It makes me really sad when I think about it. We needed, and still need, the person Elon Musk was at least pretending to be when he founded SpaceX.
Or he's completely deranged and the drugs have irreversibly damaged his mind. Both scenarios, or some intersection therein, are plausible.
Also, Tesla just jumped bc Musk said that there’s going to be full sell driving in china…. Next year…
We’re back to 2017-era strategies but in china this time.
But these are all kind of dime a dozen examples of brand destruction compared to how much Elon has hurt the Tesla brand, IMO.
“One of the unfortunate things about the ‘Osborne Executive’ was that the owners were unaware of marketing strategies. The ‘Executive’ was a computer that was a bit outdated, so Osborne decided to make an announcement of a future unit that was IBM compatible. The announcement caused a chill on the sales of this particular computer which eventually caused the company to go under. The Osborne Executive came out in 1982 and the company filed for bankruptcy in September of 1983.”
The Tesla hype cycle is either nearing its end or peaked and I'm sure he knows this. The valuation for this company is ridiculous by any standard. So he's on to his next thing. By joining ranks with MAGA and he's purchased himself a driver seat for the most powerful country and strongest economy.
Obviously he still cares about Tesla, but it's not his primary focus anymore. He's moved on to his next big thing which I'm sure he expects to be many times more lucrative than Tesla was.
The human future in space is important and needs a better champion.
He's massively empowered the worst elements of the left and the right, which of course feed on each other. On the right he's reviving fascism and race science, and on the left he's giving tremendous ammunition to the "anti-everything" crowd. "See! human ambition is fascist! stop everything now!"
He was, for a time, the antidote to that, a liberal who built things and seemed to believe in a better future.
Not something I want to see but if it's possible I am afraid something like this may happen.
At that point it would be the US government via contracts keep Tesla afloat. An even bigger conflict of interest then already.
If you can handle the occasional funny guy chucking you a heil as you drive past and tech that tries to murder you about once a month they look highly affordable. Probably not what they were going for but hey ho.
Can you name me any billionaire who isn't an opportunist? How can you become super wealthy without being opportunistic? Do you think by being kind and law abiding gentlemen, massive wealth just lands into your lap while your competitors let you by? This entire platform is full of opportunists. You don't get anywhere in life by not being opportunistic, life is just too competitive the higher up you go.
Tesla lost their innovator / first mover advantage years ago, choosing to spend their R&D on dead ends and vanity projects like autopilot and the cybertruck while not delivering on projects that might have merit if they would actually listen to their target audience like the semi. They would've remained pretty successful had they iterated on their existing offerings, improving range, quality and reducing production costs of their existing lineup.
[0] https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-brand-won-...
If Sundar or Tim reduced market penetration across EU by 43% they’d get recalled in a quarter.
Even with controlling interest it likely would result in a class-action from shareholders... But he's defanging all the federal organizations that have been keeping his double handed dealings in check and the judiciary that would oversee the cases sooo... Oligarch can do no wrong?
Or, more likely, to institute some kind of perpetual monarchy passed down through his 14 kids.
Today, he spends his time empowering the worst habits of the ultra right and ultra left.
We need modest centrists with no egos driving us towards things like space exploration. Not whatever dystopian space-time trajectory we're on today.
If even HackerNews can't have a rational discussion about Tesla then we're all doomed!
Thing is, people just put up stupid stickers about purchasing their Teslas before he went nuts, but he has never been centered.
Seems unlikely to me that his long term goal was to lead the Republican Inquisition in a great crusade against the libs.
It's probably the drugs. That or he just got bored with the nerd CEO shtick and now his new passion is epic pwning teh libs.
Especially when the competition dies off leaving spacex the only one standing.
While her infamous quote "let them eat cake" seems to be falsely attributed to her and many stories about her seem to have been fabrications, she did contribute to the downfall of the French monarchy through her high personal expenses and hardline stance against reforms. I'm not sure her role in the collapse of the monarchy can be compared to Elon Musk's role in tanking Tesla though - views of the monarchy were and would have been unfavorable without her already and her behavior wasn't much of a deviation from before, just made more significant because of the poor financial state of France at the time.
And it is not even the intent of his actions, it is the haphazard, chainsaw slash-&-burn, "move fast and break things" way he is doing them.
The same thing was done by Al Gore in the 1990s, cutting 250,000 federal jobs, eliminating 100+ programs, and consolidating over 800 agencies [0], all without creating these kinds of programs — specifically because Gore CONSIDERED all the issues and players and worked with congress to get it all done in a rational, and more importantly effective way. And that effort is respected decades later.
In Musk was using a similar approach, he'd earn respect, which indicates he is not making changes for efficiency for the government or people, but to slash-&-burn for his specific goals, e.g., gutting regulators requiring him to behave responsibly in his businesses.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...
It's an inherently toxic format. It promotes incoherent, contradiction-ridden, emotionally-driven, short-attention-span meme-think.
IMHO Bluesky is no better, which is why I'm not there. It's the same format, an incoherent soup of sound bites competing to emotionally trigger you into amplifying them. This format is the kind of thing a mad scientist would design with the explicit goal of rotting the human mind.
The good thing about books and longer-form works... even things as long as Reddit and HN comments... is that they can encapsulate complete thoughts that are connected to other thoughts. Building systems of thinking is how humans reason coherently about the world. Meme soup reduces us to some kind of animal level of grunts and short-horizon reactions but with language. It's gross.
I've been calling "social" media companies in general "the tobacco companies of the mind" for years.
I've yet to see any good writeup on how this recent trouble would affect the legalities of that lawsuit.
There are still other issues that I have with Tesla vehicles, but I am looking forward to see how RAM's upcoming Ramcharger will do (all electric drivetrain with built-in generator for extended range).
They already limit signups in oversubscribed areas, and as good as starlink is, it's still a technology that has higher latency, and higher ongoing costs from what I can see.
Meanwhile, once fibre is in the ground, with PON there's very little maintenance required. And upgrading speeds is a case of upgrading the OLT and ONT's - I'm going out on a limb and guessing that's much cheaper to do than launching thousands of upgraded satellites.
>In fact, Model 3 is down 29.4% in Europe so far this year despite plenty of inventory.
Sedan sales have been down for a while so Model 3 isn't trendy. Also, last year Q1 had the new "Highland" Model 3 in full-volume delivery from Shanghai (https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-highland-deliveries-...) after the launch in October.
It's all about the new Y now and it was only launched in mid January and deliveries only started on March 10 https://www.electrive.com/2025/03/10/tesla-hands-over-first-...
>The shift to the new Model Y design is certainly having an effect, but it cannot account for the 43% drop in deliveries.
Why? Model Y already accounts for 2/3 of the sales in Europe. And the production lines were down for 3-5 weeks, they take time to ramp back up and Tesla started the quarter with only 12 days of inventory.
>With deliveries of the new Model Y having started this month in Europe, we can see Tesla is still suffering in markets that report registration daily.
But who knows in which countries did Tesla prioritize the "Junpier" deliveries. If they picked the markets with no public daily numbers, then their arguments collapse. I doubt Norway and Sweden are the easiest to reach from Berlin, for instance.
The only EV market where that looks to be true is the US, which has a protectionist policy of 100% tariffs in place to keep out the competition.
And then there’s SpaceX…
Or going further back, he got pushed down some stairs as a kid because he was bullying someone whose father had killed himself.
Which they are not even close to yet. Starship is about launching the suckers in bulk.
It’s because musk is the Tesla stock price. The entire valuation of that company is based of the force of personality that musk has.
If they ousted musk, the Tesla shares would be worth less than any other auto maker instead of more than all of them combined.
> Doesn’t the CEO have fiduciary responsibility to not tank the company in a worldwide market?
I don’t think this is necessarily true in a legal sense
In Europe, deliveries re-started on March 10 after the official launch in mid January.
In China where they move faster, the sales are picking up as expected. They might end the quarter with stable sales YoY despite the factory downtime. https://x.com/Tslachan/status/1904464265303699919
Back when Tesla was the only long-range EV you could buy, well, Tesla pretty much had the market cornered. Now, with other manufacturers offering long range EVs, Tesla just isn't standing up to the competition.
Here are some non-political reasons why, IMO, Tesla sales are down:
1: They do not justify the price premium, because they do not feel like a luxury vehicle. The interior is basically a mass market vehicle with pleather. (And the Cybertruck is just too expensive.)
1a: They severely dropped the price of the Model Y right after people bought it, with no goodwill. (This happened to me.) Ford dropped the price of the Mustang Mach E shortly after, and then offered goodwill to people who recently purchased it.
2: They have weird quirks:
2a: The yoke (square) steering wheel in the Model S should have always been optional.
2b: The automatic windshield wipers work very poorly, and there is no wiper speed control on the stalk. The "just push the button and spin the dial on the steering wheel" is not a solution. (Either use the same kind of sensor that other car manufacturers use, or bring back the old fashioned dial on a stalk.)
2b: The heat/AC and radio turn on when you open the door. (I hate this.)
2c: On newer Teslas, shifting happens on the touchscreen instead of a physical shifter.
2d: The general lack of physical buttons. The car doesn't need a button for everything, but even some programmable physical buttons would be a huge improvement.
3: The Model 3's driver's seat is too uncomfortable. (The Model Y's driver seat is better.)
4: They should have a wider range of vehicles by now. For example, they should have a Cyber SUV based on the same platform as the Cybertruck, but with 3 rows. They also need to have a lower-end vehicle.
5: They can't "ship." They've had pre-orders for the roadster forever. In contrast, Chinese EV makers come out with new models much faster.
6: They are sorely behind on Autopilot. Other manufacturers allow hands-free. The promise of full-self-driving was never met, people who paid for full-self-driving in their 2018 Model 3s will never get a true hands-free self-driving car while they own it.
Two people I know were holding off from purchasing Tesla cars last year, thinking that if Trump lost then the political views of Musk wouldn't really matter any more. As Trump won, one has bought a VW, and the other is continuing to wait.
Which are caused by the retooling of the Model Y production lines which took 3-5 weeks. Y represents 2/3 of the sales globally and all factories where down simultaneously.
Deliveries are back up in China and at current trends, they might achieve ~130,000 sales - just like Q1 2024, even though they had to close down their most production factory lines. China is the first to get back to speed but it says a lot about the "sales dip" which is actually a planned production dip.
Which are caused by the retooling of the Model Y production lines which took 3-5 weeks. Y represents 2/3 of the sales globally and all factories where down simultaneously. They started 2025 with only 12 days of inventory worldwide.
Deliveries are back up in China and at current trends, they might achieve ~130,000 sales - just like Q1 2024, even though they had to close down their most production factory lines. China is the first to get back to speed but it says a lot about the "sales dip" which is actually a planned production dip.
What did you expect?
> Berezovsky, who elevated Putin to power from behind the scenes, was soon exiled and replaced with more compliant oligarchs. He also met a grisly end—found hanged at his Berkshire mansion at 67—a precedent that might give pause to anyone thinking of risking his business empire to play that gray-cardinal role for the likes of Trump and J. D. Vance.
He stylized himself as "founder" of PayPal and Tesla, and "chief engineer" at SpaceX, but he's none of the things and even the specifics of his supposed university degrees seem dubious upon investigation. He has also repeatedly demonstrated a lack of basic practical knowledge in domains he publicly talks about while allegedly having deep technical knowledge from committing entire sections of text books to memory. He knows how to seem like a genius without actually having the hands-on experience to back it up.
He has been widely successful as a hype man and somehow managed to keep things going while continuously ovepromising and underdelivering. But I find it difficult to imagine that resulting in a positive as long as the purposes are ultimately entirely self-centered. He seems to be desparately trying to look "cool" and be admired - even going to the lengths of pretending to be world class at a number of challenging video games by paying people to boost his accounts and by widely exagerating his real participation in competitive e-sports. He's extremely insecure and unable to handle challenges to his qualifications or authority.
I find it plausible that at one point he did have the aspiration to be the man who put the first man on Mars but it wasn't driven by the motives he has claimed (multiplanetary species etc) because that would require acknowledging the global requirements to sustain such a project over the long term. Instead it seems to have been entirely about creating a legacy and a perception of himself. I guess if his desire was to be mentioned in future history text books he has achieved that - but not for landing reusable rocket boosters.
Whether he declines before then, to a point of uselessness for the republicans, is a different question. Also I'm assuming someone is pumping him full of every drug available to prevent his decline as much as possible.
vance seems to think he's next in line, having been anointed by the billionaire class, but he's all hatred and no charisma. Although saying that, he may just shuffle into the top spot when it's impossible to dislodge him. Or he may just get accepted by whichever bot farms drive the rightwing social media frenzy.
I'm personally hoping that their general fascist incompetence will fuck their chances of an everlasting reich.
Do you mean for delivering cars? A quick search suggests they used to be moved by road, but are now moved by rail.
I don't see why Norway and Sweden are any more difficult to deliver to than anywhere else. Over 150 freight trains cross the bridge from Denmark to Sweden every day.
Lots of examples from American history too though where things turn out better like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Girard
Chinese electric cars are available here, but not, as yet, particularly popular.
SpaceX is narrow; specialized, high revenue per launch, but not that many launches (although they're doing more than any other company), whereas tesla is broad, no longer unique but potentially big volume of car sales and recurring revenue from infrastructure and maintenance, could have been a competitor to GE and the like.
Most of the backlash / protests you are hearing about is manufactured i.e. not based on any rational cause. This kind of protest doesn't hold for long term.
There were quite a few of these; Elagabalus is probably the best-known for it, but about 30 emperors received _some_ form of damnatio memoriae.
> And we're talking about him 2k years later
Well, clearly the damnatio memoriae didn't work very well, then, did it?
Personally I think, that Cybertruck was badly timed experiment for Tesla. Model 2 would bring market domination and long term stability instead.
Imagine you're one of the richest people on the planet. What are you going to do? Keep chasing more and more money, like a drug addict chasing more and more high? Nah, that's not sustainable, surely not when you're already virtually at the top, and you can have everything you want. Run a charity? Why? Starving children in Africa weren't your problem when you were poor, why should they be now?
Dick around and do dumb shit, that's what you're going to do. Because you can. You have enough money to buy popular social media and turn it into shit because it's fun and why not. And your best buddy who's on board with doing dumb shit happens to be the president of America. Dream come true.
A core feature of historical fascism is a significantly expanded government. For example, under Mussolini’s regime (1922–1943), the Italian state dramatically increased its control over the economy — by 1939, it controlled over 80% of shipping and shipbuilding, and around 75% of iron and steel production. He also significantly expanded the state bureaucracy to enforce fascist ideology — from education to the media.
I’m not defending Musk’s behavior or suggesting anything, but labeling him “fascist” doesn’t seem historically accurate.
They had some mechanical issues with the fuel line that was a fire risk and they software locked it to reduce the tank capacity by 20% in the US so it wouldn't be classed as a plug in hybrid, but even with those problems I've generally heard positive things about it. Basically acting as reserve to avoid range anxiety on early small battery EVs when it was all quite new.
No, one is a cruel fox and another one is a stupid monkey.
Their skills lie mainly in adaptability to the situations they found themselves in and using them, but neither is a mastermind.
(I'm not singling out Tesla specifically btw, Apple is also getting a lawsuit for selling the iphone 16 but not delivering on Intelligence like they advertised)
[0] https://electrek.co/2025/02/27/tesla-is-hit-with-a-fresh-cla...
I'm a car guy so I've been following automotive electrification for a while, and in the earlier days, Electrek was a shameless Tesla fan blog. I occasionally followed a link and ended up there and felt like I was reading the thoughts of someone fully enveloped by Musk's reality distortion field. Lambert was an early investor in TSLA from the sound of it and just raved about Tesla cars and gushed about Musk.
Anyhow, I think it was the repeated moving of the goalposts for Full Self Driving, or maybe it was the Roadster 2.0 delays, or maybe it was the unhinged Twitter rants ... but anyhow, Lambert slowly became more critical of Musk (until the 2 had a falling out on Twitter), and Lambert now writes things like:
> Call me crazy, but I think the company would fair better with a competent full-time CEO instead of an egomaniac wannabe oligarch who consistently lies to shareholders, engages in resource tunneling with his private competing company, and is deeply lost in one of the worst cases of social media addiction that I’ve ever seen.
(from https://electrek.co/2025/02/04/theres-finally-some-tesla-tsl...)
I have a feeling that if Einstein, Newton, Leonardo da Vinci, Churchill or really any of the great historical figures had access to Twitter, there legacies (or lack thereof) would be very different today.
> […] strong regimentation of society and the economy.
> "Fascist goals" – the creation of a nationalist dictatorship to regulate economic structure […]
> Paxton argues: “fascism redrew the frontiers between private and public, sharply diminishing what had once been untouchably private. […] It reconfigured relations between the individual and the collectivity, so that an individual had no rights outside community interest.
> The Fascist Manifesto supported the creation of an eight-hour work day for all workers, a minimum wage, worker representation in industrial management, equal confidence in labour unions as in industrial executives and public servants, reorganization of the transportation sector, revision of the draft law on invalidity insurance, reduction of the retirement age from 65 to 55, a strong progressive tax on capital, confiscation of the property of religious institutions and abolishment of bishoprics, and revision of military contracts to allow the government to seize 85% of profits.
Etc.
All quotes taken from:
However, there is much wisdom in McLuhan's "we become what we behold" -- and consuming too much "social media" turns one into a performative puppet. Twitter is the distilled version of this (Jaron Lanier called it "Twitter Poisoning").
If Elon Husk huffing Twitter 24/7 while owning Twitter isn't a case of "getting high on your own supply", then I don't know what is.
He is an active, high-level, participant (formally an adivsor, clearly practically exercising directive influence) in a fascist, kleptocratic regime. There may be some definition of personally being a fascist where this is consistent with him not being a fascist, but I would suggest that any such definition is inconsistent with what the bast majority of people you might speak to mean by “being a fascist”.
> Fascists don't follow neoclassical economics.
Neoclassical economics, like Newtonian mechanics, is an approximate descriptive model, not a normative system; to the degree that it is accurate, everyone follows it, regardless of ideology.
(anecdotally, Chinese cars are pretty popular here in Ecuador, but they're fossil fuel cars, not EVs)
lose -> lost
loose -> loosened
That’d be best for the company long-term but they’d have to survive the inevitable lawsuits first, not to mention the high likelihood of physical violence if Musk tweets about it. I think the board are basically sitting around praying that the horse learns to sing before they’re forced to act.
Newton was known to be very egotistical and his grudge with Hooke was well known: https://culturacolectiva.com/en/history/isaac-newton-dark-si...
Einstein was generally considered a very kind and generous man, outside of his marriages: https://www.grunge.com/264270/the-dark-side-of-albert-einste...
I don't know much about da Vinci, though he designed machines for war and he must have performed a lot of macabre work on cadavers for his research into anatomy (not that studying anatomy is a bad thing).
Musk and Trump - are well within the bounds of Liberalism. They may not be John Rawls. Trump is a Neo-Liberal protectionist. Musk tends to be more classical liberalism.
You may not like it - but his constituents elected him to defund, or try to (congress is really the only people who can), those politically bias programs. This is how democracy works.
His Tesla stock is personally levered. I don't know at what point he gets margin called, but a sharp drawdown in Tesla's stock price could force him to sell stock in his crown jewel, SpaceX. (Or just extract money from it somehow. Either way, diminish it.)
Yep, so liberal, doesn’t sound like a fascist even a little.
Starlink's international prospects are getting trashed. Meanwhile, its competitors have basically free money from foreign governments to compete with SpaceX.
I'm rooting for Musk to fall on his face as much as the next guy. But I'm not delusional enough to substitute my desired reality for actual reality. By any measure Musk has had a remarkably successful year or so. He's much richer and wields more influence over the government than any non-president in history that I can think of.
That is not the case. I took a look at the German numbers for Januaries 2025 and 2024 and Model 3 fell proportionally the same as Model Y in the YoY numbers:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43027039
Numbers are rational, are they?
Once again - wake me up when they ban political parties, centralized power to the federal government, install political officers in the public and private sectors, and ban capitalism.
Right … it’s a “calculated move” to cater to far right, and Neo Nazi groups abroad (ie, AfD).
It’s a “calculated move” to not only do one but two Nazi salutes on national television.
Let’s stop treating this guy as some sort of genius. That Potemkin village/illusion was dispelled long ago.
Honestly it's surprising that it's still so high. Compare it to any other car manufacturer and its valuation seems ludicrous. A lot of people are somehow still persuaded that the company is going to have some kind of amazing breakthrough Any Day Now.
Are infomercials toxic? maybe? Is banning them useful? maybe - can you find them addictive, as a post-TV individual? I can't, and I can't get schezophrenic like those perpetually enraged Twitter users, either.
I think it's just that those people, including Musk, didn't have the new form or literacy, a stronger grounding to the reality, required to be online. Twitter/Bluesky architecture itself, IMO, is about 10^2-5 less toxic than anything before it.
Was that before or after he started over-promising/lying about Tesla's full self driving capabilities?
I don't think he was ever likable, it's just that back then his reputation hadn't caught up with his hype.
Personally, I don't think he is some genius mastermind, he just took some risks with business strategy and tactics and ended up being really lucky. Eventually, luck runs out.
Also, success and sycophants have probably caused him to get a lot more arrogant and less careful.
That is not true in any sense in which it was not equally true of Adolf Hitler in 1933 Germany.
Fascist regimes don't usually spring from the head of Zeus as fully formed unelected autocracies, they are a failure mode of other systems, very commonly representative democracies.
There's also more competition than just other long range EVs. I plan on getting a new car sometime in the next year or two and had been planning on an EV. But lately I've been thinking that a PHEV might be the right approach.
In the last 10 years I think that there are only 3 days on which I drove more than 40 miles, and only 1 day where I was away from home overnight. If I had a car with a lower energy cost per mile than my current car (a 2006 Honda CR-V) I would probably drive more than I do now, but still would be under 40 miles most days.
A PHEV with a 40+ mile range on battery would be on battery most of the time for me. It would only need to use the ICE on the occasional long trip plus whenever its software decided to use it to keep it in good condition (ICE engines need to run occasionally to remain in good share).
It would in effect be an EV for me most of the time. And on the occasional long trip it would be more convenient than an EV due to gas stations being more widely available and faster than EV charging stations while still being economical.
1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism 2. Disdain for the importance of human rights 3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause 4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism 5. Rampant sexism 6. A controlled mass media 7. Obsession with national security 8. Religion and ruling elite tied together 9. Power of corporations protected 10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated 11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts 12. Obsession with crime and punishment 13. Rampant cronyism and corruption 14. Fraudulent elections
By my count, Trump and his movement score 14 out of 14.
My FTTP ONT is using less than 2.
That's 788kWh per year ((90 * 24 * 365) / 1000) and at 25p per kWh that's an extra £197.10 of energy usage per year. Compared to £4.38 for my FTTP ONT.
It's cool tech, no doubt, but it's not a replacement for a fibre connection by any stretch of the imagination, and so the positing that it'll be the, or one of the, bigget ISP's in the world seems off base, most likely by an order of magnitude or more.
He took on 13 billion of debt for Twitter, but it seems like dreaming to think this would be enough even if Tesla went bankrupt.
As of 2023 Musk had 238,441,261 "shares pledged as collateral to secure certain personal indebtedness [1].
I have not seen any great reporting around what prices he borrowed at (and thus when his margin calls may come).
> Is any of it tied to SpaceX?
Not directly. My point is if Tesla goes bankrupt he has to sell something to make good on those loans. (After, presumably, a year of court fights.) If Tesla is under there will be litigation around an xAI disposal. So that basically leaves Twitter and SpaceX, and one of those is more marketable than the other.
[1] https://ir.tesla.com/_flysystem/s3/sec/000119312523094075/d4...
Fascism does not care about ethnicity. Fascism is Anti-Capitalist Anti-Socialist. It cares about the collective. It thinks some capitalist mechanisms are important but it must be under the state control.
Nazism may function similar to Fascism as is also Anti-Capitalist and Anti-Socialist but it requires German Mysticism. German Mysticism pins the idea of Aryanism to rule.
This is all besides the point - it is not 1933 - what is happening is nothing like 1933 - Their policies are not even close to 1933 - your failure to recognize that prevents you from seeing the actual issues and offer real solutions. This is why Trump won the majority vote. Stop using thought stopping clichés
Nazism is a specific instance of fascism the way the latter is used as a general political term; it is, of course, distinct from Fascism in the narrow sense of the particular Italian movement of Mussolini.
Est-il habile où est-il heureux [1]?
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Mazarin not Napoleon
If a regime can’t control education, is shrinking the size of government, and is expanding individual rights (e.g., gun rights), can it truly be called authoritarian?
The issue with much of the modern left is that it often misidentifies the problem. The left should be focused on advocating for the working class and the poor. After all, figures like Trump and Elon Musk clearly align more with the wealthy elite.
But the current left seems dominated by affluent, highly educated people, and instead of class-focused politics, it often resorts to dramatic labels that don’t reflect reality.
Step one in solving any problem is understanding it. And that starts with asking harder questions, not just repeating slogans.
This seems very similar to claims I heard from Republicans about Biden a year or two ago.
I wish English had better language to distinguish possibility arising from limited observer information about the world versus possibility arising from uncertain future. I'm not saying you did it, but people tend to conflate the two.
The problem with PHEVs is that they are super-complicated, mechanically; and much more complicated than a conventional vehicle. It's hard to find a mechanic who will work on them when they get old. If they have problems, like mine did, even the factory / dealer mechanic will struggle, because they are all low-volume cars.
Then, you still need to get oil changes. The only thing you need to do with an EV are tires, washer fluid, and air filters.
> And on the occasional long trip it would be more convenient than an EV due to gas stations being more widely available and faster than EV charging stations while still being economical.
That's really not the case. On long trips I take bathroom breaks at Superchargers. It's enough:
I drove from MA to Washington DC, and there were so many Superchargers I just didn't think about charging. When I left the hotel, I went to a Whole Foods with a supercharger, grabbed lunch at the buffet, and was ready to go.
I drove from MA to Montreal. I stopped twice to pee on the way up, and that was long enough. The hotel had chargers. On the way home I charged at a grocery store to buy stuff for a picnic, and then charged again at a bathroom break.
At most Superchargers I now see non-Teslas, too, so don't feel like you have to buy a Tesla if you want to use a Supercharger.
I know this is off topic, but I find that sentence beautiful. Is this a common idiom or did you just come up with it?
The guy is clearly very skilled at identifying opportunities and putting together the best team to execute on them. Probably better than any other human alive today.
People may not like the guy for whatever reason, but saying he isn’t talented is absurd.
Keep in mind that big batteries charge "faster." On a road trip, a 200 mile EV will need more time to charge 60 to 200 miles then charging a 300 mile EV 80 to 220 miles.
One of the major advantage of an EV is low maintenance. You'll have to bring the Prime in for oil changes. You don't need to do that with an EV.
- Space X -> we need humans on mars
- openAI -> we need the power of AI
- neuralink -> also the AI talks to our brains (arguably the most rational path to immortality, a common goal of billionaires)
- tesla -> e cars are feasible, simpler, better for the environment
- starlink -> internet for anyone is feasible and rural areas are poorly served
- boring company -> make roads 3D and traffic is gone
all that, I wouldn't call dicking around. He doesn't give a fuck about a lot, but he gives a fuck about cool sci fi stuff
Russians close to power have historically often met that fate - at least since 1917, I suspect either prison or forced internal or external exile was more common before that. Americans not so much I think, so this probably won't transfer.
People typically do not compare the opposing tariffs, only the US. Europe charges 10% on top of the 10% imposed on all cars imported to the EU. The US charges only 2% on EU car imports, higher for light trucks. I believe in a free market, but also leveling the playing field, so hopefully we will raise the tariffs equally on EU car imports.
And your 100% import on EV figure is only for China if I recall correctly, not from the EU. It is to counter Chinese unfair trade practices. I am curious about the BYD EVs from China though, and I would like to test drive one, especially after being in and driving my son's Tesla to compare them. I'd still get a Tesla, since more than 50% of the parts are sourced in NA and assembly (Fremont, CA, and Austin, TX) for the main models for sale here in the US (batteries from Nevada's Gigafactory).
No one's putting in the work to deliver for twice the current price.