Elon Musk

heh, you might be right. you think it's kind of like a loss-leader, worth the billions of losses because it opens up other ways that he can make $ in a non-boring fashion?

theres that and also hes not a totally rational actor who has made it clear he just hates public transportation on its on merits and he prob also believes his own bs so i mean why not dig some tunnels and make ridiculous claims

whatever you think of bezos, he is clearly a good executive and logistics is the original hard operational problem. musk just seems insane, maybe 0.5% of the world (i.e. US men aged 20-30) find his shtick compelling, and the fact that he is the world's second richest man is proof that nothing matters.

i get a panic attack just thinking about riding in that thing

it looks too narrow to open the doors (which probably don't work unless you turn the engine off and on again)

half-kidding but: Elon as a public figure makes me regret that Freudianism has fallen so out of favor

Engineer who worked on this tunnel for a bit before quitting messaged me other day and said “basically all the engineers did was work to make sure that the fancy lights looked cool” and that people trashing the tunnel - bc cars are slow, etc - are way more right than they realize https://t.co/arWokSQxdR

— Ryan Deto (@RyanDeto) April 16, 2021

I don’t think it’s possible to be any more right about Musk than I think I am

I swear this whole project is a death trap.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22387887/elon-musk-spacex-win-nasa-lunar-lander-contract-artemis

finally...mankind will touch the surface of the moon

i have to admit it would be kind of funny if we found out that elon musk faked his moon landing

I see Musky as this guy who controls/pays lots of really smart people then steals all the credit

He is the Thomas Kinkade of tech.

controls/pays lots of really smart people

to do what

stuff that he steals the credit for

tbf space exploration feels like a major grift

> Acting NASA administrator Steve Jurczyk said Friday that under President Biden’s budget request, the agency’s Artemis mission has a new goal: in addition to landing the first woman on the Moon, it will also send the first person of color to the lunar surface. So far, the only Earthlings to touch the Moon’s surface have been white men.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375899/nasa-first-person-of-color-artemis-mission-moon-woman

I hope this prevents cops from shooting black kids.

i think it makes a lot of sense that his market worth is so huge because he's basically an avatar for the continued dominance of car culture. it's certainly not because he's competent in any way. he's kind of a similar figure to trump in the sense of being a stand-in for the relevance of a huge reactionary industry where his incompetence is a feature. like his real asset is just the fact that he's a stupid blowhard true believer.

stuff that he steals the credit for

all they do is make robot cars that murder people, spaceships that explode on the ground, and imaginary submarines that get too mad at invisible paedophiles to get around to existing

eh if you're into space stuff than SpaceX making launches way way cheaper is a big deal. and jump-starting the electric vehicle market (sorry too lazy to change bad metaphor) was a big deal.

but yes, launching a suicidal self-driving feature was bad. the tunnel under Las Vegas seems like the dumbest so far (someone pointed out that they're too small for people to open their doors, so no escape in an emergency ... AND you can't get help because they're too small for emergency vehicles. and it was an awful idea anyway. trains! just make trains!)

what good is SpaceX going to go for anything?

Ruining the night sky with orbiting trash and satellites.

I feel like the only real motivation is some pathetic billionaire sci fi escape fantasy of escaping a dying Earth and living on a space station

yeah I'm not into space stuff either but I know smart devoted geeks who worship SpaceX so ... like so many things ... it might be useless, but the engineering was good.

I’ll give Tesla some credit for making a fully electric EV seem like a luxury vehicle - there are a lot of legitimately cool and impressive things about them. This has almost nothing to do with Musk himself, however - in fact, the more I read about this company the more I’ve come to the conclusion that his contribution to the company is generally limited to stupid, gimmicky features and bad QC as a result of making dumb promises. That said he does appeal to a certain type of mega online dork and that alone has probably sold thousands of cars.

I’ll give Tesla some credit for making a fully electric EV seem like a luxury vehicle

this is terrible, not good

it might be useless, but the engineering was good.

The explosion of yet another (3rd so far this year) SpaceX rocket prototype yesterday showered metal and potentially toxic debris far into the sensitive tidal flats of the South Bay Coastal Preserve, Boca Chica State Park and the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. On the right side of the highway is the SpaceX fenceline, and on the left is what has historically been one of the single most important sites for wintering Piping Plovers and thousands of other shorebirds. Since SpaceX gets County orders to close the highway and beach most weekdays we have had to cut back extensively on our monitoring there. Sadly, most news stories about these explosions neglect to mention the extensive damage being done to these highly unique coastal public lands.

prototypes do blow up sometimes, that's sort of the point of the testing.

if my comment didn't make it sufficiently clear, I'm a HUGE fan of blanketing wildlife refuges with rocket debris. I hope they explode a thousand more rockets. muhahahaha

this is terrible, not good

maybe I should rephrase. Tesla made EVs cool. a total 180 from the way that say, hybrids were portrayed.

I definitely think Tesla make the big manufacturers move to EV more quickly

hence why I'll never own one, every good idea Tesla has is gonna get stolen by the big car companies, improved upon, and made cheaper

the big car companies have spent a century refining the process of manufacturing motor vehicles. they are familiar with failures and what recalls cost. tesla is like oops, sorry, let's roll out the latest nightly beta, that'll probably fix it

if a car explodes but nobody is driving it, was it really a car

the problem with the idea that tesla popularized electric vehicles is that a. it was all built on government subsidies without which tesla would not exist, literally the popularization of electric vehicles is a government program that elon musk was just a willing partisipant in, and more importantly b. electric vehicles just arent popular, any of the big automakers would happily sell them if people were buying, theyve certainly put a lot of time and effort into developing and marketing them and theyve made some decent cars but so far they are not in high demand, even with the government trying to push them, one would assume that will change some day but as of now in the usa at least electrics are not in high demand

the back of the envelope math people are doing to justify teslas insane stock price that assumes domination of a huge market of which electric cars are just part is especially weird considering in the countries where electric vehicles are more popular people are just buying the same volkswagens and toyotas they always have, there doesnt seem to be any sort of big first mover advantage there

brand loyalty is more and more a thing of the past but it still exists in the auto industry

The automotive industry and oil industry just failed to move on quickly enough to ensure... human survival. It's not Musk's accomplishment, it's a societal massive failure.

I agree their stock price is silly but even with subsidies, people were arguing that nobody was going to buy EVs ... then it was that Tesla wouldn't be able to scale manufacturing to meet preorders ... now it's "well 2% of the market is tiny" which is fair, but ... I mean, I detest Elon Musk, but I just don't get it. Selling electric cars is a good thing! Nobody else was making it a priority! They're an incredibly irresponsible company but it's not a scam and I don't understand the hate.

I think people are tired of cars.

https://i.imgur.com/GFOrXUI.png

https://i.imgur.com/yXSfm5m.png

https://i.imgur.com/N9NfQSe.png

being in 6th place in norway is pretty amazing if they could have nearly that success in rich countries world wide it would be huge, but it prob still wouldn't justify their stock price lol, then if we look at sweden theyre not even on the list, not sure whats going with there

https://i.imgur.com/kuGZtOn.png

then theres the usa, being up there with bmw and benz isnt nothing but its also not everything

Selling electric cars is a good thing! Nobody else was making it a priority! They're an incredibly irresponsible company but it's not a scam and I don't understand the hate.

― lukas, Friday, April 16, 2021 11:29 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

not sure if any of these statements are true tbh

When I envision an utopian future, there is no cars.

However bad you think the future is going to be, it'll be worse without electric cars, cuz we're definitely not going to restructure society around mass transit in my lifetime.

welp then theres prob no point in doing electric cars

why?

if you dont think doing the major surgeries needed to forestall catastrophe are possible then theres really no point in applying the bandaids like electric cars

transportation, mostly cars and trucks, is the single greatest source of greenhouse gases? am I missing something????

electric cars produce greenhouse gasses, i mean theyre better than fuel burning cars but its marginal, where public transpo is orders of magnitudes better

and just on a philosophical level the sort of fatalist incrementalism of contemporary liberalism where building public transportation, something that has been done before and in fact continues to be done, is impossible but electric cars are going to save us is well its just... uhh not great

eh even with the electricity generation and the battery manufacturing, it's a 2-3x reduction. and as we decarbonize electricity generation that number will get better and better.

i'll be overjoyed to be proven wrong here, but we don't just have to build public transportation, we have to build housing stock in saner places where transit makes sense ... we can't even build houses to solve homelessness. i'm not saying we'll get nothing done here, but thinking electric vehicles don't have an important role to play in this transition is ... it's bad, lagoon. bad.

i generally agree. electric cars are a good thing. they're not the answer, but nothing is. do it all.