There were of course other people at Tesla- smart people who made lots of good choices.

I’m simply pointing out that your initial assertion (that other people made most of the good decisions, Elon showed up after those decisions were made and took credit) is demonstrably false, given that pre-Elon the company was proceeding down an ultimately failed engineering path.

With respect- I have been following Tesla closely since the original Roadster was first in development. Your statement is not correct.

When Tesla started, Elon was one of the first, and biggest, investors. A man named Martin Eberhard was one of the team, he was put in charge of Tesla and wrote a blog that I read religiously. The original Roadster, under Eberhard, had a two-speed gearbox- no clutch, just a synchromesh. This would allow one to select either rocket fast acceleration in first gear, or higher top speed in second gear.
The gearbox however became a significant source of problems. Making a gearbox work at 16,000 RPM is difficult, getting one that shifts under load at 16,000 RPM and will last for 100k miles (without costing a fortune) is a real challenge. And while not impossible, it’s not something that had been done cost effectively for a vehicle before. So Tesla went through several gearbox designs and multiple suppliers trying to make one that was cost-effective and reliable. Demo cars were loaned to reviewers, locked in 2nd gear so they wouldn’t shift.

After the 3rd or 4th attempt at the gearbox and a year plus worth of delays, Elon took over Tesla. Eberhard was pushed out. He was salty about that and for a while wrote a blog called ‘Tesla Founders’ which was critical of Tesla. As I recall there was a small legal dispute, it was solved and Tesla/Eberhard went their separate ways.

Anyway, Elon took over at Tesla, and one of his first orders was delete the shifting gearbox, use a simple non-shifting reduction gear (inexpensive and lasts more or less forever if you keep it lubricated), and make the motor bigger to provide more torque. The result was the Roadster. Model S, the luxury production sedan, followed. Then Model X, luxury production SUV, Then Model 3, mainstream sedan, and Model Y, mainstream SUV. All under Elon, as the company grew from a ‘might not make it’ startup to one of the biggest automakers.

I say you’re incorrect because all the ‘good decisions’ Tesla made in the beginning were under Elon, NOT Eberhard.

Go test drive one and you’ll understand. Seriously.

Cars are pretty much the same, EVs are a different animal. No shifting, instant torque, full torque at all speeds. A Tesla SUV can out-accelerate many gas-driven sports cars. You put the hammer down on the highway and you’ve got instant 1st-gear-level acceleration.

The US govt has a responsibility to keep the PetroDollar in tact since Nixon killed the gold standard, otherwise the global dependency on USD is no longer maintained and other currencies have a chance to replace it.

This 100%.

US Govt is propped up on debt. We have no financial discipline today and none is anywhere in sight. If our currency loses value we’re mega-fucked.

If petrodollar goes away, our currency loses a lot of credibility. And we are doing everything possible to ensure that everyone involved wants nothing to do with us.

Great strategy :)

This is nonsense. Pedophiles are attracted to PRE-pubescent children, like 0-12 years old.

We have a cabal of hebephiles (11-14yo) and ebephiles (15-19yo) running our country. And they don’t bomb poor defenseless countries, they bomb heavily defended countries that have military control of vital trade corridors and nuclear response capability. And they’re not just bombing those countries to distract people from the money they’re stealing, it’s also to distract people from demanding the release of documents proving they all signed up to rape early-teenaged girls.

Trust me, this is MUCH better this way :P

What a bunch of crazy talk. Next I bet you’re going to say something REALLY batshit, like we should stop offshoring all our manufacturing to China and build stuff here in USA, right?

Jokes aside- you’re quite right, but with one issue- making solar panels has a chemical environmental impact. If China wants to trash their environment to build our solar panels cheap, let them. Other than that I 100% agree we should be buying the tech and setting up our own manufacturing lines.

You can’t think that way. Just understand that building clean infrastructure is too difficult and too expensive and will take too long. The electric car is always 10 years away.

(Like the dude or not- this is something you gotta give Elon Musk credit for-- before Tesla the electric car was perpetually ‘10 years away’, Tesla actually went and built one, and a whole fast charging network, with the intended goal of embarrassing other automakers into producing their own EVs and chargers. It worked, and I truly believe without Tesla we’d still be hearing that the electric car is only 10 years away.)

But for real, as a Freedom-loving American- it pisses me off because the sooner we start the sooner we’ll be finished, and then from a national security POV we are MUCH better off as we aren’t depending on shithole sandbox countries with religious dictatorships to provide our fuel.

Oh hi there fellow citizen with no connection at all to the government!

I’m at 123 Fake St, Nowheresville AL, 12345. Feel free to stop by anytime!

Is this where I develop sudden depression and decide that life is so not worth living that I shoot myself twice in the back of the head before driving my car off a cliff?

Wait, you’re saying my Congresscritter who only shows up every few years to demand my vote (because it’s ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL THIS YEAR that we defeat the other party) isn’t actually laser-focused on my needs as a citizen?

That seems unpossible.

:P

It’s a 2023ish car so pre-refresh. The suspension is stiff and it lacks a lot of luxury creature comforts. But it’s FUN AS HELL to drive, tons of chargers everywhere, the nav system is top notch, and the self driving system is light years ahead of anyone else’s. Plus they don’t sell their customers data like GM and some others or show ads on the display like Stellantis.

I bought it back in 2022ish, before Elon’s association with Republican politics.

That said- I’d buy another one in a heartbeat, new or used. The self driving feature is light years ahead of anything else. And unlike other manufactures (looking at GM) they don’t sell their customers driving habits to insurance companies. The security is actually pretty good unlike most automakers who institutionally don’t understand computers so they outsource most of it to their suppliers like Bosch, Delphi, etc.

Have you even said thank you to the oil companies?!

Good point. They made oil prices so high I bought a Tesla. Thanks guys you really did me a solid, best car ever :D

Okay so let me go over this again as I have an idea…

Nation that’s struggling with dependency on petroleum and unreliable supply chain turns to renewable energy. The solar energy is clean, reliable, requires little maintenance, and is helping that country become less reliant on foreign petroleum.

If that works for Cuba, a tiny nation with few resources, perhaps it would work in other more wealthy nations also. Perhaps if a nation were, say, reliant on petroleum to the point that they start multiple multinational wars to ensure their own access to oil, costing literally $trillions, it might be cheaper to put some or all of that money into renewable energy. Presumably China will sell their solar panels to whoever’s buying, yes? So why wouldn’t a larger, more developed country purchase them in great quantity so spending $trillions on military actions in the Middle East would no longer be necessary?
If a country like this has some of their own domestic oil production, wouldn’t it be a desirable future to just walk away from the Middle East entirely, let the oil assholes kill each other without our involvement, and run the country for a few decades on sunshine? Use that money to buy solar panels literally by the boatload / container-ship-load (or buy the tech and manufacture them ourselves), and then national security is improved through removing foreign dependencies?

Or is this just crazy talk?

I don’t have a problem! I can stop whenever I want! :P

Thing is- I don’t use reddit for ‘scrolling’, mainly for participation in various discussions. That makes it a lot harder to replace…

I don’t blame you. I’m not quite at that point yet, but I’m not far off.

If they kill or nerf Old Reddit I’ll probably be done.

Well gee golly.

A Russian cargo ship carrying nuclear components for North Korea has a ‘surprise accident’.

I can’t think of anyone who might have wanted to arrange that accident, can you? I mean surely everyone wants North Korea to have nuclear stuff… Oh wait…

I would love to be 100% Lemmy but there’s still a lot more users and discussions on Reddit. It’s getting better, but it’s not yet at critical mass for me

This exactly.

I looked into setting Plex up a few years ago. It installed, and then starts talking about making a cloud account. I don’t want to talk to a cloud I just want to organize my own shit on my own network. Why does that need a cloud?

I uninstalled it. Everything I’ve seen since, and I mean EVERYthing, tells me I dodged a bullet. Not once have I read an article that makes me wish I’d continued the install.

They’re gonna shut down old reddit

Day they do that is the day I never go back to Reddit.

Yes. You are always adding net energy to the system. That’s why a heater is a self-contained unit (turns energy into heat) while an air conditioner requires two units- one to suck up the heat outside, another to reject that heat outside. It’s not ‘creating cold’, it’s using energy to pump heat from the inside to the outside. The total amount of heat rejected outside is a net addition- it’s the heat sucked up from inside, plus the waste heat from the compressor.

The air conditioner (current design) works on the simple principle that the boiling point of a liquid changes based on ambient pressure, and that phase change (between liquid and gas) carries a lot of latent energy. To boil water with heat alone, it takes about 100 calories to heat a gram of water from just above freezing to just below boiling. But to boil it, to heat it less than one more degree and turn it into gas, takes another 433 calories. That means if you adjust its boiling point by pressurizing and depressurizing it, whenever it boils or condenses it’ll suck up or release a lot of heat at the same time.

Obviously we want colder than 100c, so we use a refrigerant like tetrafluoroethane with a boiling point of -26c.

This gadget uses a similar concept. Instead of using pressure to tweak the boiling point of a refrigerant, it uses a solid that heats or cools in response to pressure. Then water carries the heat around.