pylons

Part of Elon's design for the pylons allows the track to remain stable even when the pylons are moved by an earthquake.

If the pylons are every 100 feet and the joint offset is 20 feet between pylons then that implies a shear strain of.20.

So if things move a long distance, the closest pylons will break free from the tube and the tube will be supported by pylons which are further apart.

That means if the earth moves 20 feet sideways between two pylons the steel has a chance to bend and move rather than be sheared.

So long as there is enough room on the pylons to accommodate this, things will be pretty good.

Secondly it is very important that the tube remain still while the pylons move relative to it.

The pylons move 20 feet relative to each other, and only 10 feet relative to the tube.

The pylons are built with an internal structure allowing them to move horizontally both ways, and vertically.

There are pylons of brilliance on the shoulders of which everyone builds, and Knuth must be one of the strongest.

That is, tunnels work better than pylons except at the point where the large offset occurs.

The Hyperloop paper (as originally proposed) was going to use pylons to ease land acquisition costs.

That reduces the angles necessary to keep the rest of the tube on the remaining pylons which support it, and that means you're asking even less of the steel.

Now your argument that the tube will just break free of the pylons seems like it has merit; however, the question of "why do we have all these pylons every 100 ft if we only need them every XXX ft?" should immediately spring to mind.

Seaside is a refreshing change from the Rails/Django/Pylons style frameworks.

Can Django (or Pylons, or Catalyst, or $other_framework) do that?

Some of the tools we are using include Python, Pylons, nginx, memcached, Thrift, and git.