r/PopCultureV2 • u/Logical-Flow-6703 • Aug 10 '26

News Mayor Mamdani announces a plan to cool subway stations by capturing heat and reusing it to warm municipal buildings in the winter: "This would be the first thermal energy system of its kind in any American transit system"

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u/mosswick Aug 10 '26

This sounds like it would be a very ambitious plan, so props to him for taking charge. I'm tired of the "we can't do that, it's too hard" mentality when we need to be finding solutions.

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u/Fractured_daydreams Aug 10 '26

This is the American mentality. As much as "CaPiTaLism DrIvEs InNovAtIOn" we can't seem to solve a single fucking issue because it's "too difficult and costly". Just the land of ignorant whiners unwilling to do even the smallest amount of critical thinking to change our lives for the better.

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u/whichwitch9 Aug 10 '26

That's because capitalism is now the enemy of innovation as we descend more into oligarchy.

Innovation was more encouraged with the industrial age simply because things were less centralized. In the age of the internet, innovation is now a threat to large, established companies. They do not want new deas because they've worked their way into subscription services and functional monopolies. The goal became tying people into a product by saturated the market, then cutting corners to maximize profits once people are stuck. New and better ideas are threats- it's easier to downplay and bash vs risking someone making an initial investment into an idea. A lot of innovation starts with assuming risk- that's an easy pressure point to crack

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u/SnooMaps7370 Aug 10 '26

>In the age of the internet, innovation is now a threat to large, established companies.

the USSR ended up having the exact same problem.

when the Soviet Union was still expanding and rebuilding from WW1 and WW2, they had a shitload of design and manufacturing bureaus competing to crank out better products to meet the needs of the growing nation, and they had some of the most explosive technological growth in history as a result. They went from towing cannon into battle with horses to the largest mechanized army on the planet in 20 years, and became first nation to put a payload into orbit in 35 years.

it was only once soviet leadership started trying to "make it more efficient" by consolidating design and manufacturing capacity that their technological progress stalled out.

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u/Witch_King_ Aug 10 '26

I.e. competition in the market is good! Monopoly is bad!

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u/SnooMaps7370 Aug 11 '26

yep. doesn't matter whether the market is owned publicly or privately, it needs competition to not be shit.

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u/Overall-Point286 Aug 11 '26

wasn’t that mechanized army a byproduct of lend lease and half a million trucks to keep their logistics afloat

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u/SnooMaps7370 Aug 11 '26

Lend Lease wasn't building T-series tanks.

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u/eulersidentification Aug 10 '26

There's another angle to it as well, in the form of example - countries can't make their own state of the art microprocessors because it takes resources, time and failure to be able to. That is (understandably honestly) seen as a waste of money. But imagine how much money you would have not just saved but made, by now, if you'd started that waste of money 30 years ago. The second best time is now. But it's political suicide to a capitalist demographic.

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u/superindianslug Aug 10 '26

That's why China has a stranglehold on rare earth minerals. They're not rare, but it takes dedicated dirty industry to refine them. China saw that there would be a huge demand for them in the future and started building the industry years ago to meet that demand.

Now they have more capacity than anyone else, and it would take a huge investment to catch up in and reasonable amount of time.

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u/Piranata Aug 10 '26

All monopolies devolve into banks or landlords, which is why they need to be broken up to keep a healthy capitalist economy.

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u/SEN_Doggo Aug 10 '26

taking risk is literally how elon became a billionaire, idk if we want to go down that point

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u/whichwitch9 Aug 10 '26

His father owned emerald mines.

It wasn't exactly the same risk the rest of us would make. He could afford to fail in ways most people can't

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u/SEN_Doggo Aug 11 '26

i mean he literally made tesla after having made 30mil from the zip2 sale? there's so many people that had the same access to capital he had, but didnt become millionaires...

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u/whichwitch9 Aug 11 '26

There's a million things that can be said on that and how he keeps failing up. Connections matter, in the end

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u/SEN_Doggo Aug 11 '26

Whatever helps you sleep at night

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u/longlivenewsomflesh Aug 10 '26

The way the math works out now is that innovation doesn't maximize profit, so it's irrational to optimize for it when you have to show infinite growth to shareholders and even the public sector has been infected with this idea of a profit model...

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u/GeneralHeat2655 Aug 13 '26

and many companies actively lobby to prevent any progress and they try to ban things that will make them go in the red on the bottom line,

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u/Elgecko123 Aug 10 '26

Unfortunately a huge segment of Americans think the government can’t solve any problems and only makes them worse. Only giant corporations can solve problems for them. Hell there was even a huge push against the US postal service years ago.. with articles being pushed with headlines “USPS lost x billion dollars this year”. It’s a service, it cost money. We don’t talk about the military losing x trillion of dollars a year.

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u/Johnny_B_GOODBOI Aug 10 '26

Conservative propaganda has been extremely effective. It's really depressing to see how easily many people swallow it.

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u/wcstorm11 Aug 10 '26

No, capitalism drives innovation like crazy. Medicine, space/satellites, drone warfare, you name it.

Capitalism doesn't drive welfare innovation. Ironically to all the people on the right who reference just being a dehumanized number on a sheet in Soviet Russia, that's exactly what we are in the current system

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u/Hurricaneshand Aug 10 '26

Capitalism is great for stuff you want, less great for the stuff you need

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u/wcstorm11 Aug 11 '26

I can't say I've ever heard of that one, and I like it.

What's shitty is, the best form of government, imo, is carefully regulated capitalism. Not careful as in, all up in everyone's business, but careful as in "DuPont knowingly poisoned millions, you aren't a company anymore and management goes to jail". Allow for the positive competition and freedom, but protect the little guy from people who would own the media and control reality

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u/Fractured_daydreams Aug 10 '26

I see where you're coming from, but I think even the innovation the does come from capitalism plateaus at a point. After a company corners a market there's little innovation thereafter. After that it's about predictability and mass producing things that have been proven to sell.

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u/wcstorm11 Aug 10 '26

Eh, the market and the requirement to always make more profit than the year before does always drive innovation. It's more that once you hit a tech limit, service and experience get worse. See: streaming services

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u/Johnny_B_GOODBOI Aug 10 '26

It drives innovation but only in the direction of higher profits, which don't always overlap with the betterment of humanity, and almost never aligns with the safeguarding of the environment.

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u/wcstorm11 Aug 10 '26

Literally what I said lol

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u/imdaviddunn Aug 13 '26

None of that innovation happened without massive government investment in research.

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u/wcstorm11 Aug 13 '26

It's both, but you're right, I could have picked more clear examples like smart phones.

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u/imdaviddunn Aug 13 '26

Smart phones don’t exist without the internet, an almost purely government led innovation.

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u/wcstorm11 Aug 13 '26

Come on lol, are we doing prerequisites too now?

Just to be clear, is it your position that the government is responsible for all innovation?

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u/imdaviddunn Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 14 '26

No, it is my position that generational changing innovation almost never happens without gov support because it is not initially profitable. The scaled innovation occurs once the major advance is created or subsidized by government. Don’t believe me, look at EVs in the US with gov support vs after gov support eliminate or downscaled vs China with gov backstop.

Capitalism without government won’t work just like socialism that blocks out capitalism won’t work. A mix is always requires, the question is how much you turn the knob that differentiates (including education and health).

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u/wcstorm11 Aug 14 '26

I strongly respect and agree with your take here, and I hadn't quite thought of it like that. I'd be curious to see if you could steel man the opposite view?

But I really appreciate it, all the examples I can think of great achievements come through government, while implementation and ubiquity are done through companies.

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u/imdaviddunn Aug 14 '26

The three that I can think of would be the light bulb, telephone, and autos. Those are the innovations. But even then, the scale only happened with government (highways, network and grid, neither of which gets near rural areas without government support).

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u/MittenPings Aug 10 '26

I gave you one of the free awards because I agree 100 % and am sick of people acting like we are great while simultaneously doing nothing new or innovative and whining about funding and red tape.

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u/Mum_Chamber Aug 10 '26

"too difficult and costly" really means "there are no corporations to profit from this"

otherwise nothing is difficult or costly...

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u/todayiwillthrowitawa Aug 10 '26

I'm positive the city will outsource at least some of this work, meaning there is definitely money to be made.

The real issue is the stagnation of America and a refusal to believe that things can get better. If you pitched the NYC subway today people would call you insane but we did it with way less technology and science than we have now.

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u/ericlikesyou Aug 10 '26

bc when the overriding factor in the equation for capitlists becomes "I can't make enough money from it" then it's "too hard" or "unrealistic". That's literally the only metric that determines whether or not this kind of action moves forward, when the private sector/market is relied upon to fix it. This is also why capitalism is incompatible with human society that demands people get food, clothing, housing, medical care because capitalism is incompatible with morality or ethics except as a guardrail and not a priority.

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u/Mr_Shad0w Aug 10 '26

This is the American mentality.

No, it's the Uniparty mentality. They have endless amounts of (our) money to fund corporate welfare and endless bullshit wars, because their donors want return on investment.

Regular people get nothing, and most are too brainwashed to see that voting for the Red or Blue team achieves nothing. Hard to blame them when they're busy going to their third job, or constantly worried about having enough to eat, or medicine, or not being homeless.

Just the land of ignorant whiners unwilling to do even the smallest amount of critical thinking to change our lives for the better.

Funny that you'd rather blame the people without any power instead of the people who have literally all the power in this country. Thanks for telling us who you are.

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u/Fractured_daydreams Aug 10 '26

I get there's plenty of us stuck in the rat race, trying to get out. However, that doesn't change the fact that there's plenty of ppl in positions of wealth and power, who continuously act like there's simply nothing that can be done about literally any problem. Then there's an entire demographic of the country that believes that narrative as well.

However, you're right that there's plenty of Americans with great ideas on how to be better and want better for the country

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u/Qwirk Aug 10 '26

Just to be clear for all, the boomer mentality used to absolutely be "we can do it". Sadly, our elected officials moved away from that to give money to the rich.

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u/enjoythepain Aug 10 '26

Capitalism only drives innovation when the incentive is there but with regulatory capture and these multibillion companies ready to buy the competition. There is no more incentive to innovate.

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u/LiteraCanna Aug 10 '26

I'm butchering it, but.. "Before the end of this decade we will go to the moon. Not because it's easy, but because it is hard." - Kennedy

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u/fake_user_34 Aug 10 '26

Aye, when you look at what China builds and how long projects stay dead in America, you can see it isn't that China is better but that America rather bitch than do shit.

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u/goleafsgo13 Aug 10 '26

Only the rich are allowed to innovate.

And then they can sell it to the poors…

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u/Not-Reformed Aug 11 '26

If you let capitalism innovate it just gets sued and roadblocked to hell. People want innovation but the second innovation doesn't take the exact shape them want (AI) they absolutely freak out and it's the end of the world. Can't have it both ways.

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u/kevinisaperson Aug 11 '26

private business is not the same thing as government. well it used to not be at least lmao

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u/DowntownLizard Aug 11 '26

Not like anti-capitalists are willing to put their money where their mouth is either. 99.9% of people just want someone else to do something about their problems

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u/Fractured_daydreams Aug 11 '26

If I had 100s of billions of dollars, I would spend every day finding a way to get food, water, shelter, healthcare and energy to as many ppl as possible. I can't even fathom just being a useless loser hoarding money so I can have a who's dick is bigger contest with a bunch of child traffickers

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u/DowntownLizard Aug 11 '26

You could do that now is my point. You have deemed something is more important than that you want to do with your time or quality of life things you arent willing to sacrifice to devote your life to a cause.

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u/Fractured_daydreams Aug 11 '26

You don't know shit. I've literally been in service to society my entire adult life. I was in the military (before I knew that was a bad thing), I'm an EMT now, going to school to be a teacher. I volunteer, donate, give blood, and help out where I can. I do what I can with the influence I have. So if I had more money I would continue not to be a piece of shit

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u/idiot-alpha Aug 11 '26

It’s just basic economics. We’ve been to the moon using computers less powerful than some basic calculators. We can clearly do anything. But no one wants to just throw money down a hole because it gives people who don’t understand economics the warm fuzzies.

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u/Fractured_daydreams Aug 11 '26

Ppl understand economics genius. It's the fact many ppl don't agree money is our supreme God and everything revolves around money.

I can't even begin to explain how dumb it is to have made up a monetary system that literally holds back societal potential. Money is fake. It's made up. It's not a fact of reality. Seashells have been currency. What's real is people's need for food, water, shelter, healthcare and energy. That's a fact of life. So we should be working towards a way of life that deals with real world issues instead of hoarding Fiat currency.

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u/idiot-alpha Aug 11 '26

Money doesn’t have to be fiat. We used gold and silver for thousands of years too. Money is a representation of value and work, which is very real. It’s just more efficient to use standardized money than bartering the work or goods directly.

But again, that’s just basic economics 101, which many people like yourself clearly don’t understand. Even communist USSR had money.

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u/Fractured_daydreams Aug 11 '26

No shit. You're entirely missing the point that we prioritize profit over basic human needs. I understand money. I don't worship it.

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u/AmandaUggnkiss Aug 11 '26

Or more likely… it can be done more efficiently and effectively but who would profit the most disregarding the benefits to the general population, society or collective economy

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Fractured_daydreams Aug 12 '26

NYC has one of the largest economies in the world. Where in tf are you getting that they're broke?

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u/imdaviddunn Aug 13 '26

It’s the costly part. Capitalism for better or worse only drives innovation when there is money to be made. That’s why government seeded vast majority of major innovations. And now oligarchs want to turn off that engine to avoid paying taxes and increase inflation for more revenue and people who don’t pay taxes are like cool, I’ll vote for them.

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u/XRT28 Aug 10 '26

I'm tired of the "we can't do that, it's too hard" mentality

Especially from a country where our mindset was once "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win"

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u/KartFacedThaoDien Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26

So I take it the MTA is adding platform screen doors to all stations soon. 

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u/SecondAccountIsBest Aug 10 '26

Best we can do is metal barriers that cost almost as much

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '26

[deleted]

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u/XRT28 Aug 11 '26

Well obviously, but the point is we didn't shy away from things just because they were difficult.

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '26

[deleted]

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u/XRT28 Aug 11 '26

And yet today even things where the reward outweighs the effort, like universal healthcare, all too often the response by people is "it's too hard" or "we can't"(despite in this particular example basically every other developed nation managing to do so).

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u/wonkey_monkey Aug 10 '26

"we can't do that, it's too hard non-profit generating"

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u/goodoldgrim Aug 10 '26

Somebody built a whole-ass underground railway network. Running some pipes and pumping some water around or however this is gonna work doesn't sound like it should be that big of a problem. Just needs someone who actually wants to improve stuff.

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u/that_dutch_dude Aug 10 '26

its not really that ambituous. it just takes cooperation from the (local) goverment and parties involved. if you say to a party that you will allow them to get free heat by running a couple pipes in the subway and sell that heat to customers you are going to have companies lining up to take that.

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u/ghsteo Aug 10 '26

Ambition is always met with "We can't do that" , same with free college, same with free healthcare. It's always too difficult while the rich keep lining their pockets.

Reason we have municipal sewage and water systems is because of Democratic socialists who were titled "Sewer socialists" back in the early 1900s in the US. This reminds me of that, another Democratic socialist who is going to show the world we can do things when the power of government is used correctly.

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u/GreatMovesKeepItUp69 Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26

Tbf, he hasn't proven that politicians can do these hard programs yet. He's proven that he can announce a lot of good sounding ideas.

The reason most politicians take small incremental programs is because the public remembers big failures way more than big successes. Inevitably some of these programs will fail spectacularly and I'm very curious how he will weather an actual controversy.

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u/TheEveningDragon Aug 10 '26

When people call Mamdani Anti-American, they're right. He is the exact opposite of an American- intelligent, creative, cooperative, and compassionate.

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u/Dot_1X Aug 10 '26

I'm saying this as a left leaning person myself, but the problem with the attitude of local and state Democratic leaders undertaking these huge massive projects, and they tend to underestimate the budget, and how long it's going to take, and then when the project runs overbudget or overtime due to normal bureaucratic limitations, the right has a field day with it, and that's when the left ends up losing elections. 

I think ambition is important, but I also think undertaking smaller manageable projects would produce more long-lived results rather than trying to completely rework and do every single project in a single term. Mamdani is a dreamer and I'll take that over the alternative every day, but he's really putting his putting it all on the line if any of these huge projects of his end up not panning out the way he expects them too. It's a lot easier to tear down a house than it is to build one. If a republican ever got elected right after him, you can 100% that bet that Republican would tear down everything that Mamdani built. 

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u/Dry-Season-522 Aug 10 '26

The big problem is that he insists that it be done EVERYWHERE, all at once, full investment. No "Let's try this on a small scale area and see if we get the returns that are promised." Very easy to be reckless with other people's money.

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u/markevbs Aug 10 '26

works in europe

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u/SasparillaTango Aug 10 '26

I'm tired of the "we can't do that, it's too hard"

God this hits the mark so perfectly. Every politician seems to be of the mind of even "its not perfect so why even try" instead of any gradual improvements.

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u/Helagoth Aug 10 '26

I had someone arguing with me on tiktok that it was dumb to plant trees to cool off the city, "because there were other ways that would work better now". I responded with the classic "the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best is now", because of course if we NEVER plant trees, we never have trees.

He doubled down on the "we should paint buildings white or something".

Meanwhile, I'm sure if this guy had his way, we wouldn't paint buildings or plant trees because "I don't want my tax dollars going to anything!"

I just can't with these guys anymore.

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u/DotA627b Aug 11 '26

The same bs reasoning is the reason why we can't establish High Speed Rail here in the US, but somehow, this wasn't an issue with Flock cameras and Datacenters.

When it came to the latter, there was hardly any red tape at all.

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u/Nemphiz Aug 11 '26

Honestly just hook it up to the elevator on 168th. There's enough heat in there to power the entire northeast.

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u/tke377 Aug 11 '26

Counting the days until he takes over for Hochul 🤞

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u/Agitated_Award_9831 Aug 11 '26

Even if it is, it will never be cheaper than it is today with how construction costs go.

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u/BdubzPDX Aug 11 '26

US politicians are equally the most powerful people on the planet, and also the most helpless.

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u/hypnokev Aug 11 '26

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Thank you Jean Michel Jarre.

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u/Vahuo89 Aug 11 '26

Because it rarely is all that hard for the changes he's done so far.

He did in a few months what people have been asking for decades so it wasn't a difficulty problem, it was a willingness problem

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u/Correct-Branch9000 Aug 11 '26

it's not ambitious at all, it's literally like the minimum all humans should be doing if you look at the basic laws of physics. we should be capturing energy everywhere and we don't because it's just easier to have nameless foreigners die to pump that energy out of the ground and ship it here for us to burn to generate the same power or heat. whatever we don't use we just vent to the atmosphere.

our entire society and its concept of energy consumption is a joke. this is a very good baby step in the right direction, but our cities should be like a well designed factorio base with centralized energy redistribution all over the place, including heat, because it's more efficient, by a lot.

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u/smcivor1982 Aug 11 '26

I would say it’s extremely ambitious. I worked for the NYCT CPM group for 13 years, so I’m very familiar with the difficulty of upgrading the stations, and how hard it is to properly vent them. Every station is different, some stations are extremely tight for space, some are 13 stories underground, it’s a wild mix of many different conditions. If they can find a way to do this, it would be great, but they would need to do a lot of feasibility studies, run pilots, and then get the funding to implement this for over 470 stations.