What is this? A statue for ants?!

Big Tech keeps building smarter devices

Smarter or just louder?

It’d be nice to see the lending market smarten up and tell him to pound sand.

Because the stock valuation has inflated so far beyond the company’s actual revenues, its been pushed into a number of major index funds and become a “must buy” for 401ks and other retail investment accounts. This creates a kind-of self-fulfilling overvaluation as a result. I don’t think there’s any real market mechanism that will devalue Tesla in the near future. Kicking the Tesla tentpole means shaking up the entire S&P 500. Even the mega-hedge funds with the ability to do it don’t have a strong monetary incentive to try.

At the same time, the kind of stock growth Elon is expected to deliver in the next five years is astronomical relative to their core position. Either he’s going to Tulip Mania his company again or he’s going to fall far short of the mark.

I worry he’s going to fuck out space industry in the process of fleecing NASA though.

NASA’s been a contractor’s boondoggle since at least Reagan. The Challenger Disaster can be linked directly back to an outsourcing scandal that was covered up and buried under Reagan in order to keep Thiokol Chemical Corporation (now a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman) financially insulated.

I would argue that SpaceX exists precisely because NASA has become a budget of money to be siphoned from. The Space Industry was fucked in the 80s and never really recovered, leading to our reliance on Soyuz rockets for much of the Bush Era and creating an environment at Boeing so toxic that we’ve largely lost our ability to do space flight domestically.

For all the talk of Moon bases and Mars missions, it seems the real money in aerospace is just spewing up endless waves of cheap disposable satellites for commercial communications. That’s going to be the limit of US space technology for the foreseeable future.

Also, the machine costs $500B/year to operate and generates less than $2B in gross revenue. So John Shareholder is going to need a multi-trillion dollar bailout in a year or two.

He’s gonna cheat to get his trillion

He’s going to try. Even then, the bar is higher than just nibbling at the margins. And everything is stacked on the shoulders of an overall positive outlook for the US economy in total. He can’t insource all his car sales in any practical sense. And he can’t use options markets to outrun the perpetual gaggle of Tesla bears nipping at his heels. He also can’t reliably expect Congress to bail him out when he’s made this many enemies inside both the White House and Congress.

That’s not to say he won’t get a piece of paper with “$1T” written on it from his company at some point. But nothing in the Tesla financials suggests he will have anywhere to cash it.

He placed loyal people on the board and had them vote to give him control of the company.

He could place loyalists on the board because he bought a controlling interest in the company.

And now he has been having them vote to give him absurd unseen before “salaries”

The latest compensation package has virtually unattainable sales targets. And the compensation is almost entirely in equity that assumes a monumental increase in stock valuation.

If he can manage it, I’d be tempted to say he earned it, except I know he’ll only “hit” the target by lying and market manipulation that will collapse as soon as he hits his mark.

I mean, “stealing” is a strong word. Elon bought them out, and they’re both enjoying a net worth in the hundreds of million.

What’s more disturbing about Elon’s tenure as head of the company is how social media manipulation, insider trading, and blatant SEC violations can pump a company’s valuation into the stratosphere.

Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard both continued to contribute advances in engineering that far exceeded the Tesla project. But they’ll never have the kind of easy credit Elon secured through politics and media manipulation. So don’t expect to see them included among the ranks of “billionaire” any time soon.

Americans are going to mandate retractable handles in response

It’s weird to think of a top-down historically-isometric RPG as “AAA”. We’ve come a long way, baby.

The big question is why we started adding computer operating systems to our vehicles to begin with.

Originally, automakers tried to shoehorn proprietary subscription services into their vehicles for GPS and roadside assistance and satellite radio. But the opt-in for these services was scant, because they were obnoxious to set up and overpriced relative to - say - a TomTom or a cell phone’s core features. And you could get after-market integration added to your vehicle through its entertainment system, so why bother with the clunky manufacturer options.

CarPlay and AndroidAuto were concessions that automakers began to adopt because they sold more vehicles that way. Reversing this out will likely have the same effect it did the first time - by driving people to foreign car companies like Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and Kia.

I already see Kia cars on the road fucking everywhere. And moves like this will only accelerate the trend, I’m sure.

So, by utilizing built-in systems, the car manufacturers would indeed be able to collect more data about how you use the systems in place, while also possibly getting more money out of you through subscriptions.

There were massive protests and constant public pushback against vaccines for as long as vaccines have existed.

There were a handful of outspoken reactionary groups in the early 19th century who registered outsized alarm. But when you look at the data, the rapid decline in smallpox over the century was the direct result of the success of inoculation domestically. By 1898, the mandatory imposition of vaccinations was functionally unnecessary, due to the near complete eradication of the disease on the island. People were - by and large - more than happy to undergo inoculation at a level that provided herd immunity.

The fight for widespread adoption of vaccination has been rough fought against the tides of the confidently ignorant who let their irrational emotions control them.

Confident ignorance has been as much a benefit to vaccine campaigns as an opposition to it. People are, by and large, trusting and appreciative of advancements in medical science, especially when they are subject to regular and repeated trauma from a chronic malady.

Quackery succeeds on this sense of naive desperation. Vaccination does, too (with the added benefit that it actually works). A straightforward solution to an immediate problem is an easy sell.

The real detriment to vaccination policy is its own success. Once you’ve systematically eliminated a disease, the social memory of the disease’s consequences fades through generations. People aren’t afraid of Polio because they don’t have a President in a wheelchair who fell victim to it. People aren’t afraid of measles because they’ve never experienced it, or had to care for children suffering from the disease.

The rapid adoption of prophylactics in the sex work community comes from people who are regularly faced with the threat of STIs, both personally and in their peer groups. People with little direct or indirect exposure to recreational sex are a much harder sell. And so we see STIs flood through religiously insular communities (ex. the sudden surge in Syphilis in Salt Lake City) that had historically shown very low rates of incidence.

This tends to set off a rebalancing of behaviors, as the community rapidly adopts the techniques for prevention. When news of an outbreak spreads, vaccine hesitancy collapses in its wake

In fairness, Expelliarmus has a higher success rate

America doesn’t just do this domestically.

They do. It’s just tied up in the private sector. Tons of quackery on American TV and in news journals. Everything from “Head On, Apply Directly to The Forehead” to Dr Oz shilling ginseng as a panacea to the social media conspiracies about MedBeds that Trump himself retweeted.

The CIA undermined polio vaccination programs in Pakistan when global eradication actually seemed possible.

Can’t let the wrong kind of people benefit

deleting my account

When the 25lb bag is mostly weavels?

90% of Spotify is trash. Much like Audible, it’s just choking on AI generated content and similar worthless vanity projects

Knowing HTTP status codes is a prerequisite for transitioning

The Onion: Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?

In my experience, there’s an impulse to eat that can be curbed if you aim for foods you can chew on without outpacing your calorie count.

The classic is celery. Carrots, apples, and other crunchy foods all work pretty well, too. I can nosh and sate the raw impulse to eat without feeling like I need to starve myself at actual meal times. Just having vegetables you enjoy on hand to indulge in is a good for you generally speaking, even when you’re not aiming to lose pounds.

For bigger meals, soup is a favorite dish. Lots of fluids leave you full. You can have the flavors you enjoy without housing an entire slab of meat or a bunch of carbs. I also try to avoid sauces (which often means avoiding eating out generally speaking). All that stuff is packed with sugar, which makes everything more expensive to consume. Dry fried meat and veggies, spices and rubs for flavor, and grilled food rather than fried or stewed keeps me away from excess junk.

For my sweet tooth, Japanese candy tends to have less sugar than the American stuff. Mochi is better than a candy bar. Pocky is better than a box of popcorn.

I straight up cut soda and beer out of my diet when I’m focused on losing weight. (Really, just ditch soda entirely, or go to the flavored seltzer water - it’s awful for you).

After that, it really does help to count the calories. When you know what you’re eating, your logical “is this worth it” brain can temper the base impulses of the “I just want it in my mouth” animal brain. I hate counting calories, because it’s annoying. But making the things that are hard to count annoying to keep track of also helps to focus my diet back onto foods I’ve got memorized and are low calorie.