Nevada Governor's office covered up Boring Co safety violations | Hacker News Reader

Nevada Governor's office covered up Boring Co safety violations

fortune.com

336 pointsChinjut74 comments

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https://archive.is/JUevh

(Long may it live)

As to the grout accelerant in question:

TDS [PDF]: https://assets.ctfassets.net/ctspkgm1yw3s/DMSY-1685695220-39...

MSDS [PDF]: https://assets.ctfassets.net/ctspkgm1yw3s/3Tp3imoxG5XfZlrlzU...

I am not skilled in the arts of aggregate curing and occupational exposure, but I wonder if it’s the “silicic acid” or a non-table-variety of “sodium salt” (from the MSDS) that’s sloughing the firefighters’ skin off here… or something that happens when the sodium oxide (from the TDS) hits water? Chemistry class was a lifetime ago but does that turn it back into lye? Is the oxide technically a “sodium salt”?

Looking at the CAS number[1], it's the sodium oxide component of it that's likely the problem, yeah.

And yep, Na2O + H20 -> 2 NaOH, sodium hydroxide :)

[1] https://www.epa.govt.nz/database-search/chemical-classificat...

>Long may it live

Off topic, I found out that my university blocks archive.is or any of its mirrors. Why does the university care about this?

archive.is could be used to mirror unsuitable content (ie porn) which would otherwise be blocked

Maybe your university is just using some commercial provider (such as Microsoft) that categorizes pages.

Seems like something impeachable, this doesn't strike me 'faithful execution of the laws'. Impeachment requires a 2/3 majority in the state senate, which would require only one vote from the Governor's party. The corruption will continue until people do something about it.

people love corruption

the laws of men only exist if men are willing to enforce them.

From what I've read in the local news, the chemicals were already in the soil, but dumping the waste into the (only) drainage system available without treating it first is apparently a no-no.

https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/environment/no-boring-co-...

https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/c...

This reminded me of another local story (I live in both locations). The local swimming hole was fined for releasing seawater back to where it came from, cleaner than it was beforehand.

https://www.dailybreeze.com/2010/01/20/redondo-beach-asks-li...

https://documents.coastal.ca.gov/reports/2018/8/th13b/Th13b-...

I read the daily breeze article and can’t find where they claim the released water was cleaner than it was before?

Try these articles:

https://www.dailybreeze.com/2010/04/21/faced-with-the-possib...

https://easyreadernews.com/city-launches-campaign-to-save-la...

Proves again that fines aren't the answer, jail time is. Fines only matter for the poor, the rich just see fines as a cost of business, and the truly rich and powerful just call their friends and problems just magically go away.

Screw this. OSHA and other safety violations should, by default, pierce the corporate veil. Particularly ones where those that help others in need get injured.

Had a acquaintance who was in a billionaire family. Trick is never ask them for money. They will invite everyone to lunch, parties at the beach house, ect.. The guy drove a Tesla and parked it anywhere. First time I went with the group, there was a ticket on the windshield, he pulls it off, and he says, "It is just a tax." He puts it on the pile of other parking tickets and says, "it is what accountants are for."

[flagged]

Fun fact: in Germany, egregious parking violations can and will lead to your license being not just taken, but you gotta take a psychological evaluation to make sure you're of sound mind [1]. Can't get your way out of that.

[1] https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/vgh-baden-wuerttember...

I’d rather tolerate some level of rude / obnoxious behaviour than be concerned with government reeducation programs.

The authorities aren't going to send you off to reeducation, they will just determine (accurately) that you are a me-first guy who must not be allowed on the public roads and won't return your license. A win for the general public because road traffic is a coordinated effort.

I don’t mind being admonished by a magistrate for my mad behaviour, but being required to attend what boils down to nonsense treatment theatre is a bit much.

Anyone who’s enough of a sociopath to intentionally park like a jerk knows the right things to say to appear repentant.

I wonder what Germans think of this waste of time / money / effort.

My guess here is that this is not treatment as sic but assessment and that if you’re not appealing for your licence back you could just skip it. Perhaps a German could comment?

It’s weird to me how right wing Americans seem primed to catastrophise about Marxist big brothers when they hear about any vaguely effective or equitable example of public policy.

> My guess here is that this is not treatment as sic but assessment and that if you’re not appealing for your licence back you could just skip it. Perhaps a German could comment?

German here, yep, exactly that.

Absurd.

Who loses their license for a parking infringement and doesn’t go through the motions of getting it back.

Like anyone thinks: yeah, fair enough, I’m such an irredeemable reprobate I think I’ll just walk from now on.

The point is that there should be a mechanism to prevent such arseholes from getting it back if it seems likely that they'll continue their behaviour. This is one such mechanism.

What? Faking their way through empathy theatre?

Only people with organic brain damage are failing that.

Where’s the data? Has the price of implementing such a scheme been worth the costs?

I live in a regional Australian city.

Driving is a privilege, not a right. Privileges require responsibility.

Freedom of movement is the relevant right. That's why you may need a certification to operate a vehicle above a certain level of dangerousness. But you can't be denied that certification unless you have done something that makes it impossible for you to be a safe operator of that vehicle. Vehicles for commerce are treated differently. Your mileage may vary but that's the theory of those laws in most places.

In countries with sufficient transportation alternatives, freedom of movement is still guaranteed even with your driver's license permanently revoked.

And I've never heard anyone use freedom of movement to argue against prisons, so I think we can all agree that limiting someone's movement can be an appropriate response to certain violations of law.

If you're rich enough to ignore fines, leading to a license suspension, you're rich enough to afford a driver. Or at least to Uber everywhere.

Parking violations can affect handicaped people. Also parking and halting restrictions at least in Germany are often motivated by safety concerns. If you get injured in an accident made more likely by a parking violation you may feel different.

This is why the Swiss system makes so much sense. Since fines are meant to a deterrent they need to inflict a similar level of punishment on the people who receive them.

Rich people get out of jail time too

The vast majority of violations that lead to loss of life result in charges that are dropped or acquitted. In the US it’s very, very hard to get anyone in jail for gross negligence in construction projects. Look up Plainly Difficult on YouTube, pick one of his hundreds of videos about negligent construction, and there is roughly 99% probability that all the charges were dropped, especially if it was in the US. (It seems to be a bit easier to get people in jail overseas.)

I don’t know why this is, only that it is. And it’s unclear how to change it. You could lobby for new laws, but those tend to be lobbied by the very companies that would stand to lose from those new laws.

Laws don't protect the people, they protect wealth. It's easier to create wealth if you sacrifice life and limb. Look up how many people were buried inside the Hoover Dam -- alive.

The delusion of recompense for damages incurred is a placation of known risk. By that, I mean, if you think you can sue your employer for doing you dirty, then you feel safe to work there.

But it almost never works in the favor of the harmed unless it's a violation of a protected class and that's not really harmful.

What's harmful is dying or losing limbs or the ability to work and employers don't pay much for cases like that.

Get groped by your boss and you'll get millions tho.

"No people were intentionally buried inside the Hoover Dam's concrete. While 96 deaths were officially recorded during construction, the belief that bodies were entombed is a myth. The dam was built in interlocking blocks, and workers who died were recovered or accounted for"

I believe that is incorrect. My grand-uncle worked on the Hoover Dam. The safety precautions were limited, to be charitable. Suspending manned Bobcat (equivalent) excavators from ropes, lowered down to the sides of the dam was witnessed. The reason the 96 names are not on the memorial plaque, is because they literally couldn't keep track and aren't exactly sure. IDs and IDing not required at that time. Conveniently, everyone who worked on the Hoover Dam project is now dead.

There were thousands of workers, tens swapped out daily (which is why there are fewer deaths than you would expect). If you weren't a top performer because you were the lowest on the near-manual boring machine with mud/water and stone dumping on you from above, you were replaced. This was built during the Great Depression where there were crowds appearing at the gates everyday looking for the opportunity to work. My great-grandfather, grandfather and granduncle all worked it as Foreman, Carpenter, and Shift Supervisor, respectively. These were at different times in the project.

My extended family all know a different version where there certainly are bodies. I think they are more credible dead, than the official numbers for a highly controversial project back then. Peck wasn't an outlier, but it had the problem of accounting for the people lost. The Hoover project did not.

> The delusion of recompense for damages incurred is a placation of known risk.

Negligence is separate from known and unavoidable risk.

> By that, I mean, if you think you can sue your employer for doing you dirty, then you feel safe to work there.

Maybe I just assume they're following relevant safety laws?

> But it almost never works in the favor of the harmed unless it's a violation of a protected class and that's not really harmful.

A settlement is separate from criminal charges. Settlements happen all the time. The state even provides it's own injury compensation plan.

> Get groped by your boss and you'll get millions tho.

The point of that is to prevent the company from blithely creating more victims in the same way it did the first. That's what _true_ wealth actually is.

I wonder what being a worker would be like if every CEO of every company could be personally arrested for a mistake made by any employee.

My sense is it would be significantly worse than it is now.

There would be no companies.

> the rich just see fines as a cost of business

They will only do the business so long as it is profitable. If the fines are high enough that they internalize the negative consequences of the business's behavior, you should get a good outcome. For example, there should be a very large fine if a waymo hits and kills someone. It should not be an infinitely large fine or result in jail time for waymo executives. To operate self-driving cars, they should have to put enough money in escrow to prove they can pay the fine.

You don't want an infinite punishment and you don't want no punishment. You want to align the incentives. Fines are probably the best way to do that for rational actors

But people and corporates are demonstrably not rational actors. There are thousands of studies documenting our inability to properly track and think about risks.

Plus, as this story shows, if the fines are large enough they just phone up their friends to have the fines quashed.

Naming culpable individuals inside corporations and regularly holding them accountable is the only way to make this stop.

> Fines are probably the best way to do that for rational actors

How can you say that after not only this instance but also all the other instances that showed how ineffective they are?

That also has the huge assumption that companies are rational actors. They're not. They're merely profit machines that'll do anything to achieve their goal.

It simply does not work.

> For example, there should be a very large fine if a waymo hits and kills someone. It should not be an infinitely large fine or result in jail time for waymo executives.

The way this is done is by certification and testing. Mercedes Benz for example? They got their driving assistant certified under SAE Level 3 [1]. Do that and you'll get a pass because you followed the legal guidelines - but if you don't and use an uncertified system, it means jail time.

Autonomous cars aren't some random webshop or bananaware (ripens at the customer's), autonomous cars are two ton heavy ballistic weapons capable of mass murder (as a bunch of terror attacks show) and should be treated as such - test before going on the road, not afterwards after you used the general public as guinea pigs.

[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Autonomes-Fahren-Mercedes-wird-Lev...

> Proves again that fines aren't the answer, jail time is.

Correct. In terms of cost-effectiveness in preventing crime, 30 days in jail for an executive is much more useful than 3 years for a shoplifter. Courts should routinely be handing out short sentences, rather than fines, to suits.

Or alternatively, apply the corporate death penalty: remove the board and C-level executives, nationalize the assets.

I favour this penalty especially for crimes related to worker unions.

Nevada is making a mockery of its own laws by giving Boring Co special exceptions treatment for tunnels that likely get abandoned due to its impracticality.

This is pretty standard for Nevada.

This isn't the first time: In 2019 Tesla illegally prevented OSHA officials from entering a Tesla site in Nevada (with a warrant and officer from the sheriff's office) to address serious workplace injuries.

These are what are claimed to be the onerous regulations slowing down innovation.

> When Boring Co.’s Davis called the Governor’s office the day the company received the citations, he spoke to Chris Reilly, the governor’s point person for state infrastructure, who was hired in 2024 after working at Tesla for more than seven years.

The revolving door continues to spin. Wouldn’t have guessed that a former Tesla executive now leading state infrastructure policy would give special treatment to another Musk-owned company.

Unsurprising but still despicable that the Boring Company disregards worker and emergency responder safety to this level, and that even a slap on the wrist fine was enough for them to go crying to the governor.

With former pharmaceutical execs working at the FDA regulating drugs, former Boeing execs working at the FAA to regulate airlines and countless more examples it’s staggering corruption in the US isn’t talked about more.

It’s almost like the media companies no longer serve the population, and only serve the corrupt.

Well, expect more. We’ve gutted the federal bureaucracy like a fish, anyone who wasn’t fired is leaving as soon as they can.

I’m hiring lots of amazing people from the feds. My client is going to make a fortune as the smartest people regulating them are now advocating for them. The government is, as intended, going to be generationally broken.

The government works better the fewer dollars and bureaucrats it has

So... Defund the police, I guess?

[citation needed]

The federal government has been trying this approach for a number of years, and it doesn't seem to make it more efficient or mobile. Justl ook at the state of it's digital services, they are stuck in 2005, at best.

Thats before you talk about the IRS. Virtually everywhere else most tax on wage is automatic, where filings are the exception.

Do you ever wonder if parroting the thing they tell you to say without adding any context or justification might have negative consequences for you in the future or just make you look dumb in public? Even good faith people agreeing with the premise here aren't going to value a mindless dismissal.

Do you have any thoughts on why that might be or any times you haven't seen that to be true?

This is my learned opinion working as a FTE government contractor, as an IC.

Fantastic. I encourage you to add your first hand anecdotes and perspective to the conversation next time!

It’s exceptionally weird to blame “the media” for this type of thing in the comments of a story that was researched, written, and published by the media. At some point we’re the problem. If we don’t take corruption seriously, and apparently we don’t given everything happening at the moment, that’s a reflection of us and our priorities.

but how did we get the priorities?

> It’s almost like the media companies no longer serve the population, and only serve the corrupt.

Almost ? Who do you think owns the media companies ? /s

Background:

Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45862674

Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540585

Live drills can be very dangerous and this was no exception, especially in unique environments where folks have little experience. We lose many first responders and military personnel from their regular work here.

Who failed to inform the firefighters that quickening agents can leech from walls?

The FTC doesn't crack down on FSD, why would Nevada crack down on Boring Co?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com