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Elon Musk Can't Fix Your Commute | NYT Opinion

NYT, 14 Oct 2022
Say what you will about Elon Musk, but the man has ideas. Loads of them.

He has ideas about how to improve Twitter and colonize Mars. He has ideas about space tourism and the future of artificial intelligence. He has ideas about how to end the war in Ukraine and save children trapped in underground caves.

But in the video above, Adam Kovacs, who runs the YouTube channel Adam Something, suggests that unrelenting bravado and tremendous wealth don’t necessarily make bad ideas good.

Mr. Kovacs, who has developed a large following for his critiques of flawed urban planning and design, takes a close look at Mr. Musk’s proposals to revolutionize mass transit: the Hyperloop and the Boring Loop.

Both ideas have generated much excitement and even investment, but as Mr. Kovacs explains, they are unnecessarily complicated and not designed for real people. There’s even a word for exciting but catastrophically flawed concepts like this: “gadgetbahn.”

Mr. Musk, he says, “would rather pump millions of dollars into some made-up tech fantasy than doing something actually useful for us mortals.”

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