To be fair, few could have anticipated that Tesla and Musk would be unaffected by valid scrutiny and criticism.
This is also addressed in the article:
> E. DON’T TRY TO SHORT SPACEX!!
> Elon Musk is a cult figure. Moreover, he has again and again proven himself immune to any meaningful market, legal, or regulatory scrutiny.
> Musk’s detractors have been correct about Tesla’s terrible fundamentals, its Full Self-Driving lies, its robotaxi fantasies, its shaky accounting. But when they have imagined these things might affect the stock price, they have been wrong.
All that.
But also he makes products so compelling that people who dislike him drives in them. "Fuck Elon" gotta be an all time top seller among bumper stickers.
> few could have anticipated that Tesla and Musk would be unaffected by valid scrutiny and criticism.
This almost implies that the scrutiny itself, and not the economic reality, should be the reason of Teslas demise or otherwise lesser financial outcome.
Which seems a little self referential.
If Elon doesn't wash his hands after peeing, and we pointed it out, that would be valid criticism. Ewww pee-hands.
But the economic reality and aggregate outcome wouldn't change.
Like not even if the frontpage of WSJ, The Times or FT said "eww Elon pee-hands".
And that the thing - with enterprises of this scale, you could always nitpick and find some things that are suboptimal. But we gotta see it in proportion. 100mm accounting error in Tesla is not the same as a 100mm accounting error in the local McDonalds franchise. For one the error is magnitudes larger than their real economic footprint. For the other it's a rounding error.
TL;DR:
I hear you - yes there is valid criticism. We just gotta see it in proportion.
I like Teslas cars. But I don't like pee-hands.
Tesla isn't the technology, performance, luxury, infotainment, or value leader in EV's any longer. If you think the Germans know what the salute meant, and they stopped buying the cars, you can take the hint and have a lot of excellent choices.
There is no future prospect of explosive growth at Tesla any longer. That price to earnings ratio is not less absurd for having lasted this long.
I hear you. And I believe disagreement is good.
The markets were right back in 2018 - Tesla did manage to overcome their manufacturing struggles, and they did become profitable (now having retained earnings equal to ~65% of their then market cap).
The markets may well be wrong now. But they weren't back then, and the arguments haven't changed drastically.
Currently I'm sitting in Palo Alto. So I get to see a lot of Waymos and Cybercabs. I struggle to see how Waymo can compete on price if Tesla can keep production prices in the same realm as M3.
And making a car is a pretty steep barrier to entry. So that edge may take some time to compete away.
You are living in a fantasy world where, for one thing, Tesla overcoming early production problems merits and astronomical P/E ratio. For another thing you think a non-functioning robotaxi service portends some future growth. Sleep in the backseat of an FSD Tesla if you dare.
> Unfortunately, they're blinded by their beliefs and can't think things through even one step further.
Yes, our new generation of overlords seem to be socially and emotionally stunted and exhibit an alarming naivete about the world. This worries me almost as much as the tech itself. It is impossible to predict the future but in the past when a ruling class completely disregarded the effects of their greed and excess on the wellbeing of society, at some point the bill came due and the consequences for them (and society) were dire.
I blame the disdain for humanities, philosophy and the liberal arts.
Not just with the overlords, but also with our fellow nerds. We're all so busy trying to see if we can build something that we don't stop and think if we should build something, what consequences that might have or what history has taught us.
Theres a reason those fields of study are important.
Nowhere is this urge (and the reward for it) stronger than HN. In the majority of comment sections, the top comment is one that pounces on a few words from the posted article, however tangential or self-serving.
I definitely agree it happens more than ideal on HN as far as I've seen.
However, HN is also one of the few places where it's not uncommon for me to see people push back on it. And often comments that "pounce on a few words" are offering valid criticism on only that part IMO, while still accepting the larger work that's been posted.
Yeah, I use goto all the time in C, mostly in the “goto cleanup before return” pattern but sometimes in jumping to different points of a loop. And I know I’m not the only one.
> The authors of the study also propose alternative ways of thinking about the dog-human bond, blending the characteristics of different human relationships – not only the child-parent relationship, but also friendship and partnership - resulting in a unique bond with its own dynamics.
This is only towards the end of the article but addresses what was bothering me throughout it all — that having dogs is only viewed here through the lens of how it relates to having children.
What if some people (like me) simply 1) like dogs 2) don’t want children, and there’s no link?
I love the Apollo 11 computer stories but by today’s standards it was more of an MCU than a computer. And sure, in the embedded space it is true that in a lot of cases error recovery doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and it makes more sense to reset quickly.
But there are many systems today that take a long time to restart so you can’t just abort if you have a chance to recover.
This is also addressed in the article:
> E. DON’T TRY TO SHORT SPACEX!!
> Elon Musk is a cult figure. Moreover, he has again and again proven himself immune to any meaningful market, legal, or regulatory scrutiny.
> Musk’s detractors have been correct about Tesla’s terrible fundamentals, its Full Self-Driving lies, its robotaxi fantasies, its shaky accounting. But when they have imagined these things might affect the stock price, they have been wrong.
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