ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
Twitter wasn't meant to be a profitable business.
Tell that to the people who gave him $10 billion in loans to buy it.
He kicked a four digit number of problem employees and greatly improved free speach on the global public square. That is a major achievement.
Yes, which is why I put it at the top, as the least problematic of his companies. If he could do that after winning Twitter in a lottery, and not having to pay for it, or if there was no advertiser boycott in response, I'd say things have gone quite well for him.
SpaceX has been the most successful rocket program since the 60s. F9/FH, the dragon capsule have been true game changers.
I guess this is another part of the Motte and Bailey that I mentioned - the things he already did already were revolutionary. Ok, cool. Show me how it's paying for their bills, though.
Starship is a complete paradigm shift
No, it is not. Maybe it will be one day. This is the thing that drives me a bit nuts in discussions about Elon, people are acting like he already achieved what he promised.
The other problem is that "the paradigm", such as it is, falls apart after you want to do anything beyond LEO. 15 refuelling launches to get 1 rocket to the moon is a little bit excessive, wouldn't you say?
They made sci fi tech happen
What they did was cool, but not mind-blowing. It's not even clear there's much benefit to reusability. In either case, again, show me how that will satisfy the investors.
Starlink is almost profitable as is and has 50% growth per year
Can you give a link to breakdown of their numbers? I'd be interested in seeing that.
Growth in itself doesn't necessarily mean much, if you have to keep launching satellites to expand service.
While starship will take several years to get operational it unlocks a giant market as it allows regular cell phone users to send text messages globally and use basic services everywhere in the world.
But... most people don't go around to "anywhere in the world", they tend to stick to their local population hub. Their phones tend to already have perfectly fine Internet access, and when they don't, and need a satellite connection, it's not exactly clear why they would be willing to pay more just to get their latency a bit lower.
The launch market has a shortage and the demand is greater than supply.
Again, any links will be appreciated.
The legacy manufacturers don't have anywhere near the experience with electric cars
This is only a problem, if we're all going to switch to electric cars. I can already tell you I don't want to. The EU played with the idea of forcing people to switch, but even if they go through with it, the Chinese are providing perfectly fine alternatives.
Tesla was one of the biggest things to happen to the car industry in decades.
Teslas are still a rarity, and it's not clear how long they will stick around. Their sales numbers have gone down, and they have competition now, so even if electric cars will stay, it's not clear that people will keep buying Teslas.
Musk became obscenely rich from it.
Yeah, through people buying meme-stocks on the back of wild promises he never fulfilled. Do you think people will see "but Musk got rich from it" as an argument in Elon's favor, if Tesla crashes with no sign of semis, self-driving, robo-taxis, bipedal robots, or revolutionary new batteries?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17hr ago
then this is quite rational.
Sure, but it's still a new and surprising development. Dawkinites turning their attention to Islam was a thing 10 years ago. In response feminists, LGTBQ+'s, and anti-racists decided to form Atheism+ and drive out the Dawkinsians. If what you're describing is happening again, then that is indeed a sign that the vibes have shifted, though a restart of New Atheism might be hard to pull off, given how much damage their core thesis of "Imagine no religion", or Science Trusting, took.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17hr ago
Gentlemen, it is with deep regret that I must urge you to consider to drop Elon...
Okay, okay... so I can't pretend I was ever much of a fan of his, and given my past comments about him here, some might even consider me biased against him. I am, however, very much a fan of the ethos he represents. "Move fast and break things", regulations stifling innovation, anti-credentialism., etc., etc. are all ideas close to my heart, and this is precisely why I'm worried Elon going down in flames would irreparably damage the reputation of the entire techo-libertarian ethos, and why I'd like to persuade fellow weird nerds to give the guy a skeptical look.
I always felt there was a bit of a motte and bailey with the arguments for Elon's greatness. The bailey being that he has/will revolutionize anything he touches, that he will take us to Mars, where we will be chauffeured around by self-driving electric cars via a network of vacuum-tunnels. The motte is something to the effect of "look at how much his companies are worth", and I have the impression that it's integrity heavily depends on some parts of the bailey being true, or there's no reason to value anything he does at it's current levels. Going from good to bad:
His takeover went a lot better than I expected. I fully expected him to face the full wrath of the Powers That Be for opening it up, and while he did face an advertiser boycott, and does still occasionally censor dissidents, the truth is Twitter is a much more open space than it used to be, and a lot more stable than any of the haters or hopeful skeptics could have predicted. Were it not for the boycott, what he did might have even been a formula to turn it into moneymaker, but as it stands it seems to be stuck at a decent and stable state. That would have been fine, but Elon's issue is he had to go into substantial debt to buy it, so he does need it to be a moneymaker. This is probably where all the ideas like login walls, and limiting previously open APIs came from. While this comes off to me as "greedy" / "needs this stuff to generate money", there's one thing that comes off as "no longer able to maintain the project", and it's the sudden appearance of porn bots. It seems that nobody likes having them around. Old Twitter, for all it's faults, was able to keep a lid on them, but nowadays they roam freely, so it does feel like it's a sign of weakness.
SpaceX
A fundamental problem for SpaceX is that there just isn't all that much demand for space. The entire space launch market on Earth can gross you $4.28 billion. So even if he monopolized the entire industry, he won't exactly be paying for those Twitter loans this way anytime soon. His solution was to grow the market - to come up with services he can sell that depend on high-volume low-cost launches, like Starlink or Point-to-Point.
At a glance, Starlink seems at least plausible, but I think it will be a struggle to make any kind of profit from it. Between launches being expensive, the sheer amount of satellites required, their 5-year lifespan ensuring the costs will be recurring, and fees for Earth-side ISPs, I doubt they're anywhere near the break-even point. Elon seems to agree. Starship is supposed to be the cure for all their ills, but anything reliable seems years away, even in an optimistic scenario.
Point-to-Point is dead on arrival. The idea here is that if you get rapid reusability right, you can outperform long-haul flights by making several trips in the time it would take a plane to make one. If they get their rockets to stop rapidly disassembling, then we can start talking about reusing them fast enough to make a roundtrip on the same day. While they might be able to crack the former at some point (again, years away IMO) the latter is unrealistic, given that even with Falcon 9, the shortest reuse time they managed to achieve was 21 days. And this is without going into details like how much would the ticket have to cost, for the idea to make any sort of sense, or which city would want to have a starport anywhere near it.
I don't know if they were hoping to make any significant amount of money from government contracts, but if they were, it's not looking good for them either. The Artemis mission is an utter clown show right from the drawing board (the whole speech is pretty great, if you have time to kill). I'm prepared to lay a significant portion of the blame for that on NASA itself, and their autistic levels of obsession with reusability, but I don't think it's NASA's fault that the current mission architecture requires something to the tune of a dozen launches, in order to get one rocket to the moon. The... suboptimal... architecture in itself might not have been that much of an issue for SpaceX. The contracts are signed, so as long as they could deliver, they'd get their money, but they can't seem to deliver. There's already a big slip up with the schedule, and no sign of getting close major milestones like ship-to-ship refuelling. On top that, they have actual competition. A date that could mark the turning of the tide for SpaceX is 29 September 2024, that's when Blue Origin is set to go to Mars. As far as I understand, the mission is deemed high-risk, so it might very well end the same way as SpaceX' Starship launches, but if they get it right (on the first attempt, no less), while Starship can't even get to orbit, that might trigger a cascade of "wait, what have you guys been doing all these years?" from investors and NASA administrators.
This goes more into the realm of Vibe Analysis, but an interesting thing to look at is Elon's "Starship Update" presentations (2018, 2022, 2024). The first one goes great for him, he is largely able to sell his vision of building a self-sustaining city on Mars. The press asks him a few skeptical-ish questions about the details, but he's allowed to brush them off ("Boil-off? Pfft, that's easy!"), and is taken seriously, even as he's making wild promises/predictions (orbital flight within 6 months, manned flight within a year). The second one is largely a repeat of the first and the reception is still warm, but by the third the vibe changes completely.
Every engineer / techie probably had the experience of working with a sales / marketing guy BSing the client, promising impossible things in order to make a sale. What is perhaps less common is having the marketing guy trying to BS the very techies responsible for delivering on the fantastical ideas being sold, but I've had that experience as well, and Musks latest presentation reminds me of it. Exciting announcements of imminent success are met with a wall of silence, but that's the reaction you're always going to get, when you're trying to hype up a crowd that knows exactly how far away they are from reaching any of these goals.
SpaceX being private, I can't tell what their financial are, but unless they pull a rabbit out of a hat (and possible even if they manage it), I think they're toast.
Tesla
In theory that should be the strongest company, since they have actual factories, producing actual cars sold to actual people... but that's never the argument used to support their value it's always about great innovations that are just around the corner:
- Cybertruck!
- Tesla Semi (it beats diesel, NOW!)
- Revolutionary new batteries!
- Self-driving cars!
- Robo-taxis!
- Optimus!!!
Listen to the last few quarterly earnings calls, and it's always the same story. Any moment now they'll crack some great new thing, and it's gonna be bigger / faster / stronger than anything anyone has every done, "by orders of magnitude", but they never seem to have anything to report on that they actually cracked, and are ready to go with. Cybertruck is a meme by now. Semi, which was supposed to be shipped to the tune of 50K this year, looks like it will be lucky if it reaches 50. The revolution in batteries turned out to be a minor iterative improvement, if that. The way Elon is talking about self-driving is especially bewildering. He seems set on the idea of "photons in, controls out", and maybe I'm a simpleton, but I have no idea why you would kneecap your system by deliberately cutting it off from other sources of data. I'd literally have an easier time believing they're close to cracking it, if he completely glossed over the implementation. And as far as I can tell Optimus is a manually controlled puppet, that they can't find a practical use for, by their own admission.
If he actually delivered on any of this stuff, I'd probably be more cautious about criticizing the company, it wouldn't even have to live up to the hype, but it looks like the cycle for the company and it's supporters is "cusome product, get excited for new product", with the "consume product" bit crossed out. I think it's the hype that will do them in, and I don't think they can even pull off a "let's get back to the basics" and just make good cars anymore, because of the insane valuation their hype has gotten them. And again, they have actual competition now. Feel free to make the case that they make the best cars, but even if that's true, I don't think that's going to help them much, when other companies make good enough cars that are more affordable.
It won't be long now...
As always in Vibe Analysis, timing is tricky, but something's in the air. Between Tesla's top brass cashing out, and deciding this is a great moment to spend more time with their family, construction projects being halted, people getting fired, public opinion turning against Elon, and everything depending on a rabbit (possibly multiple rabbits) being pulled out of a hat, it feels like things are hanging on by a thread. If investors pull out, I don't think either of his companies has strong enough fundamentals to survive.
I would love to be proven wrong. If Elon delivers, all that happens to me is that I look a bit silly for shitposting on the Internet (and will also have to pay for some outstanding bets about Starship going to orbit), but on the plus side, I'll be driven around by robo-taxis, as I watch a livestream from the latest moon landing. If he doesn't, we're up for a massive collapse of wealth, call-off for our return to the moon, and the cratering of the credibility of the entire techno-libertarian memeplex.
The idea of in-group policing was commonly disputed on our site / subreddit, the idea being that no movement or subculture is a monolith, so you can't blame people for the excesses of their group. I happen to disagree, I think it's extremely important to call out the excesses of your in-group, so if you happen to be an Elon fan, please try taking a skeptical look at the guy's endeavors. If nothing else, if you conclude he still comes out on top after a more skeptical analysis, you'll get the chance to hone your arguments.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
20hr ago
You never talked to @Lizzardspawn?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
21hr ago
I'd be interested in his answer too, but the basic case is pretty simple: being a part of that subculture puts you at risk of exclusion from polite society, therefore it's a counterculture. Calling it "the true" counterculture might be going to far, I'm sure there's plenty of other groups that can lay claim to being countercultural, but this one's by far the biggest.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Well, if you're still optimistic enough to believe addressing these responses with arguments and studies can change someone's mind, I don't want to poison you with my cynicism.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
They might, if you tell them a trans woman wants to join their darts championship.
But otherwise, so what? For any question you'll find a person taking the other side of the debate, but an honest investigation of this particular question does leave basically no doubt.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Studies are lower quality evidence, than the combned scoreboards of every competition involving those skills, in their entire recorded history.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
It's not. It's the people acting like there is such a thing that are hard to deal with.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
By contrast, liberalism and progressivism fundamentally surrender that what others do or are is out of one's control, and the differences come down to how to handle that.
That created the loudest record scratch in my head I've heard in a while.
As far as I can tell this is precisely backwards. The entire point of progressivism is to remake human nature. What else do you call it's unrelenting obsession with equity, insistence that everything is a social construct, galaxy-brained ideas like having social workers fight crime? I've had progressives tell me point-blank that human nature does not exist. Even liberalism isn't free from this, though it's notably toned down.
To be sure there are right-wing equivalents of this. Fascism was a revolutionary ideology, so I can grant you the argument there - though I'd note that this is largely where Hlynka's alt-right progressive meme - but for more traditional forms of authoritarianism / elitism, their entire point is to respond to human nature, rather than acting like you can engineer it.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
Crime is still lower than it was in the 1970s-1990s pretty much everywhere in the 1st world, and everyone who can actually remember the bad old days knows this
Are you sure this isn't more of a US / Anglosphere thing? Sweden went from a left-wing meme about the glories of social welfare and prison rehabilitation, to a right-wing meme about the dangers of immigration. Data from any country that has the guts to record the ethnicity of criminals tends to show that whatever crime they have, is mostly attributable to immigrants.
The only people who see brown faces on the streets and assume that crime is out of control are American racists.
What is this bit supposed to bring to the discussion? If it turns out you're wrong, are you going to admit to your racism, or does it only go one way?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
I don't see how you can live well as a normie in a country where the bread is sweetened by default.
Buy a bread maker?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
And what does Labour offer the people that they are not already getting force fed with two hands by the Tories?
Things did start moving there on the trans issue (to a far greater extent than in the US), and Labour could reverse course on that.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
I'm not the best person to answer this question, since I don't dislike immigrants, and the current world is so far away from my perfect one that it renders your ennture question moot, but generally it's about loyalty. Leave your past loyalties behind, and endorse the host population as your tribe, and we're good.
Everything that's talked about around this subject - jerbs, crime, language, culture - is just a proxy for that.
What would you be willing to do to make it real? How many mistakes and how much damage are you willing to tolerate along the way.
"About as much as our current society is tolerating" seems like a reasonable answer. Your questions seems to assume the current system is making some sort of effort to avoid mistakes, but a cursory glance at the current state of affairs will tell you l that you could regularly ruin the lives of tens of thousands of people, and still come out on top relative to today.
And perhaps, what other qualities of this society would you be willing to sacrifice, to gain the ones you describe? (Universal suffrage, for example?)
While 2rafa fancies herself an aristocrat, I'm a pleb and proud of it, and I'd take that deal Ina heartbeat.
The whole democratic system is deliberately designed to minimize any chance the common people will have any kind of impact on policy, while insisting it is absolutely essential that they participate. At least spare me the humiliation of having to pretend I'm a part if the decision making process.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
Isn't that infinite recursion? I thought all neocons were Trotskyites larping as conservatives...
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
If it was an effective of preventing him from using nukes, they would have done so to prevent or stop the war by now. That killing of leaders doesn't tend to pan out this way is my entire point.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
If they could kill him without repercussions, they would have already done so, which means they either can't, or doing so would come with costs they're not willing to pay. This might change if he uses nukes, but it's far from clear to me how it would pan out.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7d ago
He has seen into the abyss and with that you are still a viable candidate. That speaks about both the alternatives he is aware of and likely his calculus of what the baseline mental state of the educated Indian male of your social stature. If his daughter is hot go for it, and rub it in your brothers face that you overcame adversity.
Absolutely. Reject modernity, embrace tradition, take the arranged-marriage-pill. Your family knows what's best for you @self_made_human, listen to them.
How am I supposed to even begin to argue the opposite position? I don't suppose that the fact that AC2 exists today, and the people you're criticizing are still alive, but they're not complaining about AC2 despite having ample opportunity to do so, changes your mind in any way?
Is your position at all falsifiable?
That said, I agree people should have realized mainstream games, and media of all sorts, are a lost cause, and moved on a long time ago.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
8d ago
If they’d released AC2 in current year, the same people would be complaining that beating up the Pope was an attack on Western civilization.
The same people who are complaining about woke stories today, were alive and active on Internet forums back then, and did not, in fact, complain.
Anyway, can't wait for the new Black Panther game to come out.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
8d ago
Back in the before times we had to wait for a new SO to introduce us to friends and family, but apparently now if a man doesn't at least have a sort of "pre-introductory portfolio" in that regard girls worry that they might get the "it puts the lotion on its skin" treatment.
That sure stirred up some thoughts. In rough chronological order order:
- Boy, am I glad to already be married...
and now if you start to type "dating las vegas" into Google then autocomplete will helpfully suggest "dating last chopper out of nam" instead.
Oh lol, I guess I'm not the only one.
-
We need a total and complete shutdown on America until we figure out what the hell is going on.
-
Butlerian Jihad when?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
9d ago
Fighting entropy is a noble act. It's sitting in traffic that we should eliminate
ohhh wait, people were not abusing that system? I'm not from the west though, so my baseline is probably lower trust than most readers here.
Yes. Going from a low-trust to a high-trust society was one of the things that blew my mind when I visited the US. High-trust systems no longer working is probably one of the biggest downsides of immigration, which will not be measurable until it's too late, and won't be easily attributable to it by any data you can gather, so The Experts will be able to gaslight people about it until the heat death of the universe.
Another thing is their electoral system. It's security is laughable by any objective measure, but it more or less worked until now due to high trust. Even if the previous election was more or less fair, it's only a question of time until someone decides to abuse it.
And how long do you think that's going to last? As a techie, I can tell you techies can indeed accept overtime and submarket wages, but they want to actually build stuff. They want to point at the cool thing everybody is going crazy about, and be able to say "I built that". When they catch on you're dealing with vaporware, they're probably not gonna sign up, and definitely not for a sub-market wage. How long do you think they'll keep signing on when they hear you can get fired from one day to the next, like what's happening at Tesla?
It's another meme. My post was already long so I didn't go into it. The company that wants to revolutionize the world with cheap tunnels makes tunnels that aren't cheap.
Well, another issue he has is that even when he attracts talented people, he doesn't seem to listen to them. Listen to this Twitter space with George Hotz. Hotz sounds like exactly the kind of guy that Elon should hang on to for dear life, but what happened is that Hotz's ideas were ignored (probably for financial reasons), and he left after a few months.
I kind of have the idea this might already be happening with Starlink, behind the scenes, but I'm not sure it's enough to keep the lights on in perpetuity. But the whole problem with SpaceX is that it's pretty opaque, so who knows, maybe I'm wrong.
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