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In car it requires liquid cooling and from conversations I've had with former Tesla engineers, exquisite control over power quality.

Just ask a Nissan Leaf or Chevy Bolt owner.


EV battery engineer here. It's not hard. Battery management systems are often over engineered but the state of the art is fairly straightforward and will allow battery packs of sufficient size last 200k miles or more easily.

I dunno the PhD electrochemist that I know who spent a long time teasing out the conditions and requirements for megapack operation didn't think it was trivial. That's also the reason Tesla pays Jeff Dahn so much money. A million miles/20k cycles is the goal.

> exquisite control over power quality

So a... 16 bit microcontroller?


The electrochemical interface where lithium intercolates into the anode and cathode of the battery experiences microscopic electric field variations that, depending on the local surface geometry, lead to side reactions and battery degradation. The hardware that converts DC to DC and DC to AC must be designed to mitigate the voltage ripple and harmonics that exacerbate the localized electric field extremes that prematurely degrade electrode interfaces and battery electrolytes. State of the art BMS and rectifier components are much more difficult to build than you might think.

And the fact that they literally stopped making their best selling car for "several weeks" switched over all their production lines to produce the refreshed Model Y and ramped production back up. In the automotive industry this is a monumental task that necessarily reduces production. Non Model Y sales were up year over year.

Well lots of institutions hold hundreds of billions worth of the stock. It's easy to forget that the easiest person to fool is yourself.

There were equally compelling reasons for me to think that Google, Amazon, and Apple were wildly over valued in the 2000s. I was dead wrong.

When evaluating a stock's value it's always important to look for reasons you're wrong instead of minimizing contradictory data.

One data point of interest is that for the past few weeks Tesla cars built in Texas have been driving unsupervised from the factory across the highway to the end of line facility on uncontrolled roads. So far 50k miles without incident. They are also driving unsupervised at the Fremont factory.


Amazon had a P/E ratio of 3000 right before AWS started making major bank.


Tesla has the capacity to produce 2.5 to 3 million cars a year. They are constantly building new capacity.

The fact that they aren't production constrained isn't indicative of a decline is demand since the company only sold 1.7M cars last year.


The indication of a decline of demand is the decline in the number of sales we've seen over the last few quarters.


My Dad still uses WordPerfect on his windows XP machine. He recently called me up because he wants to convert one of his "books" into a resizable EPUB.

I feel like this legacy format might be the death of me. The USB is in the mail (Dad doesn't even know dropbox exists, gulp).


Word can open a WPD file, just fine. If you change the extension to doc, it'll load in. Which also means you can open it in LibreOffice, or use Pandoc or whatever else you would usually reach for. [1]

WordPerfect's format is a subset of Word's original.

Though, if you want to nerdsnipe yourself, the format is also documented [2], and there's a few libraries here and there for parsing it.

[1] Well, almost. The Mac-versions of WordPerfect aren't a subset of Word. See the spec docs.

[2] https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats//fdd/fdd000...


The vertically integrated Tesla strategy is to use batteries to arbitrage the value of stored energy. This is well described in the Tesla "Master Plan" documents. Solar is a huge part of this.

According to the company filings the solar assets Tesla acquired are still generating revenue at the rates projected during the acquisition.


Well I trust Elon's statements (even the financial statements) as far as I can throw them but can you point out where it says that? I'm searching the 10-K and I don't see solar broken out.

But even if it's true I assume they are including their utility-scale solar and battery packs, which has nothing to do with Solar City: the panels are generic, the customer lists are not residential, they don't use the fancy shingles. Solar City did not help them in any way with these getting or fulfilling these contracts.


The value of Twitter was set when the bonds used to finance the purchase were sold recently for 97cents on the dollar.


Musk threw in xAI ownership to sell those bonds, which themselves have an 11% rate. Musk basically backstopped the bonds by giving a heads up of this.

No, that was absolute fantasy numbers, and in no universe did it verify any value of Twitter.

Musk really, really knows how to play people. He deserves that credit.

And I mean, bond discounts or not have nothing to do with the value of a company. The discount on a bond is based upon the likelihood they'll ever be paid off, and after it was clear that Musk would save the failure of X by using one of his other companies and AI hype to do so (as others have said, just like SolarCity), the bond lost its discount. X's value could be $1, but if the bonds are going to be repaid they'll sell at no discount.


?

When debt is worth near par that only means that equity is very likely positive (not null). Doesn't tell you anything about how positive.


Unless it works. If it works Self driving cars will save thousands of lives. Camera only self driving is 1/10th the cost of Lidar based solutions.

If you ban it you are literally killing and maiming people.


> Unless it works. If it works Self driving cars will save thousands of lives

Sure. We don't know if it works. We know Musk is causing clear and present harm to the constituents of those jurisdictions, and that Tesla isn't the only option for self driving. Forcing them through extra scrutiny is a win-win.

> If you ban it you are literally killing and maiming people

No. You're statistically killing people to the extent those cars would be bought. With Tesla sales crashing in blue states, the comparative cost is less.


Evidence so far is against it working. FSD is the ivermectin of AVs.


I use FSD everyday. It's spectacular and improving dramatically over time.


Is it spectacular enough to take a nap in the back seat? OTOH would you worry about falling asleep in a Waymo after a night out?


The perpetrators know full well that most Tesla owners are Democrats.

They are using violence to try and hurt Tesla's business and make people afraid to buy their cars.


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