[Seattle3503]

The tricky thing about environmental regulations is that they are crafted and utilized by NIMBYs to block any infrastructure development. Even if, on balance, the infrastructure is a net positive.

It's not clear if these violations actually represent a real environmental hazard or are more reflective of NIMBY degrowth sentiment.

[3D30497420]

From the article:

> Workers have complained of chemical burns from the waste material generated by the tunneling process, and firefighters must decontaminate their equipment after conducting rescues from the project sites. The company was fined more than $112,000 by Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in late 2023 after workers complained of “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and burns.

That sounds like a "real environmental hazard" to me.

[Seattle3503]

Indeed I agree chemical burns would suggest a real environmental hazard in this case.

[guywithahat]

Technically the term chemical burn doesn't indicate severity, just that you got in contact with a corrosive material which had an effect on your skin. My guess would be someone got lime/cement powder on themselves and reported it as a chemical burn. They could have also been dissolved alive in an acid bath, but the size of the fine and the fact propublica doesn't say what happened suggests it was minor.

[idiotsecant]

as was posted elsewhere, it was an industrial curing accelerant chemical used to make grout cure faster. It was not a cement burn.

It's interesting, though, that your first impulse is to defend the robber barons that made this happen.

[guywithahat]

I derived my opinion by reading the article, noticing there was no description of the burn, and then noticing the incredibly small fine and relatively relaxed attitude by regulators. If you'd read my comment again I didn't say it was a cement burn, just that that is an example of a mild burn. The real irony is if it was just a curing accelerant, then it was an incredibly mild burn, and you're still wrong.

[pas]

they are not defending Elon

their guess was pretty good

cement or curing agents are hardly the environmental apocalyptic scenario for the beautiful and pristine environment of downtown Vegas, hm?

[astroflection]

I wonder what chemicals were involved. Probably nothing that you wouldn't find in any other construction site with heavy machinery. Fuel? Grease?

[DrewADesign]

> I wonder what chemicals were involved. Probably nothing that you wouldn't find in any other construction site with heavy machinery. Fuel? Grease?

It was a chemical to speed up grout curing. I don’t know which one. I looked up a few and they were corrosive petrochemicals with like 20-letter-long names and an acute health exposure rating of 4 on the MSDS. They also didn’t provide PPE or instructions on what PPE was necessary. And have you ever gotten any significant amount of gasoline on your skin? It burns and it is not safe. Here’s a list of chemicals in common gasoline mixtures: Gasoline, Toluene, Hexane, Xylene, Octane, Ethanol, Trimethylbenzene, n-Heptane, Pentane, Cumene, Ethylbenzene, Benzene, n-Hexane, Cyclohexane.

Even if it was just the water in the tunnel — how about you try 8+ hours of heavy work in steel toed boots with damp feet, let alone standing in ankle deep water filled with corrosive chemicals. Even standing still in clean water, your skin basically turns to paste after not too long.

With the way the job market is trending in tech, you might have the opportunity to find out one day while someone sitting in a Herman miller chair in a climate controlled office building dismisses your pain as petty griping.

[simonsarris]

Parent comment was correct to say "Probably nothing that you wouldn't find in any other construction site with heavy machinery." Actually they're extremely common anywhere any kind of finish construction is involved, including DIY.

Those kind of chemicals (including gasoline!) are in all the most common products like Watco Danish Oil floor finish that you can buy from home depot and use inside your home (and burn in your car for everyone to enjoy). They speed up curing. I don't recommend them! But they're very, very ordinary. If you want a product without them, you have to go out of your way to get it, unfortunately. (I recommend Tried and True Danish oil, which you'll find is significantly more expensive, and takes far longer to cure, but has no ill health effects)

https://www.rustoleum.com/MSDS/ENGLISH/65151H.pdf

[DrewADesign]

Well, the chemicals listed in the original comment— fuel and grease— do not have the same acute health impact as the ones they were cited for, and if we’re going to be pedantic about it, I wouldn’t say grout curing accelerator is so common we could assume it would be at most construction sites with heavy equipment. You also don’t need to go any further than your convenience store to buy a bottle of drano, which can cause a lot more damage, a lot more quickly than many of the listed chemicals. It doesn’t matter. The precautions required for production workflows are completely different from home use or small projects. For example: I work in manufacturing. This past Wednesday two of our most experienced workers were applying a caustic glue from a squeeze tube onto a number of parts laid out in a table. One of the workers just happened to be turning his head when there was a small blowout in the crimped end of the other workers tube and it sprayed all over the side of the guy’s head and goggles. It hardened before he could wash it out of his hair, which he had to cut off, revealing a bunch of blisters on his skin where the glue touched. That’s a glue you can buy at Home Depot, but if he wasn’t wearing goggles, he’d have probably had serious eye damage. Two people quickly glueing dozens of things on a table is so much riskier than using that glue yourself for a home project.

These chemicals are being sprayed at high enough pressure to splash them, all day long, in enclosed spaces, in the presence of lots of other people. Even if it was bleach, that would require significant effort to protect the people in that environment from injury. They didn’t do that, the workers are human beings that deserved that, and that shouldn’t be minimized.

[sebmellen]

Yes this sounds quite serious. In line with Elon’s “at all cost” mindset, which is very powerful but also dangerous.

[jordanb]

"At all costs" to the workers and community, not to Elon.

[idiotsecant]

move fast and break people, communities, and governments. The motto of the post-tech boom new american robber barons

[alienthrowaway]

Hard-core tunnel engineering

[93po]

How much of this is coverage is because this a true outlier situation versus Elon ragebait? Let's look at one of the larger construction companies in the US:

https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/?parent=acs-sa&or...

Since the year 2000, they've had 45 fines (and many violations per fine) by the federal Occupational Safety & Health Administration, and nearly $8 million in fines. And over $200k in fines just last year. There's separately 34 global violations totalling is over $50 million in fines.

This doesn't make Elon's company's violations excusable - it is however clearly the course of business in construction that these sorts of things happen. I think this is a good criticism of capitalist pressures in general rather than Elon being uniquely shitty in how he operates his companies.

obligatory Elon sucks, i'm just allergic to bullshit and ragebait

[doawoo]

This is a company owned by the same guy whose other company is dumping huge amounts of pollution into the air around Memphis, TN. And when asked they basically said “no we aren’t.”

Something tells me it’s not NIMBYism.

[hn_acc1]

It's not like it's new - the Fremont Tesla plant has a long list of violations, including illegal dumping of toxic waste.

[pas]

why not both?

it's exactly NIMBYism which makes the installation of the very small inefficient gas turbines make economic sense.

because it would take too fucking long to get a transmission wire set up to the grid, not to mention about the fight required for starting a new power plant somewhere else.

(that said I think it's unethical to run those turbines there)

[idiotsecant]

This is so wildly ignorant that I wasn't sure what website I was on for a minute.

Clearly, anyone who says [complex, multifaceted loose grouping of kind of related things] is [extreme, polarizing claim with no evidence] is not worth listening to further.

Please explain exactly what regulations in this context were 'crafted and utilized by NIMBYs'. Please cite agency and ruling for each supposed grave offense to your anti-NIMBY sensibilities.

[tzs]

> It's not clear if these violations actually represent a real environmental hazard or are more reflective of NIMBY degrowth sentiment.

Here’s an article that has some details on some of the violations [1]. The sound like things that the state legitimately should be regulating and that this would have minimal impact on growth.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-boring-company-...

[maxnevermind]

NIMBY is in the past, now it is a BANANA - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone

[ceejayoz]

Las Vegas does not strike me as a very friendly place for NIMBYs.

[Ekaros]

Just depends on whose backyard. Haven't the casinos blocked certain possibly beneficial transport projects for long time now?

[bobthepanda]

You’re thinking of the taxi industry which is the primary reason the monorail doesn’t go to the airport

[serf]

sort of? vegas and the surrounding areas are totally inundated with gated communities, I bet you'd get a LOT of nimbyism in those areas.

As far as the strip itself goes , well that's controlled by the corporate casino post-mafia folks. I think most of that stuff gets negotiated in backrooms.

[micromacrofoot]

Some environmental regulations are crafted and used that way, but certainly not all, or even a majority, of them.

[delfinom]

Workers getting chemical burns and firefighters needing to frequently take on decon sounds awfully like environmental regulations run amuck.

Its also outrageous that companies have to pay for workman's comp insurance /s

[Seattle3503]

> Its also outrageous that companies have to pay for workman's comp insurance /s

That's not something I proposed in my comment.

[miltonlost]

[flagged]

[tomhow]

> it's not clear if you know what environmental regulations are or if you are just shilling for polluting billionaires.

Please don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines ask us to "assume good faith" and avoid accusations of shilling. Commenting like this poisons discussions, and we're trying for something better than that here. Please observe the guidelines and make an effort to do better in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[daedrdev]

The best part is that the regulations are often written so that both cases happen!

[Seattle3503]

> if you are just shilling for polluting billionaires.

What an acidic thing to fling. I want us to build infrastructure. Nowhere did I say we need do whatever Musk says.

I want us to use cost-benefit analysis to judge infrastructure projects rather than the heavy moral framing we get a lot.

[anigbrowl]

It's a parody of your comment, which ascribes all environmental regulation to NIMBYs. If you blow a raspberry and someone blows a similar one right back at you, maybe you earned it.

[ToValueFunfetti]

>It's not clear if these violations actually represent a real environmental hazard or are more reflective of NIMBY degrowth sentiment.

>it's not clear if you know what environmental regulations are or if you are just shilling for polluting billionaires.

This is pretty clearly an escalation beyond what you're describing.

e: Because you did already read these lines, I guess I should spell this out: the former says we can't trust this datapoint as reflecting the issue we're concerned about; the latter says that the former person is either completely ignorant about the subject matter or lying due to corruption. The former is disagreeable; the latter is an ad hominem assuming bad faith against HN guidelines.

[HelloMcFly]

You did not include the more equivalent quote from the OP in my view:

> The tricky thing about environmental regulations is that they are crafted and utilized by NIMBYs to block any infrastructure development

This doesn't just say we can't trust a datapoint, it starts with a position premised on bad faith motivations for all environmental regulations. Still not totally equivalent, but I don't think the original commenter was exactly being neutral or reasoned in their opening argument.

[ToValueFunfetti]

A charitable reading of their comment would be that they meant NIMBYs write and use environmental regulations to stunt development, rather than that there is no such thing as a legitimate environmental regulation. It's definitely poorly phrased in a way that lends itself to the uncharitable interpretation, but their subsequent remarks are very clear that they don't agree with that.

As you note, even the uncharitable interpretation isn't equivalent- you say 'not totally equivalent' but they're different quite critically in that the one is attacking a political position and some laws and the other is attacking an individual person on this forum.

[anigbrowl]

Let's look at the opening of the two comments which clearly mirror each other in tone and structure.

The tricky thing about environmental regulations is that they are crafted and utilized by NIMBYs to block any infrastructure development. Even if, on balance, the infrastructure is a net positive.

The tricky thing about deregulating the environment is that deregulations are uncrafted and utilized by amoral capitalists who want to make money no matter what, including by poisoning the land and sea and air as much as they want.

Perhaps missing the point like this was not deliberate, but you nevertheless missed it.

latter says that the former person is either [...] or [...] [...] the latter is an ad hominem assuming bad faith

You went from characterizing it as an either/or comment in one sentence, to characterizing it as a bad faith assumption in the next. This is equivalent to: 'he says it's either odd or even...he says it's odd.'

[ToValueFunfetti]

I don't think that taking umbrage with a rude part of a comment can be called missing the point because another part of the comment was better. Am I missing yours?

And yeah, looks like I dropped an 'or' between 'hominem' and 'assuming'. My bad, I wasn't sure how long the edit window lasts and rushed it.

[miltonlost]

You need a moral framing for big infrastructure projects, or else that's how you get redlining and the destruction of minority neighborhoods for "urban renewal" and the inner-city highway system. You can't do a "cost-benefit" analysis without some sort of moral system inherent in the costs and the benefits, or else how can you calculate the effects on humans. Your "just the numbers" has its own moral system you are ignoring and instead saying everyone else isn't a cost-benefit and is only morality.

I want to build infrastructure too. Just not at the cost of the destruction of the world we live in.

[terminalshort]

Can't build new infrastructure without destroying what was there previously, so yeah, you actually don't.

[freejazz]

>I want us to use cost-benefit analysis to judge infrastructure projects rather than the heavy moral framing we get a lot.

By framing a regulation as some ploy? You're just as ridiculous

[jackphilson]

Regulations can often be bad for progress so a CBA is probably best. Doesn't matter about the framing.

[freejazz]

What do you mean framing doesn't matter? You just called the other post 'acidic' The idea that a CBA is somehow useful outside of any moral context is facially ridiculous anyway. You're just spewing word-mumbo-jumbo. The entire point of the law is to uphold the basic moral values of society in its function.

[sleepybrett]

Well isn't the boring company trying to build his dumbass single lane tesla road? Is this really infrastructure or just 'trains with extra steps and no safety'

[hollerith]

This seems intrinsically safer than trains, or so it seems to me (although I am not an expert). It seems safer because trains derails regularly. Tires can blow, but blowing a tire is unlikely to damage the whole train like a derailment is. At the least, the operator has the option to increase safety against blown tires by increasing the separation between cars.

Instead of bringing up safety, I'd bring up the microplastics and other pollutants emitted by the technology of the elastomeric tire and which might be an intrinsic property of cost-effective use of the technology.

[AlienRobot]

>From the very first run of the Tōkaidō Shinkansen on October 1, 1964, until the present day, there has never been a single derailment or collision on the entire full-standard Shinkansen rail network resulting in a passenger fatality

https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d01045/#:~:text=Zero%20Fa...

Sounds like trains are pretty safe to me.

[hollerith]

Huh. Thanks.

[bobthepanda]

Derailments are really rare in properly maintained railroads; even the NYC subway with a century of chronic underinvestment derails rarely (think one every few years).

Cars get into accidents way more frequently. The American freight rail system derails at a more frequent rate because the private operators are incentivized to really not do any maintenance at all.

[hollerith]

Looks like I was wrong. According to an unreliable source of fast answers, "passenger rail lines appear to be two to five times safer than intercity bus lines on a per-passenger-mile basis".

[JumpCrisscross]

> actually seems intrinsically safer than trains because trains derails regularly. Tires can blow

Trains don’t “regularly” derail. And when they do, they aren’t as fatal as the median highway crash.

There are unlikely to be too many fatalities in this system because it runs slowly. (Unless Li-on batteries cascade combust somehow.)

[GuinansEyebrows]

> What an acidic thing to fling.

if you don't automatically assume bad faith when dealing with hypercapitalist private infrastructure projects, you're going to be taken advantage of. every time.

that, or you're on the payroll. there's not a ton of wiggle room here.

[Seattle3503]

You are falling prey to the myth of the cynical genius

> A further three studies based on the data of about 200,000 individuals from 30 countries debunked these lay beliefs as illusionary by revealing that cynical (vs. less cynical) individuals generally do worse on cognitive ability and academic competency tasks. Cross-cultural analyses showed that competent individuals held contingent attitudes and endorsed cynicism only if it was warranted in a given sociocultural environment. Less competent individuals embraced cynicism unconditionally, suggesting that-at low levels of competence-holding a cynical worldview might represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the potential costs of falling prey to others' cunning.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29993325/

[anigbrowl]

only if it was warranted in a given sociocultural environment

GP explicitly specified such an environment. Musk is the epitome of a hypercapitalist - an outlier in terms of wealth, fame, ambition, and micromanagement.

[hn_acc1]

This 1000x. I can't believe Musk is still fooling people..

[GuinansEyebrows]

i may be stupid but i'm not wrong.