>>Personally, I think if we had better laws Musk would be looking at charges of criminal negligence for encouraging people to think they have things like actual "autopilot" and "full self driving". But as it is, he lied his way to the top of the world's richest list. So Tesla's problems here are just the consequences of his actions.
Your idea of better laws would mean no Tesla and no SpaceX.
Tesla has replaced two million gasoline cars with electric cars, and given its current growth rate, and Musk's long standing plan to release progressively more affordable cars, this number will likely be massively larger in a few years.
Beyond Tesla's own sales, its success has sparked massive investment by other carmakers to push their electric vehicle manufacturing timetables forward. All told, Tesla has had a massive impact in pushing the world to replace gasoline vehicles with electric ones.
SpaceX, for its part, is responsible for reducing the cost of launching material to orbit ten fold, with another 100 fold reduction possible with StarShip. The spike at the end of this graph is almost solely due to SpaceX:
Not quite - GP cites the spectre of Tesla nearly going bust to imply that Musk helped achieve the opposite (extremely healthy company) via dubious, ideally criminal means. It's not entirely based on that, but the implication is there.
Put simply, if Musk only made one controversial call, this comment thread wouldn't exist. The many controversial calls cannot be easily disentangled.
Do really healthy companies often have their stock price fall by half?
Personally, I think that Tesla is not particularly healthy, and that its future is grim as mainstream car manufacturers get in on the EV action. Tesla is not particularly well regarded by Consumer Reports. Of the 16 EV cars with current rankings, Tesla's models are at spots 4, 10, 11, and 16, with low reliability scores. [1]
Tesla does have a big slice of the US EV market, but that's only 3% of the total market. It's perfectly plausible that Tesla's lead among tech enthusiasts, always a small fraction of a market [2], won't translate into mainstream acceptance, and that Tesla will enter a death spiral where their relatively low volumes mean they won't be able to keep up with the major car manufacturers. Their eventual fate could be what happened to so many promising early manufacturers of internal combustion cars: they become brands owned by bigger car companies. [3]
So personally, I think Musk lies did create a window of opportunity for him, but that as with so many liars, he sowed the seeds of Tesla's destruction with the same lies that enabled initial success.
Apple are down 26% ytd. It wouldn’t be unheard of in this market. What should hopefully be clear is that stocks such as Tesla are not particularly correlated to the fundamentals of the company, there are whole-economy effects driving price rises and drops.
What I see in Tesla:
- extremely profitable car manufacturing. industry beating profits per car driven by cheaper BOM than legacy manufacturers, in large part due to innovation. margin of 30.5%.
- Manufacturing limited - huge wait list despite accelerating production (Q1 2022 best quarter ever, 68% increase yoy).
- huge investments in manufacturing across the supply chain starting to pay off.
- for the first time, manufacturing investments that can rival premium legacies. With the factories in Berlin and Texas coming online, it’s believable that Tesla has capacity to produce in excess of a manufacturer like BMW.
- very high purchaser satisfaction (the product is good).
- large overall profit - already beating most in the industry.
I'm no finance expert, but Tesla being down twice as much as Apple is not what I'd call a positive sign.
We'll see how Telsa's finances go once competition heats up. A major source of profit for them is selling emissions credits to other companies. Which a) undercuts Tesla's claims to eco-goodness, and b) will surely decline as others EV sales pick up. We'll also see how much that profit is affected by recalls and lawsuits.
In many cases, high customer satisfaction is indicative of a good future, but I'm not sure that's the case here. One, their satisfaction is in the same range as a lot of car companies, including BMW and Honda [1], so it's not a competitive advantage. And two, their current user base is a technophile, early-adopter niche. It's not clear that Tesla can cross Moore's Chasm and serve a mass audience that doesn't care who Musk is.
I look forward to seeing how it turns out. But given the way Musk is flaming out in his attempts to buy Twitter, his success is clearly not guaranteed. And that's before we account for him being distracted by trying to run 3 big companies at once.
> Your idea of better laws would mean no Tesla and no SpaceX.
Elon is not the only one that needs to be held accountable -> big oil has literally prosecuted and killed people, just look at what they've done to Steven Donziger.
If we actually enforced these laws, maybe we would have electric cars even earlier, and indeed, there maybe wouldn't be Tesla.
> Tesla has replaced two million gasoline cars with electric cars
Laws don't work this way - If I save someone's life today that does not give me a voucher to murder someone tomorrow.
>>If we actually enforced these laws, maybe we would have electric cars even earlier, and indeed, there maybe wouldn't be Tesla.
This is just utopianism.
>>Laws don't work this way
I wasn't saying they do. I was explaining the consequences of those "better laws" existing. In truth, the laws being sought by the OP would further undermine the very foundations of a liberal society, with contract liberty, to replace it with social control by an officialdom made up of unionized government bureaucrats with next to zero accountability, micromanaging the actions of others based on an elitist "government knows best" philosophy.
Are you saying that bold lying and criminal negligence were also necessary for SpaceX to succeed? I wasn't aware of that, but I'm happy to take your word for it.
It’s fascinating how quickly people will suddenly decide apolitical things you are associated with are “not cool/impressive” when you start expressing political opinions they disagree with.
You're talking about Musk becoming open about his backing for an authoritarian, cult-of-personality party? People have been plenty critical about Musk well before that, and about most of the same points.
Honestly, I think the causal arrow goes the other way. Musk has beclowned himself with the way he handled the Twitter deal, and Tesla's stock price has dropped accordingly. So a lot of the noise he has made since then can be seen as attempts to distract people with politics so they don't notice how his impressiveness is declining. This article makes a good case for that: https://twitter.com/BITech/status/1534939630809800706
>>You're talking about Musk becoming open about his backing for an authoritarian, cult-of-personality party?
Musk doesn't have any good alternatives, unfortunately. He's supposed to back the Democratic Party, that relies on a long-tradition of union-backed left-wing violence to intimidate the opposition? [1] The party that fanned the flames of 500+ riots in the summer of 2020, leading to dozens being killed and billions of dollars worth of people's livelihoods going up in flames?
The party that is aggressively moving toward authoritarianism, and trying to silence/cancel any one who speaks out about it, like Glenn Greenwald? [2]
The party of lawyers [3], who early on pushed aggressively for CCP-style lockdowns and vaccine mandates [4]?
The party fully backed by elite anti-Free-Speech movements? [5]
Even when the GOP were under Trump, the Democrats weren't clearly the more moral choice.
I think it stands to reason that nuclear power plant design and construction efficiency would have progressed far more quickly with continued construction of nuclear plants.
And the amount of fossil fuel usage that greater energy production from nuclear sources would have curbed would have saved thousands of lives via reduced air pollution, particularly from coal usage, without coming at the expense of high energy prices, that increase mortality among the poorest segments of the population, that simply capping energy usage would have brought about.
So I disagree the mainstream environmental movement, that opposed the nuclear industry, got it right. I think they got it totally wrong, as any populist movement, that is heavy on simple narratives and ideology, and light on science, is bound to be, when it weighs in on extremely complex large-scale issues.
Denial is always strong. Meltdowns prove the same thing as non-meltdowns.
What we do know is that if solar PV had got the subsidies in the '80s it finally got from China the '00s, PV prices in the '90s would have been where they are now, and we would today be well along toward a fully renewable and radically cheaper energy infrastructure today without looming imminent climate catastrophe. Nobody would be hyping dodgy super-expensive nukes. We probably would have avoided the whole Iraq fiasco besides.
Do they consider putting someone in prison, for their refusal to surrender their privacy and private property in complying with the Income Tax Act, a violation of Human Rights?
How about confiscating someone's fruit cart because they do not possess a licence for it? This led to Mohamed Bouazizi immolating himself, which triggered the Arab Spring.
How about fining someone for refusing to use someone else's gender pronouns? Or for refusing to perform a Brazilian wax on the male genitalia of a male who asserts they are a woman?
If not, then I question the existence of any underlying principle, beyond ideology, guiding their assessments.
>>There's a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that could quite easily be applied as a baseline.
The UDHR, as interpreted by the UNHR High Commission, explicitly defines "collective bargaining rights" as a human right:
Laws that grant collective bargaining rights mandate an employer to engage in collective bargaining with any set of his workers that form a union and demand collective bargaining, to the exclusion of negotiating with any other worker or job applicant. Such a government mandate is a blatant violation of the right to free association, and thus property understood as a violation of human rights. In fact, it violates article 20 of the UDHR, which states:
>>but still ran on a platform of "taxes are evil".
One can have a morally consistent world view that holds that voluntarily submitting oneself to the state's tax obligations to be a moral good, comparable to donating to the state, while relying on the state's apparatus of violence (the courts, police and prisons which compel compliance with state edicts) to tax the private income of people at large is an evil.
>>The sad reality is that many poorer and financially illeterate people have been tricked by VCs and other grifters into this with billions of dollars spent in advertising.
I'm a consumer of tether. I know the risks, and I take a calculated risk in using it for some applications. I perceive almost everything in the space as an experiment, and I'm willing to run that experiment. I personally believe that my sentiment is common among those who use and hold crypto assets. Cryptocurrencies are widely perceived as experimental and subject to large unexpected rice declines, hacks and other risks. That goes for stablecoins too.
I don't want you to forcibly prevent people from making any offer they want to me. By doing so, you are violating my right to free association, and assuming you know better than me what's best for me. I am not a child.
Maybe we can give people an option to suspend their rights as free citizens, and subject themselves to your political camp's centralized control, and leave every one else alone to decide for themselves, in accordance with the basic principles of liberal democracy. Is that a fair compromise, or are you going to presume large sections of your fellow citizens are not only financially illiterate, but also are too poor in judgment to realize they are better off under the control of people like you?
The problem is one of ethics, though: It's one thing to say "I've used it to move money" and "I believe and trust that they have the reserves they claim to have and I'm willing to hold USDT forever". If you just use USDT as a hot potato, your "calculated risk" is meaningless and you should be calling out that Tether is a fraud.
There is nothing inherently scammy in using a distributed blockchain to record balances, and cryptography to authenticate updates to the balances. While opening the door to financial contracts to every one in the world with a computing device may make scam offerings more common, it's overly simplistic and lazy to resort to a caricature of crypto tokens being, as a rule, scams.
The vast majority of crypto projects in top 100 by market cap are not like UST/LUNA. The demand for them comes from speculation about future utility, but there is no unsustainable market-beating yield to entice people to deposit new money.
Copying a project that was supposed to have limited tokens and then making your own private money and selling it is inherently scammy. And then avoiding security laws and responsibilities for your personal project by claiming decentralision
I was not referring to this particular project. You implied all crypto projects are scammy. I was taking issue with the over-generalization.
And as an aside, not being in compliance with SEC regulation does not in any way make a project scammy. Being non-compliant with SEC regulations could be the case with LUNA, and still be entirely incidental to it being scammy, as it is possible to operate with no deception and without exploiting any one - which is an essential component of any scam - and still run afoul many SEC regulations.
Utterly disingenuous characterization of the impact of Musk in his capacity as Tesla's first major investor, first chairman and 14 year long CEO, and of SpaceX on commercial space flight:
But before you point at Musk and Tesla or SpaceX, I need to remind you that he didn't found Tesla, he merely bought into it then took over: SpaceX's focus on reusability is good, but we had reusable space launchers before—the only really new angle is that it's a cost-reduction measure. Starlink isn't an original, it's merely a modern, bigger, faster version of 1990's Teledesic (which fell victim to over-ambitious technology goals and the dot-com bust).
I sometimes wonder what kind of psychopathology motivates this kind of mindset and ideology, that prioritizes the demonization of the most financially successful over even basic integrity and truth.
A lot of people look at everything in simple, reductionist way. Musk is either a god or he's a charlatan who stole companies and contributes nothing. Some people do this to influence a view point and others do this because they are simpletons echoing sentiments that feel good to them, this is how it has always been.
The property of being preserveable affects more than just the appropriability of resources. Cereals being preserveable also would have made them more tradeable, and trade increases productivity.
Taxation is a concept related to trade, in that it enables resources to be transferred to facilitate larger-scale coordination, and with it, greater division of labor. But it is this ability to transfer resources, to facilitate larger scale coordination and division of labor that I believe would be the underlying economic advantage provided by cereal crops, with taxation just being a subset of this class of interaction.
It stands to reason that the ability to store cereal surpluses more easily also increased cereal crops' utility as a food source by leading to less waste through spoilage.
Depends on what you think is normal I guess. I'm not going to repeat the whole comment I posted elsewhere in this thread, but his allegiance with Trump, his association with Yarvin, and his protégé Blake Masters are pretty informative of his politics.
Half the country voted for Trump, do you really want to tell all of them they're in the same group as the Nazis? They might just take you at your word.
Saying somebody is a fascist is not the same as saying they're a Nazi. Fascism has a few competing definitions, including Umberto Eco's 14 points and "palingenetic ultranationalism". Both of these definitions match Trump very well. The latter essentially means national rebirth by returning to the old ways, of which "make america great again" is a perfect example.
Also, the classic alt-right threat of "if you keep calling us fascists then I guess we'll become fascists" is... Basically just an admission of being a fascist, or at least proto-fascist? It's not the "gotcha" you think it is.
[edit] also, voting for Trump doesn't make you a fascist. Plenty of different interest groups voted for him and most of them, I would say, aren't fascistic.
edit: so people told you you were a fascist and, to own the libs, you decided to abandon what you believed in? must've been a pretty tenuous belief for you to switch from pro-liberty to pro-authoritarianism so easily, but so many libertarians do so that it's unsurprising. it's almost like capitalism is inherently authoritarian...
I just assume you fell down the alt-right pipeline and had conservative talking heads like Tucker Carlson convince you into becoming fascist.
No, the libertarian-to-fascist pipeline is a little more nuanced than that.
It happens due to accepting the impossibility of a free society, and it goes something like this:
1. I want to be left alone and leave others alone, and freely contract and associate with whomever I want.
2. The left won't let me do this, and they're willing to use force to ensure it.
3. The far-right also advocates using force, which I'm against, but the society they envision much more closely aligns with my own vision, and I would enjoy greater freedom under their regime than I would working to death in Gulag Part Deux.
4. If voluntaryism is literally impossible due to the authoritarians, my best gamble here is to align with the least-bad authoritarians and hope we can dismantle the worst parts of it when the dust settles.
The maths is basically "I'd rather help build death camps than (tolerate minorities/reduce worker exploitation)
Ironically, with your claim that voluntarily agreed to employment contracts are "exploitation", you turned out to support Communism, which is the ideology used by privileged unions to legitimize their privilege, and which has led to the creation of the most totalitarian states in history, while you falsely accuse any one who opposes Communism of being a genocidal fascist.
I'm not going to dive into the whole theory side, but suffice to say as a libertarian socialist, no, I'm not a communist in the sense you're thinking. I also don't accuse "anyone who opposes communism" as being a genocidal fascist, so I'm not sure where you got that from. Libertarians have a tendency to backslide into fascism when confronted with left wing pushback, but libertarianism itself isn't a fascist ideology.
You're framing this as libertarians versus Stalinism or something like that, I was thinking more unionisation, social-democratic movements, that sort of thing. Fascists pop up in the face of some pretty milquetoast leftist agitation - see the parent commenter who decided to become a fascist because leftists were mean to them.
I do believe that voluntary contracts can be exploitative (because they can by definition), but that didn't come up in this thread at all so I'm not sure where you're bringing that in from.
You very much are a Communist, your denials notwithstanding. Communism is a theoretical stateless anarchy, which means it is, in theory, libertarian socialism.
It is also the most destructive ideology in history, that has created the most totalitarian states that man has been subjected to.
Those who believe in your ideology will always side with anti-libertarians, and advocate centralization of power to stifle the individual, because Communism deems man, in his natural state, as evil, and glorifies efforts to stifle him as good.
>>I do believe that voluntary contracts can be exploitative (because they can by definition),
By definition, they cannot. If both parties choose to engage in the trade, no one was exploited. Marxism claims otherwise, in order to villify a free society and those who champion it, and legitimize anti-libertarian ideologies like Communism.
>>I was thinking more unionisation, social-democratic movements
You framed it as death camp supporting fascists versus your political camp, implying libertarians are in the former, and now you take issue with me calling your camp Communists.
Edit: since your account has clearly been using HN primarily (maybe even exclusively) for ideological battle, and that's the line at which we ban accounts, I've banned this one.
For past explanations about why we draw the line this way, see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
We do this regardless of which ideology an account is battling for or against—it's tedious and destructive of what HN is for, irrespective of which side people are on.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
This is just bad polemics. I wasn't even talking about my own positions here, so I don't think it's important to try to explain them to you.
I framed fascists as the death camp ones and a variety of left wing causes from outright revolutionary communism to social democratic positions as the opposition, and said that libertarians often pick the former over the latter. I'm not sure what about my argument you are struggling to follow - it's a widely acknowledged historical tendency. Yknow, IBM's holocaust computers and all that.
Please stop using HN for ideological battle. It's repetitive, tedious, not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
We've also had to ask you this multiple times before. Also not cool.
Since it doesn't look like you've been using HN primarily for this, I haven't banned your account, but if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the intended spirit—regardless of how wrong other commenters are or you feel they are—we'd appreciate it.
I do try to remain more tone-neutral on the political threads, but it seems like no matter the degree to which you try to be well reasoned or diplomatic it just draws angry responses. But at the same time, the status quo of startup politics goes unchallenged under the rules (ie, neoliberal or libertarian perspectives) - so it's a matter of just let those perspectives go unchallenged even when there are level headed arguments to be made, or make the argument and risk people getting mad and then me getting banned for "flaming". I'm genuinely unsure what good answer there is, because this isn't an un-political forum (at least, not so much nowadays it would seem). Do we just ignore Thiel's fascistic tendencies in a thread surrounding one of his political projects?
I'm not expecting a reply because I know moderating this place must keep you busy, but it's a legitimate bind and the guidelines aren't very instructive. From an intent perspective, I'm not trying to sling mud, I think legitimate discussion of political perspectives is interesting and important.
Your idea of better laws would mean no Tesla and no SpaceX.
Tesla has replaced two million gasoline cars with electric cars, and given its current growth rate, and Musk's long standing plan to release progressively more affordable cars, this number will likely be massively larger in a few years.
Beyond Tesla's own sales, its success has sparked massive investment by other carmakers to push their electric vehicle manufacturing timetables forward. All told, Tesla has had a massive impact in pushing the world to replace gasoline vehicles with electric ones.
SpaceX, for its part, is responsible for reducing the cost of launching material to orbit ten fold, with another 100 fold reduction possible with StarShip. The spike at the end of this graph is almost solely due to SpaceX:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...
I see laws that prevent the emergence and flourishing of Tesla and SpaceX as far worse than current laws.