China Suspects Its 'Car-Eating,' Traffic-Straddling Bus Is a Total Scam (qz.com)

China's "Transit Elevated Bus" or TEB-1 made headlines last year for its futuristic design that let it straddle two lanes of traffic, allowing cars to pass under it. Now, that very bus is the focus of an investigation. According to Quartz, "police in Beijing announced that it had started an investigation into the company behind the TEB for alleged illegal fundraising." From the report: More than 30 people associated with Huaying Kailai, an online financing platform that has been selling an investment product to raise money from individual investors to develop the bus, have been held, said Beijing's Dongcheng district police bureau in a statement (link in Chinese) on microblogging site Weibo. The statement added that the police is working to recover funds from the firm, and advised TEB investors to report their complaints to local police stations. Huaying Kailai couldn't be reached for comment. The number listed on its website is invalid and a message to the email provided bounced back. Bai Zhiming, who runs Huaying Kailai and is also chief executive of TEB Technology Development, a Beijing-based company that purchased the patent for the elevated bus, was among those detained, according to the police statement. Bai bills himself as "the father of the TEB" on Weibo. Days after the Qinghuangdao government announced the TEB track's demolition, Bai told Chinese media that the bus would be relocated to another Chinese city.

Comments

Flost tosp

[Hognoxious]

Looks like somebody didn't bribe the right people. Schoolboy error, that.

Re:Flost tosp

[rmdingler]

Yep. This could never happen here.

Re:Flost tosp

[Megol]

It is illegal to take and give bribes in China. While it is deeply ingrained in society making it hard to root out the Chinese government severely punish this crime - some are executed.

Scams happen everywhere BTW.

Re:Flost tosp

[aberglas]

The only ones executed are those that did not pay the right bribes to the right people.

Re:Flost tosp

[ShanghaiBill]

The people executed were political opponents of Xi Jinping. Their arrests and executions had very little to do with "corruption".

Xi's term in office ends in 2022. By then, he will have completed the purge, stuffed the central committee with his cronies, and should have no problem getting rubber stamp approval to extend his term "for the good of the nation".

Re:Flost tosp

[rogoshen1]

What exactly does some shifty business in china have to do with shifty business here?

You're like that annoying dude in every 100 level class who goes out of his way to come up with some contrarian opinion during a lecture, despite it being totally fucking unrelated to the lecture at hand.

No one finds that guy interesting or clever -- ever.

Re:Flost tosp

[AutodidactLabrat]

Thanks for the link.
One problem with Capitalism is that crime and corruption are so intrinsic that NO ONE builds a working database to take to the judges to get "prior bad acts" admitted in lawsuits and criminal trials against the 1% who coordinate these crimes.

Re:Flost tosp

[AutodidactLabrat]

Well, there is a difference. Trump has his victims buried in the dark of the night, so we don't know about them

Re:Flost tosp

[rmdingler]

Admittedly, I have some regrets about a 100 level class.

I wasted a boost on a Rogue and almost immediately wished I'd gone with a Druid.

Re:Flost tosp

[rogoshen1]

well since the nerf(s) to quad kiting, druids are not quite as awesome.. though having handy access to ports would be a plus (not to mention on-demand SOW)

More stories about Kardashians please!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to read about a stupid chinaman's elevated bus.

Welcome to the rough and tumble world of China

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

The financial markets are a joke and there is zero transparency into the banking and investment banking businesses. If you know the right people, you ride their coattails to riches (which you quickly slip out of the country into banks in first world countries along with your corrupt partners in crime, the very government officials who are supposed to be monitoring and regulating the industry). Otherwise, you may as well be playing roulette.

Enjoy the ride.

Re:Welcome to the rough and tumble world of China

[ShanghaiBill]

So...just like the US, eh?

No. The opposite of the US. China has the world's biggest trade surplus, yet the value of their currency is falling. That reason is that much of the surplus is leaking out of the country into offshore investments. China has implemented capital controls, but those are easy to work around, and actually increase the desire to get money out before restrictions get even worse.

America has the world's biggest deficits, Yet the dollar is rising. A big reason is that America is the biggest destination for investment, despite having perverse tax laws that discourage capital inflows.

Clearance

[denbesten]

Pretty much anything that depends on others to stay in their lane is doomed to failure. Investors not considering this will get the results they deserve. Better take the losses now then after a car takes out a "leg".

Re:Clearance

[JaredOfEuropa]

Drivers get confused or misled by the silliest little things. Care is taken to design roads so that drivers do not get confused (like ensuring tunnel facades are perpendicular to the road even if the object over the road isn't), or to mislead drivers on purpose (like visually narrowing a road to make drivers slow down). Sometimes a new road opens with a confusing element, with a lot of accidents happening there as a consequence, until the situation is remedied. And on top of all that, some drivers do the craziest things if they are about to miss their exit.

So yeah, a bus that requires drivers to adjust speed to catch an exit they cannot see, while driving in a tunnel where the walls themselves move giving them a very confusing sense of speed, sounds like a great idea. If you're an ambulance chaser, that is.

Doesn't seem to be a complete scam

[bongey]

They actually built something and installed track. A complete scam would be nothing pretty pictures.

Re:Doesn't seem to be a complete scam

[crimson tsunami]

Pretty pictures may get you the first round of funding, when that dries up it's not too hard to lay a few tracks to show how 'serious' you are for the next round of suckers / investors.

Re:Doesn't seem to be a complete scam

[Megol]

You just gave the perfect illustration why scammers would build something! Take a token from the "investments" and build something (a model most often or in this case a track segment) - suddenly people thinking like you is interested in investing as the project "can't" be a scam.

Advanced scamming operations tend to produce multiple models/parts as time goes by with no intention to make whatever they claim they are doing.

Seems they have much bigger problem

[bongey]

With people overloading vehicles. I thought seeing a f-150 in the US with 10 feet of pallets was crazy, Asia says that ain't shit. http://en.rocketnews24.com/201...

Not very smart

[Rick Schumann]

For a country that ostensibly wants to be the preeminent world power, they sure can be dumb. Who would fall for that thing in the first place?

Re:Not very smart

[jandersen]

For a country that ostensibly wants to be the preeminent world power, they sure can be dumb. Who would fall for that thing in the first place?

It is called being willing to take a risk; a lot of the things we now consider obvious parts of everyday life, will have been considered frivolous, hare-brained schemes initially. Computers, for example: didn't the CEO of Digital once, famously, say that he could see the need for perhaps 2 or 3 computers to be built, globally? The very idea that they would be owned by everyone and used mostly for idle play would have been ridiculed. America became the world leader, at least for a while, by being willing to take a risk and invest in things that might fail.

That said, though, this particular project does seem like one that could never work - at least in its naive form. Having a cars, bicycles or pedestrians moving freely under a moving bus on stilts doesn't strike me as a good idea; it would require immense self-control and presence of mind from all road-users, qualities you don't find in abundance on the roads. But it might be feasible to have a train system in two layers, with the top and bottom moving independently. Doing it as trains on stilts might even be cheaper than building trainlines in layers tha traditional way.

Re:Not very smart

[Megol]

Eh... Tritium isn't required for fusion reactions.

Re:Not very smart

[cjameshuff]

That claim was messed up in several different ways. Most cold fusion schemes used pure deuterium fuel. The problem with cold fusion is simply that cold fusion doesn't work. The notion that fusion is a scam if it can't produce more tritium than it consumes is an odd one too...the goal is power production, not tritium production. Fuels are typically consumed, tritium is unusual in that the process that consumes it can also produce it.

And finally, D-T fusion can actually produce excess tritium by breeding it from Li-7, which reacts with a high energy neutron (>2.466 MeV, D-T fusion producing 14.1 MeV neutrons) to produce tritium and a lower energy neutron which can go on to produce more tritium. And even the Li-6 reaction would reduce the overall tritium requirements.

Re:Not very smart

[Rick Schumann]

And funnily, in this endevour he actually got farther than most of you yanks do when you're trying to get that lifetime payout.

..which means they're not as smart as we are, apparently.

Re:pot meet kettle again

[blindseer]

The USA holds about 5% of the world's population but about 25% of the world's wealth. That makes us idiots?

Re:pot meet kettle again

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep you temporarily distressed billionare you. How much of that wealth is just a handful of people?
Being complete dumfucks electing Trump and even nominating Hillary makes you idiots.

I liked the straddle bus.

[Oswald McWeany]

I liked the straddle bus. I found it an interesting and unique concept. It's that weird, out-of-the-box genius ideas the world needs.

Very disappointed I'll never see it developed.

Re:I liked the straddle bus.

[Cochonou]

It was more like a straddle tramway anyway, since it runned on rails. However, even if this is a scam, the general concept looked interesting...

Re:even with 1/4 of the wealth...

[GLMDesigns]

mmm. I guess you forget the millions of impoverished immigrants that come here. Do you think, just maybe, that drives the average down?

I'm glad to see that you would like to limit the influx of poor, illiterate people - especially as automation removes their lawn care, dish washing and taxi driving jobs.

What about the people in the cars?

[DeAxes]

Am I the only one who's thinking of what it must be like for the people in the cars? As it's coming up from behind, it's impossible to know what's going on and people will freak out. Just imagine driving and suddenly you're enveloped by something above you, the entire car suddenly dark. It would spike my blood pressure! It should fail on that alone.

Really

[LWATCDR]

So are solar paved roads and sidewalks. Bridges with wind turbines, and putting water turbines in water mains.
My theory is that people make up stuff like this to get funding to study it and if that fails to put it into a book about brilliant ideas for the future.
AKA see flying cars.