_louisr_
Tesla also would not have survived without
government money.
other car companies ... make and sell far
more cars every year than Tesla has made
since its founding.
1. Hyundai Accents in 2017
2. All Smartcars in any of recent years
3. Subaru Imprezas (excluding WRX/STI) in 2016
4. All Jaguars in recent years
5. Infiniti G-35s in 2013
6. Lexus ES in 2015
To have better sales than Tesla Model 3, you basically have to be a Nissan Sentra, Toyota Prius, Honda Civic, Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, Toyota Corolla, or some other extremely well-known line of cars from a reputable brand.
[1]https://insideevs.com/tesla-model-3-sales-epic-august/ [2]http://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-data/hyundai/hyundai-ac...
Comments on "the cult of Musk" or speculations be damned.
That would never, ever happen at a VC funded tech startup no matter how bad the situation was. All investors care about is growth, and all the C-suite cares about are investors.
The human race has been directed out of an apocalyptic technological cul-de-sac by his hand. I recognize crony behavior when I see it.
It's truly sickening that the truth about diversity, inclusion, and equity is so muddled that even Linus can be deceived about it's nature. Fundamentally, the D.I.E. values are racist, Marxist, anti-capitalist, anti-merit, anti-competence at their core, and they pose a significant threat to modern working culture. Their threat is mostly their guise of compassion.
Alternate systems have not worked out so well, as you know. Communist planned economies led to the starvation of tens of millions, and that number increases to hundreds of millions when you add the persecution, jailing, and sometimes immediate execution of citizens of Communists states that had a history of political activity of the wrong sort. Recall that in Soviet Russia it was beneficial for each individual to "inform" on their neighbours to the KGB, so that they could claim their apartment. And it's suspected that Vladmir Putin is actually the richest person in the world.
Colonialism and slavery are pretty rough, but they are not a product of capitalism as much as a product of human malevolence and brutality. I'm sure you would find evidence of colonialism and slavery in pre-civilization times and in non-capitalist societies, so that argument falls flat.
Also, regarding the 8 richest individuals - If the rest of the world is getting on OK, why should we not have a couple of super rich people around? Why is that inherently bad? Why do _you_ think you should have a say of where that money belongs, exactly?
It won't be easy.
1. the industry has a chain of dealers that will have to sell EVs alongside gas cars - how can they say that the gasoline cars are the cars of the past (Tesla's stance) when they have to sell gas cars, too? Thus the dealers will not sell EVs that strongly by principle. "Yeah, the other 90% of the cars on this lot are dead as history. You'll do well not to buy one of those." Traditional dealers will never say that to their customers. But Elon has been giving that message to Tesla customers for a decade and EV shoppers are listening.
2. Where are they getting their batteries from? Tesla already has the battery factory. Every other company is going to have to have some kind of battery deal with LG or Panasonic or whoever, and thus no vertical integration, like Tesla already has.
3. How is "the industry" going to sell cross-country travel? Buying a Tesla, you have access to a world-wide charging network that is super-quick to charge the cars, and incredibly expansive. "the industry" cannot just whip a charging network up, out of thin air.
4. Tesla has re-invented _the car_, not just electric vehicles. Look at the Model 3 dashboard. It stands out! "the industry" is still building EVs in their existing factories, with existing interiors and exteriors, that look and feel like gas cars but with an EV powertrain. There are literally tens of brands that look and feel similar to each other, and only one car brand - Tesla - that is actually unique. You think folks are not going to notice that? Tesla is not on the same planet, design and feel wise, as the other carmakers, which all exist in the same small, close-minded space. Customers are noticing that.
Well, it hasn't been a deliberate and intentional effort to exclude those without property or net worth from the decision making process - People like that, who reside at the bottom of the hierarchies they inhabit, have never in history been looked to for guidance or input on any decision. I'm making an evolutionary biology claim: Folks with no clout can only have a say if it is deliberately & intentionally given to them. It's the opposite of your speculation that it's been taken from them.
And frankly why _should_ someone who cannot gather value for themselves have a say in economic decisions that will affect others? The reason we have these big evil hierarchies, where the poor are dispossessed and a small group of tycoons at the top make the decisions, is because they have a track record of good decisions. If you suddenly took some progressive initiative to invite some idlers to give input on tax law, they might make a decision that inadvertently lowers your country's GDP by half a percent for five years.
And we should find ourselves completely at ease at the end of our investigation, for in every species success is distributed inequitably. Inequality of net worth is a natural law, and human society is no exception. And we need to keep very hard working people motivated to keep working very hard by ensuring them that they will always keep the lions share of their labour's products.
No more biased edits from the accused, and no more witch-hunting from the whistleblower.
Relevant quotes from article:
Philip Cross is indefinitely topic banned from edits relating to post-1978
British politics, broadly construed. This restriction may be first appealed
after six months have elapsed, and every six months thereafter
KalHolmann is indefinitely restricted from linking to or speculating about
the off-wiki behavior or identity of other editors. This restriction may be
first appealed after six months have elapsed, and every six months thereafter
Reusable rockets weren't a hard problem
I would argue that arguing over how big our websites are is not the important factor. I submit to you that PC electricity usage is the most relevant quantity we need to discuss when it comes to consumption of bits. I argue that the increased load on the network of sending more bits is negligible compared to the many endusers and their PCs that consume our data.
If we agree that PC electricity consumption is the most important thing to address, then we must ask whether or not the electricity generation process is bad for the environment. Most likely, electricity is generated by hydroelectric dams or coal/combustibles power plants. Suppose we replace those two types of power generation with low-maintenance, 50-year-lifetime solar panels (for which the tech exists). Can you still argue that the increased amount of bits sent over the wire for heavy modern websites is an environmental negative that we should address? I would say, no, at this point we have reduced the environmental impact of most electricity-consuming devices, and we can ignore PCs for the time being.
Therefore it is not the personal computer and the quantity of bits it consumes that should be your focus. It should be electricity generation.
I would like to ask you to consider whether or not your compassion-based arguments contain any resentment. Are you acting and speaking entirely on the grounds of compassion? And if so, how can you be sure that your supposed actions are going to reduce suffering of people and the planet and not have the opposite effect? How can you suggest solutions, like decreasing the weight of websites, and know with a high degree of certainty that it will produce the desired outcome (environmental preservation)? Could it have an unintended consequence?
Since when is doing something efficiently and non-wastefully not a good idea for its own sake?
Do not denigrate the modern web in the name of efficiency when your measure for evaluating websites is wrong and you incorrectly assume that the difference between a 1mb and 10mb payload matters to the actual operation of the site and visitor satisfaction.
Re: That comic you once saw.
Yeah, what if we shut down all coal power plants and make the earth better? Oh wait, now we have destroyed our critical infrastructure and our government/nation has absolutely no leverage to even make decisions regarding the environment. If people would stop dumbing down these complex problems, it would be a good thing.
2. Fair enough
3. Referencing "increasing the entropy in the universe" isn't a good argument because the amount of entropy increase due to humans is much, much less than how much entropy is increased by particles being blasted out of all the stars in the universe (unless I fundamentally misunderstand what entropy is). I think that stars blasting out particles is a much larger contributor to entropy than humans not using computer bits effectively.
And also what does entropy as a concept have to do with anything, anyway? Why should human engineering tasks have such considerations? If being super efficient with an abundant resource has a large cost (of some sort), but low efficiency has no business- or environmental- downside, then why be efficient with it?
In your last bit you argue that it's acceptable to send a site that is bigger than even the most bloated HTML/CSS page; I don't think that's true for any site/app that wants to be fast. It slows you down and people notice and stop using your service unless it's required of them.
I think that in general things are not as bad as you make them out to be, and your arguments have some merit but are mostly revealed as nonsense when the rubber hits the road. Universe entropy is completely unrelated to modern software engineering and web sites that have a lot of devs and are not SalesForce are not _that_ bloated.
Go look at reelgood.com. Imagine if Salesforce worked like that. It should be clear as day that this is a SalesForce problem, not a modern-web problem.