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Next Big Thing From Elon Musk? It Could Be 'Boring' (usatoday.com)
A string of tweets put out by serial tech entrepreneur Elon Musk on Saturday hints that his entrepreneurial future may be a little "boring." USA Today reports: The Tesla and SpaceX founder got on Twitter on Saturday morning to rant about an issue he seems to find irksome -- traffic. Musk has also been working on resolving his frustration with traffic issues through above-ground means with his Hyperloop venture, which proposes a plan for mass-transit pods moving through above-ground tubes. But that doesn't appear to be enough, commenting: "Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging..." He even offered up a name for the venture, calling it "The Boring Company," and began branding it with a slogan: "Boring, it's what we do." Then capped it off by tweeting, "I am actually going to do this."
Or both.....
Poor guy. What he really needs is a helicopter.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Isn't running:
- A car design and manufacturing company
- A rocket launcher and capsule design and manufacturing company
- A lithium batter design and manufacturing company
- Managing a very high speed mass transportation concept
enough for one person?
It's not like Tesla cars are perfect or that SpaceX launcher's aren't blowing up on the pad and I don't think battery one has come out of SolarCity yet.
Mr. Musk has come up with some great ideas, but I think he needs to keep his (business) interests limited to ensure that they are all successful and outstanding products.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
He's suffering from Shockley/Chomsky syndrome. A smart person that thinks they are smart about things they have no training, knowledge or ability in.
Comes from having their asses kissed too much (sustained by being surrounded by echo chambers, hence Shockley went away, but Chomsky keeps on blathering).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Southern California isn't the best place for a subway. There are currently only two underground subway lines, and they came in vastly over budget - the Metro Red line's original cost estimate was $400 million; it was completed for $4.5 billion. It held the record for the most expensive civic construction project until Boston's Big Dig.
The reason is that SoCal is full of oil. If you visit, you'll see functioning oil pumps scattered around in random places. It bubbles out of the ground naturally in the La Brea Tar Pits, and into the surrounding ocean as underwater oil seeps. When they dug the first tunnels for the Red line, the workers returned the next day to find oil and tar seeping in through the walls of the freshly-dug tunnel. They had to stop construction until they could come up with new ways to hold back the seepage and insure it wouldn't become a problem in the future decades of subway operation. (The Big Dig was expensive because of similar problems, except with seawater seepage.)
Oh yeah, the earthquakes tend to be a problem too. Especially if your tunnel crosses over a fault line.
I think it was Stephen Colbert who made an attempt to describe the Lincoln Tunnel to people who didn't live in New York:
Imagine trying to get that contents of this container of jelly beans into this bucket, putting them all through these two drinking straws...Also, all of those jelly beans are late to work.
A major problem is when accidents happen in tunnels. There is literally nowhere for anyone - including emergency vehicles - to go. Now, accidents in tunnels tend to be of the fender bender variety, but when a vehicle is rendered inoperable, you're just plain screwed. Making tunnels the way roads are built as a general rule is not the best of ideas - it's why subways make more sense as long as the stops can pick up and drop off enough people to nudge the needle of the rest of traffic. Manhattan would be utterly impassable without the subway moving half a million people a day.
Nobody likes traffic, and nobody likes parking. LA has its problems due not simply to cost, but the lack of a useful alternative when dealing when that level of population density independent of a useful mass transit system.