Purely from a technology perspective, they're probably feasible in that physically if we really really wanted to build them, we could. From an everything else perspective, they're worse than pointless (it's used to try and discredit feasible projects).

China (and also the UK lolololololol) is installing 220mph rated conventional high speed rail tracks. Sure, not under an hour, but still under 2. That's still about an hour and a half (e.g. London to Dublin) gate to gate plane with all the faffing around, never mind the airport faff.

And yet somehow people make 300mile trips by plane and train all the time.

The issue is the noise, and you don't need a vacuum tube to solve it.

You'll need a lot of power to do that, but there's no theoretical reason why it's impossible. Not sure I'd want to design a tunnel in a compressible flow regime though!

https://www.bbc.com/news/artic...

"More" is doing a lot of work, the front has expanded like 5%, we can look at this. Also Ukraine is like 2-3x on casualties. And we have to take perspective, Russia is/was the 3rd largest military in the world, Ukraine still is massively the underdog. Holding lines like this for so long says something.

I am sure here in America if we were fighting for our literal homeland we wouldn't appreciate a country capable of helping us instead telling us to give them up while we are willing and are literally fighting right at this moment. Yes it robs agency. Everything else you wrote is cope to justify removing that agency because it suits your... something, I never understand the Russia defenders, what are you defending? it's clearly the immoral position. Saving money? That can't be it.

This entire paragraph is empty words, why write it?

Oh bullshit, we are capable of holding those positions just fine. Iraq 2003 was immoral. Russia in 2014 and 2022 is immoral. Easy, i'm a human being with a brain, I can process this.

And this is just more justification for an obvious immoral action, the unjustified invasion of a nation. Something we all apparently understand? The alternative you propose is to just let an immoral actor succeed at an immoral action because... again, money? If we're talking American boots on the ground, yeah we can maybe get a little more in the weeds but this is just horseshoe tankie "America bad" blended with America First "Russia good".

I know this site is built on the back of autism but you could at least try to read like we're all human beings here.

I'm not here to defend Trump in my estimation the tariffs are not in the interest of the US and it's unfortunate.

Considering that maybe the increased military spending is good for Europe now, certainly can't blame them for finding the US and unreliable partner.

That though doesn't change the fact that Russia invasion is unjustified and should be resisted, it's actually irrelevant to that. You can admit it's unjustified and all that and still not want to defend Ukraine, that's arguable at least.

We are and have always been able to afford it, it's a political choice through and through.

You're not thinking about the trillions of dollars and cheap imports that being the world's primary currency gets you. It's a form of economic colonialism and China would love to have it. So would any European country.

America is very close to handing nuclear launch codes to religious lunatics. One more election and it happens.

These people believe God will protect them from literally anything. I know because I have family like this.

They will launch those nukes. And is America's empire fails we are going to have to start doing military expansion to maintain our economy. We are already moving into Venezuela to take the oil for exactly that reason. Canada and Mexico and the rest of South America will follow. Europe will be next and eventually we'll try our chances with China.

The rest of the world ought to be interfering with the Russian interference that's getting us into this mess but they're all hoping that America will collapse letting them take over as the primary world power and letting their currency take over as the world's de facto currency. If they can pull that off then they're a billionaires get to become the first trillionaires instead of our billionaires becoming the first trillionaires.

The problem is everyone is underestimating how fucking crazy my country is. We will launch those nukes folks. Especially if the religious lunatics who are currently running our government finish the project 2025 work they've been planning for 60 years and end up in total control.

Be interested to see the perception in other countries with different payment systems. If the cost was 1/3 the current rate all else equal does this polling move? I imagine it does.

It's much like healthcare in that despite all the evidence out in the world Americans treat these systems as intractable laws of nature, the costs are sky high because that's how they are and always have to be. Meanwhile it's just basic economics that tells you why the costs keep going up and yet we take the route of "we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".

There are ways to fix these systems and they are obvious once you get over the scary "socialism" talking points and our own hangups that somewhere, someone might get something you personally feel like they "don't deserve"

it has detailed arguments in between making fun of idiots who think hyperloop is real.

If you can't be arsed to learn things though I can't help you. Maybe reddit's "conservative" forum is more your speed then. They'll do a good job of protecting you from knowledge.

Did you know they had a week long gap in new posts when the voting on the Epstein files was going on?

That's part of it but you need to remember that every single one of those Rich fuckers is a crook.

This means they fully expect their kids to be the target of a wide range of scams and ripoffs and they want their kids to be able to think critically so that they don't fall for that shit.

Some of them are so dumb they still do like Trump. But if that happens the elites have solidarity and they take care of each other.

Occasionally you will get somebody like Bernie Madoff or Elizabeth Holmes that manages to get through that system but when it happens and they get caught they go to jail for decades.

You know there are people who do this thing called being born and then they grow up and then they have to buy things because you're not born with a 32 GB memory kit. At least I wasn't maybe that's a birth defect...

Away from the build-out being finished. The bubble isn't a bubble it's not going to pop. The infrastructure isn't going to get shut down and sold off it's going to get used.

Like I mentioned on another thread the problem AI solves is wages. Paying wages.

This means that AI isn't going anywhere. Now a whole bunch of companies will collapse and the banks will be in trouble because they would have loaned those companies hundreds of billions of dollars. But you're just going to have to bail those Banks out or they will take the entire economy down with them and you will lose your retirement and your job.

There are solutions to all of these problems but none of them are acceptable to the average voter.

Even in the current environment they are objectively wrong. All the study proves is that propaganda works.

The ruling elite has decided they do not want you to be educated. They have spent a lot of money to convince you that you do not need to be educated.

You can tell they're lying because they don't tell their kids to go become plumbers. They send them to very expensive schools with a lot of humanities courses so that they can be taught critical thinking

I know tech nerds don't like the humanities but when you are dealing with someone who does not automatically think critically about information that is how you teach them to do it. This is why you will always find lots of humanities classes at expensive schools.

Good lord, we agree on something.

Anyway I think the issue is that there are idiots everywhere, and a lot of people who jump on bandwagons and are too proud to jump off once the evidence comes out it's a scam. And while I hate the idea personally, it sounds worse than flying, I would assume a lot of people look at the transportation speeds involved, and just assume it would be successful for that reason, especially in an era where a significant number of people believe America's railroads collapsed due to "flying", when the story is way, way, more complicated (essentially a systemic shock from all sides, over regulation, poorly thought out taxes that weren't applied to rival transportation systems, poor management, and out of control dumbass unions. A perfect storm of crappiness.)