SirEDCaLot @ SirEDCaLot @lemmy.today

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XKCD #538: Security

Closely following the company during that time period and their various development efforts.

Watching Eberhard repeatedly go down the tech tree of a gearbox, and having it repeatedly fail. Switching designs, switching manufacturers, two or three times doing this and ending up with a result that would not be reliable.
Then Elon steps in with an obvious, simple solution of just put a single gear and a larger electric motor and suddenly development moves forward.

I also note with interest that nobody of any real acclaim wanted to work with Eberhard after he left Tesla. Ex Tesla employees are generally in high regard, Eberhard was not.

Joe Biden could theoretically pardon all people in violation of this, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for a blanket universal pardon involving guns

Nope. Biden's DOJ was happily pushing the 'weed users can't have guns' as one angle of gun control, while the administration was simultaneously pushing the 'weed shouldn't be persecuted' angle. Quite hypocritical really.

I was literally watching it happen.

Musk, Eberhard, and a few others came together to build an electric sports car. The only reason Musk isn't listed as a 'founder' is because one of them already had an LLC registered and it saved them some paperwork to reuse that.

I understand you dislike him and that's fine, but calling him names just makes you look like an uneducated buffoon.

CEO salary is in most cases out of control. But you're ignoring that most of this compensation is in stock. The only reason it's worth so much today is because Tesla stock went up so much. It wasn't worth nearly as much when the package was signed.

Probably have 200 pictures of the back of his hood. None of them worth a damn

sentenced to death

New York has no death penalty afaik.

They'll throw him in prison where he'll be treated like royalty.

Not even slightly okay. I am shedding no tears for this asshole. My comment was directed at the user who is happy that this might lead to more gun control.

regulate them slightly

I would encourage you to educate yourself. If you honestly think there is not even slight regulation of gun ownership, then you are not informed on this issue.

Of course he was. Where did I say otherwise?

Not saying otherwise. I'm saying if your takeaway is that it's good to put more gun control, maybe you should reevaluate your position on gun control.

Maybe you should re evaluate that. Like in 'are we the baddies?' style.

//Edit-
I am certainly not saying the CEO was anything other than a bad guy. I'm talking about being anti-gun.

IE, 'if when a guy with a gun kills someone we all agree is bad, and your takeaway from that is 'yay now we can can the gun', maybe you aren't the anti-violence person you like to think you are.

Only if it starts to dissuade their awful behavior. Which it likely won't.

Quite frankly I'm surprised this sort of thing doesn't happen more often. Actually I suspect there will be copycats and this will start to happen more often.

Pilot here. I fly those little airplanes. We all want to get rid of the lead very much. We don't like the environmental damage, we don't like the lead exposure, and it's also expensive- the machine that mixes the lead into the gasoline costs millions and the resulting fuel can't be transported by pipeline as it would contaminate the pipeline. Result is that aviation gas is always expensive.

Problem is, some of the airplane engines actually need the leaded fuel. So avgas available everywhere is 100LL, meaning 100 octane low lead.

There is a lot of effort underway to fix that situation. Probably the most currently advanced is an outfit called GAMI who made a fuel called G100UL, it is made by combining normal high octane gasoline with a series of additives that make it run in any airplane engine (including the ones that need lead). Unfortunately due to some weird legalities regarding it, to legally use it you need to pay GAMI a couple hundred bucks for a sticker. It's also not widely available yet.

There should definitely be a notification to people in those areas that rush delivery will not be available. There are other reasons to buy prime, so I don't think it should be completely unavailable, but residents should be able to make an informed decision.

This is exactly it, and this is the point that is often missed in a great many discussions on modern racism and discrimination. Amazon is not refusing to deliver there because those people are black. They refusing to deliver because their drivers got attacked. The fact that those neighborhoods are mostly black has nothing to do with it. It is a correlation, not a causation. The root causes the same though, it was probably a red line neighborhood back in the mid-1900s and never recovered.

Amazon should make it clear to people buying prime in those areas though, that rush delivery will not be available and if they want to buy prime they will get all of the other benefits but not fast delivery.

18650's existed. But nobody was putting them in cars. All the prototype cars automakers were showing off used large format pouch cells. These had various issues with heat and longevity and safety and thermal expansion. Using 18650's in a car was a Tesla invention.

Teslas today no longer use 18650s, they use 2170s and 4680s, both cell formats brought into mainstream by Tesla.

The bigger issue is nobody was building electric cars!! All the pieces of tech existed but nobody was bothering to put them together. A big part of Tesla's mission (which they accomplished) was basically to embarrass mainstream automakers into building EVs. That's worked.

That's what I credit Tesla/Elon with doing- actually building a damn EV and selling it.

Actually I suspect I know more about him than you do.

I didn't know of him in the PayPal days. I did know of Tesla though. I was reading their blog as their then-CEO Martin Eberhard was trying to make the original Roadster into a reality. Eberhard was focused on a design that involved a two-speed gearbox, you could select gear 1 for more power or gear 2 for more range/higher speed, and switch between the two at any time (including while driving). The problem is, making a gearbox and synchromesh that will reliably shift under load at 16,000 RPM is tough. Making it last the life of the car, and be cheap enough to put in a car, is double-tough.
So I watched that blog as they tried for about two years, going through different transmission vendors and designs.
That was when I first heard of Elon. He was one of the initial founders of Tesla, one of the largest investors. And after a year or two he stepped in and started throwing his weight around. He pushed Eberhard out and stepped in as CEO. And his first choice was to dump the transmission entirely, focus on engineering a larger / more powerful / more efficient electric motor that could deliver good acceleration through a single-speed reduction gear.
That got the Roadster out the door.

Point is- while he may have stepped into the big chair like a bull in a china shop, he was right. He quickly identified the objectively correct engineering decisions and started Tesla on the right path.

Look at SpaceX. Elon basically built SpaceX from the ground up. Him and Tom Mueller (designer of the Merlin rocket engine) were the first two employees.

I'm not claiming he's a saint. I personally know people who have worked directly for him. Everyone inside and outside his companies agrees he's kind of an asshole sometimes and he rides his people absurdly hard with no concept of work life balance. And lately he's gone a bit off the rails with his politics.

But I am claiming, and I think objective history shows, that he is effective. Being an asshole doesn't invalidate that.

China's too smart to 'invade' Taiwan. There will be no tanks and helicopters invading. China / CCP may be assholes but they are also fucking smart.

Look at Hong Kong. There were no tanks or helicopters. Just steadily increasing political control. More or less the entirety of HK protested for weeks/months. It did fuck all.

That will be what happens with Taiwan. It won't be an invasion. It will be a gradual slide.

Right now, USA officially supports the 'One China' policy to appease China even though we want Taiwan to be independent. It's let us keep huge trade with China (which the Chinese also want/need) while we depend (and NEED) Taiwan for a lot of tech manufacturing especially computer chips.

Thing is, China has no desire to be dependent on us. They want us dependent on them for manufacturing, but don't want to need that business. That's why China is doing aggressive R&D on pretty much every high tech area they depend on the West for, trying to ensure that everything China needs can be made in China from Chinese tech. To do that they need to be able to design and manufacture the latest computer chips, which they currently can't. But they're pouring billions into figuring it out.

If China takes over Taiwan, either openly or covertly, they get TSMC. And that gives them all the chipmaking tech they need.

Don't expect tanks. Expect state sponsored industrial espionage at TSMC and their own suppliers. Then expect Chinese chipmakers to flood the market with top-line or near-top-line hardware at low prices, which US won't embargo and thus we'll get even more dependent on China.