OpenAI, meanwhile, accused Musk of essentially being jealous that he was no longer involved in the startup, after he left OpenAI in 2018 following an unsuccessful bid to convince his fellow co-founders to let Tesla acquire it.
So a spoiled brat had a massive hissy fit after not getting his way? Yeah, that sounds like Elon alright.
Hard to say. Cars put out before the Model 3 were typically not sold at large quantities. So the lower runs were sold to rich people or fanboys at first and it’s hard to get an honest long term review about them.
From what I’ve seen though, their earlier cars weren’t filled with tech like the newer ones which meant less points of failure so I’m betting the older ones were at least somewhat better.
I've driven in a Model S from before the Model 3 came out (2015 or 2016, IIRC), and the build quality was worse than the Model 3.
Significantly worse than the Skoda Fabia I bought almost new for £12k at around the same time. That thing isn't flashy but man it's put together solidly. Nothing rattles, nothing wobbles, all stitching is consistent, no glued-on materials are peeling off, the panels line up consistently everywhere, the paint is thick. None of that was true for the Tesla.
Don't get me wrong, part of me enjoyed driving in that Model S, the acceleration was insane, but the build quality was absolutely appalling.
I thought it was just car reviewers who are used to high end Mercs, Bentleys, and BMWs, needlessly trashing Tesla, and that the build quality would be fine. But it wasn't, if anything they go way too easy on Tesla.
I would buy from a company that knows how to build cars already so the difference is mostly a new power train, not an entirely new product. That’s not to say Tesla, Lucid, or Rivian can’t build a good product, but there are more unknowns with them. As with any car, be careful buying the first model year.
I felt the same way but ended up going with a volvo anyway because Chinese Investment or not, the company does at least try to make an effort to be more safe, ethical, and sustainable. Given the alternatives I made the decision that volvo was still the right car for me.
Edit: why the downvotes? If I wanted to buy a car from the number one brand in my nation, I couldn’t right now. BYD isn’t selling cars in the US. Moreover, their presence in Europe is still small.
They downvote you because that's a very western-centric vision.
Additionally, a car manufacturer in one of your western nations, Volkswagen, is also one of the top EV manufacturers.
And nearly every other manufacturer like Hyundai, BMW, Mercedes and Ford are now making EVs too. So it's not like there's a shortage of non-Tesla EVs in the western.
All I’m saying that #1 is relative with car brands.
In Europe and the Americas, the Model Y is still king. By you’re right, VW group is catching up.
Right now BYD is killing it because they’re affordable and a brand that centered in the world’s largest auto market. Outside of China, BYDs numbers are very very different.
Yup, just going back to the root of this thread. As that article states, even in Australia, Telsa is still “comfortably deliver[ing] the most electric vehicles of any brand.”
I wouldn’t be shocked if that flips in the coming years. Telsa has a toxic CEO which is bad for marketing, and many people question their attention to detail. But, going back to my original point, Telsa is still the number 1 brand in western countries by a very large margin.
Not trying to be a Tesla fanboy - I’m in camp Volvo / Polestar. I’m just presenting the numbers. BYD is crushing it because of their domestic sales.
I have a Kona Electric but I think my next car will be either a Polestar 2 if I can afford it or an EX30. Volvo/Polestar are doing things extremely well
If you haven't, I would make sure you test drive a polestar 2. I personally wasn't impressed with the quality. And trust me. I really wanted to be. Just felt super super cheap
If BYD was available in the US (and i'm certain BYD is looking into how to get here, probably the same trick Renault tried with Saturn and ultimately Mitsubishi) they would probably saturate the market, because at the very least, they're affordable. Nobody in Detroit or Wolfsburg will make a cheap EV because Tesla spooked the market into being a luxury thing.
Renault tried it with AMC first and didn’t “succeed“ until merging with Nissan and then Mitsubishi as well. BYD should probably try to buy out them, or somehow license to Stellantis to give them small cars worth buying. I bet an EV Neon would sell if it was remotely affordable (I know, no new cars are affordable to younger drivers, even if it’s a cheap BYD underneath).
Volkswagen EVs are pretty crap though. Teslas are way above them even if VW is catching up. There's a reason why they fired a lot of C-level people and other execs in the software side last year.
The Ford Mach-E is excellent. I have also heard great things about Kia/Hyundai, VW and Volvo EVs as well.
In 2016 I drove a Tesla Model S P85D and I was surprised at how crappy the interior was considering it was a six figure car. And I don’t mean minimalist, I mean poor quality.
Back then, Tesla was you only real option. Today, there’s a lot of great competition in the market.
VW and Volvo both make some pretty bad EV's IME, they have a ton of software issues and the entire infotainment system is insanely slow and buggy, which is a big problem when thats the main interface to the car. The interior is also very low quality. But these are probably general issues for them though and not strictly their EVs.
Exactly. At the moment we're just watching the Tesla board grit their teeth and look worried. By the time they get around to Doing What Needs To Be Done, will it be too late?
Same for SpaceX. No one will ever give a shit about Twitter again already.
I really don’t like cases like this, nor do I like how much the legal system seems to be pushing “guilty by proxy” rulings for a lot of school shooting cases.
It just feels very very very dangerous and ’going to be bad’ to set this precedent where when someone commits an atrocity, essentially every person and thing they interacted with can be held accountable with nearly the same weight as if they had committed the crime themselves.
Obviously some basic civil responsibility is needed. If someone says “I am going to blow up XYZ school here is how”, and you hear that, yeah, that’s on you to report it. But it feels like we’re quickly slipping into a point where you have to start reporting a vast amount of people to the police en masse if they say anything even vaguely questionable simply to avoid potential fallout of being associated with someone committing a crime.
It makes me really worried. I really think the internet has made it easy to be able to ‘justifiably’ accuse almost anyone or any business of a crime if a person with enough power / the state needs them put away for a time.
I think the design of media products around maximally addictive individually targeted algorithms in combination with content the platform does not control and isn't responsible for is dangerous. Such an algorithm will find the people most susceptible to everything from racist conspiracy theories to eating disorder content and show them more of that. Attempts to moderate away the worst examples of it just result in people making variations that don't technically violate the rules.
With that said, laws made and legal precedents set in response to tragedies are often ill-considered, and I don't like this case. I especially don't like that it includes Reddit, which was not using that type of individualized algorithm to my knowledge.
Attempts to moderate away the worst examples of it just result in people making variations that don't technically violate the rules.
The problem then becomes if the clearly defined rules aren't enough, then the people that run these sites need to start making individual judgment calls based on...well, their gut, really. And that creates a lot of issues if the site in question could be held accountable for making a poor call or overlooking something.
The threat of legal repercussions hanging over them is going to make them default to the most strict actions, and that's kind of a problem if there isn't a clear definition of what things need to be actioned against.
There's nothing ambiguous about this. Give me a break. We're demanding that social media companies stop deliberately driving negativity and extremism to get clicks. This has fuck all to do with free speech. What they're doing isn't "free speech", it's mass manipulation, and it's very deliberate. And it isn't disclosed to users at any point, which also makes it fraudulent.
It's incredibly ironic that you're accusing people of an effort to control expression when that's literally what social media has been doing since the beginning. They're the ones trying to turn the world into a dystopia, not the other way around.
Bullshit. There's no slippery slope here. You act like these social media companies just stumbled onto algorithms. They didn't, they designed these intentionally to drive engagement up.
Demanding that they change their algorithms to stop intentionally driving negativity and extremism isn't dystopian at all, and it's very frustrating that you think it is. If you choose to do nothing about this issue I promise you we'll be living in a fascist nation within 10 years, and it won't be an accident.
This is the real shit right here. The problem is that social media companies' data show that negativity and hate keep people on their website for longer, which means that they view more advertisement compared to positivity.
It is human nature to engage with disagreeable topics moreso than agreeable topics, and social media companies are exploiting that for profit.
We need to regulate algorithms and force them to be open source, so that anybody can audit them. They will try to hide behind "AI" and "trade secret" excuses, but lawmakers have to see above that bullshit.
Unfortunately, US lawmakers are both stupid and corrupt, so it's unlikely that we'll see proper change, and more likely that we'll see shit like "banning all social media from foreign adversaries" when the US-based social media companies are largely the cause of all these problems. I'm sure the US intelligence agencies don't want them to change either, since those companies provide large swaths of personal data to them.
While this is true for Facebook and YouTube - last time I checked, reddit doesn't personalise feeds in that way. It was my impression that if two people subscribe to the same subreddits, they will see the exact same posts, based on time and upvotes.
Then again, I only ever used third party apps and old.reddit.com, so that might have changed since then.
It's probably not true anymore, but at the time this guy was being radicalized, you're right, it wasn't algorithmically catered to them. At least not in the sense that it was intentionally exposing them to a specific type of content.
I suppose you can think of the way reddit works (or used to work) as being content agnostic. The algorithm is not aware of the sorts of things it's suggesting to you, it's just showing you things based on subreddit popularity and user voting, regardless of what it is.
In the case of YouTube and Facebook, their algorithms are taking into account the actual content and funneling you towards similar content algorithmically, in a way that is unique to you. Which means at some point their algorithm is acknowledging "this content has problematic elements, let's suggest more problematic content"
(Again, modern reddit, at least on the app, is likely engaging in this now to some degree)
Mate, I never got the same homepage twice on my old reddit account. I dunno how you can claim that two people with identical subs would see the same page. That's just patently not true and hasn't been for years.
Quite simple, aniki. The feeds were ordered by hot, new, or top.
New was ORDER BY date DESC. Top was ORDER BY upvotes DESC. And hot was a slightly more complicated order that used a mixture of upvotes and time.
You can easily verify this by opening 2 different browsers in incognito mode and go to the old reddit frontpage - I get the same results in either. Again - I can't account for the new reddit site because I never used it for more than a few minutes, but that's definitely how they old one worked and still seems to.
Do you not think if someone encouraged a murderer they should be held accountable? It's not everyone they interacted with, there has to be reasonable suspicion they contributed.
Depends on what you mean by "encouraged". That is going to need a very precise definition in these cases.
And the point isn't that people shouldn't be held accountable, it's that there are a lot of gray areas here, we need to be careful how we navigate them. Irresponsible rulings or poorly implemented laws can destabilize everything that makes the internet worthwhile.
Literally no one suggested that end users should be arrested for jokes on the internet. Fuck off with your attempts at trying to distract from the real issue.
I didn’t say that at all, and I think you know I didn’t unless you really didn’t actually read my comment.
I am not talking about encouraging someone to murder. I specifically said that in overt cases there is some common sense civil responsibility. I am talking about the potential for the the police to break down your door because you Facebook messaged a guy you’re friends with what your favorite local gun store was, and that guy also happens to listen to death metal and take antidepressants and the state has deemed him a risk factor level 3.
I must have misunderstood you then, but this still seems like a pretty clear case where the platforms, not even people yet did encourage him. I don't think there's any new precedent being set here
Rulings often start at the corporation / large major entity level and work their way down to the individual. Think piracy laws. At first, only giant, clear bootlegging operations were really prosecuted for that, and then people torrenting content for profit, and then people torrenting large amounts of content for free - and now we currently exist in an environment where you can torrent a movie or whatever and probably be fine, but also if the criminal justice system wants to they can (and have) easily hit anyone who does with a charge for tens of thousands of dollars or years of jail time.
Will it happen to the vast majority of people who torrent media casually? No. But we currently exist in an environment where if you get unlucky enough or someone wants to punish you for it enough, you can essentially have this massive sentence handed down to you almost “at random”.
Sure, and I get that for like, healthcare. But ‘systemic solutions’ as they pertain to “what constitutes a crime” lead to police states really quickly imo
The article is about lawsuits. Where are you getting this idea that anyone suggested criminalizing people? Stop putting words in other people's mouths. The most that's been suggested in this thread is regulating social media algorithms, not locking people up.
Drop the melodrama and paranoia. It's getting difficult to take you seriously when you keep making shit up about other people's positions.
In her decision, the judge said that the plaintiffs may proceed with their lawsuit, which claims social media companies — like Meta, Alphabet, Reddit and 4chan — ”profit from the racist, antisemitic, and violent material displayed on their platforms to maximize user engagement,”
Also worth remembering, this opens up avenues for lawsuits on other types of "harm".
We have states that have outlawed abortion. What do those sites do when those states argue social media should be "held accountable" for all the women who are provided information on abortion access through YouTube, Facebook, reddit, etc?
This appears to be more the angle of the person being fed an endless stream of hate on social media and thus becoming radicalised.
What causes them to be fed an endless stream of hate? Algorithms. Who provides those algorithms? Social media companies. Why do they do this? To maintain engagement with their sites so they can make money via advertising.
And so here we are, with sites that see you viewed 65 percent of a stream showing an angry mob, therefore you would like to see more angry mobs in your feed. Is it any wonder that shit like this happens?
It's also known to intentionally show you content that's likely to provoke you into fights online
Which just makes all the sanctimonious screed about avoiding echo chambers a bunch of horse shit, because that's not how outside digital social behavior works, outside the net if you go out of your way to keep arguing with people who wildly disagree with you, your not avoiding echo chambers, you're building a class action restraining order case against yourself.
I’ve long held this hunch that when people’s beliefs are challenged, they tend to ‘dig in’ and wind up more resolute. (I think it’s actual science and I learned that in a sociology class many years ago but it’s been so long I can’t say with confidence if that’s the case.)
Assuming my hunch is right (or at least right enough), I think that side of social media - driving up engagement by increasing discord also winds up radicalizing people as a side effect of chasing profits.
It’s one of the things I appreciate about Lemmy. Not everyone here seems to just be looking for a fight all the time.
It depends on how their beliefs are challenged. Calling them morons won’t work. You have to gently question them about their ideas and not seem to be judging them.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Another commenter on this post suggested my belief on it was from an Oatmeal comic. That prompted me to search it out, and seeing it spelled out again sort of opened up the memory for me.
The class was a sociology class about 20 years ago, and the professor was talking about cognitive dissonance as it relates to folks choosing whether or not they wanted to adopt the beliefs of another group. I don’t think he got into how to actually challenge beliefs in a constructive way, since he was discussing how seemingly small rifts can turn into big disagreements between social groups, but subsequent life experience and a lot of good articles about folks working with radicals to reform their beliefs confirm exactly what you commented.
Nah. I picked that up about 20 years ago, but the comic is a great one.
I haven’t read The Oatmeal in a while. I guess I know what I’ll be doing later tonight!
Absolutely. Huge difference between hate speech existing. And funneling a firehose of it at someone to keep them engaged. It's not clear how this will shake out. But I doubt it will be the end of free speech. If it exists and you actively seek it out that's something else.
I dunno about social media companies but I quite agree that the party who got the gunman the gun should share the punishment for the crime.
Firearms should be titled and insured, and the owner should have an imposed duty to secure, and the owner ought to face criminal penalty if the firearm titled to them was used by someone else to commit a crime, either they handed a killer a loaded gun or they inadequately secured a firearm which was then stolen to be used in committing a crime, either way they failed their responsibility to society as a firearm owner and must face consequences for it.
This guy seems to have bought the gun legally at a gun store, after filling out the forms and passing the background check. You may be thinking of the guy in Maine whose parents bought him a gun when he was obviously dangerous. They were just convicted of involuntary manslaughter for that, iirc.
Well you were talking about charging the gun owner if someone else commits a crime with their gun. That's unrelated to this case where the shooter was the gun owner.
The lawsuit here is about radicalization but if we're pursuing companies who do that, I'd start with Fox News.
If you lend your brother, who you know is on antidepressants, a long extension cord he tells you is for his back patio - and he hangs himself with it, are you ready to be accused of being culpable for your brothers death?
Did he also use it as improvised ammunition to shoot up the local elementary school with the chord to warrant it being considered a firearm?
I'm more confused where I got such a lengthy extension chord from! Am I an event manager? Do I have generators I'm running cable from? Do I get to meet famous people on the job? Do I specialize in fairground festivals?
Knowingly manipulating people into suicide is a crime and people have already been found guilty of doing it.
So the answer is obvious. If you knowingly encourage a vulnerable person to commit suicide, and your intent can be proved, you can and should be held accountable for manslaughter.
That's what social media companies are doing. They aren't loaning you extremist ideas to help you. That's a terrible analogy. They're intentionally serving extreme content to drive you into more and more upsetting spaces, while pretending that there aren't any consequences for doing so.
Oh, it turns out an extension cord has a side use that isn't related to its primary purpose. What's the analogous innocuous use of a semiautomatic handgun?
Self defense? You don’t have to be a 2A diehard to understand that it’s still a legal object. What’s the “innocuous use” of a VPN? Or a torrenting client? Should we imprison everyone who ever sends a link about one of these to someone who seems interested in their use?
You're deliberately ignoring the point that the primary use of a semiautomatic pistol is killing people, whether self-defense or mass murder.
Should you be culpable for giving your brother an extension cord if he lies that it is for the porch? Not really.
Should you be culpable for giving your brother a gun if he lies that he needs it for self defense? IDK the answer, but it's absolutely not equivalent.
It is a higher level of responsibility, you know lives are in danger if you give them a tool for killing. I don't think it's unreasonable if there is a higher standard for loaning it out or leaving it unsecured.
“Sorry bro. I’d love to go target shooting with you, but you started taking Vynase 6 months ago and I’m worried if you blow your brains out the state will throw me in prison for 15 years”.
Besides, youre ignoring the point. This article isn’t about a gun, it’s about basically “this person saw content we didn’t make on our website”. You think that wont be extended to general content sent from a person to another? That if you send some pro-Palestine articles to your buddy and then a year or two later your buddy gets busted at an anti-Zionist rally and now you’re a felon because you enabled that? Boy, that would be an easy way for some hypothetical future administrations to control speech!!
You might live in a very nice bubble, but not everyone will.
So you need a strawman argument transitioning from loaning a weapon unsupervised to someone we know is depressed. Now it is just target shooting with them, so distancing the loan aspect and adding a presumption of using the item together.
This is a side discussion. You are the one who decided to write strawman arguments relating guns to extension cords, so I thought it was reasonable to respond to that. It seems like you're upset that your argument doesn't make sense under closer inspection and you want to pull the ejection lever to escape. Okay, it's done.
The article is about a civil lawsuit, nobody is going to jail. Nobody is going to be able to take a precedent and sue me, an individual, over sharing articles to friends and family, because the algorithm is a key part of the argument.
Yeah man. Even if you loan it to them you shouldn’t be charged.
Lmfao okay yeah sure man. No one is this year. See you in 10. I know it’s easy to want to retreat to kind of a naive “this would never happen to ME!” worldview, and yeah. It probably won’t. But you have to consider all the innocent people it unjustly will happen to in coming years.
Also, not what a strawman is. You’re not really good at this.
Also you still can’t respond to anything not related to guns. All those VPN and torrenting points went right over your head huh? Convenient. When you get busted for talking about how to store “several TB of photos” to some guy that turns out to be hoarding CP I hope the “assisted in preserving pedophilic content” charge rests easy on you
You're really deluded into thinking you're correct and that your strawmen are good arguments. "If we do anything at all about this, then extension cords will be illegal," really wet sobbing.
"If this civil lawsuit is allowed to proceed then we are already under 1984's Big Brother police state, they are coming for you," wild. Your imagination is a very frightening place. You feel threatened by so many things. Must be hard.
Why would I participate in your side quests? You like writing strawmen, have fun with it on your own.
“Why would I participate in a conversation about the very real slippery slope of vague, easily exploited criminal rulings? That way I would have to think about it.”
"Vague" "easily exploited" "criminal" all doing a lot of work here, but it's good that you recognize your own words are a slippery slope fallacy surrounded by strawmen.
So frightened. I hope you can get some help and feel better.
Holy fuck dude, go back to Reddit if all you can do is quote the “logical fallacies!!!” Infographic you have saved in your terabytes of photos. I can (and have) engage with other people who actually want to talk about complex issues here without you
Hold up, let's get this straight: you're accusing me of redditor behavior, but this discussion has enraged you so much that you went looking through the comment history for anything you could possibly use as an ad hominem? Sometimes it is absolutely the case that every accusation is a confession.
I think the distinction here is between people and businesses. Is it the fault of people on social media for the acts of others? No. Is it the fault of social media for cultivating an environment that radicalizes people into committing mass shootings? Yes. The blame here is on the social medias for not doing more to stop the spread of this kind of content. Because yes even though that won't stop this kind of content from existing making it harder to access and find will at least reduce the number of people who will go down this path.
I agree, but I want to clarify. It's not about making this material harder to access. It's about not deliberately serving that material to people who weren't looking it up in the first place in order to get more clicks.
There's a huge difference between a user looking up extreme content on purpose and social media serving extreme content to unsuspecting people because the company knows it will upset them.
Is it the fault of social media for cultivating an environment that radicalizes people into committing mass shootings? Yes.
Really? Then add videogames and heavy metal to the list. And why not most organized religions? Same argument, zero sense. There's way more at play than Person watches X content = person is now radicalized, unless we're talking about someone with severe cognitive deficit.
And since this is the US... perhaps add easy access to guns? Nah, that's totally unrelated.
"Person watches X creative and clearly fictional content" is not analogous in any way to "person watches X video essay crafted to look like a documentary, but actually just full of lies and propaganda"
I don't think you understand the issue. I'm very disappointed to see that this is the top comment. This wasn't an accident. These social media companies deliberately feed people the most upsetting and extreme material they can. They're intentionally radicalizing people to make money from engagement.
They're absolutely responsible for what they've done, and it isn't "by proxy", it's extremely direct and deliberate. It's long past time that courts held them liable. What they're doing is criminal.
The algorithms themselves. This decision opens the algorithms up to discovery and now we get to see exactly how various topics are weighted. These companies will sink or swim by their algorithms.
I do. I just very much understand the extent that the justice system will take decisions like this and utilize them to accuse any person or business (including you!) of a crime that they can then “prove” they were at fault for.
This wasn't just a content issue. Reddit actively banned people for reporting violent content too much. They literally engaged with and protected these communities, even as people yelled that they were going to get someone hurt.
And ironically the gun manufacturers or politicians who support lax gun laws are not included in these “nets”. A radicalized individual with a butcher knife can’t possibly do as much damage as one with a gun.
The emails appeared to show Musk acknowledging the need for the company to make large sums of money to fund the computing resources needed to power its AI ambitions, which stood in contrast to the claims in his lawsuit that OpenAI was wrongly pursuing profit.
I think the news is that he's dropping his lawsuit, and the emails (which are old news in the tech press) are the presumed reason he's dropping the lawsuit.
Problem is the entire concept of a site like reddit being "for profit" in the first place.
I know we all wax nostalgic about the old non-centralized Internet with its various small websites and forums, but one thing I do genuinely miss from those days was that those places existed because the people running them wanted them to exist. They had ads or took donations to keep the lights on, but no one was looking to get rich. Passion, not profit.
The decentralized internet was run more by people, the centralized internet is run by board rooms.
That's why I like the idea of the fediverse. That is why this place feels familiar to those early days.
I still remember clicking a bunch of irrelevant ads for knives and other weird shit on a forum I visited regularly because the owner said they get slightly more money when ads get clicked on site.
Ads don’t even bother me inherently. It’s part the maximum obnoxiousness of them these days, of course. But most of all, if I do manage to see an ad (like in a mobile app), I get irrationally annoyed at the fact that it is supposed to be tailored to me and yet here I am looking at a 20 second unskippable ad for something I would never in a million years care for.
The "old internet" hasn't gone away. It's easier than ever for your average person to set up their own website. Look at all the shit you can do with WordPress, usually for free and usually with minimal technical knowledge or experience. Reddit/Facebook/Google/etc have done nothing at all to prevent people from doing that. The people still choose reddit/Facebook/google. I don't know we're supposed to change that without actually removing people's freedom of choice.
The people still choose reddit/Facebook/google. I don't know we're supposed to change that without actually removing people's freedom of choice.
In my opinion/experience, it's for a few reasons. People are marketed these centralized platforms, typically they're very/fairly simple to use, and those platforms already have an established userbase. Combined with the other factors, the userbase will keep growing, which also incentivizes Even more users to adopt the platform.
For most people, there's no incentive to use some small random forum. And these small random forums aren't typically run for profit, meaning people aren't paying for ads for their niche forum or hobby website because it's just a hobby, not a business run for profit. Whereas people will see countless ads for Instagram or TikTok. Typically, people who don't block ads, and use these sorts of media didn't care enough to bother looking for alternative platforms, they couldn't even be bothered to set up an adblocker.
There was a simple version of reddit that could be profitable without compromising what made it enjoyable for the users, but the suits had to go chasing after a bunch of fads (remember bow they tries to produce a series of video AMAs?).
I have no qualms with a person making a comfortable living off of building a website like Reddit. None at all. I’d rather have someone who’s able to dedicate their full time and even a team to making an experience great for users and making a very healthy living off of it.
But yea, spez is a greedy fuck and the ELT at Reddit are all greedy fucks. Reddit has no business being a publicly traded company.
What I'd really love to see more of is tech co-ops and unions.
With the current wave of corporate tech layoffs, I'm seriously surprised I'm not seeing more movement on the tech unions. Not so surprised I'm not seeing many co-ops since that business model is rarely used, but really should be invested into by more smaller tech shops. Additionally, unless you're an AI startup or some other buzz-tech startup trying to grift the trend wave, the investor money has mostly dried up outside of a few people that have actual knowledge in the space and understand that there needs to be more diversity in the tech space or else innovation stifles.
If you have money you'll make money. It's all bullshit. Valuation and stocks and trends... It's all made up nonsense created to make sure the rich remain rich and Walmart employees remain on food stamps. Why we aren't constantly protesting or better yet destroying this system is beyond me. I guess the bulk of you assume one day you'll benefit from this system of suffering so you keep it in place just in case. Fuck.
Because people take the easy way out. They keep their head down and repeat a few lines they heard Hasan say in between piss breaks where he plays someone else's video in its entirety and think they are heroes. Oh, maybe they voted for Bernie.
And.. that does jack all. On the off chance labor DOES manage to unite, you get the usual outcome which is people getting pissy that they can't get a coffee at their local starbucks or angry they have to use the back door to the building. Not to mention people constantly attacking labor themselves (remember how everyone insisted it was rogue fedex drivers stealing their PS5s? All while ignoring that the logistics of doing that when you are monitored to the point of needing to piss in a gatorade bottle while driving...)
And no, Bernie 2016 was not the solution either. He would have been the most ineffective president in the history of the US because congress would have stopped everything he tried.
No, the answer is... what the republicans are doing. No, not insurrection and terrorism and giving out handjobs in between visits from child prostitutes. Actually giving a shit about the entire ballot. Getting people on school boards and in county and state governments. Because a "grass roots" campaign to elect the top seat does almost nothing. A "grass roots" campaign to... actually grow some grass leads to change.
But it is so much easier to just talk about how liberals and democrats are truly the source of all problems and how engaging in the system at all is a fool's errand (and supporting Xinnie The Poo and Putin in the process) than it is to actually get involved with your local democrats (or even similarly aligned third parties) to actually push for the candidates who represent you.
Your solution to rampant economic inequality is ... campaign and vote downballot.
I mean, sure, that's a great idea, but your argument essentially boils down to combating apathy (which isn't a new or unique problem), and I guess attacking a hypothetical Sanders administration that never happened because--I dunno, you just wanted to get a jab in at voters who were actually motivated about a candidate for once in a lifetime? Well, good news for you; all the Sanders supporters are back to voting defensively until their kids grow up, if they vote at all. Does that feel like a win to you?
People aren't "taking the easy way out" by not voting the entire ballot. In fact, split-ticket voting is down historically, at least as of 2020, across both parties. Blaming people for not devoting their lives to political activism is akin to blaming minimum wage workers for not walking out: Yeah, maybe things would be better if they did, but people have to survive. Choosing to use what little spare time one has with family instead of participating in local politics isn't a moral failure, and it's not the easy way out. It's just rational. People have limited time and limited means, and there are more important things than who gets to be the constable next year.
Thanks for reiterating why there are no revolts or even regular protests
Because, when faced with the actual solution that is already demonstrably effective, you:
Complain you didn't get a nonsensical magic solution.
Say you are busy and people should be ashamed of calling things out
But hey. I'm sure you'll make time to bring food to a striking workforce or bust a cop in the face after you get pepper sprayed and shot at. Just so long as it isn't a new episode of young Sheldon
I honestly just think it's ignorance and/or plain idiocy. One of my closest friends who's not dumb by any means, bought a home with his gf when homes were highly overvalued but loan rates were still on a record low (European country). I asked him if it was really such a good idea and if they couldn't just rent or keep living seperately for a while longer - but no.
Well, when everything caught up and their rate doubled all of a sudden it's hard to make their economy work (luckily they get by and are both educated but the rates can't go much higher before shit hits the fan).
He later had to get a new car and could barely afford a 20yo used car and complained that it's hard to have money left after all costs of living and I, like a good (bad?) friend, discreetly (not very much) brought up the fact that I "told him so". His response was "yes I know but those are the rules we just have to play by and it's out of our control".
You do know rent is just someone with a mortgage on a house too right? (Paid off or not)
And if that landlords mortgage goes up, that will also make the rent they charge go up. ( Often far more than the rent, as it's percentage related. So, if your friend was renting, he'd be even worse off...
Firstly, apartment complexes and the likes are usually owned by bigger companies with more leverage when negotiating loan rates compared to individuals. Secondly, renting a small apartment while holding on to their down payment money / saving even more is clearly gonna be cheaper than buying a 2 bedroom home in the middle of a city.
I want to destroy it so bad. But my kids are able to sleep peacefully and night and have full bellies. Will the power vacuum we create ensure that survives? Even if I don't?
Help me organize against citizens united and I'll follow you into the 10 hells. Until then, its just me versus the capitalists that control my life. Thats the mode we all exist in right now. Because I really do know that doing nothing curses them.
We can destroy it but that's also discomfort. Your quality of life will likely go down, and if not you, for many as this battle ensues.
I bet you, like me, enjoy leaving the stress of work behind at the end of the day and turning on Netflix, or whatever your vice is, instead of skipping work, and my extension your pay, and not being able to afford the comfort of eating a dinner and watching Netflix after work.
Not everyone is at a point they're infuriated enough to revolt. A revolution is the only way anything is going to change.
This is my opinion, but I think protest is worthless unless the people protesting show that they are willing to give up somethingsomething important to get what they want. I don't think we'll make progress until people are willing to give up the status quo for a better future. The mind hates uncertainty, so even shitty future that's predictable is more desirable than a possible better, but uncertain future.
The middle class came into existence because people that would never be a part of it were willing to give their lives for it. Many did. If we are not willing to sacrifice our safety and secure future for a better life we may never experience, we will make no progress.
The reason people aren’t protesting in not some fantasy that they’ll benefit from it one day but that they will fall under the weight of capitalism’s heavy hand if they get recorded protesting and get fired or get a sick day and get fired and lose everything. The reason that the wealthy don’t want a safety net is not just because they hate the poor (they do) but because they have control over a population of workers who live in fear of the economic meat grinder. The system is so much more cynical and cruel than I would have imagined possible.
The answer is simpler: things arent bad enough. Also, nobody is protesting because everyone is sitting around wondering why nobody else is protesting rather than going out and protesting.
"You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it."
The stock market, much like capitalism in general, is useful if regulated properly, but the inherent corrosive nature of human greed on any regulatory system will eventually erode those regulations down and let this shit run rampant. There are genuine benefits to it, but they're buried beneath the sheer scale of wealth begetting more wealth at the expense of everyone else.
Part of it is that, to spite it being "gambling", it sure doesn't feel like there's a lot of losing going on with the biggest players. They don't seem to need to be as careful as you or I would need to be. It'd be one thing if it was fair gambling, but it isn't.
Every decision made since before the first world war has been a mistake for humanity, from the way we deliver electricity to the way we run the economy to the way we run our education system. Just one big ball of mistakes coming right at ya, all with better alternatives available at the outset, all prejudicially rejected because you can't make dragon-hoard piles of money those ways.
Pretty soon we'll all die though, so there's that.
the only ideology compatible with any company is capitalism. Do you think companies that make EVs do it for the greater good of the planet? No, they do it for profit.
If Tesla gets rids of Musk it will be because he's making the other shareholders loose money.
I'd argue we're at the point where that would be a good business move too. It wouldn't fix my main issue of but allowing 3rd party repairs so I wouldn't buy one, but I know several people who have bought other brands due to Elon.
I'm not one of those people who will say Musk has done nothing for Tesla. The entire market wouldn't have gone as quickly towards EVs without his leadership. No other company would have been (or has been) as aggressive on self-driving technologies, and he has pushed the entire market to try to keep up. They wouldn't be where they are today without him.
But now he's just a liability. He does just as much harm as he does good. Unless you see coal rollers out there buying Teslas to show fealty to new, alt-right Musk (and I don't), I can't see what he's continuing to provide to Tesla.
As someone from the US, a hearty thank you to Europeans. Not all of these will directly benefit me, but some of it will. Also, Apple has to be so fucking mad that they can't keep their app store monopoly, even if just in Europe.
Don't know who you mean by 'us regulars', but normal people don't have the power, the guts is irrelevant. Only a few countries or organisations have that: The EU, USA, UK, China, and maybe a few others I have missed. The others besides the EU in that list don't have the 'guts', as you put it, but the rest don't have the power, even if they wanted to.
Maybe it's just my UK-centricity, but it seems to me that the UK does have quite a large effect on various markets. Of course, the effect was strongest when it was still part of the EU, but it still has 70m people, a non insignificant number, as well as historical ties.
They aren't mad about the app store. All they did was just create a separate pay structure for non apple app store apps which effectively makes it impossible to afford to create a successful app outside their ecosystem. Those pieces of shit probably feel pretty smugly proud of themselves for flouting the regulation, but I hope the EU brings the hammer down much harder because they clearly are trying to get around the entire point of the regulation.
Their attempt to maliciously comply is both against the spirit of the law - making it a violation in the EU regardless - and the letter of the law: the text mentions that they can't charge for this.
Time for a nice 10% of global revenues-fine. That'll do some good in the coffers of the EU.
Oh I so hope you are dead on here. It would be an incredible step forward for modern society. Our world revolves around this tech and it's about time someone stopped the low hanging fruit aspects of how it's corrupt.
Man, if we discover some cancer killing thing and a time machine that can go back it time the first thing I would do would be to help Steve Jobs get better, literally apple just got worse and worse when the "innovator" got replaced by the "logistics and finance" guy
Just look at how Steve did things, if he was confronted with this problem he would probably just do it android style and not screw over people like Timmy does
I fundamentally believe what Apple has become is the inevitable consequences of a company being successful under capitalism. For one thing we see this with all of them not just Apple. Apple just goes to excessive lengths to fuck people over for a couple extra bucks
You are correct, and to this day if he hasn't his family's money, i guess he wouldn't be as successful, I mean all.those bad decisions would made a small business going into the red really fast.
He sold the shares, why should Tesla reimburse him for his folly? If he wants to have those shares back, he can rebuy them on the open market, just like anybody else would do.
Yeah that's most most sci-fi dystopian article I've read in a while.
The line where one of the people waiting to get their eyes scanned is well eye opening " I don't care what they do with the data, I just want the money", this is why they want us poor, so we need money so badly that we will impatiently hand over everything that makes us.
But we already happily hand over our DNA genome to private corporations, so what's an eye scan gonna do......
I can feel the disgust of the car being related to Elon Musk, but at least the newer Teslas are actually great cars. Not sure where this idea of poor quality comes from. My previous car was a Toyota and I don't really miss it at all.
When I was making my choice of an EV, Polestars were too expensive and the Hyundais were too synthwave and gray. Volkswagens were shit. Tesla was practically the only choice.
I do hope there will be more serious competition the next time I have to choose. But I'm hoping I won't have to make that choice in at least 5 years.
Tesla cars also have notoriously poor build quality, especially for the price; if you must buy an electric car, at this point, as far as I can tell, Hyundai cars are much better built. (Of course, we do need to remember that electric cars do not solve the problem of car dependency.)
He created a massive failure with a cult following? Because that's what the PT cruiser was. The difference with the cybertruck being that it won't sell to rental companies on account of the price.
“It was a novelty car, and like all novelty items the enthusiasm faded,” says Keenan Mayo, associate editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, who wrote an obituary of sorts for the Cruiser. “The only people who were really buying it for much of the last decade were the rental car companies because it was cheap.”
The PT Cruiser was more or less a Dodge Neon with a funny looking body shell on top, meaning engineering cost to bring it to market was pretty minimal.
The Cybertruck is... pretty much the opposite of that. Tesla has spent literally years trying to get the thing to market meaning it's failure will be far more painful than PT Cruiser sales tapering off was for Chrysler.
If they could get someone boring like Tim Apple Cook, that just runs the company very well and profitably... Tesla would be sitting pretty good with their dominant place in the Electric market. The only reason most people dont pick tesla for an EV is literally Elon.
Unfortunately, idiot Elon gets his grubby fingers ALL OVER every last piece of tech in the Tesla. It’s ALL shoddily engineered because of him. Like simple, time tested engineering concepts like redundancy? Elon would fire you. He eliminated redundancy in their FSD, choosing to rely solely on computer vision and machine learning. He literally had a good design for the sensor modules and got rid of it. Tim Cook doesn’t sabotage Apple’s engineering team like that.
The lidar removal really pissed me off. At best, a Tesla can "see" as well as the human driver. It seems to me that half of the point of using a computer to drive a vehicle should be that it can easily access sensors that us meat bags don't have access to.
Plus the stupid central instrument cluster in Model 3s and Model Ys is beyond idiotic.
The problem with Tesla is the problem Apple had for many years: Your CEO is the reason for the stock price. Apple had a plan for succession that saved them in the end, and they've never been better. Tesla has nothing. They are basically a carbon credit company run by a sycophant, and without Elon, they are nothing but a carbon credit company. If he departs, the stock price will crater/adjust.
Last time we had a CEO get fired because they were bad was the OpenAI fiasco and that proved that we no longer live in reality, because Sam was back in a week.
Apple had a plan, but Apple also had the iPhone and the MacBook. Literally the best smartphones and laptops you can buy.
Tesla does have the best EVs and, in the US, charging network. I think saying "tesla has nothing" is a bit disingenuous. Outside of China, no company is even close to Tesla.
Custom AI silicon designed by the designer of Apple's M1 chip. It's designed for training. They are about to scale it massively to create the Dojo supercomputer. They look to be on par with NVidia on performance/$. No small feat, and means they arent reliant on NVidia
They have custom inferrence chips used in all of their cars and their android robot. It gets fantastic performance per watt. My 5 year old car has first-gen inferrence chips and it's still getting better with software... meaning it hasnt reached its potential. The latest chip design is probably much better, but I dont know much about it
They have possibly the best humanoid hands and arms that will work with this AI goodness.
Their walking and navigation is looking to be top notch... We'll see
FSD really is incredible. I drive with it and it improves every year.
Tesla solar is still a thing. The model 3 kinda derailed development a while back and it never really recovered. I think competitors are doing well and Tesla sees better returns on their other projects. Tesla needs to bring down their Solar prices which they just dont seem to be doing. Im guessing they dont want to scale manufacturing yet.
They have some of the largest casting machines on the planet and press out the frames of their cars for far cheaper than their competition can stamp and weld theirs. Stellantis and Toyota are adopting this manufactiring strategy as fast as they can, but they are a year or maybe 2 behind. I suspect Ford, VW and GM are adopting this too.
Tesla factory floors are much more efficient at iterating and improving. Their in-house software for managing workers and workflow development are unique to Tesla.
Just look at the efficient packaging of their HVAC system after dozens of iterations every year for a couple years. It's by far the best HVAC in the car world.
They have developed a lithium clay extraction process that vastly reduces chemical waste and water usage. They're still 5 or so years out from implementing this in even a small capacity and clay extraction isnt guaranteed to be superior to spodumene. I expect the efforts they're putting to this will pay off in 15 years.
They own lithium clay rights in Nevada where some of the richest Lithium clay deposits are. I think theyre doing permitting for mining, which will probably take to the end of the decade. Mining's crazy
They offer the best price for grid-scale batteries and are growing that business faster than their cars grew. Hawaii just replaced their last coal peaker plant with Tesla batteries. California and Australia are saving a lot of money with them. The batteries pay for themselves when used to replace peaker plants and stuff to maintain frequency.
They are growing so-called virtual power plants and have been doing extremely well in a few test locations in Texas, Australia and Puerto Rico. I think the UK too?
After funding and working with the inventor of the lithium battery's team they've been getting first looks at new battery chemistry. The thick walls of their 4680 are designed with adding silicon in mind. I suspect theyre testing this out at Kato road production facility.
They've collected a bunch of battery manufacturing patents over the years and their dry-electrode process is providing very good economics. Getting them to scale has been excruciatingly slow, but they're about to triple capacity this year in Texas and I think are starting development of another iteration of their 4680 battery production process at their Kato road facility right now.
They are on track for becoming a top-three battery manufacturer by the end of the decade.
GM and Ford's battery packs are like 5 years behind tesla's. Tesla packs more battery in less volume using less weight with better thermals and ridgidity. Their packs are a lot cheaper to produce too.
Tesla claims they have a ferro magnet motor in development. We'll see. If so, watch out for very cheap electric cars with no rare-earths or cobalt
They just signed deals with BP and an another conglomerate to sell chargers for the other business' charging infrastructure. More volume means cheaper manufacturing for their own charging stations too.
All cars will soon have the NACS plug so everyone will be able to charge at a Tesla station... Which is the largest and most reliable charging network in the world.
Battery prices keep falling. Gas cars are going to have to compete with cheaper electric by the end of the decade. Tesla isnt competing with other electric car makers so much as it's competing with fossil fuels. Electric will win this. The faster the better
Elon has contributed to these only in a "we're gonna fund these wild ideas!" Way. Like Edison. He's smart and avoided bad projects and embraced fast failing to great success... Things are maturing and I dont think there's much value to get from Elon...
Tesla will be fine without Elon. I'd argue better.
The only fear of Elon leaving would be big oil investors buying control and derailing things... I dont think that'll happen though. I think enough investors are in it specifically to eliminate fossil fuel dependency.
The fear of Elon staying is he drags Tesla into his edgelord bullshit and uses it to dick over the world as hard as he and some dictator/billionaire friends can... Which seems more likely
After he derailed the CA bullet train with his hyperloop hyperbole and joked on twitter abould the Bolivian coup, I dont trust his ass one bit.
Tesla's lofty stock price is to some extent based on hype, and Musk being credited (far too much imo) for the company's success. If he did leave the stock price would come down to something more sensible, which at least short-term would make shareholders unhappy. But yeah leaving him in charge after what he did to Twitter must also be causing sleepless nights.
There's good reason to believe that Tesla is an Enron-esque style fraud. No one in charge has shown any business acumen, and no one can explain how it is actually profitable. But that requires only stooges and yes-men on the board. There cannot be any accountability.
Every time I leave my house, I see dozens of Teslas driving around. If they're not profitable, then they're horrifically bad at making money. They're ubiquitous. Pretty impressive market penetration for a business run by people who don't know what they're doing.
Yeah but in their cases the "hustle" got them the funds to move into their current space. Musk just had so much money that Tesla outlasted all the red it was in. Same thing going on with Twitter.
We all know it'll never fully go under, he has too much money for it too. It'll last long enough to sooner or later come back up.
That depends on how bullshit the numbers really are. If it is just Jack Welch level of financial shenanigans, you can see a stump version of the company eventually surviving. If it is worse than that, then probably not.
and no one can explain how it is actually profitable.
Hang on a sec, its publicly trade company. Its pretty easy to see how its profitable especially compared to other legacy automakers.
Tesla vs Ford numbers:
On the other hand, "let’s look at Tesla and the Model 3. Tesla is aiming for 25% gross margin on the Model 3 and mid-teens profit margin (let’s say 14%). The average price of the Model 3 is projected at around $42,000... [so] the average gross margin on a Model 3 would be $10,500 and profit margin would be $5,880. Compared to Ford’s average vehicle profit margin of $1,100, the Model 3 would be 5x as profitable." source
Disclaimer: the source is from March of 2023 and Tesla has cut prices (which means less profit) since then, but they had a lot of room to do so with so much profit per car.
So one could say that Tesla has been able to charge a premium for a cheaper car, or they've been able to reduce manufacturing cost for a moderately priced car. Both result in high margin returns for the company.
They have a direct sales model which is more expensive to operate and exaggerates profit margin. There’s also reason to believe they are wildly understating warranty costs plus ignoring R&D costs. People who look closely have consistently concluded that Tesla cannot really be making money, or have very narrow profit margins at best.
Huge price cuts will compound these problems dramatically.
They have a direct sales model which is more expensive to operate and exaggerates profit margin.
How would adding a middleman that also has to make profit make the company earn less? Wouldn't direct sales allow Tesla to sell for a higher price because they can sell at retail instead of a "wholesale" cost normally sold to a dealership?
People who look closely have consistently concluded that Tesla cannot really be making money, or have very narrow profit margins at best.
I'd be interested in reading more on this assertion. Do you have a source you can point me to?
You have to build the entire system out yourself. That costs a lot of money. The dealership model also costs the manufacturer basically zero dollars, because it really profits on used car sales and maintenance works. You don't make anymore money by having your own dealerships. The whole argument that there's some secret behind Tesla's business smacks of gaslighting, not something that actually holds up to reason.
It's been a long standing issue with Tesla's accounting. No one can really explain how profits are actually being generated going back years, especially considering everyone in the West is losing money on EVs. It's also being ran entirely by sycophants and people with minimal qualifications, with zero accountability anywhere. So it just seems, via Occam's razor, that they're cooking the books.
You still have to pay out warranty work either way. Someone has to fix it after all.
There are many people who have made the claim that Tesla doesn’t really make money. You can google it up. Just look for stuff like “tesla profits” or “tesla not profitable” and you see it. Also, the only people who do vigorously insistent that Tesla is profitable are the fanboy investors and some of the least credible analysts out there. It screams gaslighting no matter how you look at all.
You still have to pay out warranty work either way. Someone has to fix it after all.
Yes, but if you're paying a dealer, they need to be paid to make it worth their while. Manufacturers using dealers are essentially hiring an outside company for the work. This would contrast very differently with a direct sales company that simply has its own employees doing the work. A direct sales company doesn't need to "profit" from the effort put into its warranty work.
There are many people who have made the claim that Tesla doesn’t really make money.
Then what, Tesla owns their own repair and maintenance service? That also costs money.
Ultimately, you’re going to accept that there’s no way around some of the cost of running a car company. If you won’t accept it, then there’s nothing I can say to change your mind.
Also, most of the numbers can’t be trusted. It’s known as “regulatory capture.” And they’re probably not the only one. Likely many companies have doctored accounting numbers these days. If anything, this is a huge problem in business today.
Also, most of the numbers can’t be trusted. It’s known as “regulatory capture.” And they’re probably not the only one. Likely many companies have doctored accounting numbers these days. If anything, this is a huge problem in business today.
This is not accurate at all.
This is not what regulatory capture is
PWC is massively incentivized to catch any fraud by Tesla/Musk
Then you live in on another planet. Or at least another decade. Regulatory capture is everywhere these days, and PWC is 100% motivated to hide any fraud. In fact, pretty much all accounting firms are motivated to do so. I'd rather believe every major accounting firm is guilty of aiding some kind of accounting fraud than the reverse.
Your understanding of the term is incorrect. I am definitely using it correctly. And you are definitely wrong about PWC, plus any other accounting firm on Earth.
But I think it is clear that your mind is made up. If you won't believe me, then I won't press any further.
Regulatory capture is anytime that special interests have overridden the enforcement agencies' desire to protect the public. That can also apply to accounting firms. So yes, it is correct.
There's no reason for them to conduct audits honestly. Again, if you are totally convinced that what I described is impossible, just let me know. We can end this conversation now.
Not OP but regarding sources, there's a group referred to as "TSLAQ" (Q referring to a letter typically added to bankrupt stock symbols, but they're not entirely free of conspiratorial thinking) that's been critical of TSLA and others including David Einhorn who have criticized their accounting practices. I've not had time to look much into it myself but see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Tesla,_Inc.#Accounting
Here's the section for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
=
In 2017, a lawsuit alleged Tesla made materially false and misleading statements regarding its preparedness to produce Model 3 cars. The U. S. Department of Justice also began an investigation in 2018 into whether Tesla misled investors and misstated production figures about the Model 3. The lawsuit was dismissed in Tesla's favor in March 2019.
cnn.com
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