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

31–40 of 111 posts

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

#31

Post by acomjean »

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.

A lot of times the businesses are long gone when the cleanup needs to be paid for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund

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

#32

Post by therobots927 »

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?

Corporations are never held accountable in America

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

#33

Post by captainkrtek »

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.

Especially if you donate money to politicians in power, extra perks

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

#34

Post by theptip »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #20
testing22321 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing about this feels revolutionary or even evolutionary. They were trying hard to make a TBM that was faster than the current literal snails pace and cheaper than existing ones. It doesn’t appear they’ve had much success, though I’d rather they tried than just sticking with the status quo forever. > The fact that Teslas can't navigate autonomously even in these controlled, enclosed environments is also quite em…

Were they even trying to redesign a TBM? I think they were just using off the shelf boring machines at a smaller diameter (many tunnels one lane each) because building tunnels wide enough for a highway is exponentially more expensive.

Elon did some napkin math along the lines of “we will make tunnel boring ~10x faster by: 4x lower boring surface area, 4x faster boring because the industry are currently idiots not operating their machines at the limits that physics dictates”. (I can’t remember if there was actually another factor of 2 in there)

Making a much faster TBM was absolutely part of the initial plan.

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

#35

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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

> 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 publication. But they are not authoritative.

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

#36

Post by terminalshort »

viraptor wrote: post #29
PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

They didn't hire an inspector, and they counted each day they didn't hire the inspector as 700 different violations, so I don't really trust their reporting on this.

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

#37

Post by terminalshort »

jcranmer wrote: post #26
jazzyjackson wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Too bad he didn't succeed in killing that $100 billion boondogle.

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

#39

Post by YouAreWRONGtoo »

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.

[dead]

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

#40

Post by YouAreWRONGtoo »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #20
testing22321 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing about this feels revolutionary or even evolutionary. They were trying hard to make a TBM that was faster than the current literal snails pace and cheaper than existing ones. It doesn’t appear they’ve had much success, though I’d rather they tried than just sticking with the status quo forever. > The fact that Teslas can't navigate autonomously even in these controlled, enclosed environments is also quite em…

Were they even trying to redesign a TBM? I think they were just using off the shelf boring machines at a smaller diameter (many tunnels one lane each) because building tunnels wide enough for a highway is exponentially more expensive.

[dead]
Post reply on HN