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

bawolff 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How is that only a $500,000 fine???

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?

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lelandfe 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

ProPublica's reporting has been dogging Boring's heels in Las Vegas on this, I've been reading them religiously. It appears that the city views this project as Cool™ and opts either to not fine or fine pittances for constant violations.

This was their big expose back in January: https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-boring-company-...

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ETH_start 17 hours ago | parent [-]

ProPublica is extremely left-wing. That doesn't imply that their journalism is low-quality or inaccurate, but it does suggest that their choice of stories will be colored by that ideological/establishment-friendly bent. You won't see them investigating the political influence exerted by public sector unions for example.

Their X feed gives a pretty clear picture of that:

https://x.com/propublica

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CursedSilicon 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"Don't dump toxic waste into fucking manholes" is "left-wing" now?

You're gonna have a real head spin moment when you find out who founded the EPA!

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bawolff 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Its more basic then that. This is follow laws as they are written. It should not be a left/right issue. If you dont like a law, that's why its a democracy.

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ETH_start 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Of course not. But there are a myriad of wrong-doings from all sectors of the economy. Choosing to focus exclusively on the wrongdoings of interests that are obstacles to the coalition of unions, bureaucracies, and allied media that economically benefit from ever-increasing public spending (from 20% of GDP in 1950 to 38% today) is a case of shaping public opinion by selection.

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port11 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Pure whataboutism, come on. Yes, other things deserve investigation, but so does this. 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.

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ETH_start 11 hours ago | parent [-]

>Yes, other things deserve investigation, but so does this.

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).

	▲	ndsipa_pomu 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> 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. 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).

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JumpCrisscross 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> That doesn't imply that their journalism is low-quality or inaccurate

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.

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throwworhtthrow 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Be specific. Which article and which citation? Otherwise this is insinuation or even slander.

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.

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JumpCrisscross 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Be specific. Which article and which citation? Otherwise this is insinuation or even slander

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...

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throwworhtthrow an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Thank you for this. Count me as one more person who's been influenced by your exchange with Eisinger.

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.)

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Timshel 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not sure where you extract is supposed to come from, the paper argue that

> 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

	▲	JumpCrisscross 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Not sure where you extract is supposed to come from 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.)

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ETH_start 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm just speculating here, but it could be that he doesn't want to risk doxing himself. If he emailed them from his personal email address, which contains his real name, the journalist could out him.

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throwworhtthrow 16 hours ago | parent [-]

It would be extremely counterproductive for a ProPublica writer to maliciously dox someone who pointed out a logical inconsistency in their writing, if the writer's intent is to bolster their own trustworthiness. Any journalist crazy enough to do this would be forever out of a job because no source would ever speak to them again.

	▲	ETH_start 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There's a lot of paranoia out there so this is good to know.

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httpsoverdns 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What exactly was thing the subject matter? Was it something he could have reasonably disagreed with?

	▲	JumpCrisscross 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Was it something he could have reasonably disagreed with? No. He cited a paper showing the opposite effect from what he claimed it to be.

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hvb2 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why does left or right even matter? This is ordinary stuff that should be covered?

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.

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ETH_start 15 hours ago | parent [-]

The systematic bias arises from story selection, not from whether a specific investigation is accurate.

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.

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hvb2 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So what outlet would choose to not cover this? One that doesn't care?

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.

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bawolff 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Given that the current president is right wing, wouldn't the left have a vested interest in talking about self-dealing in the state?

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.

	▲	ETH_start 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>Given that the current president is right wing, wouldn't the left have a vested interest in talking about self-dealing in the state? 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.

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therobots927 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Corporations are never held accountable in America

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latch 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Isn't the problem exactly the opposite? A corporation has personhood which shields its executives?

	▲	therobots927 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Fair enough. That’s a more accurate way of putting it. Corporations are shields for the ruling elite to get away with pretty much anything. And in addition to that the corporation can be sued by shareholders if it doesn’t maximize shareholder value by externalizing costs. It’s the kind of policy that would be very popular among cancer cells.

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TulliusCicero 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's rare for even blatant misconduct of this kind by a company to result in criminal charges.

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.

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PeterHolzwarth 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Fines start small, then get big.

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viraptor 17 hours ago | parent [-]

That's the idea in general, but show us how that applies to this company. They're at ~800 violations https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/elon-musks-boring-compan...

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terminalshort 17 hours ago | parent [-]

They didn't hire an inspector, and they counted each day they didn't hire the inspector as 700 different violations, so I don't really trust their reporting on this.

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Larrikin 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Isn't that atleast one violation per day? 800 assumes they were perfect and committed zero violations other than not having an inspector, so it's inaccurate because it probably is undercounting significantly.

	▲	viraptor 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's ~700 for inspections and ~100 for other things. Which I'm not sure why would anyone discount as not important. Especially since they may be avoiding more fines due to missing inspections.

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ulfw 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do you know who runs that company???

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charcircuit 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To be fair it's over 3 times the amount of damage they caused, so that is a pretty big profit margin on cleaning up the mess.

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hvb2 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Profit margin? What a weird point of view.

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?

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charcircuit 13 hours ago | parent [-]

>What a weird point of view.

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.

	▲	hvb2 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Treating environmental law as a way to make money is, odd. If the financial Harm is minimal that implies that in your worldview it shouldn't be punished? You must view jails and prisons as a terrible outcome, since you're essentially paying money to punish someone.

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dns_snek 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Let's take this bizarre worldview to its logical conclusion, is the amount of damage that a school shooter causes equivalent to the sum of funeral costs and school repair costs?

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?

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charcircuit 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, they should be able to walk away from the damages of destruction of property and funerals. They would not be able to walkway from the murder charges.

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.

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dns_snek 13 hours ago | parent [-]

They dumped toxic waste that causes chemical burns into the system which runs to the natural waterways.

> 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.

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charcircuit 12 hours ago | parent [-]

I would assume treating to the highest standard would mean they remove things such as chemicals that cause chemical burns from the water which would mean it doesn't reach the natural waterways.

	▲	dns_snek 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Why do you assume that society would subsidize your chemical waste processing? Why do you feel entitled to break laws without consequence? 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.

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Animats 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just for comparison, here's how real tunneling companies deal with sludge.[1] There's a small portable plant that separates sludge from water. It's about the size of two shipping containers. The water usually gets re-used in the tunneling operation.

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCctmBUHIMo

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binary132 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Some of these companies seem to have figured out that you can just do things and get away with it if you don’t mind paying a few fines (maybe “fees” would be a better term??)

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bamboozled 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Some? This is basically how we let society work now. If you have money, you can do really abhorrent things and just get away with it with almost zero consequence.

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.

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acomjean 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A lot of times the businesses are long gone when the cleanup needs to be paid for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund

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XenophileJKO 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I guess my question is when was it ever not this way? Seems way better now than in the past.

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shakna 17 hours ago | parent [-]

It doesn't [0] always work out [1] this way.

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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring

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binary132 10 hours ago | parent [-]

The Russian and French Revolutions are hardly examples of “a different way” to be pointed to. I’m a Rerum Novarum appreciator personally.

	▲	shakna 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If "Let them eat cake" isn't an example, I don't know what is.

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captainkrtek 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Especially if you donate money to politicians in power, extra perks

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nashashmi 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I gladly run into parking tickets because the fine is less than the headache of distant parking

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port11 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Move fast and pollute things: the 3M school of business.

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rkagerer 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Separate from the fines, why doesn't CCWRD litigate to get their cleanup costs back?

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

	▲	ryanmcdonough 13 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The clean up costs were referenced in the article and noted that they made up around $130,000 of it.
	▲	zggf 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		$493,297.08 in fines, including $131,297.08 for the district’s expenses to remedy the fluid dumping

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hashstring 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

a parking ticket costs more. this is veiled corruption.

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ChrisArchitect 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas

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

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consumer451 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There was an amazing YouTube poop format satire video with Musk saying: ~"There are no consequences. Life has no meaning."

I can no longer find it. If anyone else can, it might be nice to link here.

	▲	x______________ 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Please be safe and healthier in your ways, consuming poop-related anything is not in your best interest.

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bmitch3020 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A $500k fine for someone worth $1T is equivalent to a $0.50 fine for someone worth $1M.

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AlexandrB 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Boring Company seems like a total nothingburger at this point. The Las Vegas Loop is not particularly impressive and it's taking a long time to expand it. Nothing about this feels revolutionary or even evolutionary. Just novelty.

The fact that Teslas can't navigate autonomously even in these controlled, enclosed environments is also quite embarrassing.

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testing22321 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Nothing about this feels revolutionary or even evolutionary.

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)

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jazzyjackson 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Were they even trying to redesign a TBM? I think they were just using off the shelf boring machines at a smaller diameter (many tunnels one lane each) because building tunnels wide enough for a highway is exponentially more expensive.

	▲	rsynnott 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The funny thing is, the actual industry is going in the opposite direction, because it turns out that a single big tunnel is in practice cheaper than a bunch of small ones. Conventional deep-bore metro lines consisted of two tunnels about 3.5 meters in diameter, but if you look at _current_ metro projects, the Dublin metro is using a single 10 meter tunnel, the newer Barcelona lines are using a singe 12 meter tunnel... 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.
	▲	theptip 17 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Elon did some napkin math along the lines of “we will make tunnel boring ~10x faster by: 4x lower boring surface area, 4x faster boring because the industry are currently idiots not operating their machines at the limits that physics dictates”. (I can’t remember if there was actually another factor of 2 in there) Making a much faster TBM was absolutely part of the initial plan.

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k4rli 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Regulations about using their own tech to drive inside their own property?

The problem rather appears to be with the tech itself being unable to perform "full self-driving".

	▲	testing22321 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes. There are regulations about how you transport the public.

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nrhrjrjrjtntbt 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What do they do that is more impressive than routine tunnels built in cities for the last few decades (or even between different soverign countries under the sea!)?

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ggreer 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Their main differentiator is cost. The Boring Company bid $48.7 million for the initial LVCC loop. The total cost to complete it was $53 million. The second cheapest bid was Doppelmeyer Cableliner, which would have built a people mover for $215M. The people mover would have had about 50% more capacity per station, but at 4 times the cost.

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.

	▲	Rebelgecko 18 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		How do their operating costs compare?
	▲	bamboozled 13 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		they also don't exist.

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wyldfire 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's an outstanding mechanism to derail public transit efforts, that's all. It's not a nothing burger because that would suggest it's a good faith effort that just didn't pan out.

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jazzyjackson 18 hours ago | parent [-]

People like to die vote this because it's apocryphal that the purpose of hyperloop was to sabotage public transit but the motive sure fits the crime, musk ain't in the railroading business.

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)

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jcranmer 18 hours ago | parent [-]

> because it's apocryphal that the purpose of hyperloop was to sabotage public transit but the motive sure fits the crime

Elon Musk told his biographer that the purpose of his Hyperloop proposal was to kill CAHSR. That's not exactly apocryphal.

	▲	terminalshort 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Too bad he didn't succeed in killing that $100 billion boondogle.

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whamlastxmas 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They literally autonomously drive through a Boring tunnel when they leave the manufacturing plant to park in a parking lot. I have no idea why you're stating they can't.

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ProofHouse 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Honestly this is extra repulsive coming from the richest man in the world

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dangus 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We need to wise up and make fines based on the net worth of top shareholders and company officers.

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.