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Little Elon had a dream that he will one day walk on Mars. He thought to himself, well why can’t I? All I need is billions of dollars, and rockets (lots of rock

by zaroth 7y ago

Little Elon had a dream that he will one day walk on Mars. He thought to himself, well why can’t I? All I need is billions of dollars, and rockets (lots of rockets), and space ships, and renewable energy, and tunnels, and,... And then Little Elon started a little company during the dot com boom called Zip2 and sold it to Compaq for $300 million. Then X.com which led to PayPal. Then SpaceX, Tesla, and all the rest. It’s anything but “silly”. It’s incredible, it’s aspirational, it’s undeniably impressive. I love that his goal is so audacious as to be entirely implausible, and he keeps taking step by tiny step toward to realization of his mission. And even though the goal may be entirely pointless to 99.999% of humanity, the steps taken along the way are reaping tremendous benefits to our lives and those of future generations. Back to TFA, again I think they are missing the significance of what Boring will be doing here. An underground autonomous system which otherwise would have cost hundreds of millions for $50 million risk free is a perfect win-win for Boring and Vegas. Boring gets a beautiful test bed for a whole array of new tech, and a marketing demonstration of what they can accomplish if all goes well. Vegas saved a boat load of money, and gets a tourist attraction to boot. It’s sad hearing/reading all the comments that this is stupid, just build a train, etc. Because that misses entirely the point that while this deployment could be served by a train the bigger vision is not one that could be served by trains, and the whole point, like everything Elon does, is to take a step on the path toward the Big Vision in a way that provides incremental value that can be monetized in order to fund and drive future R&D.

bongobongo 7y ago
Yikes, dude. I'm sorry, but Elon Musk is just a guy with money. He's not a demigod. He's not a genius. He's not even a captain of industry. He's just a rich guy playing with money and and building a personal brand. I'm not saying that he doesn't have ideas, and that some of those ideas aren't the totally self-serving delusions of a rich dickhead, but a good many of them are, and I certainly don't want any part of "the path toward the Big Vision" of some rich dickhead. Seriously, buddy. Listen to yourself. You just described "the path toward the Big Vision" of some unelected billionaire as if it were some form of spiritual revelation or ideological telos.
- embwbam 7y ago
  I'd like to live in a world where rich dickheads act more like Musk and do cool things. It's like living in a comic book. It's fun. But that's not our way forward. Forget the billionaires, we need to assemble, reinvest in our political system, and start building a better future from the ground up.
  - jimmaswell 7y ago
    > But that's not our way forward. Forget the billionaires, we need to assemble, reinvest in our political system, and start building a better future from the ground up. Good luck with that. For now people like Musk and Gates are doing a pretty good job of things in various areas though.
    - embwbam 7y ago
      I agree, it looks pretty hopeless sometimes, and I definitely appreciate what Musk and Gates are doing. I’d highly recommend reading “Winners Take All”, as it completely flipped my opinion on this subject. The author argues that giving up and trusting rich philanthropists to fix things further undermines our faith in the political system, requiring us to give billionaires even more power. And it distracts us from the question of whether we should change the system to prevent individuals from having that much power in the first place.
      - indigochill 7y ago
        Although I appreciate the sentiment, I actually think this is impossible. Some people are going to be inherently extremely ambitious. Those people will compete/cooperate and somebody's going to come out on top. Supposing you establish a system explicitly designed to stop this from happening, you need someone to enforce that system. Congratulations, you just created a role for the ambitious people to fight over.
        embwbam 7y ago
btilly 7y ago
This is a cool story. But the dream of Mars started later than that. In fact if the Russians had been willing to sell the dot com billionaire some rockets for his publicity stunt of getting a plant to Mars, SpaceX would have never been formed.
computerex 7y ago
> An underground autonomous system which otherwise would have cost hundreds of millions for $50 million risk free is a perfect win-win for Boring and Vegas. How do you think the boring company is going to be able to achieve these cost savings? If this system is otherwise going to cost hundreds of millions how the hell is the boring company going to achieve orders of magnitudes improvement?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- zaroth 7y ago
  For now, Boring company uses the $50mm to subsidize their R&D cost as they move up the “learning curve” toward the realization of an order of magnitude in cost savings. I would guess the engineers at Boring have a list of a hundred things they think they could do differently that would lower overall cost. I imagine the biggest ROI is automation which removes humans from the vicinity and therefore the presumably huge cost of allowing humans to safely coexist with the machine while the tunnel is being dug. Boring will surely spend a lot more than $50mm building this thing in Vegas. Investor dollars (which in this case I think is mostly checks from Elon) make up the rest. But rather than subsidizing glorified taxi rides like investors in Uber/Lyft where the learning curve is questionable, here the theory is there’s a lot of learning to be done in construction of a reusable and highly automated boring machine that isn’t just entombed in the tunnel at the end of the project. I think the biggest cost savings initially is smaller bore tunnels using much smaller scale transport pods (e.g. reworked Model 3s). Also, who else would be able to develop the custom small scale transport pods or the autonomous software that they will run on for just this project? Elon has access to all the Tesla IP as a starting point. They can build TM3s without the steering wheel or pedals pretty easily, and they already demo’d the software for driving in the tunnel. Handling the pickup, drop off, and coordinating multiple vehicles I’m sure is not trivial but depending on exactly how they design the loading/unloading zones could be contained. I’m just as interested as anyone in how they will be handling safety, and particularly what happens when a vehicle ends up stopped midway in the tunnel.
  - 7y ago

by zaroth 7y ago

bongobongo 7y ago

Yikes, dude. I'm sorry, but Elon Musk is just a guy with money. He's not a demigod. He's not a genius. He's not even a captain of industry. He's just a rich guy playing with money and and building a personal brand. I'm not saying that he doesn't have ideas, and that some of those ideas aren't the totally self-serving delusions of a rich dickhead, but a good many of them are, and I certainly don't want any part of "the path toward the Big Vision" of some rich dickhead. Seriously, buddy. Listen to yourself. You just described "the path toward the Big Vision" of some unelected billionaire as if it were some form of spiritual revelation or ideological telos.

embwbam 7y ago
I'd like to live in a world where rich dickheads act more like Musk and do cool things. It's like living in a comic book. It's fun. But that's not our way forward. Forget the billionaires, we need to assemble, reinvest in our political system, and start building a better future from the ground up.
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  > But that's not our way forward. Forget the billionaires, we need to assemble, reinvest in our political system, and start building a better future from the ground up. Good luck with that. For now people like Musk and Gates are doing a pretty good job of things in various areas though.
  - embwbam 7y ago
    I agree, it looks pretty hopeless sometimes, and I definitely appreciate what Musk and Gates are doing. I’d highly recommend reading “Winners Take All”, as it completely flipped my opinion on this subject. The author argues that giving up and trusting rich philanthropists to fix things further undermines our faith in the political system, requiring us to give billionaires even more power. And it distracts us from the question of whether we should change the system to prevent individuals from having that much power in the first place.
    - indigochill 7y ago
      Although I appreciate the sentiment, I actually think this is impossible. Some people are going to be inherently extremely ambitious. Those people will compete/cooperate and somebody's going to come out on top. Supposing you establish a system explicitly designed to stop this from happening, you need someone to enforce that system. Congratulations, you just created a role for the ambitious people to fight over.
      - embwbam 7y ago

btilly 7y ago

This is a cool story. But the dream of Mars started later than that. In fact if the Russians had been willing to sell the dot com billionaire some rockets for his publicity stunt of getting a plant to Mars, SpaceX would have never been formed.

computerex 7y ago

> An underground autonomous system which otherwise would have cost hundreds of millions for $50 million risk free is a perfect win-win for Boring and Vegas. How do you think the boring company is going to be able to achieve these cost savings? If this system is otherwise going to cost hundreds of millions how the hell is the boring company going to achieve orders of magnitudes improvement?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
zaroth 7y ago
For now, Boring company uses the $50mm to subsidize their R&D cost as they move up the “learning curve” toward the realization of an order of magnitude in cost savings. I would guess the engineers at Boring have a list of a hundred things they think they could do differently that would lower overall cost. I imagine the biggest ROI is automation which removes humans from the vicinity and therefore the presumably huge cost of allowing humans to safely coexist with the machine while the tunnel is being dug. Boring will surely spend a lot more than $50mm building this thing in Vegas. Investor dollars (which in this case I think is mostly checks from Elon) make up the rest. But rather than subsidizing glorified taxi rides like investors in Uber/Lyft where the learning curve is questionable, here the theory is there’s a lot of learning to be done in construction of a reusable and highly automated boring machine that isn’t just entombed in the tunnel at the end of the project. I think the biggest cost savings initially is smaller bore tunnels using much smaller scale transport pods (e.g. reworked Model 3s). Also, who else would be able to develop the custom small scale transport pods or the autonomous software that they will run on for just this project? Elon has access to all the Tesla IP as a starting point. They can build TM3s without the steering wheel or pedals pretty easily, and they already demo’d the software for driving in the tunnel. Handling the pickup, drop off, and coordinating multiple vehicles I’m sure is not trivial but depending on exactly how they design the loading/unloading zones could be contained. I’m just as interested as anyone in how they will be handling safety, and particularly what happens when a vehicle ends up stopped midway in the tunnel.
- 7y ago