It's not clear if these violations actually represent a real environmental hazard or are more reflective of NIMBY degrowth sentiment.
> Workers have complained of chemical burns from the waste material generated by the tunneling process, and firefighters must decontaminate their equipment after conducting rescues from the project sites. The company was fined more than $112,000 by Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in late 2023 after workers complained of “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and burns.
That sounds like a "real environmental hazard" to me.
It's interesting, though, that your first impulse is to defend the robber barons that made this happen.
their guess was pretty good
cement or curing agents are hardly the environmental apocalyptic scenario for the beautiful and pristine environment of downtown Vegas, hm?
It was a chemical to speed up grout curing. I don’t know which one. I looked up a few and they were corrosive petrochemicals with like 20-letter-long names and an acute health exposure rating of 4 on the MSDS. They also didn’t provide PPE or instructions on what PPE was necessary. And have you ever gotten any significant amount of gasoline on your skin? It burns and it is not safe. Here’s a list of chemicals in common gasoline mixtures: Gasoline, Toluene, Hexane, Xylene, Octane, Ethanol, Trimethylbenzene, n-Heptane, Pentane, Cumene, Ethylbenzene, Benzene, n-Hexane, Cyclohexane.
Even if it was just the water in the tunnel — how about you try 8+ hours of heavy work in steel toed boots with damp feet, let alone standing in ankle deep water filled with corrosive chemicals. Even standing still in clean water, your skin basically turns to paste after not too long.
With the way the job market is trending in tech, you might have the opportunity to find out one day while someone sitting in a Herman miller chair in a climate controlled office building dismisses your pain as petty griping.
Those kind of chemicals (including gasoline!) are in all the most common products like Watco Danish Oil floor finish that you can buy from home depot and use inside your home (and burn in your car for everyone to enjoy). They speed up curing. I don't recommend them! But they're very, very ordinary. If you want a product without them, you have to go out of your way to get it, unfortunately. (I recommend Tried and True Danish oil, which you'll find is significantly more expensive, and takes far longer to cure, but has no ill health effects)
These chemicals are being sprayed at high enough pressure to splash them, all day long, in enclosed spaces, in the presence of lots of other people. Even if it was bleach, that would require significant effort to protect the people in that environment from injury. They didn’t do that, the workers are human beings that deserved that, and that shouldn’t be minimized.
https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/?parent=acs-sa&or...
Since the year 2000, they've had 45 fines (and many violations per fine) by the federal Occupational Safety & Health Administration, and nearly $8 million in fines. And over $200k in fines just last year. There's separately 34 global violations totalling is over $50 million in fines.
This doesn't make Elon's company's violations excusable - it is however clearly the course of business in construction that these sorts of things happen. I think this is a good criticism of capitalist pressures in general rather than Elon being uniquely shitty in how he operates his companies.
obligatory Elon sucks, i'm just allergic to bullshit and ragebait
Something tells me it’s not NIMBYism.
it's exactly NIMBYism which makes the installation of the very small inefficient gas turbines make economic sense.
because it would take too fucking long to get a transmission wire set up to the grid, not to mention about the fight required for starting a new power plant somewhere else.
(that said I think it's unethical to run those turbines there)
Clearly, anyone who says [complex, multifaceted loose grouping of kind of related things] is [extreme, polarizing claim with no evidence] is not worth listening to further.
Please explain exactly what regulations in this context were 'crafted and utilized by NIMBYs'. Please cite agency and ruling for each supposed grave offense to your anti-NIMBY sensibilities.
Here’s an article that has some details on some of the violations [1]. The sound like things that the state legitimately should be regulating and that this would have minimal impact on growth.
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-boring-company-...
As far as the strip itself goes , well that's controlled by the corporate casino post-mafia folks. I think most of that stuff gets negotiated in backrooms.
Its also outrageous that companies have to pay for workman's comp insurance /s
That's not something I proposed in my comment.
Please don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines ask us to "assume good faith" and avoid accusations of shilling. Commenting like this poisons discussions, and we're trying for something better than that here. Please observe the guidelines and make an effort to do better in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What an acidic thing to fling. I want us to build infrastructure. Nowhere did I say we need do whatever Musk says.
I want us to use cost-benefit analysis to judge infrastructure projects rather than the heavy moral framing we get a lot.
>it's not clear if you know what environmental regulations are or if you are just shilling for polluting billionaires.
This is pretty clearly an escalation beyond what you're describing.
e: Because you did already read these lines, I guess I should spell this out: the former says we can't trust this datapoint as reflecting the issue we're concerned about; the latter says that the former person is either completely ignorant about the subject matter or lying due to corruption. The former is disagreeable; the latter is an ad hominem assuming bad faith against HN guidelines.
> The tricky thing about environmental regulations is that they are crafted and utilized by NIMBYs to block any infrastructure development
This doesn't just say we can't trust a datapoint, it starts with a position premised on bad faith motivations for all environmental regulations. Still not totally equivalent, but I don't think the original commenter was exactly being neutral or reasoned in their opening argument.
As you note, even the uncharitable interpretation isn't equivalent- you say 'not totally equivalent' but they're different quite critically in that the one is attacking a political position and some laws and the other is attacking an individual person on this forum.
The tricky thing about environmental regulations is that they are crafted and utilized by NIMBYs to block any infrastructure development. Even if, on balance, the infrastructure is a net positive.
The tricky thing about deregulating the environment is that deregulations are uncrafted and utilized by amoral capitalists who want to make money no matter what, including by poisoning the land and sea and air as much as they want.
Perhaps missing the point like this was not deliberate, but you nevertheless missed it.
latter says that the former person is either [...] or [...] [...] the latter is an ad hominem assuming bad faith
You went from characterizing it as an either/or comment in one sentence, to characterizing it as a bad faith assumption in the next. This is equivalent to: 'he says it's either odd or even...he says it's odd.'
And yeah, looks like I dropped an 'or' between 'hominem' and 'assuming'. My bad, I wasn't sure how long the edit window lasts and rushed it.
I want to build infrastructure too. Just not at the cost of the destruction of the world we live in.
By framing a regulation as some ploy? You're just as ridiculous
Instead of bringing up safety, I'd bring up the microplastics and other pollutants emitted by the technology of the elastomeric tire and which might be an intrinsic property of cost-effective use of the technology.
https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d01045/#:~:text=Zero%20Fa...
Sounds like trains are pretty safe to me.
Cars get into accidents way more frequently. The American freight rail system derails at a more frequent rate because the private operators are incentivized to really not do any maintenance at all.
Trains don’t “regularly” derail. And when they do, they aren’t as fatal as the median highway crash.
There are unlikely to be too many fatalities in this system because it runs slowly. (Unless Li-on batteries cascade combust somehow.)
if you don't automatically assume bad faith when dealing with hypercapitalist private infrastructure projects, you're going to be taken advantage of. every time.
that, or you're on the payroll. there's not a ton of wiggle room here.
> A further three studies based on the data of about 200,000 individuals from 30 countries debunked these lay beliefs as illusionary by revealing that cynical (vs. less cynical) individuals generally do worse on cognitive ability and academic competency tasks. Cross-cultural analyses showed that competent individuals held contingent attitudes and endorsed cynicism only if it was warranted in a given sociocultural environment. Less competent individuals embraced cynicism unconditionally, suggesting that-at low levels of competence-holding a cynical worldview might represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the potential costs of falling prey to others' cunning.
GP explicitly specified such an environment. Musk is the epitome of a hypercapitalist - an outlier in terms of wealth, fame, ambition, and micromanagement.