I don't own shares in any Musk company, and agree that Tesla as a car company is grossly overvalued. But as the parent states, dude gets shit done.

It is _hard_ to start a successful car company, let alone one on an untested platform. He did it, and it taught China how to build the future of cars.

It is _impossible_ to build a successful rocket company from nothing. He did it, and SpaceX is now ~60% of _worldwide_ launches.

He's had plenty of failures, but Musk is what people are buying. He's gross and annoying, but I wouldn't count him out, and I'm rooting for his success.

The rocket company is probably more technically impressive anyway but I am disinclined to accept the attempts to rewrite Tesla's history. Maybe it was necessary to force the actual people who started the company out for it to survive and a Series A is certainly important, but Musk is still an investor in the car company and not the person who started it.

I guess I'm rooting for his success too, my point was that the actual product successes as I see them all happened pre-2020. Covid era broke some people and Musk seems to be one of them.

If he were still mission focused, he would have used his time in the Trump administration on cool missions instead of "ctrl-f trans" and defund random projects with "transducer" or "transfusion" in them.

I've never understood Tesla's valuation as greater than the entire automotive industry combined.

But as a 95% FSD user, I'm living (and loving) the Full Self-Driving lie.

> is that current "conservative" politicians are actually more neoliberals than conservatives.

I suppose "neoliberal" means whatever anyone wants it too, but perhaps you were looking for "postliberal". From the AI summary:

> Postliberalism is a political and social philosophy that rejects the core tenets of traditional liberalism. It argues that liberalism’s hyper-focus on individual autonomy, free-market capitalism, and secularism has eroded social cohesion and community.

"Conservative" is used to describe the current US administration, and I suppose they imagine they're conserving _something_, but they seem very eager to attack the liberal foundation of the Republic.

"Postliberalism" is a really flowery way to say fascist/corporatist. I guess it is less likely to shut down the conversation though.

The AI numbers are huge, but I remember similar arguments about residential high-speed internet. According to Gemini, the "price for internet" is down 12% in real terms (ugh, capitalism!), while speeds are staggeringly faster.

The providers have spent a fortune on wireless, pulled a lot of fiber/cable, and it's cheaper than it was when it started.

We always called it "the nubbin"

"hellscape"

Ugh, capitalism.

I only use Grok through the "Gork" personality in the Tesla, but find its responses to be very realistic, often genuinely funny, and occasionally useful.

Do you use its unhinged mode? It can be hilarious but tiresome after a little while.

We tried it, it was fun. Conspiracy mode just sounds like talking to my kids.

+ all the complexity that makes the stuff coming out the backend less polluting

> And cars lasted much longer back then and were much easier and cheaper to maintain.

I lived through those "amazingly affordable" decades, and while the engines were simpler (if you're driving a '68 Caprice 327 V8 without all those pesky environmental gadgets), no way they were more reliable. What was reliable was oil leaks, and burning oil. My parents popped a bottle of champagne when the station wagon hit 100k miles! 100,000 miles is table stakes for auto reliability these days.

My father was a quite capable home mechanic, but most people weren't. I guarantee you cars spent more time in the shop then than now.

Go to a car show and compare the interior of anything from this Golden Era to Nissan Versa somebody else mentioned, and tell me you'd take the old thing.

I have nostalgia for the decades I grew up in, but it's for the people I loved and simpler life of a child, not the stuff.

I grew up in that era too (born late 60s). My dad repaired the cars we had, and they definitely lasted a long time. Granted, I grew up in Europe (we had Peugeot, VW, etc.) so maybe the build quality of the US cars was worse--I can't say.

Yeah, they used way more oil than today, and they were more polluting, and they were less safe, and there were less rules (I can remember six of us kids piling into a VW Bug with my dad). But we're discussing affordability.

I can get to work with oil leaks and burning oil.

The argument that cars weren't more affordable is that... cars were replaced much more often? Meaning people could afford to replace them with new ones more often?

> The argument that cars weren't more affordable is that... cars were replaced much more often?

nobody was making that argument

cars weren't replaced more often; people drove the same car for longer than they do now, in part because they more easily repairable

Totally agree. I was non-professional smoker for a long time, and quit many, many times. Even after years, I'll get this "you know what'd great?" tap on the shoulder.

One cigarette is not a slippery slope, it's a vertical cliff drop.

I love booze in all its forms, but it doesn't have the same pull.

I've gotten those taps on the shoulder. Every time I went for it, I ended up thinking, "Geez. What was I expecting to be good about this? This experience is awful."

I even still dream of smoking sometimes, after all this time. And I know I shouldn't be smoking in the dreams. Really shows you how addiction messes up your brain. I'm happy I never really tried anything harder.

I'm curious, what is a professional smoker?

It was a weak joke I made-- I _could_ quit or go without, but I was always nearby to real addicts and ended up smoking a lot for a long time. Also, I didn't inhale deeply or hold the smoke like the "professionals".