mircea_popescu: gives very palpable, estimable value to something asciilifeform already amply describes as having felt on own skin, which is... "land value" of wash dc real estate ? why, 0, it's a sea away from The Road. san francisco ? same. congo capital ? SAME.

mircea_popescu: which is why and wherefore the whole "not much room in future for united states". there isn't.

mircea_popescu: by the time you end up with 500 or so 1mn strong towns dotting the mega-road, you've a whole new nation of a whole new kind. larger than current day us

mircea_popescu: icing industry needed for switchyard maintenance, and human services for the involved humans and so on. around this town then go the thick roads. so the town of the future has a "west side" and an "east side" in the sense of... the part of town margined by east-bound or west-bound megahighway.

mircea_popescu: but to revisit upstack : the item contemplated, 80 car lanes on each side of 30 traintrack lines would redefine a number of things. the new town then becomes... the switching station. every unit-of-distance the 30 tracks turn into a switch yard, 120 lines, 600 lines, whatever. in between these, the traintracs are fully reversible, meaning the trains run in arbitrary directiosn! around this yard is then built town, out of serv ☟︎

mircea_popescu: problem is... there's only one stake for the tv viewer, and it dun look pretty.

mircea_popescu: i guess so, at that. tv forced mistake, "gotta give the viewer steak"

mircea_popescu: i suppose this is one of those major "there are two kinds of people" things : those who speak languages, and those who don't.

mircea_popescu: once-notable empire, meanwhile powerless, saddled with a bunch of nominal allies thatr don't like it and readily intervene militarily against it.

mircea_popescu: in this future worldview, us role is very much that in which turkey lingered throughout the 1800s.

mircea_popescu: piddly ass 1817s level tech of single-railtrack doesn't reallty expose the power of rail in all its glory.

mircea_popescu: and with computerized control and much better robotics, you actually get car-level (about 50 tons) control! have the railcars switch in and out of high-speed bands! it's easy when you have 30 of them!

mircea_popescu: all euro industry was, at the time the "Common market" somewhat distant goal, served by rail spokes custom built.

mircea_popescu: whereas trains... fuck... make 5. make 55. make one per mile. what diff can it possibly make.

mircea_popescu: so you're stuck having to place them well.

mircea_popescu: exact problem discussed above! the issue with ports is that they, unlike train station, naturally concentrate.

mircea_popescu: yes road cost a whole lot more to maintain than the sea's 0. but this is a counter-argument here, we're overpowerful and desperately in need of useful work to do, ntowa.

mircea_popescu: it's funny how shipping counterintuitively loses to land routes. even among the romans, who were built AROUND a fucking sea, seaborne gross tonnage in any year was less than road gross tonnage in same year.

mircea_popescu: whether 2050s unavoidable or 2150s unavoidable though...

mircea_popescu: but the argument is undefeatable -- ship burns oil. train can burn electricity which can mean hydro, can mean nuclear, can mean things. things other than oil. in this sense, it's unavoidable.

mircea_popescu: well i guess time will tell.

mircea_popescu: whether the increased precision (no, you don't have to have your item lorried to port and then from port to dest) actually gives a 20% shorter distance, or 25 or 15% ; and whether the cost can be kept to 0.02 or even the foreseen 0.014 rather than 0.025 or 0.1 etc...

mircea_popescu: you might prefer to b) send it via train freight from exact origin to exact destination, at cost of 0.02, which is to say 8`000 * 0.02 = 160.

mircea_popescu: in this model, rather than have a) load it on ship in a week, from the single port, and then take n weeks to reach destination, and then unload and distribute by lorry, so yes you pay 0.01 per km on sea, which is 99% of the distance, but then 10 for the servicing, making your total cost 10`000 * 0.01 + 6 * 10 = 160

mircea_popescu: paradoxically, there's even an argument for freight. yes, it's true that shipping is cheapest per mile. the problem with postmodernity is that the needs are so fragmented and the costs of onboarding so significant, shipping could conceivably lose out.

mircea_popescu: in any case the only viable alternative to "well... let's just have another war, then" i've seen anyone propose. mile-wide highway still costs a billion or two per track mile, making the whole project large enough to give substance to something like us gdp. (that it will pointedly not be in any way related to us, secondary consideration. bitcoin isn't either, to its great benefit.)

mircea_popescu: but on the upside -- a 80 lane highway perfect place for ai driving. can have lanes sorted by speed at a 1kmph resolution. there's a marginal but present for "american technology companies" even in chinese owned future!

mircea_popescu: but whether it will go through turkey or through ukraine (doh. turkey, evidently) is by far the more important consideration of today.

mircea_popescu: fwis the strategic plan is "one week silk road : car or train, take your pick". IF they do manage to build it, which isn't a given even if not necessarily unlikely ; and IF they manage to market it so it reaches their traffic goals (this part, easier), all the "vision 2030" bs by everyone else, from crown prince of saudis to kirschner prince of us to etc fade in a very very distant bokeh.

mircea_popescu: yeah, like building a mile-wide train-and-road belt from beijing to vienna.

mircea_popescu: great winners in all of this, of course, zee chinese -- who get to see likely lightningstrike in land far far away rather than in sea as close to home as say... taiwan.

mircea_popescu: i suppose next time i am about to call something mp-whatever ima say gooduseful-whatever instead.

mircea_popescu: seriously, chicklit heroine meets Cool Guy McFucksticks ? i wonder what the odds are of such a name naturally occuring...

mircea_popescu: kek. by the time epithets are part of the "name" you know the marysue fiction's well caked at the edges.

mircea_popescu: but no, there's no getting out of it : turkey-iran with a russian background much much stronger than usg.israel + usg.saudi-arabia. israel isn't coming apart just yet -- therefore the peninsula must.

mircea_popescu: "it should help that prince mohammed, following the example of ibn saud, sees the importance of forging a special bond with the united states", sez teh official propaganda for anglotards. quite. lol.

mircea_popescu: conseuquently i dun think i'd buy saudi assets for less than 50% premium.

mircea_popescu: anyway. the deeply inept handling of qatar recently (which was, at least nominally, his responsibility, even if botched 100% by ineptitude imported by ustards) and the goingnowhere in yemen promise to yield the end of the whole affair.

mircea_popescu: anyway. usual failure mode -- got "us trained" moles into the security half of the construct, because "more competent", which is universally false but then again disease works by the host failing to recognize the pathogens, then 30 years later wants to "futuristic cities" where "people can have fun" and obviously list aramco on nyse.

mircea_popescu: and a fine example of nazi-socialism standing opposed to roossvelt-socialism. country essentially ruled by a fuhrer + the propaganda/gestapo construct (here, wahhabi clerics + "security" forces)

mircea_popescu: originator of the entire political system that took down teh wtc.

mircea_popescu: nah. think -- women not allowed to drive.

mircea_popescu: "bitch, you call me to a meeting i fail to return from, there's 10`000 rockets per square kilometer that take to flight. better hope they all miss, unless you're prepared to live in ruins-of-riyadh"

mircea_popescu: incredible fucktards though, argued with the dude all summer long, had no missile-acre at the ready ?

mircea_popescu: more like, turkey actual country. saudi arabia, like venezuela, very much madmax item, "here's this oil rig surrounded by vagrants. need big lawnmower."

mircea_popescu: amusing that this shit worked in saudi arabia where it failed so miserably in turkey.

mircea_popescu: to keep to form he'll make a blogpost now about how "he was surprised by wealth", ers style

mircea_popescu: as it is, next in the queue is plaintive missive from mohammed bin salman about how "he was tricked" and "teh deliveries didn;t live up to promises" in a few months/years/whatever.

mircea_popescu: sooner or later the dorks will understand that until/unless burned down us "embassy" / all ustards coming in detained and shot, there won't be peace. ☟︎

mircea_popescu: nah, moar like failure of orange revolution ("teh people matter, and here's a buncha dorky chicks fresh from usg "criminology" studies going topless hurr durr) had dept of blue usg move to white revolution ("teh people dun matter, here's kings-youngest-son being totally the true lost tsarevich!!!"). in this case the local pretext for legitimacy is that 32yo princelet.

mircea_popescu: (fwiw marriott still reports their ryadh carlton not available for check-in. sounds moar like nationalization than anything)

mircea_popescu: expensive where not built, expensive because temporary disruption (flood, bait-and-switch in switch cycle by socialist "corporation", etc)

mircea_popescu: there's conservation rules afoot in teh universe, and the web isn't going to produce an increase of information ; it provides a fraction of what you put in back and no more.

mircea_popescu: ie there WAS a hdd price issue after asian floods, but if you searched... much like http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-06#1733268 ☝︎

mircea_popescu: the web doesn't keep up with pricing issues in this sense.

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform just what the bolix wanted huh ☟︎

mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo cheap transportation makes french "terroir" (as distinct from arab terreur) a meaningless concept.

mircea_popescu: for someone who can't even tetris, what's with all the wank anyway ?