Indeed! I think the Vegas loop has immense potential. There are many ways we can iterate on this concept. Perhaps we can use bigger cars, in a bus like shape to transport more people at once. Or we could remove the batteries to save cost and weight and supply the cars with an external power source. There is immense potential here and I believe this will revolutionise transport.
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If you know how to do things in decent way. There is no point of doing them poorly. Each large investment should reach previous level if not improve from it. Or have reasonable trade off when not doing that.
Should next time we build say water infra, instead of burying pipes underground we build massive aqueducts to deliver water to each house?
And they will be punished for it, exactly as defined by the law.
A fine that isn't based on income isn't a fine, it's a cost of doing business at the expense of workers, the environment and society at large. 242k, that's peanuts for someone with Musk level wealth.
So you’re angry that fines are not based on income?
I didn’t say anything like at the same time. In my week in Vegas for SEMA from 8am to well after dark it was always jam packed. That’s tens of thousands of riders. What was it like when you rode it?
I’m not in LA so I haven’t ridden it but that’s a moot point to the discussion. Having tens of thousands of drivers over an unspecified time period rather than simultaneously isn’t really a flex imho.
You are 100% correct. It’s small fry right now. You might be shocked to learn the first airplane couldn’t take passengers. Things improve, or at least attempt to. Even if it fails, I’d rather live in a world where new ideas are being tried and tested and not always talking about how good my horse and cart is.
I don’t think most people are arguing against the concept, or even implementation, of the system as developed. Obviously it’s both a publicity stunt and beta test as they learn how to build and operate a tunnel system like this. The concern is that much of the environmental harm that’s being done (according to the EPA) is repetitive , and that The Boring Company (TBC) actively pledged to hire an environmental inspect…
What I think is that environmental review rules are so convoluted that almost any project you would investigate breaks plenty of them. I also don't trust the definition of "environmental" when it comes to environmental regulations. When you hear "environmental" you think dumping toxic chemicals, but in reality environmental reviews have components like a building casting a shadow on a playground for 1 hour a day. And on top of that I don't trust journalists for counts of number of violations. In this case they get to 800 by counting one real violation 700 times:
> The letter also accuses the company of failing to hire an independent environmental manager to regularly inspect its construction sites. State regulators counted 689 missed inspections.
> If only it weren't for those few tweets, it would be successful and done by now. Not what I said. I said he did it to try and kill high speed rail, not that he was solely responsible for its failure. And Musk did a whole lot more than tweet. Just because you are ignorant of the significant evidence that this was (and remains) Musk's goal doesn't mean it isn't true. Ashlee Vance wrote about this way back in 2015: ht…
If he did it for that reason, which he didn't, we all owe him a big thank you for trying to stop that boondoggle before it started.
100 tons/day from NASA https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/asteroid-fast-fa...
Okay, that makes sense. The reading I did indicated that the composition of the man-made mass is very different, and could greatly elevate the amount of certain elements released in the upper atmosphere, like aluminum. Is this not cause for concern?
You are 100% correct. It’s small fry right now. You might be shocked to learn the first airplane couldn’t take passengers. Things improve, or at least attempt to. Even if it fails, I’d rather live in a world where new ideas are being tried and tested and not always talking about how good my horse and cart is.
I would rather live in a world where you do not get to cause hundreds of times more environmental violations than others just because you imagine your new horse and cart idea is way better than cars. You can, in fact, not discharge your sewage and contaminated water into public spaces even if you are trying something new. What a concept.
At no point did I suggest anything like that.
Clearly they broke the law, and will be punished for it as the law demands. Good.
> if you are just shilling for polluting billionaires. What an acidic thing to fling. I want us to build infrastructure. Nowhere did I say we need do whatever Musk says. I want us to use cost-benefit analysis to judge infrastructure projects rather than the heavy moral framing we get a lot.
You need a moral framing for big infrastructure projects, or else that's how you get redlining and the destruction of minority neighborhoods for "urban renewal" and the inner-city highway system. You can't do a "cost-benefit" analysis without some sort of moral system inherent in the costs and the benefits, or else how can you calculate the effects on humans. Your "just the numbers" has its own moral system you are i…
Can't build new infrastructure without destroying what was there previously, so yeah, you actually don't.
Indeed! I think the Vegas loop has immense potential. There are many ways we can iterate on this concept. Perhaps we can use bigger cars, in a bus like shape to transport more people at once. Or we could remove the batteries to save cost and weight and supply the cars with an external power source. There is immense potential here and I believe this will revolutionise transport.
The Boring Company’s mission is in its name. Better boring tools. The Teslas running around inside it are dumb, but that’s almost the point: it’s a PR project. We wouldn’t be talking about it if it were a train. From what I can tell, TBC has failed to revolutionize tunnel-boring machines to date.
How did you reach the conclusion that it is a PR project?
Since Elon Musk is pushing ahead to colonize Mars - and Martian cities will probably be built underground - it is just as likely that he is using this company to develop one of the critical technologies for interplanetary expansion.
>> >Many regulations are terrible and serve as a huge hindrance to innovation What is an example of a regulation that was a "huge" hinderance to innovation? Looking at the past 40 years of the US technological progress and the only thing I seen hindering innovation are the tech companies themselves through monopoly, monopsony, patents, and regulatory capture. (Unless the last one is what you meant, but that's a regul…
– Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform: Intended to stabilize the system post-crisis, but its complex compliance requirements made it difficult for small and mid-sized banks to offer new products or compete with large incumbents. - State by state money transmission licensing: Fintechs like PayPal and Stripe had to get 50+ separate state licenses, creating huge compliance costs and delaying product launches. - FDIC De Novo B…
Thanks for listing these, this is really an impressive compilation. I see how naive I was. I assumed everyone agreed that Dodd-Frank was a great bill, and protection of FCC from being carved up by billionaires was also a good thing. Same goes for keeping drones from filling the skies, and putting guardrails on AI billionaires from running wild and breaking big important things. But clearly political alignment determines what is considered innovation. I think almost all but a few of these regulations are spectacular (except for the broadband one) and don't stifle innovation: they protect us from centibillionaires' greedy, vile nature to take more for themselves at our expense while providing a net negative (e.g., Amazon, Facebook, Oracle, megabanks, cryptobros, Private Equity for medical and insurance, etc.). I can see we are on opposite sides of the political spectrum here.