Have they pushed the boundaries though? As I understand it TBMs have been a thing for a while and plenty of pretty impressive and enormous tunnels have been built in the alps or under seas like the Channel Tunnel or the tunnel section of the Oresund bridge.
This isn't my area of expertise but all I've heard so far were a few test tunnels and the Las Vegas Loop, which isn't lighting the world on fire. I mean if they make it easier + cheaper to build tunnels then I'm all for it. I've just not yet seen anything that suggests TBC is particularly interesting.
The original TBC at the tunnel across the street from SpaceX was a proof of concept that used essentially off-the-shelf tunneling tech so that the team could learn how the current state of the practice was accomplished, and that they could improve on it.
I don't know if you're familiar with tunnel boring (and if you are, sorry I'm explaining something that you probably know better than I do), but essentially the phases of digging, mucking, and reinforcing are not done concurrently, and I think that was the first things they were trying to do, and then move on from there. But yes, smaller tunnels were part of it.
Also, they did not do any real innovation, as you seem to be claiming. Combining those steps is 50-year-old technology, at least, and has been done at scale (ie not on tiny tunnels) many times.
I always thought Boring was a project intended for digging a base on Mars, fitting a whole Tesla in the tunnel would be even more than what's needed to connect some underground habitats.
I'm not sure that's true considering why he was (or the public story of why he was) pushed out of PayPal.
IIRC: He forced a port/rewrite of their platform to Windows (from Unix) that eventually led to a code freeze of the existing platform to allow the port to "catch up" to the existing platform. At the same time, they were hemorrhaging money due to fraud and they couldn't do anything about it due to the code freeze.
1) having money to throw around
2) having big manic swings that make the money seem attractive
Everything else is a hagiography.
I’ll have to go through the book(s) and check out the explanation again.
Except what people in America actually want to do, which is not ride a train outside of novelty.
The trains in the Boston - NYC - DC corridor seem fairly decent and useful, although I’ve only ridden them as a tourist (from Europe).
[1] TCO of an average car is ~$6,000-10,000/year of after-tax money, median US after-tax income is sub-$40,000/year.
The IRS mileage deductible rate is 65 cents/mile, and it's pretty close to operational cost of a vehicle. Parking and tolls and 10,000 miles a year will easily get you to these numbers.
Some call this freedom, but I call this a financial millstone around your neck.
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(Not to mention the mountains of public[1] and private money that get spent on automobile infrastructure, parking offsets, etc, etc.)
[1] Most of which comes from the general tax fund...
Oh, and about $5,000/yr in gas.
Are you in Europe or the US?
My insurance at age 20 with an accident under my belt was under $3,000 a year. My 50k mile Corolla cost less than your annual car payments.
> Oh, and about $5,000/yr in gas.
That's $100 or two sedan sized tanks every week at US prices. At 30 MPG that's over 30,000 miles a year.
Of course this is very situation dependant but under my exact scenario you can probably imagine why I’d spend tens of thousands per year on a car. Of course I don’t, and the number is actually closer to $4k, but even then the time saving makes up for that in like a month.
And I say tens of thousands because car amortization/maintenance, road maintenance, oil subsidies, environmental cost (gigantic) probably clears 4 figures per year easily.
I live in the second largest city in the country.
In order from me to get from north of the golden gate bridge in the SF Bay Area (in Marin) to say, Cupertino, which I did regularly when I worked for Rancher Labs and MariaDB, I'd have had to take 3 separate modes of public transportation which I would need to weave together in a weird way, and was surprisingly expensive. It would also take 4 hours with appropriate adjustments in variation in route timing. Each way. So 8 hours in commute time alone. I didn't even try. The route would have been Home -> Ferry -> Walk from Ferry Building to King St -> Caltrain -> Cupertino'ish, then bus or walk.
OKOK, maybe I should have to live closer to take advantage of the marvels of modern public transportation...
When I worked at Docker, the Golden Gate transit bus stop was right outside of my house (less than a block.) It was $15 each way. The bus ride took an hour+ and dropped me off 2-6 blocks away, depending on the location of the office at the time. So 1.5 hours each way or 3 hours a day + $30 in fares.
Taking the bus was very limiting. Not only did I have to get to the bus at a specific time in the morning, but I had to leave before a certain time at night. What ended up happening was I would take the 5:45am bus, arriving in office around 7:30am and often take the 4pm or 5pm bus back, on average. This was the time I'd get to the office earlier than everyone, work away for a few hours without anyone there, but also leave earlier than most (but arrive home around the same time)
If there was an event in the evening, a spontaneous outing with co-workers, anything, which would happen after work, the busses were no longer running so I had to take the ferry which would take my across the bridge and ask my lovely wife to come pick me up (in a car) from the ferry terminal.
The ferry was shorter in terms of travel time (30 mins across the bay) but you have to get there 15 mins early to park and get in line to board and there's a variation in the schedule. Factor in potential traffic getting to the ferry terminal, and you're leaving to the Ferry 45 minutes prior to departure (for a 30 minutes ride.) So all told it's not much better, all in, but I am already in a car, driving. So no car savings in this scenario.
Even later (past 10pm, oh no!) I'd then I've to call an Uber, and it was incredibly expensive ($120+) in addition to being inconvenient for the Uber driver to have to drive so far away from their normal operating place.
I've tried to like Public transit. It was not time efficient or cost efficient in any way for me personally to do any of this. It was far too constraining, despite the benefits.
I don't think my situation is all too different from most people living outside of a major city or the suburbs of a major city in the united states. Trains and public transportation is definitely not the answer for me. Getting more transportation infrastructure in my area to make it more efficient is not appealing to me in the slightest.
HOWEVER, because of all of this, I am such a huge proponent of remote work. Remote work eliminates all of this shit, and, if you don't want to have a car or commute or have your car on the road, you don't have to.
I've put substantially less miles on all of my vehicles since 2020 as a result of the pandemic and the shift from remote work and I could not be happier. I started my truck and drove it for the first time this year today. That's amazing.
Using public transportation - for me - and a lot of America where population density is LOW in such a case is a waste of time for all of the reasons I listed.
It's not like there's a convenient alternative to be chosen, it's a country where for a lot of people the choice is either to have a car or to starve (by proxy, not being able to get to your job). Doesn't sound much like a choice about what Americans want to do.
This is obviously all the technology that Elon thinks is necessary to colonize Mars, and in each case he's doing the best he can to develop it on Earth. However its usefulness on Earth is a secondary concern.
Think the fact that the engineering problems Musk demonstrated some aptitude for finding solutions to were also vaguely related to his stated aspiration to colonise other planets actually perfectly fits the armchair speculation that Twitter is just an addictive distraction from hard science which he's pursuing out of sheer hubris, not because of any grand vision but because he said he could do better than the people in charge and people liked his posts
But, then again, "woke mind virus"--the cope, it's real.
Are they doing a better job that anyone else? Also, anything they make appears to have to be paired with Telsa's, which for mass transportation, is literally the stupidest idea ever conceived.
The Boring Company an Hyperloop are just Gadgetbahns to try to convince State and local governments to not make public transportation.
Now, if The Boring Company could make tunnels for cheap and then install real trains, then it might be a game changer but until then, it is not.
- Identifying inefficiencies in an existing technical solution
- Making people do what he wants
The things that Elon is really good at don't necessarily translate to great success in a long-term strategic vision. In a pure engineering discipline, like automotive production or aerospace engineering, they're very useful, but neither one of those things necessarily lends itself toward making a thing that is better or more appealing for the populace at large.
As an example: The Boring Company. The pure engineering problem of "how do I remove mass from the ground and create a tunnel as cheaply as possible" is a great application of Elon's strengths, and a useful problem to work on, because humanity will always need to build tunnels.
Hyperloop, though, is completely f'ing stupid, because regardless of whether an evacuated tube and car system can transport people efficiently or not, almost nobody wants to travel like this, and the entirety of the system is completely inefficient - trains are better in every case and with every metric.
In both TBC and Hyperloop, Elon wanted a thing, and convinced people to do it. It's just that there was no consideration as to whether the thing Elon wanted was useful or not.
This is Twitter. Elon looked at Twitter as a strictly engineering problem. And yes, Twitter was horribly inefficient, as evidenced by the fact that the vast majority of employees were let go and the service mostly continues to function, but my suspicion is that it is riding virtually entirely on H1B employees who are bound to the job else they are forced to leave the country. People will grind themselves to the bone for advancing human spaceflight and (to a lesser extent, maybe) improving alternative energy, but I don't know of any rational person who would do the same for Twitter, even if Elon bills it as the defacto public square.
Not to defend Elon, because I can't, but to be fair, any person reading this, if they had experienced the successes that Elon has in SpaceX and Tesla, fighting and succeeding against all of the naysayers, would have a non-trivial ego. When you combine that with the echo chamber of Elon's fans who treat him like the second coming, and who seem to honestly think that Elon (personally) can fix any problem, is it any wonder that he starts believing some of the bullshit? When he built the sub that led to him calling the rescue diver a pedoguy, and did it because people asked him to, and so many people constantly lauded him with egostroking compliments that he believed he could. And even though he didn't do anything that ended up saving those kids, he was found not guilty of defamation, so he still walked away with a win.
Fast forward 7 years and when he's forced to buy Twitter, he still feels like whatever he does is the right thing, and will do it regardless, and he will convince people under his influence to do what he wants so that he walks away with a win.
So that's a lot of text to say, yes, you're right, it is foolish. He doesn't care, he wants to win, and he'll do anything he can to walk away with a win, regardless of how it impacts anyone else, because ultimately it's not about the people who use the service, it's about Elon feeling good about himself.