Draft:Adam Something

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Adam Something is a YouTuber who makes videos on urban planning and transportation, economics, and European politics. Some of his most popular videos take shots at Elon Musk and Dubai. As of May 2022, he has over 750k subscribers and has amassed more than 47 million views.

Views on urban planning

Dubai

Adam really, really, really hates Dubai, as well as the UAE and Persian Gulf countries in general, calling it a "twisted parody of everything wrong with modern humanity." His main reason is its horrendous track record with human rights. Workers from poor South Asian countries are lured into the city with promises of high-paying jobs, but when they arrive, their passports are taken away, and they are forced into dangerous jobs with little pay and squalid living conditions, while the rich live in ultra-luxurious high-rises just blocks away.

In addition, he also considers the city as a massive failure in urban planning. He points to how the Palm Islands and World islands are doomed to sink into the sea (a situation he compares to Atlantis), the Burj Khalifa doesn't have a functioning sewage system, and the many copy-and-paste houses, giant highways, car-centric communities, cul-de-sacs, and other excesses of American planning filling up the city.

Adam has also criticized the The Sustainable City development. While he appreciates its efforts to reduce energy consumption, he argues it fails in many other aspects. His biggest problem is that it doesn't scale well; there are other communities that use space more efficiently, and it won't fit most of the world's population, since the vast majority of people live in high-density housing rather than single-family units (and trying to fit everybody in single-family units makes communities car-centric, which introduces other problems.) He also feels it's still suffers from a lack of density and is too car-centric, pointing out how it takes a long time to reach other parts of Dubai through public transit.

Elon Musk

“”He's an out-of-touch carmaker billionaire. He doesn't care about innovation. He doesn't care about the environment. He doesn't care about you. All he cares about is making as much money as possible and then, on the side, constructing his own little private escape route to Mars should things on Earth go to shit. Because if they do and Elon Musk does manage to build his Mars colony, I'm sorry to tell you, but you will not be on his evacuation spaceship. The top 1% will escape. You will rot in the toxic wasteland Elon Musk helped bring about. His utopia is not Star Trek. It's Blade Runner.

—Adam Something, summing up his opinion on Elon Musk

Adam has a lot of videos critical of Elon Musk. It's easy to identify them because most of their thumbnails have a picture of his face with a big red clown nose and rainbow hair, and he even has an entire playlist for it. He chalks up the man's popularity to him using sciencey-sounding terms that give off the appearance of science, without any actual scientific merit.

Many of them mock The Boring Company's Loop systems. One of his most-watched pokes fun at how much the system was scaled down and how the system suffered a traffic jam despite being advertised as a solution to them, in addition to highlighting a vehicle fire. In a one video about the Loop proposed for Las Vegas, he calls it an inferior alternative to trains and buses that causes excessive wear on tires and sports elevators with too many points of failure. In a later video revisiting the Loop, he argues American car culture is unsustainable and that Elon Musk and his Loop system are only adding fuel to the fire by furthering the nation's dependence on cars.

He explains his criticisms in further detail in his video on their proposed Dugout Loop system for Los Angeles, where he makes similar points and adds that the system also has laughably low capacity, can't meet the advertised 150 mph speeds, and ultimately doesn't solve congestion, since due to induced demand, adding capacity (which is what the Dugout Loop and The Boring Company's other proposals do) actually increases traffic. Instead, he believes the city should take one or two of the lanes of roads leading into the stadium and repurpose it into either a tramline or a bus lane where buses have transit signal priority.

As you might expect, Adam is not a fan of the Hyperloop, on basis of engineering, financial, and political issues. He claims that since long vacuum tubes are hard to maintain, the Hyperloop is only really viable over short distances. While current costs estimates are lower than those for alternative forms of transportation, he counters that they're unrealistically low, given that no major Hyperloop projects have actually been built, and predicts they will rise drastically as the idea gets implemented on a larger scale. Because of that, Adam believes it will be difficult for Hyperloop projects to find support among voter in comparison to proposals to improve existing infrastructure, save in autocratic governments that can bypass public opinion.

Adam doesn't like Starship Earth to Earth either, considering it even worse than the Hyperloop. His main issue is safety: rockets have a much higher rate of accidents than airplanes, and the g forces experienced during flight would have catastrophic effects on the human body. He also cites concerns over noise, and according to his calculations, rocket travel is still slower than hypersonic flight when the entire travel experience (security checks, loading luggage, etc.) is taken into account, and a rocket flight outputs over 900 times the CO2 than a single flight.

Other practices

Other things Adam doesn't like include:

• Monorails - Inferior to regular rail in his eyes. They don't mix well with conventional rail, the systems for switching lanes are slow and overly-complicated , the capacity is too low, and they are too expensive since they required elevated track and additional, specialized maintenance infrastructure.
• Skybus - An "needlessly over-engineered train" as he calls it, with excellent safety and comfort but outrageous costs and horribly low capacity. He argues that instead of building "gadgetbahns", cities should instead build regular trains and treat congestion at its source by reducing the amount of cars on the road. One of his ideas is repurposing road lanes into lanes for public transit, with the idea that if widening roads actually increases congestion due to the Induced demand, narrowing them should lower it.
• Parallel Systems autonomous battery-powered railcars - They have too many points of failure, the batteries are vulnerable to the weather and present a fire hazard, and all the additional charging infrastructure required will eat into space saved by eliminating large freight terminals. Adam also argues the firm misunderstands economics; the company believes big terminals waste space and add to costs but fail to recognize that the reason they're so large is so they can lower costs through economies of scale.

Other views

Economics

Adam opposes free market capitalism and especially opposes anarcho-capitalism. He argues that corporations are fundamentally autocratic and really about as free as chiefdoms or totalitarian dictatorships; the decision-making process is ultimately in the hands of a single owner or group of owners, and while workers can theoretically have the freedom to move or switch workplaces, both of these are impractical for most people. The state is the only institution that can actually safeguard workers' freedoms, so eliminating regulations just gives businesses more room to coerce employees. Instead, he advocates giving workers more power in the workplace, with his personal solution being to give co-ops tax breaks.

In particular, he believes that under ideal conditions, anarcho-capitalist systems will transition into one of the following:

• Feudalism - The unchecked accumulation of wealth produces monopolies that can strong-arm competitors, rapidly gain control of all aspects of production, and expand into all aspects of life, such as making food and protecting people and property. Executives essentially become the equivalent of nobility.
• Theocracy - Religion can be another potential form of coercion, particularly if believers are encouraged to turn away business from non-believers. Even if a religion ostensibly discourages martyrdom and merely promotes anarcho-capitalist ideals, it indirectly controls the economy by encouraging its members to run their businesses a certain way (not unlike the relationship between the medieval Roman Catholic Church and European politics). As its influence grows and as it assumes more and more business-like functions, the church effectively becomes a government.
• Communism - The various measures for preventing monopolies, accumulation of wealth, and unfair advantages, such creating replacing currency with service contracts and a central record maintained by a heavily-restricted group of administrators and making it so that everyone has to help provide public services such as firefighting and defense to fend off natural monopolies, also effectively create a classless society where the means of production are owned by the people.

Politics

European politics in general

Adam is in favor of a European federation, not just a confederation like the present-day EU. He claims a unified Europe would help close tax loopholes, strengthen the military, protect against terrorism, aid in rooting out corruption, and generally allow more efficient use of resources. In particular, he believes that if Europe had better border defense and a well-organized system of refugee camps, the 2015 refugee crisis and resultant resurgence of the far-right would have been less severe. He contends that according to opinion polls, the idea would have popular support, and believes the best way to implement an European federation would be to do so slowly, in phases, to allow for course corrections, while making sure to sell the idea to the public and keeping watch on reactionary forces, lest there be a repeat of Brexit.

In his eyes, the potential obstacles to federation can be resolved. According to him, the progressive-conservative divide is gradually wearing away as the younger generation becomes more progressive, and the disparities between rich and poor could actually be fixed by a federal anti-corruption force and federally-mandated minimum salaries for education and healthcare workers, so as to prevent a brain drain of skilled labor migrating to richer countries in search of better wages. Concerns over national sovereignty are, he argues, just a cover for the elite ruling class to maintain their power. Cultural and language differences are exaggerated, and the latter would not affect government affairs since English would be the official common language. While he acknowledges that Europe is indeed full of competing geopolitical interests, he holds that it's more important for Europe to present united front against global powers such as China, Russia, and Big Pharma companies trying to gouge them during crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Adam has also criticized Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian government in general for their handling of the 2015 European migrant crisis, arguing that, despite their insistence otherwise, their actions directly exacerbated the catastrophe and in some ways caused the November 2015 Paris attacks.

Ukraine

He has released a video on the Gravel Institute's coverage of Ukraine, criticizing it for making overgeneralizations and using loaded language. He has also made a video highlighting German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's many attempts to avoid sending aid to Ukraine and a video mocking the general leftist reaction to the situation.

Fun fact, he actually made some predictions about a Russian invasion of Ukraine back in April 2021, during a flareup of conflict in Crimea. During that time, he believed that an all-out war was not imminent, arguing that it would be an economic, military, and political disaster (instead, he forecast that Vladmir Putin would use the saber-rattling to boost his approval rating, Volodymyr Zelenskyy would try to unite the Ukrainian people and push for entering NATO and possibly the EU, and Joe Biden would consolidate US-European relations and maybe even end the Nord Stream 2 pipeline), but if Russian did invade, three things would happen:

• Russia would try to create a land-bridge from Crimea to Russia by taking cities such as Mauripol, albeit at great costs
• Russia might also take industrial centers such as Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv, Kryvyi Rih, Poltava, and Kharhiv and try to create a land-bridge from Crimea to Transnistria by conquering Kherson and Odesa, but again, these would be come with escalating casualties
• If, somehow, the Russians defeated the Ukrainian army, and no foreign power intervened, sanctions would mount drastically and hit Russia hard. The possibilities include measures against sovereign debt and Russia being disconnected from the SWIFT system.

See also

• Shaun - Fellow BreadTuber. Adam is also a fan of his videos dissecting PragerU.
• Vaush - Similar, and the two have collaborated before.
• Destiny (person) - Not a BreadTuber, but Destiny and Adam do sometimes debate together.
• Thunderf00t-both hate Elon Musk and expose bad city projects

External links

• Channel link. His side channel, Adam Something Else.