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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

#381

Post by ineedasername »

idlewords wrote: post #379
edmundsauto wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a few things, to name a few: * improved firefighting protective gear * Athletic shoes * Sports stadiums being able to move the field of play * seismological monitors for everything from trains to trucks * base defibrillator tech * cordless power tools * skin care: "Estee Lauder uses digital image analyzers and software based on NASA lunar research to evaluate cosmetic products." [0] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/d…

Putting a dude on the Moon seems like a roundabout way to get better skin cream and footwear.

And if that had been the only benefit then of course the whole program would be questionable. You asked for examples for the moon program and LHC, and you were given them in ample supply. If they aren't satisfactory in budging your opinion, this flow of discourse puts the burden on you to say something intelligent, and cherry picking only a single, and perhaps least relevant example doesn't really accomplish that.

There's no lack of material demonstrating that NASA's accomplishments contribute more to the economy than they drain in tax dollars [0] and it's difficult to ignore the volume & leaps of technical advancements achieved by earlier missions. You clearly have a different view though, so perhaps sharing that in a constructive way would be more beneficial than posting shallow comments that obviously ignore the information you requested.

[0]https://www.thebalance.com/nasa-budget-current-funding-and-h...

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

#382

Post by Retric »

the-dude wrote: post #100
Retric wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making an existing tunnel wider is vastly cheaper than building an equivalent tunnel from scratch. Simply knowing the soil composition makes a huge difference. In hard rock you can use drilling and blasting across long sections rather than just the leading edge. Alternatively, a TBM needs to remove significantly less material.

Are you sure about that? Because I have never heard about a tunnel project which has been 'upgraded' this way ever. And if I start to think about the practical problems, like breaking up part of the tunnel before widening it, it quickly seems like building a new one might be more efficient.

Assuming the tunnel is not in use then yes.

Here the are filling the tunnel and using a TBM. https://www.newcivilengineer.com/farnworth-tunnel-widening/1...

Widening an existing tunnel without interrupting traffic is still possible like: https://www.rocksoil.com/pdf/233_r.pdf. Though with increased costs.

However, this changes for under sea tunnels which are segments placed down and thus can’t really be widened.

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

#383

Post by Retric »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #122
Retric wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making an existing tunnel wider is vastly cheaper than building an equivalent tunnel from scratch. Simply knowing the soil composition makes a huge difference. In hard rock you can use drilling and blasting across long sections rather than just the leading edge. Alternatively, a TBM needs to remove significantly less material.

Almost every tunnel has a lining that makes widening prohibitive. Which is why the London Underground is forever stuck with small tunnels on the original lines.

A larger issue is the underground is in use forcing you to do something like: www.rocksoil.com/pdf/233_r.pdf

That and the cost vs benefit is not considered worth it.

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

#384

Post by Retra »

roenxi wrote: post #343
embwbam wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will always be people in power. But maybe it is better if those people are elected, and operate in view of the public

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.…

That all depends on who is doing the voting.

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

#385

Post by Retra »

epanchin wrote: post #203
spraak wrote: post #95

Earlier 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

Ironic that you use the Wild West as an example. Do you think the world would be better now if the British had just worked on improving Britain rather than settling in America? I’m sure there were many people calling the settlers silly back then too.

The settlers back then were not trying to settle a barren rock with no breathable atmosphere or heat. If Britain had tried settling Antarctica, things would have gone very differently.

And as others pointed out, America was already settled when Europeans arrived, so what innovation even occurred there?

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

#386

Post by GuB-42 »

greglindahl wrote: post #313
GuB-42 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't discount Musk's obsession with Mars, the recurring pattern I see is government money. - Electric cars: subsidies - Solar panels: subsidies - Tunnel: transport infrastructure - Rockets: NASA/military contracts Starlink looks more like a commercial project but it doesn't mean the government can't get interested. After all, the internet itself started as a military project. There are missing pieces in both…

Winning a competition to ship cargo and then people to the space station is a bad thing? Is there some universe in which entrepreneurs exit the electric car industry solely because the government starts offering consumers subsidies to buy them?

It is not a bad thing. I will never criticize a company for making money or an entrepreneur for grabbing opportunities.

I don't like the hype around Elon Musk and I think Hyperloop is a borderline scam (I can detail if you want). However I also think the success of PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX are well deserved. With them the world is a better place and Elon Musk is a richer man, that's capitalism working as intended. That subsidies helped creating a company that makes nice electric cars and solar panels is the reason the subsidies exist in the first place.

My previous point wasn't a criticism.

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

#387

Post by spraak »

ekianjo wrote: post #375
spraak wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the analogy is poor, because the "New World" was abundant with resources. The new world of Mars is not, and nearly everything would need to be brought there.

abundant with resources? How do you explain the first colonies starved to death in several different locations? Its not the resources that matter as much as the ability and capability to extract something from them.

No matter how large the numerator (the ability), divide by zero (lack of resources) is still an error.

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

#388

Post by nickik »

serf wrote: post #280
wurst_case wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason PayPal is ignored by most people is two reasons. 1. In its current form, it has less resemblance to what he wanted to do with it (its a better product because of this fact) and 2. He famously found the biggest hurdles for humanity and their solutions after selling PayPal and becoming a multi millionaire with nothing but time to spend it. Originally he wanted to put a mini greenhouse on mars as a media stun…

>The reason PayPal is ignored by most people is two reasons. You forgot the most important one. 3) PayPal is a huge PR nightmare, a pseudo-bank that sits between legal boundaries whenever it needs to in order to maximize profit, screwing over thousands of folks -- many of them with small businesses that foolishly relied on them as a service. A successful service that everyone uses, and most people hate -- the custome…

PayPal is a nightmare but the reason is that banking and other innovation was so slow. Even if you don't like it, it still solved a massive problem in the internet, or at least made it more possible.

You can say PayPal is bad, but pretty much any company starting on that path run in many of the same issues.

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

#389

Post by nickik »

alaskamiller wrote: post #268
HALtheWise wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Elon is new Steve Jobs is the new Jesus. Anyone can foist one's own unbridled ambitions, mixed in with a dash of lottery dreaming, tossed in with a bit of hubris, to come up with whatever the bright shiny future could be.

He is not really like Jobs at all. Jobs created nice end user devices and that pretty much all he did. Other then some personal things people like to focus much of their process and goals are vastly different.

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

#390

Post by JetSpiegel »

gleenn wrote: post #276
alaskamiller wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon is new Steve Jobs is the new Jesus. Anyone can foist one's own unbridled ambitions, mixed in with a dash of lottery dreaming, tossed in with a bit of hubris, to come up with whatever the bright shiny future could be.

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

Jesus's exit dwarfs Jobs and Musk combined.

The company is more resilient than Oracle, it was left for dead for centuries, but it's still around.

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