Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable

[AudubonB]

Economically, there is zero difference between a subsidy and a non-costed externality.

 

[aubreymcfato]

Economically, there is zero difference between a subsidy and a non-costed externality.

This.
Also, it's quite tricky to discriminate between subsidies and tax cuts, incentives for gas cars, etc. There are a million levers, small and big, which lobbies used for incentivising the fossil fuel industry.

 

[SOULPEDL]

Gas in not subsidized at least in Europe. In fact, it's taxed quite heavily. It's that externalities are not priced in correctly or at all. So it should be much more expensive in reality.

Does the price of gas go up or down next?

Assuming today's low cost of gas is due to volume sales (Wright's Law, subsidies aside), would a decrease in demand cause prices to rise in this case as well?

At the same time, whole countries could eventually break down and compete on price (oil producers are not all friends and blowing up refineries could become part of the strategy someday).

So do these forces cancel each other out? How will this play out. Can I tell my gas friends that fuel prices will rise faster than inflation? Or is there a lot of margin remaining in the industry to squeeze harder?

 

[growler23]

Optimus Prime will be their leader, this might be a bit premature but I offer my allegiance and bow down to his authority.

Finally! That must be Elon's new title, to be added to Technoking?

 

[EverettRuess]

This.
Also, it's quite tricky to discriminate between subsidies and tax cuts, incentives for gas cars, etc. There are a million levers, small and big, which lobbies used for incentivising the fossil fuel industry.

I have worked on public lands issues in the west for forty years. Here are some new developments.

Oil and gas companies must pay more to drill on public lands under new Biden administration rule​

Economy Apr 12, 2024 2:47 PM EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) — Oil and gas companies will have to pay more to drill on public lands and satisfy stronger requirements to clean up old or abandoned wells, according to a final rule issued Friday by the Biden administration.
The Interior Department’s rule raises royalty rates for oil drilling by more than one-third, to 16.67 percent, in accordance with the sweeping 2002 climate law approved by Congress. The previous rate of 12.5 percent paid by oil and gas companies for federal drilling rights had remained unchanged for a century. The federal rate was significantly lower than what many states and private landowners charge for drilling leases on state or private lands.

Oil and gas companies must pay more to drill on public lands under new Biden administration rule

The Interior Department rule finalized Friday raises royalty rates for oil drilling by more than one-third, to 16.67 percent, in accordance with the sweeping 2002 climate law approved by Congress.

www.pbs.org

 

[UncaNed]

Stillstand in Germanys BEV market. The April dip for all new cars wasn't as deep as the years bevor, but BEV won nothing and Tesla lost -32% against April'23. Gas, Diesel and all form of Hybrids are the winners. What a sad result.
That's the market in total:
View attachment 1044759

This is probably temporary because EV's are and will continue to get cheaper, (Lithium prices dropping, cell manufacturers overproducing...) -so they should still win in the not-so-long-run, no?

 

[T@oo]

Economically, there is zero difference between a subsidy and a non-costed externality.

That wasn't the question. A f'#, why did I even bother replying.

 

[2daMoon]

It would be good of us to thank Warren Buffet for mentioning Tesla, FSD, and the potential impact autonomy will have on insurance going forward.

Perhaps today's bump is in some way related to folks on the Street seeing this validation from Warren regarding the future impact of this technology, its tie to Tesla, and, along with a good strong cup of coffee first thing this morning some of them may have actually connected the dots for a change.

 

[SOULPEDL]

It would be good of us to thank Warren Buffet for mentioning Tesla, FSD, and the potential impact autonomy will have on insurance going forward.

Perhaps today's bump is in some way related to folks on the Street seeing this validation from Warren regarding the future impact of this technology, its tie to Tesla, and, along with a good strong cup of coffee first thing this morning some of them may have actually connected the dots for a change.

I almost forgot! Reading up, ya Buffet is giving everyone a head's up.

Re: Berkshire...

"About $2.4 billion worth of the company's most recent quarterly operating profit came from its insurance arm. The insurance gains were largely pushed by profits coming from car insurer Geico. The company managed to turn around its balance sheet by hiking rates by almost 17%. "

 

[philw1776]

Beloved Buffet & Geico suck more cash from inflation besieged Americans while hated Musk continues to drop prices for Tesla automobiles.
Irony.

 

[replicant]

 

[scaesare]

We don’t know. But the non Tesla people in my life mock it ceaselessly and my father and brother cancelled their orders when the numbers were clear.
It’s also unclear still why they throttled back production
And then a couple of things: A more conventional and utilitarian design without stainless and other quirks would likely have sold better up to a point. Pickup owners generally are going to lag car owners in EV adaptation a little, but there is prob still pent up demand.

Folks who don't want to be educated on facts and instead prefer tropes despite my attempts to help them understand lose my respect. And my degree of caring is directly proportional to my respect for an individual.

It makes life much easier not caring what 97.3% of folks at large think,

 

[Unpilot]

Where is @StarFoxisDown! ?

This is a nice walk down from 187.22 (Day's high)

 

[scaesare]

In the context of AGI it's pretty close to 0%. But percentages mean nothing if we don't know the target.

So, I think we need to distinguish between the NN "framework" itself, and the weights it uses that are generated by training.

I consider a written but untrained NN largely complete.

 

[scaesare]

Elon has never lied on social media, right?

Your question implies he has... and assertions require evidence.

 

[scaesare]

Some blatant bot speculation:
One of the 'issues' for the bot, is that it does not have the data that FSD has. The sheer gigatonnage of video clips amassed by millions of tesla cars provides a huge amount of data that dojo can chunk through to train the FSD network for learning how to drive in all situations and circumstances. This has been key to FSD V12 and seems to be the holy grail of getting real-world AI. However, the bot does not have this data AT ALL, and even given today's video of a dozen or so employees wearing VR headsets, its definitely not going to be enough, Unless Tesla wants to hire 50,000 bot-trainers to wear VR headsets all day, which is never going to happen.

However there is a solution.

Human neural networks learn in first and third person. We learn how to catch a ball partly by watching lots of other people catch balls, but also, most helpfully, by trying and failing, again and again and again. In many ways the first person approach is better, because you start off with way more fails (disengagements) and the data is a one-to-one mapping to our own movements.

With FSD V12, the cars are overwhelmingly learning from third hand video clips, and from observing what humans do in each situation. Almost all the data is successes, where the car did not crash. Because the real world failure condition of driving is often death, the cars cannot be left to just experiment and see what happens.

The lack of huge datasets for each task means its likely that the bot learning may have to skew towards 'try it and see' rather than 'see how its done'. In a factory carrying stuff around, the failure condition isn't too lethal, so this is acceptable, and its all on company premises anyway. As a result, I think there will be a very rapid deployment of bots to work alongside humans at the factory. You might have one person unloading trucks full of of headlights, and 4 bots trying' to help with this task, and doing it really, really badly for quite a while.

Why does this matter?

Firstly we might see a lot of bots get produced and deployed on the factory floor. Videos may leak of this. We should not get too excited. This will be for training, and will NOT be either efficient, or a sign that sales are imminent.
Secondly, that might mean there is an actual production line for bots way in advance of them being useful. It might also mean a fair bit of capital expenditure. This will be seized by the excitable as sign that 'bot production is ramping up, but it will not mean much.

IF it turns out that Texas or Fremont has 500 bots working in the factory in a years time, don't get excited. That may be just a complete clown car of rubbish bots dropping stuff and walking into doors. This is to be expected, but any leaked videos will be a FUD bonanza. Don't fall for it.

So.... how long before we see Tesla engineered "training harnesses" with cams & sensors on them for the factory workers? Something lightweight and wearable that grabs training data from 1000's of workers rather than a handful of lab trainers?

 

[aubreymcfato]

Beloved Buffet & Geico suck more cash from inflation besieged Americans while hated Musk continues to drop prices for Tesla automobiles.
Irony.

You know why?
Buffet knows the power of silence ;-)
He's cunning like a fox.

 

[SOULPEDL]

What an idiot for not having a tool handy to block it from fully closing on his finger!!!
Oh, and let's try it closer to the hinge, maybe it will work better??? He is lacking an understanding of physics and leverage as in moments!

Good news for Optimus and FSD - competition with humans should not be hard to beat.

 

[EVWatcher]

On the note of optimus progress. Its easy to look at the footage they share and then think its early days. Or that the footage is disconnected from the statements that its doing factory work.

I was just looking at the optimus X account feed and noticed in the Jan 15 video that it had 3680 cells and cell "crates" on one of the work tables in the background under the table. It would not surprise me at all if the footage released over the weekend was filmed at the same time as the Jan 15 footage. And maybe both of those were filmed earlier. I feel like when Elon made that comment about the competition studying and copying their footage they had a meeting about what to show, and maybe decided not to show functionality or development techniques in a video until the competition showed something on their stuff first. I may be deep in the kool aid but I really feel like optimus is much further along than what they are showcasing.

 

[advocate8]

Folks who don't want to be educated on facts and instead prefer tropes despite my attempts to help them understand lose my respect. And my degree of caring is directly proportional to my respect for an individual.

It makes life much easier not caring what 97.3% of folks at large think,

Not sure I understand this, can you elaborate a little?