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China on Thursday rolled off the production line a prototype magnetic-levitation train with a designed top speed of 600 km per hour in the eastern city of Qingdao.
The debut of China's first high-speed maglev train testing prototype marks a major breakthrough for the country in the high-speed maglev transit system.
The testing prototype, which has one car only, can check and optimize the key technologies and core system components of the high-speed maglev system and lay a technological basis for the forthcoming engineering prototype, said Ding Sansan, head of the train's research and development team and deputy chief engineer of CRRC Qingdao Sifang Co., the train builder.
China is the third-largest country in the world by area. If they successfully implement a high-speed rail network, will American objections to scale finally be overcome?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 26 2019, @10:03AM (9 children)
Another fact that I don't buy. It's certainly false in the case of phone systems and passenger airlines in Europe for a glaring counterexample.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nuke on Sunday May 26 2019, @10:39AM (1 child)
I guess you just forgot to exclude British Telecom in that assessment. They are shit with shit Indian call centres manned by shits who talk shit. And I do remember the previous nationalised phone system. I was left without a phone connection for 6 weeks by BT because their Indians could not understand the concept of a line brought down by a tree (don't they have trees in India? - wouldn't surprise me). I changed companies after that.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 26 2019, @07:44PM
So is there more to Europe than the UK?
That choice wouldn't have existed prior to privatization.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pav on Sunday May 26 2019, @02:37PM (6 children)
Australias national telco (rebranded "Telstra") was such a disaster part of the governments mandate was unscrewing the situation, which of course was out of public hands... so a new telco called "NBNco" was formed. Unfortunately during the long rollout process of new infrastructure the government changed, and the neoliberal ideologues who made the original mistake of privatising were voted back in. They purposely sabotaged the rollout so badly it's now a worldwide laughing stock - they actually downgraded the fibre-to-the-node infrastructure by buying all the poorly maintained privatised wires (for BILLIONS!) just so they could say "See! The private sector was just as good!".
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 27 2019, @12:27AM (5 children)
I guess we shouldn't privatize stuff that way, right? Notice we've gone from saying that such privatization doesn't work to cherry-picking cases where it doesn't work.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dry on Monday May 27 2019, @02:07AM (4 children)
Private is usually more expensive then public due to needing to make a profit on top of operating costs. The exception is when someone who wants to kill it is put in charge and they then proceed to sabotage it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 27 2019, @03:39AM (3 children)
This is based on the completely unwarranted assumption that public entities operate anywhere near the efficiency of private businesses so that the additional cost of profit matters. My view is the converse. The existence of profit means that private businesses have an incentive to operate at a higher level of efficiency and lower operating costs.
Sure, one can come up with companies that are ridiculously inefficient, particularly companies that get plenty of their business from government contracts and funding, and hence, can operate at similar levels of inefficiency without consequence. But most businesses don't have that luxury. And sorry, there are no government organizations anywhere in the world operating at the efficiency and effectiveness of a UPS, Amazon, or SpaceX.
(Score: 2) by dry on Monday May 27 2019, @03:45AM (2 children)
Private companies operate efficiently in a competitive atmosphere. Generally governments get involved in businesses where for various reasons, there is little or no competition.
Once a business is in a position where there is little or no competition, efficiency doesn't matter as much as profit.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 27 2019, @03:54AM (1 child)
I've discussed how to make that competitive atmosphere in high speed rail. I don't think the problem is intractable.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Wednesday May 29 2019, @04:25AM
Well, let me spell it out - initial outlay and maintenance is so huge only the busiest routes in the world are worth a high speed rail link. Even with a private duopoly the profit motive is roughly halved, and a duopoly is not much better than a monopoly (few players make competition easy to "avoid"), and the huge infrastructure overhead has just been doubled for this dubious reason.