Clean water is definitely a problem, but getting power for locations definitely helps, and as more gets power it will be easier to provide clean water or to boil not so clean water.
Fast forward to late 2013, when a dentist named Rob Meaglia alerted some of his patients that a computer was stolen from his offices with "medical records and dental insurance information." But, Dr. Meaglia told his patients that the records system they were using, Dentrix, made by a company called Henry Schein, Inc., had all of that data encrypted. Except it appeared that Dentrix was actually using Faircom's "Data Camouflage" and not actual encryption. And, as that link notes, Henry Schein, Inc. had been informed of this problem months earlier, around the time Faircom admitted it wasn't actual encryption.
In May of 2016, the FTC announced a settlement with Henry Schein, Inc. over the claim that it "falsely advertised the level of encryption it provided to protect patient data." Kudos to Justin Shafer.
But, literally days later, the FBI was raiding Justin Shafer's home and taking all of his computers. This was not specifically about the Harry Schein case, but since Shafer had continued to investigate poor data security practices involving dentists, he'd come across an FTP server operated by another dental software company, Patterson Dental, which makes "Eaglesoft," a dental practice management software product. Shafer had discovered an openly available anonymous FTP server with patient data. Shafer did the right thing as a security researcher, and alerted Patterson. However, rather than thanking Shafer for discovering the server they had left with patient data exposed, Patterson Dental argued that Shafer had violated the CFAA in accessing the open anonymous FTP server. Hence the FBI raid.
Or maybe they were just annoyed that you came off as the latest form of this guy:
https://www.theonion.com/area-... [theonion.com]
Sure, cars, TVs and being vegetarian are all the sort of thing that people do feel a need to tell others about. http://grrlpowercomic.com/archives/664 is relevant.
It's great that you get by just fine without a car. But not everyone can or wants to. Perhaps his job requires him to work odd hours which would make other options impossible or less desirable. Perhaps he works on call and needs to respond quickly without being at the mercy of uber or zip car availability. Maybe his life is just so busy that the extra 5 minutes you take for granted here and there makes it less realistic for him. There's a multitude of other reasons.
Sure, those are valid reasons! And it is easy to add to that list. If for example one has kids it is pretty much impossible to function without a car. The person in question however is an academic who works at the same university as I do and doesn't live that far from campus.
The simple fact that you engaged in such a conversation with them and challenged them about their commitment level suggest to me that you're probably at least as interested in signalling as they are.
This is the problem with emphasis on "virtue signaling" in a nutshell; it simply assumes that people don't have some minimal level of actually caring about results. So any conversation or action must be about signaling rather than actually trying to be helpful.
It seems that a big part of how people are using the term "virtue signaling" is to mean something like "engaging in support of values or goals I don't care about." Unfortunately, this abuse of the term is making it much less useful to discuss actual virtue signaling; the term actually arises from the study of religious communities where people would engage in public behavior that was obviously very stringent about the rules. In fact, the term could be used in a useful context for discussing environmental issues but almost never is: if for example you make a big deal about how you turn off the lights when you leave a room, but you drive a car regularly and use you a clothes dryer all the time rather than let your clothes dry on a rack or the like, there's a real chance that you are engaging in virtue signaling (or you don't understand to even an order of magnitude how much energy different things use and don't care enough to find out which sounds a lot like virtue signaling also). Yes, every little bit helps, but the big things help more.
I had a conversation a few days ago where someone more or less proudly talked about how they were so careful to turn off lights; I attempted to tell them that if they cared about their energy use, there were a lot of other things they could do. They were completely incredulous that anyone could do any of them (e.g. not own a car, even though my wife and I don't own a car in the same city that this person lives in and it works fine), and got a little irate. When I mentioned that about half the things on the list were things that we actually did, they got very upset. My conclusion is that the person cared more about signaling "I save energy" then actually saving energy. And one when someone out-signaled them, got upset. Part of their mind seemed to have trouble with the idea that one could be taking a course of action to be genuinely helpful in an optimal fashion.
What does them not being children at this point have to do with anything whatsoever? They've known their entire lives here, they are students and coworkers, productive people who have done nothing wrong and are being punished and having their lives disrupted for the sins of others. Instead of kicking them out which benefits no one at all, why not normalize their status and make it easier for them to legally find work and everything else so they can continue to be loyal, productive members of the society they grew up in.
Right, that makes complete sense. Let's go ruin the lives of people who are active, productive members of society who have jobs, friends and communities because their parents did something when they were little children. Because that's a policy that's both practically justifiable and reasonably compassionate.
So, how do you decide what is a "closed" problem and what is an open problem? More to the point, I suspect that for whatever definition you are using of "open ended" by the time an AI can beat humans at a bunch of them, it may be too late.
Yes, and this is happening faster and faster with more tasks. Unfortunately, once a task is well done by computers, we cease to think of it as impressive. Thus, it was a big deal when computers beat the best humans at chess, and now you can literally get an app that beats grandmasters at chess on your phone, and it just fades into the background. Even scarier, Go is (depending on your version of the ko rule you use) either EXPTIME complete or EXPSPACE complete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXPSPACE, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXPTIME, so from a computational complexity standpoint, this is one of the hardest types of problems humans ever face. If this isn't strong evidence that we should be worried about the capability of AI, I'm not sure what would be.
A typical power plant is often on the order of 100s of MW http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/how-is-electricity-measured.html, but this is of course what will be just the first such, and more will follow. Since they have a large battery farm, it will also not suffer from the general problem that many solar and wind farms have of being essentially intermittent in their production and often producing more power than one needs sometimes with no way to store it. Taken together with the fact that new wind systems are so efficient that many are repowering wind farms early https://electrek.co/2017/10/16/new-wind-turbine-efficiency-so-great-utilities-repowering-farms-early/, it appears that we're finally at a point where wind is starting to be a a serious competitor. Even if natural as were not killing coal and oil, solar and wind would seem to be doing almost as effective a job.
I'm having trouble finding the specific details. It looks like they aren't releasing all the details publicly until a conference on November 2nd https://crocs.fi.muni.cz/public/papers/rsa_ccs17 but it appears to be a problem only with RSA keys they generate and has to do with how they are generating large primes, not a fundamental flaw in RSA. This has happened before with some implementations. For example, some early RSA implementations (and occasionally some ones still today made by people who have no business programming them) would chose primes in the following way: Pick a random big odd number and check if it is prime, and if so use it. If not, add 2 and check again, keep going until you have a prime. The problem with this method is that some primes end up being much more likely to be selected than others. For example, if you are picking two digit primes then the only way this way to pick 109 is if one picked 109 on the nose, but 127 becomes much more likely to be picked because if your initial number is 121,123,125 or 127 then it gets picked. It seems like some much more subtle variant of something like this is at fault.
In part, these numbers may simply reflect the enormous scale of the world's most populous nation.
That is probably part of it, but it is worth emphasizing that that is definitely not all of it. The per a capita retraction rate for China is much higher than it is for other large countries.
As a regular reader on both r/space and r/spacex, I agree completely with your analysis. I do want to make one essentially editorial remark:
. The nice thing there being a much higher level of technical questions were asked, but it did serve to alienate a lot of the/r/space community who probably isn't used to hearing about deep throttling ratios of methalox engines, etc.
If one is claiming to like space things, one shouldn't get annoyed if one then has someone else go and ask a more technical question; if people get alienated by that then it is their own damn fault.
In addition to the excellent points by whoever57, it is worth noting that flat taxes essentially are missing that money has diminishing marginal utility. If one has $10,000 of income, the difference in lifestyle if that doubles is massive, often difference between being homeless or not. But if one has $300,000 of income, in most respects it doesn't change nearly as much if one doubles income. This is a general pattern. A flat tax only makes sense if everyone is paying the same utility. But dollars are not utils.
None of mine have died from waterdamage, and I even take mine in the bath regularly. That said, a waterproof one would make that experience even more relaxing.
No, it would be economically conservative to roll back those tax breaks. The Republican Party has largely left behind most sane notions of conservatism.
That's for a year in space. BFR trips to Mars will be around 3 months.
As for radiation, they only experience we have of sending people to an area that's not protected from the earths magnetic field is to the moon. We have no experience of keeping people outside of its bubble for months. And then it doesn't get much better once you get to Mars as Mars has no magnetic field to protect people. The planet may provide some protection at night from the sun, but nothing from all the background radiation. And in what world is building underground not "too much effort"? Here on earth it's a right pain in the ass where we can, you know, breath, and have established infrastructure.
Yes, we don't have that much experience with people in those sort of high radiation environments, and that could be a cause for concern. Some proposals have suggested having one's fuel tanks act as an additional barrier (and frankly, I suspect that the next version of BFR will have something like this or end up having a water-ice shield). It is true that Mars doesn't have a magnetic field, but this ignores the fact that as I pointed out, one has functionally about half as much radiation as in deep space simply because one is on a planet. As for building underground not being too much effort, I stand by that statement, although part of the disagreement there may come down to how we are defining effort; the point is that the level of resources needed is comparatively tiny. Note by the way, that major parts of why building on Earth is very tough is that almost everywhere we want to build has other things in the ground we want not damage (sewage, electric lines etc.) and again, higher Earth gravity also makes that tough.
And again to your claim about a third of earths gravity "probably" enough, first off, citation?
So, this is discussed with some reasoning in Zubrin's "The Case for Mars." Unfortunately, most of what we have to understand this is biological modeling rather than experiments. Unfortunately, the primary experiment which was going to at least get some useful data here, the Mars Gravity Biosatellite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Gravity_Biosatellite was canceled. Before we do go to Mars we should probably do at least some experiments in this regard, and as satellite launch costs go down, this should be easier.
Then of course there's the whole, what do you eat when you get there? You can't exactly grab a hoe, till some ground and plant seeds. It's sort of really cold and a near vacuum. Or are you going to plant those underground as well? And this may come as a surprise, but plants don't deal with radiation too terribly well either.
The primary point under discussion was the issue of gravity which is what I was responding to. This is a distinct issue. Frankly, food issues actually strikes me as much more likely to be a serious problem, not because of radiation or the like, but because Martian soil is so high in perchlorates which are very unfriendly to conventional living organisms.
0 G for a few months is not terrible. We have good data on this. This along with radiation is part of why most Mars plans favor fast trips. Once on Mars the radiation level is much lower (it is about halved outright simply because there's a big planet in the way, and one can then live underground without too much effort), and the gravity is then about a third of Earth's which is enough to probably deal with most of the issues from gravity. These aren't big issues.
Hmm? I'm not in favor of just applying it to Musk, but it should be applied to people in general. Heck, note that I'm serious about not being selective here- my initial post in this subthread was making the point that Musk has the virtue that when he says something will happen, it does. His primary issue is with timelines. At the same time, it is worth noting that Musk has timing issues on pretty much everything he does (rockets, electric cars, solar power) so this isn't car specific. I'd just prefer if he (and anyone else who has the same problem) tried a little more to reduce their optimism levels a bit more.
If there's one thing that has become very clear it is that Musk is not good at estimating how long something will take. At the same time, when he says it will happen, it does generally happen. The really good example of this is SpaceX. The Falcon 9 took far longer to get off the ground and be really reliable than he predicted, but once it did, it became an absolute monster in the industry. More than a third of all rocket launches worldwide this year are SpaceX launches http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a27290/one-chart-spacex-dominate-rocket-launches/ and the projections suggest that will be more than half next year, even without the Falcon Heavy (which is another example of this since it has taken much longer but will eventually go). The real issue with Tesla is that if things go slowly enough then the other car companies will essentially out-compete him; but by his own description he's essentially ok with that, since the primary point of Tesla was help deal with global warming.
I agree with almost everything you have said, but I'd like to address the last sentence: people on the island right now are using cell phones when they have access to send text messages (which require must less electric power). Some people have been keeping their cell phones off except for when they know they are near a functioning tower, and some people have been using cars to recharge them. I agree that at this point, many of those have likely worn out, especially because many people didn't bother doing this because they weren't anywhere near a functioning tower at all, but it isn't like there's no help from this. This also combines with the fact that damage isn't the same everywhere: some places have power but no cell coverage even as others have the reverse. So you are correct that Tesla's work will be helpful, but this will be too.
There's another important sense that this isn't tautological. Sputnik 1 had no scientific instruments- it really was just a beeping sphere. This was because of delays in the originally planned Soviet satellite which was proving too heavy and too complicated http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/vintagespace/2017/10/04/sputnik-was-the-soviets-backup-satellite/#.WdfwV8iGOUk. After the bugs were worked out, that became Sputnik 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_3 which was launched after Vanguard, so the oldest satellite with scientific instruments ever launched was Vanguard, and it is still up there.
Not particularly; I also don't think that the short term growth of the stock market is the only metric of how things are going; I personally do quite well from the current stock market, that doesn't mean that there aren't serious problems with this administration.
No, the other side isn't evil or crazy, but that doesn't mean that climate change isn't real, that Donald Trump isn't a sexist asshole who literally bragged about sexually assaulting women, and that he very likely collaborated with Russia in if not illegal, certainly questionable ways. And of course, there are Republicans out there who are willing to stand up to him, but that doesn't make Trump less bad.
Every Presidential election since I was old enough to care except this one, I've sent time arguing with people that it wouldn't be terrible if the candidate from the major other party they were opposed to won. I didn't do that where Trump was concerned, because he really is that bad. It is true that people are often much too willing to assume that the politicians they dislike are somehow absolutely awful, but it doesn't mean that that doesn't sometime genuinely occur.
Slashdot Mirror
Clean water is definitely a problem, but getting power for locations definitely helps, and as more gets power it will be easier to provide clean water or to boil not so clean water.
Fast forward to late 2013, when a dentist named Rob Meaglia alerted some of his patients that a computer was stolen from his offices with "medical records and dental insurance information." But, Dr. Meaglia told his patients that the records system they were using, Dentrix, made by a company called Henry Schein, Inc., had all of that data encrypted. Except it appeared that Dentrix was actually using Faircom's "Data Camouflage" and not actual encryption. And, as that link notes, Henry Schein, Inc. had been informed of this problem months earlier, around the time Faircom admitted it wasn't actual encryption.
In May of 2016, the FTC announced a settlement with Henry Schein, Inc. over the claim that it "falsely advertised the level of encryption it provided to protect patient data." Kudos to Justin Shafer.
But, literally days later, the FBI was raiding Justin Shafer's home and taking all of his computers. This was not specifically about the Harry Schein case, but since Shafer had continued to investigate poor data security practices involving dentists, he'd come across an FTP server operated by another dental software company, Patterson Dental, which makes "Eaglesoft," a dental practice management software product. Shafer had discovered an openly available anonymous FTP server with patient data. Shafer did the right thing as a security researcher, and alerted Patterson. However, rather than thanking Shafer for discovering the server they had left with patient data exposed, Patterson Dental argued that Shafer had violated the CFAA in accessing the open anonymous FTP server. Hence the FBI raid.
Or maybe they were just annoyed that you came off as the latest form of this guy: https://www.theonion.com/area-... [theonion.com]
Sure, cars, TVs and being vegetarian are all the sort of thing that people do feel a need to tell others about. http://grrlpowercomic.com/archives/664 is relevant.
It's great that you get by just fine without a car. But not everyone can or wants to. Perhaps his job requires him to work odd hours which would make other options impossible or less desirable. Perhaps he works on call and needs to respond quickly without being at the mercy of uber or zip car availability. Maybe his life is just so busy that the extra 5 minutes you take for granted here and there makes it less realistic for him. There's a multitude of other reasons.
Sure, those are valid reasons! And it is easy to add to that list. If for example one has kids it is pretty much impossible to function without a car. The person in question however is an academic who works at the same university as I do and doesn't live that far from campus.
The simple fact that you engaged in such a conversation with them and challenged them about their commitment level suggest to me that you're probably at least as interested in signalling as they are.
This is the problem with emphasis on "virtue signaling" in a nutshell; it simply assumes that people don't have some minimal level of actually caring about results. So any conversation or action must be about signaling rather than actually trying to be helpful.
It seems that a big part of how people are using the term "virtue signaling" is to mean something like "engaging in support of values or goals I don't care about." Unfortunately, this abuse of the term is making it much less useful to discuss actual virtue signaling; the term actually arises from the study of religious communities where people would engage in public behavior that was obviously very stringent about the rules. In fact, the term could be used in a useful context for discussing environmental issues but almost never is: if for example you make a big deal about how you turn off the lights when you leave a room, but you drive a car regularly and use you a clothes dryer all the time rather than let your clothes dry on a rack or the like, there's a real chance that you are engaging in virtue signaling (or you don't understand to even an order of magnitude how much energy different things use and don't care enough to find out which sounds a lot like virtue signaling also). Yes, every little bit helps, but the big things help more.
I had a conversation a few days ago where someone more or less proudly talked about how they were so careful to turn off lights; I attempted to tell them that if they cared about their energy use, there were a lot of other things they could do. They were completely incredulous that anyone could do any of them (e.g. not own a car, even though my wife and I don't own a car in the same city that this person lives in and it works fine), and got a little irate. When I mentioned that about half the things on the list were things that we actually did, they got very upset. My conclusion is that the person cared more about signaling "I save energy" then actually saving energy. And one when someone out-signaled them, got upset. Part of their mind seemed to have trouble with the idea that one could be taking a course of action to be genuinely helpful in an optimal fashion.
What does them not being children at this point have to do with anything whatsoever? They've known their entire lives here, they are students and coworkers, productive people who have done nothing wrong and are being punished and having their lives disrupted for the sins of others. Instead of kicking them out which benefits no one at all, why not normalize their status and make it easier for them to legally find work and everything else so they can continue to be loyal, productive members of the society they grew up in.
Right, that makes complete sense. Let's go ruin the lives of people who are active, productive members of society who have jobs, friends and communities because their parents did something when they were little children. Because that's a policy that's both practically justifiable and reasonably compassionate.
So, how do you decide what is a "closed" problem and what is an open problem? More to the point, I suspect that for whatever definition you are using of "open ended" by the time an AI can beat humans at a bunch of them, it may be too late.
Yes, and this is happening faster and faster with more tasks. Unfortunately, once a task is well done by computers, we cease to think of it as impressive. Thus, it was a big deal when computers beat the best humans at chess, and now you can literally get an app that beats grandmasters at chess on your phone, and it just fades into the background. Even scarier, Go is (depending on your version of the ko rule you use) either EXPTIME complete or EXPSPACE complete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXPSPACE, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXPTIME, so from a computational complexity standpoint, this is one of the hardest types of problems humans ever face. If this isn't strong evidence that we should be worried about the capability of AI, I'm not sure what would be.
A typical power plant is often on the order of 100s of MW http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/how-is-electricity-measured.html, but this is of course what will be just the first such, and more will follow. Since they have a large battery farm, it will also not suffer from the general problem that many solar and wind farms have of being essentially intermittent in their production and often producing more power than one needs sometimes with no way to store it. Taken together with the fact that new wind systems are so efficient that many are repowering wind farms early https://electrek.co/2017/10/16/new-wind-turbine-efficiency-so-great-utilities-repowering-farms-early/, it appears that we're finally at a point where wind is starting to be a a serious competitor. Even if natural as were not killing coal and oil, solar and wind would seem to be doing almost as effective a job.
Because I can't count apparently. The logic does go through with 3 digits as our example though so just pretend I said that.
I'm having trouble finding the specific details. It looks like they aren't releasing all the details publicly until a conference on November 2nd https://crocs.fi.muni.cz/public/papers/rsa_ccs17 but it appears to be a problem only with RSA keys they generate and has to do with how they are generating large primes, not a fundamental flaw in RSA. This has happened before with some implementations. For example, some early RSA implementations (and occasionally some ones still today made by people who have no business programming them) would chose primes in the following way: Pick a random big odd number and check if it is prime, and if so use it. If not, add 2 and check again, keep going until you have a prime. The problem with this method is that some primes end up being much more likely to be selected than others. For example, if you are picking two digit primes then the only way this way to pick 109 is if one picked 109 on the nose, but 127 becomes much more likely to be picked because if your initial number is 121,123,125 or 127 then it gets picked. It seems like some much more subtle variant of something like this is at fault.
In part, these numbers may simply reflect the enormous scale of the world's most populous nation.
That is probably part of it, but it is worth emphasizing that that is definitely not all of it. The per a capita retraction rate for China is much higher than it is for other large countries.
. The nice thing there being a much higher level of technical questions were asked, but it did serve to alienate a lot of the /r/space community who probably isn't used to hearing about deep throttling ratios of methalox engines, etc.
If one is claiming to like space things, one shouldn't get annoyed if one then has someone else go and ask a more technical question; if people get alienated by that then it is their own damn fault.
In addition to the excellent points by whoever57, it is worth noting that flat taxes essentially are missing that money has diminishing marginal utility. If one has $10,000 of income, the difference in lifestyle if that doubles is massive, often difference between being homeless or not. But if one has $300,000 of income, in most respects it doesn't change nearly as much if one doubles income. This is a general pattern. A flat tax only makes sense if everyone is paying the same utility. But dollars are not utils.
None of mine have died from waterdamage, and I even take mine in the bath regularly. That said, a waterproof one would make that experience even more relaxing.
No, it would be economically conservative to roll back those tax breaks. The Republican Party has largely left behind most sane notions of conservatism.
I recommend you read what you wrote there. First off to your 0G claim: https://science.slashdot.org/s...
That's for a year in space. BFR trips to Mars will be around 3 months.
As for radiation, they only experience we have of sending people to an area that's not protected from the earths magnetic field is to the moon. We have no experience of keeping people outside of its bubble for months. And then it doesn't get much better once you get to Mars as Mars has no magnetic field to protect people. The planet may provide some protection at night from the sun, but nothing from all the background radiation. And in what world is building underground not "too much effort"? Here on earth it's a right pain in the ass where we can, you know, breath, and have established infrastructure.
Yes, we don't have that much experience with people in those sort of high radiation environments, and that could be a cause for concern. Some proposals have suggested having one's fuel tanks act as an additional barrier (and frankly, I suspect that the next version of BFR will have something like this or end up having a water-ice shield). It is true that Mars doesn't have a magnetic field, but this ignores the fact that as I pointed out, one has functionally about half as much radiation as in deep space simply because one is on a planet. As for building underground not being too much effort, I stand by that statement, although part of the disagreement there may come down to how we are defining effort; the point is that the level of resources needed is comparatively tiny. Note by the way, that major parts of why building on Earth is very tough is that almost everywhere we want to build has other things in the ground we want not damage (sewage, electric lines etc.) and again, higher Earth gravity also makes that tough.
And again to your claim about a third of earths gravity "probably" enough, first off, citation?
So, this is discussed with some reasoning in Zubrin's "The Case for Mars." Unfortunately, most of what we have to understand this is biological modeling rather than experiments. Unfortunately, the primary experiment which was going to at least get some useful data here, the Mars Gravity Biosatellite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Gravity_Biosatellite was canceled. Before we do go to Mars we should probably do at least some experiments in this regard, and as satellite launch costs go down, this should be easier.
Then of course there's the whole, what do you eat when you get there? You can't exactly grab a hoe, till some ground and plant seeds. It's sort of really cold and a near vacuum. Or are you going to plant those underground as well? And this may come as a surprise, but plants don't deal with radiation too terribly well either.
The primary point under discussion was the issue of gravity which is what I was responding to. This is a distinct issue. Frankly, food issues actually strikes me as much more likely to be a serious problem, not because of radiation or the like, but because Martian soil is so high in perchlorates which are very unfriendly to conventional living organisms.
0 G for a few months is not terrible. We have good data on this. This along with radiation is part of why most Mars plans favor fast trips. Once on Mars the radiation level is much lower (it is about halved outright simply because there's a big planet in the way, and one can then live underground without too much effort), and the gravity is then about a third of Earth's which is enough to probably deal with most of the issues from gravity. These aren't big issues.
Hmm? I'm not in favor of just applying it to Musk, but it should be applied to people in general. Heck, note that I'm serious about not being selective here- my initial post in this subthread was making the point that Musk has the virtue that when he says something will happen, it does. His primary issue is with timelines. At the same time, it is worth noting that Musk has timing issues on pretty much everything he does (rockets, electric cars, solar power) so this isn't car specific. I'd just prefer if he (and anyone else who has the same problem) tried a little more to reduce their optimism levels a bit more.
Yes, there's a fundamental uncertainty but when your date estimate is always off in one direction, you should clear adjust how you are estimating.
If there's one thing that has become very clear it is that Musk is not good at estimating how long something will take. At the same time, when he says it will happen, it does generally happen. The really good example of this is SpaceX. The Falcon 9 took far longer to get off the ground and be really reliable than he predicted, but once it did, it became an absolute monster in the industry. More than a third of all rocket launches worldwide this year are SpaceX launches http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a27290/one-chart-spacex-dominate-rocket-launches/ and the projections suggest that will be more than half next year, even without the Falcon Heavy (which is another example of this since it has taken much longer but will eventually go). The real issue with Tesla is that if things go slowly enough then the other car companies will essentially out-compete him; but by his own description he's essentially ok with that, since the primary point of Tesla was help deal with global warming.
I agree with almost everything you have said, but I'd like to address the last sentence: people on the island right now are using cell phones when they have access to send text messages (which require must less electric power). Some people have been keeping their cell phones off except for when they know they are near a functioning tower, and some people have been using cars to recharge them. I agree that at this point, many of those have likely worn out, especially because many people didn't bother doing this because they weren't anywhere near a functioning tower at all, but it isn't like there's no help from this. This also combines with the fact that damage isn't the same everywhere: some places have power but no cell coverage even as others have the reverse. So you are correct that Tesla's work will be helpful, but this will be too.
There's another important sense that this isn't tautological. Sputnik 1 had no scientific instruments- it really was just a beeping sphere. This was because of delays in the originally planned Soviet satellite which was proving too heavy and too complicated http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/vintagespace/2017/10/04/sputnik-was-the-soviets-backup-satellite/#.WdfwV8iGOUk. After the bugs were worked out, that became Sputnik 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_3 which was launched after Vanguard, so the oldest satellite with scientific instruments ever launched was Vanguard, and it is still up there.
Not particularly; I also don't think that the short term growth of the stock market is the only metric of how things are going; I personally do quite well from the current stock market, that doesn't mean that there aren't serious problems with this administration.
No, the other side isn't evil or crazy, but that doesn't mean that climate change isn't real, that Donald Trump isn't a sexist asshole who literally bragged about sexually assaulting women, and that he very likely collaborated with Russia in if not illegal, certainly questionable ways. And of course, there are Republicans out there who are willing to stand up to him, but that doesn't make Trump less bad.
Every Presidential election since I was old enough to care except this one, I've sent time arguing with people that it wouldn't be terrible if the candidate from the major other party they were opposed to won. I didn't do that where Trump was concerned, because he really is that bad. It is true that people are often much too willing to assume that the politicians they dislike are somehow absolutely awful, but it doesn't mean that that doesn't sometime genuinely occur.