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

[WarpedOne]

Interestingly, a desalination project that was backed by California Governor Gavin Newsom was rejected just recently. It doesn't seem like the people of the LA basin actually want water or anything. We'll see how that goes for them.

This clearly shows that the greatest danger for humanity is not climate change, it is humanity itself.
The intelligent and mortally corrupt part of humanity.

 

[Thekiwi]

Tesla delays plan to restore Shanghai output to pre-lockdown levels

Tesla Inc has delayed a plan to restore production at its Shanghai plant to levels before the city's COVID-19 lockdown by at least a week, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.

www.reuters.com

SHANGHAI, May 16 (Reuters) - Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) has delayed a plan to restore production at its Shanghai plant to levels before the city's COVID-19 lockdown by at least a week, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.

The U.S. electric car maker originally aimed to increase output at its Shanghai plant to 2,600 cars a day from May 16, Reuters reported earlier this month citing another memo. But the latest memo said that it plans to stick to one shift for its Shanghai plant for the current week with a daily output of around 1,200 units. It also said that it would now aim to increase output to 2,600 units per day from May 23.

 

[UnknownSoldier]

Since we're all looking forward to a nice recession and some other general gloom and doom in the next few years, here's some real solid long term glooming and dooming to put things into perspective. Remember: this is based on a continuously running economic model since the 1970's which means it IGNORES climate change entirely. And, well, as the Magic 8-Ball would famously say: "Outlook not so good."

Note that the general predictions the model makes are eerily closely aligned with our current timeline for climate change: By 2030, we will have warmed the Earth by about 1.5C. Currently at around 1.2C today we are already seeing droughts that will never end in the American Southwest, annual firestorms in the American West and Australia, heat waves that are borderline unsurvivable by millions of humans in India, flooding in Europe that washes away entire towns, the gradual warming of desert nations like Iraq which are already forcing people to migrate away from the hottest regions, and unprecedented heat waves in places like Antarctica and Siberia which have never been seen before in recorded history.

Assuming nothing changes, and so far it really is "business as usual" as nobody except the European Union are even pretending to meet their carbon emissions targets today, much less in 2030, 2040, or 2050, we will be seeing the Earth warming up to 2C in 2040. This is mostly likely enough to trigger the largest human migrations in history as large swathes of the planet are now uninhabitable year round. Large portions of India (population: 1.4 billion) will need to be abandoned. Rising seas will drown major cities of the world, including Jakarta (population: 33 million) and Miami (population: 6 million) as examples. Societal collapse will indeed become likely once billions of humans are facing famine, death by heat in the summer, no potable drinking water. After that, the collapse is inevitable once wars for remaining resources start. Humanity's long term survival may still be possible, but civilization as we know it will be gone as billions of humans starve, die of thirst, fail to survive migrations or never have a chance to migrate before dying, or are killed in global resource wars.

Well, that was perfectly sunny and optimistic, I hope everyone has a good Monday!

 

[Gigapress]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/colorado-river-crisis/

Today's reminder what we're all doing here. I think a lot of people who have done the quintessential American summer vacation has seen a lot of these sights. Las Vegas, Hoover Dam, Glen Canyon Dam, Lake Mead, Lake Powell, and the national parks like Zion, Arches, etc. The Colorado River looks pretty cool and we probably thought it was going to provide water for the arid desert of the American Southwest forever. Turns out that's not the case due to accelerating climate change. I wonder what the plan is for the 13 million humans who inhabit the Los Angeles metropolitan area when it returns to the desert from which it came.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I think the only viable plan is desalination on a tremendous scale.

We have more water on this planet than we could possibly use. The problem is that almost all of our H2O molecules are jumbled together with salt ions and other impurities in big pools located downhill from where we live.

The Sun’s energy has always solved this problem for us by generating evaporation, wind, clouds, rain and rivers. This has always been frustratingly inconsistent, unpredictable and unevenly distributed across Earth’s landmass. With climate change, desertification, deforestation, erosion and biodiversity loss these issues are getting significantly worse every year, and our food supply is currently dependent on unsustainable water draw rates. That’s very bad news.

Some very good news is that we can actively use the same solar energy to bypass the natural hydrological cycle to synthesize as much freshwater as we want and pump it to wherever we want and even put it in solid or gaseous form if we want. In principle, it’s physically possible to artificially refill all our lakes, rivers and streams with clean, 100% reliable water supply. With electricity we can remove the salt and other impurities and then pump the water uphill. The process is already pretty well established, with over 21,000 desalination plants in operation worldwide today, mostly concentrated in the Middle East where they have nearby saltwater, cheap oil and gas, and severe freshwater scarcity.

The problem with desalination and water transportation has always been the cost and environmental impact of the energy and pipeline requirements. A breakthrough in cheap sustainable energy and underground pipeline construction costs is needed. How else will we irrigate the Midwest when we’ve finishing sucking the Ogallala Aquifer dry? How else will East Africa survive when Lake Victoria is nothing more than a memory?

Solar energy is soon going to be cheaper per Joule, by an order of magnitude, than hydrocarbon fuels ever have been anywhere in the world. So the energy portion is already likely to be solved in a timely manner.

Underground aqueducts already exist. Mexico City, for instance, relies heavily on their pipeline infrastructure and they recently completed a 39-mile wastewater removal tunnel. Sadly, these subterranean aqueduct projects take years to complete, cost around $1 billion per mile and have insufficient flow rates to really make a dent in the overall global water crisis.

Can we fix that part? Suppose that Boring Company hits their technical goals for Prufrock and then follows that up with a MegaPrufrock variant with a 4-meter radius. It might cost 5x more per mile than regular Prufrock for a cost of about $25M per mile fully outfitted with pumps. With a 50 m^2 cross sectional area and a 20 m/s flow rate (we don’t care much about pump energy consumption in this future) it could transport 1000 m^3 of water per second.

For comparison, the discharge rate of the Amazon River is 200k m^3/s. If we wanted to deliver an equivalent flow of water, we could do it with just 200 of these aqueducts at a cost of just $5B per mile. No crazy technology involved, just big pipes with big internal propellers.

Building one such aqueduct from the Gulf of Mexico to Nebraska 1000 miles away would cost $25B. Nebraska today has about 1M irrigated acres of farmland. Our pipeline can deliver 1 acre-foot of irrigation (1200 m^3) every 1.2 seconds. Corn needs about 2 acre-feet per season.

1M acres * 2 feet irrigation * 1.2 sec/acre-ft / 86400 sec/day = 28 days of aqueduct flow to grow 1M acres of corn.​

Wow, that actually sounds feasible!

Lake Mead has a maximum capacity of 32 billion m^3. At our estimated 1000 m^3/s flow rate, Lake Mead could be completely filled from empty in one year with a single pipe. It’s 270 miles from the ocean. At $25M/mile the pipe would be $7B to construct.

I am fairly convinced by now that if Boring Co can actually hit their preposterous goals and Wright’s Law for solar development holds true for another decade or two, we can provide plenty of water for our own needs, directly fix our wildlife reserves and reverse desertification. Tesla would play a massive role in powering this infrastructure because they will be the leading energy company by the time any of this would happen.

 

[raffiniert]

Not sure how new this is - but the Tesla Semi page is now live and Tesla is taking firm orders - first come first serve I guess Tesla Semi

Living in Switzerland, I can not preorder it. I would like to and build a giant motorhome out of it then. I would be even willing to do the required license to drive it.

And, by participating in this thread that got a bit out of hand imo (meaning: it's offtopic af), I wish we could get back to topic.

So, when 1000? When 2000? When to the moooooon? ;-)

 

[lascavarian]

You must politely remind them that refusing a vehicle inspection based on brand is illegal and that they will be reported to the appropriate authorities if they continue to do so. They deserve to have their inspection station certificate revoked if they refuse to meet the requirements.

Tesla design was incompatible with many lifts. Inspection shop lifts might damage the vehicle. I bought special pucks before receiving the vehicle for use in that first inspection since they did not come with the vehicle. I still have them in the car.

Discount Tire lifted my car without using pucks

www.teslaownersonline.com

When I had Costco install snow tires, they did not want to use their lifts and used floor jacks instead. It took longer. Since those days, I believe Costco has upgraded their lifts.

 

[UCF3]

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I think the only viable plan is desalination on a tremendous scale.

There are other options for cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix:
1. Rip up every golf course and grass lawn
2. Stop building new homes in the desert and encourage people to move to other parts of the country that have water

 

[15Peter20]

Positive news, hopefully: Shanghai to end Covid lockdown and return to normal life in June amid economic slowdown

 

[UkNorthampton]

Not sure how new this is - but the Tesla Semi page is now live and Tesla is taking firm orders - first come first serve I guess Tesla Semi


View attachment 804913


View attachment 804914

I've never looked before, has this changed? Also available in UK

 

[CLK350]

Not sure how new this is - but the Tesla Semi page is now live and Tesla is taking firm orders - first come first serve I guess Tesla Semi


View attachment 804913


View attachment 804914

The implication is that ramping up production lines of the new 4680 batteries could be going very well - so 4Q target is likely to be reached.

 

[ZachF]

SpaceX intends to have 1k Starships launching 1k times per year each. Every $1 saved per launch adds up to $1 million annually.

The Virgin Islands have too many disadvantages I think

• Size: probably too small to handle the million annual launches
  • Probably at least 100 launch pads needed if cycle time is ~1 hour
  • Also, tourism is most of their economy, and the noise from 2700 launches each day would be a no-go.
• Not suitable for manufacturing Starships and fuel on site
  • Very little existing industrial base and few natural resources
• The VIs are at 18.3 degrees north. Launching from the Equator gives 85 km/h of delta-V advantage.
• Not a place Elon will be frequently visiting for Tesla business

Musk companies always go hardcore and head directly for the best physically possible solution. SpaceX in particular has been laser-focused on minimizing the delay until the Martian colony becomes self-sustaining, which is directly a function of how much useful payload each Starship can deliver per trip, considering that SpaceX will be severely production constrained by Starship and Super Heavy manufacturing. The rate of delivery and the cost per ton of payload to Mars are a function of the latitude of the launch site. Orbital refueling helps make this less of an issue, but getting to orbit in the first place is the harder part because it requires 27000 km/hr of delta-v but the trip out of Earth’s gravity well requires only an additional 13000 km/hr. SpaceX wants to really optimize because their goal is to ship at least 1 million tons to Mars as soon as possible.

If they want at least 99% of the maximum possible assistance from Earth’s rotation in order to accelerate the timeline for developing a self-sufficient Martian colony, then they need to stay within 8 degrees north or south of the equator. Within that band of the planet, there are unfortunately only a few places with eastward-facing shoreline on a lake or ocean:

1. Brazil (around the Amazon River delta)
2. Galápagos Islands
3. French Guiana
4. Democratic Republic of the Congo
5. Uganda
6. Tanzania
7. Somalia
8. Kenya
9. Maldives
10. Sri Lanka (southern tip)
11. Malaysia
12. Singapore
13. Thailand (southern tip)
14. Indonesia
15. Philippines (southern tip)
16. Papua New Guinea
17. Solomon Islands

Indonesia is by far the strongest candidate for a launch industry of this magnitude. It has:

• A huge amount of suitable, no compromises coastline for launch pads
• 274 million population
• $4T GDP ($15k per capita) from diversified market economy
• 0.72 Human Development Index (high)
• G20 membership
• Abundant natural resources including nickel, copper and natural gas
• A massive partnership with Tesla in the works
• A President who has been seen meeting with Elon Musk at SpaceX facilities multiple times who has publicly stated for years that he’s actively pursuing development of spaceports for SpaceX

Singapore and Malaysia are similarly situated, wealthier and more highly developed, but they have much less population, natural resources, and eastward-facing coastline, plus they’re not directly on the Equator. Singapore and Malaysia almost certainly will play a significant role in the growing space economy, but Indonesia is better positioned to send off gigantic fleets of Starships hauling bulk freight every 26 months when the planets align.

Brazil’s northern coast and French Guiana are potentially solid secondary options for the Western Hemisphere for cargo that’s difficult or expensive to get to Indonesia/Singapore/Malaysia.

If we expand the band a little bit wider, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, northern Australia, and Trinidad & Tobago become decent 2nd-tier candidates.

Overall, it’s really an obvious choice considering the goals of both Tesla and SpaceX and the limitations on Elon’s time.

Seen at Starbase yesterday:
View attachment 804863

Ain’t no place like Indonesia to make batteries and launch cargo to deep space!

You are massively overestimating equatorial boost and massively underestimating ITAR. The dv boost from the equator vs FL or TX is like 50m/s. Most of the benefit of equatorial launch is if you are going to geostationary orbit, as you can subtract a few hundred m/s of inclination change.

 

[ZachF]

California Coastal Commission rejects plan for Poseidon desalination plant

After hours of intense debate Thursday, coastal regulators have rejected Poseidon Water's proposal to build a desalination plant in Huntington Beach.

www.latimes.com

Interestingly, a desalination project that was backed by California Governor Gavin Newsom was rejected just recently. It doesn't seem like the people of the LA basin actually want water or anything. We'll see how that goes for them.

CA government will chose virtue signals over actual problem solving ten times out of ten.

 

[ZachF]

Tesla delays plan to restore Shanghai output to pre-lockdown levels

Tesla Inc has delayed a plan to restore production at its Shanghai plant to levels before the city's COVID-19 lockdown by at least a week, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.

www.reuters.com

That means that Shanghai Q1 production is around 30k so far.

1200 per day out to the 23rd then a ramp up to 2600 for the last week gives us around 40k for may.

2600/day during June gives us 80k for June total.

This gives ~130k for Q2 when the 10k for April is added in.

Adding in Fremont Austin and Berlin will probably get to 280-290k total.

Q3 should be well over 400k, and Q4 over 500k.

 

[MD70]

Does it sound plausible that a 2million backlog exists for the model Y performance in Europe ?

https://twitter.com/x/status/1526154805814648833

 

[CorneliusXX]

Does it sound plausible that a 2million backlog exists for the model Y performance in Europe ?

https://twitter.com/x/status/1526154805814648833

It does sound pretty high. That's 4 years of production at full capacity (excluding new factory builds). If it were true then we would see delivery timelines pushed way out into the future or more price increases I think.

It would be good to see alternative sources of evidence before believing it too strongly.

Tesla could be sandbagging Berlin capacity like they report >450k for Shanghai, if so then the 2m number might be more reasonable.

 

[Nocturnal]

Does it sound plausible that a 2million backlog exists for the model Y performance in Europe ?

https://twitter.com/x/status/1526154805814648833

That does not sound plausible. 2 million for the Y performance alone?

 

[ThisStockGood]

That does not sound plausible. 2 million for the Y performance alone?

I agree it sounds very high. But… it would make sense with regards to Elon’s statement in the FT interview: “We might stop taking orders because of too high demand” (as far as I remember)

 

[Maarten]

Imo Giga Indonesia makes more sense than Giga India. I have lived in Bali for ~4 years. Seen a few Teslas, they have Tesla taxi in Jakarta, but not in Bali. The country is not very rich, but there are a lot of rich people in it, specially in Surabaya there are many ”crazy rich surabayans”. Sometimes you will see caravans of Ferrarri, McLaren, Lamborghini etc on road trips. When I talk with Indonesians, Tesla seems to be very popular with the young people. My girlfriend’s brother started talking about Tesla spontaneously, he was mightily impressed when I said I owned one.

Indonesia has a young population that is very IT savvy, lot’s of apps for deliveries of everything from medicine to car cleaning that people use daily. They have their own alternatives to Amazon(Tokopedia) and Uber(Gojek) etc. The country has been a bit protectionistic, but recently Jokoko has been proposing an Umnibus law to make lots of changes including foreign ownership.

Imo they should start with expanding sales of Chinese made Model 3/Y and Powerwall(power outages are not rare). Open some stores in Jakarta, Surabaya and Denpasar. Check the market and build a few superchargers in between. Then later they can consider doing a battery gigafactory in Java. The market is probably not large enough to motivate car production for a while, maybe if they can make some smaller production line for multiple models or if they make a smaller cheaper car or a minivan that could sell a lot, but the current models are not optimized for the Indonesian market. But there still would be a decent demand for imported Model Y.

A nice result from our 2013 investment in Tesla is that we were able to buy an incredibly beautiful villa in Bali with a part of our shares.
Tempted to post pictures, but will not do that for reasons of privacy.
Financially not the best decision because of the rise of TSLA after that, but now we have a beautiful place to stay during the grey winters in The Netherlands.
A whole life of hard working couldn't do for us, what investing in Tesla has done.
So yes, we have 'our island' now.
Bali and Indonesia are perfect for electric driving. A lot of sunshine to generate electricity and relative short distances to drive.

Every year around March people celebrate Nyepi on Bali, the Balinese New Year.
The island, including harbours and international airport, is completely shut down for 24 hours. Everybody stays inside of their homes.
No motor cycles (main way of transport for the Balinese) on the roads, which are also completely silent.
Only emergency vehicles are allowed, like police and ambulance.
A time for the Balinese people used for reflection on their life.
In the evening lights are off and curtains are closed. It's pitch dark and the galaxy opens itself in all its wonder for all to see.
Tourists are kindly but strictly requested to stay in their hotel.
It's also called Silent Day, because all you hear are birds and the wind.
The air is very clean for a day, as the Indian Ocean winds sweep the island completely clean.
That day shows what electric transport can do for us with respect to silence and clean air and it feels magical.

 

[RationalOptimist]

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I think the only viable plan is desalination on a tremendous scale.

We have more water on this planet than we could possibly use. The problem is that almost all of our H2O molecules are jumbled together with salt ions and other impurities in big pools located downhill from where we live.

The Sun’s energy has always solved this problem for us by generating evaporation, wind, clouds, rain and rivers. This has always been frustratingly inconsistent, unpredictable and unevenly distributed across Earth’s landmass. With climate change, desertification, deforestation, erosion and biodiversity loss these issues are getting significantly worse every year, and our food supply is currently dependent on unsustainable water draw rates. That’s very bad news.

Some very good news is that we can actively use the same solar energy to bypass the natural hydrological cycle to synthesize as much freshwater as we want and pump it to wherever we want and even put it in solid or gaseous form if we want. In principle, it’s physically possible to artificially refill all our lakes, rivers and streams with clean, 100% reliable water supply. With electricity we can remove the salt and other impurities and then pump the water uphill. The process is already pretty well established, with over 21,000 desalination plants in operation worldwide today, mostly concentrated in the Middle East where they have nearby saltwater, cheap oil and gas, and severe freshwater scarcity.

The problem with desalination and water transportation has always been the cost and environmental impact of the energy and pipeline requirements. A breakthrough in cheap sustainable energy and underground pipeline construction costs is needed. How else will we irrigate the Midwest when we’ve finishing sucking the Ogallala Aquifer dry? How else will East Africa survive when Lake Victoria is nothing more than a memory?

Solar energy is soon going to be cheaper per Joule, by an order of magnitude, than hydrocarbon fuels ever have been anywhere in the world. So the energy portion is already likely to be solved in a timely manner.

Underground aqueducts already exist. Mexico City, for instance, relies heavily on their pipeline infrastructure and they recently completed a 39-mile wastewater removal tunnel. Sadly, these subterranean aqueduct projects take years to complete, cost around $1 billion per mile and have insufficient flow rates to really make a dent in the overall global water crisis.

Can we fix that part? Suppose that Boring Company hits their technical goals for Prufrock and then follows that up with a MegaPrufrock variant with a 4-meter radius. It might cost 5x more per mile than regular Prufrock for a cost of about $25M per mile fully outfitted with pumps. With a 50 m^2 cross sectional area and a 20 m/s flow rate (we don’t care much about pump energy consumption in this future) it could transport 1000 m^3 of water per second.

For comparison, the discharge rate of the Amazon River is 200k m^3/s. If we wanted to deliver an equivalent flow of water, we could do it with just 200 of these aqueducts at a cost of just $5B per mile. No crazy technology involved, just big pipes with big internal propellers.

Building one such aqueduct from the Gulf of Mexico to Nebraska 1000 miles away would cost $25B. Nebraska today has about 1M irrigated acres of farmland. Our pipeline can deliver 1 acre-foot of irrigation (1200 m^3) every 1.2 seconds. Corn needs about 2 acre-feet per season.

1M acres * 2 feet irrigation * 1.2 sec/acre-ft / 86400 sec/day = 28 days of aqueduct flow to grow 1M acres of corn.​

Wow, that actually sounds feasible!

Lake Mead has a maximum capacity of 32 billion m^3. At our estimated 1000 m^3/s flow rate, Lake Mead could be completely filled from empty in one year with a single pipe. It’s 270 miles from the ocean. At $25M/mile the pipe would be $7B to construct.

I am fairly convinced by now that if Boring Co can actually hit their preposterous goals and Wright’s Law for solar development holds true for another decade or two, we can provide plenty of water for our own needs, directly fix our wildlife reserves and reverse desertification. Tesla would play a massive role in powering this infrastructure because they will be the leading energy company by the time any of this would happen.

Great post. Thank you.

 

[JRP3]

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I think the only viable plan is desalination on a tremendous scale.

I'll just point out that we are in this situation because of a failure to understand unintended consequences of our actions.