Alexisg

Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity, one of the most high-profile private sector attempts to “disrupt” higher education discovered inequality this week. Thrun has spent the last three years dangling the shiny bauble of his elite academic pedigree and messianic vision of the future of higher education before investors and politicos. He promised nothing short of radically transforming higher education for the future by delivering taped classroom lessons of elite professors through massive open online courses.So what went wrong?

After low performance rates, low student satisfaction and faculty revolt, Thrun announced this week that he has given up on MOOCs as a vision for higher education disruption.    The “godfather of free online education” says that the racially, economically diverse students at SJSU,“were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives…[for them] this medium is not a good fit.” It seems disruption is hard when poor people insist on existing.

Thrun has the right to fail. That’s just business. But he shouldn’t have the right to fail students like those at San Jose State and the public universities that serve them for the sake of doing business.

It is fine if you missed it but for three years now Massive Open Online Courses from tech giants and start-ups have been selling a solution to all that ails higher education. Two short years ago Thrun declared to Silicon Valley and the traditional universities with the courage to follow him that he could not go back to teaching at Stanford. He’d taken the red pill, massive open online courses pioneered by Udacity, and he couldn’t go back.

In 2013, reality harshed Thrun’s red pill high. The low completion issues he had encountered with his MOOC courses while at Stanford became deeper, more fundamental problems at San Jose State. Single digit completion rates in MOOC courses make for-profit colleges’ dismal completion rates look progressive. Thrun said the courses were the pedagogical best he could make them. Coming from a rock star professor from an elite institution, that suggests the class must have been pretty damn good. But it wasn’t good enough for SJSU students.

The faculty at SJSU handed Thrun’s Udacity a very public flogging. Many faculty members questioned the morality of a publicly funded college with a mission to serve diverse students should spend tax-payer money and invest the hopes of students with fewer options than those at the Stanfords of the world into being Thrun’s guinea pigs.

It is a fair question that in many ways the academic and scientific communities have already answered with a resounding no. When I want to interview students for a research project I have to present a carefully, detailed plan to my University for approval. The plan is vetted by an Institutional Review Board. Every research university has an IRB but they didn’t always. Before 1974 doctors figured out the internal reproductive organs of women by cutting them open without consent or sedation. They observed the effects of untreated syphilis on test subjects — insanity and death — without bothering to inform the participants that there was a known, available treatment. They told volunteers they had electrocuted a stranger to see how human decision-making works.

Basically, before IRB a lot of modern science would have been war crimes had the U.S. been on the losing end of World War II. And because this is America, there was a disturbing pattern among the victims of these kinds of horrific experiments. They were overwhelmingly black, brown, indigenous, poor, and powerless. A 1978 report on regulating research on human beings declared that ethical research has “an obligation to protect persons from harm by maximizing anticipated benefits and minimizing possible risks of harm”. The connection to inequality was clear. The most vulnerable were likely to be prodded, poked and tested because the elite don’t often sign up to risk their lives for little reward. And flagrant disregard for these risks had few penalties because the victims were powerless. The rules governing academic and scientific research recognizes that some groups are too vulnerable to risk the failure that the scientific method requires.

Where was this institutional ethic in what Thrun freely concedes was always an experiment? When Udacity was primarily interested in beaming the erudite countenance of professional smart people out into the world, it can be said that any risk was assumed by the those who chose to sign up. But when Udacity went after formal arrangements with colleges like SJSU to offer courses, for credit, to students enrolled in the University, the risk calculation changed.

Udacity’s partnership with SJSU mostly offered general education courses in things like math. General education courses like English and math fill up fast in most colleges because all students have to take them. At places like SJSU that don’t benefit from Stanford’s highly selective admissions standards to skim the most prepared students, those general education classes have to do double-duty filling in learning gaps. Offering these courses for credit using Udacity significantly increases the incentive for students to take the class and risks for students if the class is a dud. General education courses are path dependent, meaning you fail one course at the beginning of a sequence and you cannot take the next course in that sequence. Research shows that disrupting path dependent coursework really hurts the most marginal students by increasing their time to degree completion, dinging their motivation, and sinking their GPAs.

Udacity always knew that the non-completion rates were high for its courses. They may not have known why, but that was a reason for greater testing, not a reason to roll-out the for-profit product for University clients. With sanction from the California governor on down the political line, Udacity  had to meet no ethical requirement to prove that the risk of failure was worth the promise of rewards. And what was promised? University partners could prove they were innovative, forward-thinking, and cut expensive faculty out of the complex equation of teaching students.

To prove that teachers don’t matter and Stanford knows best what the world needs, a public university gave a for-profit company unfettered authority to experiment on its students without informed student consent or consideration of an ethical threshold. We may need more experimentation in higher education but it should be as explicit and ethical as any other we conduct in the name of science and progress.

Thrun says it wasn’t a failure. It was a lesson. But for the students who invested time and tuition in an experiment foisted on them by the  of stewards public highered trusts, failure is a lesson they didn’t need. Students like those at SJSU tend to know quite a bit about failure — institutional, social, and political. They did not need to learn again what Thrun, a smart guy from Stanford and Google, could have learned from a book.

In a blog entry on her recently revitalized personal Web site, Vi Hart lays out her reasons for leaving YouTube. It boils down to what a friend of mine (an ex-Googler) calls "the plusterfuck". Google+, Google's attempt to be Facebook and Pinterest and every other social network, has become the chosen replacement for YouTube comments. The result is horrible, and many popular YouTube presenters are either leaving or turning off comments on their videos.

We've talked about how Amazon being a monopsony is a bad thing for e-books. Although many people write and (self)publish e-books, being forced to do so through Amazon's platform puts them at the mercy of Amazon's business purposes. Those business goals might or might not line up with what readers and writers want. Likewise, there are probably hundreds of millions of people who post videos to YouTube, but for them to reach their audience they have to go along with whatever policies Google chooses to put in place.

I don't think anyone ever claimed YouTube comments were a good system, but it seems to be pretty universally understood that the wholesale replacement of a bad system with another bad system has made things even worse. This is going to hurt a number of people who are trying to use YouTube channels for their businesses, and outside of boosting Google's ad revenue and maybe injecting some life into their flailing social network experiment I don't see what value it brings.

The parallels between this situation and the brewing storm over net neutrality are obvious to me; are they as clear to everyone else?

“This is so FUN! Let’s do this every day.”
-students at Klamath Falls elementary schools.

That sentiment was echoed by kids across the Oregon yesterday as over 30,000 students walked or rode to school for International Walk+Bike to School Day.

The Bicycle Transportation Alliance and the Walk+Bike Network are excited to announce that 260 Oregon schools participated in the 2013 International Walk+Bike to School Day on October 9th, coming in 4th in state-wide participation, just behind California (519 schools), Florida (284), and South Carolina (277)!

“I am so proud of each and every volunteer Walk+Bike Organizer who held amazing events at schools all over the state,” said LeeAnne Fergason, Education Director for the Bicycle Transportation Alliance. ”We are grateful for the time and commitment to the health and safety of the 30,000 students impacted! Next year let’s give South Carolina and Florida a run for their money!”

Walk+Bike to School Day is celebrated in many schools as part of a larger Safe Routes to School program based on 5 programmatic principles aimed at increasing the number of families walking and riding to school for health and safety: education, encouragement, engineering improvements, enforcement engagement, and evaluation.

Portland Transportation Bureau Director Leah Treat “As a mom of four children I am always concerned about their safety, being able to get them to and from school is something my husband and I think about twice every day during the school year. As (Portland’s) Transportation Director I care about every child traveling to and from school in a safe manner. And I want to encourage healthy choices in that endeavor. Safe Routes to School is a great resource that helps our city do just that.”

The BTA has been working since 1998 to encourage students to walk and bike on International Walk+Bike to School Day. Participation has increased from 47 schools and 7,000 students in 2004 to what we saw yesterday when 20% of Oregon’s 1,305 schools participated. Over 30,000 Oregon kids took an important step towards being active and healthy yesterday because they walked or biked to school.

“The childhood obesity epidemic is a crisis that, in the long run, affects all of us,” says Dr. Jimmy Unger, a Portland pediatrician who attended a Walk+Bike to School Day event at Maplewood Elementary in Portland. “As one who spends much of my day encouraging families to be more active for the sake of their children’s health, I know that efforts such as these at Maplewood make it easier for families to make healthy choices.”

At Maplewood and other schools across Oregon, Volunteer Walk+Bike Organizers pulled off some amazing events and took note of students’ reactions:

• “I over heard kid say, ‘I love walking.’” -Burt Tate, Roseburg
• “The health room is filled with scooters! and 7th grader with walk bike shoe lace tied to his head, ‘yeah, I’m starting a trend.’” -Cynthia Keifer, Beaverton
• “Students are bragging that they walk almost everyday.” -Nicole Perry, Milwaukie
• “One student said, ‘I want to ride to school EVERY day this year!’” -Julie Gefroh, Portland
• “Teachers were saying, ‘This was AWESOME!’” -Katrina Hanson, Roseburg
• “Kids shouted, ‘We should do this every month!’” -Brett Walter, Portland
• “Kids are already asking when the next (event) is.” -Bobbi St. Clair, Grant’s Pass
• “Kids said, ’That was cool!’” -Kim Ryhlick, Hood River

“The more we celebrate with students, the more they and their communities value making an active trip to school, and the more they want to do it,” says Fergason. “We have all heard the terrifying statistics on childhood obesity and understand who is at risk. International Walk+Bike to School Day is just one way we can help give kids what they want: more safe places to walk and ride.”

Serves 4
Total time: 30 minutes || Active time: 30 minutes

I don’t know how this happened, but I guess I’m a tomato farmer. Tomatoes are all I’ve thought about all summer. If I’m traveling, I don’t wonder about my boyfriend and cats, I wonder about my tomatoes. Are they getting enough nutrients? Are they getting the right amount of water? Do they need trimming? Are there any pests pestering them? And, most importantly, do they miss me like I miss them?

After a few snafus this past Spring (who expects snow in May?!) my babies finally got going. And even now in mid-September, most of my plants are still producing juicy orbs of ridiculous deliciousness. So of course I’ve been using them in everything. And, well, one thing led to another and I guess I don’t have to tell you, that this is how BLT Mac & Cheeze was born.

Being late summer, I really wanted this mac to be gardeny. If you have a garden, or a CSA, or just want to use some in-season produce from the grocery, maybe you’ll appreciate that. So I made the “B” out of eggplant (remember: vegans will make bacon out of anything.) For the “L”, arugula is always prolific in the garden, plus I love its muskiness, which goes perfectly with the bright and smoky flavors of the other ingredients.

The “cheeze” sauce is just something I threw together, very similar to the Chipotle Mac, but without the pepperiness and perhaps a little more noochy than usual. It’s just a nice creamy backdrop to the more assertive flavors its tossed with.

And there you have it: BLT Mac & Cheeze. I hope your summer has been as fruitful as mine (literally and figuratively) and I can’t wait to share some fall recipes with you soon!

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Recipe Notes
~For time management: Get the oven preheating and the water boiling, then prep the eggplant. Once the eggplant is in the oven and the pasta is boiling, you have plenty of time to prep the tomatoes and puree the sauce.

~I was making this for a friend who is sensitive to garlic (I KNOW!) and so I didn’t use it. If, however, you NEEDS your garlic, throw a clove or two into the sauce while it’s pureeing.

~I used gluten-free noodles here, and actually, I usually do with Mac-N-Cheeze. I just prefer them. They stand up beautifully to the sauce, and tend not to get mushy as leftovers. But you obvs can use whichever noodles you love! I recommend Tinkyada brand. (I used shells, but they have a macaroni, too.)

~If you forgot to soak the cashews, have no fear. You can boil them for the same creamy effect, and still have this on the table in 30 minutes. Just submerge in boiling water for 15 minutes, drain, and proceed.

~Oh and hey, if you’re doing the oil-free thing, you’ll be happy to note that this recipe is completely oil free if you leave the cooking spray off of the eggplant bacon recipe.

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Ingredients
8 oz small shell pasta or macaroni (gluten-free, whole wheat, or any type)
4 cups baby arugula
2 cups cherry tomatoes, halved (or chopped regular tomatoes)
1 recipe Eggplant Bacon

For the sauce:
1 cup cashews, soaked in water for at least 2 hours (see note above)
1 cup vegetable broth
3 tablespoons nutritional yeast flakes
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
2 teaspoons dijon mustard
2 teaspoons onion powder
Salt and pepper to taste

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To make the sauce: Drain the cashews and place all sauce ingredients in a blender and blend away until completely smooth. Scrape down the sides with a spatula to make sure you get everything. Depending on the strength of your blender this could take from one to five minutes. Taste for salt and pepper, keeping in mind that you want it just a little saltier than you think because it’s going to be poured over all of the other ingredients.

When the macaroni is tender, drain it in a colander. Immediately place it back in the pot you boiled it in and stir in the sauce. Place pot on low heat and stir for 3 minutes or so, until the sauce is thickened a bit and everything is deliciously creamy. Taste for salt again.

Now toss in the arugula, tomatoes and eggplant bacon, leaving a little extra aside to garnish if you like. Serve!

As a provider of arrivals displays, Portland Transport is a happy organization today.

(No, we never got sued - the lawsuits seem to have been limited to the providers of the web services and arrival estimates.)

There is a belief within American media that a successful person can succeed at anything. He (and it’s invariably he) is omnicompetent, and people who question him and laugh at his outlandish ideas will invariably fail and end up working for him. If he cares about something, it’s important; if he says something can be done, it can. The people who are already doing the same thing are peons and their opinions are to be discounted, since they are biased and he never is. He doesn’t need to provide references or evidence – even supposedly scientific science fiction falls into this trope, in which the hero gets ideas from his gut, is always right, and never needs to do experiments.

Thus we get Hyperloop, a loopy intercity rail transit idea proposed by Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk, an entrepreneur who hopes to make a living some day building cars. And thus a fair amount of the media coverage is analysis-free summary of what Tesla already said: see stenography by ABC, Forbes, the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, and even BusinessWeek (which added that critics deal with “limited information”). Some media channels are more nuanced, sometimes even critical; the Wall Street Journal deserves especial credit, but Wonkblog also has a second, mildly critical post. But none has pressed Musk or Tesla about the inconsistencies in his proposal, which far exceed the obvious questions about the proposed $6 billion price tag (compare $53 billion in today’s money for California HSR). For better prior criticism, see James Sinclair’s post and Clem Tillier’s comment on California HSR Blog.

My specific problems are that Hyperloop a) made up the cost projections, b) has awful passenger comfort, c) has very little capacity, and d) lies about energy consumption of conventional HSR. All of these come from Musk’s complex in which he must reinvent everything and ignore prior work done in the field; these also raise doubts about the systems safety that he claims is impeccable.

In principle, Hyperloop is supposed to get people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half an hour, running in a tube with near-vacuum at speeds topping at 1,220 km/h. In practice, both the costs and the running times are full of magic asterisks. The LA end is really Sylmar, at the edge of the LA Basin; with additional access time and security checks, this is no faster than conventional HSR doing the trip in 2:40. There is a crossing of the San Francisco Bay, but there’s no mention of the high cost of bridging over or tunneling under the Bay – we’re supposed to take it on faith the unit cost is the same as along the I-5 corridor in the Central Valley.

There is no systematic attempt at figuring out standard practices for cost, or earthquake safety (about which the report is full of FUD about the risks of a “ground-based system”). There are no references for anything; they’re beneath the entrepreneur’s dignity. It’s fine if Musk thinks he can build certain structures for lower cost than is normal, or achieve better safety, but he should at least mention how. Instead, we get “it is expected” and “targeted” language. On Wikipedia, it would get hammered with “citation needed” and “avoid weasel words.”

The worst is the cost of the civil infrastructure, the dominant term in any major transportation project’s cost. Hundreds of years of incrementally-built expertise in bridge building is brushed aside with the following passage:

The pods and linear motors are relatively minor expenses compared to the tube itself – several hundred million dollars at most, compared with several billion dollars for the tube. Even several billion is a low number when compared with several tens of billion proposed for the track of the California rail project.

The key advantages of a tube vs. a railway track are that it can be built above the ground on pylons and it can be built in prefabricated sections that are dropped in place and joined with an orbital seam welder. By building it on pylons, you can almost entirely avoid the need to buy land by following alongside the mostly very straight California Interstate 5 highway, with only minor deviations when the highway makes a sharp turn.

In reality, an all-elevated system is a bug rather than a feature. Central Valley land is cheap; pylons are expensive, as can be readily seen by the costs of elevated highways and trains all over the world. The unit costs for viaducts on California HSR, without overhead and management fees, are already several times as high as Musk’s cost: as per PDF-page 15 of the cost overrun breakdown, unit costs for viaducts range from $50 million to $80 million per mile. Overheads and contingencies convert per-mile cost almost perfectly to per-km costs. And yet Musk thinks he can build more than 500 km of viaduct for $2.5 billion, as per PDF-page 28 of his proposal: a tenth the unit cost. The unrealistically low tunnel unit cost is at least excused on PDF-page 31 on the grounds that the tunnel diameter is low (this can also be done with trains if they’re as narrow as Hyperloop, whose capsule seating is 2-abreast rather than 4- or 5-abreast as on HSR; see below on capacity). The low viaduct unit cost is not.

This alone suggests that the real cost of constructing civil infrastructure for Hyperloop is ten times as high as advertised, to say nothing of the Bay crossing. So it’s the same cost as standard HSR. It’s supposedly faster, but since it doesn’t go all the way to Downtown Los Angeles it doesn’t actually provide faster door-to-door trip times.

Nor is the system more comfortable for the passenger. Levitating systems can get away with higher cant than conventional rail because they sway less: Transrapid’s lateral acceleration in the horizontal plane is about 3.6 m/s^2 in Shanghai, and the company claims 4.37 m/s^2 is possible. On standard-gauge rail, the conversion rate is approximately 150 mm of total equivalent cant per 1 m/s^2. HSR cant tops at 180-200 mm, and cant deficiency tops at 180 mm for Talgos and 270-300 mm for medium-speed Pendolinos, so about 2.5 m/s^2 at high speed; this was shown safe by simulation in Martin Lindahl’s thesis, which is also a good source for track construction standards.

But Hyperloop goes one step further and proposes a lateral acceleration of 4.9 m/s^2: 0.5 g. This is after canting, according to the standards proposed:

The Hyperloop will be capable of traveling between Los Angeles and San Francisco in approximately 35 minutes. This requirement tends to size other portions of the system. Given the performance specification of the Hyperloop, a route has been devised to satisfy this design requirement. The Hyperloop route should be based on several considerations, including:

1. Maintaining the tube as closely as possible to existing rights of way (e.g., following the I-5).
2. Limiting the maximum capsule speed to 760 mph (1,220 kph) for aerodynamic considerations.
3. Limiting accelerations on the passengers to 0.5g.
4. Optimizing locations of the linear motor tube sections driving the capsules.
5. Local geographical constraints, including location of urban areas, mountain ranges, reservoirs, national parks, roads, railroads, airports, etc. The route must respect existing structures.

For aerodynamic efficiency, the velocity of a capsule in the Hyperloop is
typically:

• 300 mph (480 kph) where local geography necessitates a tube bend radii < 1.0 mile (1.6 km)
• 760 mph (1,220 kph) where local geography allows a tube bend > 3.0 miles (4.8 km) or where local geography permits a straight tube.

These bend radii have been calculated so that the passenger does not experience inertial accelerations that exceed 0.5 g. This is deemed the maximum inertial acceleration that can be comfortably sustained by humans for short periods. To further reduce the inertial acceleration experienced by passengers, the capsule and/or tube will incorporate a mechanism that will allow a degree of ‘banking’.

0.5 g, or 4.9 m/s^2, is extreme. Non-tilting trains do not accelerate laterally at more than 1.2 m/s^2 in the plane of the track (i.e. after accounting for cant), and at high speed they have lower lateral acceleration, about 0.67 m/s^2 with limiting cases of about 0.8 for some tilting trains relative to the plane of the train floor. For example, the Tokaido Shinkansen has 200 mm of cant and maximum speed of 255 km/h on non-tilting trains on 2,500-meter curves, for 100 mm of cant deficiency, or 0.67 m/s^2.

The proposed relationship between curve radius and speed in the Hyperloop standards is for a lateral acceleration much greater than 4.9 m/s^2 in the horizontal plane: 480 km/h at 1,600 meters is 11.1 m/s^2. This only drops to 5 m/s^2 after perfectly canting the track, converting the downward 9.8 m/s^2 gravity and the sideways acceleration into a single 14.8 m/s^2 acceleration vector downward in the plane of the capsule floor, or 5 m/s^2 more than passengers are used to. This is worse than sideways acceleration: track standards for vertical acceleration are tighter than for horizontal acceleration, about 0.5-0.67 m/s^2, one tenth to one seventh what Musk wants to subject his passengers to. It’s not transportation; it’s a barf ride.

Even 4.9 m/s^2 in the horizontal plane is too much. With perfect canting, it combines with gravity to accelerate passengers downward by 11 m/s^2, 1.2 m/s^2 more than the usual, twice as high as the usual standards. Motion sickness is still to be fully expected in such a case. Transrapid’s 4.37 m/s^2, which adds 0.93 m/s^2 in the vertical component with perfect canting, is the limit of what’s possible.

Speaking of vertical acceleration, this gets no comment at all in the Hyperloop proposal. At 1,220 km/h, it is very hard to climb grades, which would require very tall viaducts and deep tunnels under mountains. Climbing grades is easy, but vertical acceleration is such that the vertical curve radius has to be very large. A lateral acceleration of 0.67 m/s^2 would impose a minimum vertical curve radius of 170 km, versus 15 km at 360 km/h HSR speed. Changing the grade from flat to 2% would take 3.4 km, and changing back would take the same, so for climbing small hills, the effective average grade is very low (it takes 6.8 km to climb 68 meters).

Nor does jerk get any treatment. Reversing a curve takes several seconds at the cant and cant deficiency of conventional HSR (about 3 seconds by Swedish standards, more by German ones); reversing a curve with the extreme canting levels of Hyperloop would take much longer. Maintaining comfort at high total equivalent cant requires tight control of the third derivative as well as the second one; see a tilting train thesis for references.

The barf ride that is as expensive as California HSR and takes as long door-to-door is also very low-capacity. The capsules are inexplicably very short, with 28 passengers per capsule. The proposed headway is 30 seconds, for 3,360 passengers per direction per hour. A freeway lane can do better: about 2,000 vehicles, with an average intercity car occupancy of 2. HSR can do 12,000 passengers per direction per hour: 12 trains per hour is possible, and each train can easily fit 1,000 people (the Tokaido Shinkansen tops at 14 tph and 1,323 passengers per train).

But even 30 seconds appears well beyond the limit of emergency braking. It’s common in gadgetbahn to propose extremely tight headways, presuming computerized control allowing vehicles to behave as if they’re connected by a rod. Personal rapid transit proponents argue the same. In reality, such systems have been a subject of research for train control for quite a while now, with no positive results so far. Safety today still means safe stopping distances. If vehicles brake at a constant rate, the safe headway is half the total deceleration time; if a vehicle brakes from 1,220 km/h to zero in 60 seconds, the average acceleration is more than 5 m/s^2, twice the current regulatory safety limit for passengers with seat belts.

Most of this could be chalked to the feeling of some entrepreneurs that they must reinvent everything. The indifference to civil engineering costs, passenger comfort issues, and signal safety could all be chalked to this. So could the FUD about earthquake safety of HSR on PDF-page 5.

However, one thing could not: the chart on PDF-page 9 showing that only the Hyperloop is energy-efficient. The chart has a train consuming nearly 900 megajoules per person for an LA-San Francisco trip, about as much as a car or a plane; this is about 1,300 kJ per passenger-km. This may be true of Amtrak’s diesel locomotives; but energy consumption for HSR in Spain is on average 73 Watt-hour (263 kJ) per passenger-km (see PDF-page 17 on a UIC paper on the subject of HSR carbon emissions), one fifth as much as Tesla claims. Tesla either engages in fraud or is channeling dodgy research about the electricity consumption of high-speed trains.

Indeed, a train with a thousand seats, 20 MW of power drawn, 60% seat occupancy, and a speed of 360 km/h can only ever expend 333 kJ per passenger-km while accelerating, and much less while cruising (acceleration at lower speed requires more energy per unit of distance, but cruising at lower speed expends only a fraction of the energy of full-power acceleration). Tesla’s train energy consumption numbers do not pass a sanity check, which suggests either reckless disregard for the research or fraud. I wouldn’t put either past Musk: the lack of references is consistent with the former, and the fact that Musk’s current primary endeavor is a car company is consistent with the latter.

There is no redeeming feature of Hyperloop. Small things can possibly be fixed; the cost problems, the locations of the stations, and the passenger comfort issues given cost constraints can’t. Industry insiders with ties to other speculative proposals meant to replace conventional rail, such as maglev, are in fact skeptical of Hyperloop’s promises of perfect safety.

It’s possible to discover something new, but people who do almost always realize the context of the discovery. If Musk really found a way to build viaducts for $5 million per kilometer, this is a huge thing for civil engineering in general and he should announce this in the most general context of urban transportation, rather than the niche of intercity transportation. If Musk has experiments showing that it’s possible to have sharper turns or faster deceleration than claimed by Transrapid, then he’s made a major discovery in aviation and should announce it as such. That he thinks it just applies to his project suggests he doesn’t really have any real improvement.

In math, one common sanity check on a result is, “does it prove too much?” If my ten-page paper proves a result that implies a famous open problem, then either my paper is wrong or I’ve proved the famous open problem, and it’s up to me to take extra care to make sure I did not miss anything. Most people in this situation do this extra step and then realize that they were subtly wrong. If a famous question could be solved in ten pages, it probably wouldn’t still be open. The same is even true in undergrad-level proof classes: if your homework answer proves things that are too strong, you’ve almost certainly made a mistake.

Musk’s real sin is not the elementary mistakes; it’s this lack of context. The lack of references comes from the same place, and so does the utter indifference to the unrealistically low costs. This turns it from a wrong idea that still has interesting contributions to make to a hackneyed proposal that should be dismissed and forgotten as soon as possible.

I write this not to help bury Musk; I’m not nearly famous enough to even hit a nail in his coffin. I write this to point out that, in the US, people will treat any crank seriously if he has enough money or enough prowess in another field. A sufficiently rich person is surrounded by sycophants and stenographers who won’t check his numbers against anything.

There are two stories here. In the less interesting one, Musk is a modern-day streetcar conspiracy mogul: he has a car company, he hopes to make money off of it in the future and uses non-generally accepted accounting to claim he already does, and he constantly trash-talks high-speed rail, which competes with his product. Since he’s not proposing to build Hyperloop soon, it could be viewed as clever distraction or FUD.

The more interesting possibility, which I am inclined toward, is that this is not fraud, or not primarily fraud. Musk is the sort of person who thinks he can wend his way from starting online companies to building cars and selling them without dealerships. I have not seen a single defense of the technical details of the proposal except for one Facebook comment that claims, doubly erroneously, that the high lateral acceleration is no problem because the tubes can be canted. Everyone, including the Facebook comment, instead gushes about Musk personally. The thinking is that he’s rich, so he must always have something interesting to say; he can’t be a huckster when venturing outside his field. It would be unthinkable to treat people as professionals in their own fields, who take years to make a successful sideways move and who need to be extremely careful not to make elementary mistakes. The superheros of American media coverage would instantly collapse, relegated to a specialized role while mere mortals take over most functions.

This culture of superstars is a major obstacle frustrating any attempt to improve existing technology. It more or less works for commercial websites, where the startup capital requirements are low, profits per employee are vast, and employee turnover is such that corporate culture is impossible. People get extremely rich for doing something first, even if in their absence their competitors would’ve done the same six months later. Valve, a video game company that recognizes this, oriented its entire structure around having no formal management at all, but for the most part what this leads to is extremely rich people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg who get treated like superstars and think they can do anything.

In infrastructure, this is not workable. Trains are 19th-century technology, as are cars and buses. Planes are from the 20th century. Companies can get extremely successful improving the technology somehow, but this works differently from the kind of entrepreneurship that’s successful in the software and internet sectors. The most important airline invention since the jet engine is either the widebody (i.e. more capacity) or the suite of features that make for low-cost flights, such as quick turnarounds. What Southwest and its ultra low-cost successors have done is precious: they’ve figured how to trim every airline expense, from better crew utilization to incentives for lower-transaction cost booking methods. This requires perfect knowledge of preexisting practices and still takes decades to do. The growth rate of Microsoft, Google, and Facebook is not possible in such an environment, and so the individual superstar matters far less than a positive corporate culture that can transmit itself over multiple generations of managers.

There is plenty of room for improvement in HSR technology, then, but it’s of a different kind. It involves adapting techniques used by low-cost airlines to reduce costs, as SNCF is doing right now with its new low-cost TGV product. It perhaps involves controlling construction costs more tightly, though $5 million per km for viaducts seems like an impossible fantasy. But it has to come from within the business, or from someone who intimately understands the business.

And with the kind of success that US media harps on, this is almost impossible to do domestically. Someone as smart as Musk, or any of many other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, could find a detailed breakdown of the operating and construction costs of civil infrastructure, and figure out ways of reducing them, Megabus- or Southwest-style. That’s what I would do if I had the unlimited resources Musk has: I’d obtain unit costs at far greater detail than “X meters of tunnel cost $Y” and compare what New York is doing wrong that Madrid is doing right. But I don’t have the resources – in money, in ability to manage people, in time. And the people who do are constantly told that they don’t need to do that, that they’re smart enough they can reinvent everything and that the world will bow to their greatness.

Update: people all over the Internet, including in comments below, defend the low cost projections on the grounds that the system is lighter and thinner than your average train. The proposal itself also defends the low tunneling costs on those same grounds. To see to what extent Musk takes his own idea seriously, compare the two proposals: the first for a passenger-only tube, and the second for a larger tube capable of carrying both passengers and vehicles. On PDF-pp. 25-26, the proposal states that the passenger-only tube would have an internal diameter of 2.23 meters and the passenger-plus-vehicle tube would have an internal diameter of 3.3 meters, 47% more. Despite that, the tunneling costs on PDF-p. 28 are $600 and $700 million, a difference of just 17%.

The same is true of the “but the Hyperloop capsule is lighter than a train” argument for lower pylon construction costs. Together with the differences in tube thickness posited on PDF-p. 27, 20-23 mm versus 23-25, there is 60% more tube lining in the passenger-plus-vehicle version, but the tube and pylons are projected to cost just 24% more. In this larger version, the twin tube has 0.025*3.3*pi*2 = 0.5 cubic meters of steel per meter of length, weighing about 4 tons. This ranges from a bit less than twice to a bit more than twice the weight of a train. To say nothing of the pylons’ need to support their own considerable weight, which is larger than for HSR due to the need for taller viaducts coming from the constrained ability to change grade. They are far more obtrusive than trees and telephone poles, contra the claims of minimal obtrusiveness and disruption.

Comments on this thread are closed as of 8/17. Thank you. 

 

Hi Captain Awkward,

My mother and my boyfriend HATE each other. I know you’ve heard this all before, and until now I’ve learned to just deal with it. Until now.

My mother is my supporter, I am currently a 19 year old undergraduate, about half way done my B.A. My mother has supported me my whole life, she always babied me. I didn’t have to work, pay any bills, as long as I was in school and getting good grades all was okay. Then this summer my long distance boyfriend from France, who I’ve been dating for 1 year and a half decided to come visit for a few months in our house. This is where they started hating each other. This won’t change no matter what, she even kicked him out of our house just last week, because they argue about stupid pointless things. Even though it has only been a year and a half, I love my boyfriend more than anything in the world. I know I want my future to be with him, and its important to me that I start my future with him.

My mother began agreeing that she would support me as long as I am in school, but recently she’s changed her mind. Now, either I go live with my boyfriend in France for 1 year (firstly, I don’t speak french so University and working is not possible), and then support myself in University in my homecountry Canada, or I am unable to live with my boyfriend for another 3 years or so. My mother has made it clear that whether were in the same city or not, if she’s supporting me, I am not allowed to live with him, and even if I attend school and live with him, her support for everything is gone. I need your help, because my mom is not someone you can sit with and have a reasonable calm conversation. She is illogical, and for her, as long as she’s paying, she doesn’t care what I have to say unless I’m doing exactly what she says.

Here’s my issue. Do I stay in school and stay in long distance/ not live with my boyfriend and basically say whatever to my relationship? I don’t want to do this because he makes me so happy, and I want to be able to live with him, we’ve been trying for this for a year to transfer schools to be together. Or do I go to Paris and then go back to school in Canada and depend significantly on him, and loans from the government? Should I leave school all together, and work until I am stable and can pay for myself? This option is also hard for me, I don’t know if I could do it. I’ve never supported myself and I know absolutely nothing about it, how would I make ends meet with no savings, no money at all?

Cautious Canadian

So, basically, “solve my entire life, my two most important relationships, and my economic future in a blog post, please?”

I cannot promise to do any of that, but maybe I can help you form a basis for making a good decision.

I don’t know your mom or your boyfriend or what these arguments were about or who was starting them. It is possible that your mom is being unreasonably controlling and trying to sabotage your relationship with a really good man, and that this is a story about how you fight for your autonomy & your right to choose who you love. It is also possible that your mom has a little bit of age, experience, & distance from the situation and sees something about him that you do not. Maybe your boyfriend is an argumentative tool who picks a lot of fights. Maybe she thinks he doesn’t treat you well or that you will be unhappy. Maybe this is a story about a concerned parent wanting you to complete your education and figure out who you are and what you want outside of the context of some guy, even if he is a good guy.  Maybe this is “I love you, but I do not think you are ready.”

Using purse strings to control & compel the personal life of an adult someone who is not you is:

a) Doomed. Even if the controlled person outwardly conforms to the rules you lay down, your relationship with them is destroyed forever and they will never trust you again. This is what your mom is risking by making this ultimatum.

b) A point in favor of narrative #1.

I can relate. When I was 19-20, I was involved with a guy I’d been with about a year. My second year of college we were long-distance, with me in DC and him in New York. My mom did not really like him and definitely did not want me taking the bus up to New York to see him. It was fine if he visited, but she did not want me to be running around New York when I was supposed to be studying (quite expensively & at considerable financial sacrifice to her) in D.C. I visited him anyway, she found out, and she threatened to pull financial support. Into this story-stew, shake a giant shaker of slut-shaming, teen pregnancy fears, and Catholic guilt & judgment and stir it up reaaaaaaaaaal good.

Guess what.

1) I think she was wrong to use money & education as a bargaining tool to control my sexuality & romantic life and it damaged our relationship severely.

2) That guy was an awful boyfriend and she was completely right in her assessment of his character & whether he was worth my time.

I don’t think my mom reads this blog, but just in case:

YOU WERE RIGHT ABOUT GREG

HE TURNED INTO A CLINGY STALKER

HE WAS TERRIBLE IN BED

THE MEMORY OF HIM MAKES ME CRINGE

MY GRADES & COLLEGE EXPERIENCE WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER IF I HADN’T GONE TO NEW YORK SO MUCH

Letter Writer, you are not me, your mom is not my mom, your dude is not that dude, but that’s been on my chest for a while and if we solve nothing else in this post, I appreciate the opportunity to say Happy Mother’s Day, 1993-present. To counterbalance, a family member met her current husband when she had just started college and “her whole life was ahead of her” and a lot of voices were telling her not to settle down just yet. She took the lumps & the judgment, did what she thought was right, and in return got the love of her life.

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My mom’s mistake was to try to control when she could not persuade. And that is one of your mom’s mistakes here, too. (There are others. We’ll get to them). And this relationship & these questions are things that you might want to sort out, at length, with a mentor or counselor.

However badly designed, your mom has put some choices in front of you and issued you a test. That test is called, “Okay, How Badly Do You Want This Dude?”

It is but one essay question on a larger test that you were always going to have to take eventually. The bigger test is called “What Do You Want Of This One Life That You Get?”

With the caveat that I think your mom is wrong to try to control you in this way, I want to try to look at this test as a thing made up of things that you would have to figure out for yourself anyway.

• Where do I want to live?
• What do I want to do?
• Is this guy a person I can make a happy life with?
• How will I support myself?

Here is your terrifying/comforting thought for the day:

Even if we could answer all these questions “correctly” right now, today–

Even if we could make a pretty good guess at an optimum path that will make you the most happy in the long run–

The only way to really know is to choose something and see how it works out.

Terrifying: Mistakes carry real costs. Opportunity costs, sunk costs, relationships strained to a breaking point, and time that you will never get back. You got exactly what you wanted and then found out you wanted the wrong things.

Terrifying: Things are always in flux and many things are out of your hands. You can prepare very hard and make yourself a good candidate for a certain career….and still not get a job. You can swim in a lake and a bacteria amoeba can swim up your nose and eat your brain from within. People get sick, die, leave you. Tornadoes. People who drive while texting. Men in expensive suits behind expensive doors making expensive decisions. A butterfly flaps its wings on the other side of the world and the envelope with your resume in it accidentally falls behind the file cabinet.

Comforting: These questions are asked and answered over and over again in the course of your life. The “right” answers will change because you will have changed.
Plenty of people have chosen the wrong partner, the wrong college major, the wrong place to live, the wrong roommates, the wrong paint color, the wrong career, the wrong pants for those shoes, etc. and lived to tell the tale and do better.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.  From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.  One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.  I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.  I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.  ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Chapter 7

Sylvia was eating from a pretty privileged fig tree. Certainly not everyone has the same crisis of “All the choices are awesome, how do I pick just one?” But your choices are not horrible, either. Keep going to school with full financial support of your mom and no need to take out student loans, on the condition that you do not share an address with this guy vs. Take a year off from school, live in Paris, make sure that this guy is really who you want to be with, at the cost of supporting yourself much sooner than you planned.

Here is a helpful process for me when making a big decision, developed from one part therapy, one part storytelling, and, weirdly, about four parts management consulting.

1. If I choose this, and everything goes really well and works out exactly how I want it to, what does that look like? What is the fantasy/best case scenario/perfect world version of this? Does that seem like a good goal to have in the first place?

2. If I choose this, and everything does not go well, what does the worst case scenario look like? What do I stand to lose? How likely is it to happen?

3. If the worst case scenario happened, what would I do?  DO NOT SKIP STEP #3. STEP #3 IS WHERE POWER, RESILIENCE, CONFIDENCE LIVES.

4. What are the questions I still need to ask myself? What research do I need to do? Is there some way I can expand my information base to anticipate potential problems and set myself up better to succeed? Are the logistical issues (money, space, time, etc.) surmountable?

5. What is the real obstacle here – The risk, the cost, the thing I am not seeing? Where is my blind spot?

6. What would Old-Me tell me to do? On my deathbed, what will I regret NOT having done? This is the call to adventure

If we were to take your dilemma briefly through that process, here’s what it might look like. These are not meant to be comprehensive or even likely. This is just storytelling. What *could* happen?

Team France

The Dream: You move to France with your boyfriend. You find some kind of au pair or tutoring gig, your housing & visa situation works out, you spend the time that you would have spent on your schoolwork studying French and becoming fluent in it. Taking some time off from school gives you some more clarity and focus about what you do want to study if & when you go back. Gaining independence and distance from your mom helps you gain breathing space and confidence in your own abilities. You figure out how to apply for grants and loans and some way of supporting yourself and/or continuing your studies, leading to [vague future happiness]. You and your boyfriend are incredibly happy together, and you feel confident that this is the person for you. Or, maybe things don’t work out between you, but you are confident that you tried and know more about what you want from life & love.

The Nightmare: You burn your bridges with your mom, and then…..You hate France. You hate this guy. You hate croissants. You need to break up with him and come home and admit that you made a mistake, but your mom enacts your worst “I told you so” nightmare. Now you have no dude and no promise of college and no mom’s house to go to. So you stick it out in a bad relationship. Or you leave him and find yourself stranded. In France. Student loans and debt force you to stay in bad situations, bad jobs and curtail your freedom.

I’m not going to go through all of the questions – that’s between you and your journal and actual discussions with your boyfriend and your mom – but I do want to say two things:

-Being 19, not quite sure what you want to do with your life, and having no parental support or safety net describes A LOT of people’s circumstances. Couch surfing, roommates, a string of part-time jobs, thrift stores, furniture you find in alleys, rice & beans, work-study jobs, student loans, military service, scholarships, night school etc. - If you had to do it, you could do it.

-The “what am I going to do with my life?” question is not going away whatever you decide.

Team Debt-Free Degree

The Dream: You finish your degree. You figure out what you want to do when you grow up, or at least what you want to do next, or, at least a thing you can do for money while you figure the rest of it out. Because you have parental support and no student loans, you are able to take on many internships, volunteer opportunities, and interesting projects that you might not otherwise have had. You are also able to throw yourself into student activities and non-study related passions and friendships. You keep seeing your boyfriend- long distance when you can, visiting when you can. Maybe he manages to transfer to your school. Eventually, you find a way to be in the same place at the same time and start your lives together, and you feel confident about the health of something that can survive so much time and distance. Or, you break up, which is sad, but you meet someone else at the student newspaper or at your theater group and that person is also great. You leave college debt-free, having gotten the most you can out of your education and having tried out many interests.

The Bad Dream: You feel constantly torn between your boyfriend and your college life. You spend all your time Skyping and writing emails and fantasizing about the future at the expense of the now. You miss out on friendships, opportunities, and experiences because you are tied to the future and the distant. You wonder constantly if you are doing the right thing and should have made a different choice. Your relationship with your mom is full of controlling behavior and resentment. The conflict with your mom and distance from your boyfriend drag you down and affect your mental health, and you spend three years of your life feeling resentful, depressed, and torn.

Again, not going through all the questions here, but DO NOT SKIP STEP #3. Step #3 is where you have power & agency, always, no matter what happens. There is no shortcut for Step #3, and no one can do it for you – even if we listed 10-,000 helpful & exciting suggestions, Step #3 is not complete until YOU can articulate what YOU would do if things went wrong.

I am going to cheat and tell you about Step 5 (What is the real question or obstacle here?), as I see it reflected in your letter.

I do not think that you feel particularly invested in or confident in your studies and in your ability to take care of yourself away from your mom’s influence and protection. You cannot quite envision the future where you know how to take care of yourself. “I’ve never supported myself and I know absolutely nothing about it, how would I make ends meet with no savings, no money at all?”

Whether or not you stay or go, I think that is the question you must work on. You don’t have to solve it immediately – there is no shame in not being ready to leave the nest and in needing some time and help to figure this out, and college is a good time and place to do that. You are right exactly where you should be, so don’t use that as a stick to beat yourself up with.

I said earlier that being controlling isn’t the only mistake your mom potentially made here, and that we’d circle back. So here’s my (rhetorical!) question: How the hell did your mom raise a 19-year old with no confidence in her own abilities to take care of herself and no idea how jobs and money actually work?

Because one way I used to win arguments with my mom when she was judgmental or worried-in-a-way-that-basically-adds-up-to-judmental about my choices is, “Well, you either raised me to be able to handle this or you didn’t. I guess we’ll find out.” (She did).

It’s awesome to take care of your kids and provide for them and give them a safety net, but controlling parents can foster dependency pretty hard. If that’s what is going on here, it’s another argument for sorting this out with a counselor. However the problem originated, “but that’s how I was raised by my controlling mother” does not age well as a thing you say out loud to people who are not your therapist.

I’m not under the illusion that capitalism = freedom, or that having good skills and education automatically leads to a paying job, or that the ability to get and hold a job is a statement on a person’s value. We know too much to believe in that anymore, and you’re not stupid or naive to be anxious about this aspect of planning the future. But the ability to earn a living (or at least envision a future where you know how!) is a kind of freedom. It’s the freedom to say “Mom, I am sorry you feel that way, but this is the right choice for me.” It’s freedom from finding yourself in a foreign country dependent on some dude you even aren’t sure you like anymore.

Whatever you decide about France vs. school this year, work on building autonomy and confidence. Get a part-time job – ANY job – and earn a little money with your own sweat. Learn some concrete, practical skills that someone might pay you for at some point down the road. Those skills don’t have to be tied to any college major or degree. Fully half of my professional skill-set comes from managing and being a part of performing arts groups. Seek out counseling & advising through your school, if available.

Finally, if I do all the work of putting my choices through a detailed analysis, and I still don’t feel like I can decide, I add a 7th step. When that fails, I go to an 8th step. I know, they conflict directly with each other. Life is complicated.

7. In the absence of a clear right choice or best choice, which choice preserves the most options for me down the road?

8. I’d generally rather regret a mistake than stay stuck and afraid forever.

I wish you well, Letter Writer. This is an exciting journey that you are on, and these are big, hard questions that you are tackling in a brave and honest way.

Alan Durning has an outstanding post over at Sightline looking at the policy and expectations around residential curbside parking, including this gem:

Urban planners and lawyers may think of on-street parking as public property: a shared, public resource to be managed for the common good. Most home owners--and most voters--think of curb spaces as their own, their domain, their property.