Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

yahoo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 111 posts

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

#41

Post by apical_dendrite »

sharkjacobs wrote: post #4

[flagged]

> Do companies run by Elon Musk violate ethical and environmental regulations much more often than other similar companies, or does it just seem that way as a casual news reader because it is more worthwhile for outlets to publish a story when it happens?

He's contemptuous of regulators, doesn't care about his or his company's reputation (or at least negative publicity doesn't seem to change his behavior, although he whines when people criticize him), has an extreme tolerance for risk, knows that he has unlimited resources to fight off lawsuits and regulators, has donated vast sums of money to the current president, and at least at Twitter, got rid of all the people who were working on safety issues.

So it's not a surprise that there are more ethics violations then at a company where the executives still go by the "don't do anything that would get your name in The New York Times" rule.

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

#42

Post by rkagerer »

Separate from the fines, why doesn't CCWRD litigate to get their cleanup costs back?

CCWRD says that its crews ultimately had to clean 12 cubic yards of “drilling mud, drilling spoils, and miscellaneous solid waste” from one of its sewage treatment facilities due to Boring’s discharges across two of its project sites

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

#43

Post by hvb2 »

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.

Profit margin? What a weird point of view.

They should just follow the rules, period. And any fine should be larger than the amount of money they saved by their illegal behavior and cover the corrective actions.

Here's a thought experiment. They're tunneling beneath your house and, because they skip all normal precautions, your house collapses. Sure, you don't mind as long as they're fined a decent amount, right?

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

#44

Post by httpsoverdns »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #35
ETH_start wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> That doesn't imply that their journalism is low-quality or inaccurate Anecdote: in some early reporting, I noticed a citation to a paper that didn’t support the purported argument. (It said the opposite.) I emailed the author, one of the founding journalists at Pro Publica and an award winner. He basically thanked me for the feedback and then left the article unchanged. Pro Publica is reputable for a small publicat…

What exactly was thing the subject matter? Was it something he could have reasonably disagreed with?

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

#46

Post by CursedSilicon »

ETH_start wrote: post #30
lelandfe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Don't dump toxic waste into fucking manholes" is "left-wing" now?

You're gonna have a real head spin moment when you find out who founded the EPA!

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

#47

Post by atmavatar »

sharkjacobs wrote: post #4

[flagged]

> Do companies run by Elon Musk violate ethical and environmental regulations much more often than other similar companies

This strikes me as a completely wrong-headed take on it. It's not OK for one company to do this merely because others do the same or worse. I'd much prefer no companies violate ethical and environmental regulations.

I applaud the exposé not because of Elon's political leanings or even because he's involved with the company at all, but because I hope it's at least a little push towards the company behaving better. Should there be other companies requiring similar exposés (and I think we all there are), I look forward to reading them if/when Politico or some other journalist outlet publishes them, regardless of the political affiliations in the offending companies' leadership.

I don't quite understand this mentality that it's not OK to investigate or otherwise bring justice to organizations considered right-leaning until it's been exhaustively proven no organization on the left is at least as bad.

If you don't want right-leaning companies being the first in the crosshairs, maybe join the team and convince them from the inside that flagrantly violating the law in front of the very inspectors sent to verify legal compliance only to resume doing it the moment they believe said inspectors left but without verifying it is really stupid.

If you have a large number of corporations breaking the law, you have to start your investigations somewhere, and the company with the giant neon sign saying "we're breaking the law!" is as good a spot to start as any.

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

#48

Post by hvb2 »

ETH_start wrote: post #30
lelandfe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why does left or right even matter? This is ordinary stuff that should be covered?

If you've read the article, you can see how

- they were told to stop, and refused

- lied about what they did to make the problem look smaller

- reversed corrective action as soon as they thought the inspectors left

This has nothing to do with bias. A right wing outlet should've covered this too. They might have used some different words but I don't see how this can be anything other than intentional. In the end their own legal department had to step in and acknowledge that they won't do any other projects before putting in remediations.

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

#49

Post by shakna »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #27
bamboozled wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't [0] always work out [1] this way.

But it does seem like a consistent theme across civil wars - when the divide between a ruling class and the average is too large, then something violent eventually happens [2].

Lets hope we rebalance before reaching the point where everyone loses, this time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Revolution

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring

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

#50

Post by throwworhtthrow »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #35
ETH_start wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> That doesn't imply that their journalism is low-quality or inaccurate Anecdote: in some early reporting, I noticed a citation to a paper that didn’t support the purported argument. (It said the opposite.) I emailed the author, one of the founding journalists at Pro Publica and an award winner. He basically thanked me for the feedback and then left the article unchanged. Pro Publica is reputable for a small publicat…

Be specific. Which article and which citation? Otherwise this is insinuation or even slander.

Edit to add: what you've done here is defame every member of the ProPublica staff, past and present (because you don't name a particular writer or article). There is no way for anyone from ProPublica to refute this.

If you want to critique ProPublica honestly, quote a particular statement they've published.

Post reply on HN