Hypnotized by Hyperloop
Couldn&#x27;t finish this. It started off badly by calling the hyperloop &quot;vacuum-powered&quot;. First, it&#x27;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?<p>Then, the author continues with more material errors. The hyperloop&#x2F;tunnel combo apparently &quot;requires a hard reboot&quot; of the modern city. No it does not. The whole point is that it is tunnels underneath the modern city.<p>Finally, it starts mentioning ambitious projects that didn&#x27;t work, such as the Concorde. Yes, people have tried things that failed before. And then it talks about putting more money into Amtrak, when Musk&#x27;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!<p>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.<p>It seems the author&#x27;s point is &quot;Let&#x27;s never fund anything else speculative ever again&quot;. What&#x27;s that network you&#x27;re using to blast this tripe straight to my eyeballs right now? The inter-what? Who ever funded that waste of money? Why didn&#x27;t they just fund the post office a little more?<p>The fact that we&#x27;ve lost faith in humanity&#x27;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&#x27;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.