Elon Musk

it drives me nuts that in every article the media is not yelling about how all his tunneling/vacuum tube schemes are blatant ploys to disrupt in process public transpo plans

thankfully none of those schemes are going anywhere, at least as far as I know. his CA vacuum tube proposal was laughed out of town.

word. to the extent LA makes any progress on transit and emissions over the next couple of decades it will be in spite of this walking hair plug.

xp

his CA vacuum tube proposal was not laughed out of town. it starts with a proof of concept https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/05/elon-musk-talks-proof-of-concept-tunnel-parallel-to-the-405-in-los-angeles/

you know what would absolutely drive down emissions (and make cities more livable places for humans rather than private property that gets stored in the street): mass adoption of mass transit

I am all for mass transit, but it's not an either/or proposition. CA is both building a bullet train and investing in EV infrastructure, both are driven by state mandated GHG reductions goals.

*takes .25 hits of acid* what if a subway for cars?

The company has buy-in from LA Metro, the city's public transportation provider. In a short, tweeted statement Thursday evening, LA Metro announced: "Metro leadership and CEO Phil Washington had a great meeting today with the talented staff of the @boring_company. They will coordinate with us as they move ahead with their proof of concept tunnel under Sepulveda Boulevard to ensure it doesn't interfere with our Sepulveda Transit Corridor rail project. We'll be partners moving forward."

jfc LA is so stupid. Doesn't help that they have utility that doesn't give a fuck about GHG emissions.

it is an either/or proposition if the EV business, to the extent it exists right now, is intentionally (and successfully) doing political and practical harm to harming urban mass transit efforts in southern california.

typos, but you get my point (which, for the avoidance of doubt, is that this guy a bad)

cars are bad throw them all into outer space

everything this guy does from when he wakes up to when he goes to bed harms that goal

Tesla's customers are among the least likely to embrace public mass transportation for their own use, whether Tesla existed or not.

LA metro is an exceedingly dysfunctional organization, but i'm not sure that has to do with LADWP

LADWP is just the worst, they are deliberately dragging their feet on solar storage permits as well

to be absolutely clear, the issue with musk vs. mass transit is not people buying teslas, whether or not they would have otherwise taken transit ---- it's elon musk launching cockamamie faux-transit boondoggles that drain resources, energy, and attention away from projects that would actually transport large numbers of people reliably.

I am positive you're right about the cockamamie part. As to whether any of these boondoggles have actually drained any significant resources in their direction I am skeptical.

I was just complaining about LADWP in general, they are a terrible utility. idk what their relationship to LA Metro is, but other utilities (and public utilities, like SMUD) are way more aggressive with figuring out how to incentivize activities, including those in the transportation sector, to reduce emissions. how that ties in specifically with mass transit can vary, but I know there are programs, that hand out cash to transit agencies to convert their fleets to electric buses or install EV charging stations in their parking lots, for example.

xxp

As to whether any of these boondoggles have actually drained any significant resources in their direction I am skeptical.

the LA Metro-approved thing hasn't yet, but if they start handing money to Musk then that's a different story

the drain is hard to measure in most cases. imo we'd have to count e.g. newspaper page space and city council meeting time devoted to considering his transit-sabotaging nonsense instead of getting down to brass tacks on schemes that would actually transport large numbers of people (and take large numbers of cars off the road) and that'd be hard to quantify. but we don't really have to delve that deep: chicago has selected his stupid company to build and operate a line to the airport! please see this article for a quick breakdown of the boondoggle.

It is vital that everyone keep saying cockamamie and boondoggle

American Things.

the main problem i have with tesla is their negative influence on mass transit. it's not just the boondoggles, or god help us actual subsidies (yet). it's that SCAG is making regional planning decisions with significant input from a car manufacturer (one that makes cars that are incrementally, not qualitatively better for the atmosphere, and are no better for the urban environment).

also, i'm realistic about the likelihood of this happening in the US, but there are places in the world where people who can afford (and actually own!) teslas also ride the bus. yes, tesla owners are not the first people you'll see on the current US mass transit system if they made it more reliable. but the reasons why mass transit does effectively serve the wealthy (and politically influential) in this country are more political than practical.

LADWP doesn't have a relationship with LA metro that i know of.

btw i feel like there's an implicit thing here that LA is a dysfunctional basket case and the rest of the united states doesn't need to worry about it, or that it's not predictive of what could happen elsewhere. 1. the socal metro is 20m people and a lot of people are moving there. 2. it's not *that* badly run. like at least they build housing.

arglebargle also acceptable

xp

(one that makes cars that are incrementally, not qualitatively better for the atmosphere, and are no better for the urban environment).

see, whether or not they are better qualitatively for the atmosphere depends on where they're drawing their power from on the grid. An EV in Alameda, which is served 100% by renewable power, is definitely reducing emissions, because that's one less car burning gas. But an EV in LA, drawing power from LADWP's bizarre ass mix of out-of-state coal and natural gas and god knows what else, is actually probably *worse* than a gas-powered car.

you probably know this

there is also the impact of pursuing policy that envisions a car-oriented urban environment, which A) facilitates the daily use of countless gas-powered vehicles that massively outnumber any electric cars on the road and B) is massively more carbon-intensive just on the sheer quantities of asphalt and concrete involved, even if the cars were all yanked from the road.

xp

right, LADWP is bad news, and southern california is in many ways an ecological superfund.

which makes the fact that musk concentrates his efforts here even worse!!

So you guys are blaming Musk for bad public transportation and coal-burning power plants? You know he runs a solar company, right?

I should probably just keep my mouth shut. He is obviously a jerk with a messiah complex - I get it. But, to me, he still seems like he's trying to change the world in a good way. I don't agree with a lot of things he's done (union-busting, starting dumb-ass fights on twitter, being, by all accounts, a total jerk boss), but I'm still happy that he's making things like electric cars and solar roofing and order-of-magnitude-cheaper rocket launches happen.

"runs"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimcollins/2018/06/22/teslas-constant-turmoil-cant-hide-the-fact-that-solarcity-is-dying/

Solar City itself was nothing more than a tax scam, maxing out customer roofs with extra panels they didn't need so the company could rake in that tax credit cash.

and the roofing is a scam too, total vaporware

the fact that he has spent some of his mostly accidental fortune on green tech is just him grabbing onto a trend and trying to capitalize ahead of the rest of the market incumbents. It has absolutely nothing to do with him giving a shit about other people or the world.

yeah SolarCity is a disaster due to mismanagement/overextension (sound familiar?)

So you guys are blaming Musk for bad public transportation and coal-burning power plants?

i guess i'm blaming capitalism for creating incentives to make a shitty situation worse.

I predict there will be a zipline from the top of the Sears Tower to Midway before there is a $25 hyperloop from the city to O'Hare.

All this dummy does is talk about hypothetical tunnels and tunneling.

Tunnels not his strong point. And mini submarines.

we are trapped inside Cars 2

Lightning McQueen is on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel

the pistachio ice cream was wasabi paste and we ate it up

and the roofing is a scam too, total vaporware

― sleeve, Wednesday, September 5, 2018 2:05 PM (fifty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yuup does not actually exist, wed all be better off if the tech media only covered irl products not press releases

e.g. just today. pretty generous of the press to call this a "production vehicle".

this is literally an empty body shell. there's not even a working prototype of this thing yet and people are sharing spec sheets https://t.co/o3NLCPPdR8

— Michael T Sweeney (@mtsw) September 5, 2018

lmfao

we are trapped inside Cars 2

― for i, sock in enumerate (Sufjan Grafton), Wednesday, September 5, 2018 11:31 AM (forty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lightning McQueen is on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel

― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Wednesday, September 5, 2018 11:34 AM (thirty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

really great 1-2 here

windshield sunglasses area: 10,000 sq. inches

my 6 year old cousin has this cool toy where you launch cars through a loop-de-loop and into a garage and all the cars look exactly like that

hey man, as long as it's a loop.

relatedly

Pleased my headline/image combo got through pic.twitter.com/T654peazLk

— christhebarker (@christhebarker) September 4, 2018

epic burn

scream that headline while holding a thin slice of whole foods deli ham up to the store lights imo

it drives me nuts that in every article the media is not yelling about how all his tunneling/vacuum tube schemes are blatant ploys to disrupt in process public transpo plans

― sprout god (lag∞n), Wednesday, September 5, 2018 1:14 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

100%

Elon Musk's snake oil being sold so well is an indictment of tech journalism's inability to go beyond 'woah gadgets' and engage with the real world. Not that the real world did better, I remember he was on the Late Show with Colbert's and he talked about nuking the poles of Mars to make it habitable and people were like 'woooh genius' and no one dared asked if it made any sense.

'the boring company' is a good name, gotta give him that