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The Las Vegas visitors authority on Tuesday picked Elon Musk's tunnel-making startup "The Boring Company" to build an underground "people mover" as part of a massive convention center expansion.
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) board of directors touted its choice as a "monumental decision that will revolutionize Southern Nevada's transportation."
The Boring Company will design, construct and operate a convention center transport system consisting of a loop of express-route tunnels capable of carrying passengers in autonomous electric vehicles at high speeds, according to LVCVA.
Travellers of the Vegas underground are advised to keep an eye out for Deathclaws, Mirelurks, Mole rats, and Feral Ghouls.
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Elon Musk Startup Picked to Build Las Vegas 'People Mover'
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:33AM (6 children)
Wake me up when you manage to show how drilling tunnels is suddenly a... ummm ... groundbreaking scientific or technological achievement (as opposed to just, you know, literally groundbreaking).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Sulla on Thursday March 14 2019, @04:19AM (3 children)
What is so great about Musk is he is the kind of person who would bother to clean, cut, and set the diamond at the side of the trail everyone else has been passing up. By finding a way to turn a profit on old ideas by finding new ways to implement them he is actually doing something to improve society. The way to reduce our carbon footprint is not to start wearing jackboots. You wont get people taking subways and ditching their trucks unless you offer them a better product in return. Musk wanted to drive a luxury electric vehicle and wanted to attempt a fully electric vehicle that was affordable. Like or hate the Tesla, he made it work. Not just vehicles, he is trying to change solar panels so he can sell them to vain people in the suburbs so they turn from something people might want into a fashion statement they must have. He wanted to elevate traffic and the excessive pollution of being stuck on the road longer than needed, so he is trying to find a way to build tunnels for cheaper and do it faster than done before.
Musk is hated because he is doing the right thing, doing the green thing, actually making a difference for the environment, and doing it for profit. Once again, capitalism provides what socialism only dreams. Hearts and minds are better changed with honey than vinegar.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 14 2019, @06:37AM (2 children)
Wake me up when he managed to do it. With "pictures or it didn't happen". 'Cause until now, whatever I saw from The Boring Company was "not-a-flamethrower"s.
Long before Tesla (inc in 2003) and Musk stretching his grubby hand in the pockets of vain upper-middle-class pockets, the Chinese were already doing electric public transport [technologyreview.com] (note the publish time: 2009).
Their first-most contribution to renewables? Driving down the prices of PV panels to under $1/W-installed - I know it, I installed my PV panels in that price range about 8 years ago, in Australia.
You know who is the biggest manufacturer [wikipedia.org] of lithium batteries? /gunther_electric.fortune/">Speaking of innovation [cnn.com] (see the time of the linked: 2009), how does the following sounds to you?
You know what that battery is? The Li Fe PO4 [wikipedia.org] - only 88% energy density of the ones, but they don't catch fire or explode and the charge cycles is humongous.
When it comes to impact on the world, see here at a glance [ft.com] what FT has to say [ft.com].
Are you sure? I don't hate Musk, I'm just calling his bluff (or your misconception).
My point: Musk has done many good things (probably), but "creating electric car", "batteries" and "digging tunnels" are not among them. Stop being blinded by his bling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 14 2019, @07:22AM
Sorry, the "Speaking of innovation" [cnn.com] link corrected.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Thursday March 14 2019, @03:16PM
Hell, the electric car was invented before the internal combustion engine. Nobody alive is claiming to have invented the electric car. What Musk did, was develop an electric car with a range and power to appeal to affluent Americans and Europeans, and proved that it could be manufactured cheaply enough to have a mass-market appeal. Any of the major major car manufacturers could have done the same thing, and we're seeing them begin to do so, but none were interested in leading that charge.
It's not a major technological innovation, but like Apple, his team put together existing technology in a way that had a lot more "sex appeal" than anything else in the market at the time, and in the process created a new
As for tunneling, it seems Musk claims that the 1.14mile test tunnel cost $10 million to dig, which from what I can find is in fact dramatically cheaper than the norm - for contrast, in this post claiming the primary costs for rail tunnels are stations, etc., they compare to the much cheaper cost of a 3km(1.86mile), ~3.9m diameter water tunnel in New York that cost only $134m per mile https://pedestrianobservations.com/2012/04/20/quick-note-how-much-tunnels-really-cost/ [pedestrianobservations.com]
That's a slightly smaller diameter tunnel, at well over 10x the cost per mile. Now, maybe more than 90% of the cost is installing the waterproof lining, but that seems unlikely.
Now it could be that Musk is lying through his teeth about the cost, but while he's overly optimistic about timelines, and a definite showman, I can't think of any examples of him outright lying about technical and economic accomplishments on that scale.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @06:37PM (1 child)
I can dig a tunnel from New York, under the Atlantic ocean, to London at the cost of $1 per mile in the timespan of 3 days.
Okay, that's not true, but it does demonstrate how incremental improvements in efficiency is a major groundbreaking scientific and technological achievement. After all, at its core, a Intel I5-8500 is fundamentally the same thing as the 8086 CPU from 25 years ago.
If Elan Musk can reduce the cost of drilling by half (as an example), it would be a major achievement which could cause people to fundamentally rethink how civil engineering is done.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 14 2019, @09:01PM
Then, wake me up "If Elan Musk can reduce the cost of drilling by half"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford