Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?

[Humble Beast 258]

1 minute ago, MeerkatBong said:

Ah okay, so I guess any attempt to try and model out business impact (using conservative SG&A benchmarks and assumptions, but admittedly assumptions) by non-biased business reporters is bad pool. But internet posters like briskettexan saying "revenue good, advertisers and layoffs bad, twitter go bye-bye" is considered smart conjecture and objective analysis. cool, cool.

You can just say "I think his assumptions are bad and the model is wrong/bad-- not buying this" rather than call the guys integrity in question, right? Especially since you had zero clue the source.

Wildcat is regarded. 
 

Anyway, take this with a grain of salt. 
 

Would Apple go so far as to pull Twitter from the App Store?

[956 Worldwide 34705]

46 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Thus the question that's been asked around here many times: what are we going to do with our morons?  If we want to expand it to more skilled labor, that's fine.  The point remains that for a society to function, the people in it have to have something to do and to feel valued.

That doesn't mean that we're only happy if we're working like mules 80 hrs a week for shitty pay.  But there's basic human dignity in work, and it also feeds a broader utilitarian and egalitarian goal and need -- if all we have is a handful of kings and hundreds of millions of peasants who fight over the scraps, that's not a sustainable model (nor is it a good or decent thing, and that matters as well).  This is some digression from the thread topic, but maybe not.

Elmo is not advancing any social good.  He is a strident proponent of oligarchy -- just pay attention to what he says and actually does.

Here’s the thing: work is not bullshit, but many jobs are and we equate jobs with work. 

As far as what to do with morons, let me recommend the late jet-age, cynical sci-fi masterpiece “The Marching Morons.” 
 

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm

[NoName 16351]

22 minutes ago, elguapo said:

yes, calling out companies by name is absolutely going to lead to folks bringing the business back. he followed up by tweeing @ tim cook.

very very seriously doubt that. they probably got an email/phone call that went into a black hole because some entire team got fired.

 

[MeerkatBong 115]

1 minute ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Here’s the thing: work is not bullshit, but many jobs are and we equate jobs with work. 

As far as what to do with morons, let me recommend the late jet-age, cynical sci-fi masterpiece “The Marching Morons.” 
 

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm

Also this isn't the forum for it, but a certain Asian-American from the newly established Forward party had a few ideas about how to address the unskilled population and displaced workers in the automation revolution...

Maybe his ideas will be adopted in the future since he's so unlikable to most people, it seems.

[NoName 16351]

13 minutes ago, Humble Beast said:

Wildcat is regarded. 
 

Anyway, take this with a grain of salt. 
 

Would Apple go so far as to pull Twitter from the App Store?

if they go full Gettr and Parlor and have no moderation, then yes they will yank them.

but they won't, so apple won't yank them.

holy shit now he is shitposting about the apple app store 30% stuff and calling it "secret"

 

i hope he gets angry and pulls the app from the app store. that would be glorious. of all the companies on the planet to go to war with, apple is the last one he should be fighting.

Edited November 28, 2022 by NoName

[Chopper 17230]

35 minutes ago, elguapo said:

Huh seems like bad news for snowflake nazi elmo

[GenXer 2850]

17 minutes ago, Captainant said:

AI code is moreso to create the foundational boilerplate and give you a starting off point that's already mostly ready to go, and then you customize from there. There's not really any pattern of "AI code" that isn't still steered by a human, since neural nets haven't learned the ins and outs and whathaveyous of IaC. Yet

I’m having difficulty distinguishing what you’re describing as opposed to code snippets/plugins/etc that devs have been pulling from websites for years. Maybe ai can systemically identify the best code from some ai repository as opposed to a dev looking for it themselves. There seems to be value for the ai approach there.

Story grooming sessions will be a lot of fun trying to describe the desired functionality to Max Headroom. If development goes the way of ai, requirements/story writing will need to conform to a very strict format that leaves no room for interpretation or nuance.

[HenryJames 66041]

6 minutes ago, MeerkatBong said:

Also this isn't the forum for it, but a certain Asian-American

Also, dude, Asian-American is not the preferred nomenclature. Chinaman, please.

[Chopper 17230]

6 minutes ago, NoName said:

holy shit now he is shitposting about the apple app store 30% stuff and calling it "secret"

My guess is this is about the share of the 9.95 (or is it 8.95?) that twatter is charging for a blue check mark. Apple is saying pay us 30% of any charges in the app because that's the terms of the apple store. The fact that elmo hadn't accounted for that revenue split was conjecture when they first rolled it out.

Apple won't be fucking around with this one and I'm certain it's not an idle threat.

[Francisco 2.0 32389]

Calling out the CEO of a (roughly) $3 trillion company, who is the sole gatekeeper for at least half, if not more, of your worldwide audience's method of accessing Twitter.

I'm sure they teach these tactics in business school.

 

 

[Francisco 2.0 32389]

 

 

[Goredho 17399]

21 minutes ago, GenXer said:

I’m skeptical of ai doing away with dev jobs. At this very moment I’m blocked from testing a downstream issue because the software application won’t let me perform an upstream function. When this happens, I chat with a dev to troubleshoot the upstream issue. Assuming devs go away, explaining this to some ai and having it explain whether it’s a data issue, configuration issue, or some previous deployment failed seems dubious.

Right now, most big tech companies dev group is organized into small teams where a senior resource with significant experience is leading 3-4 younger engineers that are 0-5 years removed from college with a good comp sci or related degree.  The senior resource spends a significant amount of time shepherding the less experienced resources on their team.  They help with design, review code and otherwise serve as a voice of experience to their young energy and mental acuity.

I don’t think you would see all devs go away, but I think you might see AI filling the role of those young workers with a seasoned engineer essentially shepherding the AI.  They would oversee what the AI generates, be a gatekeeper for its generated code being applied and likely be your point of contact for bugs and errors in business logic.  They might have to fix the flaws in the code generated by the AI.  So coder jobs don’t go to zero, but they might be cut by 50% or more.

[Chopper 17230]

There's at least 3 issues with Apple and twatter.

-Musk doesn't want to abide by terms of the ap store, which front & center require 30% of in-app purcahses to the builder of the store (apple) in exchange for the right to sell your app there

-Apple doesn't want to advertise on twatter, at least for now, because of unmoderated nazis and sexual harassment

-Apple may not want to advertise on twatter because its ceo is taking off his hood and exposing his pro-nazi proclivities.

 

edit and actually the 4th reason, if the lack of moderation has been sufficiently recorded or verified, then yeah it's very possible twitter is going into the dustbin with gettr and social. I've seen several reports this morning, all only subjective, about how horrible it's become over there with nazis, incels, russians and chinese misinformation.

 

Edited November 28, 2022 by Chopper

[MeerkatBong 115]

1 minute ago, Goredho said:

Right now, most big tech companies dev group is organized into small teams where a senior resource with significant experience is leading 3-4 younger engineers that are 0-5 years removed from college with a good comp sci or related degree.  The senior resource spends a significant amount of time shepherding the less experienced resources on their team.  They help with design, review code and otherwise serve as a voice of experience to their young energy and mental acuity.

I don’t think you would see all devs go away, but I think you might see AI filling the role of those young workers with a seasoned engineer essentially shepherding the AI.  They would oversee what the AI generates, be a gatekeeper for its generated code being applied and likely be your point of contact for bugs and errors in business logic.  They might have to fix the flaws in the code generated by the AI.  So coder jobs don’t go to zero, but they might be cut by 50% or more.

I think this sounds logical. A lot of what people don't understand is the labor demand new IT (AI/ML included) tools create just to manage them. It's not a net FTE savings as much as it is taking lower skill, lower value positions and replacing them with tooling and then having your labor manage those tools and programs. In a lot of instances, the total cost of ownership is actually more just on unforeseen and unbudgeted maintenance from a smaller, more specialized pool of talent.

[Captainant 27653]

10 minutes ago, GenXer said:

I’m having difficulty distinguishing what you’re describing as opposed to code snippets/plugins/etc that devs have been pulling from websites for years. Maybe ai can systemically identify the best code from some ai repository as opposed to a dev looking for it themselves. There seems to be value for the ai approach there.

Story grooming sessions will be a lot of fun trying to describe the desired functionality to Max Headroom. If development goes the way of ai, requirements/story writing will need to conform to a very strict format that leaves no room for interpretation or nuance.

It's moreso just putting in a description string like

//method to get secret with SAML authentication

And then the NLP and neural net spit out a method to do approximately that. The idea is to skip the "looking for code snippets on stackoverflow" step and build your idea more quickly

[MeerkatBong 115]

2 minutes ago, Chopper said:

There's at least 3 issues with Apple and twatter.

-Musk doesn't want to abide by terms of the ap store, which front & center require 30% of in-app purcahses to the builder of the store (apple) in exchange for the right to sell your app there

-Apple doesn't want to advertise on twatter, at least for now, because of unmoderated nazis and sexual harassment

-Apple may not want to advertise on twatter because its ceo is taking off his hood and exposing his pro-nazi proclivities.

 

What might be an interesting, unintended effect of this brouhaha (still TBD) is what this mummer's farce will mean for putting more visibility on Apple's 30% cut. A lot has been made in the last 12 months of if it should be legal and it has regulator's attention. I think it all started with the Fortnite guys firing the first shot years ago, but Elmo could put some gas on that fire. Apple might not want that smoke or they might not care at all and brush Elon away like a gadfly.

This is why Elmo's Twitter is more entertaining than a soap opera, every week there is some new dramatic story arc.

[G650 14249]

4 hours ago, fattyflattie said:

His coaster game is weak af. 

Dude this was literally my only thought lol

[NoName 16351]

13 minutes ago, Chopper said:

My guess is this is about the share of the 9.95 (or is it 8.95?) that twatter is charging for a blue check mark. Apple is saying pay us 30% of any charges in the app because that's the terms of the apple store. The fact that elmo hadn't accounted for that revenue split was conjecture when they first rolled it out.

Apple won't be fucking around with this one and I'm certain it's not an idle threat.

i think its a flat $8 now? but yeah, this is absolutely the thing you handle behind closed doors. he should have just charged $11 for it and then said he has to charge more because of Apple's cut and made more money across the board since they can't adjust what you pay for it via web/android/ios, but he is a moron and didn't.

[Deej 76759]

14 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Calling out the CEO of a (roughly) $3 trillion company, who is the sole gatekeeper for at least half, if not more, of your worldwide audience's method of accessing Twitter.

I'm sure they teach these tactics in business school.

 

 

You think more than half the people worldwide use Apple? Not even close. Isn't their smartphone market share something around 15-18%, worldwide. 

[Francisco 2.0 32389]

1 minute ago, Deej said:

You think more than half the people worldwide use Apple? Not even close. Isn't their smartphone market share something around 15-18%, worldwide. 

Oh, I have no idea how close or far off my math is.  I know worldwide Apple is a minority in terms of smartphone usage, but not everyone with a smartphone uses Twitter, either.

Also, the optics of Musk bitching about Apple and their CEO, while using an iPhone himself, is funny.

 

 

 

 

[Chopper 17230]

need a meme for elmo finding out there's no free lunch

[GenXer 2850]

10 minutes ago, NoName said:

i think its a flat $8 now? but yeah, this is absolutely the thing you handle behind closed doors. he should have just charged $11 for it and then said he has to charge more because of Apple's cut and made more money across the board since they can't adjust what you pay for it via web/android/ios, but he is a moron and didn't.

I wonder if he even knew about the 30%. It doesn’t appear he did much analysis on pricing. He probably fired that department.

Upthread, someone mentioned he lowered the checkmark price when stephen king questioned it. I get the sense, he simply picked a lower number that sounded more palatable.

I bet he got surprised by an invoice from apple.

[DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12301]

Man this guy is completely off his rocker.

This is bonkers.

[RDCanecutter 26411]

3 hours ago, Goredho said:

Yep, if you can be replaced for something cheaper, you will be.  Tangential thread hijack ensuing...

Everyone at my job is all atwitter (pun intended) about Github's CoPilot, which uses AI to generate code from natural human language.  "Open a csv file and convert each row to JSON with attribute names equal to header values" and it spits out code in your chosen programming language that will do just that.  It's AI is trained on all the code repositories on Github, and also leverages your use of it as a digital coding assistant to continue to train its model.

It speeds up some repetitive tasks for sure, and the people using it are getting some things done faster.  It is still somewhat crude and needs human oversight, but it is not inconceivable that at some point it's continued training leads to it being a good enough code monkey that some (most?) human code monkeys are no longer needed.  It will probably hit the outsourced workforce first, but if/when the outsourced workers are all replaced by lower cost AI code monkey options, it will start to eat away at US tech jobs.

The people I see embracing and using this don't seem to realize they are willing participants in automating away tech jobs.  Individuals getting more done in less time means the company can maintain the same throughput with less human engineers.  Your training of the AI to do what you do is training your non-human replacement.  It's like auto factory workers in the 1960s training the robots that would start to replace them en masse in the 1970s.  Tech nerds are bedazzled by the technical coolness of AI writing code for them while executives above them twiddle their handle bar mustaches while contemplating the potential cost savings opportunity.

It's probably poetic justice, given it has been the tech nerds who have been the foot soldiers in the war of automation against American workers.  But how does the mass of the population earn a living in a post-post industrial capitalistic society where even skilled labor has been automated away?

"CoPilot: ENHANCE!"

[Hefeweizen 5311]

1 hour ago, elguapo said:

No Elmo, they hate you.

[mdmost 43001]

36 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Oh, I have no idea how close or far off my math is.  I know worldwide Apple is a minority in terms of smartphone usage, but not everyone with a smartphone uses Twitter, either.

Also, the optics of Musk bitching about Apple and their CEO, while using an iPhone himself, is funny.

 

 

 

 

JUST WAIT TILL HE GETS HIS TWITTER PHONE UP AND RUNNING!!! /Elon fanbois!

Edited November 28, 2022 by mdmost

[Hefeweizen 5311]

Jitterbug, now with twatter for the olds to sit on the shitter and get lit.

[Goredho 17399]

16 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

"CoPilot: ENHANCE!"

Yes, eventually my job will be to keep the AI happily doing its job.

[pantone159 719]

1 hour ago, GenXer said:

Story grooming sessions will be a lot of fun trying to describe the desired functionality to Max Headroom. If development goes the way of ai, requirements/story writing will need to conform to a very strict format that leaves no room for interpretation or nuance.

And then you will need a software developer to do the very strict and unambiguous specification of the requirement. And then you will be back to exactly the result of every software writing automation system that has ever been developed (over probably 40+ years of trying). Namely, there needs to be a human software developer to specify exactly and unambiguously what you want. Only this time, you will be working with a system that has much inferior tools (like debuggers) than the programing language that you just 'eliminated'.

[atomheartbevo 89648]

59 minutes ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

Man this guy is completely off his rocker.

This is bonkers.

Yeah, Tim Cook is not somebody that Elmo wants to tangle with or try to embarrass.  Cook didn’t get to where he was by being a pushover.

Also, once again, Musk shows the world he doesn’t understand a single fucking thing about what free speech actually means! which goes back to my theory that he doesn’t have anybody around him who corrects him that he will listen to, or who doesn’t care if he looks like a fucking moron.

[Celery Man 20934]

1 hour ago, Goredho said:

Right now, most big tech companies dev group is organized into small teams where a senior resource with significant experience is leading 3-4 younger engineers that are 0-5 years removed from college with a good comp sci or related degree.  The senior resource spends a significant amount of time shepherding the less experienced resources on their team.  They help with design, review code and otherwise serve as a voice of experience to their young energy and mental acuity.

I don’t think you would see all devs go away, but I think you might see AI filling the role of those young workers with a seasoned engineer essentially shepherding the AI.  They would oversee what the AI generates, be a gatekeeper for its generated code being applied and likely be your point of contact for bugs and errors in business logic.  They might have to fix the flaws in the code generated by the AI.  So coder jobs don’t go to zero, but they might be cut by 50% or more.

every time you refer to a person as a resource, a junior developer is put on a pip

[Aqua Buddha 14590]

1 hour ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Calling out the CEO of a (roughly) $3 trillion company, who is the sole gatekeeper for at least half, if not more, of your worldwide audience's method of accessing Twitter.

I'm sure they teach these tactics in business school.

 

 

Twitter desperately needs Apple and Apple doesn't need Twitter at all.

 

[Francisco 2.0 32389]

Here we go.  A story about another of Musk's ventures other than Twitter that has wild claims, yet doesn't really do anything.

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-boring-company-tunnel-traffic-11669658396

 

Quote

The unsolicited proposal from Elon Musk’s tunnel-building venture arrived in January 2020. To the local transportation authority, it felt like finding Willy Wonka’s golden ticket.

Officials had started planning for a street-level rail connection between booming Ontario International Airport and a commuter train station 4 miles away, with an estimated cost north of $1 billion. For just $45 million, Mr. Musk’s Boring Co. offered to instead build an underground tunnel through which travelers could zip back and forth in autonomous electric vehicles.

 

Quote

Dazzled by Boring’s boasts that it had revolutionized tunneling, and the cachet of working with the billionaire head of EV maker Tesla Inc.,  the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority dumped plans for a traditional light rail and embraced the futuristic tunnel.

When it came time to formalize the partnership and get to work, Boring itself went underground—just as it has done in Maryland, Chicago and Los Angeles. Boring didn’t submit a bid for Ontario by the January 2022 deadline.

 

Quote

The six-year-old company has repeatedly teased cities with a pledge to “solve soul-destroying traffic,” only to pull out when confronted with the realities of building public infrastructure, according to former executives and local, state and federal government officials who have worked with Mr. Musk’s Boring. The company has struggled with common bureaucratic hurdles like securing permits and conducting environmental reviews, the people said.

 

Quote

“Every time I see him on TV with a new project, or whatever, I’m like: Oh, I remember that bullet train to Chicago O’Hare,” said Chicago Alderman Scott Waguespack. Boring had backed away from its proposal for a high-speed tunnel link to the airport there.

Mr. Musk and Steve Davis, president of Boring, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

 

Spoiler

Boring’s only tunnel open to the public is a 1.6-mile “loop experience” under the Las Vegas Convention Center. There, Teslas with hired drivers ferry convention-goers through neon-lit white tunnels at speeds of about 30 miles an hour.

Boring has yet to make good on its most ambitious pitch: that it can design tunnel-boring machines that are so fast to operate that they will drive down costs and shake up the industry. Tunneling industry veterans question some of Mr. Musk’s claims.

The company has believers. This spring, tech-focused venture-capital firms Sequoia Capital and Vy Capital led a $675 million fundraising round that valued Boring at $5.7 billion. Major real-estate firms including Brookfield, Lennar and Tishman Speyer are among the investors.

“Their technology is now past the state-of-the-art, and improving at an exponential rate,” Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire wrote in a post on the firm’s website, announcing the round.

Mr. Maguire declined to comment and the other investors didn’t respond to detailed requests for comment.

Mr. Musk has frequently criticized government regulation, calling it an impediment to building new infrastructure. At a WSJ CEO Council event in 2020, he said he had moved from California to Texas, where Tesla was building a new factory, in part because of government regulations. Government should “just get out of the way,” he said.

The Boring Co., based in Pflugerville, Texas, occupies an odd place in Mr. Musk’s business empire, which includes Tesla, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, and most recently Twitter Inc. He launched the tunneling venture with a tweet in December 2016 that many took as a joke. “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…” Mr. Musk wrote.

“I am actually going to do this,” he added in a second tweet.

At Boring’s helm is Mr. Davis, a longtime lieutenant to Mr. Musk who came from SpaceX. Some of the space contractor’s investors have complained about Boring soaking up SpaceX’s resources, including employees and equipment purchased with SpaceX funds.

Mr. Musk’s leadership style—he recently told his Twitter employees they must be “extremely hardcore” or resign—pervades Boring, too, several former senior executives said. Boring employees work long hours and weekends, and the company has struggled to retain employees, particularly in technical positions such as engineering, they said.

For years, the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority had sought a solution to an enviable problem: Freight-focused Ontario International was steadily gaining passengers. Airport officials decided a link to a nearby commuter rail station would help it grow even more.

The authority issued a request for proposals for a light rail line, estimated to cost between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, when Boring’s pitch showed up.

The authority struck a preliminary deal with Boring in February 2021 for a narrow-diameter tunnel filled with autonomous EVs for $45 million.

“When I went to the public and shared this, the enthusiasm was overwhelming, just for something new and different,” said Janice Rutherford, a county supervisor and transportation authority board member. “And it’s the Boring Company, so Elon Musk brings that kind of sexiness to it, if you will.”

Over time, the company and the transportation authority dropped references to autonomous vehicles. By late 2021, cost projections rose to almost $500 million, agency documents show.

The authority asked for a third-party environmental review, required by state law, of the Boring proposal’s impact, records show. That’s when the process came to a halt.

“We tried to reach agreement with them,” said Carrie Schindler, the authority’s deputy executive director. “We went through the standard request for proposal process. And ultimately at the end of that process, they decided not to propose.”

Boring had powerful boosters from the time Mr. Musk declared his war on traffic in late 2016. Trump administration officials counseled the billionaire on how to pursue his stated goal of building an underground Hyperloop from New York to Washington. The Hyperloop, a concept Mr. Musk revived based on a proposal from the 1970s, calls for moving passengers through vacuum tubes at around 700 miles an hour. Despite an influx of investor interest, no commercial system has ever been constructed.

Mr. Musk tweeted in July 2017 that he had “verbal govt approval” for Boring to begin building the Hyperloop. Besieged by calls from the media and government officials, White House staff helped come up with a follow-up tweet, according to former government officials. “Still a lot of work needed to receive formal approval, but am optimistic that will occur rapidly,” Mr. Musk later tweeted.

That fall, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan was standing at a fenced-off site affixed with Boring signs near Fort Meade and telling a videographer to “get ready” for a high-speed train from Baltimore to Washington. Mr. Hogan declined to comment.

An aide to Mr. Hogan toured a parking-lot test site at the company’s then-headquarters near Los Angeles International Airport, getting a look at a tunnel-boring machine the company purchased secondhand. Boring named it Godot, the title character in Samuel Beckett’s play about a man who never shows up.

The Republican Hogan administration sped up the bureaucratic process for Boring, granting a conditional permit in October 2017 and an environmental permit a few months later.

All Boring had to do was bring its machine and start digging, former Maryland officials said. But months, and then years, passed. Maryland was waiting for Godot.

Boring deleted the Maryland project from its website last year.

The company also captured the attention of Chicago’s then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who wanted a high-speed rail link between O’Hare International Airport and the downtown business district.

In 2017, Mr. Musk proposed a Hyperloop-like solution, in which 16-passenger pods would be propelled through an underground tunnel on electric “skates” moving up to 125 miles an hour. Mr. Musk said he could do it for less than $1 billion, and that Boring would finance the job and keep the fare revenue for itself.

Mr. Emanuel’s Democratic administration selected Boring to develop the system. At a press conference with Mr. Musk, the mayor dismissed “doubters,” who he said also would have questioned other landmark projects, like the 1900 reversal of the flow of the Chicago River.

Mr. Waguespack, the alderman, and other elected officials challenged the cost estimates as absurdly low, warning that taxpayers would be on the hook if Boring couldn’t build as cheaply as it proposed. “It was a lot of flash and dash and not any kind of public discussion about whether it was even necessary or not,” Mr. Waguespack said.

Mr. Emanuel said in an interview that the company had promised to assume financial risk for building the proposed tunnel. The proposal didn’t go any further after Mr. Emanuel decided not to seek a third term.

Other Boring projects announced with fanfare, including a 3.6-mile underground high-speed transportation link from the Hollywood subway line to Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, also have failed to materialize.

Some sites where Boring once courted public attention are now abandoned. The entrance to its first demonstration tunnel sits behind a chain-link fence in a lot near SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. In the California desert town of Adelanto, where city leaders once hailed the arrival of a Boring research operation, stacks of concrete lining segments sit alongside a short U-shaped section of tunnel partially blocked off with plywood amid rattlesnake warning signs.

For the past year, Boring has been directing potential clients to its work in Las Vegas as a showcase for what systems in their cities could look like.

“We’re fans of the Boring Company,” said Steve Hill, chief executive of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. “We’re fans of clean transportation systems that are great. So we want to help.”

The convention authority paid Boring about $50 million to build two 0.8-mile single-direction tunnels connecting different wings of the sprawling convention center. It opened in the spring of 2021. This year, Boring completed a short offshoot between the facility and Resorts World casino and hotel.

The Clark County and Las Vegas city government councils have approved a 34-mile loop of tunnels that Boring will finance. Private casino and resort owners are being asked to pay for stations. The company plans to break ground soon on segments, Mr. Hill said.

Boring signed a 50-year contract to operate the Vegas loop and will collect revenue from ticket sales, sharing a small percentage with the city and county after crossing a quarterly revenue threshold.

To get a permit to begin operating the convention loop, Boring had to run a demonstration showing that it could move 4,400 passengers an hour.

Boring passed the test and received its permit, in a category called ATS, for Amusement and Transportation Systems—the same one that local officials award to roller coasters.

Crowds strain the network of individually driven cars far more than mass transit like light rail, according to some of the former executives. In social media postings, visitors have documented the loop’s Teslas sitting, underground, in traffic. The fleet of required accredited drivers adds to labor and administrative costs.

At the convention’s jam-packed auto products show this month, visitors queued in 10 lines in a subterranean station, waiting to hop into Teslas that drivers steered through a pair of tunnels just inches wider than the sedans themselves.

Boring employees directed attendees into cars. Mr. Davis, in a safety-orange sweatshirt, paced among them and talked to convention officials who later said he often manages operations on site. When approached by a reporter, he declined to comment.

Mr. Musk has lately tweeted videos of a Boring-designed machine, nicknamed Prufrock after the title character of the T.S. Eliot poem, digging test holes in the Texas dirt. Boring says Prufrock is designed to dig at one mile a week, and that a succeeding version will be able to dig 7 miles a day.

Boring says it can improve tunneling speeds with fully electrified machines and by digging continuously, rather than stopping to assemble sections of the tunnel wall. The company also says angling machines in from ground level will help avoid the cost of first digging a shaft to launch the machine.

Veterans of the tunneling industry note that tunnel-boring machines have been electrified for decades, and that neither continuous construction of the tunnel lining nor digging in from aboveground is new.

Boring’s speed claims are “totally unrealistic,” said Lok Home, president of the Robbins Co., a leading maker of tunnel-boring machines. “There’ll be improvements here, for sure, but there’s not going to be a revolution.”

Industry veterans said that in terms of cost, factors like property acquisition, permitting and engineering work, and the sheer complexity of digging through rock or soil matter far more than tunneling speed.

As for most of the tunneling Boring has done, in the desert soils of Las Vegas, Mr. Home said, “That’s about as easy as it gets.”

Public officials across the country remain eager to land Boring projects, and some are eyeing the roughly $1 trillion federal infrastructure law as a source of potential funding.

In Fort Lauderdale, Democratic Mayor Dean Trantalis is pointing to the availability of the funding as he tries to sell the public on a $100 million pair of Boring-built tunnels that would ferry beachgoers back and forth from downtown. Mr. Trantalis said that he was awe-struck by Boring’s Las Vegas project, which he toured last year.

North Miami Beach officials want to use federal infrastructure money to pay Boring for a tunnel project to reduce traffic.

On a lark, Vice Mayor Michael Joseph tweeted at Boring and Mr. Musk in February 2021. Company officials quickly expressed interest. “They just called me out of nowhere and said, ‘Hey, this is Boring,’ ” Mr. Joseph said. “I was very surprised they responded to my tweet.”

In Ontario, the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority hasn’t abandoned its tunnel dream. The authority is seeking bids from other construction companies to build tunnels, and from operators to run electric vehicles inside.

Ms. Schindler credited Boring with introducing local officials to the possibility of subterranean transportation that might cost less than more conventional aboveground systems.

“While I’m disappointed we’re not in design at this point and headed towards construction, I’m grateful for the disruption that I think got us going in a really viable direction,” she said.

The authority said it would still welcome a bid from the Boring Co.

 

[Mrs Whiggins 13050]

6 minutes ago, Aqua Buddha said:

Twitter desperately needs Apple and Apple doesn't need Twitter at all.

 

Elon's phone talk is trending on social media right now. His fan club thinks it is a great idea. Among the counter side comments beside the ones with images of phones on fire,  a pundit remarked that Musk would buy/absorb a developing phone company, push the owners out and rebrand it as his phone, which was pretty funny. And accurate.

[Aqua Buddha 14590]

3 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Here we go.  A story about another of Musk's ventures other than Twitter that has wild claims, yet doesn't really do anything.

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-boring-company-tunnel-traffic-11669658396

 

 

 

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Boring’s only tunnel open to the public is a 1.6-mile “loop experience” under the Las Vegas Convention Center. There, Teslas with hired drivers ferry convention-goers through neon-lit white tunnels at speeds of about 30 miles an hour.

Boring has yet to make good on its most ambitious pitch: that it can design tunnel-boring machines that are so fast to operate that they will drive down costs and shake up the industry. Tunneling industry veterans question some of Mr. Musk’s claims.

The company has believers. This spring, tech-focused venture-capital firms Sequoia Capital and Vy Capital led a $675 million fundraising round that valued Boring at $5.7 billion. Major real-estate firms including Brookfield, Lennar and Tishman Speyer are among the investors.

“Their technology is now past the state-of-the-art, and improving at an exponential rate,” Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire wrote in a post on the firm’s website, announcing the round.

Mr. Maguire declined to comment and the other investors didn’t respond to detailed requests for comment.

Mr. Musk has frequently criticized government regulation, calling it an impediment to building new infrastructure. At a WSJ CEO Council event in 2020, he said he had moved from California to Texas, where Tesla was building a new factory, in part because of government regulations. Government should “just get out of the way,” he said.

The Boring Co., based in Pflugerville, Texas, occupies an odd place in Mr. Musk’s business empire, which includes Tesla, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, and most recently Twitter Inc. He launched the tunneling venture with a tweet in December 2016 that many took as a joke. “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…” Mr. Musk wrote.

“I am actually going to do this,” he added in a second tweet.

At Boring’s helm is Mr. Davis, a longtime lieutenant to Mr. Musk who came from SpaceX. Some of the space contractor’s investors have complained about Boring soaking up SpaceX’s resources, including employees and equipment purchased with SpaceX funds.

Mr. Musk’s leadership style—he recently told his Twitter employees they must be “extremely hardcore” or resign—pervades Boring, too, several former senior executives said. Boring employees work long hours and weekends, and the company has struggled to retain employees, particularly in technical positions such as engineering, they said.

For years, the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority had sought a solution to an enviable problem: Freight-focused Ontario International was steadily gaining passengers. Airport officials decided a link to a nearby commuter rail station would help it grow even more.

The authority issued a request for proposals for a light rail line, estimated to cost between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, when Boring’s pitch showed up.

The authority struck a preliminary deal with Boring in February 2021 for a narrow-diameter tunnel filled with autonomous EVs for $45 million.

“When I went to the public and shared this, the enthusiasm was overwhelming, just for something new and different,” said Janice Rutherford, a county supervisor and transportation authority board member. “And it’s the Boring Company, so Elon Musk brings that kind of sexiness to it, if you will.”

Over time, the company and the transportation authority dropped references to autonomous vehicles. By late 2021, cost projections rose to almost $500 million, agency documents show.

The authority asked for a third-party environmental review, required by state law, of the Boring proposal’s impact, records show. That’s when the process came to a halt.

“We tried to reach agreement with them,” said Carrie Schindler, the authority’s deputy executive director. “We went through the standard request for proposal process. And ultimately at the end of that process, they decided not to propose.”

Boring had powerful boosters from the time Mr. Musk declared his war on traffic in late 2016. Trump administration officials counseled the billionaire on how to pursue his stated goal of building an underground Hyperloop from New York to Washington. The Hyperloop, a concept Mr. Musk revived based on a proposal from the 1970s, calls for moving passengers through vacuum tubes at around 700 miles an hour. Despite an influx of investor interest, no commercial system has ever been constructed.

Mr. Musk tweeted in July 2017 that he had “verbal govt approval” for Boring to begin building the Hyperloop. Besieged by calls from the media and government officials, White House staff helped come up with a follow-up tweet, according to former government officials. “Still a lot of work needed to receive formal approval, but am optimistic that will occur rapidly,” Mr. Musk later tweeted.

That fall, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan was standing at a fenced-off site affixed with Boring signs near Fort Meade and telling a videographer to “get ready” for a high-speed train from Baltimore to Washington. Mr. Hogan declined to comment.

An aide to Mr. Hogan toured a parking-lot test site at the company’s then-headquarters near Los Angeles International Airport, getting a look at a tunnel-boring machine the company purchased secondhand. Boring named it Godot, the title character in Samuel Beckett’s play about a man who never shows up.

The Republican Hogan administration sped up the bureaucratic process for Boring, granting a conditional permit in October 2017 and an environmental permit a few months later.

All Boring had to do was bring its machine and start digging, former Maryland officials said. But months, and then years, passed. Maryland was waiting for Godot.

Boring deleted the Maryland project from its website last year.

The company also captured the attention of Chicago’s then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who wanted a high-speed rail link between O’Hare International Airport and the downtown business district.

In 2017, Mr. Musk proposed a Hyperloop-like solution, in which 16-passenger pods would be propelled through an underground tunnel on electric “skates” moving up to 125 miles an hour. Mr. Musk said he could do it for less than $1 billion, and that Boring would finance the job and keep the fare revenue for itself.

Mr. Emanuel’s Democratic administration selected Boring to develop the system. At a press conference with Mr. Musk, the mayor dismissed “doubters,” who he said also would have questioned other landmark projects, like the 1900 reversal of the flow of the Chicago River.

Mr. Waguespack, the alderman, and other elected officials challenged the cost estimates as absurdly low, warning that taxpayers would be on the hook if Boring couldn’t build as cheaply as it proposed. “It was a lot of flash and dash and not any kind of public discussion about whether it was even necessary or not,” Mr. Waguespack said.

Mr. Emanuel said in an interview that the company had promised to assume financial risk for building the proposed tunnel. The proposal didn’t go any further after Mr. Emanuel decided not to seek a third term.

Other Boring projects announced with fanfare, including a 3.6-mile underground high-speed transportation link from the Hollywood subway line to Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, also have failed to materialize.

Some sites where Boring once courted public attention are now abandoned. The entrance to its first demonstration tunnel sits behind a chain-link fence in a lot near SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. In the California desert town of Adelanto, where city leaders once hailed the arrival of a Boring research operation, stacks of concrete lining segments sit alongside a short U-shaped section of tunnel partially blocked off with plywood amid rattlesnake warning signs.

For the past year, Boring has been directing potential clients to its work in Las Vegas as a showcase for what systems in their cities could look like.

“We’re fans of the Boring Company,” said Steve Hill, chief executive of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. “We’re fans of clean transportation systems that are great. So we want to help.”

The convention authority paid Boring about $50 million to build two 0.8-mile single-direction tunnels connecting different wings of the sprawling convention center. It opened in the spring of 2021. This year, Boring completed a short offshoot between the facility and Resorts World casino and hotel.

The Clark County and Las Vegas city government councils have approved a 34-mile loop of tunnels that Boring will finance. Private casino and resort owners are being asked to pay for stations. The company plans to break ground soon on segments, Mr. Hill said.

Boring signed a 50-year contract to operate the Vegas loop and will collect revenue from ticket sales, sharing a small percentage with the city and county after crossing a quarterly revenue threshold.

To get a permit to begin operating the convention loop, Boring had to run a demonstration showing that it could move 4,400 passengers an hour.

Boring passed the test and received its permit, in a category called ATS, for Amusement and Transportation Systems—the same one that local officials award to roller coasters.

Crowds strain the network of individually driven cars far more than mass transit like light rail, according to some of the former executives. In social media postings, visitors have documented the loop’s Teslas sitting, underground, in traffic. The fleet of required accredited drivers adds to labor and administrative costs.

At the convention’s jam-packed auto products show this month, visitors queued in 10 lines in a subterranean station, waiting to hop into Teslas that drivers steered through a pair of tunnels just inches wider than the sedans themselves.

Boring employees directed attendees into cars. Mr. Davis, in a safety-orange sweatshirt, paced among them and talked to convention officials who later said he often manages operations on site. When approached by a reporter, he declined to comment.

Mr. Musk has lately tweeted videos of a Boring-designed machine, nicknamed Prufrock after the title character of the T.S. Eliot poem, digging test holes in the Texas dirt. Boring says Prufrock is designed to dig at one mile a week, and that a succeeding version will be able to dig 7 miles a day.

Boring says it can improve tunneling speeds with fully electrified machines and by digging continuously, rather than stopping to assemble sections of the tunnel wall. The company also says angling machines in from ground level will help avoid the cost of first digging a shaft to launch the machine.

Veterans of the tunneling industry note that tunnel-boring machines have been electrified for decades, and that neither continuous construction of the tunnel lining nor digging in from aboveground is new.

Boring’s speed claims are “totally unrealistic,” said Lok Home, president of the Robbins Co., a leading maker of tunnel-boring machines. “There’ll be improvements here, for sure, but there’s not going to be a revolution.”

Industry veterans said that in terms of cost, factors like property acquisition, permitting and engineering work, and the sheer complexity of digging through rock or soil matter far more than tunneling speed.

As for most of the tunneling Boring has done, in the desert soils of Las Vegas, Mr. Home said, “That’s about as easy as it gets.”

Public officials across the country remain eager to land Boring projects, and some are eyeing the roughly $1 trillion federal infrastructure law as a source of potential funding.

In Fort Lauderdale, Democratic Mayor Dean Trantalis is pointing to the availability of the funding as he tries to sell the public on a $100 million pair of Boring-built tunnels that would ferry beachgoers back and forth from downtown. Mr. Trantalis said that he was awe-struck by Boring’s Las Vegas project, which he toured last year.

North Miami Beach officials want to use federal infrastructure money to pay Boring for a tunnel project to reduce traffic.

On a lark, Vice Mayor Michael Joseph tweeted at Boring and Mr. Musk in February 2021. Company officials quickly expressed interest. “They just called me out of nowhere and said, ‘Hey, this is Boring,’ ” Mr. Joseph said. “I was very surprised they responded to my tweet.”

In Ontario, the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority hasn’t abandoned its tunnel dream. The authority is seeking bids from other construction companies to build tunnels, and from operators to run electric vehicles inside.

Ms. Schindler credited Boring with introducing local officials to the possibility of subterranean transportation that might cost less than more conventional aboveground systems.

“While I’m disappointed we’re not in design at this point and headed towards construction, I’m grateful for the disruption that I think got us going in a really viable direction,” she said.

The authority said it would still welcome a bid from the Boring Co.

 

Elon:  "I'll build underground tunnels with automated cars."

Everyone else:  "You mean like subways?"

[Captainant 27653]

2 minutes ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

Elon's phone talk is trending on social media right now. His fan club thinks it is a great idea. Among the counter side comments beside the ones with images of phones on fire,  a pundit remarked that Musk would buy/absorb a developing phone company, push the owners out and rebrand it as his phone, which was pretty funny. And accurate.

Elon is doing with twitter what trump is trying to do with truth social lol

[Firemans4Horn 18046]

Just now, Aqua Buddha said:

Elon:  "I'll build underground tunnels with automated cars."

Everyone else:  "You mean like subways?"

Elon: “No, much much worse”

[SydneyCarton 48076]

9 minutes ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

Elon's phone talk is trending on social media right now. His fan club thinks it is a great idea. Among the counter side comments beside the ones with images of phones on fire,  a pundit remarked that Musk would buy/absorb a developing phone company, push the owners out and rebrand it as his phone, which was pretty funny. And accurate.

China will be happy to give him the specs on the latest iPhone so he can make small changes after cloning it, and thus further putting Musk into their fucking pockets. 

[texasdago 7570]

So... about those blue checkmarks.

 

Saw some really interesting news today on Twitter about Juventus.  Reported with someone with a blue checkmark.  Repeated by some others with a blue checkmark.  I can't tell if it is BS or not because the blue checkmark now means nothing.

Thanks, Elmo!

 

[956 Worldwide 34705]

1 hour ago, Deej said:

You think more than half the people worldwide use Apple? Not even close. Isn't their smartphone market share something around 15-18%, worldwide. 

This is a case of him failing to understand who’s on Twitter. In most of the world, Twitter is way down the list of social media apps, and those who are on it are the elites— business, politics, culture, media. And those who want to engage with and aspire to be elites. 
 

Yes, the vast mass of Chinese, Pakistani, Indian, African smart phone users have a Huawei or ZTE cheapo handset for Weibo or Facebook and WhatsApp and will never think about Twitter. Elon won’t get him there and he doesn’t want to be due he ain’t got shit to sell them. The people who Elon wants to make money off of sure as shit have iPhones, though. 
 

The social media ecosystem is a place where you need to know what you’re doing and making people choose between their iPhones and their Twitter ain’t it. Trying to create a developing world app out of Twitter ain’t it either. 

[pantone159 719]

10 minutes ago, texasdago said:

So... about those blue checkmarks.

 

Saw some really interesting news today on Twitter about Juventus.  Reported with someone with a blue checkmark.  Repeated by some others with a blue checkmark.  I can't tell if it is BS or not because the blue checkmark now means nothing.

Thanks, Elmo!

 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sportsnews/article-11478827/CHAOS-Juventus-ENTIRE-board-resigns-following-stunning-meeting-Monday.html

Well since the Daily Mail is now a more reliable news source... the ENTIRE board resigns following a stunning meeting on Monday amid charges of false accounting... with president Andrea Agnelli and director Pavel Nedved leading the exodus

[Brisketexan 105095]

6 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

The people who Elon wants to make money off of sure as shit have iPhones, though. 

That fact is the key.  Advertisers don't just look for generic "eyes."  They want to reach certain demographics with certain income levels.

So, perhaps smartphone share worldwide for Apple is 15%.  But of smartphones with Twitter installed, it's closer to 40-50%.  And among Twitter users, the "eyes" who are most coveted by advertisers (folks with more money to spend on products), Apple may have a 60-70% share of those eyes.  All of those numbers matter. 

Picking a stupid public fight with a source of a significant portion of your bread and butter is not what they usually teach in business school, but Elmo is a superbraingenius playing 39D chess, so we're clearly the fools here.

[Chopper 17230]

53 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Picking a stupid public fight with a source of a significant portion of your bread and butter is not what they usually teach in business school, but Elmo is a superbraingenius playing 39D chess, so we're clearly the fools here.

The logic of the phone thing escapes me. SpaceNaziKaren's fanbois don't want to pay $10 a month for his shitty app but they'll spring for a new cell phone just so they can get the app and go around apple? And then have zero functionality with every other app under the sun?

[elfenix 34230]

 

(went back to look and not already posted)

[Humble Beast 258]

1 hour ago, SydneyCarton said:

China will be happy to give him the specs on the latest iPhone so he can make small changes after cloning it, and thus further putting Musk into their fucking pockets. 

Tbf there’s a lot of big tech companies in their pockets. Apple and Google pretty prominently come to mind. 
 

Not sure what this means exactly 
 

 

[Firemans4Horn 18046]

3 minutes ago, Humble Beast said:

Not sure what this means exactly 
 

He paid $44bn to read Grimes DM’s?

[chainsaw 9865]

10 minutes ago, Humble Beast said:

Tbf there’s a lot of big tech companies in their pockets. Apple and Google pretty prominently come to mind. 
 

Not sure what this means exactly 
 

 

It's going to be a nothingburger

[atomheartbevo 89648]

30 minutes ago, Firemans4Horn said:

He paid $44bn to read Grimes DM’s?

[atomheartbevo 89648]

@elfenix Reminder

[Samson's Wig 3191]

4 hours ago, Chopper said:

edit and actually the 4th reason, if the lack of moderation has been sufficiently recorded or verified, then yeah it's very possible twitter is going into the dustbin with gettr and social. I've seen several reports this morning, all only subjective, about how horrible it's become over there with nazis, incels, russians and chinese misinformation.

How is this different than Facebook?  It's a free for all shit fest for the most part, which is why everyone's aging parents have gone full-stupid over the last few years.  Who advertises there?  How does lizard boy manage this shit better than Elrond the half man? Or does he?