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Hypnotized by Hyperloop

newyorker.com

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Re: Hypnotized by Hyperloop

#11

Post by aaron-lebo »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #7

For fun, let's say we'd sat Geoff down 20 years ago and asked him to rate the following futures in units of 'preposterousness': "Geoff, how preposterous is it to believe that in 20 years..." 1. We live in a world of self-driving, all electric automobiles, the safest and fastest ever built in mass production. 2. We live in a world where private space companies build profitable space transportation systems that can lan…

Wouldn't Geoff be correct? None of those have materialized. Maybe another 20 years? 3 and 4 still haven't scaled past prototypes and might never exist in quantity.

Re: Hypnotized by Hyperloop

#13

Post by njarboe »

Such a negative, do-nothing article. "taking every billionaire’s quirky visions at face value". Elon Musk is a bit different than every billionaire. Re-usable orbital class boosters and the Model S is what gives Elon the street cred others don't have. "so-called Boring Company" WTF? The New Yorker was always a purveyor of a certain type of elitism, but since the Trump election they have really upped the intensity. Not sure if I'll renew my subscription I've had for decades when it expires.

Re: Hypnotized by Hyperloop

#14

Post by zeigotaro »

kfk wrote: post #2

Difficult topic. You can make this argument on any new transformative tech. You could have made the same arguments about smartphones 10 years ago. On the other hand, I am still not clear how a pod that can carry max 12 people can compete with trains that can carry hundreds.

Very much agreed, lots of FUD for a technology that's only now being prototyped. Would the author rather technologists not get excited by interesting possible solutions to long-standing problems?

Re: Hypnotized by Hyperloop

#15

Post by ethn »

paulcole wrote: post #9
kpil wrote: post #8

Some hypnotized people think that a Hyperloop in tunnel under the Baltic sea between Stockholm and Helsinki is a good idea - two sparsely populated capital cities of two small countries. http://nordic.businessinsider.com/stockholm-helsinki-hyperlo... Even if it's only there to siphon of some taxpayer's money to someone or another, I just can't fathom how things like this can be allowed to go on. Even if the entire po…

> it will not be economically viable Government projects don't (and shouldn't) have to be "economically viable." They can be services to the citizens with no hope of profitability.

This is largely a fallacy in the understanding of economics. Profitable, at least shouldn't, mean profitable to the government but to the shareholders of the government, its citizens. Costly government projects on large-scale speculative technology detracts from budgets of other presently needed services. There is not one existing branch of government that can't definitively improve its services to the benefit of its citizens and therefore the entire system.

Re: Hypnotized by Hyperloop

#16

Post by [deleted] »

kuschku wrote: post #4
easytiger wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have more than one pod?

Do you link them physically, do you have enough braking distances, or do you, as musk suggests, run pods that are separate close enough that in case of a disaster all pods will crash?

[deleted]

Re: Hypnotized by Hyperloop

#17

Post by fiatjaf »

paulcole wrote: post #9
kpil wrote: post #8

Some hypnotized people think that a Hyperloop in tunnel under the Baltic sea between Stockholm and Helsinki is a good idea - two sparsely populated capital cities of two small countries. http://nordic.businessinsider.com/stockholm-helsinki-hyperlo... Even if it's only there to siphon of some taxpayer's money to someone or another, I just can't fathom how things like this can be allowed to go on. Even if the entire po…

> it will not be economically viable Government projects don't (and shouldn't) have to be "economically viable." They can be services to the citizens with no hope of profitability.

"services to the citizens" that no one wishes, no one would pay for if had a chance (considering the actual prices), but still somehow paid by the citizens.

Re: Hypnotized by Hyperloop

#18

Post by dalbasal »

One feature of the transport market (from a mile high view) is that demand is almost infinite.

If you can get 40kms in 45 minutes, then you can live within 40 miles of work and commute in that time. If you could go 400kms, then that becomes your commuting radius. We've seen people spread this way as earlier mechanized transport was invented. IE, average commute times didn't go down because of faster transport, distance traveled (KMs consumed) went up. Total commuting time can even increase as transport gets faster/cheaper.

If I could get to hong kong in 15 minutes, I might go there this afternoon for some dumplings.

That creates some strangeness in transport. You can't really solve transport the way people want, which is to make getting where they're going better/faster. If you could get there faster, more people would be going there (congestion) or maybe you would be living farther away.

This definitely doesn't mean it's not worth innovating, just that predicting how this will play out can be unintuitive.

Re: Hypnotized by Hyperloop

#19

Post by angstrom »

alexandros wrote: post #6

Couldn't finish this. It started off badly by calling the hyperloop "vacuum-powered". First, it's not even vacuum sealed (just low air pressure), and second, how can something even be powered by the vacuum? Are we just throwing terms around for effect here? Then, the author continues with more material errors. The hyperloop/tunnel combo apparently "requires a hard reboot" of the modern city. No it does not. The whole…

I lost faith in the average tech writer's ability to not trigger Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect a long time ago. Thanks for saving me the time. Nothing more annoying than reading a journalist with a soap box and more time for word count than correctness.

Re: Hypnotized by Hyperloop

#20

Post by Asdfbla »

kfk wrote: post #2

Difficult topic. You can make this argument on any new transformative tech. You could have made the same arguments about smartphones 10 years ago. On the other hand, I am still not clear how a pod that can carry max 12 people can compete with trains that can carry hundreds.

>You could have made the same arguments about smartphones 10 years ago

That true, but the lesson from that is that no criticism of speculative sci-fi projects is allowed anymore or what?

Besides, smartphones didn't come from nothing. Prototypes and similar things had been around since the 90s. And they are arguably a much easier problem than infrastructure.

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