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The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

citylab.com

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Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#351

Post by WilliamEdward »

clairity wrote: post #258
breck wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes technological solutions solve political problems. Won’t let me build a wire across your property—-no problem, I’ll go wireless...as an example

> "Sometimes technological solutions solve political problems." sure, but what technology could be applied in this case? for instance, projects are often underbid and then overcharged over time, whether it's fixed bid or time and materials. fixed bid incentivizes subcontractors to cut corners. time and materials billing incentivizes subcontractors to be inefficient. and subcontractors find ways to cheat. people have…

There's no magical new technology that will entirely subvert the political expense of this project, but they make it explicitly clear on the Boring Company website that they have vastly improved the mostly old and uninspired technology of the tunnel boring machine itself, which will save millions at least. So like, that answers your question.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#352

Post by redisman »

vageli wrote: post #193
smileysteve wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It so happens, that the Sun's expansion will eventually consume most of the planets in the galaxy; of course, it will also be so cold long before that point humans won't be alive.

> It so happens, that the Sun's expansion will eventually consume most of the planets in the galaxy; of course, it will also be so cold long before that point humans won't be alive. In the galaxy or solar system?

I can see Arcturus right now and the galaxy still seems to exist so I'm gonna guess b)

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#353

Post by alaskamiller »

rrix2 wrote: post #344
jodrellblank wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't we? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19394730

most folks aren't in peoples' posting history trying to prove a point

Most folks wouldn't, but some on Hacker News certainly can't lose.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#354

Post by HNLurker2 »

geofft wrote: post #330
gleenn wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference might be they were also heads of million dollar companies. How many of those have you or I started?

Minor note (mostly since a lot of people don't know this): Musk did not start Tesla. He led investment in their Series A, became chairman of the board, and became actively involved with the company's operations, which allowed him to gain the title of "co-founder," but he was not involved with the company before then.

AFAIK Tesla founders where adviced to go to Elon for venture capital because he may be interested in it.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#355

Post by computerex »

zaroth wrote: post #333
computerex wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An underground autonomous system which otherwise would have cost hundreds of millions for $50 million risk free is a perfect win-win for Boring and Vegas. How do you think the boring company is going to be able to achieve these cost savings? If this system is otherwise going to cost hundreds of millions how the hell is the boring company going to achieve orders of magnitudes improvement?

For now, Boring company uses the $50mm to subsidize their R&D cost as they move up the “learning curve” toward the realization of an order of magnitude in cost savings. I would guess the engineers at Boring have a list of a hundred things they think they could do differently that would lower overall cost. I imagine the biggest ROI is automation which removes humans from the vicinity and therefore the presumably huge…

> For now, Boring company uses the $50mm to subsidize their R&D cost as they move up the “learning curve” toward the realization of an order of magnitude in cost savings.

What makes the Boring company have the exclusive monopoly on R&D? There is billions of dollars available for R&D. If it was just a question of money anyone could idealize those cost savings. Your entire post is mere speculation. There is not a shred of actual fact based evidence to support anything you have said.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#356

Post by A2017U1 »

idlewords wrote: post #256
toephu2 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What did exploring the Moon bring us?

A photo of one tiny world in a vast cosmos. A worldwide symbol that no amount of propaganda or violence could ever achieve.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#357

Post by roenxi »

hdfbdtbcdg wrote: post #345
roenxi wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a bold claim, for which you will need some pretty solid evidence. An election is basically a popularity contest. Winning a popularity contests does not guarantee competence, reliability or even correctness of opinion. We've got a couple of centuries of evidence that private individuals who stand to feel the effects of their choices are much better at conserving and rationing resources than elected officials.…

Sorry I don't quite understand. Are you seriously saying democracy is a bad idea and that you would like to live in an oligarchy?

Oligarchies are even worse. The point is that people who win elections, and political leaders in general, are a much more concerning threat than wealthy, powerful & unlikable business leaders.

I'd be quite happy if governments had less power. People aren't threatened by rouge business magnates in the same way as they are by rogue public policy.

A few years of bad public policy does much more damage than any businessman can in a decade. Voters & governments are seriously not good at technical questions like resource allocation. Businessmen will stop doing something if it isn't working, voters usually push on regardless long after it obviously makes no sense to do so.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#358

Post by erikpukinskis »

skywhopper wrote: post #162

The math on this is highly questionable: The contract posted on the LVCVA website projects an operating capacity of 4,400 passengers per hour using “autonomous electric vehicles at high speeds,” which might include a Tesla Model X or Model 3, or another Tesla chassis converted into a 16-passenger shuttle. There are two tunnels involved, so to manage to get 2,200 passengers through in one direction per hour, you're go…

Let’s say there are 10 vehicles being loaded at a time. 16 passengers each is 160 passengers per cycle. That means vehicles can wait 6 minutes for loading on average. (Some can be slower because some will be faster)

Is that crazy? It doesn’t seem crazy to me. Busses don’t wait 6 minutes at a stop.

BART does 1-2 minute transfers.

Your idea that it would need attendants seems to be based on the assumption that cars must depart synchronously (because one slow party can hold up the entire system). But you’re missing the whole point of the Loop design: many on-ramps and cars can join into the express tunnel asynchronously.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#359

Post by L_226 »

HALtheWise wrote: post #246
calgoo wrote: post #67

I 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 a…

I've said it before, but in the context of solar system colonisation the value behind Tesla is not the cars - it is the gigafactory. Developing a serious Human presence off-Earth necessarily requires highly automated heavy industry and manufacturing.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#360

Post by atq2119 »

computerex wrote: post #355
zaroth wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For now, Boring company uses the $50mm to subsidize their R&D cost as they move up the “learning curve” toward the realization of an order of magnitude in cost savings. I would guess the engineers at Boring have a list of a hundred things they think they could do differently that would lower overall cost. I imagine the biggest ROI is automation which removes humans from the vicinity and therefore the presumably huge…

> For now, Boring company uses the $50mm to subsidize their R&D cost as they move up the “learning curve” toward the realization of an order of magnitude in cost savings. What makes the Boring company have the exclusive monopoly on R&D? There is billions of dollars available for R&D. If it was just a question of money anyone could idealize those cost savings. Your entire post is mere speculation. There is not a shred…

While I do think you have a bit of a point, the same could have been said (and probably was said) about SpaceX and reusable rockets.

Their competitors had a huge headstart and billions of dollars available for R&D, and yet it wouldn't have happened without SpaceX.

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