Read the replies to the Hyperloop tweet to see what a neoliberalism-poisoned PhD brain and its worshippers looks like. Gems like “the idea would have been viable with infinite money” and that the point of failure was the tunneling, which is literally the first step of the whole concept.
If you put PhD in your username I will not care about what you have to say
People that put that sort of stuff give me insecurity vibes. Same with Dr., Engineer, etc…
…some of the best engineers in the world trying to build an impossible thing.
Something tells me that these were not in fact, the best engineers in the world if they knew a project was impossible and tried to make it anyway. I feel like the “best” engineers in the world would try and make things that are actually practical and possible in our reality.
Rather than looking at trains and thinking, if we build those we can sell tickets, they looked at shareholders and the government and thought, I bet we could fleece them. We’re seeing the military effects of this, too, with neoliberales looking shocked as to why more and more funding doesn’t automatically equal more and more armaments. Commodity production detached from anything with the use value that makes the commodity a commodity.
I think the practical is the most important factor, here. It’s hard to know how one of the world’s richest billionaires can get so deep into a project that has an exchange value but no use value. This is what happens when imperialists dismiss productive capital, and become parasitic on government grants, defrauded shareholders, and asset stripping. It was the same with crypto and nfts.
it is because as Vijay Prashad said US billionaires hid their monies in illicit tax havens in UK and EU. And there is no state control to put those monies back into infrastructure but Elon musk sure have his pet projects like Mars colonization and Hyperloopy , I mean why not Elon and military industrial complex don’t get why ordinary people need food and stuff.
Musk’s “Mars colonization” project will end up the exact same way as his “hyperloop”. One day it will simply and quietly be declared dead and everyone will forget about it. (Meanwhile China and Russia will be building a moon base together.)
If you aren’t this no material analysis sort frankly they won’t consider you in some fields/schools for a PhD, its all by design. If you have seen the grass outside you are unfit for the ivory halls.
Billions of dollars essentially gone to shit only to come up with trains but in tunnels and failing drastically
Wasn’t the hyperloop supposed to be pod based in some far back concept iteration? It’s not even train in tunnel, that’s just a subway, it’s gadgetbahn in tunnels
Isambard Brunel, one of history’s great engineers, tried to make one in the 1800s.
The project failed due to materials science limits of the day (leather seals for high vacuum)
So he went back to building normal, non-silly railways.
So it’s fair to say “maybe we didn’t have the technology 150 years ago” but that also means you know exactly what mistakes to not repeat. Of course, this assumes a good-faith operation, not a placebo promised to keep people from demanding normal, non-silly railways in thr first place.
