They seriously named it Whoosh?
The ticket is ~$13, and it’ll turn a 2 hours drive through a toll road (or more if there’s a traffic jam, inside the toll road, which happen surprisingly often) that cost ~$7 for the toll alone into 40 minutes journey. So yeah, it’s no brainer to use instead of cars if you don’t need to carry too much stuff.
Unless you are moving or going to the middle of nowhere, you can easily fit half a week (if not a week) of essentials items in a backpack.
Sure, but Hyperloop could have carried 10x more people at 1/10th the price and for less energy than it takes to flip a quarter. And we can do it today.
Have things gotten that bad that you can’t tell if that was sarcastic?
Shit.
People took A Modest Proposal seriously, both when it was written, and when we read it in English class.
Given that things like tone that are normally used to show sarcasm dont show through text, the only way if one doesnt explicitly state something to be sarcasm to tell if something written is sarcastic is if the statement seems so absurd or obviously wrong that nobody could seriously believe it. However, people have a seemingly limitless capacity to believe things that are factually untrue, and what is and is not absurd is to some extent in the eye of the beholder, so ultimately, one should not be surprised if one’s written sarcasm is taken seriously, if you dont include some kind of signifier to replace the cues normally given in speech.
The passenger volume, cost, and build-it-today claims are I think in line with theirs. The only outlier is the energy claim, which is so absurdly false that it falls into puffery (think ‘red bull gives you wings’) and is again believable.
It’s clear HSR costs, and infrastructure in general, are getting out of control in the English-speaking world. It’s not clear how to fix this, but moving from proven and understood technology to Muppet technology doesn’t seem to be a good option.
:(
I wonder; is it the people who miss the train get ‘whooshed’ or the people on board…
