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> Apart from somewhat worse fuel efficiency It’s better now by roughly a factor of two per passenger mile. The nature of such large improvements is that it’s
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
> Apart from somewhat worse fuel efficiency
It’s better now by roughly a factor of two per passenger mile.
The nature of such large improvements is that it’s extremely hard to get such an improvement again!
- rayiner 2mo ago> It’s better now by roughly a factor of two per passenger mile. Which is just not that big of a deal for 50+ years of technological development. It doesn't allow you to do anything you couldn't do before.
- robotresearcher 2mo agoIt allows people with half the available money to do what others could do before. That's more than twice as many people. It allows you to move freight really fast at half the cost. That's a lot of things that can move around the world 100X faster than they could on the next-fastest available mode: ships and trains.
- chongli 2mo agoIt allows you to move freight really fast at half the cost That's leaving out fuel prices. The planes may use half the fuel, but aviation fuel has increased 7x in price since 1990. I couldn't find prices for 1969, but if you take the price of crude since then you're looking at a CPI-adjusted increase close to 100x.
- robotresearcher 2mo agoGreat point. Even more value to halving the fuel cost, then, but fewer products able to take advantage of it. Of course, inflation should be canceled out before evaluating the overall benefit. If you can self the goods for 7X then the fuel savings is back to 2X.