Elon Musk

like grow the f up jeez

We can go to mars in like seven hundred years it’ll still be there

we won't, tbf

thinking abt the time he cried on national tv cause the government said he cldnt post lies about him company anymore lmfao incredible

never go to mars mars is bad

my car is in the shop after a dude hit it earlier this week and it’s paid off

should I buy the new tesla so we could have a tesla guy on the thread

when I built a new garage by my house I had it wired so I could put an electric car charger (or arc welder) in it fwiw so my infrastructure is ready

Get an electric car made by a company that knows how to build cars imo

pretty sure in current weather my battery life would be faring insanely poorly

when I built a new garage by my house I had it wired so I could put an electric car charger (or arc welder) in it fwiw so my infrastructure is ready

― mh, Friday, March 1, 2019 4:38 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

So you could use an electric kettle in your garage?

never go to mars mars is bad

― lag∞n

go to barsoom instead

go to.....heck

xxp a real european 220v one? maybe!

x-post to JiC

Yeah Josh - you're right. There is enough bad about Musk that I guess he's inexcusable? I guess I'm (somewhat) giving him a pass because I like that he has taken on bigger, more pressing problems than just the typical amass-enough-MAUs-to-get-bought-by-Google "entrepreneurs," or the lazy, rent-seeking behavior of the dinosaur capitalists.

Electric cars, self-driving cars, low-cost space travel, solar tiles - I really like all of these ideas. And while you can debate hype vs. reality, I don't think you can just wave off all that he and his companies have done in those domains. Sure he's almost always late, but after spending a long time in tech, I think that overpromising is often a successful tactic used to get things done as quickly as possible, even if it drives observers (and engineering teams) crazy in the short-term.

the planet is is dying and suburbia is causing a health crisis in the meantime. and a lot of it is on cars. electric cars and self-driving cars are bad ideas.

they're also not ambitious. they're "what if cars, but electric" or "what if cars, but you don't hold the steering wheel". they're the ideas you come up with if you take the "snakes on a plane" approach to movie ideation and apply it to physical infrastructure.

so just to be clear: i'm not waving off his accomplishments. i'm saying they are bad.

driverless cars just equals a whole lot more unemployed truckers and farm workers right?

they're the ideas you come up with if you take the "snakes on a plane" approach to movie ideation and apply it to physical infrastructure.

otm. succinct. witty, too. should be plastered all across the internet.

@caek
I hear where you're coming from that you feel that maybe driverless cars and electric cars are "bad" ideas, but I guess I disagree. I mean, they aren't the "best" ideas from a societal standpoint (I guess you'd favor putting more effort into mass transit, or no-transit solutions, which I also agree with), but that doesn't make them bad, imo.

However, to say that his ideas aren't ambitious is ridiculous. I mean, starting a car company when there hasn't been a new successful car company in the US since Jeep? Starting a rocket company? Trying to get cars to drive themselves? Those are ambitious ideas.

And to Dr. C - My end goal for technology/AI/automation is that nobody has to work. THAT is an ambitious idea. Getting to that state without mass disruption is the hard part, but I still think it's the goal.

that's a cool idea but we need some intermediary steps. the history of automation to date has often been flanked with that hope and in general capital has elected to keep the surplus to itself, with occasional pseudo-exceptions e.g. where very well-organized (and nonradical) unions negotiated final bail-out packages so that existing members would be compensated while their type of work was eliminated.

yeah i'm being hyperbolic about the no ambition stuff. but it's easy be ambitious when you're a billionaire so i grant him less credit.

"more cars" is ipso facto a bad idea from a societal point of view.

if Elon Musk were ambitious he'd spend his money lobbying to ban cars.

driverless cars just equals a whole lot more unemployed truckers and farm workers right?

not to mention they are still a very long away from actually working except in the most idealized conditions, AFAICT

the most ambitious thing any california billionaire could do is bankroll a ballot measure to repeal proposition 13.

Less self driving more self guillotining

the most ambitious thing any california billionaire could do is bankroll a ballot measure to repeal proposition 13.

Truth.

And I'm fine with tech dudes trying to automate all the jobs away, as long as we can get a 90% marginal income tax rate on their robot-fueled profits.

I mean getting rid of relatively shitty jobs should be a net good where a better job exists or we have the ability to educate/compensate people, but our societal idiocy about employment means making an autonomous semi truck makes a couple people unemployed. Unless you count the incremental number of road crews we're going to need to maintain interstate highways once unmanned amazon trailer drones are rocketing down them.

it would be cool for the rich people to support some sort of improves social safety net before they eliminate a ton of jobs

it would be cool for the rich people to support some sort of improves social safety net before they eliminate a ton of jobs

― Karl Malone

it would be but man my level of trust for "rich people" as a class is fairly low

if i'm going to take musk seriously, which nobody should because he's a clown, the idea of technological progress driving social progress is not a bad one, and also technological "progress" which brings about actively bad social change - like for instance the cotton gin - don't necessarily make their inventors bad people (elon musk is a bad person for other reasons and promoting electric cars does nothing to mitigate that)

i don't think fully automated gay space communism will become a thing until the technological infrastrucure to support it exists. i don't trust elon musk to effectively put that infrastructure in place.

you can choose what to invent and put money into developing. for example, in the wonder woman movie, dr. poison was a scientist working on technological progress and her choices about this made her a bad person.

driverless cars just equals a whole lot more unemployed truckers and farm workers right?

This is not just OTM but I've seen folks (possibly in this thread but certainly in interviews and whatnot) note the huge impact driverless cars would have on employment in the US - esp. truck drivers and taxi drivers (I think a lot of farm work has steadily become automated in some sense?). Millions of relatively low-skilled but good paying jobs, poof, gone. We should probably be planning for this, as a society, but of course we're not.

Anyone else ever read The Confidence Trap, about the tendency of people but esp. Americans (historically, per the book) to see a problem coming yet keep putting off the solution until the last minute, then successfully scramble to fix it, because it's worked like that time and again the past, however scary and inefficient? It's a pretty interesting read.

you can choose what to invent and put money into developing. for example, in the wonder woman movie, dr. poison was a scientist working on technological progress and her choices about this made her a bad person.

― |Restore| |Restart| |Quit| (Doctor Casino)

i haven't seen "wonder woman" but surely the fictional character "dr. poison" is a bad person because she's called "dr. poison"?

poison can be medicine so depending how you look at it shes dr medicine

it’s actually pronounced poy-sahn, she tried to work for the good of humanity but repeated misunderstandings due to nomenclature soured her outlook

This is not just OTM but I've seen folks (possibly in this thread but certainly in interviews and whatnot) note the huge impact driverless cars would have on employment in the US - esp. truck drivers and taxi drivers (I think a lot of farm work has steadily become automated in some sense?). Millions of relatively low-skilled but good paying jobs, poof, gone. We should probably be planning for this, as a society, but of course we're not.

― Josh in Chicago

we're not really capable of "planning" for anything as a society because we don't have a functioning society right now imo

if we're talking about making drastic societal changes like, i don't know, getting rid of cars entirely, these are changes that can come about either slowly and steadily, or rapidly and, er, "disruptively", under extreme circumstances. the existence of organized opposition to changing our society to make it sustainable is, ultimately, what will cause those changes to be radical and less-than-fully successful.

poison can be medicine so depending how you look at it shes dr medicine

― lag∞n

turned evil because the insurance companies wouldn't cover her cosmetic botox procedures

object to neowhig characterizations of history as involving "seeing" "problems" and "deciding" to "fix" them, like we're one guy behind one wheel interested in going one place. if you think of things that way of course you'll always be shocked by our driving (and by the water level)

i haven't seen "wonder woman" but surely the fictional character "dr. poison" is a bad person because she's called "dr. poison"?

which returns us neatly to "elon musk"

however i am gung-ho pro-automation; as others have already said you just have to seize and equitably distribute the value it creates. just that, lol

It’s a tough job when you’ve got a government contract to send a mannequin smoking a huge doobie to space but somebody’s gotta do it

Now I want a high tech Zero-G Indicator, $35 when in stock.

Really looking forward to Tesla's "painful but necessary" cuts to referral program payouts... sorry, no more free $250k Roadsters!

Just kidding, that'll never happen. The shills getting six-figure payouts for their daily online PR aren't expendable. Perception is the entire game

— E.W. "Linear Thinker" Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) March 3, 2019

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-faces-legal-trouble-financial-issues-in-2019-2019-2

The beginning of the year was consumed by delays in the production of the Model 3, the upscale company's more affordable sedan. There was "production hell" to make the cars, and then "logistics hell" to deliver the cars. There was a ramp up that CEO Elon Musk said took the company "near death."

Then, of course, there was the $20 million fine Musk had to pay for misleading the public about plans to take the company private — as funding was in fact not "secured"— and the $20 million fine Tesla had to pay for the same infraction. Meanwhile, all year in a still seemingly never-ending line, executives and engineers and VPs left the company. There were layoffs and leaks and of course there was that time Musk called a diver who helped rescue a children's soccer team a "pedo." It was quite a year.

But now it's 2019. This year was supposed to be different for Tesla. Musk said there would no longer be any need to take big risks and "bet the company." In Q3 of last year it turned a profit, and then it did so again in Q4, Tesla's first consecutive quarters of profitability ever. Musk told investors on a conference call that the company would be profitable going forward. It would be a new day at Tesla Motors.

Recent events have called this turnabout into question. In violation of his SEC settlement, Musk is still tweeting material financial information that contradicts company forecasts. The SEC has given him until March 11 to show how he is not in contempt of the court ruling that followed his "funding secured" debacle.

Both the company's CFO and General Counsel announced their exits. And analysts still worry that the Tesla isn't holding enough cash to finance its ambitious growth plans.

And in stark contrast to Musk's statements about Tesla's profitability going forward, on Thursday Musk told a closed call with select reporters that the company would not be profitable in Q1, maybe Q2. This accompanied the announcement that the company's long awaited standard Model 3 (at around $35,000) would be available to order — a feat Musk said would require the closing of the lion's share of its retail stores and Tesla's third round of layoffs in the last 12 months.

Wall Street, for its part, sounds exhausted.

"Last year featured a number of idiosyncratic events that shaped the Tesla narrative and, just 2 months into 2019, it seems to be another year of significant volatility, driven by both economic factors and company-specific factors," Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note to clients on Friday.

Welcome to a new year.

isn't it pretty widely accepted that there's massive accounting fraud going on here

no but its not a bad theory imho

have we heard any more about the giant parking lots full of reject cars lately

Tesla has a long history of using diesel generators to recharge vehicles. Back in 2015, I found Tesla using them to power backup Superchargers at Harris Ranch, while its supposedly open battery swap station sat unused. https://t.co/OxtOCjhNuj https://t.co/IxaT4iowvk

— E.W. "Linear Thinker" Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) March 7, 2019

Now, a real visionary would figure out a clever way to install a diesel generator under the hood of a vehicle, so it could power the engine directly. You'd need a nationwide network of pumping stations though so you could refill the car's onboard liquid fuel tank when necessary.

I wonder how much it'd take to set up the power infrastructure to run a dozen charging rigs off the local electrical grid at each dealership or w/e

it's as if they're assuming the dealership is a pop-up shop and it's not going to last long enough to actually equip the location with real charging stations. hmmm.

I’m building a supercharging network right now (not for Tesla) and it’s actually quite challenging. The power draw on each charge head (140kW in the case of Tesla, soon to be 250kW) can be quite challenging for the grid in rural areas without a lot of power and urban areas with grid congestion. There’s also a pretty long lead time on things like transformers and MV switchgear and even longer lead times on getting the utility to uprate the grid if that is needed. You need to have charging stations at the right intervals so a diesel generator powered site will be (expensively: power at 4-5x the cost of grid) filling a gap whilst other infrastructure is getting sorted.

I’ve also never heard of Tesla battery swapping. No one has seriously considered battery swapping as ‘refuelling’ since Better Place folded nearly ten years ago.

I’m no Musk. Stand but my that is a very poorly written and researched article.

the tendency of people but esp. Americans (historically, per the book) to see a problem coming yet keep putting off the solution until the last minute, then successfully scramble to fix it, because it's worked like that time and again the past, however scary and inefficient?

― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, March 2, 2019 10:21 AM (five days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

(looks at march workload) nothing has been more @ me next time

Ed dropping the knowledge

imo a smart thing to do if you're into real estate investment would be to figure out the prime overlap between underutilized or at least well built-out power grids and prime commercial space for vehicle sales and grab some property to sell/lease to future electric car vendors