There is no one so ignorant, as someone who is quite sure they know all they need to.

I would encourage you to study the writings of your enemies as well as your friends. I have found it most useful.

Have a good one!

Please don’t take what I said as a suggestion that what we have right now is great. Like anything, capitalism requires checks and balances. In my opinion the heyday of modern capitalism was the mid to late 1900s, because industry was operating at full efficiency but regulation also insured that the average person was able to benefit from that. All three factors of production, land labor and capital, all had a seat at the table.

We have moved a good distance away from that. Capital dominates the conversation, land has made some advances in the form of environmental protection, but labor still takes a distant back seat. And so you get ridiculous situations like a company gets hundreds of millions in tax breaks and subsidies while the CEO gets paid hundreds of millions and the guy who mops the floor is on food stamps. I don’t see this as good capitalism. Labor needs a bigger seat at the table. If a business cannot afford to survive without paying ALL their workers a living wage that allows upward mobility, that business does not deserve to survive. As I see it, that is part of the very base of capitalism.

That said, your suggestion that businesses don’t need a leader is a ridiculous socialist/communist fantasy that doesn’t actually work in reality. Take an established business like McDonald’s. From where you sit it probably looks like it doesn’t need a leader, it just keeps going on its own. But who decides how much the burgers cost? Who decides when to introduce new menu items? Who decides what the promotions will be? Who decides what market segments will they focus on? Who decides whether their next new product will be a salad or a triple cheeseburger? And if you’re going to say middle managers can make these decisions, who decides who those middle managers are?

For what it’s worth, I’m a big fan of employee owned corporations. That doesn’t always work in every segment, but I wish there were a lot more of them. But even an employee own corporation has a CEO, the CEO is just selected by the employees.

As for Elon, your suggestion that he has done nothing shows that you are uninformed. The reason he is not listed as an original founder of Tesla is because of the handful of people who founded it, one already had a business registered and it was cheaper for everybody to buy into that than pay to have it dissolved and pay again to register a new business. I have actually been following them very closely more or less since they started, so I know this better than most. In the early days Tesla was headed by a guy named Martin Eberhard and Elon was just an investor. Eberhard insisted on a design with a two-speed gearbox. This is extremely difficult in an electric car because of the high amounts of torque and extremely high RPMs involved. They went through a couple different versions of this, trying to get one that would last the life of a car, and burned a year or so trying to make it work. If you dig through the archives, you’ll find several news articles of journalists who got to drive the original Roadster, but it was locked in second gear because the shifting didn’t work. Eventually, Elon realized this wasn’t going to work so him and the other investors pushed Eberhard out. There was no love lost, Eberhard fought back, eventually they came to a settlement and Elon became CEO. Please understand I’m not saying this because I like Elon, I’m saying it because I was literally reading the blogs of both sides as it happened. The two-speed gearbox went right in the trash, they went to the one speed reduction gear Tesla uses today, and upsized the motor to give better acceleration. Elon was right about that decision, and he was the one who made that decision, all EVs today use that design.

As for SpaceX, Elon basically started that from the ground up. As I recall the guy who designed the Merlin engine was his first hire. I personally know people who worked for SpaceX and worked directly with Elon. Everyone I’ve talked to says the same thing- Elon is kind of an asshole to his employees, he has absolutely no sense of work-life balance and he wants employees who are 120% committed to the cause and will work late nights and weekends without complaint, he is opinionated and stubborn but in the end he’s right more often than not, but however hard he pushes his people, he pushes himself even harder. Most people don’t last very long in that environment, they put in a handful of years and when their stock options vest they quit, or if they don’t have equity they work until they have a family and can’t put in 60 hour weeks anymore then they quit.

So you want to say Elon is an asshole, you want to say he treats his employees badly, you want to say he doesn’t create a positive environment at his company’s, I will probably agree with all of these things. But you say he doesn’t do anything of value, that is just uninformed.

If you really think he did nothing at all, then you have absolutely no understanding of how business works or how Tesla works. It’s like saying the ship doesn’t need a captain because the captain doesn’t personally operate or clean a part of the ship.

You are right that it is greed. But that is the very point. That is how our economy works. That is how our government works too. The whole point of checks and balances in the US Constitution is that people are expected to be greedy. Rather than rely on a king to be altruistic, it is expected that people at every level will be greedy so their greed is balanced against the greed of others. Same thing is true with our economy, the whole point of capitalist economy is it harnesses the greed of everybody to move things forward. Investors provide capital because they are greedy and want a return on their investment. Their greed is harnessed and put to work, This benefits all by providing a rich market of investment capital for businesses to use. And because they are greedy, because those investors have partial ownership of the company, they affect its direction.

It’s not always perfect. Lately far too many business decisions are made based solely on next quarter results at the cost of long-term success, and that is driven by short-term investors. Boeing is a perfect example of that.

But to write the whole system off and say it’s all greed and it all sucks and it’s all stupid reflects a fundamental lack of understanding how the economy works.

If you want an economy without greed, the best you’re probably going to find is communism. That’s been tried, it doesn’t usually work so well because without a greed incentive pushing things forward, there isn’t incentive to innovate or to work at maximum efficiency.

And as for Elon’s windfall, I think it’s fair to say nobody needs $56 billion. I definitely support a much higher tax rate for the extreme upper income brackets. If you are making more than 50 or 100 million a year income above that should be taxed at a pretty high rate. I am extremely against the extreme income inequality that has happened in this country. When the CEO is making hundreds of millions and the guy mopping the floor relies on government assistance to afford food, something is seriously fucked up. But I think the solution to that is to bring up the lower guy, raise the minimum wage by a fairly significant amount. I think in most places minimum wage should be ¢15 or $20 an hour. And I also favor a prohibition that if any of the companies employees rely on government assistance the company loses all tax breaks and government benefits.

You’re acting like this was his standard salary. It wasn’t. His contact, approved by shareholders at the time, basically offered him a King’s ransom for an impossible miracle, defined with metrics like sales and stock price. Elon delivered the miracle. Love him or hate him, the conditions were met.

That’s when an operating system is supposed to do. They make mistakes when they make it worse. Usually, the operating system starts worse and eventually gets tolerable. That happened with Windows 10. Initial versions were far inferior to Windows 7, but now it’s at a pretty good state. Windows 11 is a pile of fucking garbage. There is no compelling feature in Windows 11 that would make anyone want to upgrade. There are compelling reasons not to upgrade, such as advertising, menus that require more clicks to get the same shit done, forced use of Microsoft account, etc.

There’s also the fact that Windows 11 refuses to run unless you have a handful of specific hardware in your computer, such as TPM 2.0, and a relatively modern processor. There is no technical reason for this requirement, it was discovered very early on that if you override the check it will install and run just fine. But Microsoft seems determined to get people to throw away their older but still perfectly good computers.

That is a very big part of why Windows 10 is still so popular. If you have a computer from six or seven years ago that you’ve upgraded once or twice, it’s probably still perfectly good. No reason to throw it away for Windows 11 when you can keep on trucking with Windows 10.

I know, right? This seems so fucking obvious to me. Maybe I’m just old school, but I still believe if you come out with a new product and it sucks you should pull it from shelves and go back to the older better one that people liked before you drive all your customers away.

That doesn’t seem to be the attitude of modern tech tho, SOP now seems to be if you come up with a new version and it sucks and everybody hates it, you double down, keep telling people why it’s actually better and your customers don’t know what they want and refuse to change course until either you fix it or all your customers leave. This apparently is better in some way. Not sure how, but most of the companies seem to be doing it.

One could hope but I don’t think it’s likely.

This thing is way too half baked to be in production. A day or two ago somebody asked Google how to deal with depression and the stupid AI recommended they jump off the Golden Gate Bridge because apparently some redditor had said that at some point. The answers are so hilariously wrong as to go beyond funny and into dangerous.

Comparing Tesla with Waymo is stupid. They are doing fundamentally different things, and people like this author don’t realize that. Waymo’s technology, like a few self-driving products from Ford or GM, rely on having a centimeter level 3D scan of the road ahead of time. This allows a crap ton of pre-processing so fewer decisions need to be made in the car. It’s a developmental shortcut, but it also means their cars will only work on roads that have been scanned and processed and approved ahead of time. Tesla’s system doesn’t pre scan roads. It makes all the decisions on the fly based solely on what the car is seeing as it drives. That means that it can theoretically work on any road, in any situation, without advance preparation.

Tesla’s approach tackles a MUCH harder problem. And that must be considered when comparing the two technologies.

Otherwise it’s like looking at two people at the gym, William lifts 25lb weights and can now lift them 10 times, Tom lifts 250 lb weights and can now lift them 9 times, and saying that William is in better shape than Tom because he can do more reps. No, Tom is in better shape because he is lifting a lot more weight. Even though he can’t lift it as many times, he’s doing a lot more work in his workout.

The eagle does not look entirely satisfied with its transportation arrangements…

I agree. Even at $120 each. 120 times tens of millions is serious fucking cash. We need to have a couple of big companies go bankrupt over this shit. Then maybe they will start taking it seriously. Perhaps at that point maintaining personal data on people will be seen as a liability rather than an asset. And that’s what we really need.

There’s actually a really good explanation for this.

This is a mixing pump. It mixes ethanol into the fuel. Because the mixing happens before the part of the pump that measures how much is being dispensed, you need at least a few gallons to fully flush things out and get somewhere close to what you’re actually buying.

Nobody is going to come arrest you if you buy 2 gallons of gas. But the gas you get me not be the mix you wanted.

This is 100% correct. Look at the average rate of crashes per mile driven with autopilot versus a human. If the autopilot number is lower, they’re doing it right and should be rewarded and NHTSA should leave them be. If the autopilot number is higher, then yes by all means bring in the regulation or whatever.

I’m not saying ignore the rural areas in the rural people

But you are. That’s exactly what will happen. Urban voters will enact policies that work well in cities but are disastrous in rural areas. And they won’t give a crap about the rural people who end up suffering and have little or no representation in government.

I’m just saying that they are second class and should be treated as second class, for good reason.

Perhaps we should codify that into law. Say, only give rural voters 3/5 of a vote? Jokes aside, I think this attitude is downright un-American. I don’t think you should be first or second class based on where you live or what color your skin is. I have political views that I think are correct, but so do you and so does everybody else and the whole point of our system is we all get a seat at the table. The Framers of our Constitution made the system the way it is so that rural voters wouldn’t lose their seat at the table. And I have seen nothing to believe that any modern politician is even a little bit smarter than them.

I agree with a lot of this, especially ranked choice voting. Don’t agree with abolishing the electoral college though. Rural voters and urban voters are generally quite different, if you get rid of the electoral college the rural voters will be completely ignored by every politician simply because there are fewer of them and they are spread out more. I don’t think that means their priorities should be invalidated.

That said, I would add one thing. Abolish primary votes. Political parties can nominate as many or as few people as they wish, anybody with enough signatures can get their name on the final ballot. The current primary system basically disenfranchises voters in any state that isn’t in the first 10 or 15 primary elections. Half the candidates will have dropped out by the time their state votes.

Generally agree.

But it depends on what your product line is. Does Google want to be Microsoft (new flavor of the same old crap, cloud centric, no special talent needed just competent coders and project leadership) or do they want to be OpenAI (push the envelope of what’s possible and commercialize it)?

If the goal is to be Microsoft, this investor’s comments are accurate. Fewer staff, less compensation, just get a few well paid product managers with a vision and a buggy whip to drive the coders to build it. Higher margins will mean more profits.

If the goal is to be OpenAI, this investor is dead wrong.

Netflix hasn’t even been following the Netflix strategy.

I was talking about their employees, not their content. Their content strategy is brain dead. They cancel so much stuff that it’s not even worth getting into a Netflix show because it’ll probably be cancelled after one season.
It might work, in the short term. But without quality content people will give up on Netflix and they will be the ‘budget option’.

HBO is doing the same thing- I really think their management must be on drugs or brain damaged or something. HBO was THE most recognizable brand name for QUALITY content in the entire industry, and they killed it in favor of ‘max’ which is generic and means nothing and blends in with everyone else’s ‘plus’. And lopping off their own content is equally stupid.

Just like Boeing putting the useless McDonnell Douglas bean counters in charge of the company post merge, WB put the people who ran Discovery into the ground in charge. Sad to watch.

Stupid short sighted crap too. Complaining about excessive compensation and too much stock given away… That’s the people who build the best generation of money making products there. If they have no skin in the game and aren’t being compensated well, they aren’t going to attract and keep the best talent. The best talent is going to go to companies like Tesla and OpenAI and various startups where those people have a chance to become millionaires on stock options.

It’s one thing to pull the Netflix strategy, keep only the very best of the best people, pay them a lot, and get rid of everybody else. But treating labor overall like a cost and not an investment is not a good long-term strategy.

Lol Don’t know anybody that does that, not since they closed in 2019 :P Amusingly, double quotes are still the standard ‘must include’ operator on Google search.

Google has also completely blown a very good opportunity to make a ubiquitous chat system. Several iterations of Google talk and Google meet and the like, only one of which federated outside of Google, none of which are compatible with each other, all of which seem to get remade or rebranded every few years.

Competitor to Facebook would have been a great idea. I had actually planned to join Google+. But shortly after it launched they started pushing it so fucking hard, like almost sneakly signing up people for it and making it damn near required to do anything, that made me say hell no. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t alone in that regard.

I don’t know what the hell is going on at Big G HQ, but it doesn’t seem like they have much of any real mission these days. Haven’t really since ‘don’t be evil’ stopped being part of their mission statement.

IMHO, the problem with Google isn’t SEO. It’s Google. When Google was great, it would find exactly what you were searching for. The whole point was to get you off of Google and on to whatever site you were looking for as quickly as possible. Over the last several years, their search has increasingly been drinking the ‘engagement algorithm’ Kool-Aid. Now Google doesn’t search for what you ask, it searches for what it thinks you are trying to find. Which is fucking useless because I know exactly what I’m trying to find and that’s exactly what I typed in. Selecting verbatim search and putting things in quotes helps. But it’s still displays tons of irrelevant stuff that doesn’t include what I searched for.

It’s actually easy to point to exactly when the downfall started. Years ago Google was trying to make a social network called Google+ that would compete with Facebook. Before this, a + operator in the search field meant only show results that contain that particular term. But they wanted people to search for Google+, so they changed it so the plus sign became a searchable term and quotes were necessary to include a term or phrase. That was the moment Google decided that search wasn’t their most important product. And it’s been slow downhill ever since.

What you see in movies is bullshit. Any explosion creates a huge fireball and people go flying in every direction. Actual munitions aren’t like that. Especially munitions that have to be carried on light little drones. That includes most hand grenades and air-dropped bombs.

I’m concept, an explosion that creates that big fireball puts most of its energy into spreading burning fuel around to create that big fireball. It’s visually impressive, but not actually very destructive. In warfare you don’t care what it looks like, you want it to be destructive. And the best way to get bang for your buck so to speak with an explosive that has to be lightweight, is with shrapnel. An explosive wrapped in shrapnel is not visually impressive to watch, but it basically sends little bullets flying out in every direction and those bullets are what does the damage.

So consider it this way. If I walk up to the jamming device and shoot it with a pistol, it’s not going to be visually impressive. Nothing is going to fly apart and explode in a shower of sparks and flames. The jammer device might not even move at all, it just now has a hole in it. But it is in fact quite thoroughly destroyed because the bullet from my pistol destroyed all of its internal workings.

Same thing is true with the grenade. The hand grenade is designed to be light and effective, so a soldier can carry it without getting weighed down. Thus it is a small explosive wrapped in a lot of shrapnel. Soldier throws it at the enemy, enemy casualties come not from the explosion but from shrapnel wounds. Drop one of those grenades next to a piece of equipment that isn’t armored, and it may not even appear to move, but it has been quite thoroughly punctured by shrapnel and is thus destroyed.