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The Boring Company [video]

boringcompany.com

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Re: The Boring Company [video]

#371

Post by tptacek »

bb88 wrote: post #335
geofft wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those subway cars are used at all hours that the system is in operation. If you're trying to compare costs with Boring, note first that a personal car is used much less and second that Boring involves these weird platform things which will also cost money, so the equivalent is more than just the price of the Tesla that sits on the platform. Also, each LA subway car can fit over 50 people seated and probably three tim…

> If you're trying to compare costs with Boring, Actually I'm not. I just want to point out that public trains cost huge amounts of money for investment, they need special infrastructure which many US cities don't have, and the only way they work feasibly is if the population density is high enough so the taxes will support them. In other words, there's a huge upfront cost to even considering building a system that m…

That seems orthogonal to the point 'geofft was making, which seems like if you're going to spend the resources to dig tunnels, it makes more sense to fill them with trains than with personal cars.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#372

Post by akamaka »

tptacek wrote: post #240
jbooth wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not thought provoking, it's a series of thought terminating cliches. I'm as liberal as they come, I'm very sensitive to disguised racism, but the tweets' entire basis of comparison between Musk and Moses is "both are/were ambitious men and now musk is talking about infrastructure". It's free-association garbage. The Moses story is fascinating because he accomplished great things that built NYC but was also a hor…

Moses wasn't a horrible person. He was an ambitious, unscrupulous, and effective person with a singular view --- one not totally out of step with the elite of his time --- that happened to be (in the opinion of many, including me) very harmful to the long-term health of New York. I think it's your rebuttal that's facile here, not the comparison in the Twitter thread, but, like you, I might be wrong.

I'm reading the biography of Moses as we speak and the current chapter does paint him as being capable of a unique kind of horribleness, regardless of his other positive qualities.

As one of his friends described him: "He's so forthright and honest that if he saw a man across the street who he thought was a son of a bitch, he would cross the street and call him a son of a bitch, lest by passing him in silence, his silence be misconstrued".

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#373

Post by jv22222 »

djsumdog wrote: post #208
nostromo wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video shows some sort of shuttle using the track. Those could be small busses or even public transport. http://imgur.com/a/Wv8YD In effect, this is a subway system. It's an underground rail system. The major difference is that you have a mixture of public and private passenger vehicles and smaller vehicles.

It's still incredibly wasteful compared to a real subway. The amount of people a real mass transit system can move is orders of magnitude above tons if individual little cars: http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol... ..not to mention all the energy required to move each of those vehicles compared to a train that can move hundreds of more people in a similar space. Americans need to get over all…

Is it really wasteful? It seems like it is an ever moving system. In terms of people capacity it seems it would carry more by being always flowing vs a stopping starting transit system.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#374

Post by nebabyte »

OoTheNigerian wrote: post #333

I think there is nothing more boring than reading a bunch of people who never propose anything point out flaws. You all sound like Balmer. This is a CONCEPT!! Elon is THINKING you all are pointing, laughing and adding no value to the conversation of "What comes next?" If your idea is "the metro works", a 150 year old system, then this video is not for you. To the video, I like the concept of combining public and priv…

If that is your idea of value, there exist plenty of scifi writers/artists with concepts like this, except more practical, better thought out, or so on

So perhaps instead of 'pointing' you should take your own advice?

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#375

Post by mabbo »

tinym wrote: post #134
tuacker wrote: post #117

I feel like everything Elon Musk undertakes with his companies is just one huge Mars Beta Test. - SpaceX: Obvious, got to get to space somehow - Tesla: Build cars/machines to run on something that is guaranteed to exist on Mars (the sun) vs. Oil - Gigafactory: How to build batteries 101 - Solar roof: While Earths environment may not be as harsh as Mars you still learn something, and improve solar panel production in…

By the time we've learned how to live on a planet as inhospitable as Mars, maybe we'll know how to make a home on Earth.

By the time we've learned how to live on a planet as inhospitable as Mars, maybe we'll have figured out how to deal with LA traffic.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#376

Post by chejazi »

distances wrote: post #272
petra wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One weakness of all public transportation is the lack of personal space. Maybe if someone would have solved that either by more space or some deep psychological insights, it would become more popular among Americans?

I disagree. Europe has many countries with at least the same wish for personal space as the US, and public transport works just fine. I'd suspect a big reason is the car-centric culture, which also gives rise to the image of public transport being only for those who can't afford a car. It's a cultural problem that'll be hard to straighten.

> Europe has many countries with at least the same wish for personal space as the US

Maybe this is me being ethnocentric, but it seems the American way of embracing diversity (through political correctness, affirmative action, etc) has come at the cost of craving for isolation and independence from each other.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#377

Post by Xcelerate »

It's amazing to me the amount of negativity directed toward his projects and the millions of reasons people give for why they "won't work" (not necessarily on HN, but at least on general news websites).

I'm starting to believe the only difference between those who start their own companies and those who don't is that the latter convinces themselves that it is impossible, never builds anything, and from their own lack of having ever produced anything, concludes that their original supposition was indeed correct.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#378

Post by cm127 »

phlakaton wrote: post #325
dyarosla wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't downvote you, but I am genuinely curious where you got the idea that we know how to live on Mars already?

In theory, you just go there, plop down a habitat, and live in it. In practice, it might be a little tougher than it sounds. :-)

Solar radiation? Probably why burrowing would be the way to go.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#379

Post by dragonwriter »

tptacek wrote: post #318
kgu wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That disagrees with the Twitter thread you linked to, which claims: > Robert Moses weaponized Civil Engineering and Urban Planning to suppress marginalized communities. Engineering is always political. Words like "weaponized" and "suppress" suggest that Emily thinks Moses was ill-intentioned, not merely an ambitious guy who in his monomania happened to overlook some of the more sinister side-effects of his work.

I don't entirely agree with the Twitter thread, but it's also possible to "weaponize" and "suppress" because you think it's the right thing to do. Overly-influential people exerting their power to harm others in the interest of what they believe to be "right" is something that bothers me a lot about the power structure of our industry today. I don't think the comparison is at all unwarranted.

> I don't entirely agree with the Twitter thread, but it's also possible to "weaponize" and "suppress" because you think it's the right thing to do.

Everyone thinks what they do is right. Ill-intentioned refers to whether the characterizer thinks it was right, not the actor.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#380

Post by pabloacastillo »

tuacker wrote: post #117

I feel like everything Elon Musk undertakes with his companies is just one huge Mars Beta Test. - SpaceX: Obvious, got to get to space somehow - Tesla: Build cars/machines to run on something that is guaranteed to exist on Mars (the sun) vs. Oil - Gigafactory: How to build batteries 101 - Solar roof: While Earths environment may not be as harsh as Mars you still learn something, and improve solar panel production in…

This project and the Hiperloop to me seems really alike, testing the capabilities of non-rocket launchers.

Kinda like in Verne's "From Earth to the Moon", both try to move and accelerate objects, maybe enough to launch something into orbit?

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Non-rocket_spacelaunch

Or maybe im reading to much scifi :)

PS: sorry for the broken english, not my native language.

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