Move fast and pollute things: the 3M school of business.
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
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do they do that is more impressive than routine tunnels built in cities for the last few decades (or even between different soverign countries under the sea!)?
Their main differentiator is cost. The Boring Company bid $48.7 million for the initial LVCC loop. The total cost to complete it was $53 million. The second cheapest bid was Doppelmeyer Cableliner, which would have built a people mover for $215M. The people mover would have had about 50% more capacity per station, but at 4 times the cost. Tunnel cost is mostly dependent on the volume of material removed, which means…
they also don't exist.
Re: Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, they should be able to walk away from the damages of destruction of property and funerals. They would not be able to walkway from the murder charges. In this scenario disposing of the waste = dealing with the bodies and property damage and digging a tunnel = shooting people within a school. I don't the scenario is a good analog since it was legal to dig the tunnel.
They dumped toxic waste that causes chemical burns into the system which runs to the natural waterways. > Our largest treatment facility, the Flamingo Water Resource Center, ensures wastewater is treated to the highest standard allowing the reclaimed water to be discharged back into Lake Mead. Lake Mead is the drinking water source for more than 95% of the population and businesses in Clark County. https://www.cleanw…
I would assume treating to the highest standard would mean they remove things such as chemicals that cause chemical burns from the water which would mean it doesn't reach the natural waterways.
Re: Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes
#84A $500k fine for someone worth $1T is equivalent to a $0.50 fine for someone worth $1M.
Re: Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes
#85Earlier 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.
The funny thing is, the actual industry is going in the opposite direction, because it turns out that a single big tunnel is in practice cheaper than a bunch of small ones. Conventional deep-bore metro lines consisted of two tunnels about 3.5 meters in diameter, but if you look at _current_ metro projects, the Dublin metro is using a single 10 meter tunnel, the newer Barcelona lines are using a singe 12 meter tunnel...
The expensive bit of building metros isn't actually boring the tunnel, generally, not anymore. It's everything around that; securing a route, the disruption while it's going on, etc etc. So the last thing you want is to have to do it twice.
Re: Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course not. But there are a myriad of wrong-doings from all sectors of the economy. Choosing to focus exclusively on the wrongdoings of interests that are obstacles to the coalition of unions, bureaucracies, and allied media that economically benefit from ever-increasing public spending (from 20% of GDP in 1950 to 38% today) is a case of shaping public opinion by selection.
Pure whataboutism, come on. Yes, other things deserve investigation, but so does this. And there's plenty of right-wing media — in fact I'd argue too much such that there's a lack of balance in US media.
>Yes, other things deserve investigation, but so does this.
I was not trying to imply that this does not deserve investigation. I just thought that it was relevant to point out the agenda or ideological bias of the source because it helps to know these kinds of things.
>And there's plenty of right-wing media — in fact I'd argue too much such that there's a lack of balance in US media.
Journalists are overwhelmingly left-wing in their ideological leanings.
The result is something you could call "silence by selection": investigative reporting on corporate or conservative money is constant, but similar investigations of public-sector unions’ financial pipelines, pensions, and political leverage are almost non existent.
When mainstream coverage discusses "special interests", it targets corporations or billionaires, not the public-sector class which is the single most powerful political bloc in every advanced Western democracy (and which is the reason why every major urban area in the US is controlled by Democrats).
Re: Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
The systematic bias arises from story selection, not from whether a specific investigation is accurate. So I am absolutely not suggesting this story is not accurate or that Boring Company isn't at fault. In the long run selective coverage creates an inaccurate picture of reality: constant stories about private greed, almost none about institutional self-dealing within the state.
Given that the current president is right wing, wouldn't the left have a vested interest in talking about self-dealing in the state? Regardless, we are on a news aggregator here. Whatever selection bias this source has should be counteracted by hn drawing from many sources. At least on the source level. HN is going to of course be biased towards stories hn finds interesting.
>Given that the current president is right wing, wouldn't the left have a vested interest in talking about self-dealing in the state?
If there wasn't a permanent bureaucracy of sorts, then yes, but in this case there is in fact a permanent bureaucracy, what some call the deep state, which is a constant regardless of which party is in power. And this political bloc overwhelmingly supports the Democrats and is threatened by potential cuts from Republicans.
Covering self-dealing within the state would give the Republicans' efforts to cut some of these programs and departments moral legitimacy in the public eye, so left-wing news sources would not do that.
Re: Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
They dumped toxic waste that causes chemical burns into the system which runs to the natural waterways. > Our largest treatment facility, the Flamingo Water Resource Center, ensures wastewater is treated to the highest standard allowing the reclaimed water to be discharged back into Lake Mead. Lake Mead is the drinking water source for more than 95% of the population and businesses in Clark County. https://www.cleanw…
I would assume treating to the highest standard would mean they remove things such as chemicals that cause chemical burns from the water which would mean it doesn't reach the natural waterways.
Why do you assume that society would subsidize your chemical waste processing? Why do you feel entitled to break laws without consequence?
The system is clearly designed to transport and treat typical sewer water and not arbitrary toxic, corrosive, volatile, or otherwise undesirable chemicals from commercial operations, for pretty obvious reasons.
Re: Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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:/…
The Russian and French Revolutions are hardly examples of “a different way” to be pointed to. I’m a Rerum Novarum appreciator personally.
Re: Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pure whataboutism, come on. Yes, other things deserve investigation, but so does this. And there's plenty of right-wing media — in fact I'd argue too much such that there's a lack of balance in US media.
> Yes, other things deserve investigation, but so does this. I was not trying to imply that this does not deserve investigation. I just thought that it was relevant to point out the agenda or ideological bias of the source because it helps to know these kinds of things. > And there's plenty of right-wing media — in fact I'd argue too much such that there's a lack of balance in US media. Journalists are overwhelmingly…
> I was not trying to imply that this does not deserve investigation. I just thought that it was relevant to point out the agenda or ideological bias of the source because it helps to know these kinds of things.
As noble as your intentions may be, it's unnecessary and muddies the conversation if you keep adding cherry-picked information about your view of the politics of those involved.
Also, "left-wing" and "right-wing" are not particularly useful terms as they are ill defined and vary from place to place (e.g. the U.S. left-wing is considered very right-wing in most of Europe).