Stopping when inspectors are there only to restart once they leave is willful enough that you wonder why this doesn't go into criminal liability?
This was their big expose back in January: https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-boring-company-...
Their X feed gives a pretty clear picture of that:
You're gonna have a real head spin moment when you find out who founded the EPA!
I was not trying to imply that this does not deserve investigation. I just thought that it was relevant to point out the agenda or ideological bias of the source because it helps to know these kinds of things.
>And there's plenty of right-wing media — in fact I'd argue too much such that there's a lack of balance in US media.
Journalists are overwhelmingly left-wing in their ideological leanings.
The result is something you could call "silence by selection": investigative reporting on corporate or conservative money is constant, but similar investigations of public-sector unions’ financial pipelines, pensions, and political leverage are almost non existent.
When mainstream coverage discusses "special interests", it targets corporations or billionaires, not the public-sector class which is the single most powerful political bloc in every advanced Western democracy (and which is the reason why every major urban area in the US is controlled by Democrats).
As noble as your intentions may be, it's unnecessary and muddies the conversation if you keep adding cherry-picked information about your view of the politics of those involved.
Also, "left-wing" and "right-wing" are not particularly useful terms as they are ill defined and vary from place to place (e.g. the U.S. left-wing is considered very right-wing in most of Europe).
Anecdote: in some early reporting, I noticed a citation to a paper that didn’t support the purported argument. (It said the opposite.)
I emailed the author, one of the founding journalists at Pro Publica and an award winner. He basically thanked me for the feedback and then left the article unchanged.
Pro Publica is reputable for a small publication. But they are not authoritative.
Edit to add: what you've done here is defame every member of the ProPublica staff, past and present (because you don't name a particular writer or article). There is no way for anyone from ProPublica to refute this.
If you want to critique ProPublica honestly, quote a particular statement they've published.
I’m literally calling out a liar. Not sure how you missed that.
But sure. This is the article [1]. Excerpt from my e-mail to the author:
“I came across your post through Dealbook today. In your article you mention that it is ‘argued that [Sarbanes-Oxley] would hurt initial public offerings, which it didn’t.’ You link through to a working paper on the SSRN at ‘didn't’. From the paper linked to:
‘Although the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the 2003 Global Settlement have reduced the attractiveness of being public for small companies, we argue that the more fundamental problem is the increased inability of small companies to become and remain profitable.’
The paper, in whole, posits that structural changes in the attractiveness of exit by acquisition versus IPO are the salient factor behind a secular decrease in IPO activity…Furthermore, the paper directly concedes (see quote above) that SOX negatively impacted IPO activity. This is not how you represented it in your article.”
Eisinger’s response: “Thanks, [JumpCrisscross], for your thoughts.”
> what you've done here is defame every member of the ProPublica staff, past and present (because you don't name a particular writer or article)
I’m calling Jesse Eisinger unreliable. Since he’s a founder in good standing at Pro Publica, I’m calling out the publication. Honest journalists don’t get free passes for negligent or crooked bosses.
Pro Publica is worth reading. It is not authoritative—it does not hold itself up to journalistic standards, a rot which starts at the top.
(I’ve used the above exchange to block Pro Publica from influencing lawmaking on Cheyenne, Albany, Sacramento and D.C. I would want anything they say independently corroborated before being acted on.)
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-sox-win-how-financial...
Edit: My layperson reading of the source makes me think the ProPublica article would be accurate if its link to the source had the text "which it mostly didn't" rather than "which it didn't". I don't have a problem with the article as it's written, but this is a good reminder that journalists writing for a general audience will often omit qualifiers, sacrificing accuracy for readability. (I, on the other hand, cling dearly to my qualifiers.)
> Many have blamed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and the 2003 Global Settlement’s effects on analyst coverage for the decline in IPO activity. We find very little support for the conventional wisdom, and offer an alternative explanation
No wonder you got ignored ..
Edit: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1954788
The paper. The one that was cited. (It was a working paper at the time.)
Nevertheless, your quote drives the point home. The paper rejects “the conventional wisdom” which “states that low public market prices are due to either lower valuations caused by the lack of analyst coverage, or to lower earnings as a public firm because of SOX and other costs.”
The Pro Publica article says that paper shows SOX did not reduce IPO volumes. That’s false. The earnings channel is rejected. But otherwise, the paper is about acquisition versus IPO.
It’s understandable incompetence. It turns into a lie when one digs in after the error is pointed out.
> No wonder you got ignored ..
If a journalist ignoring me means I can let their work be ignored in multiple state and national capitals, I will take it as a win.
(And with the benefit of hindsight, the article was dead wrong. I built a bit of a career on the private markets starting in 2012, as it happens.)
No. He cited a paper showing the opposite effect from what he claimed it to be.
If you've read the article, you can see how
- they were told to stop, and refused
- lied about what they did to make the problem look smaller
- reversed corrective action as soon as they thought the inspectors left
This has nothing to do with bias. A right wing outlet should've covered this too. They might have used some different words but I don't see how this can be anything other than intentional. In the end their own legal department had to step in and acknowledge that they won't do any other projects before putting in remediations.
So I am absolutely not suggesting this story is not accurate or that Boring Company isn't at fault.
In the long run selective coverage creates an inaccurate picture of reality: constant stories about private greed, almost none about institutional self-dealing within the state.
I think you misunderstand the whole concept of journalism. They report, you interpret. Left wing or right wing might matter in what words they choose, to influence your perception.
Not reporting something like this is not bias, that's just not caring.
Regardless, we are on a news aggregator here. Whatever selection bias this source has should be counteracted by hn drawing from many sources. At least on the source level. HN is going to of course be biased towards stories hn finds interesting.
If there wasn't a permanent bureaucracy of sorts, then yes, but in this case there is in fact a permanent bureaucracy, what some call the deep state, which is a constant regardless of which party is in power. And this political bloc overwhelmingly supports the Democrats and is threatened by potential cuts from Republicans.
Covering self-dealing within the state would give the Republicans' efforts to cut some of these programs and departments moral legitimacy in the public eye, so left-wing news sources would not do that.
Which is stupid, obviously. If it's intentional/willful breaking of the law, send them to jail the same way you would for an individual.
They should just follow the rules, period. And any fine should be larger than the amount of money they saved by their illegal behavior and cover the corrective actions.
Here's a thought experiment. They're tunneling beneath your house and, because they skip all normal precautions, your house collapses. Sure, you don't mind as long as they're fined a decent amount, right?
It's not weird. It would be bad if the government was unable to have the funds to clean up the damage. And when someone is charging you with >300% profit margins, that's a sign that you should find another way to solve the issue.
>Sure, you don't mind as long as they're fined a decent amount, right?
I would mind, but I would feel that I was made whole if they paid me >3x the damages to the house.
You must view jails and prisons as a terrible outcome, since you're essentially paying money to punish someone.
Yes. If I step on a patch of grass technically that may damage the grass, but I don't think such an action should be punished since the amount of damage is very small.
>You must view jails and prisons as a terrible outcome, since you're essentially paying money to punish someone.
No, I view it as a positive outcome as it removes malicous actors from the system.
Should they also get to walk away if they just pay 3 times the cost of "cleaning up the mess"? That's a pretty big profit margin, no?
In this scenario disposing of the waste = dealing with the bodies and property damage and digging a tunnel = shooting people within a school. I don't the scenario is a good analog since it was legal to dig the tunnel.
> Our largest treatment facility, the Flamingo Water Resource Center, ensures wastewater is treated to the highest standard allowing the reclaimed water to be discharged back into Lake Mead. Lake Mead is the drinking water source for more than 95% of the population and businesses in Clark County.
https://www.cleanwaterteam.com/about-us/who-we-are
They keep walking away from attempted murder charges by just paying a fine.
The system is clearly designed to transport and treat typical sewer water and not arbitrary toxic, corrosive, volatile, or otherwise undesirable chemicals from commercial operations, for pretty obvious reasons.
If doing something makes a profit, you don't need to subsidize it.
>Why do you feel entitled to break laws without consequence?
I have never stated that. I am actually for the opposite that with AI we should scale law enforcement to almost always be able to catch people violating laws. My initial comment in this thread is providing a contrasting view point about how the fine is a fair punishment when viewed in relation to how much damage is being caused. I wanted to provide contrast on how the fine's amount could make sense.
The Boring Company, on the other hand, has been dumping their wet sludge on a vacant lot near a mall and waiting for the sludge to dry out. The mall doesn't like that. Nor does the city of Las Vegas, now that they found out.
We have the law and the police setup to protect the rich from any real rebuttal to this status quo so we're locked in.
But it does seem like a consistent theme across civil wars - when the divide between a ruling class and the average is too large, then something violent eventually happens [2].
Lets hope we rebalance before reaching the point where everyone loses, this time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Revolution
CCWRD says that its crews ultimately had to clean 12 cubic yards of “drilling mud, drilling spoils, and miscellaneous solid waste” from one of its sewage treatment facilities due to Boring’s discharges across two of its project sites
Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas
I can no longer find it. If anyone else can, it might be nice to link here.
The fact that Teslas can't navigate autonomously even in these controlled, enclosed environments is also quite embarrassing.
They were trying hard to make a TBM that was faster than the current literal snails pace and cheaper than existing ones. It doesn’t appear they’ve had much success, though I’d rather they tried than just sticking with the status quo forever.
> The fact that Teslas can't navigate autonomously even in these controlled, enclosed environments is also quite embarrassing.
They can, regulations just don’t allow it yet. Coming soon (tm)
Making a much faster TBM was absolutely part of the initial plan.
The expensive bit of building metros isn't actually boring the tunnel, generally, not anymore. It's everything around that; securing a route, the disruption while it's going on, etc etc. So the last thing you want is to have to do it twice.
The problem rather appears to be with the tech itself being unable to perform "full self-driving".
Tunnel cost is mostly dependent on the volume of material removed, which means that cost goes up linearly with length but with the square of the tunnel diameter. Trains and people movers tend to require significantly larger diameter tunnels, so their costs tend to be much higher. Also Boring Company tunnels don't need much infrastructure in them, so they save money on rails, high voltage power systems, rolling stock, etc.
They even derailed (no pun intended) a train link from Building 37 to O'Hare by offering to build a train station in the cavern already dug for a high speed rail terminal that may exist someday in the future. I don't think they ever did anything there but the city was onboard (damn a lot of idioms are train related huh)
Elon Musk told his biographer that the purpose of his Hyperloop proposal was to kill CAHSR. That's not exactly apocryphal.
Elon Musk probably made $800k as I was typing this comment.
Maybe a $500k fine is reasonable for a dime a dozen contractor, this fine is a joke.
But it looks like they were, in total, fined for 800 or so environmental violations, which feels like a lot of violations: https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-boring-company-...
This strikes me as a completely wrong-headed take on it. It's not OK for one company to do this merely because others do the same or worse. I'd much prefer no companies violate ethical and environmental regulations.
I applaud the exposé not because of Elon's political leanings or even because he's involved with the company at all, but because I hope it's at least a little push towards the company behaving better. Should there be other companies requiring similar exposés (and I think we all there are), I look forward to reading them if/when Politico or some other journalist outlet publishes them, regardless of the political affiliations in the offending companies' leadership.
I don't quite understand this mentality that it's not OK to investigate or otherwise bring justice to organizations considered right-leaning until it's been exhaustively proven no organization on the left is at least as bad.
If you don't want right-leaning companies being the first in the crosshairs, maybe join the team and convince them from the inside that flagrantly violating the law in front of the very inspectors sent to verify legal compliance only to resume doing it the moment they believe said inspectors left but without verifying it is really stupid.
If you have a large number of corporations breaking the law, you have to start your investigations somewhere, and the company with the giant neon sign saying "we're breaking the law!" is as good a spot to start as any.
I'm concerned that this article was published because Elon Musk is a celebrity, not because the offence itself is newsworthy. And if I thought that this article would effect corporate practices anyway, I would simply shut my mouth, and keep my apprehensions to myself. But I suspect that Elon will get a little dopamine hit if he sees his name in a news headline, and every other CEO of a major corporation will ignore it altogether and continue committing environmental offences whenever they think it is advantageous.
I think that Elon Musk is a bad person, I think that billionaires shouldn't exist, and specifically that the kinds of people who become billionaires are some of the worst kinds of people to wield power in society. But I don't think that Elon Musk is special. I don't think that he's a uniquely bad person, I think he is basically a very normal CEO.
> Should there be other companies requiring similar exposés
I think that there are so many other such cases that it is almost impossible to wrap my head around. I said "I wish I had a sense of the numbers" not because I want to normalize and excuse this, but because I think the scope of the problem is so much bigger than this story suggests. Here[1] is a tiny slice of what I mean, a review of environmental penalties issued in Ontario, Canada. It seems like there should be 15 to 20 such exposes in the Local News section of The Toronto Star every year.
Elon Musk, like every other antisocial monster leading a major corporation is "just" making a calculated decision comparing the risk of getting caught and the cost of a fine against the expense of doing the right thing.
I think the real story is that maybe fines are insufficient to address the issue of corporate environmental offenses, or that maybe they accurately represent the priorities of regulators, but not of citizens.
There's a problem here and it's not that Elon Musk is evil. Our society needs to be resilient to the existence of evil people.
[1]https://www.ontario.ca/page/2016-2020-environmental-penaltie...
He's contemptuous of regulators, doesn't care about his or his company's reputation (or at least negative publicity doesn't seem to change his behavior, although he whines when people criticize him), has an extreme tolerance for risk, knows that he has unlimited resources to fight off lawsuits and regulators, has donated vast sums of money to the current president, and at least at Twitter, got rid of all the people who were working on safety issues.
So it's not a surprise that there are more ethics violations then at a company where the executives still go by the "don't do anything that would get your name in The New York Times" rule.