But sexuality being considered worse for children to view than violence makes some sense. Violence is outside of the everyday experience for most people, while sex isn't.
Sex is outside the every day experience of most people, particularly for children. If sex is not outside the daily experience of a child then that is a problem. Anyway the point is that repressing sexuality and glorifying violence results in some very weird social dynamics, many of them bad.
That makes violence more comfortable for parents - they can after all just say it's just fantasy in the real world you will be hurt or dead on the receiving end and in prison on the handing out end. Whereas, sex is uncomfortable to talk about for many people
Sex is only uncomfortable to talk about because they are told not to talk about it. There are plenty of places in the world that are much more sexually liberated than the US. Most sexual repression is religious in origin. Frankly if you aren't comfortable about having The Talk with your kids then you probably shouldn't have kids because you aren't mature enough yet. Most images and representations of sex are also "just fantasy" as you put it.
Most people are never going to find themselves using their very particular set of skills to hunt down and murder the kidnappers of their child. Most people will engage in sexual activity at some point in their lives.
I defy you to find a movie or TV show or video game that shows a realistic portrayal of sexual activity in a non-ironic way. Young girls in particular get a very conflicted set of messages about sexuality. And if you think there is no violence in our country I refer you to the number of homicides and violent assaults that occur annually. You don't have to be a special forces soldier for violence to enter your life.
The difference between games and movies is that AAA movies are usually at least somewhat responsible about portraying war as a horrible thing where everyone suffers.
Oh that's just nonsense as a general proposition. Sure some movies do but far more often they out and out glorify the violence. There are plenty of movies where the violence is the main attraction and they don't make any effort to make it seem horrible. Heck most of the Marvel movies make it a good approximation of bloodless.
I do think videogames are still too one-dimensional in dealing out death.
Probably true. I find it particularly curious that violence in movies and games is more acceptable than sexuality. Decapitate someone in a movie and you might get a PG-13 rating. Show a breast and you go straight to rated R. Very odd.
Also I really don't get why male teenie fantasies have to evolve around the closest approximation to real war we can produce.
Because males tend to fantasize about being tough and dangerous and are willing to pay to indulge those fantasies. Jerry Seinfeld said it best that all men secretly regard themselves as sort of low level super heroes. This combined with hormones and physiology and societal expectations you get a tendency to glorify violence. Boys learn to play "war" from a very early age and at least in the US we have a gun culture that makes a fetish out of the idea of shooting the "bad guys". Whether you think all this is good or bad I leave up to you.
The one bit of kit that would actually be useful to me would be an HVAC thermostat that didn't require me to switch between heat and cooling modes for the heatpump.
Plenty of thermostats have a range feature including ones like Nest. I use that feature every spring and fall (and some parts of summer) when the temperature is normally reasonable so the furnace or AC only kick on if it gets too cold or hot for comfort. Usually I have about a 15 degree range which keeps it off most of the time.
Sure if it works well and does what you want. Complexity gets introduced when one or both of those conditions is no longer met. Early car engines were much simpler than modern ones but they also didn't work as well, were less reliable, got less power, polluted more, and had worse fuel economy. The cost of those improvements was complexity. Simplicity did not equal elegance in that case - it just equaled simple.
There is elegance in simplicity. If I want to make something smarter, I put it on a timer.
There is elegance in simplicity only if it solves a problem more efficiently than other solutions. A timer can be a very elegant solution or a very cumbersome one depending on the problem it is intended to solve. Simple can be a good thing but it's not an end to be desired for its own sake.
They don't. But they know for a fact that many people do. If you aren't one of them nobody is going to lose any sleep over that. Chose what works for you and let others chose what works for them.
Really... When I retire I'd like a log cabin in the middle of nowhere with maybe a wood stove, small 12V PV system to charge some batteries and small electronics. Stream behind the house with fish, etc.
A lovely notion though I suspect you'll find it less pleasant in reality then you imagine. Living out in the middle of nowhere with minimal technology tends to be a surprising amount of work.
How hard is it to set your thermostat or flip on a light switch?
Impossible if you aren't standing right next to them. On the other hand it's pretty nice to be able to turn up the thermostat from the airport after you've landed the plane or even do it from the other side of the house without having to get out of bed.
I realize we can't spent all the extra time and $$ on "connecting" all of our otherwise mundane devices, but seriously, why is this needed?
For the same reason we have so many other devices and bits of technology in our home. Why do you "need" a smartphone when you have a perfectly good desktop PC? Same reason. Convenience, comfort, and in some cases fun.
That's not necessarily true. Company valuations are not directly related to profits.
Company valuations are ALWAYS tied to expected profits in the long run. Occasionally they get detached from reality for a brief time in secondary markets (irrational exuberance) but sooner or later they always come back to earth. A company with no plausible path to profitability will sooner or later go bankrupt because the financing will dry up. Tesla's valuation currently is irrational but the prospects of the company to generate future profits are plausibly good so there is a reasonable explanation for why it is valued like it is for now. Tesla's valuation will not remain stratospheric forever.
Some never make a dollar in profit. Amazon worked at at loss for how many years?
You're confusing profits today with expected profits in the future. Valuations are based on EXPECTED profits - specifically the present value of all future free cash flows. If you don't know what every word in that sentence means go study. A company might not be profitable today but it can still be valued because there is an expectation that it will make a profit in the future and because it has some assets which can be sold. Amazon always had a plausible path to profitability so investors were willing to be patient. Even today Amazon shows less profits than they could because they heavily reinvest in the company rather than paying out to shareholders.
Remove the hype and Tesla would probably be considered one of the worst run businesses in history.
Not remotely. Breaking into auto manufacturing requires huge up front capital investments and that's what Tesla has been making. The fact that they haven't yet turned a profit isn't surprising. Sustainable profits in auto manufacturing require scale which Tesla hasn't achieved yet or a willingness to remain a niche luxury car maker. It's why you don't see new car companies very often. It costs too much to get into the game and it's hard to keep making the investments to stay in the game if you are small. Tesla has been very well run which is why they are still alive. History is littered with the carcasses of new car companies that failed. Tesla has done better than any new car company in many decades.
History has shown otherwise. The GM EV1 debuted more than 20 years ago. Until I literally see conventional looking electric cars I will not believe it.
I refer you to the Tesla Model S. It's a very conventional looking car. Also the Chevy Bolt is doesn't stand out in a crowd among conventional hatchbacks. The Chevy Spark EV, Honda Fit EV, Ford Focus EV, Toyota RAV 4 EV, Fiat 500e, and several more all look near-as-makes-no-difference identical to their gas powered siblings.
As long as the implants are completely voluntary and offer to remove them when no longer wanted, I don't see a problem here.
Then you aren't thinking hard enough about the problem. There are all sorts of serious problems.
There is voluntary and then there is "voluntary" where your choice is to do it or lose your job. Once the infrastructure gets set up in such a way that it is inconvenient/impossible to function effectively without them then they no longer are voluntary in any meaningful sense of the word.
If it is voluntary then there is little advantage in such a system, especially if few people opt-in. The cost alone will make it prohibitive and virtually all the advantages reside with the employer not the employee.
The privacy issues involved in this sort of thing are legion. Too numerous to even enumerate here.
There is the creepy factor. Do you really want to be micro-chipped like the family pet?
There also are problems of infection, maintenance, removal, etc. If the system gets compromised then the users potentially get to have surgery. Fun!
The value of a company is often based on perceived potential. Right now, Tesla has demonstrated viable products in an up and coming market that's perceived as being on the cusp of exploding in growth.
No, Tesla's stock price is high for reasons unrelated to any objective evidence about their likely growth prospects. The price is higher than would be justified even under the most optimistic of possible expectations about Tesla's growth. People are buying the stock because the company and CEO is popular, not because the price is reasonable in relation to the expected return on that price. Tesla's stock price is currently akin to that of a dotcom era internet stock.
Ideally all of the automakers would bring electrics to market with conventional styling; I really don't care for how most special-just-to-be-special bodywork is styled for electrics.
They will. Just give them a bit of time. Right now they are actually making the weird styling because the people buying them are (often) trying to stand out and make a statement. They want eco-credibility. This will go away as the vehicles go mainstream.
No, it's pretty standard for a tech company. Car companies aren't just automobile makers anymore.
Car companies haven't been "just automobile makers" for decades but that is the core of their business and anchors how they are valued.
Software/hardware is becoming the key differentiator in that market place as there's nothing else remaining to differentiate product on.
That's just not even close to true. Cars are differentiated on styling, features, quality, performance, brand, and a number of other factors.
Stock market valuations of 40x or 50x revenue are based on future value not present value.
All stock market valuations are based off future value, not present value. The problem is that Tesla's market cap has become detached from any realistic projection of future cash flows. Doesn't mean it isn't a good company or that they won't do well. It just means that buying their stock at the current price in a secondary market is unlikely to yield a significantly positive return in the long run.
Actually it's is quite conceivable they will overtake Ford on *just* volume of cars by the mid-2020's.
Hah! That's a good one, tell me another. You are forgetting about the law of large numbers as well as a bunch of other constraints. Going from 0 to 100K vehicles is WAY easier than going from 100K to 6 million vehicles. And right now Tesla can cherry pick vehicle categories to go after. It gets harder the broader your product portfolio gets. The capital investments get larger too so if Tesla isn't making a profit it's going to get harder and harder to get financing as they grow. There also are infrastructure limitations, quality issues, and of course Tesla's competitors aren't going to sit still. GM beat Tesla to market with the Chevy Bolt by a year and it's a solid vehicle that is selling well.
If all goes according to plan, Tesla will produce 1 million cars per year by 2020.
Let's see them get to 100,000 cars per year before we worry about them getting to 1 million in just three more years. Elon Musk is renowned for overly optimistic time lines. Never mind that there is no objective reason to believe they will sell 900,000 Model 3's per year. That would make it the best selling car of all time. You are talking Ford F150 numbers. Also did you forget that Tesla does not have their next vehicle all ready to go so the Model Y (reputedly their next project) isn't going to be on the market until around 2020 or so at the earliest.
Note that they have over 400,000 reservations for the model 3. That is unprecedented in modern automotive history so it is likely that the demand for the Model 3 is present in the market.
Yes, and what it your point? The question is what is the ongoing demand for their vehicles. They sell 400K of them up front and that's interesting but what is steady state because that is the number that matters. The F150 alone is on pace to sell over 800K units just this year. I think you have a confused sense of how far Tesla has yet to go to catch companies like Ford. I'm sure the Model 3 will sell well but to get to a million cars per year Tesla will need the Model 3 to be one of if not the best selling car in the world. More likely they'll need the Model Y (bad name BTW - the snark writes itself) to be a break out hit as well.
There is a Market for 100 million cars per year world-wide. By the end of the next year Tesla will be the only car manufacturer capable of producing 500K - 1 million electric cars per year
It's adorable that you think the other car companies won't ramp up their production of electric vehicles or that they won't make the investments. Even if Tesla's wildest projections become true and they are selling 1M vehicles per year by 2020, the big car companies have plenty of time to make the investments and start building electric and hybrid cars. That simply means Tesla has captured ~1% of the market. It's going to take Tesla another 15-20 years to really capture serious market share even under the best case scenario which almost certainly won't happen.
Um, like, you mean like the same Ford that took a cozy hayride to Washington a few years back, with Chrysler and GM, to, like, ask the government for taxpayer money to pay for their mistakes, because they all were "too big to fail" . . . ? You mean, like, that Ford?
Ford didn't take any bail out money. They had by chance taken out some very substantial loans shortly before the crash. They literally used the Ford Oval as collateral but as a result they didn't need to take a penny of tax payer money.
Tesla doesn't need to overtake Ford in sales . . . they just need to wait for Ford to bankrupt themselves again.
Since Ford has never been bankrupt you could be waiting a very long time for that.
And maybe . . . just maybe . . . the folks paying taxes won't be willing to pick up the tab this time around.
Maybe but the tax payers would be stupid not to. If GM failed the effects wouldn't be limited to just GM. The supply chain for all the car companies is interconnected and the supply base is much larger than GM itself. Supplier to GM also supply Ford and Toyota and the rest. GM going under would take a good chunk of the supply chain with them and then other car companies would follow. The CEO of Toyota even said outright that Toyota didn't want GM to fail because it would hurt them badly. GM failing would have been catastrophic for the US economy.
Tesla is growing rapidly and has a price/sales of 6.98. That may be risky, but it's not out of line for a fast growing company.
Price to sales of 7 is out of line for almost any company. Tesla is a very interesting company with reasonable prospects of success but that doesn't make it a good investment at the current price. Especially given that Tesla is in a relatively low margin business with high capital costs. The most profitable car companies have net margins of around 8-10%, and most are less than that. There is no objective reason to believe Tesla is going to be able to command meaningfully higher margins than any existing car company. Therefore to justify their current valuation the company is going to have to sell something like two orders of magnitude more vehicles than they do today.
But what about their batteries? Or Solar Roofs? Same problems. Both are businesses with high capital costs and modest margins. Doesn't mean they won't be successful but it does mean they will have to move a lot of product (profitably) to justify a huge market cap. Tesla is a risky investment. Buying now means buying at a high price and hoping that others will drive it higher. Might work but odds are better for the short seller than the long right now.
You obviously have no concept of the present value of future revenue.
The value of a company isn't the present value of future revenue. It is the present value of future free cash flows. Profits matter, not revenue. You can generate tons of revenue selling $2 bills for $1 but you'll be out of business faster than you can say "chapter 7 bankruptcy". You might want to study up...
Do you even understand that Tesla is more than just cars?
Of course. Do you understand that they haven't yet turned a profit on any of it? Do you understand that if their auto business fails, Tesla likely goes bankrupt? I understand the company well and have actually done the research as opposed to just being a fanboi. It's a very interesting company with good prospects but that doesn't mean that it's a good investment at the current price.
Do you realize the sheer value of the patents and IP that they own, and the threat that this presents to the status quo?
Tesla has made their patents open to their competition and the value of their IP is no more (less actually) than that owned by a lot of other car companies. I assure you that Toyota, GM, Ford and the rest are loaded to the gills with patents including a substantial number relating to electric vehicles.
Smart people understand it may be worth a small premium now to ensure that years from now you will not be kicking yourself in the ass wishing you'd gotten in from now even if the price was a little steep.
That's the same story you hear every time you have a bunch of people trying to justify an over inflated stock price. It never lasts. Tesla sooner or later will have a stock price that more closely matches the real prospects of the company. Saying a stock is over priced is not the same thing as saying it is a bad company. There is a strong chance that Tesla will turn into a profitable and large enterprise. That doesn't mean that the current asking price is a sensible one given the risk involved.
Did you just take your old post about how Google was overvalued and strike out the word "Google" and "Brin & Page" to substitute "Tesla" and "Musk"??
Not sure who you are talking about but no I didn't. Google has been over valued at times but they largely justified their valuation before they even went public. Tesla is a very different sort of company with a very different cost structure and their current stock price is hugely over inflated compared to any objectively measurable near term prospects for the company. And even if they do eventually grow into their stock price it will take them a long time to get there which makes it a terrible investment currently. Companies are worth the present value of future free cash flows. It's not even yet clear that Tesla will be able to make a profit much less kick off substantial free cash.
I genuinely hope Tesla does well. I'm just not going to buy their stock at its current price. The expected return on that bet is just too low right now.
Business is not about manufacturing something, it's about selling something.
Close. It's about selling something for more than it cost you to get it. Whether you make what you are selling or buy what you are selling can matter a lot but it is a second order consideration.
As long as they sell something people are willing to buy, they are viable.
No, as long as they sell something that people are willing to buy for more than it cost them to get/make it they are viable. They can sell at a loss for a while but not indefinitely. You can sell a lot of $2 bills for $1 and people will be willing to buy all you have but you won't be in business long doing it.
The maker of Model S sedans and Model X crossovers saw its capitalization surge to about $48.2 billion, $3.1 billion more than Ford, the No. 2 automaker in the U.S. after General Motors Co.
I'm sorry but as much as I respect Elon Musk and Tesla that is absolutely absurd. Tesla having a market cap bigger than Ford makes no rational sense even with the most optimistic possible growth expectations for Tesla. The company has never made a sustained profit, it's revenues are a fraction of Ford, and it has no reasonable prospect of the sort of exceptional margins or market control that could possibly justify such a valuation. Yes some of their products are awesome but that doesn't justify a dotcom era valuation. There might be a short squeeze but the shorts are right. Telsla is hugely over valued.
The only upside to Telsa being over valued is that it gives them a lot of breathing room to build the company which is good for the future of EVs.
When something is a matter of engineering, and not physically impossible, I like to be a little slow before calling it impossible. First, I want to check and see if anyone's actually doing it.
Quite right. Most of the problems we face aren't limited so much by technology but by economics and/or politics. Imagine for a moment what would happen if NASA and the Defense Department swapped budgets. On a short enough time scale all problems are impossible. On a long enough time scale very few problems are intractable. The rate at which you can get from impossible to feasible is usually a function of the economic resources applied to the problem.
Not remotely. We cannot prove a negative which is why that word probably is in there. Sometimes the elderly scientist is right when he says something is impossible. But I fear you missed my point.
There's a Very Big Difference between electric cars and reusable rockets (which is "just" very, very hard) and:
Yeah, yeah, they're tough problems but so what? It's cute how you so casually dismiss them as impossible. You proclaim that these other problems are somehow more intractable than the ones Musk has been working on as if it is axiomatic. You're akin to that elderly professor declaring it to be impossible and odds are you are almost certainly wrong. Worse, like me, I'm pretty sure you aren't an expert in any of these fields or at most in one of them. I've been around long enough to realize that few problem are impossible as long as they don't directly violate a known law of physics as we currently understand them. The constraints are usually more economic than technical.
1) Colonies (not research stations, but *colonies*) on a dead planet (there's a darned good reason why it's dead which gets 40% less sunlight than the Earth),
Self sustaining colonies on Mars are going to take centuries to really happen baring some technological miracles. But getting boots on Mars and having some sort of presence there should only take decades and really is a political/economic problem more than a technical one. The technical problems are serious but do not appear intractable and I'm pretty sure Musk is well aware of the challenges. The major limitations of colonizing Mars appear to be mostly economic. And Musk is working on solving THE major economic hurdle in doing it (cost to orbit) and he's made considerable progress. Every other problem in colonizing Mars follows from that one. For example there is little point in working on developing shielding for the trip there unless you can get to orbit cheaply enough to make the trip feasible. Yes Musk has talked about colonizing Mars and some of his time lines are to all appearances unrealistically optimistic but that doesn't make him wrong in the big picture. It just means it will take longer than he hopes. If SpaceX gets cost to orbit low enough a Mars colony becomes almost a certainty because either economic profit motive or geopolitics (or both) will almost certainly make it worthwhile. I feel reasonably confident that there is something economically valuable to be had somewhere on an entire undeveloped planet.
Imagine for a moment how much progress we could make on exploring the solar system if NASA and the defense department swapped budgets. NASA gets about $18 billion per year. The entire Apollo program in 2016 dollars was around $110 billion spread over a decade. We spend $600 PER YEAR on the US military. That's 5+ fully funded Apollo programs per year with more money left over than NASA's current budget. Our pace of progress on this is a economic choice, not a technical limitation.
2) boring stable tunnels at high speed through geologically highly unstable ground, and
"High speed" is something of a relative term here. Current boring technology goes "slow" because insufficient engineering effort has gone into making it go faster. Why? Again, economics. The mere fact that ground is unstable in places does not make tunneling through it at a faster pace than we currently do an intractable problem. Indeed, improving the speed of tunnel boring seems to be rather low hanging fruit for someone with the resources to seriously work on the problem. The problem will be in financing the tunneling projects, not in making a better tunnel boring machine.
Musk is interested in this technology because it has the potential to solve a key traffic issue which is that we have 3 dimensional cities but a (mostly) 2 dimensional transportation system. Flying car
The problem is that he's got a mini version of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. He's got University students enthusiastically developing prototypes, when professors should be looking at this and saying, "bunk" for all sorts of sound engineering reasons.
Arthur C Clarke once said "If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Point is don't be that guy. You're criticizing the guy who is actually making real progress on hard problems and willing to literally put his money where his mouth is. Unless you have done the same cut him some slack. No, not everything he tries will pan out but that doesn't mean it isn't worth looking into. Working on something like hyperloop is a much better use of student's time than making yet another useless/redundant app for smartphones.
But then he says shit like hyperloop and super-speed tunnel boring and colonize Mars.
Yes he does. What's your point? Just because he hasn't actually completed those things yet he shouldn't talk about them? Seriously, what is wrong with trying to do amazing things? I feel pretty confident that unlike you (and me) he actually might make those crazy ideas happen. Probably not tomorrow but it took SpaceX 15 years to land a booster twice. Might take a little longer to get to Mars... He's working on hard problems that actually matter and making real headway on them. Fifteen years ago you probably scoffed at him starting SpaceX too. Personally I can't wait to see what he does in the next 15 years.
Seriously folks. If you aren't impressed by what Musk has done then you either don't understand it or are just trying to be too cool for the room because... reasons. You don't have to like the guy but you have to respect the hell out of him.
Interesting discussion. He made a comment there "economics don't make sense until next year". I assume that means the cost of refurbishment is currently more expensive than the value of the booster.
That would be more or less expected for the first iterations of any new project. Companies rarely make money on the early versions of a product because they are still working out the kinks and paying for the tooling and engineering. It will take them some time before it really starts to become profitable because they are still in the steep part of the learning curve and investment cycles. Normal and expected. If they are actually doing it and making a profit by next year then that is outstanding progress. (disclosure: I'm a cost accountant and a process engineer so I do this sort of analysis for a living)
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But sexuality being considered worse for children to view than violence makes some sense. Violence is outside of the everyday experience for most people, while sex isn't.
Sex is outside the every day experience of most people, particularly for children. If sex is not outside the daily experience of a child then that is a problem. Anyway the point is that repressing sexuality and glorifying violence results in some very weird social dynamics, many of them bad.
That makes violence more comfortable for parents - they can after all just say it's just fantasy in the real world you will be hurt or dead on the receiving end and in prison on the handing out end. Whereas, sex is uncomfortable to talk about for many people
Sex is only uncomfortable to talk about because they are told not to talk about it. There are plenty of places in the world that are much more sexually liberated than the US. Most sexual repression is religious in origin. Frankly if you aren't comfortable about having The Talk with your kids then you probably shouldn't have kids because you aren't mature enough yet. Most images and representations of sex are also "just fantasy" as you put it.
Most people are never going to find themselves using their very particular set of skills to hunt down and murder the kidnappers of their child. Most people will engage in sexual activity at some point in their lives.
I defy you to find a movie or TV show or video game that shows a realistic portrayal of sexual activity in a non-ironic way. Young girls in particular get a very conflicted set of messages about sexuality. And if you think there is no violence in our country I refer you to the number of homicides and violent assaults that occur annually. You don't have to be a special forces soldier for violence to enter your life.
The difference between games and movies is that AAA movies are usually at least somewhat responsible about portraying war as a horrible thing where everyone suffers.
Oh that's just nonsense as a general proposition. Sure some movies do but far more often they out and out glorify the violence. There are plenty of movies where the violence is the main attraction and they don't make any effort to make it seem horrible. Heck most of the Marvel movies make it a good approximation of bloodless.
I do think videogames are still too one-dimensional in dealing out death.
Probably true. I find it particularly curious that violence in movies and games is more acceptable than sexuality. Decapitate someone in a movie and you might get a PG-13 rating. Show a breast and you go straight to rated R. Very odd.
Also I really don't get why male teenie fantasies have to evolve around the closest approximation to real war we can produce.
Because males tend to fantasize about being tough and dangerous and are willing to pay to indulge those fantasies. Jerry Seinfeld said it best that all men secretly regard themselves as sort of low level super heroes. This combined with hormones and physiology and societal expectations you get a tendency to glorify violence. Boys learn to play "war" from a very early age and at least in the US we have a gun culture that makes a fetish out of the idea of shooting the "bad guys". Whether you think all this is good or bad I leave up to you.
The one bit of kit that would actually be useful to me would be an HVAC thermostat that didn't require me to switch between heat and cooling modes for the heatpump.
Plenty of thermostats have a range feature including ones like Nest. I use that feature every spring and fall (and some parts of summer) when the temperature is normally reasonable so the furnace or AC only kick on if it gets too cold or hot for comfort. Usually I have about a 15 degree range which keeps it off most of the time.
There's something to be said for simplicity.
Sure if it works well and does what you want. Complexity gets introduced when one or both of those conditions is no longer met. Early car engines were much simpler than modern ones but they also didn't work as well, were less reliable, got less power, polluted more, and had worse fuel economy. The cost of those improvements was complexity. Simplicity did not equal elegance in that case - it just equaled simple.
There is elegance in simplicity. If I want to make something smarter, I put it on a timer.
There is elegance in simplicity only if it solves a problem more efficiently than other solutions. A timer can be a very elegant solution or a very cumbersome one depending on the problem it is intended to solve. Simple can be a good thing but it's not an end to be desired for its own sake.
Why do they assume I want this??
They don't. But they know for a fact that many people do. If you aren't one of them nobody is going to lose any sleep over that. Chose what works for you and let others chose what works for them.
Really... When I retire I'd like a log cabin in the middle of nowhere with maybe a wood stove, small 12V PV system to charge some batteries and small electronics. Stream behind the house with fish, etc.
A lovely notion though I suspect you'll find it less pleasant in reality then you imagine. Living out in the middle of nowhere with minimal technology tends to be a surprising amount of work.
How hard is it to set your thermostat or flip on a light switch?
Impossible if you aren't standing right next to them. On the other hand it's pretty nice to be able to turn up the thermostat from the airport after you've landed the plane or even do it from the other side of the house without having to get out of bed.
I realize we can't spent all the extra time and $$ on "connecting" all of our otherwise mundane devices, but seriously, why is this needed?
For the same reason we have so many other devices and bits of technology in our home. Why do you "need" a smartphone when you have a perfectly good desktop PC? Same reason. Convenience, comfort, and in some cases fun.
That's not necessarily true. Company valuations are not directly related to profits.
Company valuations are ALWAYS tied to expected profits in the long run. Occasionally they get detached from reality for a brief time in secondary markets (irrational exuberance) but sooner or later they always come back to earth. A company with no plausible path to profitability will sooner or later go bankrupt because the financing will dry up. Tesla's valuation currently is irrational but the prospects of the company to generate future profits are plausibly good so there is a reasonable explanation for why it is valued like it is for now. Tesla's valuation will not remain stratospheric forever.
Some never make a dollar in profit. Amazon worked at at loss for how many years?
You're confusing profits today with expected profits in the future. Valuations are based on EXPECTED profits - specifically the present value of all future free cash flows. If you don't know what every word in that sentence means go study. A company might not be profitable today but it can still be valued because there is an expectation that it will make a profit in the future and because it has some assets which can be sold. Amazon always had a plausible path to profitability so investors were willing to be patient. Even today Amazon shows less profits than they could because they heavily reinvest in the company rather than paying out to shareholders.
Remove the hype and Tesla would probably be considered one of the worst run businesses in history.
Not remotely. Breaking into auto manufacturing requires huge up front capital investments and that's what Tesla has been making. The fact that they haven't yet turned a profit isn't surprising. Sustainable profits in auto manufacturing require scale which Tesla hasn't achieved yet or a willingness to remain a niche luxury car maker. It's why you don't see new car companies very often. It costs too much to get into the game and it's hard to keep making the investments to stay in the game if you are small. Tesla has been very well run which is why they are still alive. History is littered with the carcasses of new car companies that failed. Tesla has done better than any new car company in many decades.
History has shown otherwise. The GM EV1 debuted more than 20 years ago. Until I literally see conventional looking electric cars I will not believe it.
I refer you to the Tesla Model S. It's a very conventional looking car. Also the Chevy Bolt is doesn't stand out in a crowd among conventional hatchbacks. The Chevy Spark EV, Honda Fit EV, Ford Focus EV, Toyota RAV 4 EV, Fiat 500e, and several more all look near-as-makes-no-difference identical to their gas powered siblings.
As long as the implants are completely voluntary and offer to remove them when no longer wanted, I don't see a problem here.
Then you aren't thinking hard enough about the problem. There are all sorts of serious problems.
There is voluntary and then there is "voluntary" where your choice is to do it or lose your job. Once the infrastructure gets set up in such a way that it is
inconvenient/impossible to function effectively without them then they no longer are voluntary in any meaningful sense of the word.
If it is voluntary then there is little advantage in such a system, especially if few people opt-in. The cost alone will make it prohibitive and virtually all the advantages reside with the employer not the employee.
The privacy issues involved in this sort of thing are legion. Too numerous to even enumerate here.
There is the creepy factor. Do you really want to be micro-chipped like the family pet?
There also are problems of infection, maintenance, removal, etc. If the system gets compromised then the users potentially get to have surgery. Fun!
The value of a company is often based on perceived potential. Right now, Tesla has demonstrated viable products in an up and coming market that's perceived as being on the cusp of exploding in growth.
No, Tesla's stock price is high for reasons unrelated to any objective evidence about their likely growth prospects. The price is higher than would be justified even under the most optimistic of possible expectations about Tesla's growth. People are buying the stock because the company and CEO is popular, not because the price is reasonable in relation to the expected return on that price. Tesla's stock price is currently akin to that of a dotcom era internet stock.
Ideally all of the automakers would bring electrics to market with conventional styling; I really don't care for how most special-just-to-be-special bodywork is styled for electrics.
They will. Just give them a bit of time. Right now they are actually making the weird styling because the people buying them are (often) trying to stand out and make a statement. They want eco-credibility. This will go away as the vehicles go mainstream.
No, it's pretty standard for a tech company. Car companies aren't just automobile makers anymore.
Car companies haven't been "just automobile makers" for decades but that is the core of their business and anchors how they are valued.
Software/hardware is becoming the key differentiator in that market place as there's nothing else remaining to differentiate product on.
That's just not even close to true. Cars are differentiated on styling, features, quality, performance, brand, and a number of other factors.
Stock market valuations of 40x or 50x revenue are based on future value not present value.
All stock market valuations are based off future value, not present value. The problem is that Tesla's market cap has become detached from any realistic projection of future cash flows. Doesn't mean it isn't a good company or that they won't do well. It just means that buying their stock at the current price in a secondary market is unlikely to yield a significantly positive return in the long run.
Actually it's is quite conceivable they will overtake Ford on *just* volume of cars by the mid-2020's.
Hah! That's a good one, tell me another. You are forgetting about the law of large numbers as well as a bunch of other constraints. Going from 0 to 100K vehicles is WAY easier than going from 100K to 6 million vehicles. And right now Tesla can cherry pick vehicle categories to go after. It gets harder the broader your product portfolio gets. The capital investments get larger too so if Tesla isn't making a profit it's going to get harder and harder to get financing as they grow. There also are infrastructure limitations, quality issues, and of course Tesla's competitors aren't going to sit still. GM beat Tesla to market with the Chevy Bolt by a year and it's a solid vehicle that is selling well.
If all goes according to plan, Tesla will produce 1 million cars per year by 2020.
Let's see them get to 100,000 cars per year before we worry about them getting to 1 million in just three more years. Elon Musk is renowned for overly optimistic time lines. Never mind that there is no objective reason to believe they will sell 900,000 Model 3's per year. That would make it the best selling car of all time. You are talking Ford F150 numbers. Also did you forget that Tesla does not have their next vehicle all ready to go so the Model Y (reputedly their next project) isn't going to be on the market until around 2020 or so at the earliest.
Note that they have over 400,000 reservations for the model 3. That is unprecedented in modern automotive history so it is likely that the demand for the Model 3 is present in the market.
Yes, and what it your point? The question is what is the ongoing demand for their vehicles. They sell 400K of them up front and that's interesting but what is steady state because that is the number that matters. The F150 alone is on pace to sell over 800K units just this year. I think you have a confused sense of how far Tesla has yet to go to catch companies like Ford. I'm sure the Model 3 will sell well but to get to a million cars per year Tesla will need the Model 3 to be one of if not the best selling car in the world. More likely they'll need the Model Y (bad name BTW - the snark writes itself) to be a break out hit as well.
There is a Market for 100 million cars per year world-wide. By the end of the next year Tesla will be the only car manufacturer capable of producing 500K - 1 million electric cars per year
It's adorable that you think the other car companies won't ramp up their production of electric vehicles or that they won't make the investments. Even if Tesla's wildest projections become true and they are selling 1M vehicles per year by 2020, the big car companies have plenty of time to make the investments and start building electric and hybrid cars. That simply means Tesla has captured ~1% of the market. It's going to take Tesla another 15-20 years to really capture serious market share even under the best case scenario which almost certainly won't happen.
Um, like, you mean like the same Ford that took a cozy hayride to Washington a few years back, with Chrysler and GM, to, like, ask the government for taxpayer money to pay for their mistakes, because they all were "too big to fail" . . . ? You mean, like, that Ford?
Ford didn't take any bail out money. They had by chance taken out some very substantial loans shortly before the crash. They literally used the Ford Oval as collateral but as a result they didn't need to take a penny of tax payer money.
Tesla doesn't need to overtake Ford in sales . . . they just need to wait for Ford to bankrupt themselves again.
Since Ford has never been bankrupt you could be waiting a very long time for that.
And maybe . . . just maybe . . . the folks paying taxes won't be willing to pick up the tab this time around.
Maybe but the tax payers would be stupid not to. If GM failed the effects wouldn't be limited to just GM. The supply chain for all the car companies is interconnected and the supply base is much larger than GM itself. Supplier to GM also supply Ford and Toyota and the rest. GM going under would take a good chunk of the supply chain with them and then other car companies would follow. The CEO of Toyota even said outright that Toyota didn't want GM to fail because it would hurt them badly. GM failing would have been catastrophic for the US economy.
Tesla is growing rapidly and has a price/sales of 6.98. That may be risky, but it's not out of line for a fast growing company.
Price to sales of 7 is out of line for almost any company. Tesla is a very interesting company with reasonable prospects of success but that doesn't make it a good investment at the current price. Especially given that Tesla is in a relatively low margin business with high capital costs. The most profitable car companies have net margins of around 8-10%, and most are less than that. There is no objective reason to believe Tesla is going to be able to command meaningfully higher margins than any existing car company. Therefore to justify their current valuation the company is going to have to sell something like two orders of magnitude more vehicles than they do today.
But what about their batteries? Or Solar Roofs? Same problems. Both are businesses with high capital costs and modest margins. Doesn't mean they won't be successful but it does mean they will have to move a lot of product (profitably) to justify a huge market cap. Tesla is a risky investment. Buying now means buying at a high price and hoping that others will drive it higher. Might work but odds are better for the short seller than the long right now.
Ford has patents, but not many that matter.
Hah! And next you are going to tell me that you've actually looked when I know you haven't.
Tesla has crucial patents in self-driving tech, navigation, electric engines, and battery tech.
Which they've made available to everyone. Here's a little clue for you. Ford has crucial patents as well and a lot more of them than Tesla.
You obviously have no concept of the present value of future revenue.
The value of a company isn't the present value of future revenue. It is the present value of future free cash flows. Profits matter, not revenue. You can generate tons of revenue selling $2 bills for $1 but you'll be out of business faster than you can say "chapter 7 bankruptcy". You might want to study up...
Do you even understand that Tesla is more than just cars?
Of course. Do you understand that they haven't yet turned a profit on any of it? Do you understand that if their auto business fails, Tesla likely goes bankrupt? I understand the company well and have actually done the research as opposed to just being a fanboi. It's a very interesting company with good prospects but that doesn't mean that it's a good investment at the current price.
Do you realize the sheer value of the patents and IP that they own, and the threat that this presents to the status quo?
Tesla has made their patents open to their competition and the value of their IP is no more (less actually) than that owned by a lot of other car companies. I assure you that Toyota, GM, Ford and the rest are loaded to the gills with patents including a substantial number relating to electric vehicles.
Smart people understand it may be worth a small premium now to ensure that years from now you will not be kicking yourself in the ass wishing you'd gotten in from now even if the price was a little steep.
That's the same story you hear every time you have a bunch of people trying to justify an over inflated stock price. It never lasts. Tesla sooner or later will have a stock price that more closely matches the real prospects of the company. Saying a stock is over priced is not the same thing as saying it is a bad company. There is a strong chance that Tesla will turn into a profitable and large enterprise. That doesn't mean that the current asking price is a sensible one given the risk involved.
Did you just take your old post about how Google was overvalued and strike out the word "Google" and "Brin & Page" to substitute "Tesla" and "Musk"??
Not sure who you are talking about but no I didn't. Google has been over valued at times but they largely justified their valuation before they even went public. Tesla is a very different sort of company with a very different cost structure and their current stock price is hugely over inflated compared to any objectively measurable near term prospects for the company. And even if they do eventually grow into their stock price it will take them a long time to get there which makes it a terrible investment currently. Companies are worth the present value of future free cash flows. It's not even yet clear that Tesla will be able to make a profit much less kick off substantial free cash.
I genuinely hope Tesla does well. I'm just not going to buy their stock at its current price. The expected return on that bet is just too low right now.
Business is not about manufacturing something, it's about selling something.
Close. It's about selling something for more than it cost you to get it. Whether you make what you are selling or buy what you are selling can matter a lot but it is a second order consideration.
As long as they sell something people are willing to buy, they are viable.
No, as long as they sell something that people are willing to buy for more than it cost them to get/make it they are viable. They can sell at a loss for a while but not indefinitely. You can sell a lot of $2 bills for $1 and people will be willing to buy all you have but you won't be in business long doing it.
The maker of Model S sedans and Model X crossovers saw its capitalization surge to about $48.2 billion, $3.1 billion more than Ford, the No. 2 automaker in the U.S. after General Motors Co.
I'm sorry but as much as I respect Elon Musk and Tesla that is absolutely absurd. Tesla having a market cap bigger than Ford makes no rational sense even with the most optimistic possible growth expectations for Tesla. The company has never made a sustained profit, it's revenues are a fraction of Ford, and it has no reasonable prospect of the sort of exceptional margins or market control that could possibly justify such a valuation. Yes some of their products are awesome but that doesn't justify a dotcom era valuation. There might be a short squeeze but the shorts are right. Telsla is hugely over valued.
The only upside to Telsa being over valued is that it gives them a lot of breathing room to build the company which is good for the future of EVs.
When something is a matter of engineering, and not physically impossible, I like to be a little slow before calling it impossible. First, I want to check and see if anyone's actually doing it.
Quite right. Most of the problems we face aren't limited so much by technology but by economics and/or politics. Imagine for a moment what would happen if NASA and the Defense Department swapped budgets. On a short enough time scale all problems are impossible. On a long enough time scale very few problems are intractable. The rate at which you can get from impossible to feasible is usually a function of the economic resources applied to the problem.
You ignore that uber-important word "probably".
Not remotely. We cannot prove a negative which is why that word probably is in there. Sometimes the elderly scientist is right when he says something is impossible. But I fear you missed my point.
There's a Very Big Difference between electric cars and reusable rockets (which is "just" very, very hard) and:
Yeah, yeah, they're tough problems but so what? It's cute how you so casually dismiss them as impossible. You proclaim that these other problems are somehow more intractable than the ones Musk has been working on as if it is axiomatic. You're akin to that elderly professor declaring it to be impossible and odds are you are almost certainly wrong. Worse, like me, I'm pretty sure you aren't an expert in any of these fields or at most in one of them. I've been around long enough to realize that few problem are impossible as long as they don't directly violate a known law of physics as we currently understand them. The constraints are usually more economic than technical.
1) Colonies (not research stations, but *colonies*) on a dead planet (there's a darned good reason why it's dead which gets 40% less sunlight than the Earth),
Self sustaining colonies on Mars are going to take centuries to really happen baring some technological miracles. But getting boots on Mars and having some sort of presence there should only take decades and really is a political/economic problem more than a technical one. The technical problems are serious but do not appear intractable and I'm pretty sure Musk is well aware of the challenges. The major limitations of colonizing Mars appear to be mostly economic. And Musk is working on solving THE major economic hurdle in doing it (cost to orbit) and he's made considerable progress. Every other problem in colonizing Mars follows from that one. For example there is little point in working on developing shielding for the trip there unless you can get to orbit cheaply enough to make the trip feasible. Yes Musk has talked about colonizing Mars and some of his time lines are to all appearances unrealistically optimistic but that doesn't make him wrong in the big picture. It just means it will take longer than he hopes. If SpaceX gets cost to orbit low enough a Mars colony becomes almost a certainty because either economic profit motive or geopolitics (or both) will almost certainly make it worthwhile. I feel reasonably confident that there is something economically valuable to be had somewhere on an entire undeveloped planet.
Imagine for a moment how much progress we could make on exploring the solar system if NASA and the defense department swapped budgets. NASA gets about $18 billion per year. The entire Apollo program in 2016 dollars was around $110 billion spread over a decade. We spend $600 PER YEAR on the US military. That's 5+ fully funded Apollo programs per year with more money left over than NASA's current budget. Our pace of progress on this is a economic choice, not a technical limitation.
2) boring stable tunnels at high speed through geologically highly unstable ground, and
"High speed" is something of a relative term here. Current boring technology goes "slow" because insufficient engineering effort has gone into making it go faster. Why? Again, economics. The mere fact that ground is unstable in places does not make tunneling through it at a faster pace than we currently do an intractable problem. Indeed, improving the speed of tunnel boring seems to be rather low hanging fruit for someone with the resources to seriously work on the problem. The problem will be in financing the tunneling projects, not in making a better tunnel boring machine.
Musk is interested in this technology because it has the potential to solve a key traffic issue which is that we have 3 dimensional cities but a (mostly) 2 dimensional transportation system. Flying car
The problem is that he's got a mini version of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. He's got University students enthusiastically developing prototypes, when professors should be looking at this and saying, "bunk" for all sorts of sound engineering reasons.
Arthur C Clarke once said "If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Point is don't be that guy. You're criticizing the guy who is actually making real progress on hard problems and willing to literally put his money where his mouth is. Unless you have done the same cut him some slack. No, not everything he tries will pan out but that doesn't mean it isn't worth looking into. Working on something like hyperloop is a much better use of student's time than making yet another useless/redundant app for smartphones.
But then he says shit like hyperloop and super-speed tunnel boring and colonize Mars.
Yes he does. What's your point? Just because he hasn't actually completed those things yet he shouldn't talk about them? Seriously, what is wrong with trying to do amazing things? I feel pretty confident that unlike you (and me) he actually might make those crazy ideas happen. Probably not tomorrow but it took SpaceX 15 years to land a booster twice. Might take a little longer to get to Mars... He's working on hard problems that actually matter and making real headway on them. Fifteen years ago you probably scoffed at him starting SpaceX too. Personally I can't wait to see what he does in the next 15 years.
Seriously folks. If you aren't impressed by what Musk has done then you either don't understand it or are just trying to be too cool for the room because... reasons. You don't have to like the guy but you have to respect the hell out of him.
Interesting discussion. He made a comment there "economics don't make sense until next year". I assume that means the cost of refurbishment is currently more expensive than the value of the booster.
That would be more or less expected for the first iterations of any new project. Companies rarely make money on the early versions of a product because they are still working out the kinks and paying for the tooling and engineering. It will take them some time before it really starts to become profitable because they are still in the steep part of the learning curve and investment cycles. Normal and expected. If they are actually doing it and making a profit by next year then that is outstanding progress. (disclosure: I'm a cost accountant and a process engineer so I do this sort of analysis for a living)