or anything else that requires serious infrastructure have most of their costs up front - in order to qualify for the competition the system already has to be fully completed. You could skimp on the trains/pods/etc, but those are a tiny fraction of the overall cost.
So what exactly would be the point of a competition? Even if you could somehow fund all the competitors, you're building a bunch of alternate solutions to a problem that can likely only financially support one of them, meaning that at best all other contenders ave been a colossal waste of resources, and at worst the competition drives *all* the solutions out of business.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Commuting 300 mph to another city? That's science.
To work at a job there? Now that's fiction.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
I wonder if the airline industry would try to stop or slow this down. Every ticket sold to get from NY to LA via hyperloop would be a ticket not sold to an airline company.
Given the choice between waiting in long lines to be TSA manhandled, sitting on a runway for who knows how long, then suspended in air for more hours by a machine that could fail in one of any of a million ways and plummet from 30,000 feet for 15 minutes of sheer terror before violent death -- or getting on a sleek new sexy technology ground transport that gets me there sooner and safer, I think I know where I'd be more willing to put my dollars.
Not that flying will go away, of course, but this could eat considerably into airline company profits.
"Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff."
- Deep Thought
The smog to fog route should be half commuting endeavor and half civic, aesthetic milestone. It should not be viewed only as another way to shuttle business travelers around, but also as a high speed, low impact way to experience one of the most magnificent stretches of earth connecting two significant cities. The route should follow El Camino Royal (US101) with additional forays along the coast.
Not practical, not cheap, but things that are enduring and meaningful are rarely easy to do. Our legacy to future generations should be more than decaying strip malls and overburdened highways.
In this debate, people have forgotten an important point that Musk made early on: In being solar powered, the system is expected to yield enough excess electricity to make it worth contributing to the grid. I'm not going to get into the debate itself, but for those of you tossing the ball back and forth, you should consider this point in your arguments, whether you think that particular claim is feasible or not.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
We should pursue all promising new options for efficient mass transit,
That precludes the state's "high speed rail" boondoggle, then.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The largest issue I have with the hyperloop proposal is its rather pitiful capacity. At the highest rate proposed, with once cart every 30 seconds it still only transpoprts ~3600 PAX/hr, which is about on par with a 3 lane highway and that is before mixing in the car carriers.
Bog standard high-speed train lines do 30000 PAX/hr routinely, and while the hyperloop carts might be able to scale some, based on how they do the air bearing and that I think linked carts likely will not work, I doubt they can scale much other than by building multiple tubes (which adds upp the most expensive component in the system)
The biggest value add by public transport is to be able to free up the excessive area consumption an automobile based society incurs, but to do this the public transport in question better beat the automobile in land use with a wide margin.
Looking at speed alone is a bit of a red herring. faced with increased transport speeds people have always responded by traveling further which just escalates the problem of increased land use and increased energy use for transport. Throughput pr. unit land is likely a better metric for sustainable travel solutions than raw speed.
The lever you have pulled, "Brakes," is no longer in service. Please make a note of it.
I've seen police checkpoints when I was boarding an Amtrak train already and there was a remarkable case where the TSA searched people *leaving* a train.
The TSA gets to define its own scope. Guess what happens when a bureaucracy can do that.
1) you really expect to get $10 billion in corporate donations?
2) anyone who can make it through the state of California's environmental, legal and political gauntlet and build ANY dedicated passenger train system from LA to San Francisco deserves an award.
The problem is not that we don't know how to build great trains, the problem is that we don't know how to build a large project across multiple counties in California.
Giving people the chance to be stranded 50ft off the ground a few miles outside of Coalinga while the scent of 5000 heads of cattle wafts your way...
These "Hyperloop" ideas have been bouncing around since at least the 1850s. They are nothing new.
FTFY.
Pneumatic Mail, Part 1 - Dieselpunks
My main issue with the tube technology is that all the articles seem to assume that the tube will be straight. In the real world there are very few straight lines. Between any two distant points there will be mountains, valleys, cities, rivers, hills, houses, etc. The tube will not be straight unless you want to build it underground all the way then it becomes very expensive. Even underground there will be issues with valleys where the tube may have to be suspended. To me it is a given that the tube will have to have curves in it which brings me to the math of curves.
The acceleration of an object moving along a curve is a= v^2/r or r = v^2/a. If the object is moving at 600kph and we want to keep the acceleration to 1/2G at most the radius would be 167^2/4.9 = 5.7 km. That would mean to alter course by 45 degrees it would take 9kms. That is a very long curve. It is even worse in that the curve would have to have an in run and an out run to make the transition manageable. Remember that these curves are not just left and right. If one goes over the brow of a hill negative G's could be an issue. The human body can not handle feeling lighter very well. people get sick pretty fast.
To keep these smooth curves there will be very few places where the tube will be sitting on solid ground. Much of the time it will be under ground or suspended in the air. Both of those make construction and maintenance very expensive.
So, the key to high speed rail is to encourage TWO projects with a total estimated cost of $75B. And to do this by adding incentives worth ANOTHER $10B. All for a transportation mode that has not been well excepted historically. Wow. Why not.
Well, sir, there's nothing on earth
.....
Like a genuine,
Bona fide,
Electrified,
Six-car
Monorail!
What'd I say?
Elon Musk thinks California should kill its $68 billion high-speed rail project and build his $7.5 billion Hyperloop instead. It's a false choice. We should pursue all promising new options for efficient mass transit, and let the chips fall where they may; if it turns out after a few years that Musk's system is truly faster and cheaper, there will still be time to pull the plug on high-speed rail.
I would have pulled the plug on California's HSR project some time ago. It has already demonstrated sufficient failure and cost ballooning for me. But let's drag this out and spend more money.
Just remember that you probably could have funded Musk's project completely on what they'll squander on the HSR project before it is canceled. He might be a bit off on the $7.5 billion figure and he does have a tendency to promise more than he can deliver, but he's done a good job in the past of controlling R&D cost growth in his engineering projects.
delivers a live human from Los Angeles to San Francisco, over a fixed ground route
Hmmm... so the human does actually have to be alive on delivery. That complicates things a little... I wonder if I can get a special exemption for that rule if I pass an official some cash under the table.
and "ground route" too. If I strap a person to a rocket and that rocket is _close_ to the ground for its entire journey, does that count?
World's slowest "high speed" rail which will cost a ridiculous amount of money to start and overrun that, and probably never get completely build due to lawsuits and politics and such. Or a total pie-in-the-sky science fiction idea which will never happen either.
There are two approaches to big projects. First is central plan from the government, second is competition that let emerge the best solution.
Some countries are fond of the first approach (China and France for instance), some others like USA find it inefficient and usually prefer the second approach. Truth is that both way of doing big projects have merits and issues, and both have successes and failures.
However, the competition approach seems to have a big issue when the barrier to enter the project is a few billion dollars. That means that failed project will have wasted billions, which put a very high price on the succeeding project.
While it is true that a government-planned big project can also be a failure, at least there is only one billion-worth failure, not several.
For a napkin calculation you can probably keep a 100 mph average with a 150-200 mph train, so around 300 miles starts being the threshold where you'd rather fly than go by train. New York - Washington DC and LA to San Francisco seem like reasonable HSR distances
Taking a train to Amsterdam from Berlin was significantly slower than flying, even dealing with airport security. It's 406 miles...
The thing you are not factoring in is other stops. Even in an express train you may have a few stops, or points the train has to slow.
It is a bit more comfortable, I'll grant that! I myself will tend to drive anywhere within about 500 miles rather than fly, even though it's a lot slower.
Again though, even if it's comparable the thing about the hyper-loop is that it could blow both plane and train out of the water in terms of convenience and time. The things we would learn from building it could have enormous value.
When I first read about it I just figured it was a stupid wacky idea. But serving short runs as he says, that has a lot of value and beats out trains in every metric including cost! No way a train is going to get finished anyway, so why not just switch to the hyperloop?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And all these straw men libertarians? Can't say that I really care what you think there. One can study actual libertarian philosophy, discussion and such. What you claim just isn't true.
For example, let's consider your second to last sentence.
Libertarianism is for people that doesn't know that it's ok to sacrifice a pawn (their taxes) to save the king (their health care), for example. They don't know that government is a giant Costco that actually benefits them in the long-run, because they see the incremental failure that is them losing tax dollars. Libertarianism really is about the "me first, then others" philosophy. It is intrinsic to their failure.
So here, there's some naive notion that government is a giant store where you get more out than you put in. Ignoring that this analogy is so broken as to be unrecognizable, where's the demonstration that you will get more out than you put in?
Last I checked the US government together with the assistance of about every developed world government has the capability to spy on every phone or internet connection in a vast part of the world. I don't want that in my shopping cart. That's what your Costco delivers. You may not have noticed, but libertarians tend to be very paranoid about this sort of thing. And I think there's great reason to be fearful of what the governments of the world will do with this power.
Then there's the problem of governments not following the rules. A lot of people get that it's bad when businesses don't follow the laws and aren't punished for it. But who's supposed to be enforcing those laws? It's not the libertarians screwing this one up, but the same government providing all those Costco benefits.
Bottom line is the same government which you trust to hold your hand and wipe your ass, you wouldn't trust with business regulation, starting wars, or tapping phone lines. You're more of a problem to yourself than libertarians ever could be.
Planes cost a lot to lift in the air and get on the ground and there's no easy answer to both of those so the cost per trip is going to be high no matter what is spent in infrastructure.
Other stuff can be a lot cheaper per trip once you've spent a lot on infrastructure. There's a crossover point where on one side planes make sense and on another they don't. Where that point lies depends on location and the time frame considered. It's beginning to look like you don't have to consider very many years for even 1968 Japanese rail to be a better idea than planes between LA and SF, but that's where it gets political and Boeing even had the clout to get some spies to work for it at taxpayers expense against Airbus. A group pushing for something else would need similar political clout.
Also it would have to be a private or Federal thing since Californian state governments act as if they've been on a drip feed of LSD since the 1960s.
I can win this prize no problem, for a cost of just $1 billion. List of expenses:
$200,000: one top-of-the-line superbike.
$999,800,000: Bribes for every highway patrolman on I-5.
Now, if you want me to deliver more than one live human, that could get more expensive.
California's High Speed Rail is a boondoggle. I speak as a Californian. The problem is not simply traveling from SF to LA, it's how to get to where you are going once you are there. In each large city, the public transit system is not comprehensive enough to make travel easy. I don't take my family on BART to SFO because it costs $50 each way. These billions would be better spent enhancing BART or LAs subway system. What no one has yet commented on is the impact self-driving cars will have on transportation. Driving from SF to LA will no longer be so onerous if you can do work on the way. We will see the birth of the working commute.
Fixed that for you. Even the much hated French can get high speed rail right.
If you can keep the project off the radar of the bottom feeders then it's more likely to succeed. Public or private doesn't matter so much as keeping it from being run by a useless horse judge that is attracted to something big and shiny.
Uhmmm, trains inside tubes have been around since the 19th century. Why would building a train in a tube above ground (the hyper loop) be cheaper to build and run than a train in open air?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
California has no feeder routes. Even in areas where a train seems to be available, by the time a passenger manages the connections at both ends and adds in the wait time for even the most on-schedule service, train is MUCH slower than driving. If someone is to spend an hour (or two) getting from their origin to downtown LA and another hour (or two) getting from downtown SF to their destination and pay for parking and car rental, the train has to beat a car by at least 4 hours to get used much.
In the 1970's the variant was a maglev subway from NY to LA. The train would accelerate in a partial vacuum at roughly 1G and then brake at 1G -- peaking at a few thousand mph and making the trip in some ridiculous time like a half an hour. PopSci, PopMech and other sciency magazines all did features on variants. It seems I remember a feature in Scientific American that had a demonstration system built in a high school gym using a ping-pong ball as the train going some 1,500 mph.
So here, there's some naive notion that government is a giant store where you get more out than you put in. Ignoring that this analogy is so broken as to be unrecognizable, where's the demonstration that you will get more out than you put in?
Ignoring the fact that you are extending his analogy is a ridiculous level just to mock it, I'll explain how you get more than you put in.
The simple fact is that most people do get far more out of the government than they put in. That's how taxes work for most people. If I get cancer the government will treat me for free, even though the cost is likely to be far more than I have ever paid in to the healthcare system by taxation. Even if I don't get cancer I'm still better off because I didn't have to buy expensive cancer insurance that would probably have stiffed me anyway.
This is possible because taxation is somewhat proportional to income, and because companies that wish to operate in and benefit from our society also pay taxes. I realize this is quite offensive to some people who view it as theft, but I'm not debating that. I'm just pointing out the obvious way that the majority get more out than they put in.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Ignoring the fact that you are extending his analogy is a ridiculous level just to mock it
I wasn't the one comparing a government to a Costco store. Remember what I said about the parody?
The simple fact is that most people do get far more out of the government than they put in. That's how taxes work for most people.
If I get cancer the government will treat me for free, even though the cost is likely to be far more than I have ever paid in to the healthcare system by taxation.
That is never for "free" - even you reverse yourself in the next sentence fragment. Why even say that word? Even if we consider the remote possibility that you never have to pay net positive taxes due to circumstance, someone has to pay for that service.
Even if I don't get cancer I'm still better off because I didn't have to buy expensive cancer insurance that would probably have stiffed me anyway.
How if you had to buy cheaper health insurance instead? It's amazing how so many thinks the current, ridiculously priced US system is the only way to do health insurance. The US also had a health insurance system right after the Second World War, but it took a far smaller part of the economy back then.
This is possible because taxation is somewhat proportional to income, and because companies that wish to operate in and benefit from our society also pay taxes.
This is possible because someone makes a lot more than you do and they employ a bunch of people. If that changes, say because your government drives out enough businesses with regulation and high operating costs (such as via taxes), then you don't get that nice health care any more.
I'm just pointing out the obvious way that the majority get more out than they put in.
And I'll point out the obvious. That what you claim is not obvious. For example, in the US, I get to pay for corruption, NSA spying, onerous regulations, and a political class that is fairly hostile to just about everything I care about. Those things have negative value for me.
And the same government that does all that, wants to do my health care too? I'm not falling for it.
That is never for "free" - even you reverse yourself in the next sentence fragment. Why even say that word? Even if we consider the remote possibility that you never have to pay net positive taxes due to circumstance, someone has to pay for that service.
Pedantry. In the UK we say that treatment is "free at the point of delivery", i.e. you pay the hospital nothing. They don't check your wallet before checking your pulse. Obviously it isn't free in the sense that the government pays for it out of taxation, but we are just arguing over the meaning of words here.
How if you had to buy cheaper health insurance instead? It's amazing how so many thinks the current, ridiculously priced US system is the only way to do health insurance. The US also had a health insurance system right after the Second World War, but it took a far smaller part of the economy back then.
I could never afford it. I have chronic health issues. Insurance companies won't touch me, unless I agree to exclude those issues. It's hard to see how any insurance company would take on someone it knows will take out more money than will pay in, especially if there were no regulation preventing them from doing things like genetic testing or refusing people with certain illnesses.
Insurance companies are in it for the money. You are their cattle. They are only interested while you are healthy.
This is possible because someone makes a lot more than you do and they employ a bunch of people. If that changes, say because your government drives out enough businesses with regulation and high operating costs (such as via taxes), then you don't get that nice health care any more.
You made two mistakes. Firstly, it is possible because society has educated people to a level where there are skilled staff available to these companies and has kept them healthy enough to work. A lot of those companies are benefit scroungers anyway, paying so little that their employee's wages have to be topped up by the government just to allow them to live and carry on providing labour.
Secondly, if operating costs went up some companies left, that would just allow others to come in and take up their share of the market. If Ford doesn't want to meet European safety standards or pay taxes in Europe they can leave. There are plenty of other manufacturers who are happy to take their business. All you do by minimizing taxes and regulation to attract business is allow yourself to be exploited so some rich prick can pay himself a few million extra this year.
If you don't believe me then look at China. Much less regulation, lower taxes, and yet we still have jobs and a high standard of living in western Europe. All our current problems are of our own making, nothing to do with shitty low-wage jobs that contribute nothing back moving to shitty low-wage countries.
For example, in the US, I get to pay for corruption, NSA spying, onerous regulations, and a political class that is fairly hostile to just about everything I care about. Those things have negative value for me.
I pay for that stuff too and hate it, but overall it's still a net benefit. Name one country where there is minimal government and regulation and also minimal corruption, democracy, reasonable healthcare and quality of life. Such places don't exist, and can't exist.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
We should not focus money on better ways to travel long distances. Instead focus on locating work closer to where people live. The guy who has a 15min walk to work doesn't need billion dollar trains. People who live close to their family don't need billion dollar trains. We have cheap housing and utilities all over the country. These billion dollar trains are just a way of stuffing more people into Los Angeles.
The casinos should fund the LA-LV hyperloop. It would be a great demo project and image how quickly the casinos would recoup their money if people could make that trip in 20 minutes.
If you don't believe me then look at China. Much less regulation, lower taxes, and yet we still have jobs and a high standard of living in western Europe.
For now. It's worth noting that around 1975, there was a vast gap between what the China could do and make and what Europe could do and make. Both got a lot better over the decades, but China definitely is catching up.
In the last decade, it's PPP GDP per capita has doubled compared to 10-20% gains over the same period for most European countries. In twenty years at the current rate, they'll be past a good portion of the poorer European countries. And they'll have overcome those Eurozone trade barriers (like the various ISO standards). Now, obviously, they could hit the same economic walls that Japan and Europe has hit.
I see your bravado as whistling past the graveyard. There's no special reason to employ Europeans or North Americans. They aren't that well educated and the physical infrastructure of those regions just isn't that good, especially for the premium you have to pay. What makes those places special is their legal infrastructure which still makes it relatively easy to live freely, create businesses, and employ people. Throw that away, and you've lost the fundamental advantage of those regions over places like China.
I think the problem here is that when libertarians argue the societal benefits of taxes, they do so with respect to society, not individuals. Society as a whole does not get more out of taxes than they put in. They get far less (due to corruption, waste, spending on things that don't interest the general populace, etc, etc). For instance, society put a whole lot of money into the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, but saw little actual benefit from them. It is only when you view taxes in the perverse "theft of one individual from another" perspective can a "benefit" actually be achieved.
That's rather ironic, btw, as libertarians are typically seen as the greedy/self-serving ones with liberals being the generous/society-focused ones -- yet liberals couldn't give a damn about society as a whole, so long as money is being transferred from the affluent to the less affluent.
If insurance worked on a contractual basis, this would be easily solved. Basically, when you enter into a long-term agreement with a health insurance company, ensure that the contract can't be trivially terminated by either party. This would require a very small amount of regulation, not a government takeover of healthcare. To handle the case of "lock in", require that other insurance companies allow transfers of people with current policies with other companies w/ a cap on premium increases vs the average industry rate. Piece of cake.
There are always ways to solve real problems with a minimal amount of governance. However, our politicians rarely resort to those (which is why every bill is thousands of pages long, and why our tax code requires a team of accountants to decipher).
You are looking at it in the wrong terms. The majority of individuals get more out than they put in. Those who don't are not greatly harmed because they are still rich. In fact those who get less monetary value out for their own personal use still benefit from living in a relatively content and healthy society.
You, like many people, made the mistake of trying to put a dollar value on everything. You know the price of everything and the value of nothing, as we like to say.
There is also the assumption that having private companies provide services at the request of individuals would be more efficient than having the government doing it. Apart from the difficulty of organizing certain services there is no evidence that this method would be any better. Do you have any evidence?
yet liberals couldn't give a damn about society as a whole, so long as money is being transferred from the affluent to the less affluent.
It's not about transferring wealth. It's about stopping theft.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
So if you can't afford it when you are young you are fucked. If there is any tiny get-out or loophole in the contract you are fucked. If the company goes bust you are fucked. If the company just decides to screw you because by the time you get your day in court you will have died of cancer anyway you are fucked.
Insurance is already bad enough with the current level of regulation. People get screwed all the time. If you think less regulation is going to improve that you are delusional.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
So, in government, "building relationship" is manifested in what's called "taxes."
Another way to see how absurd your suggest is, is to consider a previous statement you made.
Nothing beats actual human interaction.
Telecommuting is such a failure.
Nobody wants their human interaction cheapened. If you ever want to build any kind of relationship (sales, groups, fucking, etc..), you actually have to meet people in real life.
So what sort of person would rather have "human interaction" with their favorite tax collection agency rather than the far less baneful choice of sending them a payment every now and then. You have to be missing that survival instinct.
And of course, there's the distant and remote interaction of Slashdot. I'm not particularly interested in having "human interaction" with you. And since you're posting on Slashdot, it seems to me that you reciprocate. So why are you baiting libertarians rather than having those meaningful human interactions you seem to want?
Just to answer you... normal people do it.
Nope. They only have such "human interactions", if summoned for an audit or the equivalent in your country.
You have to be missing that survival instinct.
No, he is choke full of survival instincts.
Whatever. I'd rather cut checks to the IRS at a distance than meet face to face and help an auditor make quota.
And of course, there's the distant and remote interaction of Slashdot. I'm not particularly interested in having "human interaction" with you. And since you're posting on Slashdot, it seems to me that you reciprocate.
False dilemma. Just because he posts on slashdot doesn't mean he cannot have "human interactions" outside of it with other people.
What "false dilemma"? It's a simple observation. He's yacking on Slashdot rather than having some of his valued human interactions. I merely note that he's making a choice that by his standards is rather bad. Same goes for the "trolling libertarians" observation. I don't rule out the possibility of other choices that have even more value than the two I mention.
That's not a fair statement. For one, there's wide ranging definitions of "rich", and whereas Bill Gates may not feel it if you take a million from him, a "lesser rich household" pulling in ~250k a year will impact their lives if you raise their taxes. Sure, they're not going to be starving or destitute, but their lives will be affected. They earned their money and deserve it -- who are we to say "fuck you, live an average lifestyle, now give me your wallet"? -- you seem to believe that if people aren't starving, they shouldn't be complaining -- as if the purpose of life is simply to exist. You are wrong when you claim we know the value of nothing -- as a matter of point, we know the value of our money. We know how precious each dollar is and how being taxed an extra 10% means I have to allow my cancer stricken mother w/ no savings to continue working because I don't have the funds to say "go ahead and retire, I got your back." I can't tell my starving bartender friend, "Sure man, lemme hook you up with a pub of your own." Or hell, even something so simple as having the money to retire a few years earlier than normal -- life is precious and short -- who the hell are you to tax me heavily such that I'm forced to spend an extra half decade toiling away at a job and claim it isn't going to "impact" me??? We know price AND value. You are the one who seems not to understand these things. And that's immensely obvious when you think you can take a substantial chunk of a rich man's money and assume it's going to have zero impact because he still have more than the average.
History. Both the government and the free market have their flaws, but the free market has a far better history of accomplishing efficiency than governments (likely because there is no motivation to cut costs or to compete in government).
Another talking point...you do realize there's a large swath of "rich society" that ISN'T financial fatcats gaming the system? They are the vast majority, btw. Doctors, lawyers, small business owners? Senior employees in their 30s and 40s in their prime earning years? These people aren't stealing shit from anyone -- they're living day to day just like everyone else trying to improve their own lives or the lives of their families. The theft you speak of is trying to excessively tax them because you believe their desire to pursue more wealth so that they might live a more comfortable life outside of work is "frivolous" -- that their goal of trying to retire earlier or maybe get enough money to be able to help out their friends or family -- this too is "frivolous" to you. And it's bullshit.
As you too are also delusional. Regulation in healthcare have been growing every single decade ever since the government first intruded in the 40s. That's more than half a century of increasing government regulation and all we've seen is ever increasing costs -- yet you put your faith in regulation???
You would have to have a hell of a lot of money to put in 250k/year. In the UK it would be £600,000 to pay about £250,000 in tax. Having "only" £350,000 in your pocket every year isn't exactly living an average lifestyle. The average wage is £24,000 in the UK, which after tax works out as about £19,000 in your pocket.
You seem to think I want to tax people who can't afford healthcare into oblivion. Of course we have free healthcare anyway, so everyone can "afford" it, but that really isn't the case. If $350k isn't enough to cover healthcare costs that's not a taxation problem, that's a you getting fucked by the insurance companies and doctors problem, something else we don't have to worry about.
The free market has a history of being "efficient" but also of providing shitty and expensive services. We tried privatizing stuff that the government did because people complained that the government was doing a bad job of it. Buses, railways, water supply, electricity supply, gas supply, road maintenance, some healthcare, some education, some security and policing. All went to shit. "Efficient" shit, but still shit and more expensive for us. Part of the problem is that you can't create markets in some of these areas - there is only one water network in a town, and you can't stand at the platform and decide that instead of taking a Virgin train to your job in London you will take a South West train to Birmingham today. Part of the problem is that private companies expect to make a profit and to deliver the absolute minimum service they can possibly get away with.
Interesting you should mention doctors and late career employees. Those people are not the rich. They might just about pay top tier tax on the last few percent of their earnings if they are lucky. They are well off but still middle class. At the moment, in the UK, their tax burden is probably about right. It's the people well above that band who are paying too little tax at the moment. It doesn't help that they tend to dodge a lot of tax too, by funnelling income into shell companies and offshore accounts. Most people can't do that.
You fell for one of the oldest tricks in the political book. You think you are rich because you earn, say , $100,000 and that when people talk about rich people paying their fair share that means you. It doesn't. It's just what the real rich people want to you think so that you keep voting for stuff that makes them richer while disadvantaging yourself.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I said insurance regulation, not healthcare. Learn to read properly.
In any case, the main reasons that both insurance and healthcare costs are going up are that treatment/repair is getting more expensive and that people sue them for compensation more often. A decade ago hardly anyone claimed for whiplash in a car accident, now it's pretty much standard and the insurance company usually offers it to you pre-emptively to avoid litigation.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Except that these are the people that politicians go after when they're looking for money. Obama himself drew the line in the sand at 250k w/ the Bush tax cut expiration. And the reason they do it is because there simply isn't enough money in the super upper echelon to pay for all the programs our bloated government wants to run. You can't just gouge the .1% -- you could take all their money and it wouldn't put a dent in our budget. And that's why they go after the "upper middle class", as you refer to them. And it's also why we rail against it and claim government should be smaller.
No sir, I'm afraid you fell for it. You're letting the politicians fan the flames of intense hatred people you have of the financial fatcat to raise taxes on the upper middle class and "lesser rich". Look at the legislation yourself. None of it targets the millionaires and billionaires. Every single tax break cuts off or phases out somewhere in the 100k - 200k range. Every single tax hike tends to target the 125k+ individual or the 250k+ joint. If what you said was true, this would not be the case. Hell, just look at the Obamacare tax that is 250k+ joint: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/04/obamacare-investment-income-tax_n_2236687.html
250k is well above doctor or standard career salaries. UK GPs get about £120k/year, for example, and a good late career salary would be in the 50-60k range.
If you can't live off 250k and pay fair taxes then the cost of living in your country is ridiculous. That is your problem - things like healthcare mean you have to be super rich just to live a comfortable life.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
No it isn't. That's 250k HOUSEHOLD (that's two people -- 125k per person). In some high cost-of-living regions (such as say NY or California, which comprise 46 million people total, or 15% of the total populace of the US), 125k/yr is far from "make it rain" cash. The median salary is like 60k. Doctors tend to make anywhere from ~150k to ~300k. Lawyers are somewhere in the 6 figures depending on stage of career. Late career white collar (say senior computer engineers or something like that) easily are in the low six figure range. Even a late career government employee (GS-13) is in the low 6 figures.
There is some truth to this. But it doesn't change the reality of the situation.
Right, but in most places income tax is per person, not for combined income. In fact in the UK if you are married and one partner doesn't work or earn much the other can get their some of their tax allowance (the amount before they pay anything).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC