Originally published at: Miami town commissioner eager to meet with Elon Musk in Vegas | Boing Boing
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Well he does have the ganja hookup.
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They know he can’t bore tunnels in a town with sea level elevation that has underwater rivers, lacks basements for a good reason, and floods these days even when it doesn’t rain. Not to mention the condos falling down for unspecific reasons and hence a populace that is going to be very suspicious of anyone digging underground projects.
But it’s a free trip to Vegas.
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Digging tunnels in Florida sounds like a really bad idea to me…Unless they are tunnels for fish?
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Nobody’s commented on the Time Tunnel yet? Man, that was one of my favorite shows growing up, I couldn’t wait for Saturday night to come around so I could watch it. Fortunately, it was broadcast on one of the two channels we got.
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And before he was writing such renown Star Wars themes, John Williams developed his art on all the Irwin Allen TV entries. Here’s the theme to Time Tunnel (crank back the slider to get Lost in Space, which Williams did two versions of; the second is particularly piquant)
(Always curious how Doug and Tony never ‘time tumbled’ to a time when nuth’n much was going on [shrug])
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“Johnny” Williams, eh? I wonder who was responsible for the title graphics. There’s a definite “Irwin Allen look” to all the logos and animated bits.
Miami, huh? Less Time Tunnel and more Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
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How are these people so dumb? Miami famously has problems with tunnels because of water issues. Musk can’t cheaply bore a tunnel where it’s dry - he’d have no idea how to do in Miami, and it would be incredibly expensive, even more so than if they hired someone who knew what they were doing. These Florida commissioners are buying into the cult of personality, and I hope their cities don’t pay the price.
Well, it’s possible, it’s just really expensive and requires a lot of upkeep to bore tunnels there. The local Republicans seem to actually believe it, as this isn’t the first local Florida official who bought into the hype - there was some elected official who was super-eager to take Musk up on the idea of building a bunch of underground roads under the belief that it would be possible at the costs Musk had mentioned, and not the cost Florida had recently paid for the Port Miami tunnel, which was a billion+ dollars for 4000 feet. Which cost that for the reasons you mention. It’s just a willful denial of reality.
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A monorail would make so much more sense.
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Every time this system comes up it gets worse. The platonic ideal of the Musk tunnels is less efficient that a sensible metro system. Then they faced the real world in ideal soil conditions and delivered something barely suitable for a pedestrian walkway. Now they are draining more public money for a nightmare tunneling environment.
We need to get serious about how the Boring Company scam works. They have mainly used off the shelf and modified commercial machines to build tunnels that are under the specs other companies are held to for safe operation. Apparently they’ve finally completed a machine of their own design, only three years after signing cities up for their proposals, rather than companies with a history of actually building things. The hype musk generates gets government agencies to perform free advertising and market research for them, which is valuable to all of Musk’s other businesses (you want fine grained traffic data on the Great Lakes region have the Chicago and Cleveland MPOs do a hyperloop study). They can then use this hype and free advertising to raise venture capital. They haven’t yet completed a public project, that met the design spec, at all, but they’ve abandoned plans in LA, Chicago, and Baltimore.
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I remember Time Tunnel from my childhood. The matte sets for the underground facility gave me a better sense of the vast spaceships and underground cities on other planets that I was reading about in the science fiction novels I devoured.
The stories of the different events Doug and Tony encountered also sparked an additional interest in historical events that boring history classes rarely created.
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I was too young to know that show, but I had a particular frission run through me when I recognized the time tunnel sound effect! They reused it (or at least paid homage) with the De Lorean time machine in Back to the Future!
BBTF had no reason to make it two or three 60s-era explosive crashes right before the re-emergence of the De Lorean, except that the Time Tunnel had two or three explosive charges go off in their effect.
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Miami already fell for that one, even before the Simpsons came along.
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I agree FULLY with the Swiss engineer, but wasn’t Musk’s tunnel supposed to be airtight? (I don’t believe his sample tunnel is.) I’m not sure the Swiss could build an airtight length of tunnel that fast until they get some practice. But, yeah, I’ll bet they could do it far faster than Musk’s team.
“whipper of foam” = Schaumschläger
You can’t get parts these days, and Musk would use to sabotage the Apollo program so that he could be first.
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