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There may be an effort on the short side to get people to write calls that they can buy and use later to cover their short positions during a squeeze.
This is obviously pure speculation, but I wouldn't put it past them.
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There may be an effort on the short side to get people to write calls that they can buy and use later to cover their short positions during a squeeze.
This is obviously pure speculation, but I wouldn't put it past them.
Exactly my point - Occam's razor says revisions up, like those after April when the UAW was actively trying to stir up a base, are probably more likely "new" incidents reported by employees, and not some Tesla management conspiracy which they suddenly decided to come clean on.
ValueAnalyst
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So 4 million share reduction in short interest during a 50-60% SP rise in six months.
I wonder what happens when the full 31-32m shares are squeezed out...
Oh, these rules are old. India's had a lot of rules trying to promote local industry since independence in 1950, and for very good reason: it's a reaction to the rather messed-up economy which the British left them, where they were used as a target market for exports of high-value products from Britain (part of mercantalist 19th century British policy).
The forefeiture laws are different. Renting your house out and having someone abuse your hospitality to do a drug deal does *not* threaten your house, generally; renting your car out and having someone abuse your hospitality to do a drug deal *does* threaten your car. God only knows why, but I think it relates to the difference between real and personal property. I suspect that forfeiture law reform (eliminating civil forfeiture) will be necessary before people will feel comfortable renting out valuable cars.
Leave it to the LA Times to go he low road.
Slaughterhouses and sawmills had better safety records than Tesla
Their hatred for Elon and Tesla is long, and wide and deep.
Slaughterhouses and sawmills had better safety records than Tesla
Their hatred for Elon and Tesla is long, and wide and deep.
Musk's straight-up wrong about this. There's no question about this; he's simply wrong.
It's even easier to make buses autonomous than cars (it's a fixed route, so a lot of the difficult corner cases can be eliminated). The economies of scale from a large vehicle mean that they'll have lower cost of operations per rider than any autonomous 4-door sedan rideshare. On top of that, most bus agencies are public and subsidized by tax dollars, while the supposed autonomous ride-share is supposedly going to be a for-profit operation. There's no way.
I suppose Musk might envision people lending out their otherwise-parked cars at below their average costs, but that does absolutely nothing for rush hour, which is where buses are most heavily used *anyway*. During rush hour, Uber's "surge pricing" has already made it quite clear how much more expensive ride share will be than taking the (fixed price) bus.
I'm not saying there isn't a niche for this business -- lots of people take taxis and Uber even though they're a lot more expensive than a bus -- but "cheaper than the bus" is bullshit.
(I've probably mentioned before that the situation is even more extreme if you look at an autonomous train like Vancouver Skytrain)
If he means "cheaper than a bus with a driver", well, maybe, but that's not really relevant, is it?
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I think this is a great move for Ford. Unfortunately, like most of the other auto companies, they appear to have gotten serious *this January*. This puts them a solid *10 years* behind Tesla. I wish them luck catching up.
For reference, the key development decision there was actually the i486. Nobody outside Intel saw that at the time because it was proprietary Intel trade secret material, but the i486 abandoned the underlying i386 architecture in favor of a RISC architecture with an i386 compatibility layer on top. But they didn't tell anyone what they'd done until later (the underlying RISC microcode is inaccessible). THIS is why Intel was able to compete with the RISC companies. (It's also why many CPU-intensive programs can be run on anything from a 486 up but not an actual 386 -- the locking primitives needed for parallelism are missing in the 386).
The analogy with electric cars is difficult. What's an "ICE car compatibilty layer" -- the BMW i3's gasoline generator maybe?
As I explained, this is because Intel kept their RISC development a *secret* originally -- didn't tell anyone that the i486 was actually a RISC chip.
Intel almost lost the market to AMD when Intel designed a non-compatible 64-bit system and AMD designed one with a 32-bit compatbility layer. Intel later started implementing AMD's architecture ("x86-64").
I'm at <25% and I don't keep my mouth shut when I think Tesla or Elon are being idiots.
Maybe I have a tough skin, or maybe I just don't like keeping my mouth shut...
Actually, my take is different, closer to Musk's. The primary reason is that we have to have enough vehicles to handle the peaks. And there has to be enough vehicles to get everyone where they *have* to go during any particular day, at the peak days. There are a certain number of people that will "own" cars, or at least own the reservation of a car in order to get to work/school/where-ever every single work day. After that service is accomplished in the morning and evening, then the car is "free" and can do something else. Some people will want it just parked. Others will allow it to be used for ride sharing. If a sufficient number of people allow their reserved cars to be used for ride sharing, then the prices of transport outside of the peak hours will collapse because there would be more than sufficient supply. If the price is close enough that one can get a vehicle to pick up right where and when you want it and drop you right where and when you want it, and you don't have to wait in the weather or at some unsafe place, then no one would choose the bus. Further, if the peak was spread out enough... rush hour is a flex 2-3 hour affair, then there would be far more availability and prices will again collapse even during rush hour. As you noted, metro bus services run on government support already, and it would be unsustainable for governments to subsidize for a diminishing client base. Trains will still be something, but buses... I don't see a future in buses. I do think it will take some time for this to play out and buses will be a thing for 4-5 years after Level 5 autonomy, but eventually, they will go away. We might still have small buses for very highly frequented fixed routes.
erthquake
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The article is not too unreasonable, but the headline is way out of line. Russ Mitchell, the author, is definitely an anti-Tesla hack. He insisted in this article that the "10,000 cars a week" estimate Tesla put out in the 16 Q4 and 17 Q1 letters referred to total production. I emailed with him, linking and quoting the Q4 and Q1 letters that 10,000 only refers to Model 3 production. He refused to correct his article, blaming Tesla for a poorly written sentence.
You're missing something important.
The rush hour isn't going to spread out enough to relieve congestion; people have been predicting that since the 1960s and it does not happen. No reason to think that'll change.
It's quite possible that prices will drop in the off-peak. But in the peak in a big city, it's *already* true that nobody who's in a hurry and can take mass transit takes an invididual car, to crawl through congestion at 5 mph. Buses are clearly inferior to trains, and buses in mixed traffic are already hopeless because of the cars getting in their way and reducing them to the same speed, but buses in bus lanes or carpool lanes (Market Street anyone?) still have an advantage over cars.
Think of the rich people who own 2, or more, cars and have been commuting on the LIRR for the last 100 years because you have to be insane to drive into Manhattan. Their cars are actually used by them *off-peak only*.
Now, this does raise a possible scenario: maybe I'm wrong about the price -- maybe ride share will be cheaper than the bus during peak hours *because it's worse than the bus*. People will be riding into work on mass transit and allowing their cars to be rented out at peak hours. Anyone who rents that car out will be caught slogging through traffic slowly at rush hour and will be getting inferior service to the people in the bus lanes -- so it'll cost less because it's inferior.
The fundamental issue is that rideshare cannot handle the commuting market. In the peak commute hours, either it'll be a high-priced luxury service for a few, or it'll be a low-priced junk service for those with a lot of time to kill, but there's no way for it to replace *mass* transit, because it can't move a *mass*. As long as there's a mass to move, the service which has the economies of scale will be the cheapest to operate and will have the lowest unsubsidized price. (And yes, trains do that much better than buses, but buses get the same indirect government subsidies as cars -- the subsidies for the asphalt roads -- so they'll probably hang around in the US until we start treating railroad tracks as something we should fund out of property tax. Incidentally this is also why Musk's tunnel company is doomed unless it goes for government contracts; it's very hard to run a profitable toll road against a large network of free roads funded out of property-tax, especially when your toll road has *tunnel* expenses too -- the only way to counteract that is economies of scale and he doesn't have them with cars.)
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So, funny folllowup -- does anyone think there's a carmaker out there which has secretly replaced its entire lineup with true serial hybrids, *without telling anyone*, with the inverter and plug for charging it simply hidden, and with software designed to make them shake and have a confused torque curve like an automatic transmission?
(I somehow doubt it)
I rented a car once, I think it was a Nissan Somethingorother, that had a continuously variable transmission. But it went to a lot of trouble to simulate gear change points. All I could do was sigh.
I spotted GOOG, but I thought FB corporate culture was toxic in the extreme (still is really), and I still don't get AMZN. I also have seen some which I thought had a great corporate culture and turned out to have rot at the heart of it. And then there are companies like Microsoft, whose corporate culture was outright criminal, who did great.
Corporate culture is important but it isn't everything. Monopoly power is worth a lot.
ValueAnalyst
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When you go to place a trade, you can select 'sell short' and it will automatically tell you how many shares are available to short.
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