Elon Musk Says 'The Boring Company' Will Launch in China This Month (techcrunch.com) 137
"Elon Musk wants to drill holes in China," reports TechCrunch:
Musk is due to speak at an AI conference, called the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, taking place in Shanghai on August 29-31. Replying to a tweet about the event he announced: "Will also be launching The Boring Company China on this trip."
Another Twitter user chipped into the conversation to ask whether the company would also do underwater tunnels -- to which Musk replied simply "yes"...
Another design that The Boring Company has proposed -- for an ambitious Loop system from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore -- is still on the drawing board, having attracted major safety concerns by failing to meet several key national safety standards, including lacking sufficient emergency exits and not taking note of the latest engineering practices. So perhaps, in looking to expand The Boring Company by taking his spade to the Far East, Musk is hoping for a more accommodating set of building standards to drive an electric truck through.
This week the CEO of the Monorail System in Las Vegas also complained to city planning officials that The Boring Company's proposed route there for three underground tunnels "intersects our existing system route, and it appears the presented tunnel alignment interferes with our existing columns...and creates significant concern regarding both vertical and lateral loads."
Another Twitter user chipped into the conversation to ask whether the company would also do underwater tunnels -- to which Musk replied simply "yes"...
Another design that The Boring Company has proposed -- for an ambitious Loop system from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore -- is still on the drawing board, having attracted major safety concerns by failing to meet several key national safety standards, including lacking sufficient emergency exits and not taking note of the latest engineering practices. So perhaps, in looking to expand The Boring Company by taking his spade to the Far East, Musk is hoping for a more accommodating set of building standards to drive an electric truck through.
This week the CEO of the Monorail System in Las Vegas also complained to city planning officials that The Boring Company's proposed route there for three underground tunnels "intersects our existing system route, and it appears the presented tunnel alignment interferes with our existing columns...and creates significant concern regarding both vertical and lateral loads."
Good news! (Score:2)
It put Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook on the map!
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Good news indeed, if the fElon is going away to China to search for the next boatload of idiots to scam. Hopefully we'll get fewer "news" shitnuggets about his fraudulent schemes here.
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OOH, Rei's gonna get your for that one...
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I think there's a safety issue that Elon (be it with Tesla or TBC, or SpaceX, or anything else) seems to not want to grasp.
- When you want to push a product that you want to standardize on, you fucking put safety on the top of the priority list.
- When you want to push a product that only government and criminals will use, you put security on the top of the fucking priority list.
- Anything else you want to sell, both safety and security have to meet in the middle.
Remember cars were not required to have seatb
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The problem is that their present tunnels are so small in diameter, they need waivers due to not being large enough to provide a refuge area for emergency pedestrian egress. I'm pretty sure "no exposed energized surfaces" is one of the non-negotiable requirements to get a waiver.
There are two work-arounds I know of that are presently used around the world:
1. Divide the powered rail up into segments, and only energize the segment(s) that are directly below the train.
2. Power them with something absurdly low,
Re: Good news! (Score:2)
It definitely increases the cost, but a tunnel is a 100+ year capital investment. Rolling stock is only good for 20-30 years... MAYBE 40-50 with major teardown & refurbishment.
The extra round space at the top & sides isn't exactly wasted... you can run a HELL of a lot of fiber up there & rent it to telcos.
From what I've read, 15-16' is the happy compromise... still fairly cheap, but big enough to spare you from needing exotic (expensive) railcar designs. For example, the railcars used in the nar
Chinese standards (Score:4, Insightful)
"failing to meet several key national safety standards, including lacking sufficient emergency exits and not taking note of the latest engineering practices"
Sounds perfect to open operations in China.
Re: Chinese standards (Score:1)
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No, but they did starve something like 40 million people to death, on purpose. Does that count?
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No, they did not do it on purpose you moron.
It happened in the aftermath of world war II and the revolution.
You had you nice and peaceful revolution in the USA ... but other countries may not have it? Why?
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"Incompetent bureaucratic meddling" is the definition of an accident. If you seriously think that's what "on purpose" means, you must be too enslaved to your political ideology to ever be affected by reality... just like those incompetent meddlers were, and which is why they accidentally killed so many people.
Killing 40 million people on purpose actually takes a hell of a lot of competence. Pol Pot and Hitler did their best but never came close.
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Pol Pot did not have a high enough population available.
And most people did not die on purpose, but starved.
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No, moron, it was 1958-1962, it was called The Great Leap Forward, where communist party 5-year plan, and the inevitable corruption, resulted in as many as 40 million deaths.It led to Chairman Mao's discredit, which he later got even for in the Cultural Revolution.
I thought he was a genius (Score:1, Insightful)
Probably not a wise move, Elon.
How many tunnels before he is undercut by a Chinese company using his technology and techniques? Two? Three?
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He bought the US government. How hard is buying a chinese government. What he's not prepared for is politicians not staying bought. Yes, SpaceX is only suceeding because the Air Force pencil whipped the space rating. Yes, Tesla is losing money in spite of billions, yes billions out of taxpayer pockets to buy sports cars for rich people. Yes, he made his billions through bank fraud, stealing from the working class a paypal "contested charge" at a time. But, we were told to worship him, so the idiot leftists
Re: I thought he was a genius (Score:2, Interesting)
His technology is already off the shelf. This is another grift and a distraction from the fact Tesla wont be able to afford to operate in 2 quarters
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His technology is already off the shelf.
Right, that's why this is a good plan. TBC needs to iterate through several designs. They can do some of them in China, thus getting the Chinese government to help foot the bill for development. They can rotate their engineers through the plants in China to keep them current. Then when they're ready to get serious, they can bring the development back to the USA, get cheered for it (we're bringing jobs home! pause for applause) and not have to worry about wholesale espionage.
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Much like with Tesla and SpaceX, a company managing to copy The Boring Company and make it even cheaper would be the ultimate success. The company was created to solve problems, not to make money.
China has high speed rail (Score:4, Interesting)
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No, they'll steal it, copy it, and then undercut him. Thanks for your donation, Elon, now get out.
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undercut him
Excellent! I see what you did there.
Re:China has high speed rail (Score:5, Interesting)
But China likes homegrown tech so will likely need a local partner to secure deals.
It's not that China "likes" stuff made in China, it's mandated that they meet "self-sufficiency quotas" for their Made In China 2025 initiative [wikipedia.org]. China works like a singular giant business in that China only cares about China which is something they have been very open about.
These are easily verifiable facts.
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> it's mandated that they meet "self-sufficiency quotas" for their Made In China 2025 initiative.
Why worry? Everything is Made in China!
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China is really good at doing big infrastructure projects, especially public transport. They built 3,100km of urban rail, total cost about $1 trillion, in six years.
Be interesting to see where Musk thinks the market is for his tunnels.
Re:China has high speed rail (Score:5, Funny)
Be interesting to see where Musk thinks the market is for his tunnels.
Probably underground.
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Hey kids, wanna buy a tunnel
It fits... (Score:2)
A brief summary of the future: (Score:3, Interesting)
* TBC will pass environmental and safety review, despite what a two-month-old inexplicably-repeated-now TechCrunch article asserts - via (same as pretty much any major project), addressing any expressed concerns by either providing information about plans that assuage said concerns, or via making design alterations. Slashdot will not report on this.
* Slashdot will never bother to mention that the Vegas monorail, complaining about the Boring Company's Vegas tunnel, is a competitor. Nor that TechCrunch and Jalopnik consistantly criticizes literally everything that Musk does, regardless of what it is. Musk could cure cancer tomorrow, and both sides would be lining up to damn Musk for taking too long, for focusing on the wrong type of cancer first, for the cure leading to an upset stomach during treatment, for the choice of the brand name for the medication, and for causing global overpopulation via curing cancer.
* Slashdot posters will bring up Tesla and pretend that a company with $5B in the bank that did +$614M free cash flow last quarter, while growing margins ~2% at the same time as dramatically lowering ASPs, is going bankrupt - and ignore the fact that Tesla controls the lion's share of the global EV industry (now trouncing even BYD - even worse when the comparison focuses specifically on BEVs rather than including PHEVs in the mix), and its share grows every quarter.
* Some AC teenagers will come and try to troll me for writing this.
(I know, playing prophet isn't very difficult. ;) )
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#1: Look at the URL:
https://techcrunch.com/ [techcrunch.com] 2019/05/22/review-of-elon-musks-dc-to-baltimore-loop-system-reveals-safety-concerns/
#2: Read the article:
Mark Harris@meharris / 2 months ago
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1. margins decreased.
You're talking about post-credit margins. I'm talking about pre-credit margins, e.g. the company's unsubsidized costs.
Yes, by all means, let's talk only about liabilities and not assets, only about accounts payable and not receivable. ;) Also, let's totally fail to put numbers into context. Tesla's debt to EBITDA ratio is 9,23 [gurufocus.com]. By contrast, say, Ford's is 87,64 [gurufocus.com].
Good old tax payer funded development abroad... (Score:1)
Nice to see Elon spending American tax dollars in China...
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Actually he desperately wants to spend the money at home, you just won't let him.
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Actually he doesn't... In fact, in just the third quarter of last year he received $713 million in tax payer funded subsidies for Tesla and then turned around and promised to spend over $2,000,000,000 in China while generating $320 million in tax revenues for the Chinese government according to the 10-Q form Tesla filed with the SEC last month.
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Ar... [sec.gov]
But nice job trying to defend facts with mindless fanboy'ing.
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Musk would have to be a spectacular idiot to not expand Tesla into China. The USA is currently the world's largest automotive market, but China is on track to take over our spot.
Evidence shows that Musk is a bit of a dick, but not an idiot.
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That has nothing to do with anything I said... the reality is that he's expanding to China with taxpayer dollars that we're paying him for his development while promising to pay China. We're basically giving him money for him to go to China and give them our money.
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We're basically giving him money for him to go to China and give them our money.
We're actually giving the money to the people who buy the cars, not to Tesla, though Tesla has got to sell credits to less competent automakers. But we're not giving them that money either, the other automakers are.
We're giving that money to the people who buy the cars in order to get them to buy the cars, because we want the EV industry to exist.
There is a better way to make it happen, institute a meaningful carbon tax. That is, charge people enough to fix the carbon they emit. But actually doing that, whi
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That's both factually incorrect and thoroughly idiotic.
First off, the tax credits for vehicles are entirely separate from the money being given to Tesla. You're conflating two separate pools of funds, though the existence of both coupled with their continued losses certainly does further show just how comically bad Tesla is as a company.
Secondly, carbon taxes are nothing but a corrupt money grab which has absolutely no bearing on the discussion at hand. Even if you want to talk about AGW, they're still noth
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Absolutely none of what you wrote refutes what I said. When Americans finish suing Musk in an attempt to stop him spending money on American infrastructure then you can come and talk.
I'm not sure how I qualify as a fanboi, but you without addressing my comment, citing something completely irrelevant, and then name calling have certainly outed yourself as a worthless hater.
Oh wait, they did finish suing him. Thanks to a lawsuit the first tunnel on the LA got cancelled. Good job.
https://youtu.be/nfWlot6h_JM?t [youtu.be]
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What American infrastructure has he funded? His company isn't profitable and he's living on tax subsidies... fanboys like you want to bow to him for spending our money on his projects. The LA tunnel went from his property to his property, that's hardly "American infrstructure".
And I'm not a hater... I actually love Musk as a visionary, he's just a shitty businessman and patriot who's looking to do whatever it takes to get the money to fund his vision, even if that involves robbing taxpayers.
How are they getting to China? (Score:5, Funny)
Taking the direct route to China, or the long way around?
what paper mill civil engineers do they have? (Score:1)
Those objections are about interference are things any competent civil engineer looks at as part of feasibility studies.
Is Musk using people with "engineering 101" book learning but not a shred of experience in civil engineering procedure in the real world?
Re: Please Pray (Score:1, Informative)
It would be a terrible injustice to ban the race and gender that commits the most homicides. But if you did, you wouldn't be banning white men.