So he fosters competence with his incompetence? Seems like it would work just as well without him except for marketing. I'm impressed with Tesla and SpaceX as a whole, but from what I've heard, he hasn't been heavily involved with day to day decisions for more than a decade. From my perspective, his role is to be a hype man that consistently over promises and under delivers.
Musk specializes at succeeding in fields where nobody else is seriously trying. He's never actually faced good old-fashioned market competition.
He's good at identifying ideas whose time has come, I'll give him that much credit. Ransacking the US Treasury wasn't on the radar, though, as far as I could see.
Waymo is doing good work but it's still very much a science-fair project, just another side hobby of Larry and Sergey.
Self-driving taxis will be a "market" someday, but not yet, and when they are, there is no reason to think Musk will be a force to be reckoned with. (Well, no reason other than the regulatory capture that he's no doubt putting into place now, that is.)
from their blog that GP linked to, which says they gave 4 million rides in 2024, which seems like more than a "science faire side project", whatever that's supposed to mean.
How so? I can give Waymo money and they send a driverless taxi to pick me up in SF. That's a market. Can't do the same for Tesla despite Musk saying they'd have robotaxis for years now, they're so far behind they're not even an option. How do you reconcile that with what you're saying here?
I can reconcile it by saying that I don't think he cares. He's being outcompeted in the self-driving taxi business, such as it is, but he has taken his eye off of that particular ball completely. People forget that he owns less than 20% of Tesla at this point.
If he does manage to outcompete Waymo, my guess is that it will be because he hosed them via regulatory capture somehow, thanks to his buddy in the White House. Or because Larry and Sergey got bored and folded their tent.
They just raised the price on my fixed for life deal from Century Link. If you look back, there's nothing in the documentation/terms that actually claimed it was for life. Super shady on their end and I'm going to switch to Google Fiber once they're finished installing it in my neighborhood (they're currently in the installation process)
The only way they could have raised the price was if you opted into their new "Quantum Fiber" plan. I got the snail-mail postcards offering me the "upgrade", but I did not see any benefit. They offered exactly the same service I already have. I assumed (correctly) that they were just trying to get out of the $65/mo "lifetime" deal they promised.
I still have the deal.
Edit:
I just checked, and Quantum Fiber now offers 2G/1G (two down, one up) fiber in my Vegas neighborhood for $95/mo. They are claiming it's a "lifetime" price guarantee.
Same here ($65 -> $75); I think it's an "equipment fee." I don't even use the router. My employer covers the cost so I haven't called to complain, but I suspect if you do you can return the router and lose the fee.
I keep the router they gave me in one of my garages. The only time I've ever connected it was when their service had a problem and they wanted to run remote diagnostics. The other 99.9999% of the time, I use an OpenWRT VM.
I would not have accepted the router if there were any strings attached, and they're welcome to take it back if they want to start charging me for it.
Now that's a take I've never heard before. It'd be interesting to have an opt-in for sharing your medical history with entities, but there is no way in hell I'd be sharing information that is so easily weaponized against me.
> It'd be interesting to have an opt-in for sharing your medical history with entities
That already exists. It's baked into HIPAA (if you're talking about medical history collected by Covered Entities).
All "medical" data collected by direct-to-consumer products that aren't providing clinical care (think 23AndMe, or third-party services that allow you to book appointments with doctors in a Yelp-style interface) are not subject to HIPAA, so they already can legally collect (and sell) that data without additional consent.
I haven’t worked at sendgrid in years but when I was there they took spam reports very seriously and even a few reports would negatively affect the senders reputation.
I don’t see how your solution really fixes anything as the device would still have to be found for there to be any consequences. It seems like it might help with the blatant attempts described in the article where an AirTag was slipped into someone’s pocket, but I would probably never find a well hidden device glued to my car. I hope you do find a good solution though because I don’t want to pay a monthly subscription for a gps tracker for theft protection on my motorcycle. It would be nice to just be able to drop in a tile or AirTag and forget about it until I needed jt
Not sure why the calls would be scam calls though. It would be one thing if they were legitimate marketing spam calls originating from phone number traceable back to the business originating the conversation but these are clearly cases where the number is faked in the new area code/country::city code in order to incentivize picking up. (Is that the car rental company? Is the hotel reaching out for some reason? Etc...)
I guess my paranoia here stems from this link in the OPs pdf[0].
Are there any demographics information about the people who spend a lot of money on microtransactions? There’s obviously a decent chunk of the population who does but Im not aware of anyone in my circles with this habit. Is it mostly children?
Some of my friends try to hide the amount spent in micro transactions. One reason, is that they do not want to think about it, as it would be way more money than they would like. The transactions are spread over time, so each one is a bit less “impactful” at their wallet. Also, nobody is sure about the exact amount.
Another reason is that mobile games are considered childish. So admitting to spending money on them has the danger of people considering them childish. At least in their minds.
I think it is split into two groups, the small percent of whales that contribute a huge percent of the revenue, and a larger minority of users who consider spending money on the game as an expense like going out for drinks or other entertainment. The majority of users just exist to make a game popular as a means to entice whales who will spend money.
We are sort of in a transition period where only more veteran gamers experienced the norm of having fixed cost games, whereas now microtransaction based monetization are normalized.
