To me personally, "The Loop" at the Las Vegas Convention Center will always be the epitomy of the stupidity of the Hyperloop idea. It was originally supposed to be a hyperloop. Then they gave up...
To me personally, "The Loop" at the Las Vegas Convention Center will always be the epitomy of the stupidity of the Hyperloop idea. It was originally supposed to be a hyperloop. Then they gave up and made it into a tunnel that would be manned by automated vehicles. Now it's just a tunnel serviced by regular old teslas with human drivers. It would have been more impressive if they just built a subway instead.
The loop was always a separate idea from the hyperloop. I can’t stand Musk, but it was always initially two different ideas. The hyperloop for mid distance intercity travel, and the loop as a...
The loop was always a separate idea from the hyperloop.
I can’t stand Musk, but it was always initially two different ideas. The hyperloop for mid distance intercity travel, and the loop as a weird reinvention of subways, but with little electric sleds that cars would sit on instead of train cars. The boring company was started by musk to persue the loop idea, not the hyperloop idea, which he never had any financial stake in.
Both are pretty awful ideas, but the loop actually has some semblance of grounding in reality, given that some fork of it is operating in Vegas if you squint enough.
The initial pitch was “boring small tunnels is exponentially cheaper than boring big ones, so let’s further decrease the cost of boring small holes by being Silicon Valley super geniuses who think we know better than people who do this for a living, then we’ll put tiny pods that are smaller than trains through them and that will solve traffic”
The idea is still dumb, especially because we already know how to solve traffic, but it at least is something that could feasibly be built in the real world, unlike the hyperloop which only works in a bad sci fi novel.
The fork is a tunnel. It's operating everywhere tunnels are. There's nothing unique about the Vegas "loop". Except that its' a tunnel that hasn't been built to proper safety standards.
Both are pretty awful ideas, but the loop actually has some semblance of grounding in reality, given that some fork of it is operating in Vegas if you squint enough.
The fork is a tunnel. It's operating everywhere tunnels are. There's nothing unique about the Vegas "loop". Except that its' a tunnel that hasn't been built to proper safety standards.
Last I recall it also cut horrific corners on safety and I really hope no one has to learn the hard way just how insanely dangerous that whole "loop" could be.
Last I recall it also cut horrific corners on safety and I really hope no one has to learn the hard way just how insanely dangerous that whole "loop" could be.
It’s scaled back pretty far and I agree that it doesn’t seem very impressive in its current state. But it seems it’s not done yet? I don’t know why they couldn’t automate it, considering that it...
It’s scaled back pretty far and I agree that it doesn’t seem very impressive in its current state. But it seems it’s not done yet?
I don’t know why they couldn’t automate it, considering that it has a dedicated right of way. It would be easy enough to have it automatically follow a line painted down the center or something like that. Or why not rails?
Because it was never seriously intended to be the best solution, just a "futuristic" one. Rails are 1800s tech. Seriously, they hired taxi drivers to drive cars through an isolated loop that they...
Or why not rails?
Because it was never seriously intended to be the best solution, just a "futuristic" one. Rails are 1800s tech.
Seriously, they hired taxi drivers to drive cars through an isolated loop that they built from scratch, that they were intending to purpose-build vehicles for; anyone competent can see that a metro line would be a better solution here, and one that would be trivial to make driverless!.
I would distinguish the concept from the implementation (which does seem unimpressive). I think the idea is to make smaller tunnels than a subway needs to reduce the cost of construction, but make...
I would distinguish the concept from the implementation (which does seem unimpressive).
I think the idea is to make smaller tunnels than a subway needs to reduce the cost of construction, but make a lot of them. This is different but not obviously wrong. It’s not like every form of transportation needs to have the capacity of a subway to be useful for some niche. Sure, maybe it would be booked up and not all that useful during rush hour?
This is just imagining how it might work, though, which cuts no ice. I doubt anyone here is competent to judge.
(I also wonder why more subways aren’t driverless?)
You need safety backups and better train monitoring, both of which are difficult to implement on lines built in the early 1900s that can't be shut down for extended periods. Considering the number...
(I also wonder why more subways aren’t driverless?)
You need safety backups and better train monitoring, both of which are difficult to implement on lines built in the early 1900s that can't be shut down for extended periods. Considering the number of people and line length, most Metro's operate with at least one engineer/conductor regardless.
The BART in the Bay Area was purpose built in the late 60s to be computer controlled, and it is. The trains are staffed by a single operator for emergency reasons. Airport people movers are built regularly that can be operated remotely. In New York City they're slowly retrofitting existing subway lines to be computer controlled as well, for example the "L" is now fully computer-based with a single train operator.
Moreover, new construction can be, and often is, driverless. Old construction is hard to retrofit but they're doing it anyway. An operator is often present for safety reasons. An additional example is old systems don't have platform doors, so an operator ensure the doors have fully closed and nobody is on the tracks.
It really really is. Many thousands of hours have been spent figuring these things out. Musk is not the first person to think of this, and the moment he proposed it many people who've been civil...
This is different but not obviously wrong.
It really really is. Many thousands of hours have been spent figuring these things out. Musk is not the first person to think of this, and the moment he proposed it many people who've been civil engineers or in related fields explained why over and over and over again.
Tunneling, in general, is extremely expensive and difficult to do, and doing lots and lots of tunneling is always going to be harder. Every single inch you tunnel you have to be sure isn't going to screw something up for the tunnel or up above.
The supposed claims of how "cheap" his boring company was were because he didn't include the costs for things like fire escapes in his numbers, and when you bounce all that safety OUT of your budget, well it looks like his company was slightly more expensive per mile.
And as for why they aren't driverless, its the same reason you have pilots.
It's not as simple as people think. The core idea SHOULD be simple, but how you handle the edge cases is extremely important.
Those edge cases could cost hundreds of lives if done wrong, and no one has made a system that full proof. You might be able to build something from scratch now with automation in mind, but all you need is one faulty sensor to cut someone to ribbons if they're stepping on the vehicle when it starts to move.
I still say it’s not obviously wrong to me, but I’m hardly an expert. It sounds like you might have read some good discussions about it. What are the best articles you’ve read by experts?
I still say it’s not obviously wrong to me, but I’m hardly an expert. It sounds like you might have read some good discussions about it. What are the best articles you’ve read by experts?
Thunderfoots breakdown which covers a lot of it, but is more focused on the insane safety than the absurd budget (it's in there, but not nearly focused enough)- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk
But if you don't DIG for these, low and behold you get a lot of dreamers or people in unrelated fields saying "oh yeah this is brilliant" when it never made any sense at all, and Musk just blatantly lied about the costs.
Thanks! Yes, filtering out the low-information posts (fanboys, haters, clickbait articles) is difficult for any project that gets a lot of hype. However, I was talking about Boring Company's...
Thanks! Yes, filtering out the low-information posts (fanboys, haters, clickbait articles) is difficult for any project that gets a lot of hype.
However, I was talking about Boring Company's approach, which is not the same as the hyperloop concept. I agree that was unlikely to ever work.
Sorry about the misunderstanding, I should have been more clear. (And please don't do more homework on my behalf; it's not that important.)
Ah fair enough. Unfortunately that one is even harder to find older articles on. Here's an interview with a Martin Herrenknecht, "...the world market leader with its tunnel boring company."(which...
Ah fair enough. Unfortunately that one is even harder to find older articles on.
Here's an interview with a Martin Herrenknecht, "...the world market leader with its tunnel boring company."(which you'll need google or something else to translate if the link doesn't already)- https://archive.is/ZMZmt#selection-2737.41-2737.55
There's more but I'm having trouble finding it at the moment just given the technical level of discussion I was reading at the time and how old this all is.
Realistically, you have to design the system from the ground up for that. Retrofitting driverlessness into an existing rapid transit system is going to be more expensive than staffing it without...
(I also wonder why more subways aren’t driverless?)
Realistically, you have to design the system from the ground up for that. Retrofitting driverlessness into an existing rapid transit system is going to be more expensive than staffing it without that retrofit forever.
Copenhagen's metro is 100% driverless. It was built starting in 1996. There's precious little passenger rail built that recently in the US, and much, much less than that which doesn't have to interface with much older system.
Yeah, that’s the funny part. Las Vegas had a bus line that followed a painted line at one point. I built a line-following robot when I was a teenager. But this was very much a vanity project, so...
Yeah, that’s the funny part. Las Vegas had a bus line that followed a painted line at one point. I built a line-following robot when I was a teenager. But this was very much a vanity project, so known working solutions would not do.
Wasn’t the whole point of the hyperloop to dissuade states from investing in mass transit? So he sells more electric cars. He named one of the trains Godot....
Wasn’t the whole point of the hyperloop to dissuade states from investing in mass transit? So he sells more electric cars. He named one of the trains Godot. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot)
You’ve really hit the nail on the head with most of the circus he’s been running, but to really get a better scope of his mountain of bullshit I’d recommend to anyone with ears and five hours to...
You’ve really hit the nail on the head with most of the circus he’s been running, but to really get a better scope of his mountain of bullshit I’d recommend to anyone with ears and five hours to kill the very recent Dollop episodes on Elon Musk. It’s hilarious and depressing.
well, praise but not profits: It was a Hyperloop very likely inspired by Musk's papers. But it was not Musk's Hyperloop in a financial sense.
well, praise but not profits:
To be clear, Hyperloop One is not associated with Musk himself. After launching in 2014, it was partly funded from Richard Branson’s fortune for a while, but even that didn’t last, with the Virgin branding disappearing along with the vision for transforming passenger transportation
It was a Hyperloop very likely inspired by Musk's papers. But it was not Musk's Hyperloop in a financial sense.
He’s never funded any hyperloop project. That’s the crazy part. He has no involvement in any of it except for tweeting the idea originally. A guy with zero experience in transportation technology,...
He’s never funded any hyperloop project. That’s the crazy part. He has no involvement in any of it except for tweeting the idea originally.
A guy with zero experience in transportation technology, rail, construction or public projects in general tweeted out a half baked idea with zero research or due diligence on its feasibility, made up a number of how much it cost out of thin air, and for some reason, dozens of companies, thousands of people, and hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in the idea for a decade. If anyone else proposed the idea people would just have a good laugh about it and move on, and many of those people would be more qualified than musk to come up with ideas for transportation.
Lets not forget the pile of experts in such fields who were totally ignored for "rich man's idle tweet". The physics don't make sense, the economics don't make sense, and even the use case doesn't...
Lets not forget the pile of experts in such fields who were totally ignored for "rich man's idle tweet". The physics don't make sense, the economics don't make sense, and even the use case doesn't make sense.
What it showed is that modern people are more about hype and marketing than results.
It was obvious from day 1 and shouted from the rooftops by anyone who actually cares about civil engineering or even thinks about real logistics. There was 0 way it would ever be safe. There was 0...
It was obvious from day 1 and shouted from the rooftops by anyone who actually cares about civil engineering or even thinks about real logistics.
There was 0 way it would ever be safe.
There was 0 way it would ever be cheap.
There was 0 way it would ever be WORTH either of those downsides compared to a normal high speed rail or taking a plane.
The greatest thing it did is really show just how many people who think they're always smart are just as willing to buy into bullshit and hype when it's dressed up in their flavor. They'd laugh about morons buying magic healing crystals or tarot readings and in the next breath tell me how great the hyperloop is and that I "just don't get it".
To be fair, that flavor is how all those huge tech companies became what they were today. They all had a dozen failures, but just needed one hyper success to put them on the map. even if it then...
The greatest thing it did is really show just how many people who think they're always smart are just as willing to buy into bullshit and hype when it's dressed up in their flavor
To be fair, that flavor is how all those huge tech companies became what they were today. They all had a dozen failures, but just needed one hyper success to put them on the map. even if it then takes over a decade to make such tech profitable.
Now, is it a good idea to apply software egineering culture to civil engineering concepts? Probably not. You can't really "fail fast" with something like a train, and a small prototype is still a multi-year endeavor. And then on top of all that, you can't scale up a train the way you can a website server; 10-100x the materials will probably take 10-100x the time. But that never stopped all those tech companies currently "failing fast" with stuff like autonomous driving.
One of the most annoying things about many Silicon Valley type computer people is how they think that because they’re good at, and smarter than most people on one specific, tiny niche thing; say,...
One of the most annoying things about many Silicon Valley type computer people is how they think that because they’re good at, and smarter than most people on one specific, tiny niche thing; say, JavaScript, they think that somehow generalizes to ALL things.
If they just spent a few weeks researching it, they could design a better car than professional automotive engineers. If they took some time off and applied themselves, we could get rid of all these stupid old trains and build something to end traffic. In their mind, that’s what the issue is; there aren’t enough software developers and tech people to go around, and the only reason the world still has problems is because the software developers are all too busy making software to fix all the rest of the problems, so we have to make do with all the stupid normies who currently run things; after all, that’s why software developers get paid so much.
They’re unable to conceive that the people who run the things the world needs to operate are experts in their fields and are just as intelligent as people who spend their professional lives designing new trendy filters for mobile social media apps.
The irony in this, is that any coder knows so so so fucking well that "it should be simple" never ever fucking is. "look i just want to send a message to someone else over the internet, how...
The irony in this, is that any coder knows so so so fucking well that "it should be simple" never ever fucking is.
"look i just want to send a message to someone else over the internet, how complicated could it be? Oh and I want it to have an animated emoji since that can't be any harder"
Unfortunately it can be pretty hard to get someone to transfer principles like that outside their area of expertise. Though it's not limited to tech people -- you get tons of people in other STEM...
Unfortunately it can be pretty hard to get someone to transfer principles like that outside their area of expertise. Though it's not limited to tech people -- you get tons of people in other STEM fields like this as well. See Neil DeGrasse Tyson's takes on anything outside his area of expertise.
Well, Musk or those around him certainly know their history - swindle away more efficient public alternatives in favor of private profit. Shame no one was enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in...
Well, Musk or those around him certainly know their history - swindle away more efficient public alternatives in favor of private profit. Shame no one was enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in recent years, but that might be changing.
I’ve never understood the confusion about the Hyperloop. It’s just a cool-looking concept that could theoretically be possible at some time, but hardly ever cheap. That Musk gave away all plans...
I’ve never understood the confusion about the Hyperloop. It’s just a cool-looking concept that could theoretically be possible at some time, but hardly ever cheap. That Musk gave away all plans instead of building it himself was always a clear indication that it wasn’t a viable business strategy for now and hardly ever. I’ve no idea why all those companies tried to do something with it.
I think people put way too much evil conspiracy behind these kind of actions from Musk. In my view, he simply didn’t like the bullet train concept and thought there could be a more futuristic solution available, and created / launched the Hyperloop concept because he thought it was cooler than a train.
Both things can be true. I don’t know if it was quite as calculated as the narrative has made it out to be with musk assembling a team to come up with an idea to sway public interest against...
Both things can be true. I don’t know if it was quite as calculated as the narrative has made it out to be with musk assembling a team to come up with an idea to sway public interest against public transit. I think he saw CHSR, and, having zero experience with rail, transportation, city planning, or civil engineering, decided “trains are boring and stupid and old. We shouldn’t be spending all that money on something boring and old. I bet I could come up with something cool and new” and because, like most billionaires, he has a natural strong aversion to being around poor people, and the idea of possibly sharing a train car with one was distasteful to him, he came up with one that wouldn’t require him to.
The fact that it dissuades public opinion against public rail projects was likely not a fully laid out conspiracy, but it also wasn’t likely entirely unintentional.
You definitely lived within a blessed circle. There is a company trying to build one in the province I live in and they raised half a billion in private money to work on a POC, our government...
You definitely lived within a blessed circle. There is a company trying to build one in the province I live in and they raised half a billion in private money to work on a POC, our government donated public lands and it's still considered a major project listed on the governments web site.
To me personally, "The Loop" at the Las Vegas Convention Center will always be the epitomy of the stupidity of the Hyperloop idea. It was originally supposed to be a hyperloop. Then they gave up and made it into a tunnel that would be manned by automated vehicles. Now it's just a tunnel serviced by regular old teslas with human drivers. It would have been more impressive if they just built a subway instead.
If they can't self drive Tesla's in such a pristine closed environment, how do they expect to on busy complex roads?
The loop was always a separate idea from the hyperloop.
I can’t stand Musk, but it was always initially two different ideas. The hyperloop for mid distance intercity travel, and the loop as a weird reinvention of subways, but with little electric sleds that cars would sit on instead of train cars. The boring company was started by musk to persue the loop idea, not the hyperloop idea, which he never had any financial stake in.
Both are pretty awful ideas, but the loop actually has some semblance of grounding in reality, given that some fork of it is operating in Vegas if you squint enough.
The initial pitch was “boring small tunnels is exponentially cheaper than boring big ones, so let’s further decrease the cost of boring small holes by being Silicon Valley super geniuses who think we know better than people who do this for a living, then we’ll put tiny pods that are smaller than trains through them and that will solve traffic”
The idea is still dumb, especially because we already know how to solve traffic, but it at least is something that could feasibly be built in the real world, unlike the hyperloop which only works in a bad sci fi novel.
The fork is a tunnel. It's operating everywhere tunnels are. There's nothing unique about the Vegas "loop". Except that its' a tunnel that hasn't been built to proper safety standards.
Last I recall it also cut horrific corners on safety and I really hope no one has to learn the hard way just how insanely dangerous that whole "loop" could be.
It’s scaled back pretty far and I agree that it doesn’t seem very impressive in its current state. But it seems it’s not done yet?
I don’t know why they couldn’t automate it, considering that it has a dedicated right of way. It would be easy enough to have it automatically follow a line painted down the center or something like that. Or why not rails?
Because it was never seriously intended to be the best solution, just a "futuristic" one. Rails are 1800s tech.
Seriously, they hired taxi drivers to drive cars through an isolated loop that they built from scratch, that they were intending to purpose-build vehicles for; anyone competent can see that a metro line would be a better solution here, and one that would be trivial to make driverless!.
I would distinguish the concept from the implementation (which does seem unimpressive).
I think the idea is to make smaller tunnels than a subway needs to reduce the cost of construction, but make a lot of them. This is different but not obviously wrong. It’s not like every form of transportation needs to have the capacity of a subway to be useful for some niche. Sure, maybe it would be booked up and not all that useful during rush hour?
This is just imagining how it might work, though, which cuts no ice. I doubt anyone here is competent to judge.
(I also wonder why more subways aren’t driverless?)
You need safety backups and better train monitoring, both of which are difficult to implement on lines built in the early 1900s that can't be shut down for extended periods. Considering the number of people and line length, most Metro's operate with at least one engineer/conductor regardless.
The BART in the Bay Area was purpose built in the late 60s to be computer controlled, and it is. The trains are staffed by a single operator for emergency reasons. Airport people movers are built regularly that can be operated remotely. In New York City they're slowly retrofitting existing subway lines to be computer controlled as well, for example the "L" is now fully computer-based with a single train operator.
Moreover, new construction can be, and often is, driverless. Old construction is hard to retrofit but they're doing it anyway. An operator is often present for safety reasons. An additional example is old systems don't have platform doors, so an operator ensure the doors have fully closed and nobody is on the tracks.
It really really is. Many thousands of hours have been spent figuring these things out. Musk is not the first person to think of this, and the moment he proposed it many people who've been civil engineers or in related fields explained why over and over and over again.
Tunneling, in general, is extremely expensive and difficult to do, and doing lots and lots of tunneling is always going to be harder. Every single inch you tunnel you have to be sure isn't going to screw something up for the tunnel or up above.
The supposed claims of how "cheap" his boring company was were because he didn't include the costs for things like fire escapes in his numbers, and when you bounce all that safety OUT of your budget, well it looks like his company was slightly more expensive per mile.
And as for why they aren't driverless, its the same reason you have pilots.
It's not as simple as people think. The core idea SHOULD be simple, but how you handle the edge cases is extremely important.
Those edge cases could cost hundreds of lives if done wrong, and no one has made a system that full proof. You might be able to build something from scratch now with automation in mind, but all you need is one faulty sensor to cut someone to ribbons if they're stepping on the vehicle when it starts to move.
I still say it’s not obviously wrong to me, but I’m hardly an expert. It sounds like you might have read some good discussions about it. What are the best articles you’ve read by experts?
It is naturally frustrating to research because of the stupid amounts of hype it generated, but here's a few
A quick article from the time-
https://www.inverse.com/article/7486-this-engineer-s-critique-of-elon-musk-s-hyperloop-claims-it-s-not-even-close-to-feasible
Thunderfoots breakdown which covers a lot of it, but is more focused on the insane safety than the absurd budget (it's in there, but not nearly focused enough)-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk
Here's one that does touch on the absurd economics:
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/8/14/economists-don-tbelievethehyperloop.html
And a similar one citing some of the same sources from the ny times.
https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/15/could-the-hyperloop-really-cost-6-billion-critics-say-no/
But if you don't DIG for these, low and behold you get a lot of dreamers or people in unrelated fields saying "oh yeah this is brilliant" when it never made any sense at all, and Musk just blatantly lied about the costs.
Edit:
Forgot this one by AdamSomething which was also a decent breakdown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQJgFh_e01g
Thanks! Yes, filtering out the low-information posts (fanboys, haters, clickbait articles) is difficult for any project that gets a lot of hype.
However, I was talking about Boring Company's approach, which is not the same as the hyperloop concept. I agree that was unlikely to ever work.
Sorry about the misunderstanding, I should have been more clear. (And please don't do more homework on my behalf; it's not that important.)
Ah fair enough. Unfortunately that one is even harder to find older articles on.
Here's an interview with a Martin Herrenknecht, "...the world market leader with its tunnel boring company."(which you'll need google or something else to translate if the link doesn't already)-
https://archive.is/ZMZmt#selection-2737.41-2737.55
Here's the tunneling journal (basically the first article-
https://tunnellingjournal.com/archive/tunnelling-journal-april-2021-may-2021/
which references this Vice article-
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbekv/this-is-the-most-embarrassing-news-clip-in-american-transportation-history
There's more but I'm having trouble finding it at the moment just given the technical level of discussion I was reading at the time and how old this all is.
Realistically, you have to design the system from the ground up for that. Retrofitting driverlessness into an existing rapid transit system is going to be more expensive than staffing it without that retrofit forever.
Copenhagen's metro is 100% driverless. It was built starting in 1996. There's precious little passenger rail built that recently in the US, and much, much less than that which doesn't have to interface with much older system.
Yeah, that’s the funny part. Las Vegas had a bus line that followed a painted line at one point. I built a line-following robot when I was a teenager. But this was very much a vanity project, so known working solutions would not do.
I’m wondering if it was designed with the Life Safety Code in mind. It may not be compliant for rail transit.
Wasn’t the whole point of the hyperloop to dissuade states from investing in mass transit? So he sells more electric cars. He named one of the trains Godot. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot)
You’ve really hit the nail on the head with most of the circus he’s been running, but to really get a better scope of his mountain of bullshit I’d recommend to anyone with ears and five hours to kill the very recent Dollop episodes on Elon Musk. It’s hilarious and depressing.
Part One
Part Two
well, praise but not profits:
It was a Hyperloop very likely inspired by Musk's papers. But it was not Musk's Hyperloop in a financial sense.
He’s never funded any hyperloop project. That’s the crazy part. He has no involvement in any of it except for tweeting the idea originally.
A guy with zero experience in transportation technology, rail, construction or public projects in general tweeted out a half baked idea with zero research or due diligence on its feasibility, made up a number of how much it cost out of thin air, and for some reason, dozens of companies, thousands of people, and hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in the idea for a decade. If anyone else proposed the idea people would just have a good laugh about it and move on, and many of those people would be more qualified than musk to come up with ideas for transportation.
Lets not forget the pile of experts in such fields who were totally ignored for "rich man's idle tweet". The physics don't make sense, the economics don't make sense, and even the use case doesn't make sense.
What it showed is that modern people are more about hype and marketing than results.
It was obvious from day 1 and shouted from the rooftops by anyone who actually cares about civil engineering or even thinks about real logistics.
There was 0 way it would ever be safe.
There was 0 way it would ever be cheap.
There was 0 way it would ever be WORTH either of those downsides compared to a normal high speed rail or taking a plane.
The greatest thing it did is really show just how many people who think they're always smart are just as willing to buy into bullshit and hype when it's dressed up in their flavor. They'd laugh about morons buying magic healing crystals or tarot readings and in the next breath tell me how great the hyperloop is and that I "just don't get it".
To be fair, that flavor is how all those huge tech companies became what they were today. They all had a dozen failures, but just needed one hyper success to put them on the map. even if it then takes over a decade to make such tech profitable.
Now, is it a good idea to apply software egineering culture to civil engineering concepts? Probably not. You can't really "fail fast" with something like a train, and a small prototype is still a multi-year endeavor. And then on top of all that, you can't scale up a train the way you can a website server; 10-100x the materials will probably take 10-100x the time. But that never stopped all those tech companies currently "failing fast" with stuff like autonomous driving.
One of the most annoying things about many Silicon Valley type computer people is how they think that because they’re good at, and smarter than most people on one specific, tiny niche thing; say, JavaScript, they think that somehow generalizes to ALL things.
If they just spent a few weeks researching it, they could design a better car than professional automotive engineers. If they took some time off and applied themselves, we could get rid of all these stupid old trains and build something to end traffic. In their mind, that’s what the issue is; there aren’t enough software developers and tech people to go around, and the only reason the world still has problems is because the software developers are all too busy making software to fix all the rest of the problems, so we have to make do with all the stupid normies who currently run things; after all, that’s why software developers get paid so much.
They’re unable to conceive that the people who run the things the world needs to operate are experts in their fields and are just as intelligent as people who spend their professional lives designing new trendy filters for mobile social media apps.
The irony in this, is that any coder knows so so so fucking well that "it should be simple" never ever fucking is.
"look i just want to send a message to someone else over the internet, how complicated could it be? Oh and I want it to have an animated emoji since that can't be any harder"
Unfortunately it can be pretty hard to get someone to transfer principles like that outside their area of expertise. Though it's not limited to tech people -- you get tons of people in other STEM fields like this as well. See Neil DeGrasse Tyson's takes on anything outside his area of expertise.
Can’t wait for “move fast and break things: bridge edition”
Like when the big dig killed someone when the slurry wall collapsed?
Well, Musk or those around him certainly know their history - swindle away more efficient public alternatives in favor of private profit. Shame no one was enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in recent years, but that might be changing.
I’ve never understood the confusion about the Hyperloop. It’s just a cool-looking concept that could theoretically be possible at some time, but hardly ever cheap. That Musk gave away all plans instead of building it himself was always a clear indication that it wasn’t a viable business strategy for now and hardly ever. I’ve no idea why all those companies tried to do something with it.
I think people put way too much evil conspiracy behind these kind of actions from Musk. In my view, he simply didn’t like the bullet train concept and thought there could be a more futuristic solution available, and created / launched the Hyperloop concept because he thought it was cooler than a train.
Both things can be true. I don’t know if it was quite as calculated as the narrative has made it out to be with musk assembling a team to come up with an idea to sway public interest against public transit. I think he saw CHSR, and, having zero experience with rail, transportation, city planning, or civil engineering, decided “trains are boring and stupid and old. We shouldn’t be spending all that money on something boring and old. I bet I could come up with something cool and new” and because, like most billionaires, he has a natural strong aversion to being around poor people, and the idea of possibly sharing a train car with one was distasteful to him, he came up with one that wouldn’t require him to.
The fact that it dissuades public opinion against public rail projects was likely not a fully laid out conspiracy, but it also wasn’t likely entirely unintentional.
Yeah but that narrative doesn't get clicks and engagement.
You definitely lived within a blessed circle. There is a company trying to build one in the province I live in and they raised half a billion in private money to work on a POC, our government donated public lands and it's still considered a major project listed on the governments web site.