ashtonkem

4. Tesla was able to make EVs profitably thanks to government policy designed to incentivize exactly that outcome. If Tesla didn’t exist, some other company would’ve filled that role.

> Who in this thread said "we wouldn't have EVs without Musk"?

I was attempting to paraphrase a common sentiment, and should have been more clear about that. It’s pretty easy to find people stating a varient of this idea in sibling threads.

> To say that the idea of one person changing the world has been discredited is so wildly wrong I don't even know where to start.

You could start by actually reading what I said, rather than making up for yourself and then arguing against that. Everything you said here is unrelated to my point, and directly countermanded by my actual words.

What a wildly uncharitable interpretation of my post. “Dead-end”? Come now.

All I see in this “we wouldn’t have EVs without Musk!” discussion is a rehash of the old “great man of history” theory, something that’s generally been discredited in the historical fields. The whims and decisions of individual actors matters, yes, but they also act in a context that molds and constrains them. The specific circumstance that made Musk and Tesla took both his initiative, and a specific cultural and policy environment to support his actions. We overweight the former.

First, one must acknowledge that Tesla would’ve died on the vine without the policies I mentioned above. They finally turned a profit excluding emissions credits in Q1 2021. A feat, yes, but also one that was wholly dependent on public policy to survive and grow. You can give credit to Musk for recognizing the opportunity here, but he didn’t make it.

Second, there’s really nothing to suggest that nobody else would have taken this path if Musk had not, albeit a bit later perhaps. History is full of “great men” who discover and create, but dig under the surface and one will find dozens of uncredited inventors who were either a close second, or less lucky in marketing. Heck, there is no real reason to believe that Musk was even critical for Tesla; remember that he took it over, and we have no idea where it might have gone absent his involvement.

It’s kind of like how some actors really only get into “method acting” when it allows for them to behave like assholes on set. The idea that one must be a jerk to do “great things” is a self serving lie by rich and powerful people who want to excuse their misbehavior.

All I see with Tesla is how government policy can successfully change markets. Tesla exists not because of Musk’s genius[0], but because of tax credits and carbon offset credits that allowed Tesla to be profitable early. Without Musk, someone else would’ve pulled it off, without the policy Musk would have done something else.

0 - Again, Musk didn’t found tesla, he did a hostile takeover and has tried to rewrite history with him as the founder.

Praise for Elon tends to diminish the closer you get to him. He’s kind of notorious for being a bad boss; impulsive, poor temperament, and petty. Even if you like his achievements, chances are you would very much not enjoy having him as a boss.

It’s worth pointing out that the SEC is extremely image conscious. They count on their reputation as the hammer of god himself to keep traders in line. Elon repeatedly snubbing them is going to tempt them to pull out all the stops.

> This was almost certainly done by a lawyer working on his behalf.

This is like saying that you can’t be responsible for tax dodging because your accountant filed on your behalf.

> This strikes me as a technicality of paperwork that is being seized upon by the media as a way to portray Musk in the worst possible light.

Almost all of securities law is “technicalities”, it still has the force of law.

Wording and branding is not a trivial concern if mass adoption is a goal.

You see a similar thing with fantasy television being interpreted as evidence towards non-fantastical elements of medieval life, when they really represent our modern feelings towards the past more than anything else.

In fact, most of the arguments by GP were also used by those defending now illegal labor practices, including child labor.

I ran my second hand Dell computer from work for about half a decade, it cost $75 when I bought it from work after a merger. The CPU finally called it quits, and I parted it out for a profit.

I’ve been saying for years that laptops come with rather severe tradeoffs for features that most users do not need.

That and desktop cooling tends to be lightyears ahead of laptop cooling; you can thrash a desktop for a long time before hitting a thermal limit, unlike most laptops.

Partially true. You're right that they don't spring up unannounced, but there is something distressingly feudal about a property contract by (probably long dead) founders binding future owners in perpetuity without any possibility for redress or change. Personally I think it would be much better if current home owners could create or destroy a HOA if they felt that it no longer met their needs, rather than tying it to the lot forever.

Also, depending on your state it can be very hard to avoid a HOA. If you're buying a home in California, Colorado, or Florida you've got a 2/3 chance of buying into a HOA, with the numbers getting worse over time. 2/3 new homes being made now have a HOA, so pretty soon you won't have an effective choice when buying.

> In suburbia they also manage commons, but also impose rules on what you can do with your house and on your land.

Not all HOAs have infrastructure to maintain. I know a few people in neighborhoods with HOAs that don't have private roads or facilities for the HOA to manage, it's just purely there for property value.

Indeed. Not getting a HOA was a hard requirement for us.

The fascinating thing about HOAs is that they’re all done under the guise that they “improve property values”, but I’ve never seen any evidence that this works. From my geographic location it seems like non-HOA factors drive prices (supply, demand, neighborhood location and nearby amenities like transit and shopping), not whether or not the neighbors flower bed matches the “neighborhood character”[0]. From what I see it just seems to let petty tyrants control their neighbors; the property value argument seems like a transparent excuse.

0 - You see this phrase a lot in zoning discussions and it makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills. As if neighborhood character is a concrete thing that can be pointed to and protected, rather than a constantly changing and emergent result of the humans living in a place.

If we’re talking about California, “mob rule”[0] isn’t the right framing. This isn’t a majority of citizens suppressing the rights of people to build on their own property, it’s a minority using asymmetric political involvement to get their way.

The recent lawsuit against UC Berkeley is a great example. A handful of cranks angry about UC Berkeley admissions abused an environmental review process to impose their will on their town. Not the will of the majority, but rather the tyranny of the most rich and petty.

0 - I prefer the term “tyranny of the majority”.

And then of course they’ll suggest that “something” must be done about the homelessness crisis, and things get worse still.

Because its hard to find existing construction that’s

1. In the right location.

2. Dense enough.

3. Cheap enough.

4. In good condition and zoned properly.

The last bullet point is the real kicker. It’s very tempting to point at older real estate, often shuttered light industry or commercial, and ask about converting it. Unfortunately a lot of these buildings are illegal/hard to rezone as residential, or have an uncertain cost to convert them for habitation. And of course the financiers of any project hate uncertainty.

I bet he has it turned off.

Searches for tools and sporting items have become completely useless now. Even when Google does return an actual result, it’s mostly SEO spam.

> Younger folks today are the unlucky beneficiary of years of wage stagnation and home price inflation

Yes, and the pandemic brought a brief moment of dignity (but not safety) to the low paid service workers who make our society operate. They went from the butt of cruel jokes to “essential workers” and “heroes” overnight. It is very, very hard to force people back into undignified circumstances once they’re had even a taste of being treated like a person.

Veering into my own pet theories, I think that the social aspect of who is and is not allowed to be treated like an actual person is a highly underrated factor of unionization pushes. It often costs companies little to nothing financially to treat their employees like actual people, but it feels good to those on top of the office hierarchy to abuse and belittle those they see as their social inferiors. They ignore the risks of this behavior at their own peril.

> No one is stopping you thinking, or saying, whatever you want at any time.

They literally arrested and prosecuted someone for an off color joke. This is as straightforward a case of “them” stopping you from saying what ever you want at any time as it gets.

And in classic English fashion, they’ll start picking random Scots to make an example of, and make the problem worse still.

I’m having a hard time seeing that work for them. Amazon’s tactics here fundamentally depend on there being an effectively inexhaustible pool of talent elsewhere that can be used to threaten any given store that considers unionizing, combined with the plausible threat of moving to get non union labor. Close up shop, hire non-union labor elsewhere, etc.

That might have been true of Walmart stores, which are relatively small and cheap to build, but I do not think it’s true for Amazon. The cost of relocating a warehouse is high, the number of places they can put a replacement warehouse is low, and the risk of another unionization push is non-trivial. Especially since Amazon is already beginning to hit head count issues; treating people as disposable drones doesn’t work when you need so many workers in a hot job market. They are probably making their unionization problems worse due to the way they view and treat their warehouse workers.

To be clear, I think they’ll try. What we’re seeing from Amazon is a real inability to react and innovate to new labor markets. I just don’t think it’ll work out as well for them as it did for say, Walmart.

For me it’s less about them not caring about third party brands, and more about them not caring about protecting their customers from scams and fakes.

I thought this was the second, not the third.

You can handle it locally, I do. The only feature that doesn’t work with it off is automatic firmware updates. You can still update firmware, you just have to download and upload it manually. It doesn’t even nag about setting up a cloud account.

The only thing I regret of theirs is the router (TL-R605). It’s not bad, but the VPN performance is mediocre, and I always wonder if I would’ve been happier with pfsense. Every other piece of hardware has been great.

Time for congress to make some anti-SLAPP laws; it seems to me as a non lawyer that this is a SLAPP that they forum shopped for. Especially since they dont seem to have pleaded anything that would surmount the “actual malice” requirement for defamation required here.