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Comment by hparadiz | Hacker News Reader

He's sending the weirdest mixed signals. If we want to hit anywhere near 1 on the Kardashev scale we're gonna need a planet wide high speed rail system. They should just give the major tech companies naming rights to the stations for 35 years for like 2-3 billion a pop and scale up construction 5x.

I don't get the slow roll on this thing. The stations in LA and SF are gonna end up sort of like Tokyo station for the Shinkansen. A giant mall area with a huge amount of commerce. Why isn't this thing done yesterday?

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He doesn't actually want progress. He wants power and wealth for himself. Public transit is an equalizer, it serves normal people.

Relax man. He's a bipolar weirdo who isn't always likable but progress doesn't always come from likeable people. And the fact of the matter is he has actually delivered on a bunch of stuff I thought I'd never see in my lifetime.

What kinds of things he's delivered do you have in mind?

Let's see. If Paypal was his only legacy he would have already done 99% more than most people but then he went on to build a car company that was the best selling electric car brand in the world for a decade and in the process standardized not just electric charging but the plug we're all using today. Then they released a home battery with a sub 10 ms ATS which is necessary for seamless in-house grid/off grid transition. Finally the push for a reusable rocket booster was entirely a management decision on his part. If the next words out of your mouth are "he didn't do that, his engineers did" please come up with something more original. This isn't reddit.

His company was bought by PayPal and he was fired shortly thereafter. giving him credit for that is a stretch.

"fired" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia

> in the process standardized not just electric charging but the plug we're all using today

Wat? Are you talking about NACS? If so, a minority of non-Tesla EVs currently on the road use it in the US, and AFAIK zero outside of North America.

And even in the US, the vast majority of EV charging stations are AC and use J1772, a SAE standard that predates Tesla's existence.

> Why isn't this thing done yesterday?

Land rights. Environmental reviews. Various suits attempting to exert extra compensations for tangential (at best) issues. Basically the California around.

Planet wide high speed rail doesn't make much sense, it is better of medium sized trips. Flights are will always be better for intercontinental trips. Vacuum trains could be faster but would be so expensive to build. Issues would be big deal in evacuated tunnels.

CA HSR is slow partly because the state government has limited funds and giving out slowly. The federal government should have been contributing more. The other problem is it kept getting delayed from legal issues, mainly from acquiring land. Going forward is bad because they decided to do the easy part first and leave the hard tunnels for later.

There should be a high speed rail for every minor leg along the way. Efficiency is relative. People should be able to ship their car by this system instead of renting if they chose. Or use it to go sight seeing in any direction along it's web. The whole point is freedom to move around.

The cost of the HSR is tiny and inconsequential. For the 40 million residents of California it amounts to about $20 a month over the 10 years the fund has been going. It hasn't even spent 50% of the total fund yet. If construction was even 2x the current rate we would already have the central valley done. So I know they are slow rolling it. That's my point. They can speed things up even just a little.

> Vacuum trains could be faster but would be so expensive to build

Vacuum trains are what high altitude airliners are.

Nooo, not thaaat!! We want traiiiins!!

Orbital ring would kickstart the space economy like nothing else, and is technically achievable with existing materials.

Both?!? Both.

Would you trust the operators of an orbital ring with your life though? The modern world seems to mostly be able to do sky scrapers at this point but ... ehh. We still struggle a bit even with just airliners.

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