Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Our messy unity will be our strength.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Late Night Open Thread: New (Vaporware) Phone Will Be Called the Tesla Pique

Late Night Open Thread: New (Vaporware) Phone Will Be Called the Tesla Pique

by | 71 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

Of course the Tesla fanbois are very excited — I’ve seen more than one tweet collecting votes in favor, as though that had any effect in the real world. But even the most optimistic tech news source suggests that, if there’s more than an edgelord tantrum involved, there might be some iteration of a Muskphone by… maybe 2030?

Reader Interactions

71Comments

  1. 1.

    sanjeevs

    WSJ has a long piece about Musk’s Boring Company

    The six-year-old company has repeatedly teased cities with a pledge to “solve soul-destroying traffic,” only to pull out when confronted with the realities of building public infrastructure, according to former executives and local, state and federal government officials who have worked with Mr. Musk’s Boring. The company has struggled with common bureaucratic hurdles like securing permits and conducting environmental reviews, the people said.

     

    Boring’s only tunnel open to the public is a 1.6-mile “loop experience” under the Las Vegas Convention Center. There, Teslas with hired drivers ferry convention-goers through neon-lit white tunnels at speeds of about 30 miles an hour.
    Mr. Musk has lately tweeted videos of a Boring-designed machine, nicknamed Prufrock after the title character of the T.S. Eliot poem, digging test holes in the Texas dirt. Boring says Prufrock is designed to dig at one mile a week, and that a succeeding version will be able to dig 7 miles a day.
    Boring says it can improve tunneling speeds with fully electrified machines and by digging continuously, rather than stopping to assemble sections of the tunnel wall. The company also says angling machines in from ground level will help avoid the cost of first digging a shaft to launch the machine.
    Veterans of the tunneling industry note that tunnel-boring machines have been electrified for decades, and that neither continuous construction of the tunnel lining nor digging in from aboveground is new.
    Boring’s speed claims are “totally unrealistic,” said Lok Home, president of the Robbins Co., a leading maker of tunnel-boring machines. “There’ll be improvements here, for sure, but there’s not going to be a revolution.”

     

    Elon Musk’s Boring Company Ghosts Cities Across America – WSJ

     

    THe Vegas thing cracks me up. A tunnel with Teslas which each have to be driven by employees. This is the future of mass transport apparently.

  2. 2.

    prostratedragon

    There, Teslas with hired drivers ferry convention-goers through neon-lit white tunnels at speeds of about 30 miles an hour.

    I think I strained some muscles on that one.

  5. 5.

    Yutsano

    Since the thread be open: we just lost a good Congressman out of Virginia. 61 is way too young. Rest in Power Congressman McEachin.​

    EDIT: because I’m sick of talking about the emerald slave-labour scion manbaby. We have better things to pay attention to.

  8. 8.

    Yutsano

    @mrmoshpotato: ​ Most likely. It’s a safe blue district so it shouldn’t be a loss for the Democrats.​

    EDIT: I have no idea how succession after death works in Virginia. O Another Scott! This wistful blog turns its woeful eyes to you!

  9. 9.

    Calouste

    Besides that there are barely any account managers left at Twitter and their ad management system is reported to be unstable, it’s also right after Black Friday and almost the end of the month, so advertising budgets are pretty much completely spend. But you can file that on the long list of things Elmo doesn’t know.

  10. 10.

    SFAW

    @Yutsano:

    If my memory is correct — after having it BJ-splained to me a couple of weeks ago — I believe a Rep’s seat has to be filled by a special election. A Gov does not appoint a replacement.

  11. 11.

    Calouste

    @sanjeevs: Boring says “a” succeeding version will be 50 times faster than the current version. They don’t say which one.

    Also, 7 miles per day is about 500 meters per hour. Say that the tunnel is 10 meters in diameter, for a two lane road, that means that about 40,000 cubic meters per hour of dirt need to be shifted out of the tunnel. So that’s an interesting problem to solve. (Long distance conveyor belts are in the 1,000-2,000 cubic meter per hour range).

  13. 13.

    frosty

    @Yutsano: In case no one’s answered yet. Appointments by the Governor for Senator, special elections for Representatives. And yes, I believe I learned this from Another Scott!

    ETA in all states. I think it’s in the Constitution.

  15. 15.

    eldorado

    pulling it off the app store would be a huge plus, if only so the front page here had considerably less bird app content

  18. 18.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Speaking of Musk Twitter self own performance; here is  Legal Eagle talking about Twitter’s upcoming FTC deadline in January and Musk telling the government he’s just to comply.  So, Musk might be such a special snowflake he gets hit with a huge personal fine as well as paying out 44 billion for nothing.

  20. 20.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Princess: I am no lawyer, but I would think the court would simply throw Musk in jail for contempt if he refuses.

    As for Apple, as others are saying Apple advertisement is 50% of Twitters revenue, so no Apple and it’s game over for Twitter.  Apple not including a Twitter app is a nothing bugger because there is no reason the why user can’t install it on their own.

    The other bit of this story is last week Musk had a conference call with Twitter advertisers berating them for being too concerned about their brand images and how he thinks advertising is totally overrated.  So, part of Musk’s freak out is his big mouth got him in trouble, again,

    So, what, is Tesla and Space X management filled with father figure types that every time Musk sticks his foot in his mouth,  sigh, and start with the “Now Musk, it was just a poor choice on your part, but no bigy,  this how we can fix it” like they do with their own sons? lol

  21. 21.

    Lacuna Synecdoche

    Marko Silberhand via Anne Laurie @ Top:

    first photo of the new “Tesla Phone”,

    hotter than the best model from Apple . . .

    Brings a whole new meaning to burner phone.

  23. 23.

    Lacuna Synecdoche

    WSJ via sanjeevs:

    Mr. Musk has lately tweeted videos of a Boring-designed machine, nicknamed Prufrock after the title character of the T.S. Eliot poem, digging test holes in the Texas dirt.

    Nooo!

    The man has sullied one of my favorite poems, dragging its name through his bored dirt!

    This is war, Musk.

  25. 25.

    Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]

    The more this happens, the more I am certain that Elon and Trump were stamped out of the same mold.

  26. 26.

    Lacuna Synecdoche

    @Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]: ​

    The more this happens, the more I am certain that Elon and Trump were stamped out of the same mold.

    Which raises the question: can slime mold stamp? I’ve always wondered.

  29. 29.

    Yutsano

    @Anne Laurie: We know Dolt45 has to have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Elon was raised in a society where he was taught being white made him superior. But really they’re both just assholes.

  30. 30.

    opiejeanne

    @Yutsano: I had heard the theory that W suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome, but this is the first I’ve heard that theory applied to TFG.

  32. 32.

    Ruckus

    @Calouste:

    He’s going to power the new boring machine with a jet engine and blow the dirt out of the tunnel.

    And yes that makes as much sense as leaving out the tunnel structure which would increase the risk of the tunnel caving in. And of course there’s no air to power the jet engine but still, it’s a brilliant idea if you don’t think about it.

  33. 33.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: I’m pretty sure I saw an article to that effect: that Tesla and SpaceX had a middle-management layer whose main task was to manage Elmo and act as a buffer between him and the workers who Actually Get Things Done.

    Effectively, they needed an insulation layer, and Elmo destroyed that insulation layer at Twitter with his mass layoffs and, in the process, proved why such an insulation layer is essential.

  34. 34.

    Ruckus

    @Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]:

    Naw. The molds just have many very similar defects. Possibly built in the same lab. There was a movie or two about this lab over the years. Owned by a movie company if I’m not mistaken….

  36. 36.

    NotMax

    @Yutsano

    because I’m sick of talking about the emerald slave-labour scion manbaby

    Come sit by me. Foisting it/him – daily – on the late night audience ought to be a violation of at least one Geneva Protocol.

  40. 40.

    lowtechcyclist

    The Boring Co. has so obviously been a scam for so long, it’s amazing anyone ever fell for it and paid them money.

    I mean, how fast would you have to propel ordinary passenger cars through a tunnel to be half as effective at moving people from Point A to Point B as a subway train at normal speeds in the same tunnel?

    And it doesn’t surprise me in the least to learn that the advances in technology that the Boring Co. looks forward to revolutionizing its work have been old hat in the tunneling business for years.

    There’s a role for brainstorming without being familiar with the ins and outs of how things are normally done; understanding those things might get in the way of your seeing something that others haven’t.  But once you’ve done the brainstorming, you absolutely have to see how it compares with existing methods. Otherwise, you’re just bullshitting yourself about how great your ideas are.

  43. 43.

    Geminid

    @lowtechcyclist:

    “Anything you can do, I can do better.”

    This tune from Annie Get Your Gun might as well be Elon Musk’s theme song.He has tech-bro hubris combined with a lot of old-fashioned narcissism.

    Perhaps with some passive agression thrown in. I don’t think Musk really wanted to buy Twitter, at least not at the price he injudiciously offered in April. He spent much of the time between April and October trying to wriggle out of the deal. But he’d roped himself in, and now I think he’s mad at Twitter, mad at the world, and mad at himself.

  44. 44.

    Tony Jay

    If the Savant of Muskatonic U had only borrowed a book from his Orange pal he’d have read about another right-wing bigmouth who launched an unprovoked summer invasion in search of Leftists to slay only to come a cropper as his new subjects simply melted away and left him the undisputed king of fuck all. I think they’ve even made a film or two and a couple of memes about it.

    On a brighter topic, do I have it right that if MAGAt election-deniers in Arizona don’t cease and desist their performative bullshittery by today the entire Red district they’re supposed to serve will have its votes binned, quite possibly handing the Democrats an extra House seat?

    Oh Lord, I pray thee, please make my opponents ridiculous.

  45. 45.

    Amir Khalid

    Scolding your biggest customer for not spending enough money at your business is certainly an exiting innovation in customer relations — as in, you’re going to end up going out of business.

  46. 46.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @sanjeevs:

    a Boring-designed machine, nicknamed Prufrock

    A character who commits suicide.  Who commits suicide because he will never succeed at anything he truly wants, no less, and gets depressed watching his life waste away.  At this point, Elon’s employees are trolling him.

     

     

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:

    So, what, is Tesla and Space X management filled with father figure types that every time Musk sticks his foot in his mouth,  sigh, and start with the “Now Musk

    Yes.  SpaceX is working because Musk has almost no role in it.  Everything Musk personally touches in Tesla is and has been a disaster.  It survives on hype and Elon’s ability to get government handouts.  He honestly is good at that.

    @Calouste:

    Elmo is certainly not concerned about his brand image.

    On the contrary.  Musk’s brand image is everything.  It is the source of his wealth, because Tesla stock is overinflated to an insane degree, entirely on Musk’s image as a genius.  He is a fantastic hype man succumbing to their age-old doom:  He started believing his own hype.

     

    I wish to stress, again, that Musk’s product is named after a character who commits suicide.  I cannot even.  And he apparently hasn’t noticed.

  47. 47.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Frankensteinbeck: I wish to stress, again, that Musk’s product is named after a character who commits suicide.  I cannot even.  And he apparently hasn’t noticed.

    It does sure seem like Musk is the “watched the trailer, but never read the book, seen the movie type”.   Look at Tesla and Space-X, it really seems his “passion” is he wants to cosplay Blade Runner, but he is ignoring what a crapsack world Blade Runner depicts.

  48. 48.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Frankensteinbeck: I don’t recall Prufrock committing suicide, though he’s certainly lonely and depressed–the poem is sort of a snapshot of his mental state at a moment when he’s still alive; there’s not much of a forward narrative in it.

  50. 50.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: Like Palmer Luckey and some of these other GenX tech bros, he seems preoccupied with making science fiction real even when it’s a cautionary fable.

    In Musk’s case, I think a lot of this comes specifically from Gerard O’Neill. He was a physicist who came up with the rotating cylindrical space colony design you see in science-fiction shows like Gundam and Babylon 5 (and in William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer!), and was very very big on space colonization as Manifest Destiny. But his other big ideas were an economy powered by geosynchronous solar power satellites… and a network of ultra-high-speed maglev subways that ran in evacuated underground tunnels. O’Neill insisted that these would be vastly superior to anything using steel rails.

    I think that’s what Hyperloop and The Boring Company were about, ultimately–Musk trying to do that other Gerard O’Neill idea, and sort of winging it if that doesn’t work. Of course they also served as means of spreading FUD about California high-speed rail which Musk maybe saw as a threat to his car business. But I think the big dream in that case is O’Neill’s.

  52. 52.

    PST

    @Betty Cracker: In his twenties? I had forgotten that completely. This thread made me reread Prufrock for the first time since I was in my twenties. I don’t buy suicide either. It’s just one more thing to fret about but never act on. It was strange to experience the poem now as someone much older than the speaker instead of much younger.

  53. 53.

    Betty Cracker

    @PST: Amazing that Eliot had such visceral insight into middle-aged fragility as a twenty-something. I agree about the indecisive fretting, complete with a Hamlet name-check.

  54. 54.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Betty Cracker: I’m actually not so surprised. I identified with “Prufrock” more strongly when I was young than I do now–I think the poem is the product of a kid who was paralyzingly anxious about approaching women, imagining what it would be like to get old lonely and friendless because of that. I’ve still got the anxieties and I’ve certainly got regrets, but it didn’t turn out that way for me.

  55. 55.

    Geminid

    @Betty Cracker: And Eliot was 37 when he wrote The Hollow Men (1925). Wikipedia tells me that Elliot may have been referring to Europe’s post-World War I political leaders as Hollow Men, but I am reminded of that poem’s title when I look at Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy is a Hollow Man if there ever was one.

  56. 56.

    Ken

    @sanjeevs:

    Boring says Prufrock is designed to dig at one mile a week, and that a succeeding version will be able to dig 7 miles a day.

    I’m taking it as given that this is actually two unrelated statements.

    Boring Corporation Spokesperson: “Our engineers have made incremental improvements that allow us, under proper conditions, to dig one mile of tunnel a week.”

    Musk: “And we’ll be doing seven miles a day with the next version!”

  57. 57.

    artem1s

    @Major Major Major Major:

    I do hope Apple doesn’t end up yanking the app

    If it continues to violate their terms of service they should absolutely yank the app. They’ll be inundated with lawsuits from companies that got kicked if they don’t. Who’d never hear the end of it? Why would Cook care if the dumpster fire swirling down the drain pitches a fit?

  58. 58.

    Betty Cracker

    @Matt McIrvin: That makes sense — great point.

     

    @Geminid: Agree about McCarthy, who I hope is finding it utterly humiliating to suck up to mean, dumb, fascist toddlers like MTG for speaker votes. And if he succeeds in getting the gavel, we all know that’s just the beginning of the meathead wheedling. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving empty suit.

  59. 59.

    Frankensteinbeck

    I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
    Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
    When the wind blows the water white and black.
    We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
    By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
    Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

    He’s talking about looking at the ocean, about mermaids in the context of his longing for female companionship, about being underwater, ‘till human voices wake us’ is a standard metaphor for ending a delusion/hallucination, and the last words are ‘we drown.’  All in a poem about depression, hopelessness, and loneliness.

    Literal interpretation says he committed suicide.  Thematic interpretation says he committed suicide.  Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation combining all the elements, says he committed suicide.

    EDIT – I, of all people, know writers.  Nothing is impossible in terms of what Eliot meant.  But the stretch interpretation is anything except suicide.

    EDIT EDIT – Oh, and building dramatic tension for a punch-in-the-gut ending says suicide, and Eliot is a fantastic poet who is definitely trying to punch you in the gut.

  60. 60.

    Ken

    @lowtechcyclist: I mean, how fast would you have to propel ordinary passenger cars through a tunnel to be half as effective at moving people from Point A to Point B as a subway train at normal speeds in the same tunnel?

    I don’t see that combination on this handy chart from XKCD.

    However NYC subway cars have a capacity of about 240 people, and are 60 feet long. A Tesla has a capacity of about 6 people and is 15.5 feet long. So four Teslas are about as long as the subway car (if driven literally bumper-to-bumper) but carry 1/10 the number of people, meaning that they would have to move about 10 times as fast to achieve the same throughput.

    NYC subway cars — which are electric vehicles, of course — have a top speed of 55 miles an hour, so the Teslas would have to hurtle along at 550 mph. Which is 800 feet per second, so if they follow the 2-second rule they’re 1600 feet apart, reducing throughput accordingly.

    (This is reminding me of when I was commuting to work, and noticed that the 12-car train was packed and pretty much every passenger had a smartphone. So I worked out the bandwidth of the express train and was suitably impressed.)

  61. 61.

    azlib

    @Tony Jay:

    Yes, the whole AZ situation is pretty ridiculous. It remind me of the hostage scene in Blazing Saddles where the Black Sherriff threatens to shoot himself in the head unless he gets his way.

    AZ and in particular Maricopa County where half the votes statewide are cast is rapidly turning blue. These kind of stunts in rural ruby red counties is not going to change that trend.

  62. 62.

    Geminid

    @Ken: Current tunneling technology actually has potential utility as a means for adding mass transit to our transportation mix. Surface rights of way are a scarce commodity, but New York and other cities demonstrate how subways can move a lot of people around under a congested surface.

    But if there is to be a new generation of subways, I doubt that Musk will help create it. Experienced civil engineering companies will. And people are not going to be sucked around like so many bank deposits. They’ll ride in up-to-date cars on rails, pulled by electric locomotives. This wheel has already been invented.

  63. 63.

    oatler

    You know when they program an AI to do simple tasks like “design a shovel” and the AI comes up with a spider with shovel- legs?

  64. 64.

    Kay

    @Ken:

    What bothers me is no one in California or Maryland or Chicago was able to stop the Elon fan club with actual questions about his claims. They got all the way thru the permitting process in Maryland (they sped it up special for Elon).

    This bullshit gets so far with little or no pushback. The only reason it didn’t go further was the Boring Company was a no-show on all the projects.

    They have to stop being such suckers. We have to somehow redirect them when they go swanning after one of these ridiculous conmen. What is wrong with them? Why are they so easy to fool?

  65. 65.

    Betty Cracker

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    Literal interpretation says he committed suicide. Thematic interpretation says he committed suicide. Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation combining all the elements, says he committed suicide.

    Authoritatively stated but unconvincing, IMO.

    My theory is the “we” in the “we drown” line encompasses other men in Prufrock’s situation, possibly via an allusion to the fate of male victims of the Sirens in the Odyssey. The mermaids stand in for the women Prufrock is afraid to approach.

    He hears them singing “each to each,” i.e., to one another, and says he doesn’t “think they’ll sing to me,” which means he fears rejection. I agree the “human voices” line signals the end of the delusion, but I interpret the use of the plural pronoun in “we drown” as a reference to the romantic fate rather than literal fate of Prufrock and similar men who lack confidence.

  66. 66.

    different-church-lady

    if it were to happen, it seems Musk isn’t opposed to the idea of releasing his own phone to keep Twitter alive.

    So, if I have this straight, not only will I need to pay 96 bucks a year to keep up with the paranoid rantings of fascists, but I’ll need to spend 800 dollars for the only device it will work on?

  68. 68.

    J R in WV

    @Geminid:

    …And people are not going to be sucked around like so many bank deposits. They’ll ride in up-to-date cars on rails, pulled by electric locomotives. This wheel has already been invented.

    Actually, for most electric commuter trains, there are no “locomotives”, as each car has its own motors under the floor.

    Certainly the case in NYC, Chicago, and Philly subways, and the trains I took between Philly and Harrisburg back in the late 1960s and commuting into the Loop from Great Lakes Naval Station in the early ’70s.

  69. 69.

    Geminid

    @J R in WV: I was wondering if that was the case when I wrote the comment, but I thought of the drivers in the lead cars and thought maybe those were the propulsion units. But I guess it’s simple enough to to have motors driving wheels in all the cars.

    Maybe they’ll still use locomotives on longer stretches, with overhead electric lines. Or even hydrogen fuel cells, which are just now beginning to be used in heavy trucks.

  71. 71.

    VOR

    @Ken: there is also the loading / unloading. Train cars are walk-on, walk off via multiple entrances. Automobiles are slower to enter and exit.

Comments are closed.