This is written by someone who's never lived in LA. "Trains that run on the tracks" is a joke in a region with virtually zero effective public transport.
Hypnotized by Hyperloop
31–40 of 255 posts
Re: Hypnotized by Hyperloop
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's writing this to people like you. As far as I was able to read, not a single mention that Musk has been able to take two or three other previously considered impossible tasks and bring them to completion. Call me a fanboy if you will, but at least my fanboyism is evidence-based. It's not personal. Musk is not anyone's personal juvenile delinquent (cable TV edit). Why do you care so much whether a single billionai…
Could care less about challenging Musk's reputation, that's his problem. It's the fallacies of argument. Good engineers are awash in self doubt and questioning.
And when those responding to those arguments say stuff like "my faith is more evidence based than yours", the rebuttal is just as fallacious. It's turning into "X must be right because they are X", which isn't any better.
Re: Hypnotized by Hyperloop
#33Couldn'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…
>Musk has been able to take two or three other previously considered impossible tasks and bring them to completion Such as? SpaceX and their reusable rockets might be the closest thing I guess. Tesla and his solar company use pretty conventional technology, on the other hand. He is willing to invest a lot of money, that's true. But when talking about the Hyperloop, it's hardly just his money that's at stake if govern…
> Tesla and his solar company use pretty conventional technology
The technology might be conventional, but having useful Electric cars on the road was looking like impossible task back in the days before Tesla roadster
Re: Hypnotized by Hyperloop
#34Difficult 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.
"I am still not clear how a pod that can carry max 12 people can compete with trains that can carry hundreds."
Max persons per trip seems a metric of little relevance, if a pod is much faster and can make many more trips within the same time period. In any case, that would point to how the pod could compete: carry just as many people each day, but each person would reach his/her destination much faster than if they used the train. (Wouldn't even need to carry as many people, if each person were motivated to pay more to reach destination in much shorter time.)
Re: Hypnotized by Hyperloop
#35Some 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…
As an aside, how many people use the Tokyo Bay Aqua Line every day?
Re: Hypnotized by Hyperloop
#36Couldn'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…
He's writing this to people like you. As far as I was able to read, not a single mention that Musk has been able to take two or three other previously considered impossible tasks and bring them to completion. Call me a fanboy if you will, but at least my fanboyism is evidence-based. It's not personal. Musk is not anyone's personal juvenile delinquent (cable TV edit). Why do you care so much whether a single billionai…
> why build inefficient systems like Hyperloops and car sleds when we have tech that works at scale already
You mean like why build inefficient electric cars when we had a proved combustion engine that worked at scale before?
Re: Hypnotized by Hyperloop
#37Couldn'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…
The article is not really addressing the technical merits of the hyperloop, but rather focuses on the PR behind it and why we're inherently drawn to it. The cool sci-fi project.
>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 point is that it is tunnels underneath the modern city.
One of the advantage of bullet trains in Europe is that they get to reuse the existing infrastructure in cities. That lets them reach the city centers without having to invest an ungodly amount of money laying new tracks or digging tunnels.
They're also "backwards-compatible" to a certain extent, for instance in France it's not rare to have bullet trains to have seasonal destinations, for instance in the Alps during winter. Often there's no high-speed track all the way to those rather remote cities so they just go as close as possible and then use the old tracks at a lower speed so that you don't have to change.
Clearly hyperloop requires a brand new infrastructure. I don't see ho digging tunnels changes anything, it's not like it's cheap.
>Getting around existing commitments of surface land is the whole point of tunelling!
Digging tunnels is cheaper than buying land rights? That surprises me. How we talking specifically about the LA city center here? Because I can't imagine building a tunnel between LA and SF would be exactly cheap.
>As far as I was able to read, not a single mention that Musk has been able to take two or three other previously considered impossible tasks and bring them to completion.
Musk has been extremely successful and managed to bring his vision to reality and sell it to people. I'm not a Musk hater at all, but I don't think it's reasonable to say that he did the "impossible". There were space rockets and electric cars before him. He pushed the concept further, managed to do things other couldn't but I don't think anybody reasonable would've said that what he did was impossible.
Furthermore his hyperloop paper looked more like a high school science project or maybe preliminary work for a sci-fi book than a very practical design. He hand-waves on a ton of stuff and seems extremely optimistic with the cost and the risks involved.
>Call me a fanboy if you will
Okay.
>The fact that we've lost faith in humanity's ability to improve things by taking on large, ambitious projects, even if some, even if most, will fail, saddens me every day.
That's a bit overly dramatic. Take the Eurostar tunnel between the UK and France, take the Millau viaduct, take the LHC, take the ISS... People and government can invest in large projects. It's risk we don't like. Hyperloop still looks a lot like a moonshot and I don't see why public money should fund his R&D. If he really thinks the hyperloop is viable (he seems to) then he should explain much better and in much greater details what he wants to do exactly. And especially how he comes up with his extremely optimistic figures.
The "Musk stamp of approval" shouldn't be sufficient to pour millions, if not billions of tax dollars in a highly experimental and unproven technology when we're not even certain that said technology would actually solve the problems we're facing.
Re: Hypnotized by Hyperloop
#38One 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, distan…
> If I could get to hong kong in 15 minutes, I might go there this afternoon for some dumplings.
And that's a good thing, because it increases the amount of demand available to businesses. The more potential customers you have, the more product you can make to sell to that market, and the more product you can make, the better your economies of scale.
The large population of New York is what allows it to offer so many niche and specialty stores, which would otherwise struggle to stay in business.
Re: Hypnotized by Hyperloop
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could care less about challenging Musk's reputation, that's his problem. It's the fallacies of argument. Good engineers are awash in self doubt and questioning.
And when those responding to those arguments say stuff like "my faith is more evidence based than yours", the rebuttal is just as fallacious. It's turning into "X must be right because they are X", which isn't any better.
I'm not the person that wrote that. My discord is the state of journalism. This article doesn't inform anything that prevents the business model from working. People also attempted flight many centuries before succeeding. Arguing why the physics won't work or the ROI is not possible would be informative. This is just sad click bait.
Re: Hypnotized by Hyperloop
#40Couldn'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…
> The fact that we've lost faith in humanity's ability to improve things by taking on large, ambitious projects, even if some, even if most, will fail, saddens me every day. It doesn't prevent me from trying to make the world a better place though, and I hope nobody else was discouraged by low-quality, knee-jerk thinking like this, either.
Exactly! The author pick and chose grand ideas from the past that didn’t work. We’re a nation that built the interstate highway system as well as the transcontinental railroad. Both of those ideas were considered impossible by many at the time but completely revolutionized transportation.