Elon’s wealth is driven by Tesla but sadly he is using the autopilot system. Anyway it’s $125.33 now
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) December 22, 2022
I always enjoy Ed Zitron’s (free!) Substack posts, but how can anyone resist a screed that includes sections on Zucknarök and Elondämmerung?
When someone is suppressed, restrained or otherwise pushed into a corner, the aggressor tends to assume unlimited power. The feeling of isolation and power imbalance gives the oppressor a form of momentum – as long as they can control the rules of the system, they are unstoppable, able to bend and crack someone to their will, even as onlookers attempt to intervene.
This kind of loathsome creature — call them an aggressor, a bully, a narcissist, it’s up to you — thrives on belief, and seems so poisonous because they appear to be able to get away with anything. The pain they cause and the obviousness of their malice is obvious to anyone operating outside of the system, but it’s very difficult to break in and even harder to break out.
These people, however, always make two mistakes: they believe their system is transferrable, and never attribute anything they’re doing to luck. Nothing is by accident. Their successes are a result of fairly-won victories or fairly-won swindles against lesser creatures. People that weren’t smart enough to see them coming, or just collateral damage for their empire.
Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk, Changpeng Zhao, Do Kwon, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg and every ruinous cretin that I’ve written about in the last year has the same pattern – a laundry list of excuses that never involves true regard for another human being, a higher purpose that justifies their contempt for others as a necessary evil, and an ever-growing sense of outrage that they would be criticized. They have survived for a long time on work-adjacent success and superficial charm, because they’ve all found the right ways to get what they want.
And in every case, their failures are stemming from their unwillingness to cash out, to stop and take stock and say “I have it pretty good.” They are ever-greedy, ever-hungry, ever-empty souls that get worse as you learn more. They will never be happy, a burden they outsource to anybody unfortunate enough to stay too close.
That’s why it feels so incredibly satisfying to see them lose…
You Cannot Outrun Gravity
Every single executive I have criticized in the last year has shown the remarkable belief that they are not subject to the rules of reality that you and I face. This is in part because they’ve been able to escape abiding by said rules through unimaginable wealth and the power that it grants you, but also because such greed may be impossible to acquire without hubris.They always believe that they alone are worthy. They never have a backup plan, because they have always prided themselves on “being good when the going gets tough.”
Yet they will always be deeply vulnerable to their own failures. They will always make mistakes, because they don’t believe they’ve ever made one. And when they start losing, they lack the capability to stop the world from falling down around them, because that starts at a point of introspection they’ve never had to reach…
Qrop Non Sequitur
I had been avoiding the Musk threads at first, but I’m getting inreasing joy watching Elon “just another lame Trump impersonator” Musk’s downfall.
piratedan
whatever happened to quitting while you were ahead?
Qrop Non Sequitur
@piratedan: A great strategy for security, not for attaining power.
piratedan
@Qrop Non Sequitur: true, I guess it all comes down to what your addiction is…
as I get older, my addiction is apparently… napping
Brachiator
I loved this metaphor.
cmorenc
Yep, the quoted Ed Zitron link describes Trump, Musk, and Bankman-Fried’s mental framework to a T. You could also throw in Fucker Carlson as the journalistic version of the syndrome. Holy Cow, this Carlson Op-Ed piece at the Fox website: “bipartisan-masochism” about Zelinsky’s visit, is arrogantly bonkers and detached from reality, a dissociated free-association casserole of as many toxic hard-right foreign policy and domestic memes as he could think of offhand.
NotMax
“There’s always money in the banana stand.”
//
Qrop Non Sequitur
@piratedan: A worthy activity.
Starfish
I really loved this description of Elon Musk by Mike Masnick:
Starfish
@cmorenc: What is this ageist nonsense? He is sitting at 53-years old and making fun of seventy and eighty-year-old politicians for being elderly? Go home, Tucker. It is not that long until you too shall be more old than you are now.
Splitting Image
I had a lengthy conversation with one of my co-workers yesterday. He is a big supporter of Musk and believes not only that he will turn Twitter around but that Tesla is by far the best-run of all the auto companies and its stock price will recover all of its losses this year. I’m afraid to ask where he has invested his money.
It may or may not be a surprise to hear that he is the tech support guy for my department at work and is very good at his job.
I do understand why many people are tired of hearing about this twerp, but so many people have bought into his persona that his self-destruction needs to be as public as possible. I hope Zuckerberg’s work with Meta will soon receive more public attention as well.
Qrop Non Sequitur
It just keeps accruing.
Brachiator
I never cared much about Musk and never have been impressed with his image of himself.
I don’t even use Twitter that much, but I hated watching him fuck up a service that so many people enjoyed and found useful. Other tech moguls, even those who are asswipes, often seem motivated to improve what they have created, and to make it more profitable. Musk, though, seemed motivated by bigotry, bad faith and an insecurity vastly larger than his personal wealth.
MattF
I see a mention of Changpeng Zhao, the Binance guy. A Reuters article I bumped into notes that there might be some problems with Binance:
Hmm.
eclare
@cmorenc: I would add Ye to this list
Brachiator
@Splitting Image:
This does surprise me. I would think that most people with experience in similar industries would be able to see through Musk.
Spanky
@Qrop Non Sequitur:
Until it doesn’t.
MattF
@Qrop Non Sequitur: One year per year.
Capri
@Brachiator: Bill Gates sees through it. Not sure what inside him set him apart from the others, but he’s not a “bro”
kindness
A common problem among meglomaniacs is they believe their own press clippings.
sdhays
@Brachiator: Another big factor, I think, is that he was deluded about how robust his position as wealthiest person in the world was. He really believed he had spare change to buy Twitter outright and make it his toy because he didn’t believe that his Tesla stock was absurdly overpriced. He also, somehow, lost track of how much his Tesla bubble was built on the delusion that he is a real Tony Stark and didn’t think it was necessary to protect that persona.
Now, Twitter’s hemorrhaging money left and right and Tesla is gearing up to cut 10% of its workforce as customers cancel leases and orders, and the bulk of his paper wealth is disappearing. He can’t absorb the kind of losses he’s facing at Twitter the way he thought he could a few months ago.
I’m predicting this (because rich people always seem to find a way to not become poor), but this has the potential to be such a royal shitstorm that Musk’s Twitter deal could actually end up bankrupting him.
Miss Bianca
@sdhays:
God, I hope so. It’s surprising to me how vengeful I feel towards that asshole.
.
Yutsano
I’m not sure if the latest delusions of grandeur from Uncle Vladdie fit in this category or not. I suppose it’s possible at least on paper the Russian army has 1 million units, but I’m not buying it.
scav
@Brachiator: I don’t think Musk is much good at actual coding or the ilk — he’s more the pin-striping flash and sell-the-vision whizz-dancer type. That’s on the emotional end of things. I’ve seen no sign that he’s got a realistic view of what Twitter actually was beyond shiny and a bit of an ego-boost.
ETtheLibrarian
And they were never as “good” as they thought they were. Being born on 3rd base does not mean they got there on their own merit.
Starfish
@Capri: He’s not a bro, but he is not a good person either. He was hitting on Microsoft employees and having affairs with them. He was having an ongoing affair with some pre-Melinda girlfriend.
He was at minimum hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein and at maximum more involved than we know in the Epstein related crimes.
People who feel compelled to accumulate more money than can be spent in several lifetimes are different from you and me.
Starfish
@sdhays: He never thought about the fact that having a fortune built on affluent liberals requires you to not alienate affluent liberals. That includes the well-paid Twitter engineers and the people who tended to show their status by buying fancy electric cars. His behavior did not only hit the Tesla stock, but it also hit the market for used Teslas.
Scout211
SBF is being release on a $250 million bond. So I guess that consists of the deeds to his properties since his billions are gone?
WV Blondie
@scav: I read an analysis (WaPo, probably) that his BIG mistake was thinking he was buying a tech company. He wasn’t – social media is about the whole ecosystem, not the algorithms.
apocalipstick
@Brachiator: Nope. Most of the tech people at my old school are all-in on crypto.
Qrop Non Sequitur
@Spanky: Dark. I love it.
RSA
In my experience, IT people seem more amenable to specific kinds of problematic beliefs than people in other occupations—things like creationism, climate change denialism, Objectivism, capitalist hero worship, etc. I think it’s partly because they spend their days working with computer systems that are very complex and yet predictable and controllable if you know the right sequences of invocations. The temptation is to think of the real world, including human interaction, in the same way. So… not surprised.
scav
@WV Blondie: That’s right up there. (although there are strong competitors for “BIG” mistakes he’s got juggling.) And he’s still not clued in as that’s the bit he’s clinging to personally control while purportedly ditching the CEO headlining role.
NotMax
@ETtheLibrarian
Born with a silver stick up his butt.
//
Edmund Dantes
@RSA: engineers too.
Starfish
@apocalipstick: Though I know some people who are deep into crypto, most of the people really into it were younger people. They are keeping up with their financial stuff on the Robinhood app which was front running trades by selling trading behavior to high frequency traders.
Amir Khalid
@Yutsano:
The CNN website’s front page has a story about the Russian public crowdfunding military uniforms and equipment. How did the fearsome fighting machine of Soviet times get reduced to this?
Redshift
@scav: Yeah, all of his weirdly out of date demands of Twitter engineers (“print out your code,” etc.) made it clear he hasn’t dealt with code since his first company back in his grad school days. He had no expertise at all with cars or rockets, so it seems certain his only “technical” contributions were making absurd demands of underlings and taking credit for their work.
Starfish
@Redshift: His skills are drawing attention to himself and selling fairy dust to people.
Convincing people that some bonkers stuff that is not at all profitable will soon work out is a sales skill.
That skill, which usually serves him well, is not serving him well at the moment. Drawing attention to himself only brings our attention to his massive incompetence.
Calouste
@WV Blondie: What Musk bought was an advertisement company, because ads are the only way social media can make money. The main difference between social media and old-fashioned over the air TV is that for social media the content is as good as free, but the infrastructure is where the costs are, and for TV it’s the other way around. But otherwise they’re both about creating space for ads and attracting eyeballs to them.
Spanky
From the AP:
‘Tis a mystery how it got that way.
trollhattan
@Spanky: “I cannot make a mistake and you have to pay for it.”
Burnspbesq
Anyone who was paying attention could have seen the signs a while ago. For me, it was Tesla’s reaction to finishing dead last in the J.D. Power initial quality survey a few years ago. Instead of putting on a full-court press to improve its manufacturing processes, it cut off J.D. Power’s access to the data.
Kay
This is why I’ll miss Twitter:
And then…..
cain
@sdhays:
I think he is going to be owned by Saudi Princes, Chinese and Russian oligarchs. I think he is going to be turned into their various puppets
bbleh
@piratedan: whatever happened to quitting while you were ahead?
Or in some people’s case, heading out while you’re still acquitted.
Ok I’ll come in again.
cain
@RSA: I think they are just adhere to libertarianisms believing in their own power to manipulate systems.
I come from this world. Software developers tend to be more liberal because they know how frail these systems are.
Shalimar
@Yutsano: My understanding is that the problem with the Russian military is a shortage of equipment and weapons, not a shortage of bodies to toss into the meat grinder. It seems like they would be better off putting that half a million men in factories.
schrodingers_cat
For those who missed it when I posted it yesterday. Downfall, the Elon Musk version.
bbleh
@cain: hmmm, now of whom does that remind me? Wait! Wait, don’t tell me …
persistentillusion
@piratedan: My motto for years was: When you have a lot to do, get your nap out of the way first.
different-church-lady
And the sad thing is that even if Musk goes “broke” he will still have orders of magnitude more money than I will make in my entire lifetime.
Amir Khalid
@Spanky:
It should be illegal to borrow money to acquire a company, and then put the acquired company on the hook for the debt you incurred.
Shalimar
@Spanky: Musk claims Twitter was already headed for bankruptcy in May, which raises 2 points:
1) Why buy the company and saddle it with even more debt if it is already tanking?
2) He takes no responsibility for the massive decline in advertising revenue in November as a direct result of his new policies.
Shalimar
@Amir Khalid: Welcome to the world of LBOs, which started in the 1970s and took off in the Reagan “greed is good” decade. The egregious part you left out is paying themselves massive consulting and management fees, so the people managing the buyout profit even more while the company tanks.
Captain C
@Amir Khalid: Isn’t that what the Glazers did to Man U?
Captain C
@Shalimar:
Don’t they often drain the pension funds to do this?
Citizen Alan
@Miss Bianca: Sadly, I really do think (and this is a fundamental failing in both America and Capitalism) that there is a wealth point beyond which no amount of incompetence and/or mendacity can lead to failure. Even if he’s forced into personal bankruptcy (unlikely because I’m sure all his debts are filtered through limited liability entities), I’m sure he has enough stuff filtered away either in foreign bank accounts or in assets that are exempt from seizure to where he could never in any meaningful sense become poor or even middle class. If he ends up reduced to even 1% of his current wealth, Elmo will still have wealth beyond the dreams of mortal avarice.
Steeplejack
@MattF:
I have read various hints and allegations that the Binance guy, C.Z., was somehow involved in the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. Sort of a crypto gang war. Maybe some chickens will come home to roost.
Starfish
@schrodingers_cat: I appreciated it, even if I did not say so at the time.
Splitting Image
@RSA:
This is close to it, I think, although I haven’t ever heard my co-worker say anything that makes me think he is an Objectivist or similar.
We were talking about the city’s transit efforts, for example. He is completely behind mass transit as a solution to jam-packed highways but also grouches about how governments waste his tax money. The city’s basic problem is that no one wants their taxes spent on digging subway tunnels that won’t be used to capacity, so construction gets stalled until the city is built up so much that it’s far more expensive to build when they cave to the inevitable. So more tax money gets spent on each development than if taxpayers had been more far-sighted to begin with. This is a people problem, not a government one, but my co-worker can’t see that.
He sees Musk as the genius who cuts through all the processes and “gets things done”. He correctly marked Trump as being full of hot air, though. Go figure.
different-church-lady
There’s a delicious irony to all this:
* Twitter’s most significant function was to allow assholes to be assholes in the most public way possible.
* Musk bought Twitter so he could be the mayor of Assholeville.
* He got so supercharged from main-lining his now-unlimited supply of pure, uncut asshole-junk that he ripped the mask of his own “genius.”
* The result is going to be the death of Twitter.
Twitter is the very instrument of it’s own destruction.
Roger Moore
@piratedan:
You don’t get to be a billionaire by quitting while you’re ahead. Of course, for every person who gets to be a billionaire by not quitting while they’re ahead, there are several who probably should have.
eversor
@Brachiator:
Annecdotal but sys/net admin here with a clearance.
My experience has been that all “managers” love Musk and consider him a good while those of us burning the late hours doing backups and restores and verifying upgrades think he’s an idiot.
Case in point my “manager” has a fucking english lit degree of all things and is a hardcore Musk and Trump fan. Only uses his iPad. That I spend most of my time in MS Azure running MDM stuff and our on prem stuff I manage is all Solaris UNIX and most of this runs on scripts wouldn’t compute (LOL) with him. He’s utterly convinced we run off his genius and not that we sort of do what we want and flat out lie to him constantly.
So when I heard that people just ran dummy scripts so Musk would think they were doing shit while they were waiting for real shit to do it was all “hell, welcome to Tuesday”.
Talk to anybody in IT though and you’ll get a rant about how all management isn’t really IT anymore but is MBA types who are all hype people. Musk is a shit, but he’s your normal IT manager lording it over the nerds where he doesn’t know what he does. He’s just doing it with billions.
different-church-lady
@piratedan:
Sociopaths don’t get ahead. Sociopaths just are.
BlueGuitarist
@MattF:
the “guaranteed annual year” promise from Firesign Theater’s “Papoon for President,” when “not insane,” as a presidential qualification was a joke, that wasn’t obviously a joke on us.
Starfish
@Steeplejack: I thought that SBF was accusing Binance of screwing them over. Remember, Binance said that they would acquire FTX before they decided not to. However, Alameda (one of the SBF related companies) is accused of messing up Terra and Luna.
Now, it could be that these crypto folks all screwed over someone else’s coins that were totally legit, or it could be that all crypto is a scam. I am leaning towards the latter hypothesis.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
The whole tech industry is built around workers willing to drink the Kool-Aid. They aren’t the whole industry, but there are a lot of tech people who really want to get in early on The Next Big Thing because they’ve heard about the fabulous riches that fell to the people who got in on the last big thing. They’re natural believers in people like Musk.
Amir Khalid
@Captain C:
It is. And after United finally paid off their debt, they have kept on extracting millions from the club, this time as shareholder profits.
cain
@eversor: We do seem to share a hatred to MBA types. But I don’t see anything wrong with someone with a english literature degree. I’ve met many who have degrees that is completely different than their job – they love the computer. I don’t think we should be using the degree they got as some kind of measure of anything.
If they don’t have the instincts to do the job then clearing it’s on the management above them.
WaterGirl
@Amir Khalid: Corruption at every level.
MagdaInBlack
@different-church-lady: So you’re saying he really showed his ass on this deal ?
lowtechcyclist
@BlueGuitarist:
As a Firesign fan, I’ve been lately thinking that the Dems should consider stealing “Not Insane” as a campaign slogan. “Vote for Democrats – Not Insane!” Because the other guys sure are insane.
Starfish
@Roger Moore:
There are other reasons to join a startup than the promise of riches.
A lot of startups have an interview process that is less stupid than the FAANG companies.
Because the company is small, if you enter at the period before the fast growth, there is the opportunity to be promoted to a fairly senior level pretty quickly if you play your cards right.
Getting to determine the technical direction of something is interesting to some people. Not being weighed down by legacy systems is also nice for some people.
These companies are usually working in newer tech stacks, so you are building highly marketable skills while working for them instead of maintaining something in a programming language that is falling out of favor.
Roger Moore
@Starfish:
I don’t think the big problem at Tesla is that Musk has pissed off the libs who won’t buy his cars now. His problem is that Tesla’s success was built around being the only game in town if you wanted a really nice electric car. That was why they were able to charge as much as they do for their cars and why the stock price went through the roof. People believed they were going to take over the industry, and their stock price reflected that optimism. Now it looks like that optimism was misplaced, and the rest of the car industry will be able to catch up and produce good electric cars, too. Now that the dream of taking over the whole industry looks unlikely to pan out, the stock price has nowhere to go but down.
GibberJack
Anne Laurie thank you for front-paging the link to Ed Zitron. I had not heard of him before.
Although I won’t be a fan of his writing style as it feels as if it’s delivered a bit breathlessly, I do find what he’s writing about (as far as the half-dozen of his recent posts I’ve so far read so far) to be very interesting.
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
ISTR the fearsome fighting machine of Soviet times being humbled in Afghanistan, too. Maybe they were never as fearsome as everyone believed, and that was always going to show up when they took on an actually tough opponent.
Percysowner
I always thought the big difference was Melinda Gates. Before they got married, he was a rich guy making money. After they got money suddenly they started charitable foundations and donating money to make the world a better place. I don’t think Bill came up with that on his own.
lowtechcyclist
@sdhays:
Quite possibly. When I was checking Tesla’s stock price today, I noticed its market cap. Even now that it’s down to $125 per share, Tesla’s market cap is just shy of $400 billion.
By comparison, Ford’s and GM’s market caps are in the $45B-$48B range.
Anyone here think Tesla’s really worth eight or nine times as much as GM or Ford? Me either. It’s not as huge a bubble it was when the year began, but it’s still an awfully big bubble. Musk’s wealth is going to keep on shrinking.
lowtechcyclist
@Amir Khalid:
Kleptocracy.
Maybe that isn’t the whole story, but it’s surely a huge piece of it.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Percysowner: I read Melinda Gates’s “Moment of Lift,” about trying to make the world a better place. She took each of their children on one of her foundation missions so they’d see more than the wealthy world they were born into. It’s a good book
Roger Moore
@Calouste:
I will point out that the genuinely profitable social media companies (Alphabet and Meta) don’t make their really big money from advertising on their social media sites. The social media may make enough money to cover its costs, but not a lot more. The real value of the social media is letting the companies profile their users. They then use those profiles to act as ad brokers for the rest of the web, which is where the real profit is.
Sure Lurkalot
@Amir Khalid:
How quaint a notion! Why, that’s how America’s wealthy really got started in the 80’s on their run up to the levels of wealth inequality we enjoy to this day.
Burnspbesq
@Roger Moore:
EV buyers are conditioned by years of Tesla bullshit to believe that software matters most in the driving experience. And in fairness, a number of great cars qua cars are burdened by bad software (yes, VW, I’m looking at you). But an ID.4 (to cite only one example) will outlast any Tesla because it was made by people who know how to make cars, whereas Leon Skum thinks the basic blocking and tackling of building reliable cars is beneath him.
lollipopguild
@Roger Moore: Everybody below Putin steals from the company. Some of the russian troops who went into the Ukraine were issued meals that had expired in 2015. Those meals should have been thrown out years ago but the money to do that was stolen. The russian troops ran out of fuel all of the time, some of the fuel was stolen before it headed to the troops.
Dan B
@Capri: I know several people who are close to Bill Gates and the rest. Word from them is Gates listened to people who steered him on a much better trajectory. His father, who I got to speak at a panel, is a great guy.
Mallard Filmore
@Shalimar:
“The venture capitalists lent me a lot of money so that I could overpay for this company. It is the duty of all you serfs to work hard to pay this money back. Hey, if it was easy, the board and I would have given ourselves 20 million more in executive bonuses.”
David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch
Tesla stock price tumbled 15% last week. It’s plummeted 9% today and 17% this week (only 4 days).
Over the past year it’s cratered, down 68.9% as the Invisible Hand cancels Tesla.
Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
scav
@David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch: What the Invisible Hand giveth, the Invisible Hand taketh away.
trollhattan
George Santos/head of lettuce? wager time is upon us.
Never heard of the guy before yesterday, now he’s famous for all the wrong reasons.
Roger Moore
@lollipopguild:
My impression is this is nothing new to Putin. The Soviet system also suffered from terrible corruption. We couldn’t see it as easily as we can see Putin’s, both because the Soviets were more effective at controlling the media and because the media is inherently better at finding this kind of thing out than it used to be.
Just an anecdote about this, but I follow The Lockpicking Lawyer on YouTube. One of the things he does is to collect old locks he thinks are interesting. He has a whole category for dual custody locks, meaning ones that require two keys to open. The idea is that two people hold the two keys, so whatever the lock is locking up can only be opened when both are there to monitor each other. The kicker is the main place those locks were made was the Soviet Union. They had such a perpetual problem with corruption and the black market that practically everything of value had to be locked up with dual custody locks to keep people honest.
trollhattan
@Sure Lurkalot: Was this not Willard Throckmorton Quince Hubba-hubba Romney IV’s schtick at Bain Capital?
RSA
How interesting! In U.S. popular culture, I think the most common presentation of dual locks has to do with launching nuclear missiles—i.e., not common at all.
NotMax
@RSA
Bank safety deposit boxes.
Sure Lurkalot
@trollhattan: Why, yes it was that pillar of society, Mittens. Too bad, KayBee Toys and countless other companies! Too bad, long-term employees…your pension is required to pay the debt Mitt acquired.
Poe Larity
Elron will use GPT3 to create a new religion and move into space where he will be unregulated by the liberal masses.
Ye will be invited, but he will be afraid of the jewish space lasers.
Gin & Tonic
@Dan B: Tangential to your point, but as I have mentioned in Adam’s threads, Microsoft is head and shoulders above any other tech company in their support of Ukraine. They are devoting a *lot* of resources with no clear path to monetary benefit for them.
NotMax
@Poe Larity
Which is why one books the spaceship on a Saturday.
;)
J R in WV
@Starfish:
I’m getting old, and have been know to say that getting old sucks, hard! But usually adding that it mostly beats the alternative.
BlueGuitarist
@trollhattan:
surprised; and then surprised to be surprised,
which reminded me of this excellent 1 minute stand up bit
about the algorithm: (Disappointed + surprised)2
https://youtu.be/RH1q_2SOkAI
TriassicSands
It think that kind of feeling really began with Trump. Fed up with the endless display of horrible behavior, many people, myself included, started to entertain feelings we had never had before. It can go beyond mere schadenfreude to actually hoping for dire fates for numerous people. I’m sure that part of that comes from our feelings of powerlessness. We have to sit by and watch while horrible people destroy lives, threaten democracy, and profit wildly from the misfortunes of other, innocent people.
HinTN
@Roger Moore: I guess the interesting question is, “Who is developing the battery technologies?” I sort of thought Musk had the right idea with his big plunge into manufacturing them, but I’m not really well informed on it. Never wanted a Tesla, they’re flimsy and, as we now know, prone to accidents in many different ways.
eclare
@Gin & Tonic: That is good to know.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@BlueGuitarist: another math joke! Yay!
MattF
@trollhattan: There’s a recent twist to the Santos story— turns out there’s a clause in the Brazilian constitution that prevents extradition of citizens. So, there’s a thought that maybe Santos will flee to Brazil. Except that… he’s wanted in Brazil for some financial misdeeds. Sigh. It just gets so complicated.
RSA
@NotMax: Oh, true. Less drama, I guess.
N M
@trollhattan: and yet he is a vote McCarthy needs to become (and remain) Speaker of the House, so… all sons forgiven?
ian
@MattF: Greene and Boebert show is getting boring for season 2, the writers needed to bring in a new supporting character.
trollhattan
@HinTN: The description I read of the Reno Gigafactory is of paired manufacturing units with Panasonic on one side, building the cells and Tesla on the other, receiving then and assembling the battery packs–replicated many times in the ginormous building. True? Heck if I know.
Bill Arnold
@Starfish:
As Betty said, Musk has rebranded Tesla as a maker of “rolling $100K MAGA hats”.
That part of the Tesla stock price above maybe $40 is a Musk-cultist premium. And that $40 was a couple of months ago; he’s done a lot of damage to it since then.
trollhattan
Noooooooo! That’s the political equivalent of saying “Bloody Mary” 3X in the mirror.
Roger Moore
@HinTN:
I think Tesla has done some work on battery technology, but AFAIK everything they’ve done has been in partnership with a big battery manufacturer. I want to say Panasonic, but I’m not 100% sure. I think a lot of the advances Tesla has been working on are in manufacturing and sizing cells that are appropriate for cars, not in advancing fundamental battery technology.
TriassicSands
@BlueGuitarist:
The next step, I suppose, must include “shocked.”
(Disappointed + Surprised + Shocked)³
@trollhattan:
Santos. I see a future for him as Speaker of the House, Majority Leader of the Senate, or Republican presidential nominee. He’s the “whole package.”
TriassicSands
@MattF:
No problem. If Santos has done his homework, he has a complete list of all the countries that don’t have extradition treaties with the U.S. plus open-ended plane tickets to each of those countries.
GibberJack
@Starfish: There is a big change from the mid/late 40s and the early/mid 50s.
I think this twitter idiocy is part of it. A very public midlife crisis only the obscenely wealthy can afford.
Twitter is his impractical and unaffordable sports car and a 20-something blonde mistress rolled into one.
He already had hair plugs done so at least we are spared the comb-over.
Splitting Image
@TriassicSands:
Just noting that Santos is a Republican and a very good example of one. Doing homework is a type of work.
TriassicSands
@Splitting Image:
Yeah, fair point, but work in the service of grifting is more like recreation to the true Republican
Plus, he could “hire” someone to do the work for him, and then, refuse to pay. Win-win, as they say.
Splitting Image
@J R in WV:
That’s become a tradition in my family. My granddad used to say that a lot when I was younger. My mom quotes him, and I’m reaching the stage where I’ll start saying it soon.
TriassicSands
Yeah, but looking at the upside, they’re expensive.
Ken
Not KenCoin™! The only totally legitimate crypto!! Buy now while supplies last!!!
(It is notable how many people in crypto will flat-out say that most of it is a scam — except of course the one kind of currency, token, NFT, or what have you that they are selling.)
lowtechcyclist
@Splitting Image:
My late MIL used to say it frequently, and I’d always respond, “that’s why I’m having nothing to do with it.”
And I’m doing my best so far to stick to it. Eventually old age will surely catch up with me, but I’ve got a good head start and it’ll take awhile for old age to catch up.
Geminid
@TriassicSands: They keep finding more and more shit on George Santos (if he really is George Santos). Its like every time someone opens a closet door a bunch of skeletons come rolling out. And they still haven’t found a lot of the closets yet.
Now it’s not question of whether this person will be indicted but when and for how many different crimes. House Republicans need his vote badly, though and they cannot count on winning a special election in the 3rd New York CD. They might not be sure who he is, but they know they’re stuck with him.
So McCarthy and company are in a bind and they really deserve it. The next Congress won’t start for 12 more days, but that caucus already looks like a clown car towing a blazing dumpster down a long hill, with no brakes.
Ken
@NotMax: Also the lockouts used when servicing various types of industrial equipment. Though it’s not exactly the same setup, and not even a lock as such, but a way to allow multiple locks to be applied to a single point.
Splitting Image
@Geminid:
The current media narrative, driven by the New York Times, seems to be that the Democrats are mainly to blame for the situation. The Republicans ran a crook for office, the news media (including the New York Times) chose not to reveal this information to the voting public, but the Democrats apparently did not do enough oppo research, so the situation is ultimately their fault.
I’m going to lay down a marker that when Santos’ closet is discovered to contain one skeleton too many, the narrative will shift to how the Democrats deliberately concealed all of Santos’ skeletons to make him resign and force a special election. This will be presented as ruthless, conniving, uncivil and unfair of them, and used as justification for either Santos remaining in office or electing a Republican as his replacement. The organization which pushes this narrative will be the New York Times.
GibberJack
@Splitting Image: IT people have a vision problem. They by nature only do things as they need to. Which I suppose makes sense for what they do, and it makes them a lot of money and a certain amount of social status.
But they often lack vision.
My experience is they are, in the big picture, either the most clueless smart people, or the smartest clueless people I have met.
Geminid
@Splitting Image: This is a wild story and much of it has yet to be told. I have a hunch, though that Mr. Santos will be the subject of a post on this forum. If anyone can get to the bottom of this mess, it’s the Jackal pack!
Bill Arnold
@Geminid:
We (Democrats) should be calling his electoral win election fraud.
wombat probabilty cloud
@Kay: Thanks for mentioning this. I know several of those areas on the Lake Superior (or as we call her, “Mother Superior”) coastline, and will check in with my friends tomorrow. It’s a dramatic interface even without extreme events.
Geminid
@Bill Arnold: I think the important thing here is for Democrats to hang Santos around the necks of the rest of the Republicans.
McCarthy and company should get Santos to resign or vote to expel him. They could then hope to win the special election. If they dont keep the seat I think they’d still be better off gutting it out with one less vote than they would be having Santos around.
ColoradoGuy
Sociopathic billionaires are a worldwide problem. The worst, of course, is Putin, since he has the most blood on his hands and is threatening to kill all of humanity if he doesn’t get his fetish-object. This worldview is replicated all through the billionaire class, just on a smaller scale. If they had multi-thousand nuke arsenals of their own, many of them would be just as crazy and dangerous as Putin.
We’re all trapped in this endless James Bond movie with worse and worse villains until we Do Something about this problem. I hate to sound like a Marxist, but this entire class is threatening the survival of humanity.
Something bad happens to people when they have this much money … they start thinking like Southern plantation owners, at the minimum, and Jim Jones and Caligula in the most full-blown examples.
Are there “good” billionaires? Sure. Just like there were some “good” plantation owners who weren’t sociopathic sadists. But the system itself rewards cruelty and ever more vicious behavior. The problem is a systemic problem. The individuals come and go, but the system itself shapes their behavior.
And it’s not like a wealth cap is such an extreme notion, considering the stakes. Surely $100 million, for example, would be enough for anyone to live in unparalleled luxury for their entire lives.
VOR
@Roger Moore: I think Tesla has done some innovative things. Most car manufacturers use a lot of single function parts, often bought from an external supplier, using the same part across multiple models. Tesla has designed parts for a specific car and combined multiple functions into a single part. It’s more efficient, but requires more design work. The Gigacasting concept is also interesting, of potentially being able to replace 10s, even 100s of pieces with a single cast part. I worry about ability to repair these giant castings.
I’m concerned about treating hardware like software. You can buy the same car 1 month apart, in theoretically the same model year, and they can be different. I disagree with putting every control into a single touch-screen as I like having easy to find dedicated buttons for some tasks. And you can find videos all over Youtube complaining about fit and finish issues.
jonas
@WV Blondie: A week or two ago, there was this big tech investor on the NPR program 1A who is one of Musk’s backers in his well thought-out Twitter acquisition who was telling the host that Musk’s brilliant insight for saving Twitter was to approach it from “an engineering perspective.” Yes. The engineering. That’s what was holding Twitter back.
I had been asking myself “who are the idiots who wanted to set massive piles of money on fire to further illuminate Elon Musk’s massive ego?” Here was my answer. I’m not anything close to a computer engineer or anything and my engagement with Twitter has been as a purely passive lurker over the years. But even I was listening to this and rolling my eyes in to the next county. What a moron.