Hyperloop One shuts down

Oh, nobody has ever done that. Except France, maybe. And Japan, and China, and South Korea, and Italy, and Spain, and…

Also, plasma technology; that has to be better than lasers!

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It’s Hyperloop all over again.

Shipping companies like DHL, FedEx and Amazon could be potential investors, Gendron says, as the trains could be used for commuters and light, time-sensitive freight.

Hyperloop One also pivoted to freight when things weren’t working out.

Although the technology is still years from going becoming operational, Gendron says the company could get trains on Canadian tracks before 2035.

Elon Musk similarly claimed that Hyperloop could be developed and built faster than California could build high speed rail.

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Buddha’s Balls! We can’t even build a cross-town LRT in 10 years.

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it’s not that hard to put trains on tracks. it’s putting the tracks in useful places - and connected in a line - that seems to be the main issue

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An idea that is obviously silly on its face because high-speed rail reduces travel times by hours at most, not days or weeks. Most of the stuff that travels in giant shipping containers spends so much of its journey on slow-moving cargo ships or waiting to get loaded and unloaded at some port or another that a few hours won’t make any noticeable difference anyway.

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Hey, you’ve got to come up with something for your pitch.

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I seem to recall hearing that if a Hyperloop were actually built, it would cost something along the lines of a billion dollars per mile. If that’s true, I wonder how long it would take to pay for itself…

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It would never pay for itself because even after construction was complete the cost of maintaining and operating hundreds of miles of vacuum tunnels and the pressurized pods that travelled them would far exceed the revenue one would gather from ticket sales. According to the company’s own proposals, each vehicle would only have enough capacity for 28 people. That’s less than the capacity of most city buses.

The business plan for Hyperloop was even less well defined than the business plan for Twitter.

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That’s the great thing about scams - you don’t need a business plan as such.
Just a some bullshit that sounds vaguely plausible to the uninformed.

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@orenwolf zombie boing topic

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