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Comment by jen729w | Hacker News Reader

The problem with Hyperloop isn't going to be technology - I'm sure smart people will make this thing work, if they want to - it's going to be the same problem that any new transit system encounters: land, and building on it.

How do you get [any rail-ish system] from point A to point B? You build the infrastructure from those two places. Uh-oh. Where? Want to arrive in the centre of point A? Whose land do you build over? How much does it cost to acquire or license? What regulations exist? What do the locals think, do they want a Hyperloop running past their window? What are the local unions like and how much will it cost to get the thing built?

Ultra-fast rail lines already exist. This isn't the reason there isn't one from downtown LA to SF (or Melbourne to Sydney or or London to Paris^ or New York to Boston).

^Interesting because the Eurorail was largely built on existing, upgraded track.

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That's likely why they're looking at Saudi Arabia to make the first production track, since the Royal Family can basically do whatever they want.

Hooray for bootstrapping a tech company on the money of an authoritarian regime with a human rights violations list several volumes long.

We're living in such enlightened times.

Yup, better to do it in the USA, where no human rights violations have occurred. This way we can all hyperloop with a clear conscience.

I've been thinking about sarcasm lately, as it relates to my own communication. What was the value of sarcasm in this post when you can say the same thing straightforwardly?

The point is that it is easy to argue / disagree with:

"If it is built on the back of of an authoritarian regime with a human rights violations list several volumes long, it is a bit harder to appreciate the progress."

By taking the sarcastic route, you force everyone who thinks that way to agree with you.

For example, some people like to push the better part of an operating system over the browser to anyone who views their page, under the guise of client-side javascript frameworks.

By pointing this out with sarcasm, you would force them to "agree" with you, while making them realize it is absurd.

I think the parent's post wouldn't have been as powerful if they had simply straightforwardly written what they had in mind - sarcasm can get readers to see the absurdity of lauding something.

Sometimes adding a /s is advisable but not in this case, as the sarcastic part includes blatantly negative language ("authoritarian regime with a human rights violations list") and so is quite clear.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply!

That's my problem with how deeply pervasive sarcasm is – it employs emotionality and absurdity cheaply, snidely, and often in place of a well reasoned argument.

What does this lose?

"I am troubled that the company is funded by an authoritarian regime with many human rights violations. These are modern times and we should be more judicious about who we're supporting."

The original post said nothing controversial in this audience. It was a lazy and juvenile kind of false cleverness. Irony is ubiquitous now, and employing it to wield dissonance is, to me at least, as cheap as trying to appear powerful by using hate and rage.

Your proposed version loses a TON.

Go back upthread and you will realize that someone had written this "That's likely why they're looking at Saudi Arabia to make the first production track, since the Royal Family can basically do whatever they want."

Without any moral component or disagreement.

Whereas the version you just suggested sounds like a nuanced objection - the sarcastic version shows that this reasoning is absolutely abhorrent. And the sarcastic version is right.

I mean imagine if some kind of gene biotech company, decided to do its first human tests in North Korea, "because the government there can do whatever it wants". This example shows just how wrong the original reasoning is, how outrageous it is.

The version you quoted: "I am troubled that the company is funded by an authoritarian regime with many human rights violations. These are modern times and we should be more judicious about who we're supporting" simply doesn't have the outraged effect.

For my example I alluded to (but didn't quote) - if I had said, "I am troubled that browsers are frequently downloading a megabyte or more simply to serve what amounts to a static page" this "troubled" does not really relate the level of objection someone might feel.

So I personally do not subscribe to your analysis.

Gotcha, but I think that was my poor choice of soft language rather than losing the sarcasm. How about this:

"This company is funded by an authoritarian regime that tortures and murders people on a regular basis. Remember that when you're staring into the banality of their app."

Don't you think irony ends up sabotaging some of the gravity?

What do you think about "New Sincerity"? http://www.salon.com/2014/04/13/david_foster_wallace_was_rig...

I enjoy our exchange, thanks again

Your new proposed version is great. The problem is that it requires deep thinking and research. People can't be expected to produce that on the spot.

Take something like that President Trump disallowed the BBC and CNN from his press conferences. If I wanted to mention that as a rebuttal to someone bringing up something about trump, I really have no other recourse than pointing this out, with sarcasm.

So I don't know, imagine someone says trump is committed to fair coverage and the facts, and the snide response is "yep, this is why he banned from his conferences the organizations, like the BBC, that never wanted to be there in the first place, since they were obviously perfectly happy to make up any old quote without even trying to send any correspondents."

I don't have any other point to make in this hypothetical example - isn't the sarcasm enough? How would you write it, for this hypothetical example?

Eurorail was able to straighten their rail alignments in Europe as it was built, and had a legacy of having straighter alignments than we have here in the US, as its a denser continent with more political capital to spend to eminent domain buildings over a longer period of time to get that trackage dead straight.

Rail management in Europe is also not the greatest, they tried to separate rolling stock (the cars you ride on) from the company that owns the rails, while forcing them to sublease track rights, which has created a mess as of late.

Due to topographical issues, short of another FDR style project we will not see something similar in the US in our lifetime.

What is Eurorail?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurail

That's Eurail, not Eurorail. And Eurail is a recent train ticket system. It doesn't have anything to do with rail alignment or the design of the rail system in Europe.

Eurorail is "American" for "the bullet trains in Europe".

The solution for stations in dense urban areas is, evidently, boring tunnels.

I can't tell if "boring" here is an intentional pun or not but I like it. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company

The building permit/ titles to land limit really only applies in countries with proper property rights. In a lot of emerging countries, this tech should have a bright future.

It can't even move 1000 people an hour, a road moves 2k an hour, a set of metal sticks we call rail moves 20k an hour. That is why rail is so popular across Asia & Europe, if your moving large volumes of people it is very, very efficient.

> It can't even move 1000 people an hour, a road moves 2k an hour, a set of metal sticks we call rail moves 20k an hour.

You are now making lots of assumptions for each mode of transport without stating them.

Given that none of the companies working on different Hyperloop concepts are even directly replicating the original proposal, your assumptions for hyperloop may or may not hold, but without stating which of revised models you're discussing throwing out numbers like this is entirely meaningless.

You can estimate people/hour by working out people/car * cars/hour. If you assume that Hyperloop uses 90-second headways, you need 25 people per dispatched train to meet just 1000 people per hour. I think that's higher than any proposal I've seen for a Hyperloop car.

In contrast, a regular commuter train can carry ~1000 people per train, and you need to dispatch them at 3 minute intervals (20 trains/hour) to move 20,000 people per hour. A single lane of road traffic will carry ~2000 cars per hour. Assuming single-occupant vehicles, that's ~2000 people/hour.

This video of a cable car [1] shows a ~22 second headway between cars.

And that's loading them at the lazy pace of a tourist attraction. With longer platforms, experienced commuters and more staff, you might be able to send cars out even faster.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By27vhASp1A

The limiting factor on rail networks is the time it takes switches to reset. The London Underground has a scheduled headway of 60 seconds on its busiest line, WMATA 90. (They can switch faster, but if there's a breakdown, it's useful to have extra slack in the schedule so you can recover). Cable cars don't need to switch, but Hyperloop does. At the speeds of Hyperloop, the minimum allowable distance between two cars is another factor.

The key metric you're missing is distance. It may not carry 1k people per hour, but it can carry people faster than most any other means of transportation. Because of that, I'd venture to say that your paradigm is wrong.

You're comparing apples to oranges.

What you should be comparing Hyperloop to is airplanes, not other land-based transport systems. Hyperloop is very fast, and is meant to compete with regional air travel. It's not likely to be cheap per-ticket, so it's not comparable to trains and cars. It's not meant to move large volumes of people cheaply, it's meant to move high fare-paying people very quickly so they don't have to deal with the problems inherent in air travel.

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