Very, very broadly, I’d say a lot of my concerns boil down to them convincing the broader industry as a whole that cutting costs and delivering a shit product is okay, so long as you’re doing it as a “technology company”

• Pushing out buggy, half-baked SW because “we’ll fix it with an OTA” and a recall has little to no direct financial impact, allowing for you to gamble lives on hopefully getting a SW update out before the bugs cause accidents or deaths, rather than spending the time/money to get it right from the start.

• Removing stuff like important, standard hard controls (buttons/stalks/etc) to make everything a touch control, purely for cost cutting, but acting like it’s because buttons are “old tech”

• Pushing that 100% BEV is the only current solution, rather than pushing for a far cheaper mass improvement of fuel economy and scaling BEVs as HEVs grow too, especially in developing markets.

• Using a proprietary charging standard for nearly a decade, solely as a sales tactic, and only cooperating with other OEMs once it allowed them to collect government subsidies

Those are just a few I can think of off the very top of my head, and the ones I’ve seen have the most impact on the broader industry. I can go into more detail on any of them as well.

As someone who works in the industry, and done plenty of work for Tesla, I can create a far greater list of all the things they’ve fucked up in the industry, including electrification.

Who’s the bottom pic?

Absolutely! It’s something people really don’t like thinking about, but end-of-life planning is super duper important. Create and regularly update your will, ensure you have beneficiaries listed for stuff like stock accounts, and leave very clear instructions (and ideally money) aside for how to act on them. Have a lawyer look over them as well to prevent any family bullshit from going on as well.

It was something like $9k to have my grandfather cremated and a small service for him. The funeral industry is even worse than the wedding industry at taking advantage of your time of emotional turmoil, and because even legally you’re kinda limited at what you can do with the body and you’re on a time crunch, shopping around isn’t exactly easy.

Given that servicemember funerals can be quite elaborate, and I’m sure that number also likely includes a number of other things like death benefits paid to the families, I can totally believe that cost.

The thing is that you don’t need FSD to do that. Having a really good AEB system massively improves safety, far more than a convenience feature like FSD does, but they fucked that up by taking the radar out so now it performs far worse at night, hence running over pedestrians and other VRUs far more often.

But you can’t grift billions out of investors by having a really good safety feature, so you hack together a system from hardware only ever originally only meant for adaptive cruise and lane keeping, and tech bros can show off on YouTube and hopefully not run over a cyclist, all to keep that grift rolling

This is legitimately one of the real reasons Musk is pushing for Trump so hard. NHTSA (and all the other regulatory agencies) were effectively gutted completely by the Trump admin and it’s basically the entire reason Elon could grift his way to where he is today. The moment Biden got into office, basically every single agency in existence began investigating him and pushing blocks out of the proverbial Jenga tower of the various Musk companies. He’s praying that Trump will get elected and allow him to keep grifting, because otherwise he’s almost definitely going to jail, or at a minimum losing the vast majority of his empire.

When you look at the regulatory environment and enforcement under the Trump admin, even before they were best buds, it’s very clear that Elon is absolutely terrified of a Harris administration. The moment Biden took office, he was almost instantly under investigation from basically every letter agency in the USA, and they’ve been slowly chipping away at his Jenga tower of fraud. He sees Trump as the only way to hold on to his ill-gotten gains and avoid a prison cell.

See: the cyborg soldier subplot of Metal Gear Rising: Revengence

Clearly you’ve never spent an hour+ on a bus with someone watching TikTok on a fucking Bluetooth speaker.

Just because it’s not publicly traded, doesn’t mean that there isn’t stock nor that there’s no market. Usually, you can technically still buy/sell the stock, just not as a random member of the public on a public stock exchange like the NYSE or FTSE.

Or just pull this fuse for the module?

Not to mention that 8lbs is still considered a horrendously high trigger pull. Glocks (what the NYPD carries) are already known for having kind of mediocre triggers, just due to the nature of their design. It’s literally heavier than even the double-action triggers on any of my guns, one of which is literally an old Italian police Beretta. At least then only the first shot is more difficult to fire

If you think that prevents this, you’re wrong. My company did the same thing, and when they announced RTO, people pointed out that they only had enough capacity for maybe 80% of the employees to fit. Management’s response? “I’ve seen empty desks in (other unrelated building on the other side of campus), I’m sure we’ll make it work”.

Don’t think that something silly like “physical space” or “maximum occupancy limits” will get in the way of a stupid decision.

Maybe it was just to wash down some Ambien.

Tallyho lads!

Yeah, that time is even moreso now because cars are far more complex and expensive as fuck now. Just the HVAC system alone on a modern luxury car probably has more components than the entirety of my old 1972 MG. You can bet your ass my friends find it very valuable when I can quickly fix stuff on their cars a dealership wanted to charge $1200 for.

Now just imagine how the hype is for literally everything they’ve ever done, and it’s on the exact same level. Once Tesla/Musk does something related to your field, it’s abundantly clear what an absolute fraud he is.

At least on my TV, I’ve had firmware updates enable things like variable refresh rate, enable 4K/120Hz, improve the dynamic contrast performance, and fix a couple of weird bugs it had shipped with.

I love that they literally took the plot from a King of the Hill episode satirizing government bureaucracy, and decided that would make for great government policy.