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> 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?

There's not really any such thing as a vacuum in a macroscopic sense, only how little air pressure you have. Hyperloop is a vactrain--it's using the same basic principle of "get rid of the air to eliminate air resistance"; it just avoids the name to make it not sound like a repackaging of a 100-year old failed concept.

> And then it talks about putting more money into Amtrak, when Musk's prime concern has been how slow and expensive the high-speed rail project in CA has been, precisely because of how hard it is to get land rights. Getting around existing commitments of surface land is the whole point of tunelling!

Tunnels are where you start measuring costs in hundreds of millions of dollars per mile--Japan's new, mostly underground maglev Shinkansen is costing $200m / km. Urban tunnels are expensive, because you often can't cut-and-cover (certainly not for long, linear corridors), which means expensive underground TBMs. You also have to avoid a maze of underground tunnels, wires, and pipes. Outside urban areas, land is quite cheap. It's just slow acquisition process because everyone wants to milk you for more money.

> Call me a fanboy if you will, but at least my fanboyism is evidence-based.

Civil engineers have looked at Elon Musk's Hyperloop proposal. They've generally agreed that it is about as attached to reality as Donald Trump's campaign promises.

>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 government is supposed to be involved.

>What's that network you're using to blast this tripe straight to my eyeballs right now?

A network that evolved from humble origins decades ago. Maybe if Musk financed a hyperloop prototype in the desert for a decade and showed its economic viability, then you can make that comparison. But who knows, maybe that's what he plans to do with the government approval he's supposedly gotten - good for him then, hopefully it works.

> 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

Was it? If Tesla didn't exist would things look dramatically different today?

All electric cars use pretty much the same technology. It's been developed by a variety of companies. No doubt Tesla has moved things along faster than if they weren't here, and they've made some fantastic products, but I think the economic argument for electric cars plays a far bigger role in their development than any one specific company.

> Was it? If Tesla didn't exist would things look dramatically different today?

Yes. Because the market didn't want electric cars, and if Tesla didn't force them down our throats it probably still wouldn't. At some point in the future the shift would eventually happen, but Tesla sped that process up.

The economic argument was this; we won't get off IC engines because it wasn't viable (for car companies). They have a stranglehold on regulators and lawmakers in almost every country. Their sunk costs and supply chain and derivatives are all set up to continue with petroleum (whom the producers are in similar situations, therefore in agreement with this arrangement). Do you not remember what happened with Tesla and the car-dealerships?

The economic argument was: we're staying with IC, electric cars "aren't viable." Which means the entire global economy (yuge scale) is dependent on the IC / Petrol cartel, everyone with any amount of money is happy with the arrangment. If you want to go up against us, with no sponsorship from a big money distributor (they like petrol) then good luck!

Even into the present there are a lot of legitimate concerns about Tesla. The rate at which he wants to ramp up production, whether public demand will be there for the 3, etc etc. It was and still very much is an unknown for Musk to pull this off. Not disagreeing with you, just trying to underscore that Tesla still has a lot of risk in it.

Edit: Also before the S no one had produced an EV with the range/polish to make anyone think they were anything more than a pipe dream at our current stage.

It all hinges on what "useful" and "impossible" means.

General Motors EV1 in the 1990s. NiMH cars could travel 100–140 mi.

Its fans thought it was useful.

> The whole point is that it is tunnels underneath the modern city.

And I suspect part of the point the author is making is that this is the problem. Look at the East Side Access project in New York. Building a tunnel underneath a modern city is an extremely difficult project - and largely for political and legal reasons, not technological ones. Hyperloop wouldn't solve a single one of those problems.

We have enough transportation problems with known solutions that are underfunded. Why would we spend government money on a risky Hyperloop bet rather than invest in technology we already know works well? The article isn't really about the technology being used in Hyperloop (hence, I suspect, the inaccuracies you point out. I don't see how the detract from the point being made, though), it's about our desire to always chase the new shiny thing at any cost rather than spend money on the boring, functional stuff.

Maybe we have lost sight of the marvels we can achieve with grand projects. Or maybe people are arguing we should fix the sewers before we make our gleaming tower in the sky.

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.

> 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.

Those were both networks built off of scaling existing technologies (the highway is as old as people, and the railway was ~40 years old at that point).

It's a very different thing than entirely new tech outcompeting old and outscaling it, which is what Musk is attempting.

The question is why don't we have a national high speed rail network and if that hasn't or can't work, what's Hyperloop and Boring gonna do better?

Isn't the hyperloop scaling tunneling? Making it faster and cheaper and smaller diameter? Subways have been around for a VERY long time...

We don't have a national (or contintent wide) high speed rail network because North Americans by and large don't believe in community efforts and social investment (except for military). There is absolutely incredible private wealth and an incredible poverty of public wealth.

And so we are beholden to private visionaries like Musk.

It's rather misleading to ignore the convenience of existing modes fo transit (cars in particular) in North America relative to other places in the world. People don't widely support rail investment because cars work well enough. There is just enough parking, inefficient but tolerable traffic, etc. As a result, a lot of people just don't see the problem with the car culture here. Given an immediate problem, they (as with anyone else) will support a solution.

National high speed rail network sounds like something that requires a political consensus (and public money). Probably not feasible to try to build something like that as private company.

For me Elon's ideas feel more like something private company could take.

> We’re a nation that built the interstate highway system

I think you mean this as a positive example, but a lot of people would disagree. It was an enormous public subsidy for a lot of behaviors that now don't look so good, including increased energy dependence, destruction of natural habitat, and a significant increase in racial segregation.

History is what it is, but I hope we can learn some lessons about the downsides of uncritical techno-utopianism.

How is it "not even vacuum sealed"? If you look at their white paper, then it obviously isn't space-equivalent vacuum - but it is so far from one atmosphere how could it not be sealed?

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.

If he thinks Hyperloop is viable he should build it with his own money. One of the reasons private businesses apply for public subsides is that they know they would never succeed without them. It's just easier to take risks with someone else's money :)

The job of a being a good conservative is to push back on every progressive idea.

It's good to have skeptics push back and ensure that the most valid ideas move forward. Otherwise every wacky idea would get funded

essentially that same thing that I'm saying.

Ah sorry, it came off to me like a dig at conservatives. Pushing back at progressives is a feature, not a bug

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 billionaire is validated or not? Why is every time there is an article like this, there's half a dozen Musk fans complaining that someone dare challenge the great Musk?

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.

No, there are simpler questions, like why build inefficient systems like Hyperloops and car sleds when we have tech that works at scale already for the former and we have solutions to the latter that don't require right of way under the most expensive real-estate in the world to build transport systems for transport systems (that Musk just happens to be selling), and will make our urban centers car based for the forseable future when we could be going the other direction?

It's good to praise vision and have heroes but one of the constants of history is that heroes fail (because they're people) and that rate increases as they get further and further outside their original domain. We should be thankful for the visionaries but the way of refining their visions is criticism, not bristling when someone dare do that.

Napoleon ruled the world right up until he didn't.

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.

> 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?

>> why build inefficient systems like Hyperloops and car sleds when we have tech that works at scale already

> why build inefficient electric cars when we had a proved combustion engine that worked at scale before?

The difference between these questions is precisely that the latter appears to have a good answer. What's the answer to the former?

Are you aware of how much money is dumped into maintaining roads? Erosion.