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The Boring Company [video]

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Re: The Boring Company [video]

#561

Post by oska »

andrepd wrote: post #528
oska wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and still think Musk's ideas are foolish With Musk's established track record I think it's pretty arrogant for anyone to call his ideas foolish. He has achieved things that people thought were impossible or bound to fail. You can say: “I can see this potential problem”, or “I wonder how he's going to deal with this physical limitation” or similar sorts of statements. That's feedback and analysis given with respect.…

So because he has a "track record" of founding companies that achieved impressive feats he it's now forbidden to call out his ideas as foolish?

> it's now forbidden

I dislike this sort of miscasting of what I just said. I'm a very strong proponent of free speech and the right of anyone to say anything. But with my support for free speech comes a commitment to try to be considered and careful in what I personally say and I'm encouraging others to do the same in this particular context. You can take it or leave it and of course you can go on calling him foolish if you like. Musk doesn't probably care a whole lot and in the end, I would say that the negativity simply reflects back on you.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#564

Post by tigershark »

stupidcar wrote: post #283
naravara wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hilariously so even. This is basically a subway system, except you have to provide your own seats. All this is succeeding in doing is making Musk look hilariously out of touch.

He may well be out of touch, but at least Musk's suggesting a real solution to current transit problems, even if it's impractical. On the other hand, whenever I read stuff by politicians and engineers with real knowledge and influence in this field, I'm astonished by the total lack of vision. Even in London, where you have a major, successful transport engineering project (Crossrail) completing, and an entire city de…

What? TfL has no ambitions? The crossrail is the biggest construction project in the whole Europe, and it is still not finished and they are already planning for the crossrail 2 that will be started in the next 3-4 years. These are huge projects, much more important than Musk proposal that in London would have been simply ridiculous given that the crossrail alone will move 200 million people per year. If they went for the proposal discussed here instead London congestion would have exploded given the abismally low capacity of this boring company project.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#565

Post by crush-n-spread »

rayiner wrote: post #551
Xcelerate wrote: post #377

It's amazing to me the amount of negativity directed toward his projects and the millions of reasons people give for why they "won't work" (not necessarily on HN, but at least on general news websites). I'm starting to believe the only difference between those who start their own companies and those who don't is that the latter convinces themselves that it is impossible, never builds anything, and from their own lack…

Engineers skew rational. They know that most ideas won't work. It's like aspiring actors or singers. Statistically, any given aspiring actors or singers won't become famous. The existence of Tom Cruise or Taylor Swift doesn't change that. Think about the dozen articles you read every day about some promising lab result or prototype that. How many of them do you ever hear about again? Meat-space engineering is hard. I…

I don't really get the point of this comment. I'm also early 90's and I'm wondering why you're not more heavily for or against either side. You're living in an insanely fast paced world where, in 50 years, we will either be dead and roasted in Earth-Venus, or we will have carbon sequestration figured out and be on Mars. We need engineers to get option two, and you being neutral increases the chances of Earth-Venus.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#566

Post by axlprose »

lojack wrote: post #492
jblow wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, identifying risk is important. But thinking one can "identify risk" as some random dude posting on Hacker News, criticizing a guy with a lot of experience running cutting-edge tech companies that make stuff like cars and spaceships (ACTUAL tech, not these lame web sites that people call "tech" these days), is ... well, delusional would be a polite word for it.

Not sure I agree with you. I'd expect most of the users of this site would actually do a pretty good job identifying risks. The delusional part is probably assuming Elon Musk hasn't already thought through these risks, along with plenty more we aren't thinking of.

And here we have one of the most reasonable answers in this thread. It's not about the utility of identifying risks, it's the plausibility of someone as knowledgeable as Musk putting his money and name on the line without having already considered a lot of the things some random group of strangers on an online forum would've thought up in a couple hours.

On the contrary, it seems more likely that Musk would've not only thought about risks already for more than a couple hours, but that he would've consulted a lot of domain experts about such things before even deciding to take on such a project. Even the most optimistic business person isn't naive enough to take on something they see as a sure bet to fail. Not to suggest that there haven't been entrepreneurs attempting silly businesses before, but rather that one should pause and think about the possibilities of how something might work, before jumping to the conclusion that they already understand everything there is to know about a project, and that it definitely won't work.

As another comment mentioned elsewhere in this thread, a good entrepreneur's main skill is being able to figure out some unique/unorthodox way to make something work, and capitalizing on that. Now, that doesn't mean that everyone opposing these ideas are wrong or don't know what they're talking about, it just goes to show that a lot of people's default state is one of risk-aversion.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#567

Post by nickjarboe »

mirimir wrote: post #515
whack wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking the wrong question. There are over a hundred million Americans who commute long distances in their car. Mostly because they live/work in areas that aren't dense enough to have good last-mile public transit, and they don't want to deal with transfers. You can lecture them all you want, but ultimately, these people aren't going to downgrade their lifestyle just to fit your ideas of engineering efficiency.…

> Mostly because they live/work in areas that aren't dense enough to have good last-mile public transit, and they don't want to deal with transfers. Well, suburbanization was a totally dumbass move. Maybe instead of building tunnels, we could be rebuilding cities. We could be designing them to be attractive enough that people would want to live there.

When a city in America is destroyed by a nuclear explosion, Americans will re-learn why suburbia was so popular. Hopefully this won't happen for a long time and we will have a good stretch of city living. I love cities, but having millions of people concentrated enough to be killed by a single device; this is very different world than the one humans evolved in.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#568

Post by Kutta »

andrepd wrote: post #528
oska wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and still think Musk's ideas are foolish With Musk's established track record I think it's pretty arrogant for anyone to call his ideas foolish. He has achieved things that people thought were impossible or bound to fail. You can say: “I can see this potential problem”, or “I wonder how he's going to deal with this physical limitation” or similar sorts of statements. That's feedback and analysis given with respect.…

So because he has a "track record" of founding companies that achieved impressive feats he it's now forbidden to call out his ideas as foolish?

You know about the word "evidence"?

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#569

Post by saosebastiao »

closeparen wrote: post #519
selectodude wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If subways are already as tight as sardine cans, how would giving everybody in that train a full car full of room even be the slightest bit possible? There just isn't enough physical room in the tunnels for that.

Running at the proposed 100+ mph should provide the necessary throughput (and actually require seating - have fun with those g s while standing).

The problem is that there are diminishing throughput returns to velocity. You need massive amounts of duplicated track for that to be feasible...on and off ramps for every entrance and exit. On and off ramp lengths grow exponentially relative to target velocity. That might be fine for long distance travel, where on and off ramps can be concentrated in few locations...urban travel not so much.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#570

Post by datahack »

Well if you figure a mile of urban freeway in an urban area is an easy 5 million per mile which makes it about a thousand bucks a foot. That doesn't include annexation or planning, just construction.

A tbm can make a tunnel for 19k a foot in the right environment (https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-high-tech-low-cost-world-of...), but that cost is dropping as more and more tbm projects since 2000 have driven the costs down.

So basically it's 20x as expensive to bury a highway as it is to build one on the surface.

Ok.

But, when you look deeper, in urban areas there just aren't rights of way available to put new highways, and so you have huge slow costs that grind out projects. In addition, if you can find a place to put one, they are... ready... usually public infrastructure.

This is a private highway... private highways are a good idea. Take a look at https://mises.org/library/privatization-roads-and-highways

This is a bet on free market roads. That is a big bet, but goodness it's not a naive one.

I feel like Elon has some kind of cache of historic photos and documents from the late 60s and early 70s that he is just pulling pages out of.

Anyways, 20x more expensive is very doable and these roads could operate profitably in urban areas (and that's the opening, current cost). Oh, and the son of a gun bought a used tbm, which will save gobs of the cost. Oh, and it's for a ton of jobs (the cost of acquiring the Tbm is a large part of the cost of tunnels), and there is going to be a glut of tbm inventory in coming years.

Add it all up, and it sure isn't a "dumb idea" in some kind of intrinsic, obvious fashion.

Seems like a good bet actually.

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