Yeah that's why Elon split his between two.
875 karma · joined January 31, 2016
[x] Safest
[x] Fastest
[x] Longest range for a BEV
[x] Fastest charging time, and a large network
[x] Bet looking BEV
[x] Most advanced commercial autonomy
[x] "hell bent on being the best manufacturer in the world"
> “When Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion in July 2006, I thought we should at least consider it. But Mark Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting and announced: “Okay, guys, this is just a formality, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here.” Mark saw where he could take the company, and Yahoo! didn’t. A business with a good definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random.”
I think the tube itself could be made reasonably cheaply compared to the CA high speed rail system. We transfer oil in huge pipelines with high pressure differences so I think it should be pretty feasible to keep it properly sealed. I'm more worried about the cost of the safety mechanisms and them being able to secure the land rights.
Elon mentioned at design weekend that initial versions could even use wheels if they aren't going over ~250MPH.
We aren't using the type of maglev that's used in maglev trains where the track is magnetized and super expensive. We're using ArxPax hover engines[1]. They just spin a Halbach array[2] super fast and generate a hovering force off of an aluminum track.
The winning team of Design Weekend last January, MIT, is also using magnetic levitation but they are doing a passive version. The track still isn't magnetized, but their magnets generate their eddy currents just by the movement of the pod. It sort of "takes off."
The first reason we -- and others in the competition, though not the majority I believe -- went with maglev is that the we (well, the Mechanical Engineering students, I'm CS) couldn't find air-skis that worked at high speeds. Elon mentioned at Code Conference that they'd been tested up to Mach 1.1 but when I told the ME's of that they said they hadn't found anything they could use nor any research showing that the air being pushed out of the ski "keeps up" with the pod at high speeds.
In addition to the speed problem with air skis, they also hover much lower off the ground than the maglev and require much higher tolerances on the track (more expensive).
Part of the reason to have the competition is to try a bunch of different ideas at once and see what works best. I do believe there are plenty of teams that will be testing air-skis on the track at competition weekend. We'll see how it goes.
http://electrek.co/2015/05/30/opinion-times-article-on-musks...
Elon argues that the subsidies only make sense because they offset the much greater subsidies that the fossil fuel industry gets implicitly from negative externalities (to the tune of over 5 trillion): http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2015/new070215...
Some people still like to argue that Tesla is propped up by government help, but by this slide they put up in their shareholders meeting, that's clearly not the case:
The PowerWall is designed to be cycled daily while the car is expected to be cycled weekly.
There is also a danger of electrocution and regulatory hurdles.
Go put in 80 hour weeks at Tesla?
Vote Democrat?
> Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men…
> For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities. Sailing off into the unknown may be risky, and you might drown or be killed or whatever, but then again if you stay home you won’t reproduce anyway. We’re most descended from the type of men who made the risky voyage and managed to come back rich. In that case he would finally get a good chance to pass on his genes. We’re descended from men who took chances (and were lucky).
> The huge difference in reproductive success very likely contributed to some personality differences, because different traits pointed the way to success. Women did best by minimizing risks, whereas the successful men were the ones who took chances. Ambition and competitive striving probably mattered more to male success (measured in offspring) than female. Creativity was probably more necessary, to help the individual man stand out in some way.
I think that is a valid theory. Conjecturing that men have more natural audacity makes sense in modern society. It may contribute to an explanation of the gaps in workplace deaths, entrepreneurship, gambling, and men hurting themselves on JackAss and Tosh.0
The keeping of pace and lectures are not intentionally there to add difficulty or responsibility, they are there for vestiges of an era from when the lecture and class model was invented, before we even had the printing press. They exist now mainly for logistical convenience and because people think they can find reasons for why we should keep them around and why they are the best pedagogical transmission method for most students. They are not. They really suck. It has long since been determined that most people can only even hold their attention on something for ~15-20min (hence the length of TED talks).
If the material was organized in a cohesive series of books, then you could just read those, and classes would mainly be for projects. There is a reason Sal Khan and Elon Musk both skipped nearly all of their lectures in college and both advocate for education to be massively overhauled.
You should be able to just study on your own and periodically show up for proctored exams, and take them as many times as you need to in order to reach true understanding. And you should be able to take such exams without having to pay for lectures.
https://qph.is.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-d6bcc38832f7f3716570d3...
For all of theses reasons, I learn way more on my own than I do in my classes. Many of my peers do the same.
Secondly, in the work place, it's reasonable to assume the work you are doing is beneficial to the business, whereas with classes your work isn't helping anyone else, and might not even be helping you.
To each their own.
I view this as actually one of the biggest problems with current pedagogies and curriculum structures. They don't teach the why of things[1] and so students either are unmotivated because it seems meaningless to them, or the ones who follow blindly on faith, who think less for themselves, end up looking like the smart ones. But then maybe that's what some employers are looking for.
As Musk puts it, they fail to teach to the problem instead of the tools.[2]
It falls somewhat along the lines of "work to live" vs "live to work (or create)."
This is why you choose your company carefully based on its culture and mission. If it's a place that's not doing work that really excites you, they shouldn't expect you to get into that "mode." To some extent the less interesting the work is, the more the company has to spend on perks and salary to get people to even want to work there in the first place.
As an example of its utility, I really like its description of formal systems which are a somewhat simplified version of context free grammars. There are many other concepts described in that book that give similar but more intuitive explanations of CS concepts that helped me understand them as part of "the bigger picture."
CODE: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, which is mentioned on here a lot, was helpful for similar reasons.
There are still TONS of places hiring that just aren't big sexy brands.
I wonder if Apple will partner with Tesla to use their Gigafactory batteries and charging network. If not they would have a lot of ground to make up.