I just think lidar is misguided. It's an easy way to get "part of the way there", but no further. It has the same weaknesses as your visual cameras; why would you run your sensors in the same frequency spectrum and subject to the same weaknesses (such as weather)?
The big thing LIDAR has over radar is resolution (particularly vs. lower frequency radars). But... well, "and"? You still need visual processing from cameras to identify the object either way, so how critical is the resolution on your ranging system anyway? You just need a return, you don't need it to identify the return for you. There are various other advantages and disadvantages to each, in that they can each be "tricked" in various ways and some things are very visible to one but not to the other (e.g. small chunks of jagged metal in the road = very visible to radar, not lidar; moderate-sized chunks of plywood or fibreglass = very visible to lidar, not radar). But if you have your cameras working on the visible spectrum, you really want some other spectrum giving some other insight. Radar also has the advantage of being simply-steered (via a phased array), rather than requiring a rotating dome.
And there's real potential for other insights for radar, beyond just seeing metal debris very well, seeing through weather, in some cases being able to see past the car ahead of you, etc. For example, radar can be used to measure the texture of a surface, on a scale proportional to the wavelength of the beam (the rougher the surface, the more the backscatter). So depending on what frequency you probe with, you could be measuring anything from potholes to ice. Seeing where a shoulder looks weak, seeing where something might be slick, etc, etc - important things in terms of deciding how to drive, and a sense beyond that of humans. No systems (AFAIK) do this today, but the potential is there, and it's some serious potential.
Also, the resolution issue can be (to some extent) overcome. The minimum resolution you can see is proportional to the radar's aperture. If automakers wanted to, they could dramatically increase the effective horizontal resolution by having radar antennas on opposite sides of the front of the car (or the rear, for rear-facing radar). Now you have a virtual antenna the width of the entire vehicle.
I mean, if LIDAR can be implemented cheaply enough, with minimal power consumption, and it's just a low-cost, no-drag-added addition to your cameras... sure. But that's not even close to the description of LIDAR at present. Maybe time-of-flight cameras would be a suitable replacement.
Agreed. But I don't really think Eric's "solution" is that helpful. Heres the last two "shtoopid" problems I had (in a CFD model evolution app):
1) My program (which a piped child process, which in turn had its own children) was randomly locking up when one of the subprocess's children died. Now, normally that's an eminently solveable problem... except for the fact that it was locking up in a different place each time. I was stuck digging deeper and deeper into pipe magic with no luck. I even went to strace python, but that just added more confusion, as strace was dying at random times, and sometimes not even printing out full lines!
The problem? The output of my program was running through "tee". I was only seeing the last section of the buffer to be printed out:P The real problem was that the subprocess had simply stopped printing data and so the pipe read was hanging; it was instantly obvious when "tee" wasn't used.
2) My program would sometimes go into a "subprocess keeps dying" mode. This started out of the blue with no changes to my code. Again, I kept instrumenting more and more, with no luck.
The problem? I had started, in another window, a shell script that ran on a loop to generate visualization data at regular intervals whenever the process was running. When the visualization data would appear in the middle of a run, it would sometimes interfere with the raw data, due to the way the data processing was set up. But since that visualization data wasn't present when the run started, it took time for the problem to show up, and then would just occur out of the blue.
The short of this is... if you follow Eric's "instrument everything" solution to "shtoopid" problems, you'll sometimes just dig yourself further into a hole. The problem is that you have a base assumption that's wrong. IMHO, the best solution is to bring a third party in and explain everything about what you're doing and where it's going wrong. Not only can their different perspective add insight, but the very act of having to explain and reproduce everything from scratch (and answer their questions) can help you as well.
Only 47 shares. It didn't get nearly as low as I was hoping:( I guess the market cares more about whether Musk smokes (not really) pot and whether one (of dozens) of the company's execs leaves for a different job than they do about the SEC.
Oh well, Monday will be fun. Honestly, as annoyed as I am with the SEC basically overriding shareholders and working to the benefits of the shorts - who they never investigate, despite a laundry list of complaints - there are some positives. I think institutional investors especially will be pleased with some of the terms. The one thing I like is the social media requirements. Having Musk's tweets filtered by a securities lawyer will remedy the fact that Musk's brain has no filter and he always says exactly what he's thinking, for good or for bad;) I just hope that they carefully tread the line between "filtering" and "muzzling".
Ed, correction: the original version purportedly referred to "misleading investors", not "fraud", and that was the language that Musk objected to..
That statute contains language about misleading investors. Mr. Musk’s lawyers wanted the commission to change its claim to say he was merely negligent in his statement, according to a person familiar with the details of the negotiations.
Directors are subject to shareholders. And shareholders overwhelmingly want Musk as CEO, as was shown in the last shareholder meeting.
Shareholders also overwhelmingly opposed adding two directors at the last shareholder meeting, but of course, the SEC has no problem with forcing on the company things that its shareholders don't want. As well as filling their previous complaint with language that could have been taken straight from Jim Chanos.
It's an open question as to what changed in the agreement, since we don't have the original text. Previous reports had stated that the original text included the word "fraud", which Musk was strongly against, feeling that he did nothing wrong. But we really don't know without being able to compare the two.
I'm curious as to what the requirements for "independence" for the new chairman will be. Because a lot of Tesla shareholders will probably want Kimbal Musk for chairman. He's the most obvious choice.
Speaking of short seller rumours... straight from the SEC filing:
"In 2018, stock analysts and investors increasingly began to question whether Tesla could meet its previously announced production targets and begin to earn sufficient cash in order to sustain its operations and pay its existing debt load."
The SEC presents short seller talking points as a statement of facts and credits them to "investors". The reality of the situation was that when Musk tweeted, Tesla's stock had just surged from a Q2 report that beat market expectations and increasing market optimism that Tesla actually was going to be profitable in Q3. But instead the SEC fills its filing with quotes that could very well have been straight from the mouth of Jim Chanos. Yeah, F*** you, SEC.
I can just imagine the look on the jury's face when Musk's defense team points out the simple fact that Musk personally had enough assets to take Tesla private under the terms he described (most / 80% of Tesla's current investors staying onboard, of which Musk personally was 1/4 of them), as he owns ~60% of a little company called SpaceX worth $30B+ which controls 80% of the global commercial satellite launch market. And that PIF had just purchased 5% of the company on the open market (indeed, that broke immediately before Musk's tweets, and was the trigger for him making the plans public).
Also, if you think Tesla needs Musk to thrive... "meh". Did Paypal need him? Don't get me wrong, I like his extremely aggressive moat-bridging business strategies, and am somewhat annoyed about the SEC taking actions that 99% of TSLA shareholders don't want, in order to "protect shareholders". But once you get to a certain point, a company runs on its own momentum. Did Apple just collapse after Jobs died? No, it went on to become the first trillion dollar public company.
I have no clue, BTW, what his odds are against the SEC. I thought the SEC settlement offer was surprisingly mild - it didn't even require him to admit fault. And settlement offers seemingly most commonly call for a five year ban from serving as CEO, but they only called for a two year ban in this case. I don't know why the SEC made such a mild offer, whether it was some form of generosity, or whether they think that they might actually lose this case. But they clearly wanted to settle.
Companies don't live and die by theatrics. They live and die by their fundamentals. The stock jumps and declines based on gotchas, but ultimately it's deliveries, margins, profits, etc that matter. Whether Elon is CEO, a non-executive employee with the newly created job title "Not A CEO", or no longer connected Tesla at all - and whether said status is determined one week from now or ten years from now - the company's fundamentals remain what they are.
Go look at a graph of Tesla's spikes and drops over the past year. How many of those spikes and drops can you, at a glance, remember why they happened? I'm betting it's a pretty small percentage of them. Yet at the time, each drop was people freaking out over something or other in the news, and each spike was people getting overconfident that their good news couldn't possibly be overcome.
Day traders and options traders live and die by these spikes, but for people with a mid to long-term perspective, they're really just static. Lows are a chance to expand your holdings. Highs are a chance to thin your holdings if you think you're overexposed or if you think there's a good chance that the current good news is going to be FUDded back. But in general you hold over your anticipated timeframe until the premises that you based your investment and timeframe on are either confirmed or disproven.
In my case, the premise is "two quarters of profitability with an extremely and ongoing growth story". The timeframe is "Q4 report or later, but unlikely more than two quarters later". Time will tell. In the meantime? Enjoy the noise.:)
Huh? This isn't a press release, this is part of Electrek's ongoing series of leaks of production rates from someone supposedly working at Tesla. I put "supposed" because you never know with Fred; it could easily just be someone BSing him. That said, there's no shortage of possible legit leakers; there's a display on the lines that ticks up each time a vehicle goes out the door.
Doesn't really matter that much; official delivery numbers come in in just a couple days. It's the rest of the Q3 financials that I'm (and I think most people) are more interested in; we won't get those for another month.
So now I'm both the anonymous submitter (wrong, as you may have noticed I have no qualms with posting under my own name) and 110010001000 (a person I frequently disagree with)?
I love being omnipresent:)
(And to reply to this post: it's almost as if I have not repeatedly pointed out that my investment timeframe is from between my initial purchase this summer to after the Q4 report).
Tesla has among the highest pack energy densities in the industry, so your notion about the weight of the packaging killing them obviously doesn't ring true.
The Model 3 packs are put together like giant motherboards. The cells are literally bonded to 2 meter-long PCBs. I doubt you'd argue that all of the bonding that motherboard manufacturers do (capacitors, resistors, etc) is some prohibitive cost;) The bonds on the cells in the 3 are very thin wires that double as fuses; if a cell short circuits, it melts its wire bonds. Because there are so many cells in a brick, it's easy for current to be routed past it. You can't do this with large prismatic cells, at least not as effectively.
As for technical reasons for going with small cylindrical cells, there's a couple of them. One is the resilience against failure aspect mentioned above; Tesla packs are designed to allow for cell failures with only a trivial impact on the owner. The other is that they offer a high surface area to volume ratio. This is critical for cooling, mainly during supercharging. Tesla has prioritized effective removal of heat, as they offer much higher charge rates than everyone else.
Note that there's a common myth that the S and X packs "overheat" during sustained high power driving, and this is why the S and X can't do sustained track duty. This is incorrect; pack temperature is always kept down and does not correspond with throttling. As can be seen from CAN bus readings, throttling corresponds directly with motor temperature. S and X use (inefficient) induction motors. 3, by contrast, uses a much more efficient PMSRM and sees only mild throttling (similar to that experienced in many modern performance gas cars) in sustained track usage.
The last we heard, a S/X refresh was planned for 2H 2019. Although there will likely be minor updates before then. In addition to updating the screen and computer, they've also talked about moving to the Model 3's vent system. Although it's not clear whether that would be before or during the refresh.
So long as they can move 100k/yr S+X, they have no need to improve things, because that's all the 2170s they have. And since the global EV market keeps growing, "100k/yr" is an ever-shrinking fraction of the total. So it's obvious why they'd rather focus their efforts on the 3 ramp, getting its volumes and margins up.
Have no interest in buying at $280, so your premise is false. Even when it was in the $270s *without* this news I only made a small purchase. Why would I make a large purchase at a higher price after this news? My price points tomorrow will start somewhere around $265 and go down from there, growing in size the lower the price..
I don't act on small movements. I'm not a day trader. I buy when the stock is conveniently low. I sell - occasionally - when it's high due to good news that I think that the shorts will do a good job at FUDding down over the next several days. But for the most part, I hold until at least after the Q4 report.
My last stock purchase was in the 250s, when people were freaking out about the Joe Rogan podcast, which actually got him a huge number of views and positive comments.
Haven't checked my average buy price in a while... probably somewhere around $275, $280 or so. Looking forward to really lowering that tomorrow:) This is a serious godsend, right before Q3 deliveries, but more importantly a month before the Q3 report. Didn't think I'd get such a good opportunity. Bought a little bit on the "SEC is investigating" dip a week ago, but I'm glad I didn't buy much then.
I will need to lower my sell points for after the deliveries report, mind you. Was planning to start my sell points at ~$335, but I'll need to drop that to maybe ~$310 or so. Hard to say, I need some time to think about it. Stock sales after deliveries need to be designed to be bought back before the Q3 report. As I've mentioned before, my investment timeframe is for significant sales to be after the Q4 report at the earliest. Highs and lows between now and then are just sale points / buy points.
It's always also a sort of strange bewilderment on my part why you seem to think of Iceland as some sort of fictional place where nobody actually lives.
Slashdot Mirror
I just think lidar is misguided. It's an easy way to get "part of the way there", but no further. It has the same weaknesses as your visual cameras; why would you run your sensors in the same frequency spectrum and subject to the same weaknesses (such as weather)?
The big thing LIDAR has over radar is resolution (particularly vs. lower frequency radars). But... well, "and"? You still need visual processing from cameras to identify the object either way, so how critical is the resolution on your ranging system anyway? You just need a return, you don't need it to identify the return for you. There are various other advantages and disadvantages to each, in that they can each be "tricked" in various ways and some things are very visible to one but not to the other (e.g. small chunks of jagged metal in the road = very visible to radar, not lidar; moderate-sized chunks of plywood or fibreglass = very visible to lidar, not radar). But if you have your cameras working on the visible spectrum, you really want some other spectrum giving some other insight. Radar also has the advantage of being simply-steered (via a phased array), rather than requiring a rotating dome.
And there's real potential for other insights for radar, beyond just seeing metal debris very well, seeing through weather, in some cases being able to see past the car ahead of you, etc. For example, radar can be used to measure the texture of a surface, on a scale proportional to the wavelength of the beam (the rougher the surface, the more the backscatter). So depending on what frequency you probe with, you could be measuring anything from potholes to ice. Seeing where a shoulder looks weak, seeing where something might be slick, etc, etc - important things in terms of deciding how to drive, and a sense beyond that of humans. No systems (AFAIK) do this today, but the potential is there, and it's some serious potential.
Also, the resolution issue can be (to some extent) overcome. The minimum resolution you can see is proportional to the radar's aperture. If automakers wanted to, they could dramatically increase the effective horizontal resolution by having radar antennas on opposite sides of the front of the car (or the rear, for rear-facing radar). Now you have a virtual antenna the width of the entire vehicle.
I mean, if LIDAR can be implemented cheaply enough, with minimal power consumption, and it's just a low-cost, no-drag-added addition to your cameras... sure. But that's not even close to the description of LIDAR at present. Maybe time-of-flight cameras would be a suitable replacement.
Yes. Just an ablative, hyped up by members of the press who don't know what ablatives are.
Agreed. But I don't really think Eric's "solution" is that helpful. Heres the last two "shtoopid" problems I had (in a CFD model evolution app):
1) My program (which a piped child process, which in turn had its own children) was randomly locking up when one of the subprocess's children died. Now, normally that's an eminently solveable problem... except for the fact that it was locking up in a different place each time. I was stuck digging deeper and deeper into pipe magic with no luck. I even went to strace python, but that just added more confusion, as strace was dying at random times, and sometimes not even printing out full lines!
The problem? The output of my program was running through "tee". I was only seeing the last section of the buffer to be printed out :P The real problem was that the subprocess had simply stopped printing data and so the pipe read was hanging; it was instantly obvious when "tee" wasn't used.
2) My program would sometimes go into a "subprocess keeps dying" mode. This started out of the blue with no changes to my code. Again, I kept instrumenting more and more, with no luck.
The problem? I had started, in another window, a shell script that ran on a loop to generate visualization data at regular intervals whenever the process was running. When the visualization data would appear in the middle of a run, it would sometimes interfere with the raw data, due to the way the data processing was set up. But since that visualization data wasn't present when the run started, it took time for the problem to show up, and then would just occur out of the blue.
The short of this is... if you follow Eric's "instrument everything" solution to "shtoopid" problems, you'll sometimes just dig yourself further into a hole. The problem is that you have a base assumption that's wrong. IMHO, the best solution is to bring a third party in and explain everything about what you're doing and where it's going wrong. Not only can their different perspective add insight, but the very act of having to explain and reproduce everything from scratch (and answer their questions) can help you as well.
Very well might have. We only have the most basic outlines of the original detail leaked out.
Okay, that would be hilarious ;) And they need that calm voiceover guy to translate everything that he says on the conference calls ;)
Only 47 shares. It didn't get nearly as low as I was hoping :( I guess the market cares more about whether Musk smokes (not really) pot and whether one (of dozens) of the company's execs leaves for a different job than they do about the SEC.
Oh well, Monday will be fun. Honestly, as annoyed as I am with the SEC basically overriding shareholders and working to the benefits of the shorts - who they never investigate, despite a laundry list of complaints - there are some positives. I think institutional investors especially will be pleased with some of the terms. The one thing I like is the social media requirements. Having Musk's tweets filtered by a securities lawyer will remedy the fact that Musk's brain has no filter and he always says exactly what he's thinking, for good or for bad ;) I just hope that they carefully tread the line between "filtering" and "muzzling".
Not directors. Shareholders voted down the resolution to add more directors. 85% of shares voted against the proposal.
Ed, correction: the original version purportedly referred to "misleading investors", not "fraud", and that was the language that Musk objected to..
Directors are subject to shareholders. And shareholders overwhelmingly want Musk as CEO, as was shown in the last shareholder meeting.
Shareholders also overwhelmingly opposed adding two directors at the last shareholder meeting, but of course, the SEC has no problem with forcing on the company things that its shareholders don't want. As well as filling their previous complaint with language that could have been taken straight from Jim Chanos.
The reports were that the original agreement also included the two independent directors.
It's an open question as to what changed in the agreement, since we don't have the original text. Previous reports had stated that the original text included the word "fraud", which Musk was strongly against, feeling that he did nothing wrong. But we really don't know without being able to compare the two.
I'm curious as to what the requirements for "independence" for the new chairman will be. Because a lot of Tesla shareholders will probably want Kimbal Musk for chairman. He's the most obvious choice.
Why did you just post a graph that backed up exactly what I said? The Q2 report came out on 1 august.
Speaking of short seller rumours... straight from the SEC filing:
The SEC presents short seller talking points as a statement of facts and credits them to "investors". The reality of the situation was that when Musk tweeted, Tesla's stock had just surged from a Q2 report that beat market expectations and increasing market optimism that Tesla actually was going to be profitable in Q3. But instead the SEC fills its filing with quotes that could very well have been straight from the mouth of Jim Chanos. Yeah, F*** you, SEC.
I can just imagine the look on the jury's face when Musk's defense team points out the simple fact that Musk personally had enough assets to take Tesla private under the terms he described (most / 80% of Tesla's current investors staying onboard, of which Musk personally was 1/4 of them), as he owns ~60% of a little company called SpaceX worth $30B+ which controls 80% of the global commercial satellite launch market. And that PIF had just purchased 5% of the company on the open market (indeed, that broke immediately before Musk's tweets, and was the trigger for him making the plans public).
Also, if you think Tesla needs Musk to thrive... "meh". Did Paypal need him? Don't get me wrong, I like his extremely aggressive moat-bridging business strategies, and am somewhat annoyed about the SEC taking actions that 99% of TSLA shareholders don't want, in order to "protect shareholders". But once you get to a certain point, a company runs on its own momentum. Did Apple just collapse after Jobs died? No, it went on to become the first trillion dollar public company.
I have no clue, BTW, what his odds are against the SEC. I thought the SEC settlement offer was surprisingly mild - it didn't even require him to admit fault. And settlement offers seemingly most commonly call for a five year ban from serving as CEO, but they only called for a two year ban in this case. I don't know why the SEC made such a mild offer, whether it was some form of generosity, or whether they think that they might actually lose this case. But they clearly wanted to settle.
Companies don't live and die by theatrics. They live and die by their fundamentals. The stock jumps and declines based on gotchas, but ultimately it's deliveries, margins, profits, etc that matter. Whether Elon is CEO, a non-executive employee with the newly created job title "Not A CEO", or no longer connected Tesla at all - and whether said status is determined one week from now or ten years from now - the company's fundamentals remain what they are.
Go look at a graph of Tesla's spikes and drops over the past year. How many of those spikes and drops can you, at a glance, remember why they happened? I'm betting it's a pretty small percentage of them. Yet at the time, each drop was people freaking out over something or other in the news, and each spike was people getting overconfident that their good news couldn't possibly be overcome.
Day traders and options traders live and die by these spikes, but for people with a mid to long-term perspective, they're really just static. Lows are a chance to expand your holdings. Highs are a chance to thin your holdings if you think you're overexposed or if you think there's a good chance that the current good news is going to be FUDded back. But in general you hold over your anticipated timeframe until the premises that you based your investment and timeframe on are either confirmed or disproven.
In my case, the premise is "two quarters of profitability with an extremely and ongoing growth story". The timeframe is "Q4 report or later, but unlikely more than two quarters later". Time will tell. In the meantime? Enjoy the noise. :)
Huh? This isn't a press release, this is part of Electrek's ongoing series of leaks of production rates from someone supposedly working at Tesla. I put "supposed" because you never know with Fred; it could easily just be someone BSing him. That said, there's no shortage of possible legit leakers; there's a display on the lines that ticks up each time a vehicle goes out the door.
Doesn't really matter that much; official delivery numbers come in in just a couple days. It's the rest of the Q3 financials that I'm (and I think most people) are more interested in; we won't get those for another month.
So now I'm both the anonymous submitter (wrong, as you may have noticed I have no qualms with posting under my own name) and 110010001000 (a person I frequently disagree with)?
I love being omnipresent :)
(And to reply to this post: it's almost as if I have not repeatedly pointed out that my investment timeframe is from between my initial purchase this summer to after the Q4 report).
Tesla has among the highest pack energy densities in the industry, so your notion about the weight of the packaging killing them obviously doesn't ring true.
The Model 3 packs are put together like giant motherboards. The cells are literally bonded to 2 meter-long PCBs. I doubt you'd argue that all of the bonding that motherboard manufacturers do (capacitors, resistors, etc) is some prohibitive cost ;) The bonds on the cells in the 3 are very thin wires that double as fuses; if a cell short circuits, it melts its wire bonds. Because there are so many cells in a brick, it's easy for current to be routed past it. You can't do this with large prismatic cells, at least not as effectively.
As for technical reasons for going with small cylindrical cells, there's a couple of them. One is the resilience against failure aspect mentioned above; Tesla packs are designed to allow for cell failures with only a trivial impact on the owner. The other is that they offer a high surface area to volume ratio. This is critical for cooling, mainly during supercharging. Tesla has prioritized effective removal of heat, as they offer much higher charge rates than everyone else.
Note that there's a common myth that the S and X packs "overheat" during sustained high power driving, and this is why the S and X can't do sustained track duty. This is incorrect; pack temperature is always kept down and does not correspond with throttling. As can be seen from CAN bus readings, throttling corresponds directly with motor temperature. S and X use (inefficient) induction motors. 3, by contrast, uses a much more efficient PMSRM and sees only mild throttling (similar to that experienced in many modern performance gas cars) in sustained track usage.
The last we heard, a S/X refresh was planned for 2H 2019. Although there will likely be minor updates before then. In addition to updating the screen and computer, they've also talked about moving to the Model 3's vent system. Although it's not clear whether that would be before or during the refresh.
So long as they can move 100k/yr S+X, they have no need to improve things, because that's all the 2170s they have. And since the global EV market keeps growing, "100k/yr" is an ever-shrinking fraction of the total. So it's obvious why they'd rather focus their efforts on the 3 ramp, getting its volumes and margins up.
Have no interest in buying at $280, so your premise is false. Even when it was in the $270s *without* this news I only made a small purchase. Why would I make a large purchase at a higher price after this news? My price points tomorrow will start somewhere around $265 and go down from there, growing in size the lower the price..
I don't act on small movements. I'm not a day trader. I buy when the stock is conveniently low. I sell - occasionally - when it's high due to good news that I think that the shorts will do a good job at FUDding down over the next several days. But for the most part, I hold until at least after the Q4 report.
My last stock purchase was in the 250s, when people were freaking out about the Joe Rogan podcast, which actually got him a huge number of views and positive comments.
Haven't checked my average buy price in a while... probably somewhere around $275, $280 or so. Looking forward to really lowering that tomorrow :) This is a serious godsend, right before Q3 deliveries, but more importantly a month before the Q3 report. Didn't think I'd get such a good opportunity. Bought a little bit on the "SEC is investigating" dip a week ago, but I'm glad I didn't buy much then.
I will need to lower my sell points for after the deliveries report, mind you. Was planning to start my sell points at ~$335, but I'll need to drop that to maybe ~$310 or so. Hard to say, I need some time to think about it. Stock sales after deliveries need to be designed to be bought back before the Q3 report. As I've mentioned before, my investment timeframe is for significant sales to be after the Q4 report at the earliest. Highs and lows between now and then are just sale points / buy points.
Short short short! Tesla's going down, right? Musk is a crazy fraud, right? This could be your last chance!
They still incorrectly state "charges". They've sued Musk in a civil case.
Why exactly should I be asleep before 9 PM?
It's always also a sort of strange bewilderment on my part why you seem to think of Iceland as some sort of fictional place where nobody actually lives.