The Hyperloop’s Only Destination Is a Capitalist Hellscape | Hacker News Reader

The Hyperloop’s Only Destination Is a Capitalist Hellscape

discourseblog.com

87 pointsxdze284 comments

> The company celebrated the achievement by releasing a modest video comparing it to, among other things, the moment the Wright Brothers flew the first planes.

Just so everyone knows, the Wright Brothers became well-known in the aviation community based on their work developing and flying gliders and inventing the 3-axis control system. Once they actually started flying powered airplanes, they became secretive and everyone stopped believing them, considering them to be complete frauds.

A few people saw them fly in Kitty Hawk. A few dozen people saw them fly in Ohio with new and refined designs, etc. But still they were ignored.

It was only a few years later, in France, that they blew everyone's mind with a completely new design and started flying around Paris.

They got the credit for flying in Kitty Hawk retroactively. You don't want your product to be compared to the Wright Brothers and the first flight!

Not only that, if I recall correctly the Wright brothers actually died penniless. They tried patenting and protecting their flight controls idea which is to rotate the wings. It was impractical and inefficient so never really got anywhere. It wasn't until Germany creating a mature aileron system which really pushed flight technology forward (the pressure of War and military helps a lot too).

I think that's correct. However, the concept of banking the plane to turn was their idea and is still used. Before that, everyone thought you'd turn a plane like you turn a car. It was their bicycle experience that led them in the right direction.

>...Not only that, if I recall correctly the Wright brothers actually died penniless.

I don't think that is true.

Wilbur died in 1912 in the middle of the patent disputes.

>...Orville made his last flight as a pilot in 1918 in a 1911 Model B. He retired from business and became an elder statesman of aviation, serving on various official boards and committees, including the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), predecessor agency to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce (ACCA), predecessor to the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA).

>...Orville Wright served NACA for 28 years. In 1930, he received the first Daniel Guggenheim Medal established in 1928 by the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics. In 1936, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

>...They tried patenting and protecting their flight controls idea which is to rotate the wings. It was impractical and inefficient so never really got anywhere.

>...In January 1914, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict against the Curtiss company, which continued to avoid penalties through legal tactics. Orville apparently felt vindicated by the decision, and much to the frustration of company executives, he did not push vigorously for further legal action to ensure a manufacturing monopoly. In fact, he was planning to sell the company and departed in 1915. In 1917, with World War I underway, the U.S. government pressured the industry to form a cross-licensing organization, the Manufacturers Aircraft Association, to which member companies paid a blanket fee for the use of aviation patents, including the original and subsequent Wright patents.

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

I read the entire article just to find its underlying foundation rearing its ugly head near its end:

> Maybe we’ll even have a line in the U.S. that Wall Street execs and DC lobbyists will use to blast up and down the Eastern Seaboard for business lunches. But you and me? We’ll be stuck on dilapidated Amtrak lines[...] > our only consolation the fact that the hyperloop’s vacuum-sealed tubes don’t have windows, so its riders won’t be able to gawk or gloat as they fly by at 800 miles per hour.

AKA "This is for rich people! And rich people having things I can't have is bad!"

I'm middle class in a third world country and electric vehicles coming into the mainstream make me excited for the future of public and private transportation, but I guess I should feel bad instead because rich people get vacuum tubes.

When and where did this line of thought of "it's better for everyone to stay the same than everyone get better if some people get better by a bigger amount" started being socially acceptable within grown adults?

Based on this article's argument cars, planes and paintings are a travesty.

When do you anticipate electric vehicles will become mainstream in your country?

Electric buses are mainstream in china.

Electric buses are mainstream in America, they drive past my home a dozen times a day. Of course they pull their power from overhead powerlines, but I'd guess that makes them better at handling hills and has less downtime.

That's a stretch. And China is 2nd world.

Why is it a stretch?

I didn't say china was a third world country, but they do have 421,000 electric buses, which means that it is already a country where electric vehicles are mainstream.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-15/in-shift-...

My brother lives in India and apparently there is a local brand of electric scooters. Very cool, imho. Lots of two wheelers in India, so it makes sense that happens first.

Within 5 to 15 years I would guess, depending on the moment cheaper batteries materialize at scale and/or the tax system either benefits EVs or penalizes ICEs.

Taxis and buses are already starting to use EVs due to tax subsidies for businesses so we know that reducing taxes works, but even with our currently "slightly less statist than average" government that's a long shot for regular people to get the same benefits anytime soon. This is in Uruguay FWIW.

That line of thought existed for a long time. It's the same line of thought that says that gentrification is a bad result - rich people concentrating in one suburb and never having to look 2 blocks away where people are forced to sleep on the street makes them not think about people sleeping on the street. That then influences public spending where the same rich people have stronger voices about what problems to solve.

See comments from British MP recently that people who can't afford food should sell their assets like pearls. That's a complete disconnect with normal people's lives.

I'm not sure how popular/acceptable those views are, but I'm all for some form of "if you have power over X you should experience the lowest class of X". For example elected officials should not be allowed security fast track at the airports.

I know right? I work hard and do well for my family, but I know there are folks who have much higher incomes and wealth and enjoy much more privileges. Some of them have earned it and some haven't. I spend zero percent of my life being upset about this. Why do so many young people in basically my same life station fret about it so very much? It seems very toddlerish, to be so upset just because you saw someone with a toy you don't have.

It’s not greed and looking up it’s empathy and looking down.

"Eat the rich" isn't that, no

No looking at the destitute and feeling that wealth redistribution is a good solution with a pithy slogan is not greed.

Leftists should get some better slogan writers so they don't have to constantly tell everyone that what they mean is completely different than what they're saying.

IMO, both the hyperloop and the boring company tunnels will evolve into something much more subway-like if they succeed. Starting out by soaking the rich is often a good way to start, though.

Is this level of infrastructure even viable for a few rich people?

>When and where did this line of thought of "it's better for everyone to stay the same than everyone get better if some people get better by a bigger amount" started being socially acceptable within grown adults?

That's not at all what the author is saying. He's arguing that it would be better, easier, and provide more value for more people if instead of things like Hyperloops we invested in high speed rail. If you've ever been to the US you'll know the transport infrastructure is TERRIBLE. Compared to Europe (and from the reading the article, Japan too it seems) American public transport is embarrassing; rusty diesel locomotives and pot holed roads. Having a high speed rail network in America would most certainly not be keeping everything the same.

> "it's better for everyone to stay the same than everyone get better if some people get better by a bigger amount"

I think this falls down because things aren’t getting better, at least in the US. People are less likely to own a house than their parents were at their age, minimum wage hasn’t increased in line with inflation and has therefore effectively decreased, higher education is more expensive etc.

And then you see people who profit off of making things worse buying their third house and you start to think it’s not exactly fair.

That is an absolutely disingenuous reading of what the article was trying to say. It's more like "this will not be available to regular people in our lifetimes." It's neither "Rich people having things I can't have is bad!" nor "it's better for everyone to stay the same than everyone get better, if some people get better by a bigger amount."

Can you rephrase your critique using what the article actually said, rather than what you're reading into it?

I quoted directly from the article, and said that as a characterization of what I see the underlying problem behind his statements are.

You may interpret it differently, but I clearly and unequivocally see that sentiment behind it. And to be more specific, I could be more charitable in my interpretation should the second line I quoted not be in the article verbatim.

This

> AKA "This is for rich people! And rich people having things I can't have is bad!"

and this

> When and where did this line of thought of "it's better for everyone to stay the same than everyone get better if some people get better by a bigger amount" started being socially acceptable within grown adults?

have no basis in the article text. You made it up out of your own interpretation. Stop trying to be intellectually dishonest while pretending you did nothing.

This article is completely lacking in historical perspective. There was a time when commercial aviation was a luxury reserved for the rich; one need only look at the configurations of aircraft like the DC-2 and the Boeing 317 to understand that. Between 1935 and 2020, flight became a tool to help enrich the lives of masses of middle-class people.

The hyperloop has a relatively small chance of positively impacting many people's lives, and possibly making medium-distance transportation more energy efficient; it's not a sure thing, but it would be wonderful if it works.

This would be a good analogy if in 1935 commercial aviation had already existed for 50 years.

>" This would be a good analogy if in 1935 commercial aviation had already existed for 50 years."

Battery-powered electric vehicles have existed for over 100 years, and photovoltaic solar cells have existed for over 60 years, but both have really changed over the last 5, 10, and 20! Sometimes technologies can undergo major shifts due to external forces.

I don't follow your analogy. How is this to the train what the plane was to an oceanic voyage?

I don't really have a direct analogy (possibly due to a lack of 'vision'); I just think that changing technology can create 'paradigm shifts' in access and capabilities.

It would be a better analogy if the changing technology weren’t “it’s like a train except for fewer people and also it costs more”.

Well, an alternative view is that "it's an airplane but more efficient and with lower operating costs". Everything from bicycles to commercial aviation is on the spectrum of people-movers (with alternative uses as well).

I don't think comparisons to airplanes make much sense. While early airplanes may have only been accessible to the rich, at the same time the infrastructure required was very minimal. During the early stages of the aviation industry, not much more was needed than a field or lake. A minimally viable Hyperloop for the rich requires billions of dollars of infrastructure.

I agree that these comparisons are not direct analogies, which is why I said "I don't really have a direct analogy (possibly due to a lack of 'vision')".

Most people won't take a train to do Austin-NY, or LA-Seattle.

With the hyperloop, the rich people would at first. Once scaled, everyone would. Plane can't beat downtown-to-downtown.

Absolutely on point. One thing I find particularly interesting about technologies of this kind is that they're often sold as 'the future of X', in this case transport. Just like Zoom is the 'future of doing conferences and work'.

Has anyone noticed in recent times that this is almost always the American future, rather than everyone else's future, in response to essentially rot of public infrastructure and state capacity?

Go to China, or Singapore, Or Taiwan or South Korea and ask them if their future is work from home because of Covid, or hyperloops because apparently nobody in the US can built a train any more. You'll be surprised.

“we are the future of X” === “X is observably a $Y billion total market today, so invest in us at 25x revenue”

Is public money going toward this? If not, why do you care how a private individual uses their money?

Waste is waste.

True, but is waste bad?

In the extreme long term, humans will have died out and everything that was ever done will turn out to have been "waste". That said, I don't feel bad about doing things that make me feel good and/or are interesting. People can do hyperloops if they want.

> Is public money going toward this?

Pretty much all the private investment in hyperloops is to get to the point of selling it for public infrastructure projects (it was originally proposed as an alternative specifically to California High Speed Rail), so, while the answer is mostly “no” in the strict present sense of “is”, it's also “yes” in the sense of the intended goal of the projects.

That just sounds like risk-free R&D, where the people's money only goes there once the idea has been proven by someone else, with no loss for the state if it goes nowhere near our interests.

Except in the real world, the “getting ready” from day one isn't just R&D but also propaganda. You counter the propaganda so it doesn't soften the ground for waste of public funds.

The problem is some people believe bureaucrats will spend better the money than a private group. So they want their money and give those bureaucrats the power to spend the money and believe someday they will make a revolutionary product for free.

Personally, I care because it diverts attention and thrust from developing proven alternatives to air travel, such as HSR. When something that big hinges on a narrow swing in public opinion, and someone starts dangling a pie in the sky idea, the result can be abandonment of the main idea, at the service of an unlikely moonshot by a big ego.

Here is an excellent article that discusses this (surprisingly old) phenomena

http://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/gadgetbahn/

I don't see HSR as a good alternative to air travel in a country as spread out as the US. a proper HSR route for the northeast corridor would be great; it's kind of ridiculous that a plane is the best way to get from boston to DC. when you start looking at traversing entire coasts, it's really hard for a train to compete with air travel. a non-stop flight from seattle to LA takes about two and a half hours, plus all the security nonsense. at 200mph, a train that makes zero stops would take about six hours. once you factor in travel to/from the airport and security, that's actually not too bad, but nonstop train routes are uncommon. the situation is even worse for cross-country flights. NY to LA is about six hours by plane; it would be about fourteen hours on a (highly unlikely) nonstop train.

frankly (as an east-coaster) I would be happy just to see the existing rail lines be price competitive with airlines. I greatly prefer traveling by train, and I would be willing to accept a longer transit time if it were not both slower and more expensive.

Both Europe and China are of comparable size to the US, and they enjoy high speed train since decades ago. It won't replace a NYC-LA trip anytime now, but the coastal corridors and various regional hubs (Texas triangle, lake Michigan, etc) are perfectly sized.

So, for one, the public definitely has an interest in how you spend your money. That's why it's illegal to buy things like people.

Two, public money is private money. That's what taxes are.

yes there already is public money going towards this, see the contract the boring company has with the Las Vegas convention authority, a public body, and whoops of course it's already a mess.[1]

This is infrastructure, if this ever is going to be a business it's going to be public money, it's not like someone builts a hyperloop on their cow farm.

[1]https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/16/elon-musks-las-vegas-loop-...

Japan has 1700 miles of high-speed train lines that can go up to 200 mph.

Am I missing something? Isn't the hyperloop supposed to target aircraft speeds (+600 mph)? Does the author really not understand it wouldn't be competing with trains?

I know there are a lot of Musk fans on this site, so can someone explain to me the benefits of this style of hyperloop over a train?

They're faster. That's pretty much the entire attraction.

They might theoretically be faster eventually. Currently they're significantly slower than existing production rail lines.

One issue with the hyperloop that nobody seems to talk about is safety. How do you handle ruptures in the tube? How do you evacuate? and What do you do if your pod loses pressure? This isn't like a 737 where you can give people oxygen while you drop to 10,000 feet when you lose pressure. That only works because at 35,000 ft the pressure is still high enough that you can breathe a higher concentration of oxygen for a short period of time, and not get hypoxia or decompression sickness.

Sure, you can add safety re-pressurization valves and escape hatches, but all of those seals are points of failure that need to be inspected and maintained across the entire length of the tube.

The fact that one high-caliber bullet can shut down a multi-billion dollar transport system is all that needs to be said.

It's a silly idea and is best made on the Moon or Mars where atmospheric pressure is already low enough to not cause catastrophic failure.

Incidentally, regular trains getting shot at in America is not uncommon. Apparently Boeing has to check fuselages shipped by rail for bullet holes, because that happens..

The fact that the hyperloop is not a train is by far its most important feature.

We have reasonable cost estimates for trains, with a new unproven technology, you can make any cost estimates you want.

But its all a shell game, the hyperloop has every constraint a train does (and more!), and will inevitably, at the very least be exactly as expensive.

This is an old game, I'm sure everyone remembers The Simpson's monorail episode.

http://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/gadgetbahn/

I'm not quite sure it's possible for a vacuum tube to cost less than some steel for a train track.

I guess it could be cheaper to build it under a city (tunnel needs to be smaller), but anywhere else... highly doubt it.

Plus, you know, trains are faster, more comfortable, have sleeper cabins, quieter, easier to stop in an emergency, and even have windows!

Hyperloop is basically Musk's dislike for sharing space with other people. Some of them might even be murderers, to put it in his words.

I still think that Elon's dream goal is to put a boring machine into a rocket and build subsurface habitations connected by hyperloops on mars.

>It’s entirely possible that in our lifetimes the oil and gas billionaires in Saudi Arabia will be able to shoot themselves in tiny designer-branded pods with heated leather seats from one side of the Kingdom to the other.

I can see the Louis Vitton seats from here.

> end-state death-cult capitalism that the American ruling class believes in

Who writes this garbage?

Maybe that capitalist hellscape will add solar freakin' roadways while they're at it.

More solar is good, but we have space for it elsewhere. It's cheaper and easier to have roads be "plain old roads".

I think that's the point. The 'technology' seems optimized for creating hype on reddit, not actually being commercially viable.

If it worked readily/economically enough as envisioned the hype would be well justified.

Solar roadways only value add is "we found more space to put panels" and that's not a serious problem as there's plenty of space for that.

Roads are already costly and this would just make it worse.

I think the hype comes mostly from credulous futurists who love the sci-fi aesthetic, not from people who actually think critically about the potential of the technology. It takes a serious suspension of critical thinking to believe roads made out of solar panels isn't a really dumb idea.

Why did this post get removed?

I’ll just leave this here https://youtu.be/RNFesa01llk

Many years ago, when Hyperloop's design was first announced, tlb pointed out that steel expands during summer, and that the expansion from SF to LA was roughly 400m (if I remember correctly) over a so-and-so temperature difference during summer. Where does the steel go?

I'm not sure there's been a satisfactory answer to that question. Expansion joints are very hard when you need to maintain a vacuum.

This isn't actually a problem! We build gas pipelines all the time which suffer exactly the same problem. (and no, you don't want gas pipelines to leak!) You can use expansion joints, or grooved couplings that enable movement, and there are other solutions as well. I think the problem that people have is that they assume you need some really intense vacuum for hyperloop to work. .05 bar (the pressure at 60,000 ft) is fine, and so is some leakage into the pipeline, which you just have to pump out.

Normal pipelines handle large amounts of thermal expansion in a way fundamentally incompatible with hyperloops: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-oil-pipelines-have-so-many-seem...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=expansion+loop&iax=images&ia=image...

Why would that be fundamentally incompatible?

The tube could sit on rollers and/or the expansion could go into pushing arcs out slightly more. There are probably a lot of solutions.

It doesn't necessarily need to be a perfect vacuum. The less air in the tube, the less resistance there will be. I would guess there would be vacuum pumps constantly taking air out of it.

There are no expansion joints on continuous welded rail either.

The track is instead clamped so strongly that it can maintain its alignment even under thermal stress.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_(rail_transport)#Conti...

I disagree. I think there is a profoundly bright future to be had with hyperloops, powered by a mix of solar and fusion energy.

That being said, I do believe that there are a lot of challenges to resolve along the way.

* how do we halt the release of methane from the arctic and prevent the death of the North Atlantic Current (NAC)?

* how do we make online education even better and as close to free of cost as possible?

* how do we restore trust in government and media?

* how do we free people from crushing debt, whether it be from student loans or medicine?

* how do we change the physical layout of communities so they are no longer structured around the automobile, but instead are built for remote work and raising children at home?

* how do we rapidly grow the housing stock, so that everyone has a place to live?

Solving these problems (and the many I have neglected to mention) is a difficult challenge, to be sure. I am certain of one thing though: clean technology and honestly earned wealth are our friends here, not our enemies.

A lot of great jobs will be made constructing the infrastructure required to make all this stuff happen.

How does the hyperloop solve any of these problems in a better way than an already proven technology, trains.

The hyperloop can go at the speed of a plane, using very little energy. High-speed is high-throughput. Trains aren't even in the same ballpark.

The article's author agrees with you that there may be a bright future for Hyperloop replacing air travel.

The author believes that the (technical AND political) challenges to resolve along the way are so substantial, that you're not going to see them solved until 2200.

The author then points out that all the firms working on building one seem to operate more like Theranos, or Bernie Madoff's investment firm, and less like Tesla or SpaceX.

you mean profoundly bright future for fusion energy... i mean if we had that, we can probably have things 10x nicer than hyperloops

Four links, all about MIT's Dennis Whyte and Commonwealth Fusion Systems:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/climate/nuclear-fusion-re...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY6U4wB-oYM

https://cfs.energy/

i'm not saying fusion isn't gonna work, I'm saying that i believe fusion to be a much more difficult and fundamental innovation that if realized, will impact our society much more than hyperloop.

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