I run a niche retail store and there are two sides to this.
Most of our business is selling low-price, entry-level products. There's a 80-20 distribution of people getting into the hobby versus people upgrading after a couple years. Consequently most of our floor space and inventory is devoted to high margin, quick turnover, entry-level products.
In my experience the floor space is less of an issue for high end products than the capital expenditure to bring in the inventory. On the consignment side we only take products aimed at the remaining 20%. These are specialty items we wouldn't have in regular stock. It's a win-win because we don't have to deploy capital to bring the product in-store, but we do have space to showcase some higher end used product.
Also, from the customer side, people ask at the higher end, don't they? Beyond a certain level, it's more of a search and a quest than just browsing. So you mainly have to show that you have connections for certain things. Why does this sound like drugs now?
I know this from a few friends who are deep into tabletop and boardgames, and they would regularly work with the one or two small stores around to get some special, expensive item (to help keep the shop afloat).
The myth of the Supreme Court having any check on executive power was disproven by the "switch in time to save 9", where Owen Roberts agreed to stop obstructing The New Deal so FDR wouldn't implement court-packing and term limits. That was almost 90 years ago.
Why is this a bad thing? The New Deal literally created a society that allowed the country to flourish for a solid 50 years before neoliberal economics took hold.
If the government guaranteed basic human needs are met for every person (food, shelter, healthcare) there would be less of a need for giant pools of public money (pensions, insurance) sloshing around.
Mass index fund investment is basically socialism but stupid. My retirement money is going to get invested in the SpaceX IPO against my will. The market is not efficiently allocating capital, it's structured to allow elites to skim off the top while forcing middle class people to subsidize them.
Where the do you think the government gets their tax money from if not the market? That is like saying we shouldn't kill animals from meat, we should just buy it from the store.
I had a customer do something similar with a thousand-dollar product. They had signed for delivery and provided no evidence, but banks always side with the customer.
OP seems to disregard the fact that equity in the house is basically a pile of cash you can live inside of. If you're renting you're paying some premium for the landlord to pay their mortgage interest and pay down their own principal. The cash flow is lumpier for ownership (fewer, bigger expenses) and your risk concentration is greater (you're committed to a single asset). But ultimately that stuff is all priced into rent, plus a premium for your landlord to have "passive income".
If you're able to own a rental property in today's economy it feels like you'd have to be stupid to not be able to make above-market returns
The long-term promise of buying a house isn't necessarily "number go up" but "after 25 years you own it outright".
It seems like public (REIT) landlords haven't really been making an above market return. Admittedly they have constraints that private landlords don't, but they also own a metric shitload of rentals.
It sounds like this employee was on a team whose goal was to build developer goodwill in open source. Of course now that AWS is piling money into the AI furnace they're cutting that team.
This article should be called "the guy who made the best sandwiches in our free staff cafeteria got laid off".
I clicked on the post and immediately bounced off because it was intense slop. Like a high schooler padding out their essay to hit a word count.
I don't care if they got paid for it. It's an interesting misconfiguration that you can describe in one sentence. I don't need to read the corresponding 500 word blog post.
I think a lot of the Concorde failure is tied to its status as a British-French project. Trans-Pacific flights are much longer and there's a lot of money in PEK -> LAX than in JFK -> LHR.
Qantas wanted to offer London to Sydney, but they couldn't fly supersonic over land. Mainland China or Japan to Australia is a feasible route for high-margin, low-capacity supersonic flights.
If you could make the flight from Beijing to California take less than 5 hours that seems like a premium product many ultra wealthy people would spring for. Dubai to SFO is also a possible route.
I was pretty sure the whole Concorde thing failed because people don't like it when you sonic boom an entire city dozens of times a day. And that all attempts to reduce the sonic booms necessarily resulted in flight times that aren't significantly faster than traditional subsonic flights, rendering the entire thing moot.
It was impractical due to physics, not some weird racism. You simply can't push a supersonic shockwave over inhabited areas, and the only way to not do that is to fly subsonic over land. Even if the oversea leg is supersonic, the tickets were much more expensive for not very much shorter flights. It wasn't a valuable proposition for most people.
1) The flight markets are different now. There's been a large increase in both transatlantic and transpacific flights, especially the latter. These change the economics of considering only these types of flights, flying only over uninhabited regions.
2) The technology has changed. We're much better at dealing with sonic booms now. You can't get rid of them entirely, but you can reshape them. You can't send everything "up" but the longer of a tail you can make the more the sound dissipates by the time it hits the ground. There's lots of research around this and as you can imagine, incredibly important for the military. You can't fly fast spy aircraft if they are just announcing their position while flying around. Sure, there are satellites, but those are predictable by the enemy, you'll always need aircraft to do this.
However, there are markets where you don't have to fly supersonic over land, the distance is long enough for the speed to matter, and there is massive amount of demand. The only problem is, such markets require a longer range than what the Concorde was capable of. Notably, all the very frequently traveled trips over the Pacific.
Concorde’s sonic boom was astonishingly loud. The night flights would go supersonic outside the Bristol Channel at around 9pm to 10pm. It was still audible over 60 miles away and sounded like a muffled barn door slamming outside.
Far louder though — it would wake all the pheasants up just as they’d gone to roost.
England in the '80s didn't give a shit about little people. Had it been really profitable, Concorde would have continued operations. It just did not make sense economically, particularly once they stopped making new airframes.
There is a lot of money in NYC-LHR, that's why Concorde continued to fly that route and profitably too, once they realized how high they could yank the prices and still fill the plane.
Also, Concorde's maximum range was 4,488 mi, which was calibrated to allow trans-Atlantic but not much more. Trans-Pac was not an option and even Australia to North Asia would be a stretch.
There is money in NYC-LHR (it brings BA alone $1B in revenue annually) but the market for supersonic basically vanished. In the 70s when Concorde started flying, it was certainly a step up. However, the market niche basically disappeared when the lie flat seat was developed; for a lot cheaper, you could have a sleep for six hours in a really cushy lie flat, or you could spend a crapton more to be in a much louder, more cramped cabin for only about three hours less. If you were halving a 12-16 hour journey instead, there would still be a market left, but Concorde just didn't have the ability to do so.
You can also essentially work remotely in an airplane now. I haven’t tried videoconferencing, but I easily do all my other software work on trips. So a couple extra hours might even be a benefit: more time with no distractions to wrap up that slide deck, maybe a 1:1 or two, get your free drinks from premium/business class, doze off to a movie, wake up for an early start at your destination.
Shorter, no, but having a private cabin with a shower, and a lounge with a bartender on the plane, not to mention Starlink, would make those 12 hours a lot more bearable vs 12 in an economy seat.
AFAIK: Showers are only available to first class customers flying via the major Gulf carriers. I checked Google flights for business class and first class tickets between Tokyo and London. Business is about 5,000 USD and first class is about 10,000 USD. Assuming that we are talking about first class here (to satisfy your shower requirement), what kind of developer is hacking code at 10,000 meters in first class... except... hmm... Mitchell Hashimoto?
Mitchell Hashimoto's got tres commas in his bank account and his own jet. He doesn't need to take commerical, or even first class. If we backsolve, say $10,000 is a once a month purchase, and $10,000 for a hotel and you stay a month. Say your other living expenses are $10,000/month, so we're shooting for spending $20,000/month. With the recommended shaving off 3% the nest egg, (20,000 * 12) / 3% gets us $8 million in the bank.
So at $8 million in the bank, you could take a $10,000 plane trip, stay for a month, spend $10,000 on a hotel, take a $10,000 flight back. Still upper end of net worth, but nowhere near Mitchell Hashimoto territory.
Everyone thought SSTs were going to be the next big thing. Both the US and USSR had projects. The 747 got a hump so it could easily be converted to a freighter once it was made obsolete by supersonic passenger planes.
Despite two superpowers making the attempt, and plenty of time for more tries since then, Concorde is the only one that came even remotely close to something commercially viable.
I’m sure there’s a market for California to China in five hours. But is it enough to support a whole new type of aircraft? Fuel burn is going to be enormous. Maintenance on something so cutting edge will be extremely expensive. Tickets would probably cost more than a private room on a widebody.
There are no economies of scale to be had here. If there are only a handful of plausible economically-profitable routes, all of the expenditures on R&D, testing, certification, and production facilities can only be amortized across a handful of aircraft.
Once you’ve built a dozen or two of them and a handful of extra engines and spare parts… what then? There’s no point in keeping the production lines open.
From an airline’s perspective, they have to now have an entire separate chain of employees (pilots, mechanics) dedicated to another airframe that barely makes up a fraction of their fleet. That’s a lot of overhead for two or three routes.
Those are some pretty big structural disadvantages that need to be overcome in order to make a boutique supersonic route appealing.
Scheduled service is not viable but there is a bountiful supply of billionaires willing to one up each other with lavish expenditures. Having the fastest class of private jet is worth something to them. This is what's going to be the market for Boom if they don't fold.
One analysis I read by a marketer that makes good sense is that the speed was worth paying for LHR to JFK but not really on the return given the clock changes and speed.
Getting to NYC before the clock time you left London was a cool trick. It allows you to make a morning meeting in NYC without coming in the night before.
But flying subsonic leaving NYC after dinner and arriving in London for breakfast works fine. Getting to London faster in 3.5 hours travel time but 8.5 hours later clock time means losing a day in the air effectively.
If it stays in the realm of the ultra wealthy I don't see how it will succeed in the end. Commercial aircraft are really expensive to design and qualify, and you need to have a lot of sales to justify a new model. Ultra wealthy people are willing to pay more, but they also demand luxuries that take up a lot of space.
The only reason Concorde did as well as it did, economically speaking, is the respective governments footed the bill for development.
> respective governments footed the bill for development
I just looked up development costs on Wiki: "£12–16.7 billion in 2025". Yikes. And "the market forecast was 350 aircraft", but only 20 were built. What a waste.
Yeah. But to be fair, it was the first supersonic airliner, so they were feeling around a bit in the dark when it came to estimating demand. They would have all looked like geniuses if enough demand to build 700 air frames had materialized.
I remember when the aircraft first went into service. Everybody thought subsonic air travel, at least over the ocean, would become a thing of the past.
My point is mostly that since the 80s there's a lot more trans-pacific flight from the Middle-east and Far-east to the United States. When the Concorde was developed this wasn't really a worthwhile market to consider for ultra-premium air travel.
I could absolutely see Emirates doing a super-luxury super-sonic flight to the West Coast of the US. Once you're in the States you can take a PJ.
Emirates just dominates long-haul flights to Dubai overall. Other (mostly flag carrier) airlines handle other airports in the region. Qatar Airways through Doha is also a big player in flights between the US/Europe and Asia.
It's not tied to anything other than there not being enough people who care enough to spend the sort of money required.
The people who have that kind of money are going to be more interested in flying in a jet share doing mach .96 leaving when they want to leave, going where they want to go, when they want to go, how they want to go, with who they want to go with.
You get treated like a criminal for forgetting your shampoo bottle is 2 ounces too big for some dipshit TSA agent's liking, and meanwhile the ultrawealthy are shuttling around physical assets worth millions of dollars in their private jets and customs barely does more than stamp their passport.
Yeah, this is something that changed from Concorde times (and possibly even sped up its very demise): the market for reliable, high-quality private planes has grown massively. It's now pretty easy to shuttle between the big cities in almost complete privacy through secluded airports.
> You get treated like a criminal for forgetting your shampoo bottle is 2 ounces too big for some dipshit TSA agent's liking,
Enforcement is super uneven, and etc, but IME, they just open your bag, find the thing, and then offer you the choice of tossing it or going back to check your bag. Depending on how much you paid for your shampoo and how much a checked bag would cost you and if you have time to do all that and then wait in line again, I expect most people toss it.
Does anyone seriously still believe this? I thought as a society we had realized Musk is simply BSing whatever he feels like until it becomes untenable.
Does Elon over-hype nearly everything he gets involved with? Clearly yes.
Does he also deliver on some mind-boggling timelines? Well Tesla went from delivering its first cars in 2008 to having the best selling car in the world in 2023, and SpaceX went from not having successfully launched a rocket to delivering about 80% of the world's space payload in roughly the same timeframe. So I'd say that's clearly a 'yes', too.
SpaceX also dropped the cost of kg to space by multiple orders of magnitude, which is a part of the reason they essentially are the space industry now a days. And should Starship deliver we are likely going to be seeing even more orders of magnitude drop in price there.
Elon made some political positions (which he has always hinted at in any case) publicly clear, and the divisive nature of politics in the US which has made a rather vocal minority of people just freak out with regards to him. But the reality is that if he died tomorrow, he would already go down as the Thomas Edison of modern times. And he as of yet still has some years to deliver on Mars which could cement a far greater legacy.
A order of magnitude is a factor of 10x. Multiple orders of magnitude is at least 100x.
SpaceX Falcon 9 has a launch cost of 74 M$ with a payload to LEO of 22,800 kg for a launch cost of ~3,200 $/kg to LEO.
So you are incorrectly claiming that space launch costs were 320,000 $/kg. Elon Musk is a habitual liar, but you should try not to be one as well as it demonstrates your argument to be based in ignorance and deception.
Falcon Heavy reusable is the most $ efficient system at around $1500 $/kg. The Space Shuttle costs were $54,000 $/kg. If you want to nitpick that that's "only" a 97% cost reduction instead of a 99%... well that's the sort of good faith debate I've come to expect from the aforementioned vocal minority in any topic related to Elon, and with all the class you've already demonstrated in your post.
Why are you deceptively bringing up the Space Shuttle? That was never intended to be a serious cost-effective launch vehicle. Also, why are you deceptively talking about 97% and 99% like the difference between 30x and 100x is not a factor of 3?
The Ariane 5, first launching in 2003 which is 7 years earlier than the first Falcon 9 launch, had a launch cost of ~150 M$ in 2015 with a payload to LEO of ~16,000 kg for a cost of 10,000 $/kg. The Soyuz-2, first launching in 2004 which is 6 years earlier than the first Falcon 9 launch, had a launch cost of ~35 M$ with a payload to LEO of ~8,000 kg for a cost of ~4,500 $/kg.
The truth is 3-6% of your claim of 100x cost improvement.
Because the Space Shuttle is what SpaceX replaced. A 97% discount relative to that is what SpaceX has managed, after a commercial profit margin. 99% is 2 orders of magnitude. So you're here bickering over 2% with all the class that one would expect.
No it did not. Nobody launched their commercial satellites on Space Shuttles. Soyuz, Atlas, Proton, Delta, Long March, Ariane; those are commercial launch vehicles. Even considering crewed missions we can look to ISS crew missions which were half Soyuz missions and then entirely Soyuz missions between 2009-2020.
And again, you do not seem to understand how percentages work. If I have a thing that costs 1,000 $ and I find a 99% cost reduction it is now 10 $. A 97% cost reduction means it is 30 $. That is a 3x difference. The difference between 1% and 3% is a factor of 3x. That is half of a order of magnitude right there and here you are claiming it is small.
So you are wrong on history, wrong on comparables, and wrong on math to defend a man who runs a company that is legally, and I quote a actual legal decision: a "greviously reprehensible... grossly racist workplace"[1]. But, you know, racism man good because he slightly lowered the cost of cruise ship internet I guess.
You're engaging in some wild freak out mental gymnastics here. Seriously, just read your paragraph about me not understanding percents, and tell me you don't get hard-core Chewbacca Defense [1] vibes. It seriously reads not only like satire, but pretty good satire! You just need to add a QED to the end. lol
And don't trust flatterbots to argue for you. They hallucinate regularly and just make you look more absurd. The Space Shuttle was flying crewed missions to the ISS until 2011. The reason they stopped is because the Space Shuttle had been retired and commercial crew began, which was ultimately won by SpaceX. Well SpaceX and Boeing in an overt act of insiderism, but Boeing is still - 15 years later - trying to figure out how this whole space thingy works.
The alternatives you mention were never commercially viable against SpaceX. All not only cost multiple times more but come with significantly worse reliability records as well as lacking the payload capacity of something like Falcon Heavy for those missions that require it. And when you look at things like the Soyuz, the sticker price doesn't matter so much as the price companies were obligated to pay. They offered cheap internal launches, and charged dramatically higher rates for foreign launchers - including NASA. By the end NASA was paying $90mil/seat.
Yes, you clearly do not understand how percentages work given that you continue to argue that the difference between 30x and 100x is just "2%".
You are correct that there were Space Shuttle missions to the vicinity of the ISS until 2011. I was talking about ISS crew rotation missions where the last Space Shuttle mission was STS-129 in 2009. The Space Shuttle was still used for ISS assembly flights until 2011. I was using crew rotation missions to highlight that not just commercial satellite launches, but also one of the other important class of missions, crew rotation, also regularly used alternatives to the Space Shuttle disproving your point that the Space Shuttle had some sort of magical monopoly on launches and thus the only alternative to compare against.
You were the one arguing that alternatives cost over 100x more than SpaceX. Even deceptively comparing against the Space Shuttle you were still off by a factor of 3x and comparing against actual competitors your claim is off by a factor of 16x-30x. Your claim is egregiously wrong. Continuing to argue it means you are either completely ignorant or utterly biased or both. I am done here.
I said that the difference between a 99% saving and a 97% was 2%. You're the one engaging in freak out mental gymnastics to try to turn that into 'ACTUAAAALLLY... that's like a 300% difference and the proof is that Elon kicked my dog.'
And no, I obviously know you're just grabbing nonsense from your flatterbot of choice. The tell tale is being easily confused on basic points, making rather nonsensical statements, being oddly precise about irrelevant esoteric details, and then finding yourself in a situation where you're left trying to recombobulate it all back into something sensical, which you're not quite succeeding at. Your post above is borderline incoherent, even moreso than the 97% to 99% = 300% nonsense.
> he would already go down as the Thomas Edison of modern times
A small but important correction - he would be similar to Henry Ford, with capitalistic approach to humans that would make Marx shiver and write second Capital book. Also aligns better with his nazi sympathies.
There isn't a single thing he personally invented AFAIK, but he is a good manager from certain angles and can recognize future value in ways entrenched ivy league managers seemingly cannot. Also a textbook sociopath and few other mental issues, and horrible father for those who care (most should, future of mankind and all that).
Henry Ford literally invented the moving assembly line. He's also the primary reason that we now have a 5 day, 40 hour week as the standard. Prior to him (and his successes with trialing such), the typical work week was 6 days, with 10-16 hour shifts common. Marx, by contrast, achieved nothing of value for the common man, and spent his entire life mooching off Engels' capitalistic successes, while critiquing such. It's trivial to critique systems, but quite difficult to create and build things up in a way that is sustainable and means something.
As for Musk, he completely revolutionized the space industry. In modern times no single person just invents everything around something akin to e.g. the telegraph, but I don't think that really diminishes his impact. It's just a consequence of the fact that a reusable rocket is much more complex than a telegraph machine. But he's quite infamously involved and directing essentially every single step of the process. This is quite different from the detached and profit/metric motivated focus of typical management, but in many ways it's much closer to how things were 'back in the day' rather than a novel discovery. It should go without saying that people running businesses building 'x' should be deeply knowledgeable about 'x'. "Business", as a specialization in and of itself, in modern times is the disease that's killing America.
I would argue that 15 years is not a mind-boggling timeline to go from first car to best selling single model (especially given how few models Tesla has).
Xiaomi Auto reaching a quarter of Tesla's annual output after four years is much more impressive, given it took Tesla until 2019/2020 (8 years, twice as long) to reach that level.
SpaceX is rather more impressive. Unfortunately for everyone, only someone like Musk could have pulled that off: not just the visionary, but also arrogant and litigious enough to sue the US government to reconsider when the government decided against buying from SpaceX. I'm reminded of the phrase "only Nixon could go to China".
I do. It’s not his singular focus. But he continues to personally invest himself in pushing the boundaries of human spacefaring capability. That goal seems more meaningful to him that it does to e.g. Bezos, who seems to have a rocket company to look cool.
I know there's a risk when Musk's name comes up that everyone takes "all against" or "all for" approach - very polarising figure.
But I see a lot of that announcement, and the others someone else pointed to as his "aspirational, but ultimately never going to happen" goals - whether he believes the claims are achievable, or not, he says these things to energise people to working/paying for him to try
It costs him little to nothing to say, and other people's time, effort, and capital to try (and succeed/fail)
Tesla is falling to pieces now, and SpaceX is getting loaded up with completely unrelated projects (xAI) in order to try and make it look saleable (I guess) - it's very difficult to see the Mars announcement as anything but hype.
> difficult to see the Mars announcement as anything but hype
Oh yeah, the announcement is hype. But there is actual work underneath it making real progress in science and engineering that moves us closer to Mars. Some of that, moreover, is work that has limited appeal outside a Martian context.
The real thing is that the moon is a better stepping stone, but Bezos already claimed it so Musk had to out do him, which is why he's shooting for Mars.
> the moon is a better stepping stone, but Bezos already claimed it so Musk had to out do him, which is why he's shooting for Mars
They were contemporaenous. Musk was trying to send stuff to Mars in 2001 [1]. Bezos started Blue Origin in 2000 before any Moon goals had been made concrete or public. I wouldn't say either of their goals really referenced each other until after the financial crisis (that is, after they were both comfortably billionaires with launch-vehicle programs).
That all depends on how much he values his credibility, I think..
But to be fair, for someone as good at self promotion as he is, I can believe that the value of the hype could be greater than the cost in credibility.
Year over year sales are declining. Stratospheric stock price is propped up by promise of selling humanoid robots, a technology (and market) which are unproven.
Having approximately $44 billion in cash on hand is not a massive cash reserve for any company with the market cap of Tesla ($1.3 trillion). Even less so when you realize how capital intensive its current car and non-existent robot business is… The entire EV market is risky right now for margin compression as Chinese EV manufacturers are really pulling ahead. It’s pretty wild to see just how far they’ve progressed while the west mostly does nothing. Even Tesla hasn’t provided any real innovation in years in regards to their core business. And from what I can tell, they’re pretty much outright ignoring their auxiliary businesses.
If Optimus fails to impress, and gain traction, I’d seriously expect Tesla to end up a subsidiary of SpaceX within the next ten years as Elon tries to protect up his net worth.
That's why I think the Optimus thing might make sense from a 'market cap' perspective. Tesla is great at innovation and ramping global manufacturing for new tech. Ten years ago, that was EVs. But now EVs are becoming a commodity and every other car company is catching up.
I do think 'self driving' is still their 'moat' when it comes to EVs. I use it every day, and nothing else comes close. But other than that, building EVs is becoming a cut-throat slim-margin business. I don't think that's where Elon, or Tesla employees, want to spend their energy.
When Tesla was overpromising self-driving cars, the thing they sold was still a pretty nice car. Even without the magical features, customers were still satisfied with the product.
Now imagine you're selling robots. If the robot "disengages" and breaks 10% of your plates while emptying the dishwasher, you're going to be pissed. There's no fallback to manual mode. It has to work 100% of the time out the gate.
Based on past history, I don't think Tesla has an engineering culture capable of hitting a home run with this kind of frontier technology out of the gate. So they either delay it until it's ready or they launch it prematurely, in which case everyone mocks it and the dream crashes (along with the stock price).
Even optimistically (no pun intended), I don't see Optimus justifying the Tesla share price.
There's plenty of other companies making robots. Robots can either be controlled by AI or by humans. In the case of humans, there's no moat because everyone can do that. In the case of AI, it can either be on device or on a server, but we're already hitting power supply concerns for data centres, rising prices and supply issues for the components for even local servers, and the historical timeline over which hardware and algorithms have become more energy efficient (and the available power envelope) suggests that on-device AI sufficient for an Optimus to get into a non-self-driving car and drive it at some competence score* happens around a decade after that competence is reached by self-driving cars.
It doesn't even matter if your perception on the relative ranking of different self-drive systems is right or wrong, we're still not yet seeing Tesla vehicles do as Musk said in January 2016:
I think that within two years, you'll be able to summon your car from across the country. It will meet you wherever your phone is
> Ten years ago, that was EVs. But now EVs are becoming a commodity and every other car company is catching up.
Kind of yes, the competition, especially from China, is catching up, and exceeding Tesla's offers.
Kind of no - EVs were around for a very long time before Tesla, Tesla's sales pitch (at one point) was that it was a software company not a car company.
On that front - almost every vehicle manufacturer has caught up, and Tesla is still stuck /promising/ a self driving car, but still not delivering.
The Twitter acquisition is widely seen as the marking point where Musk lost his appeal - something that was not smart because, coupled with his foray into politics was an attack on his core market - middle class left of centre people who were buying for the environment.. etc
He poisoned his brand, and Tesla's too (because the two brands, his and Tesla's, were so intertwined)
He lost the impetus in European markets, leaving a dying (for him) US market, and Asia (which is largely interested in Chinese made vehicles).
My Anecdata: In Australia, where I am, it used to be Tesla's were fairly common, now, I think I've seen two in the last week, compared to maybe a dozen BYD (and I am in a middle class suburb)
> It’s pretty wild to see just how far they’ve progressed while the west mostly does nothing.
The “west” came up with Tesla and Rivian, and their cars are on the road. And the US tariffed chinese EVs. What else can be done to combat China’s lower priced labor and possibly more lax environmental regulations?
The west needs to combat it by using subsidies and regulations to “spray and pray,” to a large degree. Just as China has… The problem with the occident, at the moment, is that corporations use the incentives to raise margins and not to innovate.
In the US at least we’re gearing
up for massive failure in the automotive industry solely because we’re avoiding competition. Yes, there will be margin compression, but without it domestic businesses become inefficient. It’s going to be “80s/90s Detroit” all over again with bigger bailouts because at some point it’ll be too politically popular to reduce prices. When that happens the public will be the ones footing the bill.
And all that says nothing of the fact cheap labor alone doesn’t make a better car. But the fact China can both make a better car (EV) and with lower labor costs really shows how dependent US automakers are on market inefficiencies. The US, and Europe, were massively ahead in quality but that lead been destroyed.
I’m not a fan of capitalism, but if the US is going to sell it and preach it— we might as fucking well embrace it. Otherwise we’re just subsidizing the rich without rhyme or reason (other than blatant corruption and exploitation). The cost of those subsidies will be stagnation, and the outright capitulation of quality long term.
> And all that says nothing of the fact cheap labor alone doesn’t make a better car. But the fact China can both make a better car (EV) and with lower labor costs really shows how dependent US automakers are on market inefficiencies.
I don’t understand this. Why would COGS impact quality? Are Chinese people inherently inferior “Western” people?
The market inefficiency is partly the difference in price of labor, which is being made more efficient by Chinese manufacturers succeeding.
I looked it up, and the key thing in favour of companies like BYD over the US companies - isn't (just) cheap labour - it's vertical integration.
BYD owns the mines, the batteries, the cars, the USA doesn't have that available, and are having to force other countries to provide their lithium/rare earth deposits to US companies in order to try and become competitive.
> The west needs to combat it by using subsidies and regulations
> In the US at least we’re gearing up for massive failure in the automotive industry solely because we’re avoiding competition
Uhhh - you want to prevent competition by using subsidies and regulations, but then complain the US companies are not competitive because they avoid competition?
The US vehicle manufacturers have been here multiple times - VW, Japanese "compacts", and now Chinese EVs
The Germans were competing on quality and fuel consumption.
The Japanese were competing on quality and price, they started out naff, and became gold standard, whilst US manufacturers were stuck delivering low rate products.
The Koreans followed the same playbook.
And, now, the Chinese are doing it again, following the Japanese playbook - offering better and better quality at a lower price.
It’s in his own biography (the older one) that spacex would pursue mars without distraction. That he went to great lengths to ensure it wouldn’t be used for military, tourism, etc.
You can’t believe musk without simultaneously believing he’s a liar. It’s in HIS fucking book.
> It’s in his own biography (the older one) that spacex would pursue mars without distraction. That he went to great lengths to ensure it wouldn’t be used for military, tourism, etc.
I said I believe he wants to go to Mars and will put in the work to make that happen. I didn't say everything he's said is true. Musk absolutely lies. But his actions speak pretty consistently to Mars being a real goal.
This is a joint project of U.S. government military planners and an ostensible private individual. If Elon disappeared, rest assured, the contracts and development would still happen.
They want mega constellations for always-on drone guidance and for "golden dome" which would allow for the laser-based shoot-down of long range exo-atmospheric missiles. You need reusable spacecraft to make that tenable. This is not about Mars, don't buy the marketing. At best for civilians, this is about making broadband widely available such that America can dominate internet connectivity going forward and increase spying further. As an example, examine a map of Starlink connectivity, you will notice that Russia and Gaza are excluded.
The Artemis missions will eventually enable the placement of communications equipment on the moon, making anti-satellite weapons less effective at disrupting critical communications.
Fortress America will be invincible forever, so so they desire. The macroeconomics are not working out for them though even though the technological edge is still working for them on that level.
> They want mega constellations for always-on drone guidance and for "golden dome" which would allow for the laser-based shoot-down of long range exo-atmospheric missiles
This is a conspiracy theory folks who just Googled In-Q-Tel have been stringing together since Covid. It's not true.
> examine a map of Starlink connectivity, you will notice that Russia and Gaza are excluded
Russia wasn't excluded until recently. That was a problem!
> The Artemis missions will eventually enable the placement of communications equipment on the moon, making anti-satellite weapons less effective at disrupting critical communications
Communications are an exception to the lunar treaty that governs the militarization of space.
Don't forget that the original space program was designed to peacefully demonstrate a high degree of control over ICBM class rockets. They're so good and accurate, we can put a human on top of one. The government does not spend huge amounts of money on things like "art" or "science" without a motivating factor. This is the capitalist empire, not socialism.
I believe the "Wat." is directed at the mandated-by-laws-of-physics fact that it adds a 2.6 second lag, and that at constant path loss and frequency it requires antennas have 768 times larger diameter (or close enough, the maths works out that it's the distance to moon divided by distance to wherever in LEO your default case is and all the other things involved cancel out).
This factor (and that it applies to all EM including both radio and optical) is also why we had to wait for lunar orbiter missions to get photos of the Apollo landing sites rather than take a picture with Hubble.
Oh, and then there's the problem with the moon having much longer and much darker nights than anywhere on Earth that isn't the [ant]arctic circle, though I have previously opined that anyone who isn't ready to put a few thousand tons of aluminium onto the moon and make a circumpolar power line *simply isn't ready for any plan like this in the first place*.
And the fact that there's only one moon, so half the planet doesn't get any signal from it at any given time.
These are good points. I don't really understand your point about the Hubble though that is very interesting. Are you saying that the pictures are too low-res?
Still, in the case of massive destruction of satellite communications, having 50% availability for crucial communications (e.g. continuity of government) etc. isn't ideal but is still something. 2.6 second lag is nothing if you aren't talking about real-time communications. Issuing strategic military orders isn't sensitive to 2.6 seconds of lag.
You can communicate to half the earth at once, you can maybe replace GPS if all the GPS sats are shot down, etc. Your point about large antennas is taken, but for USG installations, I don't doubt they would invest in a few large antennas.
> These are good points. I don't really understand your point about the Hubble though that is very interesting. Are you saying that the pictures are too low-res?
Yes. Owing to the laws of physics, the size of the optics and the wavelengths of its sensors, it is limited to a minimum feature size on the moon of about 22 meters (which happens at the limit of it's ultraviolet sensor range, 115 nm, not visible light). To see the Apollo lander as a single pixel, it would need to have a primary mirror with an 11 metre diameter, to see footprints it would need one with a diameter of 150-200m metres. And proportionally even bigger than that for longer wavelengths such as visible light.
> Still, in the case of massive destruction of satellite communications, having 50% availability for crucial communications (e.g. continuity of government) etc. isn't ideal but is still something. 2.6 second lag is nothing if you aren't talking about real-time communications. Issuing strategic military orders isn't sensitive to 2.6 seconds of lag.
Or you could just use all the stuff on the ground. We used radio well before we went to space, and if the cable-based stuff (and line-of-sight microwave towers) isn't secure then neither is the even more critical power grid.
If you're willing to give up real-time comms, then we have a lot of bandwidth available for text messages that's currently being spent on TV.
> You can communicate to half the earth at once, you can maybe replace GPS if all the GPS sats are shot down, etc.
Nope. GPS fundamentally requires you can see at least four different satellites at the same moment. Also, they're in geosynchronous orbit not low orbit, there are at present no reported anti-satellite weapons that can get to geostationary orbit, nor would this be likely due to the energy budget needed to get there. Consider that while getting to LEO essentially requires the equivalent of an intercontinental missile, getting to geostationary requires the equivalent of such a missile whose payload is itself another intercontinental missile.
> Your point about large antennas is taken, but for USG installations, I don't doubt they would invest in a few large antennas.
I think you've not quite taken on board what I said.
768 times larger diameter.
Diameter, not area.
If your ground station is 1 meter across, like some satellite dishes I see, one 768 times larger is about the size of The Pentagon building and its surrounding car park.
While I look forward to us being able to build structures that size (and bigger) on the moon, the SpaceX website for Starship is currently listing prices to the moon of $100 million per metric ton.
> pushing the boundaries of human spacefaring capability
I guess polluting space with shitty satellites and causing environmental disasters with failed and questionably-permitted rocket launches is, technically, pushing on boundaries of human spacefaring capability.
> guess polluting space with shitty satellites and causing environmental disasters with failed and questionably-permitted rocket launches is, technically, pushing on boundaries of human spacefaring capability
My cat is both cute and fluffy as well as a menace.
I mean, I really dislike what Musk has become but SpaceX has brought about a huge leap in access to space. Last year they launched more than the rest of the world combined, including the rest of the US. They now own more operating satellites than the rest of the world combined. When the rest of the Western world's launchers have had problems over the last few years (Ariane, Vulcan, EU Soyuz, New Glenn, Antares) SpaceX has been able to absorb their payloads with relative ease rather than waiting many years for other arrangements. They've saved the US many $Bs in launch costs by undercutting the incumbent monopoly. Cheaply and easily reusing a rocket was thought impossible, now it's routine and every rocket maker on earth is attempting to copy them.
If you look at their filings, they are now pivoting into an "AI company". (Meaning, that's where the majority of their future value is described as coming from.) It's possible that this is a harmless investor swindle and they'll keep relentlessly innovating. But you should probably be worried.
Musk is like that person on Facebook you know that is really good at <welding / programming / performing surgeries / etc> then they post about their thoughts on some other topic and all you can respond with is “stay in your lane.”
Musk has been successful is pure engineering efforts led by engineers he hired achieving the next big-but-not-too-big step.
Or... you maintain some moral integrity, and consider him POS despite all his deliveries. People clearly can be great and horrible at the same time, why the desperate need to paint everything black & white and ignore all the fine details of reality.
These people are all about massive ego trips and legacies. So let them build their legacy as they truly were with all the + and -, not some idealized, simplified image. Truth always deserves to be told, however inconvenient. Sort of moral imperative of a moral human being if you want.
I genuinely believe he wants to go to Mars. Desperately.
He's fundamentally a very smart socially inept largely sociopathic emotionally immature obsessively driven boy who read a lot of Heinlein as a kid. Everything about him indicates he sees himself as a saviour of humanity and the only person who has their priorities right and everybody should appreciate and adore him and it's so darn frustrating when they don't, oh wait this other party will adore me, now they don't anymore either oh HUMbug.
Do I believe any of his promises? No absolutely not. But I do think Mars is his massive obsession and that he fervently (If completely Implausibly) believes it'll work and help humanity.
Most of our business is selling low-price, entry-level products. There's a 80-20 distribution of people getting into the hobby versus people upgrading after a couple years. Consequently most of our floor space and inventory is devoted to high margin, quick turnover, entry-level products.
In my experience the floor space is less of an issue for high end products than the capital expenditure to bring in the inventory. On the consignment side we only take products aimed at the remaining 20%. These are specialty items we wouldn't have in regular stock. It's a win-win because we don't have to deploy capital to bring the product in-store, but we do have space to showcase some higher end used product.
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