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

[ggr]

Saw the following new addressing system today and immediately thought of robotaxis.

3 word address: ///guard.cling.radio

It reduces every 3m x 3m space on earth to a unique 3 word address. Thus:

Robotaxi: “where would you like to go?”
Passenger: “In three words, guard, cling, radio”
Robotaxi: “108 Elizabeth St, Sydney City, is that correct?”
Passenger: “yes”

Also useful for police, fire etc. I wonder how often they turn up to the wrong Smith Street.

That would require the words from a roughly 250,000 entry dictionary if the words "every" and "unique" are to be true. Yes, there are that many English words, but most adults only know about 20,000 of them.

Earth land area: ~150B km^2
3x3 m squares in a km^2: ~100,000
squares on land: ~1.5e16
cube root: 246,621

Then there are homonyms, easily confused words, derivations, "antidisestablishmentarianism", "floccinoccinihilipilification"...

 

[Green Pete]

That would require the words from a roughly 250,000 entry dictionary if the words "every" and "unique" are to be true. Yes, there are that many English words, but most adults only know about 20,000 of them.

Earth land area: ~150B km^2
3x3 m squares in a km^2: ~100,000
squares on land: ~1.5e16
cube root: 246,621

Then there are homonyms, easily confused words, derivations, "antidisestablishmentarianism", "floccinoccinihilipilification"...

4 word address then

 

[goinfraftw]

Is there anyone on this forum can confirm that this price, after incentives, is a real thing? Also...where?!

$3,374 for a 11.34 KW Tesla Solar system and 3 Powerwall??? : teslamotors

Edit: It's in Massachusetts.

 

[FrankSG]

Meh.

You’re excusing people’s behavior because their childhood wasn’t ‘better’. If only everyone would have had Elon’s childhood...oh, wait.

You clearly have far more sympathy and empathy for people than I do. Do you think it’s because my childhood was less better than yours? That I experienced more trauma or less hugs and kisses from my parents? Why is Elon so incredibly sympathetic and empathetic? Maybe it’s exactly because he got the crap beat out of himself over and over again and thus has a much deeper understanding of the hurt on an emotional level than someone who wasn’t beaten: me. (It’s not the reason in this case - I don’t like people in general for specific reasons that have nothing to do with my childhood or parents, though I reserve the right to blame my parents whenever I don’t want to hold myself responsible - but it is for others.)

That single example counters your entire premise. I can list thousands of contrary ones. It’s not about one’s upbringing unless that person wants to make it about that.

My premise isn't that it's impossible for individuals to overcome adversity and not resort to 'evil' acts, Elon is indeed an example that counters that premise. My premise is that people, who have happy/positive lives and have their most important needs met, won't resort to 'evil' acts. Given enough examples of people committing 'evil' acts in spite of happy lives and with no other plausible explanation, I'd definitely have to reconsider my beliefs that the underlying nature of people is not evil, but that'd be quite sad if true.

Once we reach maturity we decide to live by our past or choose another way. Yes, we do. Lots of people say, ‘I will never treat my children the way I was treated.’ And they don’t. They do better. Lots of people make no conscious choice or effort and treat their children as they were treated.

A person can do anything they want and set their mind to barring brain injury or mental illness that interrupts correct brain function.

I could, in fact, choose to work toward increased sympathy and empathy for others. I choose not to. I have my excuses and I own them.

Self awareness is not something everyone cares to embrace. Lots of people aren’t interested in knowing why they do what they do. They’d rather respond to the world at their baser level - TSLAQ members.

People are interesting and fascinating and complex and simple and good and evil and broken and stupid and brilliant and greedy and generous and hardworking and lazy and they suck, often times because of or in spite of their childhoods.

We consciously get to choose to be better and do better and be responsible for our actions. We can be like Elon or we can be like Mark Spiegel or anywhere in between.

TSLAQ members can bite me. I will drive right on by them, while they’re being attacked by zombies. On the other hand, I’d stop and risk my life for anyone who’s run their Tesla battery to zero.

People, like Elon, who do manage to overcome adversity are quite amazing in my opinion, and I have a ton of respect for them.

As for the ones that don't, I prefer to look at them with empathy and from a standpoint of how it could've been prevented. That seems more productive than passing judgement on someone whose full story I don't know.

Not to say I never get caught up in the moment and get pissed at people for their actions. I heard there was some idiot who published some conspiracy theory video about Bill Gates co-creating COVID-19, and some stupid Italian lady called for Bill Gates' arrest in parliament, and Bill Gates' Instagram is apparently being bombarded with hate.... sigh

 

[Beltsbear]

Is there anyone on this forum can confirm that this price, after incentives, is a real thing? Also...where?!

$3,374 for a 11.34 KW Tesla Solar system and 3 Powerwall??? : teslamotors

Massachusetts. Yes it’s real but not all incentives are paid right away. Some are monthly.

 

[oldTAVguy]

FYI 16 car carriers, the most I have ever seen at once.

 

[Prunesquallor]

That would require the words from a roughly 250,000 entry dictionary if the words "every" and "unique" are to be true. Yes, there are that many English words, but most adults only know about 20,000 of them.

Earth land area: ~150B km^2
3x3 m squares in a km^2: ~100,000
squares on land: ~1.5e16
cube root: 246,621

Then there are homonyms, easily confused words, derivations, "antidisestablishmentarianism", "floccinoccinihilipilification"...

Randall Munroe's world would be very small. Diameter about 52 km. About the size of the asteroid Mathide.

D=2*sqrt[(9*1000^3)/4/pi]

 

[joh01652]

An auto industry article from the New York Times:
The Pandemic Will Permanently Change the Auto Industry

A couple interesting paragraphs; it does indeed look like rough waters ahead for the legacy automakers, no doubt deadly waterfalls for some:

"Automakers worldwide had at least 20 percent more factory capacity than they needed before the coronavirus hit, analysts say. That idle manufacturing space cost them money without producing any profit. As sales plummet further, shutting down underused plants may be a matter of survival."

"In Europe, it’s impossible to close a factory without labor strife and political resistance because so many jobs are at stake. Severance payments to workers and other costs can make it as expensive to shutter a plant as it is to build one."

 

[Chunky Jr.]

Earth land area: ~150B km^2
3x3 m squares in a km^2: ~100,000
squares on land: ~1.5e16
cube root: 246,621

Those numbers seem off by a factor of 1000
Google search for "surface area of Earth" returns a land area of 57.51 million mi², which is 148,950,216.23 sq km or about 150M sq km
that's about 15T squares
cube root : ~25K

 

[jerry33]

That would require the words from a roughly 250,000 entry dictionary if the words "every" and "unique" are to be true. Yes, there are that many English words, but most adults only know about 20,000 of them.

Earth land area: ~150B km^2
3x3 m squares in a km^2: ~100,000
squares on land: ~1.5e16
cube root: 246,621

Then there are homonyms, easily confused words, derivations, "antidisestablishmentarianism", "floccinoccinihilipilification"...

Wouldn't it be easier just to use the ICBM address? You wouldn't have to convert for SpaceX either.

 

[Lessmog]

Well I'm lost here, with or without Three Words! Why are you referencing this here at all in the first place, and how do cube roots come into the calculation of area?

 

[PeterJA]

(Bloomberg) -- Tesla Inc. told employees that a California county health official has now signed off on safety measures the company took last week at its car plant as it restarted production in defiance of the area’s shutdown order. The Alameda County health officer’s approval means Tesla has local support to resume full production starting this week...

Read more at: Tesla Says Plant Musk Reopened Finally Has County’s Approval
Copyright © BloombergQuint

 

[Silent Ludicrosy]

Here’s the link to the rumored GigaTexas site from the city of Hutto webpage Welcome to City of Hutto, TX

 

[smorgasbord]

...
For a lot of TSLAQ folk, I wouldn't be surprised if they're suffering from loneliness/isolation, and simply need a place to belong. The TSLAQ community might be a way to make up for a lack of strong family ties and a life of rejection/isolation. Can you really label a human, who's simply trying to fulfill one of his most basic needs (human connection), as evil?

I just saw an interview with Tom Nichols, author of The Death of Expertise, on Amanpour & Company (PBS). He pointed out that in the pre-internet days there were towns where there might be 1 person out of 10,000 who thought, for instance, that the moon landing was faked. That person would be regarded as a flake or ignored and that would be that. But today social media lets those people connect with like-minded people in towns all over the world, and now they can feed off each other and gain support they otherwise wouldn't have. Combine that with the self-publishing capabilities of the internet and you can get a movement. That's my view of much of TSLAQ. The short seller pros like Chanos and Einhorn are glad to leverage this hungry-to-have-their-biases-confirmed community to get the word out.

Although, as I pointed out in a previous post, at least one prominent TSLAQ member (TeslaCharts) bases his views on reasonable data. It's pretty clear today that Musk's solar roof reveal at the movie studio (the old set of Desperate Housewives in fact) was at best overhyped and most likely a misrepresentation of the state of development at the time (see the FastCompany article). It took almost 3 years to get to a viable product. I also agree with TC's view that the Solar City acquisition was, in reality, a rescue of a failing company and not in the best interests of TSLA shareholders. So, I understand where TC's coming from. And if you take the time to listen to that podcast, you'll hear him try not to embarrass the host of the podcast, who goes off the deep end by being anti-everything related to Musk, Tesla, EVs, solar, batteries - at one point saying that EVs are foolish, to which TC responds that he himself owns a Chevy EV, so he's not anti-EV nor anti-US companies. It's kind of fun in a weird way. So, we need to be careful not to paint all of TSLAQ with the same brush.

However, TeslaCharts let the Solar City demo episode (he calls it a "realization") taint his view not only of Musk, but of all of Tesla. And once he donned those smoke-colored glasses, he now sees bad in everything Musk touches. For all his faults, at least TeslaCharts is self-aware, as his Twitter summary is: "Catnip for TSLA bears. Not investment advice. Disclosure: Short TSLA via put options". Heck, in the podcast TC himself talked about social media being a new tool for shorters - no longer do they have to rely on relationships with specific journalists to get their word out (read up on Chanos and Fairfax if you want to know how they used to do it, including either paying journalists to write articles or at least getting a heads-up on an article before it was released). Now that the pros can leverage amateur wanna-be's they have a much easier time getting nonsense published.

I do think the days of TSLAQ are coming to an end, probably with TSLA is added to the S&P 500 later this year.

 

[Singuy]

I just saw an interview with Tom Nichols, author of The Death of Expertise, on Amanpour & Company (PBS). He pointed out that in the pre-internet days there were towns where there might be 1 person out of 10,000 who thought, for instance, that the moon landing was faked. That person would be regarded as a flake or ignored and that would be that. But today social media lets those people connect with like-minded people in towns all over the world, and now they can feed off each other and gain support they otherwise wouldn't have. Combine that with the self-publishing capabilities of the internet and you can get a movement. That's my view of much of TSLAQ. The short seller pros like Chanos and Einhorn are glad to leverage this hungry-to-have-their-biases-confirmed community to get the word out.

Although, as I pointed out in a previous post, at least one prominent TSLAQ member (TeslaCharts) bases his views on reasonable data. It's pretty clear today that Musk's solar roof reveal at the movie studio (the old set of Desperate Housewives in fact) was at best overhyped and most likely a misrepresentation of the state of development at the time (see the FastCompany article). It took almost 3 years to get to a viable product. I also agree with TC's view that the Solar City acquisition was, in reality, a rescue of a failing company and not in the best interests of TSLA shareholders. So, I understand where TC's coming from. And if you take the time to listen to that podcast, you'll hear him try not to embarrass the host of the podcast, who goes off the deep end by being anti-everything related to Musk, Tesla, EVs, solar, batteries - at one point saying that EVs are foolish, to which TC responds that he himself owns a Chevy EV, so he's not anti-EV nor anti-US companies. It's kind of fun in a weird way. So, we need to be careful not to paint all of TSLAQ with the same brush.

However, TeslaCharts let the Solar City demo episode (he calls it a "realization") taint his view not only of Musk, but of all of Tesla. And once he donned those smoke-colored glasses, he now sees bad in everything Musk touches. For all his faults, at least TeslaCharts is self-aware, as his Twitter summary is: "Catnip for TSLA bears. Not investment advice. Disclosure: Short TSLA via put options". Heck, in the podcast TC himself talked about social media being a new tool for shorters - no longer do they have to rely on relationships with specific journalists to get their word out (read up on Chanos and Fairfax if you want to know how they used to do it, including either paying journalists to write articles or at least getting a heads-up on an article before it was released). Now that the pros can leverage amateur wanna-be's they have a much easier time getting nonsense published.

I do think the days of TSLAQ are coming to an end, probably with TSLA is added to the S&P 500 later this year.

I was looking at TC's Twitter and all i see are the same kind of nonsense they have been pedaling for years and find themselves wrong over and over again. Yes they use data, but continues to use false assumptions using such data (as in local dmv registrations of a particular area to extrapolate demand/sales for the entire world). Almost feels like a bunch of girls who can't get out of abusive relationships, self rationalizing how their boyfriend is under stress and that's why they were thrown off the stairs or smashed against the bathroom mirror.

 

[Intl Professor]

TSLAQ community is exactly what you should expect from Homosapiens - chimps throwing poop at one another. It's a miracle that our world works as well as it does. That's not to say that it can't be improved.

This view of monkeys is typical and most clearly seen by us when they are caged at zoos. The real world's success is simple when we are not caged.

We act like caged monkeys when artificially restrained through poor education, lack of jobs, poor health, inter alia. Basic root of terrorism, explaining success of Trump in 2016. He merely took advantage of the existing situation created by the fear of others. Good governing is like a vaccine for good health. Look at Scandinavia. Hard to sell in US, like expecting ICE companies, and friends, oil, to respond to disruption posed by Tesla through self-awareness and transformation, instead of shorting. Similarly, official Republican analysis touted minority, female outreach, to expand the base, was rejected in favor of restricting ease of voting and immigrant bashing.

Pogo was right! Look at the rush to open bars! (I was a happy drunk at home until I used a garden hose to put out an imagined fire.) BFO: misery loves company and thus becomes pandemic. Also, even the uncertainty principle reinforces Buddha's view that good is created by good will and evil by ill will. There are consequences to behavior—that's karma. Freedom is the capacity for enlightened choice, not the capacity for effective choice so easily augmented by wealth. Money is not the problem, only its distribution. Look at the conflict between the House and Senate over the current stimulus round.

I've reminded us of this before. Immanuel Kant was asked for a simpler understanding of his moral rule, the categorical imperative. "Do what you don't want to do."

To succeed with good we must have the conviction as Musk does, that greed can be harnessed to do good. The pitchforks are out there, fellow millionaires, heed well. This is not a moral appeal, just simple self-interest. And even in the West, we have known this since Aristotle.

 

[smorgasbord]

I was looking at TC's Twitter and all i see are the same kind of nonsense they have been pedaling for years and find themselves wrong over and over again. Yes they use data, but continues to use false assumptions using such data (as in local dmv registrations of a particular area to extrapolate demand/sales for the entire world). Almost feels like a bunch of girls who can't get out of abusive relationships, self rationalizing how their boyfriend is under stress and that's why they were thrown off the stairs or smashed against the bathroom mirror.

I believe we need to be at least somewhat nuanced here. As I said earlier: "...taint his view not only of Musk, but of all of Tesla. And once he donned those smoke-colored glasses, he now sees bad in everything Musk touches." While I agree that there is much wrong with what most of TSLAQ espouses (and your example is reminiscent of the Bakersfield doctors incorrect statistical extrapolation), they are not uniformly wrong on everything or to every extent. Tesla does have fit and finish issues, at least compared to the best in class, for instance.

We would be as wrong to write off everything TSLAQ does as TSLAQ is wrong about criticizing everything Musk does.

Back to Tom Nichols, in his interview he also talked about "expert gotchas." That's where an expert is wrong about something, and so the group throws that mistake in his face and challenges him, in effect saying: "you were wrong about this one thing, so why should we believe anything else you say?" In my view, this is what TeslaCharts had done - taking one Musk episode and wrongly extrapolating that as being indicative of everything else Musk and Tesla do.

 

[MarcoRP]

Here’s a video of the life of Elon Musk on Twitter.
Jon Erlichman on Twitter

I always thought Ashlee Vance was a woman, lol

 

[Prunesquallor]

Lora Kolodny conducts a Twitter poll. It did not turn out to her liking.

Lora Kolodny on Twitter

 

[Singuy]

I believe we need to be at least somewhat nuanced here. As I said earlier: "...taint his view not only of Musk, but of all of Tesla. And once he donned those smoke-colored glasses, he now sees bad in everything Musk touches." While I agree that there is much wrong with what most of TSLAQ espouses (and your example is reminiscent of the Bakersfield doctors incorrect statistical extrapolation), they are not uniformly wrong on everything or to every extent. Tesla does have fit and finish issues, at least compared to the best in class, for instance.

We would be as wrong to write off everything TSLAQ does as TSLAQ is wrong about criticizing everything Musk does.

Back to Tom Nichols, in his interview he also talked about "expert gotchas." That's where an expert is wrong about something, and so the group throws that mistake in his face and challenges him, in effect saying: "you were wrong about this one thing, so why should we believe anything else you say?" In my view, this is what TeslaCharts had done - taking one Musk episode and wrongly extrapolating that as being indicative of everything else Musk and Tesla do.

Is fit and finish issue something one should bet INFINITE losses on? To anyone sane, having infinite loss as a possibility with only a 2x upside in the best case should subject one to a much higher standard in analysis than being bull on a stock( in which you have infinite upside with the possibility of completely losing 1x your money).

No one is claiming that Tesla cars are perfect. We are all only talking about being a investor and making money. If losing 3x your money and still betting the wrong way when obviously a new leaf is turning then there's something wrong with the person. Is fit and finish a secret ever since the first model S review? If it's widely reported and same with the model 3, and still no one seems to care (investors and buyers) then why is it still a thesis for anything related to investors?

Also the issue with anything related to their thesis can be improved on. They lose money on every car they sell until they don't. They can't build the cars until they can. They can't expand gigafactories at a fast pace until they can. They are not profitable until they are.

There was a time you can hope they can't hit any of these benchmarks and become insolvent which is fair. That time is no longer today..Q is no longer possible. Swing trading or Tesla so tanking sure..but doubling your money is no where near possible while losing infinite amount of money has been the entire history of their Q account. Tc spends just as much time or more like us on Tesla research. How is this worth his time when you have lost 20-30x your money since Tesla inception while someone like Dave on YouTube has made 20-30x his money.