As @alon_levy has pointed out many times, Spain and Korea (among others) have already figured out how to tunnel for an order of magnitude cheaper than the US pays. We don’t need @elonmusk to reinvent the earth pressure balance machinehttps://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/943882440984223747 …
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Replying to @MarketUrbanism @stucchio and
Oh yeah, also electric cars were invented in 1828 in Hungary, and orbital launchers in 1957 in Russia. Elon has such a track record of wasting time and money on stuff that already exists, hm?
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Replying to @Plinz @MarketUrbanism and
Huh? Electric cars were never a mass market product. EPB is how a decent fraction of first-world metro construction works.
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Replying to @alon_levy @MarketUrbanism and
Exactly the point. Tunnels are not a mass market product. And did you notice that the US lost the ability to build viable subways ca. 1950? A mile of new US subway now costs upwards of a Billion!
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Replying to @Plinz @MarketUrbanism and
Tunnels are a mass market product this side of the Atlantic, but Musk is ignorant of advances here and of what drives high costs in the US.
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I have to admit that I am personally absolutely clueless wrt the economics an technology of tunneling, so my opinion is worthless. I just have the intuition that Elon Musk is smart and capable enough to buy and create more cognition on it than Spain.
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Indeed you are clueless then. Spain is the world’s civil engineering leader, they’ve proven themselves far more times than Elon Musk has in this field.
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I am genuinely curious: in your view, how would you quantify the probability that you know more about tunneling and possible business cases than Elon Musk's company at this point? I wonder how much of your position is driven by deep expertise and how much by being annoyed?
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I'll turn the question around to you: how much of your position here is driven by being annoyed, and how much is driven by your background on the topic? Because you've already admitted to being "clueless" about tunneling...
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I noticed that annoyance did indeed play a role for me, and maybe it was unjustified! I think that Elon Musk has a track record of disrupting what everybody thought they knew, and his detractors have a track record of being wrong, but that may distort my view here.
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I would like to meet the person with a passing familiarity with tunneling who thinks that Elon might be onto something. I have yet to find that person
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That seemed to be the same pattern when he decided to build a high end car from scratch: the car industry made similar noises as Nokia did when Apple announced a smartphone. I might be pattern matching too much, but otoh Musk has institutional support.
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