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The author notes that HT wants to focus on moving shipping containers before people.

What are examples of physical goods that people would pay a premium to move very fast between Los Angeles and Las Vegas (I think it's fair to say two or three times as fast as a courier in a private jet), and which can be quickly bundled together at either end into a big enough batch to make sense to move them in a container?

Fresh seafood comes to mind. At least in Phoenix, it's flown in daily at great expense. Other highly perishable luxury foodstuffs would similarly follow, I'd imagine.

That's what I was thinking, but someone more well-versed in matters lobster-related tells me they do fine driven there in vans.

You're looking for something that goes bad in less than 1.5-two hours. Say it takes 30 minutes to get to the hyperloop depot, 30 mins to Vegas, then 30 minutes from the Vegas hyperloop dept to get to the final destination casino or wherever its going.

And it needs to be something numerous enough that you could consistently fill a shipping container with it.

You're looking for something that goes bad in less than 1.5-two hours

I don't think the target is "goes bad" as much as "degrades in quality to a perceptible–or marketable–degree". Oysters, crab, et cetera (not sure about lobster) taste different, in New York, between the restaurants that make daily fish-market visits and those that skimp to three (or fewer) times a week.

And, yet, good sushi places in California get fish and shellfish flown in from Tokyo. Also, the tuna and some of the other fish sold in the Tokyo fish market is actually frozen.

To be fair, the practice of flying in fish from Tsukiji could easily be more related to prestige than quality. There are three major fish markets in Tokyo, and nobody cares about two of them (Kanda and Koto).

Not to mention, $/kg for cargo (air freight currently) is quite a bit higher than passenger flying.

So, instead of transporting passengers, they go for the more profitable and easier to handle cargo. I am not confident that they will circle back to passengers given the different facilities that are required for people versus cargo.

Unless you're being sarcastic, "more profitable" cargo? Yes, in the sense that cargo rail is profitable and passenger service is not. But certainly not in terms of pound of thing moved. Cargo rail (and shipping) is profitable because it's such a cost effective way to move high volume and high weight materials that aren't time sensitive.

The article doesn't say that they are going to build anything between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. I seriously doubt if that's what they had in mind.

At first glance, I'd say that there isn't much freight that people would pay much of a premium to chop 30 minutes or so off the e2e time.

But I guess the concept would be that there's no long-term premium -- that cost/mile is lower than air freight, after the initial (I'm sure insanely expensive) costs to build the track. If the cost/mile was competitive with rail but the e2e time was competitive with air, I expect you could find a lot of demand for it. That's a big if, of course.

Longer term, in terms of freight, if the system basically worked and you could build your practices around it, you'd expect to see people delivering goods that don't necessarily have much "freshness" requirement per se in the name of the great god of Shortening Supply Chains, which might even be worth paying a premium for -- but only if there's an extant hyperloop network that you can plan your business around.

If the hyperloop is physically basically sound (that is: it works more or less as described) but either the up-front costs are so huge or the operating costs are higher than expected that you have to long-term pay a premium over air, I'd expect it would have some success as a people-mover, even if the first freight route ended up being unprofitable.

I want to like the hyperloop idea but I get scared thinking about being in a 1000 mile long tunnel with no exits.

It's not the exits you have to worry about, it's the low vacuum inside the tunnel! Seriously, unless they let the air back into the section you're in, attempting to get out would mean a fairly swift death.

so it's like being on a plane in terms of escapability

Not to mention a potential catastrophic re-pressurization event if this long tube gets a crack in it... or catastrophic depressurization event if the train gets a crack in it. There's a lot of extremely dangerous and difficult to safeguard failure modes for this idea.

Isn't there anybody already trying to build some hyperloop ring test ?

And at what speed does the hyperloop starts to be more viable than an airplane?

while i don't think they (or anybody else in the foreseeable future, save for Chinese Communist Party taking over the Western states :) will be able to build a real infrastructure piece of several hundred miles length - politics, economy, etc. wouldn't let it, the HT looks like a starting point to develop a space or subspace launch system - it has all the necessary components like evacuated pipe, EM acceleration and levitation. Nevada desert isn't a bad place for it (while throwing over Pacific is less favorable than the other direction would be, the cheapness of ground boost compensates for the loss of Earth rotation boost).