Showing posts with label Elon Musk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elon Musk. Show all posts

Monday, April 18, 2022

Elon Musk's Attempt To Take Over Twitter

It was only a few weeks ago when, at a public event, Jack Dorsey asked Elon Musk, "How would you fix Twitter?"



Ends up it was a few years ago. But I might have first seen that video only a few weeks ago. Time travels.

Little did Jack know. Elon has ideas.

I am neutral on the idea of who should own which company. Elon's bid is a drama that many are watching. So am I.

But I am on record stating at this very blog over 10 years ago that Twitter needs to live its potential. Just do a search on Twitter in the search box in the top right corner. Thank you, Google.

Elon wants to "unlock Twitter's potential." That idea I like. Elon wants to make it the free speech vehicle around the world. That idea I like even more. I guess Twitter is in the habit of taking down tweets to play nice with governments around the world. That is not nice. People should not use Twitter to commit crimes, like inciting violence. Trump getting booted out is not a violation of free speech.

Even if Elon manages to take Twitter private -- some people think he is not even trying to do that -- but if he manages, and liberates the platform, eventually Twitter does go public again.



A lot of people in the tech space are feeling very passionate about the move.



In Defense of Elon Musk's Managerial Excellence The Tesla CEO’s track record proves he’s a pre-eminent builder of businesses and maximizer of shareholder value. ....... the chief executive officer of the world's most valuable automaker has no equal. ...... Among the 10 largest publicly-traded companies, Musk’s Tesla Inc. is No. 1 in growth the past decade with revenue increasing more than 260-fold to $53.8 billion; No. 1 the past 12 months with sales surging 71%; No. 1 in share performance over five and 10 years with its stock appreciating 15- and 146-fold, respectively, to a recent $1,000; and No. 1 in employment by more than quintupling its workforce since 2016 ...... Among the six companies with at least a $1 trillion market capitalization, none achieved the milestone as quickly – and stayed there – as Tesla, which did it 11 years after its initial public offering. It took Apple Inc. 38 years, Microsoft Inc. 33 years, Google parent Alphabet Inc. 16 years, and Amazon.com Inc. 23 years. Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. reached $1 trillion nine years after its IPO but has since dropped back to $600 billion ...... Tesla almost four times as valuable as the second-largest automaker, Toyota Motor Corp., and worth about 57% of the 10 biggest combined. ......

Tesla accounts for 41% of the total value of the 184 publicly traded vehicle manufacturers worldwide.

....... Tesla, unlike its peers, persevered through the dislocations caused first by the pandemic and then war in Ukraine by spending years focused on shoring up its supply chain. That’s a big reason why Tesla was able to report record first-quarter deliveries earlier this month despite what it called “an exceptionally difficult” period ........ “Tesla's vertical integration strategy has been critical,” Cathie Wood, founder, CEO and chief investment officer of Ark Investment Management LLC, said in an interview earlier this month. Unlike its competitors, “Tesla is in control of its cars” and “can tweak and change” in contrast to rest of the auto industry whose “specs are put to bed, you know, three to four years or five years prior. And they're not going to change.” ......... the company’s battery technology “is about three years ahead of any other auto manufacturer.” ........ Wood raised her target for Tesla last week to $4,600 a share in 2026. ...... Tesla's “more than a million and a half cars on the road are effectively data collectors for Elon Musk,” she said. “No other auto manufacturer has cars equipped to send back this real-world driving data. In order to compete with Tesla, at let's say a like-for-like price, they'll either have to skimp on range or performance and rely on their brand, otherwise they'll just lose money if they want to keep up with Tesla at the same price.” ........ Tesla's 2021 revenue of $53.8 billion accounts for 20% of the entire EV market and 80% of the world's six EV-only automakers ...... In addition to its incomparable real-world driving data and battery technology, Tesla has an artificial intelligence chip “that no one else has” ........ “Elon describes Tesla as a manufacturer of factories,” with plants in Freemont, California, Austin, Shanghai and Berlin. “With each factory, Tesla becomes more efficient and more productive” ....... “It is from the bottom up, constructing these highly automated factories, more automated than anyone else's in the world.” .



The Future Of Work





The Masses, Not Mars
The Masses, Not Mars?
Go Putin Go

This is what I would like to suggest as a roadmap, should the takeover happen, and Twitter becomes Boring.



  • Buy a browser. Something next generation. Build or outsource the Pi tablet/laptop.
  • Allow Google to index the entire Twitter. Make them pay for it. Let them be the default search engine on the browser. Make them pay.
  • Let Twitter be the landing page in the browser.
  • Marry Starlink to the whole idea. People get internet access for free on this device. The browser has a paybar, or a pay corner where ads are served. That pays for it all. Location and browsing history determine what ads get served.
  • Redo Twitter. 99% just want to consume. They don't even want to open an account. Let them consume.
  • Of the 1% who bother to sign up, most content is created by the 1% of that 1%.
  • So Twitter should have three modes. (1) Browsing mode. No sign up necessary. You don't see any symbols. Just natural language. (2) Sign up mode. (3) Content creation mode.
  • I am for free speech. No tolerating any curbs anywhere.
  • I am curious about open sourcing the algorithms. Perhaps the Open API madness can make a comeback.
Go Putin Go



With Elon, Twitter might be in good hands.



This Is Not the Year of the Optimist The news has been so depressing lately. A crazy guy opens fire in a subway in Brooklyn. The Russians are committing atrocities in Ukraine and are about to start a major offensive in the east. And my tuna melt on rye costs $21 at a not-much-to-look-at New York City diner, not including the tip. ...... The Mets are off to a strong start but give them a few months and they’ll be depressing you as well. ...... winter’s over, job openings are way up in the past year, and the subway shooting was miraculously — miraculously! — without fatalities. ....... “Crazy Guy Aims, Shoots, Misses” could also be a contender for the next Russian national anthem. ........ Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter at $54.20 a share........ Half the punditocracy seems to think this would be great; the other half thinks it’s the apocalypse....... the 4.20 in $54.20 is an inside joke about getting high. ....... Even if Twitter tanked, wouldn’t there be some new post-Twitter communications system coming around the bend soon? ........ the idea that Twitter is a good forum for speech is silly. Trying to communicate a thought in 240 characters isn’t speaking. It’s blurting. You don’t use Twitter for persuasion. You use it for insults and virtue signaling. A healthy free-speech environment depends on people talking with each other. Twitter is a medium for people to talk at others. The best thing that could happen to Twitter isn’t an acquisition, by Musk or anyone else. It’s bankruptcy. ....... And what’s the chance the Republican Party is going to become the Home for Unwillingly Retired Entertainers? ....... It’s ironic that the Democrats’ huge flaw is an inability to get anything serious passed in Congress — because of the, um, lack of Democrats in the Senate. Which will probably cost them several more Senate seats.



Elon Musk has built a track record over the past 20 years that is outstanding. He is the "king of kings" among tech entrepreneurs. And he is not that old. He could still run hard for 20 years if he chooses to, before he transports himself to Mars. (Some people think that is where he came from in the first place! When he first landed, his name was Elon Mars.) Twitter would be in good hands. I think Elon Musk could turn Twitter into a trillion-dollar company in less than 10 years.



(A cotton candy for everyone who figures out this whole blog post is just an ad for Go Putin Go.)
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Thursday, April 14, 2022

The Masses, Not Mars?

The Masses, Not Mars





Marc Is A Dud



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Wednesday, December 15, 2021

December 15: AI, Elon Musk

These Maps Reveal the Profound Progress and Peril of Modern Civilization Bacteria and viruses are still our greatest enemy. Humanity started winning the war on bacteria and viruses about 100 years ago with the rise of antibiotics and penicillin. But we are overusing them, giving rise to antibiotic resistance. Specialists fear we are approaching a post-antibiotic era, and this would be terrifying, costing hundreds of millions of lives and trillions of dollars in losses.

The rise of the anti-vax movement is a more dangerous threat than many fully appreciate.

............. Digital and wireless technologies are reconfiguring and rewiring our politics, economics, and sense of belonging. ........... the map on the US military footprint includes over 800 bases and 200,000 active personnel in over 177 countries ......... the map on China’s Belt and Road Initiative shows the terrestrial and marine investments that include over 2,600 projects spanning over 100 countries



How DeepMind’s AI Helped Crack Two Mathematical Puzzles That Stumped Humans for Decades With his telescope, Galileo gathered a vast trove of observations on celestial objects. With his mind, he found patterns in that universe of data, creating theories on motion and mechanics that paved the way for modern science. .........

Using AI, DeepMind just gave mathematicians a new telescope.

.......... Math isn’t just about numbers or algebra or geometry. It peeks into fundamental rules that may guide how our world works. .......... math tries to find patterns in data. Take one example: gravity. By examining how things fall—and on the shoulders of giants including Galileo—Isaac Newton took those observations, found patterns in them, and distilled those patterns into an equation. While that may sound boring, without that process we wouldn’t have flights, rockets, or space travel. ............ One thing AI is exceptionally good at is finding patterns in vast amounts of data ....... “I was just blown away by how powerful this stuff is,” said Williamson. “I think I spent basically a year in the darkness just feeling the computers knew something that I didn’t.” .......... DeepMind has been steadily proving that machine learning isn’t just for games and play, but has a multitude of practical uses From solving core biological principles to predicting gene expression with AI, and now aiding mathematicians in their quest to find new theorems, AI is increasingly bolstering advancements in science.

This Robot Tunnels Through Solid Rock by Blasting It With a Jet of Superheated Gas Petra is aiming to hollow out tunnels 20 to 60 inches in diameter to bury utilities. ......... costs five times more to bury lines as opposed to stringing them pole-to-pole above-ground and up to 20 times as much when the buried lines need to travel through hard rock. .......... Abrams said the company think their tech could reduce costs by 50 to 80 percent. ......... Swifty breaks rock into small pieces with a jet of gas heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit and uses a vacuum to clear the shattered remains from the tunnel. ..........

besides practical and safety benefits, wouldn’t it be just lovely to hide the mess of cables electrifying the planet





Robots Evolve Bodies and Brains Like Animals in MIT’s New AI Training Simulator



Time: Elon Musk The richest man in the world does not own a house and has recently been selling off his fortune. He tosses satellites into orbit and harnesses the sun; he drives a car he created that uses no gas and barely needs a driver. With a flick of his finger, the stock market soars or swoons. An army of devotees hangs on his every utterance. He dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable. Lately, Elon Musk also likes to live-tweet his poops. ......... having previously advised that at least half his tweets were “made on a porcelain throne.” After an interval—21 minutes, if you must know—an update: “Splish splash.” .......

“But you know, not all jokes land.”

.......... His car company, Tesla, controls two-thirds of the multibillion-dollar electric-vehicle market it pioneered and is valued at a cool $1 trillion. That has made Musk, with a net worth of more than $250 billion, the richest private citizen in history ........... “The way finance works now is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk” .......... 2021 was the year of Elon Unbound ........ and amid Musk’s sale of 10% of his Tesla stock, a process that roiled markets, cost him billions and should produce enough tax revenue to fund the Commerce Department for a year ........ A few short years ago, Musk was roundly mocked as a crazy con artist on the verge of going broke. Now this shy South African with Asperger’s syndrome, who escaped a brutal childhood and overcame personal tragedy, bends governments and industry to the force of his ambition. ............. “He was raised in a tough environment and born with a very special brain,” says Antonio Gracias, Musk’s close friend of two decades, who has held seats on the boards of Tesla and SpaceX. “Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of people in that situation don’t come out of it. Some small percentage come out of it with the ability he has to make great decisions under extraordinary pressure and the never-ending drive to change the course of humanity.” ............. The feds are probing Tesla’s Autopilot software, which has been involved in an alarming number of crashes with parked emergency vehicles, resulting in injuries and death. The company’s expansion in China required cozying up to its repressive autocrats. ...........

Former associates have described Musk as petty, cruel and petulant, particularly when frustrated or challenged.

.......... “He is a savant when it comes to business, but his gift is not empathy with people,” says his brother and business partner Kimbal Musk. ......... The vast expanse of human misery can seem an afterthought to a man with his eyes on Mars. ....... If Tesla delivers on its pledges, it has the potential to strike a major blow against global warming. The man from the future where technology makes all things possible is a throwback to our glorious industrial past, before America stagnated and stopped producing anything but rules, restrictions, limits, obstacles and Facebook. ............ the Mars Society, who met Musk in 2001, when the young, newly minted dot-com millionaire sent a large unsolicited check to the organization .............. he is an asset to the human race because he defines a great deed as something that is great for humanity .......... This was the year we emerged from the hundred-year plague only to find there was no normal to go back to, a year that felt like the cusp of a brave or terrifying new world, with nobody in charge and everything up for renegotiation—from how we work and travel to what we find meaning in and cherish. ..........

Musk has a soft handshake and an even voice that expresses exasperation, joy and breathtaking ambition in the same quiet register.

......... “And the next really big thing is to build a self-sustaining city on Mars and bring the animals and creatures of Earth there. Sort of like a futuristic Noah’s ark. We’ll bring more than two, though—it’s a little weird if there’s only two.” ........... The company proceeded to create the Falcon 9 and then the Falcon Heavy, which has three clusters of nine engines. Clustering engines was previously considered a bad idea because of the number of moving parts that can go explosively wrong—one of many assumptions Musk upended. ............. For the Dragon, Musk swept away old-school instrument panels and replaced them with three oversize touch screens. There’s no control stick; the spacecraft’s attitude, orbit and re-entry engines are all governed by the screens. Astronaut Doug Hurley, commander of the first crewed Dragon flight, worried the screens would delay reaction times, but SpaceX solved this by making Dragon an automated ship. “There’s no plans to do any more manual flying, certainly on the NASA missions,” Hurley says, “unless there’s a need for it from a systems failure kind of scenario.” ............ Over Thanksgiving,

Musk emailed employees

that Starship’s new Raptor engine was facing a “production crisis” that could bankrupt SpaceX if it did not achieve a “Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year.” ............ “If lobbying & lawyers could get u to orbit, Bezos would be on Pluto,” he tweeted. In November, the federal claims court ruled in Musk’s favor. ........... “I’ll be surprised if we’re not landing on Mars within five years” ...... We have had little use for the moon since landing there 50 years ago. ....... “I have real doubts about the viability of a large settlement on Mars,” says John Logsdon, founder of Space Policy Institute.

“What would people do there to earn a living? What would be the basis of a Mars economy?”

............... Electric cars, like homemade rockets, were a graveyard of well-intentioned investment before Musk

barreled into an industry in which he had no academic training

. ............ A $465 million federal loan in 2010 helped prop up Tesla at a crucial juncture, and its customers have benefitted from hefty tax incentives. ......... During the 2008 financial crisis, cash was so tight the company came within days of missing payroll. With a dwindling fortune, Musk borrowed $20 million from SpaceX to loan the company, cajoled another $20 million out of investors and raised the price of the company’s debut sports car to survive. ........... Musk spent much of April 2018 sleeping on the factory floor as he tried to iron out assembly-line issues ........ “He would wake up, look at the monitors on the wall and go chase the constraint” .......... For Musk’s 47th birthday that June, he briefly paused for a bite of grocery-store cake, then went back to the paint-shop tunnel. ......... Tesla sent a software update that enabled the car to make farting noises on command. (“Please put ‘invented car fart’ on my gravestone,” Musk tweeted.) ........ “We don’t spend any money on advertising,” notes Tesla board chair Robyn Denholm. “His ability to communicate with a very wide range of people globally through social media, I think, has been a huge asset to the company—you know, by and large.” .......... “I remember when he had zero followers,” Lee recalls.

“He’s probably the most viral social influencer ever.”

............. Today, thanks in large part to Musk’s pace-setting, auto companies from VW to Nissan are jostling to invest billions in electric vehicles. Their about-face is driven less by altruism than by a dawning realization that Musk is eating their lunch. “Musk and Tesla forced the change,” says Michelle Krebs, an analyst at Cox Automotive. “He proved that there was a market for EVs.” ......... That has made Musk arguably

the biggest private contributor to the fight against climate change

. Had the 800,000 Teslas sold in the last year been gas-powered cars, they would have emitted more than 40 million metric tons of CO₂ over their lifetimes—equivalent to the annual emissions of Finland. ........ The Boring Co., which Musk started in 2016, put forward a plan to alleviate urban congestion by building miles of underground tunnels to whisk cars along at more than 100 m.p.h., but critics say plain old subways would be more efficient and equitable. ......... Tesla’s Autopilot system, which has been involved in 11 crashes with parked emergency vehicles since 2018, leaving 17 people injured and one dead. ......... Musk has been accused of overstating and misrepresenting the system’s abilities, starting with the name: despite the promises of an imminent driverless future, Tesla drivers still have to keep their hands on the wheel. ...........

the new system’s name, “Full Self-Driving,” is irresponsible.

.......... Ford and GM’s combined market cap is less than a fifth of Tesla’s, even though they together sold three and a half times as many vehicles. ....... Tesla’s gains have inspired investors to pour billions of dollars into EV startups like Rivian and Fisker. One rival, Lucid Motors, is run by a former Tesla engineer who helped create the Model S. The Lucid Air sedan was recently named the MotorTrend Car of the Year. Ford and GM have pumped money into thwarting Tesla’s expansion into pickup trucks, the most profitable segment of the domestic market. .............. “If somebody makes better cars than we do, and they then sell more cars than we do, I think that’s totally fine,” he says. “Our intent with Tesla was always that we would serve as an example to the car industry and hope that they also make electric cars, so that we can accelerate the transition to sustainable technology.” ..............

Musk’s mother was a model and his father was a monster.

........... “From the time he was 3, we used to call him that—Genius Boy.” .......... In 1999, Compaq bought the company and Musk netted $22 million for his share. For his next act, Musk decided to reimagine the global banking system. His company, X.com, eventually became part of PayPal, which was purchased by eBay in 2002. Musk came away with about $180 million. ......... If PayPal had “just executed the product plan I wrote in July 2000,” he told a podcast last year, it could have put the entire banking industry out of business. .......... A globetrotting engineer named Jim Cantrell lent Musk his college rocketry textbooks, which Musk devoured, and agreed to take him to Russia, where Musk hoped to buy an old Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile and turn it into a rocket launcher. ........

“He did not come across as credible,” Cantrell recalls. “It was, ‘Who is this charlatan? This guy’s crazy; he’s not going to make a rocket.’”

.......... Energy storage had always been the biggest stumbling block—a conventional battery would have to be so big and heavy that the car would expend most of its power hauling its own weight around. .......... A few months later, Musk pledged $6.5 million to a lithium-ion car startup called Tesla, becoming its largest investor and eventually taking it over. ........... “I saw plenty of examples of people that had enormous wealth, and were entirely cautious,” Straubel says. “In Elon, there was this complete opposite mindset.” ........... The last successful startup in the American automotive industry, Chrysler, was founded in 1925. “I said, ‘Just choose one: solar or cars or rockets,’” Maye Musk recalls. “Obviously, he didn’t listen.” ............ Tesla had taken deposits of up to $60,000 from over 1,000 EV enthusiasts but had yet to deliver more than a few sample vehicles. An automotive blog was running a regular “Tesla Death Watch” feature. ............. Kimbal Musk recalls. “I remember him calling me in October and asking me if I had any money.

I had no money—everything was gone, except for about $1 million I was saving to survive the recession. I wired it to him to put into Tesla. I told him, If everything goes to hell, at least we’ll be in hell together.”

............... Then, finally, the fourth rocket made a successful launch. And two days before Christmas, NASA made the shocking decision to award SpaceX $1.6 billion for 12 flights to the ISS. ................. Musk has been known to discuss his emotions as frankly and analytically as he does thrust-to-payload ratios .............

and announced on Saturday Night Live that he has Asperger’s, an autism-spectrum disorder. Musk uttered this intimate disclosure so awkwardly that many viewers took it as a joke

. ............... As Justine later told it, Elon abandoned her to tend to his companies as she spiraled into depression inside an L.A. mansion that became a gilded cage. ......... He and Riley were married, then divorced, then remarried, then divorced again in 2016. ............ Grimes recently released a new song, “Player of Games”: “Sail away to the cold expanse of space,” she sings. “Even love couldn’t keep you in your place/ But can’t you love me like that?” .................. Musk explains the split as a matter of logistics. “Grimes and I are, I’d say, probably semi-separated,” Musk tells TIME in Texas. “We weren’t seeing each other that much, and I think this is to some degree a long-term thing, because what she needs to do is mostly in L.A. or touring, and my work is mostly in remote locations like this.” He says they are still good friends and he does not have a new girlfriend.

“This place is basically like a technology monastery, you know. There are some women here, but not many. And it’s remote.”

................ “He would be happier with a partner,” says Kimbal.

“But he’s also a very hard person to be partnered with.”

............ Having pledged on Twitter this year that he would no longer own a residence, Musk has sold off his seven houses and considers his primary home a rental near the Starbase site in Boca Chica, Texas. ........... In the future Musk envisions, no one tells you what to do. Robots perform all the labor, and goods and services are abundant, so people only work because they want to. “There’s, like, plenty for everyone, essentially,” he says. ............ So you have the freedom to do whatever you’d like to do, provided it does not cause harm to others.” ........ He has an ardent following in some of the nastier precincts of the far right, but Musk claims that when he tweeted “Take the red pill” last year, he had no idea that “red-pilling” was a right-wing dog whistle: “I was just referring to The Matrix,” the movie from which the meme derives. .............. he rejects the idea that the size of his fortune constitutes a policy problem in and of itself, or that he is morally obligated to pay some share of it in taxes .......... Musk and many others in his tax bracket paid no individual federal taxes as recently as 2018 because they had no income, only assets ............ In October, Senate Democrats considered imposing a “billionaires’ tax” on wealth. When Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon tweeted in support of it, Musk responded with a vulgar insult of Wyden’s appearance in his profile photo. ............ You want those who are managing capital to be good stewards of capital. And I think the government is inherently not a good steward of capital.” ............. “Great leaders become incapable of hearing criticism,” he says. “Why did Napoleon fail in Russia? Because every time before, he had succeeded. Plenty of French generals were saying, ‘Why don’t we just take Poland and be good?’ But every time in the past, the people who urged caution had been wrong.”

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Wednesday, September 02, 2020

Elon Musk's Neuralink Is No Scam, Just A Startup With A Long Horizon


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Trying to collect digital information from a drop of blood should be much less challenging than playing piano with the brain, and Elizabeth Holmes had 10 years before she was hounded out as maybe a thief and a scammer, but Musk's Neuralink has already run for five years, and I don't think the promised delivery will be made in another five. Both have had Steve Jobs comparisons. I think Musk is validly compared to Jobs. 

2020, the year of the Coronavirus, is the Netscape year for biotech. 

The elephant in the room is gender. Musk seems to have a longer runway because he is a man. And I do think Musk is quite off on the idea of human habitation of Mars. The rocket part is fairly easy, though plenty challenging. The hard part is the human body is designed for the earth's surface. Lack of gravity is disorienting and debilitating for many organs. Mars is more hostile than the deep ocean, and we have not colonized the deep ocean. I'd rather fund the Green New Deal than attempt Mars. It is fairly basic biology. If you can't get the eyes, you should not attempt the brain. Eyes start bulging out during prolonged loss of gravity leading to permanent sight damage. 

I am strong on Tesla. I have consistently been. I am also strong on robotic mining of asteroids. 


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Saturday, January 04, 2020

Oil Will Get Priced Out

To remain competitive with EVs, the investment firm calculates that the break-even point for gasoline is no more than $10 dollars a barrel, and for diesel, $17 to $19 a barrel.

The environmental advantages of electrifying transportation are significant and undeniable. EVs are also a pleasure to drive — they're quiet, clean, fast, inexpensive to operate and perform well in all weather conditions.





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Monday, November 25, 2019

Tesla Cybertruck Unveil

Why is it called a cybertruck? Why not simply a truck? Is it because it is a lot of software with a little bit of metal and glass thrown in?





Meet the Cybertruck, Tesla's Ford-Fighting Pickup Elon Musk has revealed the latest Tesla model, promising hundreds of miles of range for about $40,000. ....... the top-of-the-line variant, starting at $69,900, will go more than 500 miles between charges, hit 60 mph in under 3 seconds, tow up to 14,000 pounds, and start production in late 2022. ..... Musk spoke to the importance of entering the pickup segment, one of the most popular in the US....... for unclear reasons, it’s bulletproof, at least to a 9-millimeter handgun...... Pickup trucks make up roughly 15 percent of US vehicle sales, a share that has steadily grown since 2009 .......

The Ford F-150 has been the top-selling passenger vehicle in the US for 36 years straight; Americans buy nearly a million every year.

... General Motors nets, on average, $17,000 per pickup. ...... On high-end models with the sorts of options that push sale prices above $100,000, that margin can reach $50,000. ...... The large, expensive vehicles accommodate large, expensive batteries better than a compact sedan does....... Pickup customers are less likely to live in an apartment building than a single-family house where they can install a home charger. On the other hand, public charging infrastructure is hardly developed in the middle of the country where pickups are especially popular. ........ Pickup buyers.. hardly consider fuel economy when shopping. They care about capability and reliability. Plus, compared with other drivers, they’re particularly loyal to their brands of choice.......... For the Cybertruck to succeed the way the Model 3 has, Tesla must steal the customers Ford, GM, Chrysler, and other automakers most value. ....... The Roadster, Model S, Model X, and Model 3 also hit the market well after Musk’s targets. Once they did, they came off the line slowly and with problems.



https://www.tesla.com/cybertruck

Tesla Cybertruck: Impressive Specs, Killer Price, Polarizing Looks What was revealed has some damned impressive claimed specs — pretty close to Musk’s boasts that it needs to be better than a Ford F-150 and a Porsche 911 — and a price that made the audience gasp. What was revealed also looks like a 32-bit rendering of that truck you tried to doodle in class before you remembered that you’re bad at drawing. It’s a very interesting mixed bag....... The internet is already full of memes based on the looks of the Cybertruck, because the internet remains undefeated. Musk’s “armored personnel carrier from the future” looks like what the Ghost of Video Games Past drives........ the Cybertruck is bulletproof. Tesla claims the 30-times cold-rolled steel body can withstand a 9 mm bullet fired from 10 meters away........ After dropping metal balls from varying heights on sample pieces of traditional car glass (shattered right away) and the Cybertruck’s “armor glass” (never broke), Musk had Tesla chief designer Franz von Holzhausen throw one of the metal balls at the windows of the Cybertruck on stage. Twice. And each time, the window cracked significantly. Musk was quick to point out that nothing broke into the cabin, and joked about fixing it “in post,” but it was an extremely awkward and deeply funny moment that is going to be replayed on TV and online again and again........ we’re still waiting for the new Roadster two years after its reveal


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Saturday, November 23, 2019

NEOM Beats Mars

If you have read three articles on NEOM, it is fair to say you are no NEOM expert, and I am no NEOM expert. I expect to read up on it a little bit more. But sometimes it is an advantage to have read less. That gives you a freshness of perspective.

NEOM: Wide Participation Will Enhance Chance Of Success
NEOM, Jerusalem: Twin Cities?
My Take On NEOM, The City
NEOM: A City

Every astronaut has been an athlete. You need to be in an absolute great shape physically to experience that pressure on your body when the rocket accelerates at rocket speed to get out of the clutches of earth's gravity. This means everyone who buys a ticket from Elon to go to Mars will have to attain that athlete status. And that's for the first part of the journey when gravity is a big problem. Then you have a nine-month journey of being in a no gravity zone. That actually is harder on the body. Lack of gravity is very challenging for your bones, for your eyes, for your body in general. And there no amount of physical training can prepare you.

But NEOM does not have that Mars problem. NEOM is on earth. Mars has been sold as a fresh start for humanity. NEOM can be that fresh start. But it has to be a fresh start in many ways. It has to be a fresh start politically, economically, technologically.

NEOM needs peace. NEOM needs the Saudi-Iran regional cold war to end. NEOM needs genuine peace between Israel and Palestine. Peace is necessary infrastructure.

Also, NEOM is not going to have, so what air do we breathe issues. It is not going to have radiation issues. Earth has a magnetic field that protects it from solar radiation.

There are also psychological issues. If you keep people in a small space for too long, many get claustrophobic. And they start acting up.


Is Elon Musk Just Getting Started?
Elon Musk's Giant Blind Spot: Human Beings



Humans Will Never Colonize Mars The Red Planet is a cold, dead place, with an atmosphere about 100 times thinner than Earth’s. The paltry amount of air that does exist on Mars is primarily composed of noxious carbon dioxide, which does little to protect the surface from the Sun’s harmful rays. Air pressure on Mars is very low; at 600 Pascals, it’s only about 0.6 percent that of Earth. You might as well be exposed to the vacuum of space, resulting in a severe form of the bends—including ruptured lungs, dangerously swollen skin and body tissue, and ultimately death. The thin atmosphere also means that heat cannot be retained at the surface. The average temperature on Mars is -81 degrees Fahrenheit (-63 degrees Celsius), with temperatures dropping as low as -195 degrees F (-126 degrees C). By contrast, the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was at Vostok Station in Antarctica, at -128 degrees F (-89 degrees C) on June 23, 1982. Once temperatures get below the -40 degrees F/C mark, people who aren’t properly dressed for the occasion can expect hypothermia to set in within about five to seven minutes............. The notion that we’ll soon set up colonies inhabited by hundreds or thousands of people is pure nonsense.......... Gravity on the Red Planet is 0.375 that of Earth’s, which means a 180-pound person on Earth would weigh a scant 68 pounds on Mars. While that might sound appealing, this low-gravity environment would likely wreak havoc to human health in the long term, and possibly have negative impacts on human fertility. ........ the unfulfilled visions proposed during the 1940s and 1950s........ “Back then, cover stories of magazines like Popular Mechanics and Popular Science showed colonies under the oceans and in the Antarctic,” Friedman told Gizmodo. The feeling was that humans would find a way to occupy every nook and cranny of the planet, no matter how challenging or inhospitable ........ “But this just hasn’t happened. We make occasional visits to Antarctica and we even have some bases there, but that’s about it. Under the oceans it’s even worse, with some limited human operations, but in reality it’s really very, very little.” As for human colonies in either of these environments, not so much. In fact, not at all, despite the relative ease at which we could achieve this...... Unlike other fields, development into human spaceflight, he said, “has become static.” Friedman agreed that we’ll likely build bases on Mars, but the “evidence of history” suggests colonization is unlikely for the foreseeable future........ astronauts on the ISS, who are subject to tremendous muscle and bone loss, try to counteract the effects by doing strength and aerobic training while up in space. As for treating the resulting negative health impacts, whether caused by long-duration stays on the ISS or from long-term living in the low-gravity environment of Mars, “we’re not there yet” ........ It’s a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth’s problems. We’ve got to solve these problems here. Coping with climate change may seem daunting, but it’s a doddle compared to terraforming Mars. No place in our solar system offers an environment even as clement as the Antarctic or the top of Everest.

There’s no ‘Planet B’

....... Martian terraforming is a pipedream, a prospect that’s “way beyond any kind of technology we’re going to have any time soon” ....... radiation on Mars is far worse than we thought, adding that “we don’t have the long-term solutions yet, unless you want to risk radiation illnesses.” Depending on the degree of exposure, excessive radiation can result in skin burns, radiation sickness, cancer, and cardiovascular disease........ Life in a Martian colony would be miserable, with people forced to live in artificially lit underground bases, or in thickly protected surface stations with severely minimized access to the outdoors. Life in this closed environment, with limited access to the surface, could result in other health issues related to exclusive indoor living, such as depression, boredom from lack of stimulus, an inability to concentrate, poor eyesight, and high blood pressure—not to mention a complete disconnect from nature......... we don’t see colonists living in Antarctica or under the sea, so why should we expect troves of people to want to live in a place that’s considerably more unpleasant? ....... for prospective families hoping to spawn future generations of Martian colonists, it’s borderline cruelty. ...... Studies of astronauts who have participated in long-duration missions lasting about a year exhibit troubling symptoms, including bone and muscle loss, cardiovascular problems, immune and metabolic disorders, visual disorders, balance and sensorimotor problems, among many other health issues. ...... Some astronauts, like NASA’s Scott Kelly, never feel like their old selves again, including declines in cognitive test scores and altered gene function. ........ The regolith, or soil, on Mars is toxic, containing dangerous perchlorate chemicals, so that also needs to be avoided. To grow crops, colonists will likely build subterranean hydroponic greenhouses. This will require specialized lighting, genetically modified plants designed specifically for Mars, and plenty of water, the latter of which will be difficult to source on Mars.........

We may be stuck on Earth.



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Wednesday, October 09, 2019

Elon Musk's Giant Blind Spot: Human Beings

There is this no small detail called gravity. It is big, it is fat.



And gravity is physics. And Elon Musk has a degree in physics from U Penn. He must know his physics because he seems to send rockets out into space at will.

But Elon was no biology major, looks like.

There is this funny thing called gravity. The human body needs the earth's gravity. That is why long term human habitation on the moon is a bad idea. Robots? Yes. Human beings? No, no.

In absence of gravity, your eyes might bulge out. Your joints might start getting, well, disjointed. Your bones need gravity to stay bones.

But Elon stays oblivious to the fact. He says everyone who signs up for Mars will get 10 cubic meters of space inside his spaceship, "which is a lot."

And that's just gravity. Radiation will have to be another blog post. Radiation might make those ten cubic meters a microwave experience, which is a lot. Like, too much.

It is not like Elon does not have enough on his plate. There are trillions to be made through robotic asteroid mining. Spices used to be like gold. Gold can become like spices. I want his 10,000 satellites to provide gigabit broadband every point on earth. I like the idea of any point on earth to any other point on earth in 30 minutes. You escape zero gravity before the bones figure it out. Hyperloop is massive. I have an entire real estate tech startup around the Hyperloop concept. Tesla? I want one. Solar tiles on the roof? I want. Super cheap, super boring tunnels? I want them. Although it could get literally boring down there unless the walls of those underground vehicles come alive and are entertainment.

Save earth like this is the only planet we got. There is no other. Plant a trillion trees. Elon should design some drones that will plant those trillion trees. And his satellites should map out the earth to find out every patch of land where trees can be planted. And let's get it done and over with already.

Somebody drop an apple on Elon's head.











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Sunday, October 06, 2019

AI And Fire, I.E. Larry Ellison On Fire

Earlier in the afternoon, Ellison had made the point that the same regulators who are scrutinizing autonomous driving would likely have felt the same way about the invention of fire—too dangerous. Is AI dangerous? “Probably,” Ellison said with a grin. “More dangerous than fire.”

-- Larry Ellison







Oracle’s Larry Ellison on Uber, Tesla, Autonomous Driving, and More







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Sunday, September 29, 2019

Elon Musk's Starship Announcement












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Thursday, August 29, 2019

Elon Musk And Jack Ma In Shanghai













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Saturday, July 20, 2019

Africa Is Mars


Mars is undoable. Mars is undesirable. There is this funny thing called gravity. The human body does not do well in the absence of gravity. Send robots. They are gravity neutral. But people? Africa is plenty undiscovered. Plant a trillion trees instead. Save this very planet instead.

When you plant the Australian eucalyptus in a new climate, there is havoc. Imagine a microbe from Mars coming over to earth. What could happen?

The best point for rockets are one step further and one step closer. I am all for robotic mining of the asteroid belt. Countries used to go to war over spices. Gold is the new spice. I am all for internet access on every point on earth through 10,000 or more satellites.

But I am all about Africa, not Mars. Ray Youssef has an edge over Elon Musk in that regard. Mars might be Elon Musk's masterstroke in marketing, not an actual place he wants to go to. Look, Mars! He says. And then builds boring tunnels and exciting cars.

Both Ray and Elon are immigration success stories. Both are out of Africa. Elon might look like he has white skin, but you just have to read his life story to realize the sickness that was apartheid also brutalized him. Elon grew up in South Africa. Ray's parents came from Africa. Ray is a New Yorker. And now Ray is America's gift to Africa. These two inspiring entrepreneurs are in stark contrast to the stupidity emanating out of Washington. So much garbage is being talked about immigration. To Ray I might say, go back to Africa. But looks like he is already there.














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