Tag: Virgin

Hyperloop is Coming to India: How to prepare for it in your neighborhood soon

It’s been going on for a good part of the summer and is increasing in urgency now that India is going to be the first Hyperloop line built by Virgin Hyperloop One, but the roadshow for that same company has been soft selling the high speed next generation transportation system to Ohio, Pittsburg and of course Chicago heavily as the next logical step. Virgin Hyperloop One has taken their test vehicle which has successfully completed their testing just outside of Las Vegas and they are showing it off to various sites along the proposed path so that people can start to get their minds around the concept, because they are ready to dig dirt and built the thing. As I have been saying for a few years now, this is a game changing transportation system that will be well in place by 2030, but will start coming online in the 2020s with the first destination in India. The United States will need to embrace this concept so we can take the lead because this is the future, Pittsburg to Chicago roughly a half hour.

My job in these kinds of things is perspective, the future is certainly here and the desire for technology expansion is at the doorstep of the human race. How we manage it will largely dictate how successful it is, but the technology is there, billionaires with an imagination like Elon Musk who first came up with this Hyperloop concept not very long ago are coming up with the means leaving it up to us to figure out how to embrace the options. I personally think we have an opportunity to unleash hundreds if not thousands of Elon Musk types in the coming century and that a great many things could change for us all for the better. This is why I am against medicating children with hyperactive disorders, it’s a mistake because evolutionarily speaking, the speed for which young people are thinking, especially with the use of video games, is an evolutionary attribute that will help them live in that new world where such travel times offered by Hyperloop will really shrink the world in a good way.

I have also been suggesting that since Ohio is being considered as one of the hottest spots in North America for one of the first Hyperloops, that a Hyperloop station find a home along the I-75 corridor that is so explosive currently in the West Chester area—(hint, Monroe by the Outlet Mall). The ability to get around the world fast is the prime recipe for economic expansion and with a term 2 of the Trump administration understanding how the game is played and not having Democrats standing in the way of everything, this would be just the ticket. Speed is the key to growth, all growth in business sector measurements. The speed that we can extract information and do something with it, and the speed for which we can communicate with other people in collaborative efforts. And when dealing with supply chains, the speed that we can resolve issues up and down the line. A plane ticket is still an all-day affair, to visit a supplier in New England or the upper portions of the United States you can get there in a day, but the journey still takes most of a day with time zone adjustments taking entirely too long. Hyperloop will speed all that up dramatically.

We are becoming a faster world and the ability to think fast is the key. I would say that subconsciously we all understand this, which is why video games have been moving into our culture so persistently. I have been watching NFL football games lately differently with the understanding that the game is changing so rapidly due to most of the fans becoming so involved in Madden which is much more satisfying than just passively watching a football game on a Sunday afternoon. People don’t have time to waste on a 3-hour experience when they could do it in one and share that endeavor with friends all over the world through the internet. Consumers of the NFL product have so many other things to do these days, like watch a new series on a streaming service, or listen to a book through Amazon’s Audible, we just don’t have time to waste an entire Sunday watching two or three games like we used to, and those cracks are starting to show in the NFL business model.

People look at our 3% unemployment rate under the Trump administration and they wonder who will occupy all the new jobs that will be created by something like a Hyperloop. I would contend that air travel will still be important, especially internationally, and regionally. Hyperloop is a solution, but its still a fancy railroad, although if you have rode the monorail system in Disney World, Hyperloop would be more like that across a region of a country than just a train station that takes forever to get started and even longer in getting there. The speed of the Hyperloop makes up for the stagnant line that they present. Air travel will still remain important, and the competition should go a long way to bringing down prices with options, which is always a good thing. But who will do all these future jobs? Well, that answer is A.I. which is also coming along quickly. With birthrates being so low in the United States and places where birthrates are high, like India and China, matching economic growth to high population centers will require speeding up the travel and reach of people to ride the economic growth. But there are limits that artificial intelligence and robotics will have to fill.

Old timers will say, “well why would I want to get from Pittsburgh to Chicago in a half an hour with a few stops in between? Part of the fun of a journey is in getting there.” Well, those types of people can still drive a car or fly in a plane. But if you need to get somewhere, and this is certainly true for me, I don’t want to waste the time in getting there. I want to go do what I want to, then return back to my life as soon as possible. Such a transportation system would allow someone to live in Pittsburg or out in the country anywhere along Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana, but to work in the city without having to pay the extraordinarily high cost of living of such a job. This would really help in the city of New York, San Francisco and even down in Mexico City. A Hyperloop traveler could live a thousand miles away from their job and make the commute daily without having to move to a dangerous city, or an expensive one choking on limited resources. It would then force cities to compete with the suburbs for safety, cleanliness, and other general quality of living measures.

How we embrace this technology will largely determine the kind of world we could have, but first we have to solve some basic problems regarding the temptation to retreat back to anarchy and to run away from growth because its too scary, or too fast. A fast world is harder to control from the vantage point of politics. As I said, a second term of President Trump would totally understand how to make Hyperloop travel in the United States a common practice within five years of this writing, almost as common as a highway system. But we still live in a world that thinks there something wrong with having the G7 Summit. Would we want world leaders to see how nice we can build something like a Doral or stay in some gutter? Our political left doesn’t want the expectation of something so nice, so they protest against it. They want victimization for their political ambitions and that is one of our greatest challenges of the modern age. The challenge is in getting people to think in that proper, “big” fashion, which to me, is a problem with a solution that is clearly in front of us that can be solved with just a few good elections.

Rich Hoffman

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Richard Branson’s Free Cash Idea is Rediculoulsy Stupid: Humans need to work more hours, not less as artificial intellegence enters the workplace

I think its amazing that people thought a decade ago that all my talk about socialism being taught in our schools and permeating the entertainment industry was an extreme position. Now that all the politeness has been stripped away from politics and people are revealing what they have always been as the masks have been ripped away, socialists are showing themselves. In the Democratic Party in the United States, they are starting to emerge as mainstreamers, and of course as the world struggles with the capitalism advocate and promoter Donald Trump people like Richard Branson are speaking their mind about the ultimate socialist plan, of actually giving people what they call a universal basic income. I have said many good things about Richard Branson over the years, I am a big fan of his Virgin Galactic endeavors, and I think the Virgin Airlines wing at Heathrow is fabulous, but I’m inclined to say that the English billionaire is an idiot who has either lost his mind or he just got lucky in his acquisition of wealth. Because a universal basic income will never get people off the streets and raise the living conditions of the poor. It will just exacerbate their essential problems, it will fuel their drug addictions, their alcoholism and their personal behavior problems of self-destruction. You can’t throw money at bad behavior which is why socialism will never work anywhere in the world. Money and its value is a measure of productivity, so you can’t cheat wealth. People are either productive or they aren’t. The solution to poverty is to take government out of wealth creation as much as possible and to provide as many people with productive opportunities. But even then, a certain percentage of any population will be too lazy to meet the needs of an expanding economy and throwing money at them for doing nothing won’t keep homeless people from littering or streets—it will just make more of them.

http://www.businessinsider.com/richard-branson-thinks-usa-should-give-out-free-cash-to-fix-inequality-2018-7

To be fair, Elon Musk also believes in this socialist universal basic income idea, and I think he’s brilliant. Not the idea of universal basic income, but in the ideas for evolved transportation systems that his companies are putting forth. I don’t fault people for having bad ideas given to them by faulty education systems and sentiments from cocktail friends who think they have this socialism thing all figured out because one of the few books they’ve read in life was from Karl Marx or some fan of the communist advocate from the middle 1800s. I don’t think anybody is qualified to talk about economic matters unless they’ve mastered The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. Honestly, that should be the guidebook for which the world applies to all matters of their economies. Marx has always been a jealous envy driven person who was a peasant in Germany and died dirt poor in London as an enormously unproductive loser for which so many countries have tried to make work—but it never has. No economist from Oxford or Harvard, or anywhere will ever figure out how to make socialism work, because it goes against the basic human needs for productive intellectual output and the most foundational desire for personal freedom. Humans are not ant-like creatures that will coalesce around the needs of an insect society with a hive mind. Socialist advocates like Richard Branson may reveal their intellectual laziness by assuming that humans can be made to function in hive mind, but that is because they are not taking into account some of the most basic functions of being human—the desire for independence. Humans are not the social creatures that socialists assume they are, their most fundamental drive is toward complete independence. They may not achieve that in life, but that doesn’t mean deep down inside their most psychological foundations that independence from other human beings is not the driver of their basic behavior.

People like Musk say that he thinks there needs to be a universal basic income because from his vantage point artificial intelligence is going to take over our lives and there will suddenly be huge amounts of free time for people to enjoy in their leisure, because machines will be doing most of the productive work. The assumption is that companies won’t have enough work for people to perform 40 hours a week. This is where these visionaries in their respective fields are going wrong. They are looking at the page too closely relative to their respective interests—as billionaires in the industry of cutting edge technology. I am of the mind that we need to scrap the 40-hour work week and become 7 day a week creatures of productivity. It was the labor union movement, which was another socialist inspired creation that has been holding back the productivity of the human race and that the restrictor plate should be removed allowing people to be more productive not less. I thought it was very destructive that South Korea announced this past week that they are cutting the maximum hours that people can work in a week. They are reducing the number from 68 hours to 52, which will be crippling to their economy. What right does a government have in deciding that people can only make 52 hours’ worth of money? That concept would have never worked for me, I’ve never worked less than 60 hours per week my entire adult life, and most productive people I know are in the same situation. The message generated by such policies given by government is that productivity and work is not valued—that spiritual wellness is not connected to productivity, and those are just wrong ideas about the nature of human beings.

Even with artificial intelligence taking over many modern human tasks, the need for human productivity is not decreasing, its increasing. We shouldn’t be thinking of cutting down our work weeks to 32 or even 24 hours per week so we can sit around the house watching more Netflix and playing video games, we need to increase our work weeks to 70 to 90 hours to meet the onslaught of economic expansion that is becoming available due to growing market conditions. There are not enough people to do all the jobs which are emerging from the current 4% to 5% growth that is occurring in the United States. Unemployment is under 4% in America as well, which means everyone who wants a job essentially has one and to keep that expansion of the economy going, more productive output is needed. Artificial Intelligence and robotics will be needed for everything they can provide. But so will every living body available. The world needs to be working a lot more, not less to meet its fate in space and beyond based on the current rate of discovery and innovation. A universal basic income would cripple that notion and limit people to an income that the governments decide is enough—as they have done in South Korea. By taking away the dreams of enterprise and wealth acquisition, governments are taking away the incentive for upward mobility which fuels any economy—leading to disastrous results.

I would go so far to propose that birth rates need to increase around the world to post World War II levels just to meet the need for all the jobs and positions that will emerge out of the global economy over the next two decades. Artificial intelligence may end up everywhere, but it won’t be enough, we will need humans to continue to be productive, more productive than they’ve ever been. We certainly don’t need people sitting on their ass most of a work week collecting a paycheck from the government for doing nothing to help with their gross domestic product leaving all the employment tasks to artificial intelligence. We have the opposite problem that what Richard Branson assumes, humans aren’t less needed, they are needed more than ever, and a strong work ethic needs to be taught in our schools and through our media, certainly not what we have today. Our work weeks need to exceed 40 hours a week and the ceilings of wealth need to be raised as to what is expected. Minimums should never be a target for anybody—just doing whatever one needs to get by with. Wealth creation is an art form unique to human beings, the creation of productive output that generates income born of a human mind in pursuit of independent desires. Richard Branson obviously has faulty thinking in this category and so does anybody who thinks that socialism is going to become an international trend. I was right ten years ago when I pointed out the trend of socialism in our public schools and I’m correct now in saying that human productive output needs to increase, not decrease. Obviously its just a matter of time before the rest of the world catches up to that reality. I can promise they will, and when they do, they’ll want to read Adam Smith, not Karl Marx.

Rich Hoffman
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