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Comment by abhv | Hacker News Reader

The story is unfortunately sparse on the details of how the recycling works (whether there is any truly new idea).

Based on the "furnace" picture and language about melting down the batteries, it seems like their approach is to just treat the incoming batteries as "enriched ore" and proceed with an energy-intensive, standard, metal extraction process.

So what they save is the huge amount of energy and dirtiness required to dig in the earth (in the few suitable places on the earth) for rocks with <.5% metal content and crush those rocks into dust, which is substantial, but not revolutionary?

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Does it matter if it is revolutionary? A lot of things that tesla does are not revolutionary but a very large number of small improvements that end up resulting in a qualitative change.

E.g. everybody is talking about exotic battery chemistries while Tesla is able to wring out significantly more performance from their existing chemistry by doing tabless electrodes.

You could argue that the focus on revolutionary progress versus incremental improvements is sometimes holding us back.

Tesla's competition wanted to make sure that their margins don't decrease, as most of their stock holders are chasing dividends. Dividends made sense in the 20th century (and those companies had better performance), but since 1990-2000 companies that reinvested all their money into R&D and gave back 0 dividends had better returns even disregarding the tax advantages.

Is this the whole shift from value to growth stocks? See it ever tipping back the other direction again?

Sure. I don’t. The world is getting faster all the time.

This has always puzzled me. As a stockholder what is the use of a stock that never pays dividends? What does ownership of a bussiness mean when you have no share of its profits?

The dirty secret is that stock holding has slowly shifted to be the safer hedge against inflation, which has been creeping upward in the classic tradition of frog boiling.

Government bonds are safer still, but on the right time horizon index funds have had better rates of return.

Point is, you have to park your savings somewhere, because if you leave them in the bank, the paltry returns of a savings account won't maintain purchasing power relatively to inflationary devaluation.

right, I understand that, and I accept that currently cash is trash and bonds are little better. But it is very unsettling to think that there is so little tethering non-dividend paying stocks to any sort of value.

Wouldn't you want to own a company that doesn't pay profits for 20 years, but gives you $10B every year after those 20 years?

Discounted cash flow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discounted_cash_flow) is being used to value companies for this reason.

>Wouldn't you want to own a company that doesn't pay profits for 20 years, but gives you $10B every year after those 20 years?

That's an expected dividend.

What is the DCF available to shareholders of a company that never pays a dividend? Nothing.

When has that ever happened to lowly stock holders?

>but since 1990-2000 companies that reinvested all their money into R&D and gave back 0 dividends

Did you know you can see exactly how much companies are spending on R&D and reinvesting in the company in a company's financial statements? Did you know that Tesla invests a relatively small amount in R&D, and that the number has been stagnant for years? They barely spend enough to cover maintenance on their current facilities. Have you compares this to other auto companies?

Where do people get this idea that Tesla generates massive cash that it reinvests back into the company (a la Amazon)?

I think that this bias of "revolutionary over incremental" might be holding science back in a variety of other areas as well. It's kind of like how I've heard that Google's promotion structure incentivizes new services and initiatives over improving old ones, leading to deprecations and extreme redesigns for little tangible benefit.

>I think that this bias of "revolutionary over incremental" might be holding science back in a variety of other areas as well.

I agree. Despite all the ecological issues with internal combustion engines (ICE), consider the massive improvements in efficiency in the last half and quarter centuries. Some of those were small "revolutionary" changes (variable valve timing, turbocharging, electronic fuel injection, direct injection) but constant iteration and competition drove up efficiency also.

We shouldn't dismiss significant improvement in better fuel sources because the step forward isn't a big enough step. Embrace any improvements we can get. Time is running out.

That's pretty much how it's always worked, most companies rest on their laurels saying "just wait, xyz is around the corner" while companies like Intel, and now TSMC, delivered that corner.

There are companies in Germany doing small container recycling machines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxCFDWMPu38

Apparently they use remaining electricity to power the crunching step.

Amazing system. This should be the industry standard.

So what? Steel, copper, aluminum are recycled this way as well and nobody is complaining that it's not revolutionary enough.

If they can establish the supply and demand for recycling using non-revolutionary methods, revolutionary ideas can be developed and progressively swapped in as they become feasible.

Getting large scale is what matters more then if it is revolutionary.

And once you have large scale, revolutionary techniques can follow.

Incrementalism strikes again!

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