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The Boring Company [video]

boringcompany.com

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Re: The Boring Company [video]

#441

Post by closeparen »

dnautics wrote: post #436
jaredklewis wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If places aren't dense enough to support mass transit, they are certainly not dense enough to financially support car-trains tunnels. The depicted tunnels have the same costs as building subways, and I imagine similar maintenance costs. On the other hand, they can only serve a fraction of the riders a traditional subway can, which means the cost per rider is huge. Not to mention it still requires owning a car, so the…

This solves the last Mile problem

So do big parking garages at suburban train stations.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#442

Post by CamperBob2 »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #393
Xcelerate wrote: post #377

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…

edit: don't feel like arguing. Best of luck to Musk.

If you live by hype at some point you gotta start delivering (edit: this is overstated, but whatever).

He's delivering to the freakin' International Space Station. What have you delivered lately?

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#443

Post by grondilu »

bcheung wrote: post #102

Telecommuting is a lot cheaper and easier. Also, what is the point of those rails? Seems like self-driving cars would be much easier and require a lot less. I think the robotic conveyer belt style design like seen in movies like iRobot would be cheaper and more convenient. Plus, having it so people don't walk to their cars means you don't have to worry about theft in parking garages as much either.

This. When Musk came up with his hyperloop idea, I found it odd. It seems to me that transportation nowadays needs two things : supersonic airliners and self-driving vehicles.

The ideal scenario to me is this:

   1. wait for a self-driving car to pick you up,
   2. be driven to a subway/train-station,
   3. take a train to the airport
   4. fly at supersonic/hypersonic speed
   5. repeat previous steps in reverse

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#444

Post by leot »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #428
Xcelerate wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 'The millions of reasons people give for why they won't work' [...] should be welcomed. Not really. It's easy to think of reasons why something won't work. It requires an insanely small amount of effort compared to finding a way to make something work. "Reasons why not" are a dime a dozen. > And I think there are no causation and correlation between thinking reasons that make it impossible and starting a company. I…

Criticism is the sign of a healthy society. If someone is afraid of criticism or doesn't want to take it, then they are only hurting their own work. That's not to say Musk is guilty of that, but his fans could accept it. If we didn't have critics we'd still have kings with divine right. This seems like an exaggeration, but it's really just to say that we need people to look at things critically. I haven't collected a…

> If we didn't have critics we'd still have kings with divine right. This seems like an exaggeration, but it's really just to say that we need people to look at things critically.

That's an extreme straw man that trades a lot on what a "critic" is.

Martin Luther didn't criticize the papacy because he doubted the papacy's capacity to realize its ambitions. He criticized the way the papacy was then operating.

People holding forth on how something can't be done are best described not as critics but doubters (or haters). "I can't imagine a way to do X, therefore X can't be done." How many impossible things does Musk have to do before people take serious Musk's ability to realize his visions?

Hating is so easy. But today's capacity to develop technology is utterly unprecedented.

Lead. Follow. Or get out of the way.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#445

Post by athenot »

This looks really cool. However, boring through rock is the most expensive way to connect 2 places. It only makes sense if the land features or purchase value require it.

Fundamentally, this is about short-circuiting the regular road network and establishing a managed packet network that can bypass congestion. Interestingly, that's also the value proposition of public transit, though it also runs into issues of cost, and too low of a population density make it unfeasible.

I still think we haven't fully leveraged the potential of busses. In most cities, they are slow because they combine the disadvantages of road traffic with the disadvantage of time tables. But what if busses operated on their own dedicated network? Bogota deployed a public transit system made with busses but with a UX of a train[1]. This is a genius idea that could work in many US cities, which have a lot more space to spare.

But back to the original idea, I think we might see in the future a "managed" road network, reserved to self-driving cars which are driven by some central management system, optimising routing for the whole network so as to prevent congestion. This won't require tunnels, just gates, dedicated roads and lots of software.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU6ImWY4IBc

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#446

Post by labster »

proyb2 wrote: post #421
djsumdog wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not a wasteful when US has huge land and those fuel vehicles need to travel a long distance may encounter car accidents e.g. fatigue, winter, floods, would be benefits from reduce air pollution in the these concept tunnel, in contrast, the size of Singapore is a lot smaller. The tunnels could use solar energy which is not wasteful.

Uh... if the solar energy could be better used elsewhere, you're still wasting energy. We're not post-scarcity yet.

Actually it's the land use on roads and parking which is most wasteful. Maybe we could solve half the problem with this, even if it is boring.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#447

Post by strange_quark »

namlem wrote: post #328
andrewprock wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe one day we could connect the individual pods, and even gasp route these "coupled cars" on rails above ground. I wonder if anyone has tried that yet?

Above ground rail isn't practical in urban areas. The video had silly car tunnels, but in practice, I'm sure the bulk of their business will be subway tunnels.

What? The Chicago L and NYC subways (both of which carry hundreds of millions of riders per year) have many, many miles of either at-grade or above-grade track.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#448

Post by aaron-lebo »

leot wrote: post #444
aaron-lebo wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criticism is the sign of a healthy society. If someone is afraid of criticism or doesn't want to take it, then they are only hurting their own work. That's not to say Musk is guilty of that, but his fans could accept it. If we didn't have critics we'd still have kings with divine right. This seems like an exaggeration, but it's really just to say that we need people to look at things critically. I haven't collected a…

> If we didn't have critics we'd still have kings with divine right. This seems like an exaggeration, but it's really just to say that we need people to look at things critically. That's an extreme straw man that trades a lot on what a "critic" is. Martin Luther didn't criticize the papacy because he doubted the papacy's capacity to realize its ambitions. He criticized the way the papacy was then operating. People ho…

People holding forth on how something can't be done are best described not as critics but doubters (or haters). "I can't imagine a way to do X, therefore X can't be done." How many impossible things does Musk have to do before people take serious Musk's ability to realize his visions?

We're talking about strawmen: nobody is saying that. Nobody is saying it can't be done. They are saying...let's wait until it is done, because right now it's just a video. Is that hating or an entirely reasonable stance to take?

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#449

Post by ryandrake »

Xcelerate wrote: post #414
Anderkent wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. The latter are also aware of survivorship bias

> The latter are also aware of survivorship bias While that may be true, it would be interesting to compare the frequencies with which successful founders bring up the topic of survivorship bias vs the rate at which those who never found anything bring it up.

A measurement, which itself would suffer from the same bias.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#450

Post by gpm »

Strom wrote: post #267
tinym wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought we already knew how to make a home on Earth. What is this in reference to? That our current methods are unsustainable? There are plenty of ideas for solutions. That the current state of human cooperation is below the necessary threshold to achieve a self-sustaining society on Mars? Maybe, but I'm optimistic that we'll find the inspirational leaders that are required.

> I thought we already knew how to make a home on Earth.

It seems to me that this really isn't the case. Our attempt to make a home here is causing a mass extinction, extremely fast change in atmospheric makeup (compared to historical models), depletion of fresh water reserves (in some areas anyways), increased frequency of bad weather, earthquakes, etc. Under a 'business as usual' model I have trouble seeing our current ecosystem supporting us for long (e.g. another 100 years).

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