See the ACLU guidance referenced in a previous comment. There's no right to counsel during routine admission. The right only arises when arrested or being investigated for a crime.
But you can (and should) ask if you're being detained on suspicion of a specific (criminal) offense, or not (e.g. officer wants to doublecheck your story, or background, or thinks there are irregularities), or (esp. for non-citizen) refusing to consent to unlocking your devices.
The answer to the above should give you some idea what's likely to happen, and what CBP has flagged you for, if anything.
“That’s not travel, that’s like a thing you might hope to do once in a lifetime,” says Scholl, before adding, “Versus where we want to get, which is anywhere in the world in four hours for 100 bucks.”[1]
Anywhere in the world in four hours for $100 USD really caught people's imagination and attention. I'm puzzled by how they will achieve this.
Huh. The longest flights are around 10,000 miles. They usually cost over $1000. Fuel apparently accounts for about 25% of ticket price on long haul, so $250 in fuel normally. To do that in 4 hours is to travel 2,500 mph. Naively, traveling twice the speed requires 8x the power, so going over 4x the usual 550mph should mean over 64x more fuel burn, or $16,000 in fuel alone. Maybe a bit less since drag doesn't grow quite as quickly above transonic, call it $10,000. But if a ticket's only $100, I guess they've figured out how to get gas for 0.25% of typical prices.
The air density decreases exponentially with the altitude, while the drag only increases quadratically with speed. It is entirely possible that there is an altitude, maybe 70km, where it is much more economical to fly (at supersonic speeds) than the current subsonic planes. Most likely the CEO of Boom ran the numbers, and the $100 ticket price is doable, at least if you exclude things like profit, capital depreciation, insurance, etc.
> something to market to investors and potential employees
Neither the investors nor the potential employees strike me as gullible. By the way, the $100 ticket price target was not for the first aircraft, see [1]:
> The four hour, $100 dream is Boom’s long-term aim, two or three generations of aircraft down the line.
I don't get the analogy. The Boom CEO explicitly stated that $100 tickets are not around the corner. Two or three generations down the line means four decades at a minimum, if we think one generation takes 20 years. Lots of things can happen in 4 decades, like: significant advances in ramjet engines, rotation detonation engines become mainstream, people get comfortable with windowless aircraft (so there's no need for drooping nose Concorde-style), airports could start being equipped with arresting wires, like aircraft carriers today, airplanes without the vertical tail fin become common place, stronger and lighter composites become available, and, who knows, maybe even some jets will start running on hydrogen rather than jet fuel (hydrogen having about 3 times more energy density per unit of mass). I have to admit the even with all these things, $100 per ticket to any place in the world still seems like a stretch, but I'm willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt.
>Naively, traveling twice the speed requires 8x the power, so going over 4x the usual 550mph should mean over 64x more fuel burn
You've forgotten to cancel the denominator. If you use the drag relation of speed to power, you're multiplying by time, but the time is reduced by the speed. It would be more straightforward to use the F ~ v^2 relation between speed and force. So going 4x as fast for the same distance would require 16x the fuel, while going 4x as fast for the same time would require 64x the fuel. But the latter would obviously never happen in practice as you'd circumnavigate the Earth.
Once you get out of the atmosphere, drag (and fuel consumption) is ~0. So theoretically possible, but I'm not sure if that's what he was talking about. Certainly Overture won't be capable of that.
Isn't that specifically one of the types of travel predicted to be made possible by reusable rockets capable of landing on the ground? From Florida to Japan in 45 minutes type of thing
Yes point to point travel was a market for Starship. I think they’ve mostly backed off that though, as Starlink offers an easier market opportunity and just as much revenue potential.
The supersonic plane would have advantages over the rocket approach though. Rockers require long, inconvenient transfers to offshore launch facilities. (But would have the selling point of a microgravity transit.)
Reaction Engines in the UK spent over 35 years working mostly on that concept
(though when they eventually went bust trying to scale up last year I think they were focused on reusable space launch business model which is ironically more realistic)
No, they were working on the latter (skylon) most of the time, though the new management that came in after their £60M investment quickly dropped SSTO in favour of more immediate RoI applications. The passenger plane was LAPCAT which was a paper study commissioned by the EU. They did some interesting real work too, such as designing and testing a hypersonic engine combustion chamber that could reduce NOx emissions, which would be a big problem in any ‘conventional’ (eg scramjet) hypersonic engine.
> Fair, I hadn't considered the intercontinental ballistic passenger missile approach.
The terminal deceleration on an ICBM trajectory would be lethal. Ballistic passenger transport at global distances has to be almost orbital so the entry is sufficiently shallow.
There actually is still significant lift. We define the edge of the atmosphere to be where the lift to drag ratio of a plane would be less than 1 below orbital velocity (ie if you were going fast enough to lift your weight with conventional wings you'd be in orbit), so you can't fly conventionally in space but lift might still be generating a force which is significant compared to your craft's weight.
Well the assumption was that there is no drag because the air density is so low. You can’t just say there’s no drag but still assume that you get lift. Your lift/drag ratio won’t go up infinitely just because you’re flying higher.
GP's assumption was travelling through space to avoid drag which doesn't necessarily imply generating lift in space.
My comment was not a support of that argument, but a clarification that simply being in space does not automatically mean no aerodynamic forces. I'm also not saying L/D increases, actually the opposite happens at higher speeds and altitudes.
But judging by "in four hours" I'm guessing he's imagining something somewhere in between those two extremes. High enough to substantially reduce drag, low enough that you don't need to approach orbital velocity to maintain altitude.
"Fast enough" is very nearly orbital speed, though. Suborbital range is very short on the lower end, and increases rapidly and nonlinearly later. E.g. if you can boost to 2km/s (~ Mach 7), this gives you, I kid you not, around 200km of ballistic range. It's either atmospheric flight or orbital flight, and there's nothing really useful in between.
New York to Sydney for $100 in 4 hours? My bullshit alarm is blaring. Unless they have a secret teleporter project they aren't telling people about. If you're burning dinosaurs to do that it is not happening, not unless oil becomes magically free and even then I think you would struggle to make ends meet.
That’s overstating it. I literally did this flight in Polaris yesterday (from NYC), and I’d say tickets from LA are more like $5-7k. There are lots of options from LA to Sydney next week in that range.
Maybe they were talking about the program where you report tax evasion and then once the missing money is collected you get up to 30% of it? That exists.
Sure. But during a casual chat maybe somebody mentioned that reporting tax fraud can earn you money, and then somebody else assumed that they were talking about IRS employees even though they were not.
Anti-tax people like Grover Norquist and Republicans who have made his pledge have long been concerned that if paying taxes were easy, then the American people might not despise taxes anymore. So making paying taxes painful is part of the plan.
"Not very, absolutely everyone hates doing their taxes and the whole shady process behind it all"
That's the Grover Norquist (and Republican) argument for not having IRS Direct File to begin with: if filing taxes becomes easy, people might not hate the IRS and hate taxes.
And it's really because they don't know any poor people.
Because if they did, they'd know that filing taxes for low income people with kids is a HUGE bonanza, and they'd work like hell to implement a system where all tax credits were applied to individual paychecks, not lump sums during tax season. It's the one time of the year when their pockets are flush with cash.
The US is headed on the path of autonomous vehicles as the solution. It's the perfect combination of things our society loves: 1) No new public investment. 2) Continuous, end-to-end air conditioning
I suspect the US is going to get a super bifurcated urbanist result across cities in the next 20 years. Places like NYC, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco (maybe not these exact cities but you get the gist) are going to move strong towards European style urban infrastructure. It seems to be one topic that really does mobilize voters, especially younger educated voters, in these cities. It will in turn attract a lot more of these kinds of people, accelerating the change.
The rest of the US is just going to double down on sprawl.
Those cities you mentioned already have European style urban infrastructure. In my opinion the big difference is that the drivers in the European cities seemed crazier than their US counterparts.
That’s interesting. I’m a born and raised American, but I lived in two different European countries (Oslo and Geneva) between 2014 and 2017. During that time I traveled all over Western Europe and the near east for fun and business, and besides 2020-21 I have vacationed in Europe once or twice per year when not living there. Old Soviet Europe drives pretty crazy, but other than that I have not encountered anywhere else in Europe with drivers as crazy as the US.
They have very different norms in Europe that Americans might confuse as crazy but are actually better habits IMO. E.g drivers in Florence and Rome followed few rules and basically drive by the “if it fits, it fits” manta. But they were always keenly aware of pedestrians and other drivers. They drive very light cars in streets where they can’t get above 15 mph. Even if they do get into more fender-benders, I’m not very concerned about a fiat hitting my car at 15mph. In short, their way of driving is safer and I feel much more comfortable around it.
Americans on the other hand seem to prefer deadly speeds in giant vehicles even in neighborhoods. My current neighborhood regularly sees F150s and King Ranches going 55+mph, on neighborhood streets. I saw a driver last year hit a dog they should have clearly seen and avoided because they were going about 45 mph and on their phone, they didn’t even slow down after they hit the dog. Americans regularly pretend pedestrians and obstacles don’t exist at all, and have way worse reaction times than what I saw living in Europe. Combined with the high speeds and heavy cars, driving is comfortable for the driver and terrifying for everyone else on and around the roads.
I also wouldn’t compare these American cities infrastructure to most European cities of the late 2010s. Excepting possibly NYC, which is sort of its own league in the US. Maybe they are comparable to the European cities of the 90s, but things have moved on a lot since then.
>Those cities you mentioned already have European style urban infrastructure.
I hope you're joking. it's very rare to see a highway wider than 6 lanes in Europe, especially that runs through cities, whilst the aforementioned cities have a abundance of such monstrosities.
Done properly (I know…) autonomous vehicles could be a godsend for cycling in the US. If vehicles behaved properly you wouldn't theoretically need cycling infrastructure at all – the dream of vehicular cycling would actually start working and you could share the road anywhere.
+100...I love driving and will miss it with autonomous cars but I like being able to ride my bike without being nearly killed in the city every week. Autonomous cars (assuming they're trained to deal with bikes) would be a massive benefit I'm keeping my fingers crossed for.
Lots of money has been successfully spent on convincing Americans that car ownership directly makes them more free. Car == freedom
This is sorta true in part (in some places) because other options like walk/bike/bus/train have been so disinvested that in many places you really do need to own a car to get around with any level of dignity.
It does seem to be changing on larger US cities though, so I’m hopeful.
Freedom of movement. Cars represent freedom of movement akin to a horse with a trailer, except you have an engine instead of a horse.
I dont think Americans care for the current road monopoly states have, or the monopolistic tolls and enforcement.
The idea of freedom of movement isn't really a European-centric ideal - its more uniquely American and derived from being a nation derived from those escaping injustices of Europe and searching freedom and liberty.
With the history of Europe being based in serfdom - peasants being forced to work their lord's land for protection - the idea of freedom of movement never really seemed to be of importance.
Those who deemed it important probably emigrated from Europe to America.
"Freedom of choice" is literally that, a freedom to make a choice, nobody is restricting you from it. Having many choices to make is not a freedom, it's power.
Homes do the same. In both cases, though, if you don't want people to build something you need to exercise power, not freedom. Freedom of choice does not entitle you to others not doing something.
I disagree that it provides any freedom at all, since you are limited by roads. If certain roads are cut off by sabotage or other means, you lose your imaginary "freedom of movement".
Regarding it being an "American thing", Germany was the first country to build highways, and currently the highways there (Autobahn) don't even have a speed limit, so you could say that they provide more freedom of movement than the roads in the US.
Every freedom has limitations. Just because there are limitations doesn't mean that the underlying principle doesn't exist. People have the freedom to move, even before the car, and well before the interstate highway system.
The Autobahn was constructed for a similar goal as of the Interstate highway system - to act as a transportation backbone for the military during conflict. The fact that it's grown to what it is today is because it was built with free money (for the cities and states building them) and it became one of the safest ways to travel long distances without having to spend a lot of money.
Regardless, there's a lot more freedom to a car than a politically charged public transit system tied to a social credit score or even economic ability to pay whatever arbitrary fare exists. While cars do cost money, they also tended to keep going with a lot of abuse, and aren't tied to how politicians think of you.
Although I do agree that cars provide some freedom of transportation, they are still heavily regulated, are more difficult to fix yourself than ever before (good luck fixing the electronics in your new BMW in the middle of nowhere), and you have to register them, buy insurance, etc. just so you could drive a extremely limited set of public roads that could be closed down any minute for a variety of reasons. Or you could just get stuck in traffic, enjoying that sweet freedom of sitting in a metal can whilst those peasants drive past you on their bicycles or other, not-as-free, means of transportation.
Are cars cool? Absolutely. Are they some kind of freedom machines? As much as oil companies and car (excuse me - freedom machine) manufacturers would say otherwise, no.
