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Ask HN: Why is Elon Musk focused on better transportation in the internet age?

• McLaren_Ferrari 5y ago
  Because it's easier to pump a stock and commit securities fraud using something considered universally cool such as a sports car as the hook/cover , as opposed to something ethereal and invisible such as a software program like Teams or Zoom.
• yuppie_scum 5y ago
  It’s important to see the world through your own eyes and not thru the twisted lens of the internet. Travel is the best education you can get.
• gilbertmpanga12 5y ago
  Traffic congestion costs losses of billions of dollars each year. No single app can fix that & mind of not everyone sits behind a computer every day. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_congestion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_congestion
• Finnucane 5y ago
  Clearly Musk's main goal in everything he does is to put as much distance between himself and everyone else as possible. But slightly more seriously, not everyone can or wants to do everything through the internet. Sure, some white-collar jobs will be less location dependent, but that's hardly everyone. Some people will still want to see other people, and places. Stuff will still need to get from one place to another.
• dave4420 5y ago
  > The internet should make your location unimportant Musk is paying attention to the world as it is, where location is still important. For example, London and San Francisco are still terribly expensive; if location was unimportant they would not be more expensive than other cities or towns.
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    That's the conventional wisdom. The reality has largely been precisely the opposite: as transportation capabilities have increased, location matters more, and megacities rise in both absolute size and porportionate importance. In a world in which it is difficult to transport physical goods more than a few miles, most production, consumption, and commerce is local. Where centres of production do emerge, it is precisely the insubstantiality of their output that leads to their concentration. Political, commercial, and educational centres were the first to emerge. With industrialisation, we've seen centres of manufacturing production (usually dictated by transportation or availability of inputs), of banking, publishing, entertainment, cinema, and audio. "Washington, DC", "Wall Street", "Hollywood", "Silicon Valley", "Milan" (fashion), and London (politics, banking, fashion, publishing, art, ...) are all topnyms for products which are themselves largely ephemeral, but whose production becomes highly localised. Why? becomes a very interesting question. My sense is that it's analogue to Amdahl's law. In computing the limit of parallelisable processing is set by the nonparallisable component of a task. If half of operations cannot be parallelised, then the maximum possible speedup is 50%. If it's a quarter, the maximum speed-up is four times, if 10%, 10 times, etc. (The maximum is obtained only when there is infinite parallelisation, it represents a limit.) For human activities, say, software production, the end result is something that can move around the world via digital communications largely seamlessly. But production requires computers, servers, training, support personnel, and the like. Yes, some of that can be distributed (as work-from-home has illustrated), but there remains some element of centralisation required. For the start-up community, that's often face-time with Sand Hill Road VC --- an artificial constraint, but a highly persistent one. In banking, at least with high-speed trading, microseconds count. That's about 300 metres. The clock-tick time of an exchange literally defines the trading radius about it. (See the classic "500 mile email" story.) It's highly counterintuitive, but friction decreases the significance of locations. Improved transportation increases it.
• axg11 5y ago
  I think you have it half backwards. Existing transportation options and infrastructure are bad. That has meant that travel cost in time and money is too high when compared to the post-pandemic benefit we get from co-working. The internet and remote work is the best solution we currently have. However, in an ideal world we would all travel to work with each other, _if_ time and monetary costs of travel were low enough.
• shams93 5y ago
  There's a lot of government money involved with things like rockets and electric vehicles. He's also going after boomer aged investors who could never imagine not needing a car or say sending only drones to explore space instead of blowing trillions on manned space missions of dubious scientific merit.