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

Discussion in 'TSLA Investor Discussions' started by AudubonB, Dec 28, 2018.

  1. Beltsbear

    Beltsbear Member

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  2. 9837264723849

    9837264723849 Member

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    One data point. I'm a TSLA shareholder but
    1. I live very frugally (I almost never buy new stuff, reuse as much as possible, recycle when possible etc)
    2. The only vehicle I have ever owned is a cheap bicycle... and my shoes. I commute by bike or by feet. I take trains to go on vacation and, at most, get in a car at most 7 days in a year (in EV as much as possible, otherwise I ride-share with whom I live with)
    3. I live in a <500 sq. ft. apartment with my partner. Our energy provider guarantees that they source 100% of my use from renewables. Even if can't reach that, we'd get our electricity from nuke plants, anyway. I consume half the energy as similar households around us, according to their stats.
    4. We're vegetarian and I buy all our food from community-supported farmers (100% organic, local, fresh, and prepaid annually)
    I'm trying to live even more frugally and as carbon free as possible, but it's getting difficult at this point. I'd be happy to get some recommendations if you can help @Nocturnal, but rest assured that some shareholders are only here to support the mission (accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy, not mining bitcoins).
     
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  3. Creekstalker

    Creekstalker Member

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    Not our fault you live in France.

    Kidding, of course, as I pray to the 8 pound 6 ounce baby Jesus that this thread doesn't turn into a pissing contest of virtue.
     
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  4. MaChiMiB

    MaChiMiB Member

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    You guys remember that level 4 autonomy law introduced in Germany from earlier this week?

    I was too lazy to summarize it thoroughly. It's basically made for commercial providers only.

    Here is an overview by Steven Peeters with help from @avoigt


    My hope is that Tesla masters FSD outside of Europe soonish and Europe gets forced to adapt more quickly to not get left behind.
    I don't have to tell you that FSD will be a major game changer for society and productivity. The laggards will lose a lot.
     
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  5. capster

    capster Supporting Member

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    #242865 capster, Feb 14, 2021
    Last edited: Feb 14, 2021
    True, most people would not agree to a lower quality of life. Still, efficiency is a way to let them have their cake and eat it too to some extent.

    Look at Tesla. Its cars are popular in large measure due to better performance and not just because they’re green. Tesla cars get great performance in part because they’re efficient.

    I had great success making my previous house very efficient. However, when asked about efficiency, I tell people to use the 80/20 rule (for most that’d be wrt to cost not energy as that is easier to understand and measure for them).

    Put the 80% towards efficiency improvements and use your purchase power to boost technologies’ chances in the marketplace. For example:
    * Appliances with better technology such as the Miele heat pump dryer and the A. O. Smith Vertex hot water heater
    * Awnings. I love awnings. They are way under appreciated in the US. Not sure why.
    ... insulation ... LED bulbs ...
    * Don’t forget to get a Tesla or other EV if you need a car. :)

    Once you have improved your efficiency, then get solar.

    Put the remaining 20% towards others through political donations or other choices you make. It can be more impactful.

    I knew a building energy consultant who made his home so efficient that he was investigated by his local power company for stealing energy! The thing is when you get to that level, the solutions start to become much more exotic and expensive so you may not be encouraging technology that is viable in the larger market with your purchases.
     
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  6. jbcarioca

    jbcarioca Well-Known Member

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    My first trip to China was in 1967. I was terrified, but I'll skip details. Every few years I have been back for different purposes. The advances have been astounding, even in tibet, for example. It is curious that so many Westerners think of intellectual property theft as the core principle. Those people have no idea how much education and study can do without outright theft. They fail to understand that technology inevitably transmits itself. I recall spending years working for US and European firms who assiduously cultivated every effort to copy the best from their competitors.

    Lest we forget it Tesla makes all its patents available to others so long as they use them in good faith. Of course those patents are not the 'secret sauce'.
     
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  7. Brian121

    Brian121 Member

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    #242867 Brian121, Feb 14, 2021
    Last edited: Feb 14, 2021
    Woke up this morning and a little surprised about the discussion form my original post. Originally I intended to stop already, because I don't believe in fire post a lot of replies and "fight" every disagreement. I believe in make my point and listen to others response, observe my short come in my own belief and learn from it and improve myself's judgement. But a lot of responses are really good so I am going to continue a little bit. As I said, I don't want dwell on it and fire fight everyone just to try to prove myself. I enjoy learning just as giving.

    1. Yes, I am Chinese and I, for one, does not conform to the uniformity of the Chinese culture. I have been living in USA for 30 years and recently when China changed their constitution to void the term limit to the leader without any major disagreement or even discussion from the society, I even cut Wechat connection to most of my classmate because I cannot stand their jingoism and what happened run counter to my belief.

    2. Some poster indicate that we should be terrified about China's everywhere video monitoring and facial tracking. Well, from Chinese point of view, why is there anything to be terrified about unless you are a murderer or pick pocketer? A general citizen just want to live a safe life, and these high tech tools only enhance their life quality. Of course as an American, I strong disagree with their methods because I worry the lost private and the slippery road of government controlling every aspect of citizen's life, as I indicated in my original post. My point is even though we hold our belief, it is none of our business to judge how other country run their own business. And in this case, how Elon perceived how successful Chinese government run their business taking care of their people. Here we are not talking about Chinese forcing us to install camera at every corner of USA street, neither we are talking about USA and Chinese living peacefully along side each and mind their own business, I was merely responses to the very original post that Elon is soft on Chinese government because of the economic benefit, and the undertone it implied, that Chinese government is bad all around. So it is us who are judging them. And I think it is wrong that we have the moral high ground to judge how Elon's interpretation about how Chinese government treat their people.

    3. With regard to Covid, yes, in China, if there is a family member that caught COVID, then the whole house can not buy food, as you said (actually I am not sure if this is entirely true, usually what happen is that there can only be one family member leave the house to buy food every other day, but I am really not sure the situation if some family member is actually sick). But you omit an important factor in China, they mobilized a large army of neighborhood based volunteers to deliver food to your door step while you cannot leave your house to buy food. Otherwise people would starve to death, think about it. There is only one city recently that did not have enough volunteer when they implemented the house shut down polity, that people went starving. The city official was under tremendous pressure and facing the prospect to lose his job he hastily implemented the shut down policy without enough volunteer. But the situation is quickly corrected.

    Yes, in China government shut down the subsection of the city if there is COVID spreading and take people's freedom away, but you also omit the important second leg of the story that after 2 weeks hard quarantine and Covid is eradicated from the neighborhood that they give people's freedom back. I saw in videos that at 11pm in frigid temperature and high wind, people as old as 70, and young kids, lining up and slowly walk away from their apartment building in dimly lighted street towards concentrated quarantine site, under the watchful eyes of the medical staff in full protective gear. Can you imagine this would happen here without people accusing government sending them to concentration camp or even Auschwitz camp and be terminated? But the fact is, even when the line of people walking slowly in the dark, sad from the video, but from the audio they are joking with the medical staffs and there is smile and laugh. Because they understand this is temporary hardship and this is for common good. And they are willing to sacrifice their individuality for the good of the large. I find this to be noble and shining of the humanity.

    And judging by Whole China thinking "inside the box" and running free from COVID (the only country in the world) since May or June of last year (there are sporadic cases to be exact, but neglectable), do you still believe that our thinking "outside of box", unwilling to even sacrifice temporarily our freedom (mask and travel and partying and gathering) and result in the COVID running everywhere with no end in sight, and our government's continuous struggle to try to eradicate the disease without major success is a better choice because we "preserved" our freedom and individuality during the pandemic? I find this to be anti science and selfish and shortsighted and inhumane. Did you see the video of a march in a mall where mask protestors shouted: "we are willing to die, everyone die!", and one lady was furious, "You asshole, My father is in hospital because of Covid!" And the guy's response was "Well, you father will eventually die." In this case, it's not just inhumane, it's evil, evil in the name of individuality and freedom.

    Once again, I believe China did not do a good job containing the disease at the beginning when cases showed up in Wuhan in January 2020, but through the collective sacrifice of Chinese people and their government's decisive action, they are free of the Covid since May or June, 2020. And their misjudgment is somehow understandable since nobody, nobody know fully the extend of the disease at the beginning. Just think about how much misinformation US government doll out after March 2020, when the disease's damage had laid bare in front of our eyes.

    OK, I will stop now and will not continue this topic, since as one said above, Elon and Tesla is doing well adapting to different culture and that's what matters, and I feel like I said too much already and don't want to turn this into a culture debate. I don't believe in fighting with every disagreement with long posts. A lot of times listening and thinking about others opinion is more helpful than just stick with my own belief and trying to jam it down others with long post.
     
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  8. EnzoXYZ

    EnzoXYZ Member

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    #2- how dare you have vacations!
     
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  9. WVCS

    WVCS Member

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    Jul 19, 2020
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    San Jose


    Your description of your lifestyle as it relates to environmental impact matches mine almost to a T with two differences (i) my apartment is 900 sq. ft and (ii) I drive 200 miles a week (in an EV :)) - the guilt of which is somewhat assuaged by the fact that the driving is for a good purpose.

    The reason I bring this up is that a website that calculates a person’s environmental impact based on answers to a list of questions about the individual’s lifestyle estimated that if everybody in the world lived like me, it would take 3.6 earths’ worth of resources to make my lifestyle be sustainable. This was about two years back. I do not know how the growth in renewable energy changes that stat but I was surprised and not a bit disheartened by that revelation since I have very little fat to cut in my energy consumption pattern currently. I realized then how challenging a problem climate change is.
     
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  10. Twooz

    Twooz Member

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    London, UK
    (Live) Warren Redlich vs John Engle if anyone wants to be entertained...

     
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  11. MikeAtkinson

    MikeAtkinson Supporting Member

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    Don't try and be more frugal, it will make very little difference to your ecological footprint. Most of your remaining carbon/ecological footprint is caused simply by living in France. Perhaps go into local politics or influence civil society in other ways to make the greatest difference.
     
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  12. saniflash

    saniflash Member

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    so BH has 10 hours to go to reveal their mystery holding?
     
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  13. adiggs

    adiggs Active Member

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    To be clear right up front - I don't see you as trying to tell people what to do / how to do, etc... I am happy to hear about some of the steps that people choose to make as they lower their own carbon footprint; some of which are more extreme than others. I salute your particular efforts and situation. I also strongly suspect, though you didn't say one way or the other, is that you don't live your daily life feeling like you're living a highly non-desirable lifestyle; this is something you value and enjoy (but that's my guess, and I know I could be wrong).

    I'm just using your post as a starting point.


    The thing that I've found brilliant about Elon, from the very beginning when I started following the company seriously (2012 for sure - maybe 2011 or 2010) is that he doesn't invest his effort into telling people how they should live or what they should do. Nor does he invest energy into trying to tell them what they should drive. One of the historical problems I've seen in the EV industry are car makers deciding that people that want to own and drive EVs necessarily want small econo-boxes with as few frills as possible in order to maximize efficiency (or whatever they're thinking). I guess we could shorten that down to being green.

    Elon doesn't and hasn't invested energy into trying to move people to where he thinks they should be. Instead he's busy building products that meet people where they are at, or want to be. One consequence is that there are any number of Tesla owners and drivers that don't care beans about their transportation carbon footprint or how green they are - they just want to drive a great driver's car, and for their purposes, they have discovered that a Tesla fits that bill.

    Another consequence is that as new EVs are being designed and announced (and in a few cases so far, produced and delivered), the other car manufacturers are increasingly building cars that meet people where they are at instead of trying to tell them where they should be.


    Which leads me to a larger point. Whether we agree with this reality or not, and whether we think that individuals are making good choices for the planet or not, the reality is that the only way to handle this mess is to go through it. If we can't get new and better technologies (and their adoption) into broad adoption then we're doomed using the technologies as currently deployed.

    We don't solve our energy problem by consuming less energy (and therefore fossil fuels) - we solve our energy problem with massive scale renewable energy sources. In fact - I think we actually need to INCREASE our available energy budgets and energy consumption via renewable energy. Larger energy resources, drawn from renewable energy sources, can be used to address some of the problems we are otherwise facing. There are also good economic opportunities that become available when/if the cost of marginal energy consumption becomes approximately free.


    None of this comes from trying to force people to be a particular way. It arises from meeting people where they are at, and want to be, using resources (energy, technology, etc..) that aren't destructive to our planet.


    Interesting to me - the modern ICE vehicle is itself a solution to a previous environment crisis:
    The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894

    From the article:
    The solution to the Great Horse Manure Crisis was to remove horses from the streets via ICE vehicles. Or in modern terms - the solution was a new technology representing a significantly larger energy budget and technology that was also less polluting.

    It didn't come from demolishing large concentrations of people (cities) and forcing everybody that survived back to subsistence farming.
     
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  14. Singuy

    Singuy Active Member

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    I banking on a company with a relative small market cap. Did they do this before adding apple?
     
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  15. ZeApelido

    ZeApelido Active Member

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    You might want to splurge on a few letters in your username though.
     
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  16. ZeApelido

    ZeApelido Active Member

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    45 days from start of quarter probably includes the day of the 15th. So could be until 9 PM tomorrow Best Coast time?
     
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  17. UnknownSoldier

    UnknownSoldier Unknown Member

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    I'll laugh when the BH mystery holding ends up being ExxonMobil or something.
     
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  18. Singuy

    Singuy Active Member

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    Nah, the real answer is Etsy as fate has it.
     
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  19. lklundin

    lklundin Active Member

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    While true, totalitarian countries can be expected to only allow possession of the Starlink terminal along with a government issued permit. (They would never completely outlaw it, because the party officials themselves would want one).
     
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  20. MXWing

    MXWing Well-Known Member

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    Hope I am wrong but I am going to guess Nio.

    Buffett not gong to admit he has to follow Cathie Wood around for investment advice.
     
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