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The Boring Company [video]

boringcompany.com

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Re: The Boring Company [video]

#571

Post by baking »

cbhl wrote: post #520
19eightyfour wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the boring expense, an NTBM[1] or subterrene[2], is said to be cheaper and faster. [1] http://www.sheepletv.com/nuclear-tunnel-boring-machines-swit... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subterrene My impression is the boring feasibility and costs will not be the limiter of a very cool tech like this happening, but a more boring practical cost, probably the "zoning" cost required to get compliance and permiss…

Considering the name of the company, maybe they have invented a radical new way to reduce boring costs?

He has said he thinks he can reduce the costs by a factor of ten, but except for having spare parts on hand to reduce downtime I don't think he has been specific about his ideas. He bought a conventional boring machine recently (I don't know if it has been delivered yet) to get more data.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#572

Post by Matt3o12_ »

ncallaway wrote: post #313
Matt3o12_ wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they are somewhat similar to the problems Elon tries to solve with rockets. Rockets are not normally reused, which makes them expensive to use. They are often custom built (at least partly) and thus not mass produced. While we won't see that for rockets any time soon, it believe he managed to bring down the cost of building rockets and continues to do so (he uses his own money after all and does not have the suppo…

First, I want to say that I'm a _massive_ fan of what Elon Musk is doing with SpaceX. > he uses his own money after all and does not have the support of every tax-paying citizen like NASA used to during the Apollo missions This isn't really true. SpaceX, like pretty much all private Spaceflight providers, has received many development contracts from NASA. These are basically NASA giving the company a bucket of money…

Well, that's true but the only reason spaceX was given the money is because the government wanted to put satalties in orbit. They just figured SpaceX was the cheapest way to get them up their.

They had to prove that they could do it before they saw a dime. The NASA has a project and gets funded without having at least a prove of concept (e.g. A single rocket that can do the job) as long as congress likes it. I'm not saying that this is bad, but this way he earned the money.

Furthermore, unlike the Apollo missions, sending satellites into orbit served a practical purpose. Sure the apollo missions were really cool and have helped science a lot but their practicality was a lot less.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#573

Post by zmmmmm »

theWatcher37 wrote: post #524
pnathan wrote: post #85

This is very, very wasteful compared to actual mass transit. A subway network is much more effective at delivering people. If he's looking for mega-good, Musk would do significantly better to drop a full subway network. edit: tunnelling is a broadly solved problem. It's difficult, expensive, slow, etc. But there's no engineering reason why a hole in the ground can't happen. Musk might be able to drive some significan…

Except the monoculture here doesn't account for just how terrible buses and trains are. Mass transit is fundamentally superior and realistically inferior. The second any rational actor has the economic advantage necessary to not ride in a box packed with people of questionable hygiene they'll chose option #2 no matter the negative externalities. I love this place but people aren't packets in your stream, they activel…

Have you ever ridden on a really good train system?

I get the train to work each day and 99% of the time I get to sit down with space to comfortably work on my laptop and I get through a bunch of stuff each way. When I think of the alternative - spending 20% less time but dealing with the risk and frustration of driving and getting nothing done in return - driving myself seems positively toxic.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#574

Post by mirimir »

nickjarboe wrote: post #567
mirimir wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mostly because they live/work in areas that aren't dense enough to have good last-mile public transit, and they don't want to deal with transfers. Well, suburbanization was a totally dumbass move. Maybe instead of building tunnels, we could be rebuilding cities. We could be designing them to be attractive enough that people would want to live there.

When a city in America is destroyed by a nuclear explosion, Americans will re-learn why suburbia was so popular. Hopefully this won't happen for a long time and we will have a good stretch of city living. I love cities, but having millions of people concentrated enough to be killed by a single device; this is very different world than the one humans evolved in.

Sure, maybe that was part of it. Interstates were, for sure. But then, the Soviets were building huge warheads, which could take out metro regions.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#575

Post by amorphid »

bfred_it wrote: post #555
amorphid wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares if The Boring Company fails? It looks cool! You know what happens if you don't try? Nothing. You never score for a shot you don't take!

But you can score if you take the right shot. It's about wasting time and money and talent instead of directing it towards "winning" ideas.

If you learn how to take the right shot beforehand, let the rest of us know :)

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#577

Post by soufron »

cbhl wrote: post #508
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…

I think it's more nuanced than that. You can break down the world into the 99% that "know" that it's impossible. They'll never invent that world-changing thing. That leaves 1% that "don't know" that it's impossible. Of that 1%, 99% will try and fail. The remaining 1% of the 1% succeed, like George Dantzig (who came late to a Stats class at UC Berkeley, thought some problems on the board were homework, and a few days…

Everybody is trying to invent shit and make things better. It's true from your waiter at your restaurant who will try to find a way to be more amiable to you, or it's true from the public researchers who just invented the artificial utero when they're being paid nips and wont become billionaires out of their invention. This is not Atlas Shrugged. This is the real world.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#578

Post by shouldbworking »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #79
shouldbworking wrote: post #40

Did anyone else notice that cars being lowered leaves a giant fucking hole in the middle of the street?! This is a marketing fluff video untouched by engineers

I mean, you can easily cover up the hole with a sliding door pretty quickly after dropping, or, as someone else mentioned, raise fences during the process. This is far from the hardest problem to solve in the video.

I'm just pointing out that the flaw is egregious. PR videos are supposed to give people a view of the future, suspend disbelief for a minute. This just looks like something slapped together by an intern told to "put some future cars in a tunnel"

A damn disappointment for something hyped a while back from Musk himself. He should learn from Hollywood, movie trailers are far more important than the movie itself when public interest is involved.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#579

Post by klarrimore »

sid-kap wrote: post #253

If anyone's looking for a good source of information on transportation costs, I highly recommend http://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism and http://twitter.com/2AveSagas . They cut through the BS of the mainstream media and politicians on transportation policy and give really intelligent opinions, particularly on zoning/land use and on the US's ridiculous transit costs. (A lot of it is complaining about the ridiculous cost…

We have fare policing on express busses here in NYC.
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