While not revolutionary (or even all that evolutionary) it at least generates a bit of revenue while garnering more practical experience for Boring. I'm not really sure there's a future for Boring, but it is nice that an additional company is trying to improve mass transit.
The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas
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Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas
#242I love watching all of Musk's projects, as every single one can be connected to Mars colonization. 1. Electric cars for transport, Check. 2. Solar panels and batteries for power generation and storage, check. 3. Tunnel digging equipment for making underground bases and transport, check. 4. Satellite communications for an entire planet, check. 5. Then finally, the actual rockets to get us there. Hopefully he will cont…
The goal of Mars to me is silly. Mars is already worse off in terms of climate than Earth. Why not work to improve what we have? The only appeal I see is "uncharted territory" / wild west
A good quote I can relate to:
I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying, "I want to go there."But I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in. This is the kind of person I am. - Linus Torvalds
Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, the joke is that next they'll release that the concrete tunnel road is subject to deterioration, so they'll shift to steel tracks. Then they'll realize that these individual vehicles should be linked together to allow for higher capacity. Then... then you have a subway.
That would be great. Subway costs are absolutely ridiculous, so it would be fantastic if the boring company decides to build exactly the same thing for much less.
Subway cost in mismanged US are ridiculous.[0] Around the world, countries like Spain are already building tunnels for the claimed cost of an Hyperloop tunnel.
[0] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c...
Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
The goal of Mars to me is silly. Mars is already worse off in terms of climate than Earth. Why not work to improve what we have? The only appeal I see is "uncharted territory" / wild west
Musk has said Mars is the backup plan for earth. What if one day there is a disease or meteor that wipes out the entire human population on Earth? (e.g., see the dinosaurs) Even if the only appeal was the wild wild west and uncharted territory, what's wrong with that? Look at what exploring the Moon has brought us, many unexpected innovations and inventions useful for life on earth.
Life on Mars would be so horrible as to not be worth it for the vast majority of people, I'm sure. "Beats being dead", you might say, but I disagree.
Not to mention it's still unclear if it's physiologically possible for humans to survive long-term off planet Earth.
Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
The price tag for the tunnel is pretty much what you’d expect at the low end of civil engineering costs, so there’s no room in the pricing if things start to go south. Musk’s entire premise is that there are magical inefficiencies in the commercial tunnel boring machines he’s purchased, and he assumes that spacecraft and automotive engineering expertise is sufficiently transferable to uncover those opportunities and…
Based on my ballpark guesses at the cost of the tunnel, I would be surprised if The Boring Company actually made any money on this. They're liable for all cost overruns, and they have to bear the costs of developing the custom Tesla car manufacturing and safety qualification themselves. The most galling part to me is that I can't see how they make the mandated 4400 people/hr limit. That requires 26 second headways be…
Wouldn't the obvious solution be to multiplex cars at each station? They could have twenty Teslas at each location for passenger pickup/drop-off, only entering the launch queue when all occupants are seated and restrained.
Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas
#246I love watching all of Musk's projects, as every single one can be connected to Mars colonization. 1. Electric cars for transport, Check. 2. Solar panels and batteries for power generation and storage, check. 3. Tunnel digging equipment for making underground bases and transport, check. 4. Satellite communications for an entire planet, check. 5. Then finally, the actual rockets to get us there. Hopefully he will cont…
I see this point get made often, but I'm not sure it is an insightful way to look at the world. Tesla cars are only barely related to Mars colonization, and PayPal is not really at all, which is a product conveniently ignored in your post. Even the SpaceX internet satellite constellation looks almost nothing like what internet access on Mars will be anytime in the forseeable future. It seems like a similarly strong argument could be made that every Google product is designed for Mars colonization.
I bring this up because I think it is important that Elon has some projects targeted at making the world better today, like PayPal, the Boring Company, and Starlink, some projects designed to avoid catastrophes a few decades from now, like Tesla and Solar City, and some projects designed to help humanity centuries from now, like SpaceX going to Mars. This is a very nice way of resolving the objection that Elon should focus on Earth's problems, which is to observe that you can both make the world a better place today while also working towards a brighter long term future.
I think that to the extent that Elon will inevitably serve as a role model, I want that part of the story to be told as well.
Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas
#247I love watching all of Musk's projects, as every single one can be connected to Mars colonization. 1. Electric cars for transport, Check. 2. Solar panels and batteries for power generation and storage, check. 3. Tunnel digging equipment for making underground bases and transport, check. 4. Satellite communications for an entire planet, check. 5. Then finally, the actual rockets to get us there. Hopefully he will cont…
The goal of Mars to me is silly. Mars is already worse off in terms of climate than Earth. Why not work to improve what we have? The only appeal I see is "uncharted territory" / wild west
The moon might have been seen as similarly silly. US might much more easily have focused on nearer space with a greater ROI on the project itself. But apart from the geopolitical bragging rights, the technical constraints of a moon shot meant the development of all kinds of technologies that rippled outward through society. We see some of the same effects with the LHC. Its direct uses have limited (immediate) practical impact, but the technologies required to build it, harness & process those volumes of data, etc., have spurned on all sorts of more immediately practical innovations.
Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas
#248So what’s this fascination with tunnels? In Chicago, there are overhead elevated train tracks, and they work just fine. They seem a lot cheaper to build and maintain than tunnels. You can even build them over existing avenues. Why don’t we have more of that?
The El was built along with the city's expansion (often by developers who wanted to make new tracts of land accessible). That doesn't work for infill, where the intrusion and space the elevated tracks require aren't accounted for in current prices and expectations, and where right of way isn't established. If we had a Robert Moses of transit, then it could happen, just like the highways happened. There are no Robert…
Personal rapid transit is just a waste. You can transport A LOT of people by rail ... orders of magnitudes of people more than cars, even if you had a highway full of self driving cars all moving at 120kph. There's not even a comparison. Self driving and even personal transport does not compare to the capacity of standard rail stock:
https://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-so...
Public transport also forces you to see people every day. Even this very bare minimum interaction is vitally important. It changes the way we see and treat people.
There was an executive at Lehman Brothers who had a private elevator he used from his condo to take him to a car with a private driver, which took him to another elevator that took him to his office. Most days he could go from home to work without interacting with a single person. That changes the way you see and treat people, and we need less of that.
Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yikes, dude. I'm sorry, but Elon Musk is just a guy with money. He's not a demigod. He's not a genius. He's not even a captain of industry. He's just a rich guy playing with money and and building a personal brand. I'm not saying that he doesn't have ideas, and that some of those ideas aren't the totally self-serving delusions of a rich dickhead, but a good many of them are, and I certainly don't want any part of "th…
Re: unelected, people like to use the phrase "vote with your dollar" around here, so maybe all the people who liked X.com/PayPal and now Tesla cars have "elected" him according to that sentiment.
Voting with your dollar is how you elect the best products and services.
No one used PayPal because they liked Elon and thought he would make a great ruling oligarch.
Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas
#250I love watching all of Musk's projects, as every single one can be connected to Mars colonization. 1. Electric cars for transport, Check. 2. Solar panels and batteries for power generation and storage, check. 3. Tunnel digging equipment for making underground bases and transport, check. 4. Satellite communications for an entire planet, check. 5. Then finally, the actual rockets to get us there. Hopefully he will cont…
Mars colonization involves building an entire industrial economy from scratch on top of an airless pile of rusty sand, so you can connect anything you want to it. The idea that a planetary satellite network would be a top priority for a place with no air and nothing to eat is also a curious one. Musk would be better off developing an interest in hydroponics and radiation shielding.