A new year resolution: give us a better class of silly idea

Pipistrel

When berating a dumb idea on social media, we, your correspondent included, will often say, “Silicon Valley reinvents the [X].”

Hyperloop, or ‘Silicon Valley reinvents high-speed rail’, attempted to leverage today’s technology to revive a discredited idea from the 1700s. This was not by itself a terrible idea, but as the initial flood of venture capital (VC) funding became a trickle, the scope of the idea contracted; first, it was trains, then ‘pods’; then its backers abandoned ...