Blasphemous comparison
Elon is showing off his mile-long sewer, dug with a standard sewer-digging machine. He demonstrated how a non-autonomous car, piloted by an expert driver, can drive through the sewer.

As I noted earlier, none of this is remotely new and none of it can even BEGIN to function.

= = = = = START FUCKING REPRINT:

I'M WOW AMAZED! I'M WOW THRILLED AROUND THE TUNNEL SPACE! I'M PASSIONATE AROUND THE AUTONOMOUS SKATE SPACE! WOW! WOW!

Elon has now invented a hard-to-imagine super-futuristic thing that can move cars and people UP AND DOWN inside a thing. This is a WOW INNOVATIVE DISRUPTIVE SCI-FI IDEA that nobody ever imagined before!!!!!!!!!!!



Note the thing that goes up and down! WOW!

I think I've found one of Elon's prototype sketches.



This was never imagined before Mighty Creator Elon dreamed it up! All hail Mighty Elon!

The Mighty Creator says:

The company asserts that it can dig tunnels more quickly and efficiently than has been the case in other tunnel projects, in part because of the tunnel design. Vehicles in the tunnel would be transported on electric skates. Without internal combustion engines chugging away, tunnels would be smaller, as ventilation is less of an issue. An autonomous electric skate would also, theoretically at least, reduce accidents and traffic within the tunnel.

WOW DOUBLE WOW! A transit system that runs underground using ELECTRIC POWER! Nobody has ever CONCEIVED of such a WOW AMAZING THRILLING PASSIONATEING idea!!!!!!!!!!

This seems to be another of Elon's sketches:



= = = = =

Leaving aside the irresistible sarcasm, the invention can't work on its own terms. After the elevator gets the car to the lower shaft, and after the car drives over to the main tunnel, how do you put the autonomous skates UNDER the car? How do you turn the car 90 degrees and merge it SIDEWAYS into the fast-moving traffic in the tunnel with no on-ramp? What happens if just ONE of the autonomous skates runs out of battery power? The whole system freezes up with people in the cars. I'm passionate around the Asphyxiating Gridlock Space! Wow!

In the bad old days when innovation required permission, a patent lawyer would have asked these questions immediately, and would have gently told the presumably 10-year-old inventor to keep trying and learn something about mechanisms. Now we're past those bad old days. We're back in the Disruptive 1300s when the only question was WHO. If the invention was scrawled by the inbred infantile insane King, the entire budget of the Kingdom would be devoted to building it, even though it couldn't possibly work. If the WHO was a non-aristocrat, an older invention known as an "ax" would be utilized.

= = = = = END FUCKING REPRINT.

But I missed part of the non-new-ness. Elon didn't even invent the 'autonomous skate' trick.

I've mentioned Mujica as a similar character to AMLO. Two plain men who get REAL SHIT DONE.

From Mujica's biography:

In total Mujica was captured by the authorities on four occasions. He was among the more than 100 Tupamaros who escaped Punta Carretas Prison in September 1971 by digging from inside the prison a tunnel that opened up at the living room of a nearby home.

Mujica was re-captured less than a month after escaping, but escaped Punta Carretas once more in April 1972. On that occasion he and about a dozen other escapees fled riding improvised wheeled planks down the tunnel.

He was re-apprehended for the last time in 1972, unable to resist arrest. In the months that followed, the country underwent a military coup in 1973. In the meantime, Mujica and eight other Tupamaros were especially chosen to remain under military custody in squalid conditions. In all, he spent 13 years in captivity. During the 1970s and 1980s, this included being confined to the bottom of an old, emptied horse-watering trough for more than two years.

Not exactly a plain man. A ferocious fighter for his people, finally vindicated, who made good use of his vindication by leading sanely and sympathetically.

What is Elon? I apologize to God for mentioning a cheap chintzy chiseler in the same piece with an effective hero.

  ¶ 5:52 AM