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Elon Musk Is Really Boring (bloomberg.com)
Sometimes it is hard to tell if Elon Musk is serious about the things he says. But as for his "boring" claims, that's really happening. In a wide-range interview with Bloomberg, the billionaire talked more about his new venture, The Boring Company. The idea began on a Saturday morning a few weeks ago when Musk tweeted, "Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging..." Over the course of next few hours later, Musk added, "It shall be called 'The Boring Company,' Boring, it's what we do. I am actually going to do this. Excerpts from the story: And so, around noon on a Friday in January, an excavation crew started digging. "I was like, 'Hey, what's the biggest hole we can make by Sunday evening?'" Musk says. [...] "My other idea was to call it Tunnels R Us and to essentially troll Toys "R" Us into filing a lawsuit," he says, letting out a loud and well-articulated ha-ha-ha-ha. "Now we've decided to troll AT&T instead! We're going to call it American Tubes and Tunnels." When I ask him if the tunnel venture will be a subsidiary of SpaceX or an independent company, he responds cryptically. "Don't you read my Twitter? The Boring Company. Or TBC. To Be Continued." An aide chimes in: Yes, the Boring Company, aka To Be Continued, aka Tunnels R Us, aka American Tubes and Tunnels, aka whatever, will indeed be an independent company. Tunnel technology is older than rockets, and boring speeds are pretty much what they were 50 years ago. Musk says he hopes to build a much faster tunneling machine and use it to dig thousands of miles, eventually creating a vast underground network that includes as many as 30 levels of tunnels for cars and high-speed trains such as the Hyperloop. Musk chose the SpaceX parking lot as the site of his first dig, mostly because it was convenient and he could legally do so without city permits. The plan is to expand the current hole into a ramp designed for a large tunnel boring machine and then start digging horizontally once the machine is 50 feet or so below ground, which would make it low enough to clear gas and sewer lines and to be undetectable at the surface. 100 marks to Bloomberg for the headline, and the story which is as funny as it is insightful.
Between making SpaceX & Tesla profitable - or cutting the cash losses - and raising 5 kids, don't you have enough already on your plate?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Before all the sour-pusses have their say, I want to say this: good on him.
Will it work? No idea, but at least he's trying. And betting against Musk is always risky.
Is he crazy? Since he has so much money, and since he's not destructive, no, he is not crazy, he's eccentric.
As long as you leave other competent people in charge of the project, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
He's already going to space.
If he gets to build up digging know-how, he'll be the first to actually make a shitload of money off asteroid mining.
Best part: r&d possibly largelgy paid for by public money (first NASA, and maybe now he can acceds some infrastructure funds or public contracting for the boring part)... That's one hell of a way to hack the system. Go him! :-)
At least he's able to get things started and then bring in the people to see his projects to fruition. SpaceX is moving along nicely. Tesla cars are on the roads. If only 50% of his projects take-off he's doing well.
We need innovative people like him to really shake things up, even if he does get bored and move on to something else before his projects fully reach completion.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Except that they don't. Apart from their batteries, they have created exactly nothing that is fully functional or immediately useful (not that it has stopped them from bringing their half-baked cookies to market).They are a ludicrously well-funded high school science fair project, and it's really getting old. Just go away, Elon, you've cried wolf enough. Even Google, the kings of vapor and abandonware are going, 'WTF?'. I feel for young people that don't know what the world was like before the rise of clowns like Musk. You absolutely *should* demand better. He isn't brilliant, just surrounded by sycophants like all the others. Simply put: he's definitely unhinged, and he is a loser.
You can either talk people down or rise to their level.
Think well before you choose.
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A "mild" case of having an extra chromosome? Is that like a mild case of losing a leg?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Solutions like this are classic examples of tech-rich people thinking they have all the answers when there's a whole bank of qualified specialist people already working in that field who know what's really needed to fix the problem but have only been stymied by politics.
If traffic is driving Musk nuts then the solution is not to find innovative new ways to handle more traffic. The solution is to ask why is traffic so bad in the first place.
Recommended reading: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jacobs
Or if that's too heavy, try Suburban Nation: The rise of sprawl and the decline of the American dream.
Only then will you come to see the culprit: Single Use Zoning, aka the BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) rules. Single-use zoning forces everybody to make several car journeys just to get through a typical day. Going to work? Car. Going out for lunch? Car. Going home form work? Car. Need to go out for a bottle of milk and postage stamp? Car. Going to a movie? Car.
No bloody wonder the place is flooded with traffic. You try to build a city around the automobile and it becomes a hostile environment for pedestrians and cyclists. You try to widen roads to accommodate more cars and the laws of induced demand kick in, resulting in even more traffic and roads as choked as they were before.
Learn a few things about urban planning, Elon. Don't arrogantly assume that you're the first person to want to address this problem. Smart growth and sustainable, walkable, transit-oriented development is a far better solution than drilling holes in the ground and cracking puns about the word "boring." It requires years of tedious work and politicking to build support for smart growth. A city is not a private company with which you can do what you like. There are elected councils, public advisory committees, public hearings, tax implications, and all manner of complex bureaucratic hoops that you have to jump through to fix these things.
Drill baby drill - on Mars