Also California has been talking about hi-speed rail since the 90's but it's never going to happen because every proposal has the rout going through Bakersfield :/

Oh shit we attracted an asto-turfer!

More evidence this shit is bullshit.

Also evidence of the influential might of PoETV!

Wow, poetv has really fallen off its rocker.

I get that Trump is making everyone anxious, and the news has instilled a dismal availability heuristic. Let's nevertheless try to keep it together.

It would be healthier to watch less news. Failing that, please try to remember that this is water. The circus is going to leave town eventually.

In the meantime, and as always, it's comforting to know that people smarter than us are working with their heads down to make things better.

Despite the best efforts of anti-GMOers, fewer people are starving than ever.
Despite the best efforts of anti-vaxxers, diseases continue to face eradication.
Despite the best efforts of wealth inequality populists, innovative geniuses such as Musk and Bezos continue to improve humanity's technological infrastructure, reducing costs and opening new possibilities.

Read some Pinker, poetv. You're better than this. And as for astroturfing, I'm probably older school PoE than most of you.

Oh yes all hail our labor exploiting benevolent corporate overlords, blessed be their quarterly reports!

don't listen to this neckbeard- listen to the richer neckbeards. They probably know what is better for all of us.

Does a certain cognitive dissonance arise when you note that much of the noise about universal basic income arises directly from Silicon Valley, up to and including Elon Musk? Both you and your evil capitalist enemies want to see all of humanity financially secure and taken care of. What they understand and what you don't is that this isn't a zero sum game.

Regarding corporations, incorporation is a financial and legal tool. Without it, we'd have much less innovation, and everything would be much more expensive. A corporation is not a boogeyman, and if it's doing something bad, it's because it has bad leaders.

If you're going to rage at something, at least pick a deserving target. You could choose:

The corruption caused by non-public campaign financing.
The disproportionate power vested in hayseeds by the outmoded electoral college.
The polarization and poor representation caused by plurality voting.
Gerrymandering.
Disdain instead of respect for our betters, who have risked their fortunes and poured their lives into making great things happen, and who could teach us a great deal if we would pay attention.

All but the last are largely intractable until the Baby Boomers die, so choose your target wisely.

Oh please, I'm not saying Elon musk is pure evil or anything, he's done some really cool stuff. But the loop is obviously bullshit

Here's the problem: there's no new technology with elon musk.

Oh rockets that can be reused?

Oh, a shitty underground freeway?

Oh some dumbass car that catches fire and costs a fuckton?

This is all shit that is either stupid, impractical, or based on tech that has already been invented and honestly does nothing to solve any of our current problems.

What I mean is: stop it with the technocracy; it's all bullshit and it sucks

This tunnel horseshit started when Elon said he's tired of traffic on his commute to work. He said he wanted a tunnel from his house to his job.

The rest of this Fucking Magic dog show is because "I, a billionaire, want the state of California to make environmental, safety and property rights exemptions just for me so I can build a tunnel for me and my friends to use to avoid being stuck in traffic with the peasants" doesn't have good optics.

As for the hyperloop;

It could actually be useful but it's being targeted at the wrong market. It's a waste of time and money to use it for shuttling a couple rich assholes around during the waking hours of the day from downtown to a sports stadium. Where it could really make some difference is if it's used for cargo transport between busy shipping hubs. It can operate 24/7, get a bunch of dirty tractor trailers off our roads and possibly even save some money. It could be cheaper to build because less safety systems are needed if it's just automated cargo pods zipping back and forth.

It's a subway full of cars instead of people. It doesn't make much sense. But I hope I'm wrong because apparently one is going to get made right by me, I guess. I just don't understand why.

There's no new technology with Elon Musk?

Elon Musk created PayPal, which is what made eBay viable. If you've ever bought something off auction there, you can thank him.

Elon Musk made the first fully electric vehicle to reach a wide consumer market. These "dumbass" cars can be powered without fossil fuels. If you have any understanding of global warming, you can thank him.

Elon Musk and his team engineered and landed a booster rocket. This had never been done before in human history, and it drops cost by ~100x. If you've used anything that space affords (GPS, satellite television, a weather report), these services will now be vastly cheaper to operate and improve, and again you can thank him.

Shitting on someone who might be the greatest engineer to ever exist on our planet, someone who has made market-changing innovations across domains as disparate as eCommerce and rocketry, and someone who aspires to help even pitiable and broken apes like you not die from global warming -- shitting on such a person is more than just dumb, it's deranged.

You remind me of the geriatrics and hayseeds who would rage against Obama, or more precisely their bumpkin and half-witted ideas about the socialist-communist-America-hating Muslim that existed in strictly in their heads.

Drop the anti-intellectualism. None of you have looked at the tunneling problem as deeply as the engineers in The Boring Company have, and I guarantee they've thought of every objection and hurdle that pops into your jaded and unimaginative heads as you smugly sit on your computer chairs. It's a project that may or may not succeed. That's a given. However, shitting on the effort to improve transportation is wrong, as is your gleeful sneer at the engineers working on this problem.

Again, read some Pinker, poetv. Get it together.

Dude, I hope you're getting more than $20 for these sloppy blowjobs.

Something to believe in. How about you?

The guys actually inventing good tasting meat burger substitutes will do way more to save this planet than musk or Bezos ever will

Also looks like the idiots worshiping that dead Apple dipshit have found their new God of Technocracy, who can perform miracles of Marketing and Hype while doing jack shit all engineering work and taking all the credit of his researchers toil.

There are no good South Africans.

I like those guys, too. It seems your head isn't too far up your ass to see the cool things that are happening.

Though I fret that you'll turn on the first artificial meat baron who becomes a billionaire, and demonize him or her as well.

I've worked directly under a member of the tech billionaire elite. He was thoroughly quirky but also a downright kind human being. I remember when I was having a terrible day, he noticed I was feeling down and walked up and put a hand on my shoulder for a moment without saying anything. A billionaire comforting a young engineer having a bad day. His compassion turned my day around and obviously stuck with me.

Many of these guys are successful because they're leaders who inspire the best in people. The Elon Musk that most people see is him talking about the wild things that he wants to make happen, and they conclude that he's some sort of vaporous "visionary", but the day to day reality is him spending ungodly numbers of hours doing the concrete work of engineering cool things into existence.

I'd like to see us support one another's efforts, whether or not the global market has thrust billions of dollars on us.

The tunnel isn't a major project -- it deals with an annoyance, not a core human problem -- but it nevertheless it holds potential to improve the status quo. Dismissing it outright, and claiming better technical judgment over people who literally engineer space rockets, is arrogant. Even the neckbeard speaking out of his depth who made this video recognizes that there is *value* in having these tunnels, whether or not their ultimate use varies from initial prototypes.

And if a human being is creating something of value for other humans, or even just trying to create value, isn't that a thing to be celebrated?

Musk does not literally engineer rockets. The people that engineer rockets for musk also aren't working on his tunnels.

Thanks for proving my point.

(There may well be very talented people working on musk's tunnel idea, even if they know it's utterly retarded, because its a good paycheck and resume bullet point at the end of the day.)

(I'd like to point out that I'm an auto mechanic in California, and I could be working for tesla as well right now because they're hiring mechanics like crazy and their cars are horribly unreliable. No good mechanics actually want to work for tesla though because they pay shit, the benefits are shit, the work is dangerous, management is shit and tesla has terrible end-point support for repairing their cars...yes musk is nice and all to the engineers but he doesn't give the slightest shit about people lower than that)

"innovative geniuses such as Musk and Bezos" MWHAHAHAAHAHAH

"read pinker" MWAHAHAHAHAHAH

Don't you get it, Solro? Our human species can only be saved by bootlicking capitalist billionaires! It doesn't matter if their investor scamming bullshit can be debunked with math!

Billionaires already have helicopters to avoid traffic.

meant as reply to above comment

"He began a Ph.D. in applied physics and material sciences at Stanford University in 1995 but dropped out after two days to pursue an entrepreneurial career."

He's just such a fucking genius that he learned everything about engineering in 2 days and then just spent the rest of his career being a money shuffler.

Oh, el oh el...even the paypal thing is horseshit

"In March 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company, with US$10 million from the sale of Zip2.[43][47][49] One year later, the company merged with Confinity,[48][51] which had a money-transfer service called PayPal."

Just shuffle money around during the dot com boom and get made into an engineering visionary by the idiotic masses.

i'm sure the musk-worshipers and singularity people are convinced the only thing keeping father musk from letting them shed their meat-sacks and live in the eternal is people expressing skepticism about musk's plans on the internet

and not, you know, massive logistical shortsightedness

This in indeed one of the most delightful exhibits we’ve seen in awhile.

GREETINGS DENIZENS OF POE

MONOCLE. POPS.

HE HAS RISEN

Geriatrics and hayseeds raging at an Obama that exists only in their heads.

You accept that Birthers are woefully deluded about Obama. What if you yourself are woefully deluded about Elon Musk?

What would it mean if Elon Musk were actually a brilliant engineer, and the engineers working on this tunnel are vastly smarter than you and have already succeeded at doing the impossible with rockets?

Would you break down in tears at your own relative inadequacy? Would your cynical view of the universe shatter, and you'd have an existential crisis? Is this why you're so vehemently resistant to this idea?

"The people that engineer rockets for musk also aren't working on his tunnels."

WRONG. Musk has acquired the domain name BoringCompany.com and appointed a senior SpaceX engineer as leader of the project.
https://www.inc.com/business-insider/elon-musk-wasnt-kidding-t unnel-boring-company.html

"Musk does not literally engineer rockets."

WRONG. >> Musk wheels around and flashes them a spreadsheet he’d created. “Hey, guys,” he said, “I think we can build this rocket ourselves.” ... Cantrell asks, bewildered, “Elon, where did you get this?” Musk had spent months studying the aerospace industry and the physics behind it. From Cantrell and others, he’d borrowed “Rocket Propulsion Elements,” “Fundamentals of Astrodynamics,” and “Aerothermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion,” along with several more seminal texts.

"even the paypal thing is horseshit"

WRONG. Elon Musk coded and sold his first program at age 12. He and his brother starting coding Zip2 at age 24 and sold it for $307 million at age 28. He developed PayPal for years before its public offering, and his focus there went down to .dll considerations.

Elon Musk: "I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on businessy things. But actually almost all my time, like 80% of it, is spent on engineering and design."

You have a schematic aversion to absorbing any of this. Again, it's akin to anti-Obama geriatrics and hayseeds refusing to change their delusions: "Where's the birth certificate!" How do you change the mind of a birther? You don't and you can't.

I can however cause you some cognitive dissonance. Us Silicon Valley engineers and entrepreneurs are getting all the money. We can accurately identify where the money is, and we have the wherewithal to create products and services that people want and use. We seem to have at least one area of life fully figured out. And yet we're deluded idiots? Are you SURE it's not the either way around? Enjoy that dissonance, I'm out.

The money is in the pockets of Saudi stooges that have more money than sense, that's what props up Uber and probably most of Tesla and most of Sillicon Valley while we're at it.

I do appreciate if this is a troll it's a very engaging one. Much better than Bat Nuklier.

I’ll take him as the saint you portray him when he does anything for free, anonymously.

Also public transport is pretty much a solved problem.. Like with many aspects of society the solution is: do what Denmark does.

the word you are looking for White Knight

Or rabid fanboy...you see a CEO touched him once, thus proving that CEO, NAY, all CEOs are the benevolent geniuses their PR departments say they are.

"WHERE'S HIS BIRTH CERTIFICATE??"

Jesus, calm down, here it is.

"FORGERY!!"

Okay, please remember to take your pills, Grandpa.

...

Wow, check it out: engineers under Elon Musk built a booster rocket that can blast its way high into the upper atmosphere, release its payload, and then land itself.

"PATHETIC!!"

Well I certainly found it impressive, and I'm eager to see what Elon Musk and these engineers can do with tunneling.

"ASTROTURFER!!"

I'm your grandson! Remember when poenews.com got sniped and we had to switch to poe-news.com? That's something you won't find on any wiki (wikis didn't exist then) -- only in the brains of PoE people who were there for it. It's me, grandpa!

"GODDAMN BILLIONAIRES!! GODDAMN NEWFANGLED IDEAS!! I AINT NEED NO BOOKLEARNIN TO KNOW THEM BILLIONAIRES AND SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS ARE ALL FULL OF SHIT! THEY JUST TRYING TO TRICK US I TELL YOU!"

Okay Grandpa, I think it's time for a nap.

Show us on the doll where the CEO touched you.

It was a bad touch. He was lying when he told you it was a good touch.

The storm broke and the clouds relented, allowing the sun back into the sky. It revealed a wet and wind-whipped mountain landscape, branches ripped from trees, pools of water warily watching the sky for further abuse, and beside an old and weathered rock they had been generously anointed a shelter, the light reached the travelers themselves, huddled together, cold and scared, but alive.

There is a certain disbelief when darkness passes, a lack of trust that you're safe now, that you can relax your shoulders and smile and not look a fool. As such, minutes passed until the travelers stood with grim determination, their muscles weak and slow from cold, their faces pale.

Until you die, it's a give and take, every give tempered by a take, and every take softened by a give. When nature wastes you with hunger, it's well known that the eventual act of eating is one of ecstasy.

Fewer know that when nature brutalizes you with a mountain storm, its passing injects a relief as profound as morphine, and the beauty of the peaks and valleys around you fills you with such force that the innocents call it God's presence.

Looking east into the valley beside them, the travelers could see that a rainbow had formed, a scene of simple joy incongruous in a sky that had moments before been trying to kill them, but still beautiful, still mesmerizing. Their defenses were long gone, stripped away by fear and death licking at their bones, and it was without shame that tears formed in the eyes of several of the grizzled men gazing out at the prospect.

Just then, around a bend in the trail ahead, the door of an old camper was flung open. SolRo the mechanic appeared, and he cursed as stepped down from its doorway and directly into a puddle. Life had been hard on this short-statured mechanic, and he looked decades older than he actually was. "Life's a bitch and then you die." He heard this when he was a boy, back before he went to live in the mountains away from all the know-it-all city folk. It had become his mantra then, and he'd never been given reason to change it.

He stepped out squishing in wet boots, intending to resume work on the old wagon he was fixing, when he saw the travelers looking at the rainbow. He hated travelers. They had a destination they were risking their lives to get to, and they didn't understand it was the same old shit wherever you go. He looked with disdain at the tears in their eyes.

"Hey assholes, get a load of this rainbow!" he called. He pulled down his trousers, bent over, and his indigestion from the microwavable dinner he'd had for breakfast didn't fail him. A fountain of diarrhea emerged from his anus, arcing to surprising height before splattering to the ground.

The travelers said nothing.

"Ha, fucking idiots," SolRo said to himself, smug in his victory. He pulled up his pants and turned back to his wagon.

However, as the travelers passed, one of them spared him a few words.

"Our world is wider than you think. Its souls are of fractal depth, and the universe is vaster still. If you stay on this mountain, you'll meet cold and wet and death and nothing more. You will never be welcome with us, but if you leave and find someone that will accept you, you might at least taste some beauty before you die."

Soon all the travelers disappeared around the next bend, their journey a part of something timeless, an ethereal but undeniable reaching of organized matter toward the stars.

SolRo continued working on the wagon without comment, but his soiled trousers quickly grew annoying. He went back into his camper to change and wipe himself off with some one-ply from the gas station a few miles down the mountain. It's not clear if SolRo listened or understood what the traveler was saying, nor if he ever left the mountain.

Oh now I get why you worship Jobs, Musk, Bezos, etc...

You're just as insipid as they are.



Nothing more shameful than watching engineers deluding themselves and others with talks of magic useless fluff futurism while the world is collapsing around us.

Come now, I write you a story with my evening glass of wine, and that's all I get?

It's small and ridiculous to throw out opinions on people I've never met, but I certainly don't worship Jobs or Bezos. I respect their entrepreneurial work, but they otherwise seem a bit stunted.

Elon Musk and Bill Gates, however, I recognize as both being smarter than me and being sincere in what they believe -- a purpose that's beyond even them, the kings and titans of our modern world. So it's without reservation that I look to them for guidance and inspiration.

And it's not just a billionaire fix that I have. I think having a few heroes for guidance is a healthy thing, and I count among mine a number of considerably less moneyed scientists and writers, and even a few dirt poor friends that orbit far above me in their unshakable kindness when facing the coldness and hostility that often surrounds us. But who cares about me.

I suggested Pinker, not because he's the be all end all of human enlightenment, but because I know exactly what's wrong with you and most of the commentators here, and I know he would help.

You're wrong that the world is collapsing. Flat out wrong, and objectively so. It's been dog eat dog for a long long time, and we're *lucky* to today have small areas of reprieve from the disease and violence. If you can extend your cynical goggles backward, you'll see what I mean, and when you return your goggles back to the present idiocratic state of affairs, you'll realize that it's not so bad. Trump will be gone soon enough, as will the Baby Boomers who elected him, and we'll clean up the adult diapers they strew about and the furniture they burned and move on.

In the meantime, during the same period of time that Trump has been incessantly tweeting about those scary Mexicans, scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs will have further eroded hunger, disease, and poverty, carbon emissions will have been reduced, and we'll be using more and more clean energy. It's unclear that we can get it done before global warming becomes a serious issue, but there are possible ways to handle even that outcome. You have a serious availability heuristic problem if you can't see this, and you need to stop watching the news. Books are a good substitute.

To throw out my final card, aside from your (ill-founded) cynicism, you seem like an okay guy. My story was ribbing, since you were a bit of a jerk to me. However, if I met you on a mountain trail with my tech head and weirdo friends, I'd still invite you along, provided you kept your trousers on.

There's work to be done, so I'm going to fade back into the mist. This ill-considered emergence from lurking can be blamed on a cocktail during the Chiefs-Patriots game yesterday, and me having nothing better to do on the commercial breaks. Goodbye again poetv. You know where to send the Bitcoins, Elon.

"I must go now, my billionaire overlord needs me!"

Aw, that's a sweet question. Perry Bible Fellowship.

Vs your bullshit-spreadsheet-magic-will-fix-everything-maaaaaan techno hipsterism?

We don’t want money and resources being wasted on delusional fantasies of some rich assholes.

heaven forbid the ideas of lord musk or the silicon valley ubermenschen be subject to peer review or scrutiny from those outside the bay area bubble

how dare we, right? HOW DARE WE

Ha ha, being upset at Boomers ruining the world makes you a hipster.

The reactionary idiot just might be you!