The Script Boring Company Drivers Have to Recite About Musk
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
Worth remembering that these drivers are just workers, so trying to catch them in a video saying something silly or off-script probably won't affect Boring or Tesla but it could result in some blowback for the driver for not learning her/his lines or trying harder to stick to the script. I think the idea behind this Las Vegas Loop is pretty stupid and I kinda hope it fizzles out, but that's no reason to mess with a person's living while it's up and running.
It's degrading for the employees, it's like telling them "see, we can't replace you with robots yet, but until then please act like robots or else".
It's a real person just like you with hopes and dreams and everything.
I feel that people have been playing too much video games as kids.
This from a company that claims they have Full Self Driving on a closed course with no external factors or weather. Why are the Teslas in the loop not self driving? This is a private course, no government regulation like on a public road.
"The vehicles used on the Loop system are in fact banned from using driver aids, with Clark County officially outlawing their use anywhere in and around the facility. Even common features like automatic emergency braking and lane keeping are required to be disabled."
Doesn't make any sense to me. Are Teslas driving on the road in Clark County unable to use FSD?
The whole concept seems to stupid to me. You have a person driving up to 4? passengers at a time in a tiny loop. This is the most inefficient thing ever. A regular autonomous rail loop [1] would have been so much cheaper and efficient.
I’m curious why the county would apply such draconian rules, it kinda defeats the whole purpose. And why do they even have authority over transportation rules, isn’t that a federal matter?
I don't think this whole concept should be dismissed out of hand. Obviously autonomous driving is in the plans - and presumably if the concept is successful they'd develop their own vehicle more suitable for public tranist.
Why not a railway? It seems to me the Boring Company are essentially shifting the complexity from the fixed tunnel equipment (rails, signals, points - all the stuff you get in standard railways) into the autonomous car. Whether that's cheaper overall is yet to be seen - but it may well be. Subsurface railway is notoriously expensive (and the tunnel boring part is just the beginning - the fitout is also incredibly expensive). If they can move as much as possible into a factory environment and make the tunnels not much more than a concrete tube, they're going to significantly reduce the cost.
The only big downside of this approach that I can see is the efficiency of the vehicles - rubber tired cars or buses are less efficient than trains.
Looking at the screenshots, there are at least some parts of those tunnels where it would be extremely difficult to get emergency services in. And even if you can get them in, if there's a fire I would imagine those entire tunnels would be filled with caustic smoke from the batteries. It's not like outdoors where it's simply going to drift away.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/28/read-the-script-every-driv...
"The vehicles used on the Loop system are in fact banned from using driver aids, with Clark County officially outlawing their use anywhere in and around the facility. Even common features like automatic emergency braking and lane keeping are required to be disabled."
Anyone got inside knowledge?
Whereas if autopilot crashes then suddenly politicians will be forced by voters to make laws and take action.
I could totally imagine Tesla themselves have asked for these restrictions.
Driver: “You’d be barking mad not to invest in Dogecoin!”
Also, Kim Jong-un and his people make decisions collectively: Kim suggests something and when his people agree (or just don't die), decisions materialize! These decisions are collective because nothing would happen if Kim acts alone.
Wait. Maybe "collective" does not mean "multiple people working together" but cooperating towards common and mutual benefits. Those who cannot afford not to work for those who owns the capital don't make a "collective" with those who own them and decide how things must be (e.g how much Amazon can pay less tax than individuals and small businesses). Also, democracy is more than a word: when you have no choice but to vote for candidates who support billionaires, there's no "collective" behind the election either.
And those 'lords' whatever that means got that rich because they invested their personal time and resources into things that ended up working out and that's why they have the resources they have.
EDIT: To be clear: markets≠capitalism
Markets without ownership are mostly meaningless. All models of market socialism are mostly theoretical. Even the inventor market socialism didn't get far in implementing it.
Yes there are some markets that can exist outside of that but not a central organizing principle of an economy.
> "they got rich cause they worked hard" is a very shallow take
The worked hard on the right idea. Its not a 'take' its a fact'.
I didn't say 'anybody that works hard will be rich'. That would be a shallow take.
There’s nothing stopping Vegas (or other cities) from doing something even smarter. Nothing except people and enough competent companies who can implement. At least Boring Company is helping with the latter and providing more options.
I can't count how many times people in the last 10 years wanted the government to go all in on hydrogen or whatever.
The Boring company is mainly about in city transport, not city to city transport, so its simply a different problem.
And there is a reason why commercial railroads are no longer effective, literally nowhere are they effective. Elon Musk is not magic, he picks the technology that he thinks can be commercially effective.
Of course we can make some of the same assumptions about highways.
If there was actual competition between these systems we might have a more accurate picture.
But private highways do actually seem to be profitable in some countries.
China invest untold billions in that system, and I don't know enough to say if this is defensible on commercial bases.
Yeah right, let's see if this assertion is true (keep in mind that all infra cost are budgeted into annual revenue). Numbers from 2019 which was not a great year for french companies (2020 was worse, but for everyone):
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200228005403/en/SNC...
So, -300m in 2019, with strikes costing 600m (so a net positive of 300m if not for the yellow vest and strikes). -300m for an EBITDA fo 5+bn, i'd consider that you assertion "The prices costumers reflect do not cover the cost" is false, and rail is profitable. High-speed rail even more so.
But i'd agree that some rails are not sustainable and are only still kept thanks to the profitable ones. But the Paris-Marseille or Paris-Bordeaux are definitly profitable.
Railroads have a 50% profit margin, and account for 43% of all intercity shipping in the United States. I don’t know why you would call them commercially ineffective.
This thing is a car in a tunnel. It can’t even compete with a single subway car.
For freight, railroads are the best possible.
Quite a few high-speed railroads are insanely profitable for SNCF in France (Paris-Strasbourg, Paris-Marseille, Paris-Lille), some of them are less profitable, or even run a deficit, but the SNCF budget is balanced every year since 2012 (was, pre-pandemic)
If the Waltons were media personalities and Walmart deployed controversial new tech those employees would be given scripted answers regarding those topics too.
Something like https://newsroom.posco.com/en/koreas-first-personal-rapid-tr... would fit well here, and further validate PRT solutions as they don't get considered very much.
https://www.ultraprt.co.uk/ultra-prt/ has been running for well over 10 years, on time, on budget, within the downtime SLA. Not massively fast, but the system model vs the real-life stats is the thing to note here, the maths works.
Doesn't describe Musk at all.