It’s time to be honest about Musk’s vacuum tube to nowhere

  • @filister@lemmy.world
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    711 year ago

    Don’t forget the “Hyperloop” in Las Vegas, which is just a tunnel where Teslas are driving people around. IMO that’s the stupidest and the least efficient use of this tunnel.

    The cars are not even self-driving, and mind you this is a closed system and easier to implement self-driving. So far with his self-driving copium, and robo taxis bullshit.

    • Flying Squid
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      281 year ago

      That’s more about Elon hating mass public transportation. Probably because it involves being close to poor people.

    • threelonmusketeers
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      1 year ago

      Don’t forget the “Hyperloop” in Las Vegas, which is just a tunnel where Teslas are driving people around.

      Isn’t that The Loop, not a Hyperloop?

    • @Kbobabob@lemmy.world
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      01 year ago

      Don’t forget the “Hyperloop” in Las Vegas

      Isn’t that literally what they’re talking about in the article?

      • threelonmusketeers
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        71 year ago

        No, the news here is that Richard Branson’s Hyperloop One company is shutting down. I don’t believe that is related to the Loop (not Hyperloop) project in Las Vegas.

  • @Gerula@lemmy.world
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    691 year ago

    Hyoerloop is not a scam just because The con man proposed it with the intent of stopping a high speed rail road project.

    It’s a scam also because:

    • the idea is not his. It’s 100 years old and has been tackled by other before him.
    • it’s impossible to be build from the technical point of view.
    • even if you do manage to miraculously built it it won’t be economically feasible.
    • in the lasts years it’s starting to be obvious that if it’s backed by Musk it’s a scam in some degree, shape or form. (see also Solar Cities, Tesla, The Loop and the Boring company, etc.)
    • cannache
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      01 year ago

      No it’s that it hasn’t been executed properly yet, as for whether it’s an actual scam is another issue

  • @takeda@lemmy.world
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    421 year ago

    The moment he proposed it, but was not interested in implementing it and let others use that idea, was a clear sign that he himself didn’t believe in it.

    • @WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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      51 year ago

      That’s an interesting concept. After the shit he’s pulled with twitter, and in general, I now wonder if he was genuinely dumb enough to believe the hyperloop would be economically viable, and deferred because he had 5 young projects in flight… but he’s also too egomaniacal to defer a project he believed in, so maybe it was a scam from day one, because he is a con artist.

  • @witx@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    During the peak of his fame I always thought this was a money laundering scheme from Musk. Only recently I’ve learned about the (not so much) theory that it was all an effort to screw with high speed train.

  • Dr. Dabbles
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    331 year ago

    Going to run a turbofan in a vacuum chamber for propulsion and use air bearings to float on the surface. Like any of it ever made sense from day one. Fever dreams of an idiot.

  • Marxism-Fennekinism
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    1 year ago

    I fully believe the accusations that Musk only proposed the Hyperloop to derail the California High Speed Rail project because an actual high speed rail service poses a serious threat to his car sales. The entire point was to overpromise and deliver absolutely nothing while sucking funds away from projects that actually stand a chance of replacing cars.

    • @nutsack@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      i don’t think it would have done anything to his car sales. you still need a car everywhere in california outside maybe half the bay area

      • Marxism-Fennekinism
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        1 year ago

        Good point, but in the long term, a successful large scale transit project can and will sway opinions and cause other transit projects to crop up nearby. In the mind of a car exec it’s probably best to nip it in the bud in case more people get a taste of what car-free ground transportation can do and start getting ideas about transit expansions in their cities, and it’s not like he’s shy about his vehemently anti-transit stance in general either.

        • @nutsack@lemmy.world
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          21 year ago

          california cities outside the bay are spread out as fuck and the infrastructure is planned around car ownership. it would be a very long time before people would start going carless.

    • @this_1_is_mine@lemmy.world
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      31 year ago

      But his car sales are shit. And compared to the sales of all the major manufacturing is a pitance. Not saying its not the reason he did it but he’s such a little wanna be fuck boy I couldn’t help butpoints out how shit he is. What a mammas boy the soon to be Enron is.

  • Margot Robbie
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    211 year ago

    If you are ever in LA, you should take a drive around SpaceX campus and see the “Hyperloop prototype” they built outside(don’t get out of the car, Hawthorne is a run down industrial zone and not the safest place)

    There is nothing that shatters the illusion of Musk’s genius faster than seeing that sad, short gas pipeline looking thing on an run down street next to their overflowing employee garage.

  • @yamanii@lemmy.world
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    191 year ago

    The hyperloop was my wake up call that he wasn’t a good person, it felt like every reporter became dumb overnight to buy what he was saying.

  • @unreasonabro@lemmy.world
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    111 year ago

    i mean news flash and shit, but you can’t make a good product at this point under capitalism. there isn’t a single product on the market, in any category, that is not a scam. Enshittification won capitalism and the game is over.

      • @Wogi@lemmy.world
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        121 year ago

        Are you TIRED of having to buy a new toaster oven every ten years? Try Toastee, we’ll send a new toaster to you every month so you never have to wonder if you’re going to have a working toaster oven! Only 169.99 per month.

        • cannache
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          11 year ago

          Nah you can always make new things that aren’t toasters lol just harder to be more imaginative

  • @SuckMyWang@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I thought the initial scaled down tests showed it was a dumb idea from the start but the company ran for 5 years or more saying “we’re working on this idea that we’ve already proved is shit and won’t work.”

    Now they’re telling us it doesn’t work

    • @gedaliyah@lemmy.world
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      541 year ago

      There wasn’t going to be any air resistance. They were just going to build a vacuum chamber 1000 times larger than the biggest one ever engineered, then contain it in a thin metal tube snaking hundreds of miles across the heat of the California desert. So simple. /s

      • blazera
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        -191 year ago

        Right, that was the whole point. I think folks arent appreciating air resistance. The ISS is an example of what vehicles are capable of without it. Speeds incomparable to anything on earth, with little fuel usage. Its the largest source of inefficiency in travel. And the engineering science of reducing it is wholesale a scam for people.

          • blazera
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            01 year ago

            Yeah i seen the rest of it, i was short on time. Thats not how engineering tubes works, we use them because you can add as much length as you want, the balancing of pressure forces occurs cross sectionally. A 2 foot pipe carrying 100 psi is experiencing the same stresses as a 2 mile pipe at 100 psi. You might as well be adding a /s to the idea of distributing water through pipes.

            • @prime_number_314159@lemmy.world
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              21 year ago

              Very long pipes use expansion/contraction sections that may not be possible for a vacuum sealed system that has to be incredibly straight to allow the passage of a train, and can flex pretty significantly for earthquakes, seasonal temperature changes, etc.

              • blazera
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                31 year ago

                Earthquakes keep getting brought up as if they’re not devastating to absolutely everything we already use. What if an earthquake hits a regular train? Or a bridge, or a house. only a vacuum tube is susceptible to earthquakes.

                • @prime_number_314159@lemmy.world
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                  11 year ago

                  If any part of the hundreds of miles of tube suddenly stops being a vacuum chamber, every train all along the tube is going to be hit by air rushing in, at the speed of sound, with all the turbulence that implies, while its already moving at full speed. It might be possible to engineer a capsule that will keep the people inside alive when that happens, but it is not at all the same as e.g. rail, where “stop moving fowards” depletes essentially all the energy in the system.

                • @Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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                  11 year ago

                  I really don’t think they want actual science or logic, this is the five minute hate for the day.

                  I think it really boils down to capitalism being really bad at things like this, look at the UKs high-speed rail project - hugely over budget and behind schedule AND not getting any of the important bits that actually make it usable. There’s no way we could do anything actually cool like a passenger vacuum tube.

                  I was actually a little excited by some of the stuff musk was saying back in the boring company days because it briefly sounded like he was investing money in technologies that would be huge, narrow bore vaccum tunnels especially… Sadly I think he didn’t really understand the science fiction he was reading, or rather he didn’t get the importance of intermediary steps. Or he remembered me owns a car company.

                  What would make a huge difference in reducing vehicles on the road is rapid hands free cargo delivery through automated vacuum tunnels - but he wanted to skip micro tunnels and instead just go to ever so slightly smaller tunnels which is basically pointless. We needed a totally new boring technology not a slightly shrunk one, it should be doing city infrastructure and micro cargo transit then when we’ve perfected the mechanisms we can scale up into passenger sized networks to complement the developing passenger rail system (which rapid micro transit would really help as the need for cargo transit is the main reason that stops the subway being feasible for certain people)

          • blazera
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            -11 year ago

            Yes, acceleration is a thing, but trains a)reach a top speed and spend a lot of fuel maintaining it, and b)reaches much, much lower top speeds, with any effort to increase it requiring exponentially more fuel to reach and maintain. Air resistance is an absurdly important factor to travel efficiency.

    • @sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz
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      11 year ago

      The idea isn’t crazy. Shithead Musk didn’t come up with the idea, it’s been floating around for a hundred years or more. It’s just society isn’t there yet, technology wise.