I will hand you this; there seem to be legitimate rules for hyping Musk. So far I haven’t managed to nail down what those are exactly, but they’re there, and at least consistent.
Point out that TSLA is probably insanely overvalued at a decade of 40% growth rates, and you get rotten tomatoes flung at you.
However, if you then turn around and suggest that Musk is going to propose creating a subterranean cavern system that straight bores to major US cities, you have also crossed a line and are called a psychopath (perhaps rightly).
Obviously, suggesting that the billionaire spaceship maker would ever propose burying his human fed rail gun, air hockey tubing several thousand feet to a few miles beneath the surface was just silly…
As it is, I am just fairly impressed as to how far one Mr. or Mrs. Ottnott went to actually demonstrate that the math behind my last post (creative though it was) was inconsistent with anything that could be actually constructed. It takes a certain patience to sit down and calculate distances using radian methods.
Tunneling across California would cost upwards of $150-200 Billion.
I did catch one problem with the numbers, but this was really not part of my argument to begin with. The distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles is really just under 400 miles on a map.
The radial distance between the two, using a Great Circle and the longitudes and latitudes of the respective cities and a circumference of 24,900 miles (not wholly accurate since the Earth is lumpy and not a perfect sphere), is about 350 miles. Whereas the rough surface distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco according to map quest can be found at about 380 to 390 miles due to topography.
A tunnel (any tunnel) would shave about 8-10% off the distance of the trip, or theoretical increase the “speed” of a like moving object inside the tunnel by about that much. So a 600 mph object would seem to do 645-650 mph inside of the tunnel.
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Gentlemen taking to the parlour to debate transportation concepts…awesome. I enjoyed the read.
Haha, awesome.
I am watching Tron Legacy – it, too, is based on a true story.
Tunneling in earthquake California? Just the thought of it is, like you said, plain silly…
“Point out that TSLA is probably insanely overvalued at a decade of 40% growth rates, and you get rotten tomatoes flung at you.”
If you’d shown that TSLA was overvalued at decades of 40% REVENUE growth rates, I’d have no complaint. They have a respectable revenue base, and I believe that they will need significant product/technology advances to increase revenue by more than a single-digit multiple of the base.
Using EPS growth rates was the problem, for reasons that I don’t need to rehash.
“Whereas the rough surface distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco according to map quest can be found at about 380 to 390 miles due to topography.
A tunnel (any tunnel) would shave about 8-10% off the distance of the trip, or theoretical increase the “speed” of a like moving object inside the tunnel by about that much.”
Well done.
You could add that a surface route is longer not only because it has to follow terrain, but also because it avoids some terrain and because it requires a continuous right of way together.
Tunnels are prone to infestations of trolls and orcs, though.
I’m glad we are at least in agreement on something, Ottnott. Haha