For most people who's not a billionaire it's unrealistic to commit to such grand purpose.
I believe your ability is not that different from Elon. But given where he is now and the platform he built it's much more in reach for him than for you. So think about what's within reach given your own platform.
My father was a chemistry professor. I always used to go into the lab with him on the weekends when I was a kid. I'd play with spent punch cards, or build things with the carbon-model "tinker toys" while he was working. One day I asked him if he would ever win the Nobel prize.
He said, "No. To win the Nobel prize you have to dedicate your life to your work. I'm too busy for that." I asked him what was more important than winning the Nobel prize. He replied (without a pause), "Being a dad."
It always stuck with me and given that I always respected my dad, but never did the same things that he did, I never had kids (much to his displeasure). But I will never do anything like winning the Nobel prize either, because I'm also too busy.... with whatever it is that I do :-)
If you like what you are doing and believe in it, then that's enough. Really, that's more than enough. But if you are thinking, "You know I'm not so keen on how I spend my time here," then you are in the exceptionally lucky position of not being too busy to do something else! You don't have to commit, just go with the flow.
Not trying to criticise you, and if I get annoying, please tell me. Your statement is a judgement. Does that judgement come from you, or from somewhere else? I have friends who have chosen to pursue TV and games as their life's purpose. That sounds pretty geeky, but they are totally happy with their choice.
Again, from my point of view, it's totally fine if you feel that what you are currently doing is not what you want to be doing. But it makes one wonder, "What do you want to be doing". I don't mean, "What do you want to accomplish in the end" (or more to the point, "What do I want to have done"). I literally mean: "What do you want to do?" - like today.
Accomplishments sound awesome. It's tempting to think, "If I did something important, I'd feel satisfied". But it's my experience that people who do impressive things like this are not actually satisfied with the accomplishment. It's not the having, it's the doing that's important to them. As soon as one thing is "done", then it's useless and time to move on to something else.
Some people like to have goals -- targets to shoot for. But some people don't like goals. It's not a bad thing. I don't actually know where this saying comes from (I think it might be Buddhist), but it's pretty old: If you keep one eye on the goal, you only have one eye for the path. Especially if the terrain is rough, or you feel afraid, or uncertain, it's totally fine to concentrate on your path (IMHO). Following that path, you will certainly go somewhere, even if you don't know ahead of time where that somewhere is.
I hope that gives a different perspective, even if it's not helpful :-)
Is there anyway to disable autoplay videos on bloomberg's website? They're one of the few sites I routinely click through from HN, but the disruption of the autoplay is quite disrespectful, and frankly boils my blood.
Block scripts at one level or another. On that particular page, it goes assets.bwbx.io -> cdn.gotraffic.net -> imasdk.googleapis.com which introduces some XHR from hopx.cedexis.com and (a subdomain of) akamaihd.net, and the video plays.
The impression I get from googling it is that it is, in fact, a separate entity from Elon's other venture, or rather as separate as an Elon company can be.
The above helpful comments being said, my question now is, how long is he going to be able to run these companies separately without a shareholder revolt saying they should be put under one roof to create more value for the investors in Tesla? Right now it feels like I'm an unofficial investor in TeSpaceBoringLink as opposed to just the former.
I expect to get some hate for the comment as it's a Wall Street type complaint, but to my eye, it seems like these companies are becoming ever more similar.
SpaceX is an entirely separate company from Tesla, and not public. Investing in Tesla is not investing in SpaceX and Tesla shareholders have no rights to anything SpaceX does (absent contracts between Tesla and SpaceX) and the reverse. SpaceX shareholders (e.g. Google, Musk) would presumably be quite strongly against merging with Tesla. There's nothing stopping SpaceX from directly competing with Tesla if they wanted to.
On what basis do you imagine shareholders revolting? How would you imagine them doing so?
I understand the legalities of how they're separate, what I'm saying is if the "cross-fertilization" approach between the two companies proliferates to the point where they are material to each other's operations, what's to stop Starboard or some other activist investor group from launching a campaign against them?
Obviously, Elon would be against this, I'm not saying they would personally be for this decision, I'm saying if the market stops being as forgiving to Tesla as it is, could a group not gain significant voting power and push this against them?
> SpaceX is an entirely separate company from Tesla, and not public. Investing in Tesla is not investing in SpaceX
That may be strictly true, but I think most people consider Elon's ownership and direction of Tesla a big part of what supports the stock's price. Enough of Musk's loans for SpaceX are backed by Tesla stock for that to get a mention in their 10K
> Elon Musk has pledged shares of our common stock to secure certain bank borrowings. If Mr. Musk were forced to sell these shares pursuant to a margin call that he could not avoid or satisfy, such sales could cause our stock price to decline.
> Certain banking institutions have made extensions of credit to Elon Musk, our Chief Executive Officer, a portion of which was used to purchase shares of common stock in certain of our public offerings and private placements at the same prices offered to third party participants in such offerings and placements. We are not a party to these loans, which are partially secured by pledges of a portion of the Tesla common stock currently owned by Mr. Musk. If the price of our common stock were to decline substantially and Mr. Musk were unable to avoid or satisfy a margin call with respect to his pledged shares, Mr. Musk may be forced by one or more of the banking institutions to sell shares of Tesla common stock in order to remain within the margin limitations imposed under the terms of his loans. Any such sales could cause the price of our common stock to decline further.
The financial situation of his companies is very linked -- I personally think that was a big driver behind the purchase of Solar City since he had also used Tesla stock to back loans for that company as well.
There was an interesting AMA on reddit awhile back, that's since been deleted.
SpaceX money, working out of SpaceX facilities, using SpaceX tooling department, the person giving the AMA was recruited by a SpaceX employee.
There's a fairly large number of legal entities making up SpaceX, but I haven't been able to find anything that looks like the boring company. Not clear to me if it's a seperate legal entity.
You can find a list here (with a few additions in the comments, and links to up to date sources): https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/4ifvir/spacex_subsi... I checked the sources, searched for companies with the name "boring" in California, etc. Nothing stood out.
It says 50x , but i am assuming even a 10x improvement in efficiency with the already crazy increases in speed would be great, hopefully with a way to recoup the investment in 20-30 years.
Also was wondering whether above ground system is cheaper outside cities than tunneling but i guess they feel that tunneling is cheaper if they get the purported 10x gains they want there
Every estimate I've seen is incredibly idealistic or simply ignores the problems. Safety alone is an incredibly complex issue - the pod travels at high speeds in a tube a few inches from the walls, in vacuum. Any imperfection or leak immediately results in a catastrophe. Even if you somehow manage to stop the pods, how do the people get out?
When you start adding all the safety features, the costs grow extremely fast.
Hyprerloop is not impossible, just very very expensive to build and to maintain.
Glad to see him involved. I think he's earned enough credibility with moving forward battery and electric car technologies so that all can benefit. The current batch of hyperloop startups don't seem all that promising and a potential bunch of patent hoarders.
I'm super skeptical about Hyperloop and I was vehemently opposed to "wasting" tax money to build it but I'm pretty happy that he's giving it a try for real, obviously he believes in the project. Hopefully he'll prove naysayers like me wrong and we'll get a kickass futuristic mode of transportation out of it.
At least it puts to rest the conspiracy theory that he came up with the Hyperloop concept only to undermine the current bullet train projects .
I only hope that if it doesn't pan out it won't hurt his other ventures too much, but I suppose he knows what he's doing.
Hyperloop appears to be a niche solution to a specific transportation situation. It may work (be profitable/useful) for a time between specific destinations. Then the population situation (density, distribution) will change and it will become less profitable or even be discarded.
Its not clear that any current pair of cities currently fit the sweet spot for hyperloop. Even if some did, its not clear a hyperloop could be built in time, before the situation changes and they exit the sweet spot.
Execution and timing will be especially critical to a successful venture.
There are also very real technical questions to be considered with holding a vacuum over that much pipe, especially when there's gonna be some seismic activity, potential for sabotage etc. I'm not sure that it really is economically viable unless there's some kind of incredibly durable and flexible material to be had which is as easy to use as concrete, about as cheap as concrete, but basically magical spiderwebs.
For it to be enough of the vacuum to yield real benefits in terms of The fluid dynamics of the air of the tunnel, it needs to be hard enough to be hard to achieve as in this case. It is easier to achieve than the kind of vacuum NASA might want to draw to test devices, or that somebody with a Watt balance might need, but honestly that only goes to show how horrendously difficult it is to pull that kind of vacuum
There are plenty of breakdowns of the specific numbers that were given in the proposal. If you know enough to contradict one of those assessments or have enough knowledge of the engineering and current technology required to assess the proposal as a whole, feel free to submit your own numbers or point to the assessment you believe best covers the reality of the situation.
Otherwise, definitive statements about small portions of a rather large and complicated proposal that don't provide evidence for their assertions aren't really worth reading. Sorry if that comes across as harsh (it's less directed at you, and more towards the situation as a whole), but this topic is so fraught with people making assertions based on rumors and assumptions rather than the actual data presented that there's a real problem wading through the misinformed to get to the useful information.
The original proposal is available.[1] It includes enough numbers to make estimates of the physics involved. If you want to see what's essentially two youtubers arguing over the physics involved, check this[2] out. It gets a little petty by the end, but there is copious physics and math demonstrated, which you can assess yourself (along with whether the assumptions they make are valid). They do, specifically, go over what would be required to achieve the level of partial vacuum specified, as well as what would be required to safely achieve controlled rapid pressurization in an emergency.
Or you can do a little googling. There's plenty of people that have jumped in with an assessment, and just about as many that have come after to refute some or all of their work.
I was wondering if there were updates about this myself. There's been lots of work talked about researching the fluid / heat & weight dynamics, but very little about maintaining the vacuum - which seems to me a more fundamental problem here...
I'm also interested to know what's the plan in case of a brutal rupture of the tunnel. A wall of air rushing through the pipe to meet a car traveling at supersonic speed doesn't sound very pleasant.
Maybe they just plan to make the pipe sturdy enough that it wouldn't be a practical concern?
Probably true, but at the same time, there's a build-it-and-they-will-come effect that accompanies major public transportation projects, for example the Metro light rail in Phoenix. By running it from the airport to the downtown convention center district and then uptown to Bethany Home Rd. on 19th Ave., they have provided some significant convenience and cachet to the downtown area that has been struggling for decades with revitalization. Millennials are parking themselves in trendy apartment buildings near the downtown and the light rail has contributed to that lifestyle.
Will it last? Time will tell, but the trend today is to increase usage. The biggest complaint about the light rail is that it doesn't go far enough, though there are plans afoot to extend it over time.
There's plans to extend it to Metro Center (at the time they made the plans, it made sense - today, not so much). It's also pretty much extended to downtown Mesa (stops somewhere near - maybe in front of? - the HeatSync Labs hackerspace...
It's worth noting that conventional railways tend to sacrifice a bit of speed (relative to what you could engineer them for) in favour of being flexible in terms of how much passenger capacity can be provided, supporting a mixture of local/express services, and so forth. So the 'sweet spot' for a conventional or high-speed rail line between two locations may tend to be larger.
When the first wave of criticism came after Musk presented his Hyperloop concept the argument I found the most compelling was that at those speeds if you change direction very fast or the lateral and vertical accelerations felt by the passenger quickly becomes uncomfortable or even unbearable.
That means that if you have some kind of obstacle on the way, such as a mountain, lake or even a city you can't easily swerve around to avoid it. You either have to anticipate your turn extremely early (huge turn radius) or you basically have to tunnel through it (extremely expensive).
For the same reason if you decide to pass over mountains you might have to start elevating the track well before you meet the slope because you can't brutally change your inclination from 0 to, say, 20 degrees brutally without inflicting a few gees to the passengers. So you'd basically build a ramp to smooth it up, which would also be quite expensive.
Also, what if landscapes shift due to tectonic plate movement?
I'm scared to fly as it is, but hurtling through the air at mach 1 there is far less chance of an obstacle than hurtling through a cramped vacuum tube at mach 1.
If the seal on the hyperloop is ever broken (anywhere along the loop), the tube will fill with air and the train/pod will naturally come to a stop due to air resistance.
I'm sure that it will but will it do so safely when traveling at the speed of sound?
If I jump from an airliner into the ocean I'll naturally come to a stop due to water resistance but I don't think I'm going to enjoy that very much.
This is a genuine question by the way, I really don't know what kind of deceleration to expect in this situation. It just seems like in this situation the train would behave a bit like a piston meeting the rushing wall of air head-on. I can't imagine that it would make for a particularly gentle stopping.
Climb out and walk to the nearest escape hatch in the hyperloop tunel. Or perhaps sit just sit there for an hour or so and wait to be rescued. It's really not that different from a subway being derailed or a carnival ride breaking down.
How is an obstacle going to get into a vacuum sealed pipe? Unless there are parts literally falling off of the pods, I can't really see this happening.
> A misaligned tunnel wall due to shifting Earth
This would most likely break the vacuum seal and be detected immediately.
> Other pods ahead of it
Seems easy to avoid. We don't typically hear about trains crashing into each other, so I don't see why we'd expect that to happen with pods.
I suppose, but you obviously decrease the average speed that way. It could be pretty significant too, if you want to reach bullet-train speed for your maneuvers you have to slow down to around ~300km/h from your 1000+km/h cruising speed.
That's a delta-v of at least 700km/h or about 200m/s. At a deceleration of 1g it'll take about 20 seconds, and an other 20 seconds to get back to speed after that. And 1g sounds like a lot for public transportation, especially for so long. Maybe they could rotate the seats to keep the acceleration downwards from the point of view of the passengers?
And obviously it'll take a lot of energy to re-accelerate the car, so you might want to store the braking energy to reuse it but I'm not sure if it's practical to store such a huge amount of energy so quickly.
I remember the throughput was also fairly low compared to high speed rail, and many of the savings came from questionable areas (running the tube through highway medians, stopping the hyperloop at the outskirts of the city instead of going into the city like rail does).
Agreed. I'm not sure how Hyperloop scales to population changes especially if it is below ground. Sounds like a very expensive infrastructure investment.
I love new technology especially when it comes to transportation, but as a people mover this thing seems to have unsolvable problems. You're trapped in a tin can in a vacuum tunnel 20 feet or 50 feet below the surface -- what if it stops? You can't get out.
Obviously we put up with a similar predicament in air transportation, and for that matter train derailment and automobile collisions are a real and not uncommon risk of above-ground transportation systems.
But Hyperloop has this inherent issue that doesn't have any obvious solution. For transporting goods, it sounds fantastic. Move tons of cargo from SF to LA in 30 minutes, or from D.C. to Boston in 40 minutes. If nothing else, it would be great for USPS and FedEx. If it at least partially relieves the interstates of the stress and damage caused by 18-wheelers, another point in its favor (sorry, drivers).
It's long distance maglev project that's already under construction, using proven technology, and it aims to cut travel times in half relative to the existing high speed line.
I find this project far more exciting than the vague plans and ideas surrounding Hyperloop.
That technology is only proven because they started working on it about 50 years ago. So, I'm not holding my breath for working Hyperloop installations, but supposing the Hyperloop proves to have fundamental advantages over mag lev (not sure if it does or not, just supposing), then it seems worth pursuing.
I love Solar City, Tesla, and SpaceX, but I just don't see Hyperloop/Boring Co as viable or useful.
It's true that LA traffic sucks, but the only solution you need is good transit planning with existing technology. Throw in self-driving mini-busses (which I bet Tesla is working on) and you'd never be stuck in traffic again. Tokyo manages a population more than 10x that of L.A. with just good transit planning.
The problems with US transit are political. We have political problems that makes building infrastructure cost 10x too much and take 10x too long. Hyperloop can't solve those problems with better engineering. And if we fix those political problems, you don't need Hyperloop.
> I love Solar City, Tesla, and SpaceX, but I just don't see Hyperloop/Boring Co as viable or useful.
This is one of those occasions where a Hacker News appears to think they've thought of something that someone who's been thinking about this stuff for a very long time, and has the money and track record to back it up, disagrees.
You seem to have a very narrow view of the technology being proposed - the announcement is about New York to Washington, USA - but presumably this is a proof of concept build with modest scope.
> Tokyo manages a population more than 10x that of L.A. ..
> ... makes building infrastructure cost 10x too much and take 10x too long.
One should be careful with throwing around orders of magnitude claims willy nilly.
Tokyo's population is is just shy of 10 million, Los Angeles about 4 million.
> This is one of those occasions where a Hacker News appears to think
I would say this is the only occasion that I read people telling others they shouldn't write their critical thinking about an issue because of the person who is behind.
I regret the tone - I should not have adopted n-gate's vernacular here, though parent's comment is the epitome of what they, and I, find most frustrating about these kinds of seemingly ill-considered, negative HN comments.
Parent questioned viability of hyperloop, claimed that transport problems in the USA are due to poor planning and/or politics, and then made up some numbers around population, infrastructure costs and construction times.
My point was that Elon Musk thinks this is worth his time to construct. It's possible he, and the people advising him, have not properly thought this through. In TFA there's mention of some concerns by several other startups looking to build Hyperloop systems, who've raised some US$200m. It's possible that they, also, have failed to understand that all the transport problems in the USA could be solved by fixing 'the politics' and that Hyperloop is 'not viable'.
Populations depend very much on how you count, but I'd think density matters more and Tokyo's density is somewhere between 14 to 36 times LA (allowing for different ways of counting), and 40 million use just the rail system every day), so the parent's point is still very valid.
Parent said 'LA traffic sucks' and asserted all you'd need to fix it is 'good transit planning'. This doesn't sound likely, though I concede I've never been to Los Angeles, and do not know if all their intra-city transport problems are exclusively caused by poor transit planning.
Parent is also comparing intra-city transport of two different cities, despite TFA being about inter-city transport.
Ultimately trying to compare profoundly different cultures, economies, population numbers and densities, and public transport history & infrastructure, is always going to involve some amount of hand-waving and number-rounding -- I just think hyperbole like '10 x this, 10 x that' doesn't make for a stronger argument.
Thanks to good, cheap and fast public transport, people regularly commute to Tokyo from all over Japan. That is what 'manages' implies.
I know that is difficult to imagine in the US, but please have an open mind.
> ... people regularly commute to Tokyo from all over Japan.
I feel like this is one of those things that sounds like it might be true, but isn't. It's four hours from Tokyo to Hokkaido by train, f.e., and not much cheaper than a flight.
> I know that is difficult to imagine in the US, but please have an open mind.
I do try to have an open mind, despite being an Australian living in Australia.
My work requires that I travel regularly - most major cities in Australia warrant air-travel, due to the distances involved, but price and (in)convenience of air travel reduce the appeal.
Sydney to Canberra is a curious exception - at around 300km it's actually slightly faster to drive than to fly, once you factor in intra-city commute (to / from airports) and usual security & check-in waits. I'd love a high-speed ground-based option, as short-haul flights offend my green sensibilities, and as much as I enjoy driving, I can get more done, have a safer journey, and be more relaxed if I'm not driving. There is a train service - but it's not terribly frequent, and takes more than 4 hours (plus the intra-city commute, as for air travel). There's been talk of high speed rail links along the east coast (Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne) for decades, but still no actual commitment in sight.
I'm highly envious of what's happening in other parts of the world.
> This is one of those occasions where a Hacker News appears to think they've thought of something that someone who's been thinking about this stuff for a very long time, and has the money and track record to back it up, disagrees.
I don't see what Hyperloop has to do with LA. It's a whole new transit technology for long distance. And it's funny you mention Japan, since they're working on developing new transit tech in the form of mag lev to link their biggest cities [1].
It's a transit technology for medium distance. Jets spend a significant portion of a trip from LA to SF ascending to and descending from cruising altitude, where they perform most efficiently. To my understanding, Hyperloop is specifically targeted at those distances where jets don't have much time at their efficient altitude.which is what makes it somewhat competitive.
To be fair, both "long" and "medium" are terribly imprecise. But yeah, I've always heard the Hyperloop proposed as a way to link the cores of nearby metropolises within a region, like LA-SF and LA-Vegas.
> I love Solar City, Tesla, and SpaceX, but I just don't see Hyperloop/Boring Co as viable or useful.
Solar City wasn't viable and had to be "bought" by Tesla to avoid bankruptcy.
> The problems with US transit are political.
Absolutely. There are too many people with vested financial interests who throw roadblocks to sensible public planning.
The irony here is that so much of elon musk and his company exist out of political "help". I don't know how musk does it but he has access to levers of power to keep himself afloat. The guy must have been a smooth talker.
> I don't know how musk does it but he has access to levers of power to keep himself afloat.
A well run PR machine that keeps the constant hype going. The right misdirection at the right times (we totally need to worry about the mythical smart AI, oh but don't worry about the timeline or the dangers of self driving cars). The Hyperloop and Tunnels are totally amazing building blocks for Mars so we have to build them.
I think Musk is a brilliant guy, but the cult around him is pretty ridiculous.
Tokyo's subways and railroads are privately owned and ticket costs are based on the distance traveled. Americans always seem to want to pay $2 whether they go 5 blocks or 5 miles, among other unreasonable expectations for public transport.
All true. But the base of the pyramid is that Japan doesn't have the legal and regulatory barriers to construction we do, so their infrastructure just costs a lot less. That makes everything else (like fares) more affordable, which increases usage. It's a virtuous cycle.
There's still some part of me which wonders if the "Rolling Roads" vision of Heinlein's wouldn't be a better long-term solution (even if requiring much more in terms of space and materials) over rails, the Hyperloop, etc.
The concept is effectively a series of moving sidewalk (like you see in airports) loops scaled up to run at 100+ mph, with its own ecosystem of shops, restaurants, inns, etc. They would replace the highways, and be powered by solar panels on the enclosure of the road. Getting on and off is handled by a series of parallel belts which go progressively slower at reasonable increments.
No need for "stops" where the entire system must come to a halt to disgorge passengers, no need for negative pressure systems, it could power itself (and surrounding communities)... But the impact of the roads "stopping" would be pretty major and widespread (if mitigable via multiple smaller loops).
I'll be happy with better/cheaper Amtrak service. Nothing beats working at the cafe car and watching the scenery roll by. Plain old rail travel is way too expensive in the US compared to the alternatives (bus or rental).
Heck, I'd even be excited about wifi upgrades in the NE corridor.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadHe said, "No. To win the Nobel prize you have to dedicate your life to your work. I'm too busy for that." I asked him what was more important than winning the Nobel prize. He replied (without a pause), "Being a dad."
It always stuck with me and given that I always respected my dad, but never did the same things that he did, I never had kids (much to his displeasure). But I will never do anything like winning the Nobel prize either, because I'm also too busy.... with whatever it is that I do :-)
If you like what you are doing and believe in it, then that's enough. Really, that's more than enough. But if you are thinking, "You know I'm not so keen on how I spend my time here," then you are in the exceptionally lucky position of not being too busy to do something else! You don't have to commit, just go with the flow.
I spend most of my time watching TV and playing games. That's a lack of purpose.
Again, from my point of view, it's totally fine if you feel that what you are currently doing is not what you want to be doing. But it makes one wonder, "What do you want to be doing". I don't mean, "What do you want to accomplish in the end" (or more to the point, "What do I want to have done"). I literally mean: "What do you want to do?" - like today.
Accomplishments sound awesome. It's tempting to think, "If I did something important, I'd feel satisfied". But it's my experience that people who do impressive things like this are not actually satisfied with the accomplishment. It's not the having, it's the doing that's important to them. As soon as one thing is "done", then it's useless and time to move on to something else.
Some people like to have goals -- targets to shoot for. But some people don't like goals. It's not a bad thing. I don't actually know where this saying comes from (I think it might be Buddhist), but it's pretty old: If you keep one eye on the goal, you only have one eye for the path. Especially if the terrain is rough, or you feel afraid, or uncertain, it's totally fine to concentrate on your path (IMHO). Following that path, you will certainly go somewhere, even if you don't know ahead of time where that somewhere is.
I hope that gives a different perspective, even if it's not helpful :-)
yes, and it applies to me.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/891710778205626368
https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-be-as-great-as-Bill-Gates-St...
I love uMatrix.
media.autoplay.enabled = false
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/888053175155949572
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/6kw70z/rspacex_disc...
I expect to get some hate for the comment as it's a Wall Street type complaint, but to my eye, it seems like these companies are becoming ever more similar.
On what basis do you imagine shareholders revolting? How would you imagine them doing so?
Obviously, Elon would be against this, I'm not saying they would personally be for this decision, I'm saying if the market stops being as forgiving to Tesla as it is, could a group not gain significant voting power and push this against them?
That may be strictly true, but I think most people consider Elon's ownership and direction of Tesla a big part of what supports the stock's price. Enough of Musk's loans for SpaceX are backed by Tesla stock for that to get a mention in their 10K
> Elon Musk has pledged shares of our common stock to secure certain bank borrowings. If Mr. Musk were forced to sell these shares pursuant to a margin call that he could not avoid or satisfy, such sales could cause our stock price to decline.
> Certain banking institutions have made extensions of credit to Elon Musk, our Chief Executive Officer, a portion of which was used to purchase shares of common stock in certain of our public offerings and private placements at the same prices offered to third party participants in such offerings and placements. We are not a party to these loans, which are partially secured by pledges of a portion of the Tesla common stock currently owned by Mr. Musk. If the price of our common stock were to decline substantially and Mr. Musk were unable to avoid or satisfy a margin call with respect to his pledged shares, Mr. Musk may be forced by one or more of the banking institutions to sell shares of Tesla common stock in order to remain within the margin limitations imposed under the terms of his loans. Any such sales could cause the price of our common stock to decline further.
The financial situation of his companies is very linked -- I personally think that was a big driver behind the purchase of Solar City since he had also used Tesla stock to back loans for that company as well.
SpaceX money, working out of SpaceX facilities, using SpaceX tooling department, the person giving the AMA was recruited by a SpaceX employee.
There's a fairly large number of legal entities making up SpaceX, but I haven't been able to find anything that looks like the boring company. Not clear to me if it's a seperate legal entity.
You can find a list here (with a few additions in the comments, and links to up to date sources): https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/4ifvir/spacex_subsi... I checked the sources, searched for companies with the name "boring" in California, etc. Nothing stood out.
Cost per mile improvement, carbon footprint reduction etc. that has been scientifically estimated.
Also was wondering whether above ground system is cheaper outside cities than tunneling but i guess they feel that tunneling is cheaper if they get the purported 10x gains they want there
When you start adding all the safety features, the costs grow extremely fast.
Hyprerloop is not impossible, just very very expensive to build and to maintain.
At least it puts to rest the conspiracy theory that he came up with the Hyperloop concept only to undermine the current bullet train projects .
I only hope that if it doesn't pan out it won't hurt his other ventures too much, but I suppose he knows what he's doing.
Its not clear that any current pair of cities currently fit the sweet spot for hyperloop. Even if some did, its not clear a hyperloop could be built in time, before the situation changes and they exit the sweet spot.
Execution and timing will be especially critical to a successful venture.
Otherwise, definitive statements about small portions of a rather large and complicated proposal that don't provide evidence for their assertions aren't really worth reading. Sorry if that comes across as harsh (it's less directed at you, and more towards the situation as a whole), but this topic is so fraught with people making assertions based on rumors and assumptions rather than the actual data presented that there's a real problem wading through the misinformed to get to the useful information.
Or you can do a little googling. There's plenty of people that have jumped in with an assessment, and just about as many that have come after to refute some or all of their work.
1: http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha.pdf
2: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSPi1JFx4_-Gz0Fm0qq2K...
Maybe they just plan to make the pipe sturdy enough that it wouldn't be a practical concern?
Will it last? Time will tell, but the trend today is to increase usage. The biggest complaint about the light rail is that it doesn't go far enough, though there are plans afoot to extend it over time.
That means that if you have some kind of obstacle on the way, such as a mountain, lake or even a city you can't easily swerve around to avoid it. You either have to anticipate your turn extremely early (huge turn radius) or you basically have to tunnel through it (extremely expensive).
For the same reason if you decide to pass over mountains you might have to start elevating the track well before you meet the slope because you can't brutally change your inclination from 0 to, say, 20 degrees brutally without inflicting a few gees to the passengers. So you'd basically build a ramp to smooth it up, which would also be quite expensive.
Has this been addressed?
I'm scared to fly as it is, but hurtling through the air at mach 1 there is far less chance of an obstacle than hurtling through a cramped vacuum tube at mach 1.
If I jump from an airliner into the ocean I'll naturally come to a stop due to water resistance but I don't think I'm going to enjoy that very much.
This is a genuine question by the way, I really don't know what kind of deceleration to expect in this situation. It just seems like in this situation the train would behave a bit like a piston meeting the rushing wall of air head-on. I can't imagine that it would make for a particularly gentle stopping.
An obstacle in the pipe
A misaligned tunnel wall due to shifting Earth
Other pods ahead of it
How is an obstacle going to get into a vacuum sealed pipe? Unless there are parts literally falling off of the pods, I can't really see this happening.
> A misaligned tunnel wall due to shifting Earth
This would most likely break the vacuum seal and be detected immediately.
> Other pods ahead of it
Seems easy to avoid. We don't typically hear about trains crashing into each other, so I don't see why we'd expect that to happen with pods.
That's a delta-v of at least 700km/h or about 200m/s. At a deceleration of 1g it'll take about 20 seconds, and an other 20 seconds to get back to speed after that. And 1g sounds like a lot for public transportation, especially for so long. Maybe they could rotate the seats to keep the acceleration downwards from the point of view of the passengers?
And obviously it'll take a lot of energy to re-accelerate the car, so you might want to store the braking energy to reuse it but I'm not sure if it's practical to store such a huge amount of energy so quickly.
Obviously we put up with a similar predicament in air transportation, and for that matter train derailment and automobile collisions are a real and not uncommon risk of above-ground transportation systems.
But Hyperloop has this inherent issue that doesn't have any obvious solution. For transporting goods, it sounds fantastic. Move tons of cargo from SF to LA in 30 minutes, or from D.C. to Boston in 40 minutes. If nothing else, it would be great for USPS and FedEx. If it at least partially relieves the interstates of the stress and damage caused by 18-wheelers, another point in its favor (sorry, drivers).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen
It's long distance maglev project that's already under construction, using proven technology, and it aims to cut travel times in half relative to the existing high speed line.
I find this project far more exciting than the vague plans and ideas surrounding Hyperloop.
It's true that LA traffic sucks, but the only solution you need is good transit planning with existing technology. Throw in self-driving mini-busses (which I bet Tesla is working on) and you'd never be stuck in traffic again. Tokyo manages a population more than 10x that of L.A. with just good transit planning.
The problems with US transit are political. We have political problems that makes building infrastructure cost 10x too much and take 10x too long. Hyperloop can't solve those problems with better engineering. And if we fix those political problems, you don't need Hyperloop.
This is one of those occasions where a Hacker News appears to think they've thought of something that someone who's been thinking about this stuff for a very long time, and has the money and track record to back it up, disagrees.
You seem to have a very narrow view of the technology being proposed - the announcement is about New York to Washington, USA - but presumably this is a proof of concept build with modest scope.
> Tokyo manages a population more than 10x that of L.A. ..
> ... makes building infrastructure cost 10x too much and take 10x too long.
One should be careful with throwing around orders of magnitude claims willy nilly.
Tokyo's population is is just shy of 10 million, Los Angeles about 4 million.
I would say this is the only occasion that I read people telling others they shouldn't write their critical thinking about an issue because of the person who is behind.
Parent questioned viability of hyperloop, claimed that transport problems in the USA are due to poor planning and/or politics, and then made up some numbers around population, infrastructure costs and construction times.
My point was that Elon Musk thinks this is worth his time to construct. It's possible he, and the people advising him, have not properly thought this through. In TFA there's mention of some concerns by several other startups looking to build Hyperloop systems, who've raised some US$200m. It's possible that they, also, have failed to understand that all the transport problems in the USA could be solved by fixing 'the politics' and that Hyperloop is 'not viable'.
But which is more likely?
Parent is also comparing intra-city transport of two different cities, despite TFA being about inter-city transport.
Ultimately trying to compare profoundly different cultures, economies, population numbers and densities, and public transport history & infrastructure, is always going to involve some amount of hand-waving and number-rounding -- I just think hyperbole like '10 x this, 10 x that' doesn't make for a stronger argument.
I feel like this is one of those things that sounds like it might be true, but isn't. It's four hours from Tokyo to Hokkaido by train, f.e., and not much cheaper than a flight.
> I know that is difficult to imagine in the US, but please have an open mind.
I do try to have an open mind, despite being an Australian living in Australia.
My work requires that I travel regularly - most major cities in Australia warrant air-travel, due to the distances involved, but price and (in)convenience of air travel reduce the appeal.
Sydney to Canberra is a curious exception - at around 300km it's actually slightly faster to drive than to fly, once you factor in intra-city commute (to / from airports) and usual security & check-in waits. I'd love a high-speed ground-based option, as short-haul flights offend my green sensibilities, and as much as I enjoy driving, I can get more done, have a safer journey, and be more relaxed if I'm not driving. There is a train service - but it's not terribly frequent, and takes more than 4 hours (plus the intra-city commute, as for air travel). There's been talk of high speed rail links along the east coast (Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne) for decades, but still no actual commitment in sight.
I'm highly envious of what's happening in other parts of the world.
How dare I disagree with the Perfect Musk!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCMaglev#Japan
Solar City wasn't viable and had to be "bought" by Tesla to avoid bankruptcy.
> The problems with US transit are political.
Absolutely. There are too many people with vested financial interests who throw roadblocks to sensible public planning.
The irony here is that so much of elon musk and his company exist out of political "help". I don't know how musk does it but he has access to levers of power to keep himself afloat. The guy must have been a smooth talker.
That one's pretty easy to disprove...
A well run PR machine that keeps the constant hype going. The right misdirection at the right times (we totally need to worry about the mythical smart AI, oh but don't worry about the timeline or the dangers of self driving cars). The Hyperloop and Tunnels are totally amazing building blocks for Mars so we have to build them.
I think Musk is a brilliant guy, but the cult around him is pretty ridiculous.
The concept is effectively a series of moving sidewalk (like you see in airports) loops scaled up to run at 100+ mph, with its own ecosystem of shops, restaurants, inns, etc. They would replace the highways, and be powered by solar panels on the enclosure of the road. Getting on and off is handled by a series of parallel belts which go progressively slower at reasonable increments.
No need for "stops" where the entire system must come to a halt to disgorge passengers, no need for negative pressure systems, it could power itself (and surrounding communities)... But the impact of the roads "stopping" would be pretty major and widespread (if mitigable via multiple smaller loops).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll
Heck, I'd even be excited about wifi upgrades in the NE corridor.