Yes, yes. i know: "rocket exhaust" - but there's nothing stopping you putting a grid surface over the deck to have something for feet latches and the octagrabber to hook onto for stability.
I've had Linkedin blocked for spam since pretty much the day they started spamming back in 2002.
As a test, I went to their website from a throwaway account they were blasting at, to find that the only way to stop them sending "invitations" (99.99% of which were from people I'd never heard of, let alone met) was to create an account - except you can't even do it then, so that account got trashed.
Can you say fraudulent behaviour? But that's what you expect from spammers.
GDPR laws haven't stopped them spamming EU citizens either - which is going to explode in their faces. They can't try and pin this on "Your friend said it was OK to send this" as that's specifically NOT allowed under EU data protection laws. The spam's still coming in despite the prospect of $400 million fines.
For those who have any doubt: See rule #1 For those with questions: See rule #1 For those who have a "system": See rule #1 For those who think they've gotten around rule #1: See rule #1 For those who've spotted a flaw in the maths: See rule #1
If you don't understand this rule, then don't participate.
"The problem is that the spoofing happens at the spoofer's end"
Correct
"and they aren't using Verizon so Verizon can't do a thing about it"
Wildly incorrect.
Verizon has routing information about the call provided at a much deeper layer than the presentation layer, but as they (and other telcos) are paid to terminate those spoofed calls, they choose to look the other way until compelled(*) to do something about it.
(*) Either by government edict (happening in some countries and meeting strong resistance from the telcos), or because billing fraud means they don't get paid to a level where accountants start paying attention (which results in rapid implementation and those filters being sold to customers as "for your protection")
"phone numbers (like fingerprints) are great for identification but horrible for authorization"
Most of the 50 or so phone numbers I've had in various locations around the world (prepay mobile sims) have been reassigned to someone else within 12 months of going idle.
"As cell phones proliferated, and phone numbers became more reliably attached to individuals long term"
In the USA maybe. In other parts of the world people have multiple mobile numbers or dump them every year or so with a change in contract.
As a reliable identification method they were always questionable and showed a marked US-centricism in software that was clearly broken from the outset.
"50 years is a long time. Given battery improvements are happening constantly, Li-ion may not necessarily be the best chemistry for the next 50 years. "
Quite, but factor in that the lithium part of Li-ion is a minor part of the entire equation(*) and the "next big thing" is likely to be sodium-ion which uses more-or-less the same raw materials(**)
(*) It's also easy to get hold of, any potash operation has mountains going spare and if the price spikes 25% it's economic to extract from sewater. (**) Sodium's even cheaper and even more readily obtainable, but as with lithium, it's not the sodium that's the issue.
What Tesla's locked in is supplies of the more important materials - cobalt and rare earths in particular
I'm glad you brought up the issue of ideological investors - these are relatively immune to the kind of scare tactics that the dump'n'pumpers have been using to try and short Tesla, which explains a lot about why they've become increasingly frantic and obvious in their attempts to avoid being wiped out as Tesla stocks stubbornly refuse to fall.
Personally I think that the battery market alone is big enough to justify the investments. Cars is probably a break-even proposition at best, given the long-term history of the big automakers and "renewables" electricity generation is likely to keel over once molten salt nuclear finally gets rolling out (and it has to get rollling out, as even with the best will in the world, whilst renewables can just about replace carbon emitting electricity generation worldwide, they can't ramp up to also replace carbon-emitting heating, transportation and industrial processes, let alone the increases in capacity required in developing countries. There simply isn't enough energy available to extract to do that sustainably), Batteries are going to needed a lot more than they are now, for a wide variety of purposes. Peaking plants and transportation are two of the primary ones.
"What is painful and makes a lot of people avoid public transit in LA is the need to transfer. That is an urban planning issue more than a transit issue though."
Transferring is _easy_ if there's a universal pass. I do it all the time in London. One ticket purchased at the start of the day/week covers riding the trains, subway, buses and various other transports, all operated by up to 60 different companies, or a PAYG card does the same duty.
Solve that and people will happily wait 20 minutes outside urben centres (but they'd prefer 10)
Make riding the bus easy and people will ride the bus. Make transfers easy and people will happily take longer journeys. If they have to fiddle around with change for each transfer, you're putting them off. That's one of the main tactics that General Motors/Standard Oil used with their National Bus Lines sham operation (amongst others including making schedules sparser) to push people into cars.
"Transit often makes gridlock on city streets WORSE... unless it has its own dedicated right of way"
That statement is rooted in the assumption that the Car is King.
First and foremost, Cities are for People.
Transportation systems and urban planning need to work on that basis, not on one particular mode of transport to the exclusion of all others or the detriment of the inhabitants. This is something European city planners started realising in the 1970s and adjusted their thinking accordingly.
In a lot of places it makes more sense to ban private cars entirely from urban centres, replacing them with buses/light rail (park and ride) and restricting delivery traffic to specific routes for heavy vehicles or particular times of day (so you don't get large vehicles and heavy pedestrian/pubic transportion flows getting in each others way)
The USA used to have the best urban public transportation services in the world. They were heavily stressed before, during and after WW2, resulting in a need for heavily capital investment and making them ripe targets for hostile acquisition - which is exactly what happened.
The existing public transport companies and city operators were quietly bought up by front companies (National Bus Lines and friends) backed by General Motors and Standard OIl and deliberately mismanaged in order to encourage people out of streetcars/busses and into cars.
This isn't speculation. There are a number of antitrust judgements against the companies at the time and in the following decades, but you can't undo a destroyed public transport system because the shell games played meant that the reparations involved can't be taken directly from General Motors and Standard Oil.
Los Angeles in particular had one of the very best public transport systems in the world, with high frequencies of service, high levels of punctuality and rapid transit. The Streetcars depicted in Who Framed Roger Rabbit weren't fictional, nor was the laughter at the idea of freeways taking over.
It's amazing what a cartel can achieve with underhanded tactics and huge advertising campaigns about the freedom of the highways, isn't it?
The funny thing about stock prices is that once issued and paid for, their further lives have zero to do with the company in question except when it comes to dividend payouts.
They can go up or down or negative, but the company doesn't see a dime of that - It's only the cash taken in at issue value that matters.
Almost all the people investing in Tesla know that Tesla is a long-odds gamble, but it's the kind of long-odds gamble they want to suceed. It's a market disruptor with the potential to shake up not only the entire automobile manufacturing industry but several other industries too - and one of the primary reasons the _OTHER_ automakers would like to see it go down is that Telsa had the foresight to ensure its battery and magnet raw material supplies for the next 20-50 years, which has left every other maker scrambling for the scraps. I wouldn't be surprised to see them buried amongst the backers of the shorters.
Whilst all the fuss is about cars right now, remember that whilst Tesla is concentrating on those at the moment, they're not Tesla's primary long term business - making energy storage systems is, whether those are wrapped in 4 wheels or (far more profitably) buffering the output of windfarms(*) or grid systems such as South Australia.
(*) It's pretty clear that intermittent sources have a massive destabilising effect on established grids despite being a minor supply factor and sooner or later governments are going to have to legislate that all such systems incorporate South Australian style output buffers or face the prospect of repeated unpredictable blackouts (the second large SA blackout happened because the OCGT plant operators declined to fire up their backup generators, citing an incoming weather front that would result in them not making enough money to cover the startup costs of the generators, let alone running them for 4-5 hours. This is the reality of a "more renewables" world when you go about it in a half-arsed manner)
"I think short sellers are attracted because it's not clear Tesla will be able to achieve all the things needed to become profitable enough to justify the price"
That's a legitimate reason to short - and an honest reason why shorters are needed in the market.
HOWEVER: When you then start issuing a barrage of press releases with highly questionable analyses intended to bolster that position and _cause_ investor flight, you're engaging in reverse pump and dump activities, even if you disclose that you have a financial interest in the company in question.
At that point the shorting crosses the line from "legal and legitimate" to "illegal market manipulation"
To compound that criminality by attempting to sue the company for striking back is the kind of thing that gets SEC (and other regulatory bodies') attention.
This is going to get interesting in a "Be very careful what you wish for" way.
* - Short sellers (many being naked shorters, which is illegal) have been blatently atttempting to reverse pump'n'dump Tesla stock whilst staying just on the legal side of the pump'n'dump laws
*- Tesla stock has resolutely refused to crash despite the concerted PR attacks to allow those short sellers to make money
* - Authorities have not been investigating the pump'n'dump attempts.
* - Tesla makes an announcement which causes the stock to rise higher, making the short sellers' losses rise from High to Very High
* - so the short sellers respond by suing.
The interesting part is going to be when SEC investigations show how much naked shorting has been going on and who's been doing it.
I'll bet for every dollar of legitimate shorting that's been going on, the main movers and shakers have been engaging in at least $100 of naked shorting (which effectively means "potentially unlimited losses") and are now feeling the heat as their markers are called in.
" it seems dubious and borderline to, for example, short a stock/tell your company to short a stock while knowing that a smear piece of negative press is about to hit the internet in the next day "
There's a name for it, although it's usually done in the opposite direction:
In europe, nuclear plants have to pay into a fund for their decommissioning. This specifically gets around the problem that shows up in the USA with utilities selling end of life plants off to a shell company that conveniently goes bankrupt, leaving costs in the hands of the state.
Wind may be "cheaper" than nuclear, but only if it can actually produce enough to satisfy demand - and I don't mean today, but in a more-electric, less carbon future.
Not because they'll take up a huge amount of space (they won't, they're hollow and shred easily), but because unless there are environmental cleanup rules they'll be dumped where they lay and that will be the end of it.
All you need to do is voice doubts over the legality of the activities of some of the members.
Remember the Committee for investigation of unamerican activities or the various proven allegations of corruption over the years? Or the persecution of members of the ACLU, etc?
"Yes, but who is going to search 20 million rows of data to prosecute somebody for a license plate NOT connected to a crime?"
having all the details of your movements for the last decade means that if/when you come to the attention of "tha authoritah"(*), you've already given them more than enough information for them to make up _something_ to charge you with, whether or not it's related to what they were investigating you for.
And in the USA, they'll just make up a laundry list of fictional charges so you have no choice but to plea bargain because you'll go bankrupt trying to have them thrown out.
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged. - Cardinal Richelieu"
(*) As in Eric "Respec ma Authoritah" Cartman - because that's pretty much how the USA is operating at the moment.
"And on the plus side, the result would be more people following the law"
It doesn't work like that. Anyone who thinks that speed limits control traffic speeds has their head up their ass.
6 decades of traffic research across the world has shown that drivers go at the design speed of the road and if the speed limit deviates more than 10mph from the design speed, they'll ignore the posted limit and go with the design speed.
The counterpoint is that when the speed limit _is_ close to the design speed of the road, then the "pace" of the road (the 2 standard deviations of speed either side of the free running average) is normally within 4-6mph of the average, so you don't have problems with "speed spread" and slow drivers forcing everyone to pass them (these are a greater traffic hazard than the occasional speeder as on a single carriageway they put _everyone_ on the wrong side of the road).
That's why traffic speed enforcement is supposed to be rigidly controlled, traffic departments aren't allowed to set arbitrary speed limits, nor are they allowed to ticket every single motorist who exceeds a speed limit. Failing to keep enforcement under control turns it into cash-cows for local authorities and invariably leads to micromanaging control freaks ending up in positions of power - which has the documented perverse effect of markedly _decreasing_ road safety statistics.
Slashdot Mirror
To be honest I was wondering why they used a smooth deck instead of the a grid type used to land helicoptors on:
https://cramm-yachting-systems...
Yes, yes. i know: "rocket exhaust" - but there's nothing stopping you putting a grid surface over the deck to have something for feet latches and the octagrabber to hook onto for stability.
I've had Linkedin blocked for spam since pretty much the day they started spamming back in 2002.
As a test, I went to their website from a throwaway account they were blasting at, to find that the only way to stop them sending "invitations" (99.99% of which were from people I'd never heard of, let alone met) was to create an account - except you can't even do it then, so that account got trashed.
Can you say fraudulent behaviour? But that's what you expect from spammers.
GDPR laws haven't stopped them spamming EU citizens either - which is going to explode in their faces. They can't try and pin this on "Your friend said it was OK to send this" as that's specifically NOT allowed under EU data protection laws. The spam's still coming in despite the prospect of $400 million fines.
Fiat's finding out the hard way that it wasn't a good idea.
one point twenty one jigga whats?
For those who have any doubt: See rule #1
For those with questions: See rule #1
For those who have a "system": See rule #1
For those who think they've gotten around rule #1: See rule #1
For those who've spotted a flaw in the maths: See rule #1
If you don't understand this rule, then don't participate.
"The problem is that the spoofing happens at the spoofer's end"
Correct
"and they aren't using Verizon so Verizon can't do a thing about it"
Wildly incorrect.
Verizon has routing information about the call provided at a much deeper layer than the presentation layer, but as they (and other telcos) are paid to terminate those spoofed calls, they choose to look the other way until compelled(*) to do something about it.
(*) Either by government edict (happening in some countries and meeting strong resistance from the telcos), or because billing fraud means they don't get paid to a level where accountants start paying attention (which results in rapid implementation and those filters being sold to customers as "for your protection")
"phone numbers (like fingerprints) are great for identification but horrible for authorization"
Most of the 50 or so phone numbers I've had in various locations around the world (prepay mobile sims) have been reassigned to someone else within 12 months of going idle.
Tell me, how is that good for identification?
"As cell phones proliferated, and phone numbers became more reliably attached to individuals long term"
In the USA maybe.
In other parts of the world people have multiple mobile numbers or dump them every year or so with a change in contract.
As a reliable identification method they were always questionable and showed a marked US-centricism in software that was clearly broken from the outset.
"50 years is a long time. Given battery improvements are happening constantly, Li-ion may not necessarily be the best chemistry for the next 50 years. "
Quite, but factor in that the lithium part of Li-ion is a minor part of the entire equation(*) and the "next big thing" is likely to be sodium-ion which uses more-or-less the same raw materials(**)
(*) It's also easy to get hold of, any potash operation has mountains going spare and if the price spikes 25% it's economic to extract from sewater.
(**) Sodium's even cheaper and even more readily obtainable, but as with lithium, it's not the sodium that's the issue.
What Tesla's locked in is supplies of the more important materials - cobalt and rare earths in particular
I'm glad you brought up the issue of ideological investors - these are relatively immune to the kind of scare tactics that the dump'n'pumpers have been using to try and short Tesla, which explains a lot about why they've become increasingly frantic and obvious in their attempts to avoid being wiped out as Tesla stocks stubbornly refuse to fall.
Personally I think that the battery market alone is big enough to justify the investments. Cars is probably a break-even proposition at best, given the long-term history of the big automakers and "renewables" electricity generation is likely to keel over once molten salt nuclear finally gets rolling out (and it has to get rollling out, as even with the best will in the world, whilst renewables can just about replace carbon emitting electricity generation worldwide, they can't ramp up to also replace carbon-emitting heating, transportation and industrial processes, let alone the increases in capacity required in developing countries. There simply isn't enough energy available to extract to do that sustainably), Batteries are going to needed a lot more than they are now, for a wide variety of purposes. Peaking plants and transportation are two of the primary ones.
"What is painful and makes a lot of people avoid public transit in LA is the need to transfer. That is an urban planning issue more than a transit issue though."
Transferring is _easy_ if there's a universal pass. I do it all the time in London. One ticket purchased at the start of the day/week covers riding the trains, subway, buses and various other transports, all operated by up to 60 different companies, or a PAYG card does the same duty.
Solve that and people will happily wait 20 minutes outside urben centres (but they'd prefer 10)
Make riding the bus easy and people will ride the bus. Make transfers easy and people will happily take longer journeys. If they have to fiddle around with change for each transfer, you're putting them off. That's one of the main tactics that General Motors/Standard Oil used with their National Bus Lines sham operation (amongst others including making schedules sparser) to push people into cars.
"Transit often makes gridlock on city streets WORSE... unless it has its own dedicated right of way"
That statement is rooted in the assumption that the Car is King.
First and foremost, Cities are for People.
Transportation systems and urban planning need to work on that basis, not on one particular mode of transport to the exclusion of all others or the detriment of the inhabitants. This is something European city planners started realising in the 1970s and adjusted their thinking accordingly.
In a lot of places it makes more sense to ban private cars entirely from urban centres, replacing them with buses/light rail (park and ride) and restricting delivery traffic to specific routes for heavy vehicles or particular times of day (so you don't get large vehicles and heavy pedestrian/pubic transportion flows getting in each others way)
The USA used to have the best urban public transportation services in the world. They were heavily stressed before, during and after WW2, resulting in a need for heavily capital investment and making them ripe targets for hostile acquisition - which is exactly what happened.
The existing public transport companies and city operators were quietly bought up by front companies (National Bus Lines and friends) backed by General Motors and Standard OIl and deliberately mismanaged in order to encourage people out of streetcars/busses and into cars.
This isn't speculation. There are a number of antitrust judgements against the companies at the time and in the following decades, but you can't undo a destroyed public transport system because the shell games played meant that the reparations involved can't be taken directly from General Motors and Standard Oil.
Los Angeles in particular had one of the very best public transport systems in the world, with high frequencies of service, high levels of punctuality and rapid transit. The Streetcars depicted in Who Framed Roger Rabbit weren't fictional, nor was the laughter at the idea of freeways taking over.
It's amazing what a cartel can achieve with underhanded tactics and huge advertising campaigns about the freedom of the highways, isn't it?
It's hardly surprising that the article was written like that.
Seeking Alpha is one of the leading pump'n'dumpers behind the Tesla shorting mess.
The funny thing about stock prices is that once issued and paid for, their further lives have zero to do with the company in question except when it comes to dividend payouts.
They can go up or down or negative, but the company doesn't see a dime of that - It's only the cash taken in at issue value that matters.
Almost all the people investing in Tesla know that Tesla is a long-odds gamble, but it's the kind of long-odds gamble they want to suceed. It's a market disruptor with the potential to shake up not only the entire automobile manufacturing industry but several other industries too - and one of the primary reasons the _OTHER_ automakers would like to see it go down is that Telsa had the foresight to ensure its battery and magnet raw material supplies for the next 20-50 years, which has left every other maker scrambling for the scraps. I wouldn't be surprised to see them buried amongst the backers of the shorters.
Whilst all the fuss is about cars right now, remember that whilst Tesla is concentrating on those at the moment, they're not Tesla's primary long term business - making energy storage systems is, whether those are wrapped in 4 wheels or (far more profitably) buffering the output of windfarms(*) or grid systems such as South Australia.
(*) It's pretty clear that intermittent sources have a massive destabilising effect on established grids despite being a minor supply factor and sooner or later governments are going to have to legislate that all such systems incorporate South Australian style output buffers or face the prospect of repeated unpredictable blackouts (the second large SA blackout happened because the OCGT plant operators declined to fire up their backup generators, citing an incoming weather front that would result in them not making enough money to cover the startup costs of the generators, let alone running them for 4-5 hours. This is the reality of a "more renewables" world when you go about it in a half-arsed manner)
"I think short sellers are attracted because it's not clear Tesla will be able to achieve all the things needed to become profitable enough to justify the price"
That's a legitimate reason to short - and an honest reason why shorters are needed in the market.
HOWEVER: When you then start issuing a barrage of press releases with highly questionable analyses intended to bolster that position and _cause_ investor flight, you're engaging in reverse pump and dump activities, even if you disclose that you have a financial interest in the company in question.
At that point the shorting crosses the line from "legal and legitimate" to "illegal market manipulation"
To compound that criminality by attempting to sue the company for striking back is the kind of thing that gets SEC (and other regulatory bodies') attention.
This is going to get interesting in a "Be very careful what you wish for" way.
Jim Chanos wasn't reverse pump'n'dumping Enron.
These guys are.
* - Short sellers (many being naked shorters, which is illegal) have been blatently atttempting to reverse pump'n'dump Tesla stock whilst staying just on the legal side of the pump'n'dump laws
*- Tesla stock has resolutely refused to crash despite the concerted PR attacks to allow those short sellers to make money
* - Authorities have not been investigating the pump'n'dump attempts.
* - Tesla makes an announcement which causes the stock to rise higher, making the short sellers' losses rise from High to Very High
* - so the short sellers respond by suing.
The interesting part is going to be when SEC investigations show how much naked shorting has been going on and who's been doing it.
I'll bet for every dollar of legitimate shorting that's been going on, the main movers and shakers have been engaging in at least $100 of naked shorting (which effectively means "potentially unlimited losses") and are now feeling the heat as their markers are called in.
" it seems dubious and borderline to, for example, short a stock/tell your company to short a stock while knowing that a smear piece of negative press is about to hit the internet in the next day "
There's a name for it, although it's usually done in the opposite direction:
"Pump and dump"
In europe, nuclear plants have to pay into a fund for their decommissioning. This specifically gets around the problem that shows up in the USA with utilities selling end of life plants off to a shell company that conveniently goes bankrupt, leaving costs in the hands of the state.
Wind may be "cheaper" than nuclear, but only if it can actually produce enough to satisfy demand - and I don't mean today, but in a more-electric, less carbon future.
Has this crap surfaced _again_? It's been debunked about a half dozen times that I'm aware of.
It used to be known as windstalks.
Lots of promises, lots of graphics, lots of seed funding, lots of models, NO at-scale working prototypes.
https://cleantechnica.com/2015...
Not a huge issue
Not because they'll take up a huge amount of space (they won't, they're hollow and shred easily), but because unless there are environmental cleanup rules they'll be dumped where they lay and that will be the end of it.
Why indeed?
"Cha ching"
Yeah right.
All you need to do is voice doubts over the legality of the activities of some of the members.
Remember the Committee for investigation of unamerican activities
or the various proven allegations of corruption over the years?
Or the persecution of members of the ACLU, etc?
"Yes, but who is going to search 20 million rows of data to prosecute somebody for a license plate NOT connected to a crime?"
having all the details of your movements for the last decade means that if/when you come to the attention of "tha authoritah"(*), you've already given them more than enough information for them to make up _something_ to charge you with, whether or not it's related to what they were investigating you for.
And in the USA, they'll just make up a laundry list of fictional charges so you have no choice but to plea bargain because you'll go bankrupt trying to have them thrown out.
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged. - Cardinal Richelieu"
(*) As in Eric "Respec ma Authoritah" Cartman - because that's pretty much how the USA is operating at the moment.
"And on the plus side, the result would be more people following the law"
It doesn't work like that. Anyone who thinks that speed limits control traffic speeds has their head up their ass.
6 decades of traffic research across the world has shown that drivers go at the design speed of the road and if the speed limit deviates more than 10mph from the design speed, they'll ignore the posted limit and go with the design speed.
The counterpoint is that when the speed limit _is_ close to the design speed of the road, then the "pace" of the road (the 2 standard deviations of speed either side of the free running average) is normally within 4-6mph of the average, so you don't have problems with "speed spread" and slow drivers forcing everyone to pass them (these are a greater traffic hazard than the occasional speeder as on a single carriageway they put _everyone_ on the wrong side of the road).
That's why traffic speed enforcement is supposed to be rigidly controlled, traffic departments aren't allowed to set arbitrary speed limits, nor are they allowed to ticket every single motorist who exceeds a speed limit. Failing to keep enforcement under control turns it into cash-cows for local authorities and invariably leads to micromanaging control freaks ending up in positions of power - which has the documented perverse effect of markedly _decreasing_ road safety statistics.