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Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes

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Re: Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes

#21

Post by jazzyjackson »

wyldfire wrote: post #11
AlexandrB wrote: post #5

The Boring Company seems like a total nothingburger at this point. The Las Vegas Loop is not particularly impressive and it's taking a long time to expand it. Nothing about this feels revolutionary or even evolutionary. Just novelty. The fact that Teslas can't navigate autonomously even in these controlled, enclosed environments is also quite embarrassing.

It's an outstanding mechanism to derail public transit efforts, that's all. It's not a nothing burger because that would suggest it's a good faith effort that just didn't pan out.

People like to die vote this because it's apocryphal that the purpose of hyperloop was to sabotage public transit but the motive sure fits the crime, musk ain't in the railroading business.

They even derailed (no pun intended) a train link from Building 37 to O'Hare by offering to build a train station in the cavern already dug for a high speed rail terminal that may exist someday in the future. I don't think they ever did anything there but the city was onboard (damn a lot of idioms are train related huh)

Re: Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes

#22

Post by charcircuit »

bawolff wrote: post #6

How is that only a $500,000 fine??? Stopping when inspectors are there only to restart once they leave is willful enough that you wonder why this doesn't go into criminal liability?

To be fair it's over 3 times the amount of damage they caused, so that is a pretty big profit margin on cleaning up the mess.

Re: Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes

#23

Post by lelandfe »

bawolff wrote: post #6

How is that only a $500,000 fine??? Stopping when inspectors are there only to restart once they leave is willful enough that you wonder why this doesn't go into criminal liability?

ProPublica's reporting has been dogging Boring's heels in Las Vegas on this, I've been reading them religiously. It appears that the city views this project as Cool™ and opts either to not fine or fine pittances for constant violations.

This was their big expose back in January: https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-boring-company-...

Re: Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes

#24

Post by PeterHolzwarth »

bawolff wrote: post #6

How is that only a $500,000 fine??? Stopping when inspectors are there only to restart once they leave is willful enough that you wonder why this doesn't go into criminal liability?

Fines start small, then get big.

Re: Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes

#26

Post by jcranmer »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #21
wyldfire wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an outstanding mechanism to derail public transit efforts, that's all. It's not a nothing burger because that would suggest it's a good faith effort that just didn't pan out.

People like to die vote this because it's apocryphal that the purpose of hyperloop was to sabotage public transit but the motive sure fits the crime, musk ain't in the railroading business. They even derailed (no pun intended) a train link from Building 37 to O'Hare by offering to build a train station in the cavern already dug for a high speed rail terminal that may exist someday in the future. I don't think they ev…

> because it's apocryphal that the purpose of hyperloop was to sabotage public transit but the motive sure fits the crime

Elon Musk told his biographer that the purpose of his Hyperloop proposal was to kill CAHSR. That's not exactly apocryphal.

Re: Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes

#27

Post by XenophileJKO »

bamboozled wrote: post #17
binary132 wrote: post #16

Some of these companies seem to have figured out that you can just do things and get away with it if you don’t mind paying a few fines (maybe “fees” would be a better term??)

Some? This is basically how we let society work now. If you have money, you can do really abhorrent things and just get away with it with almost zero consequence. We have the law and the police setup to protect the rich from any real rebuttal to this status quo so we're locked in.

I guess my question is when was it ever not this way? Seems way better now than in the past.

Re: Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes

#28

Post by [deleted] »

charcircuit wrote: post #22
bawolff wrote: post #6

How is that only a $500,000 fine??? Stopping when inspectors are there only to restart once they leave is willful enough that you wonder why this doesn't go into criminal liability?

To be fair it's over 3 times the amount of damage they caused, so that is a pretty big profit margin on cleaning up the mess.

[deleted]

Re: Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes

#29

Post by viraptor »

PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #24
bawolff wrote: post #6

How is that only a $500,000 fine??? Stopping when inspectors are there only to restart once they leave is willful enough that you wonder why this doesn't go into criminal liability?

Fines start small, then get big.

That's the idea in general, but show us how that applies to this company. They're at ~800 violations https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/elon-musks-boring-compan...

Re: Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes

#30

Post by ETH_start »

lelandfe wrote: post #23
bawolff wrote: post #6

How is that only a $500,000 fine??? Stopping when inspectors are there only to restart once they leave is willful enough that you wonder why this doesn't go into criminal liability?

ProPublica's reporting has been dogging Boring's heels in Las Vegas on this, I've been reading them religiously. It appears that the city views this project as Cool™ and opts either to not fine or fine pittances for constant violations. This was their big expose back in January: https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-boring-company-...

ProPublica is extremely left-wing. That doesn't imply that their journalism is low-quality or inaccurate, but it does suggest that their choice of stories will be colored by that ideological/establishment-friendly bent. You won't see them investigating the political influence exerted by public sector unions for example.

Their X feed gives a pretty clear picture of that:

https://x.com/propublica

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