I’ll keep this one short and sweet.
Tesla was contacted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Monday after videos posted on social media showed the company’s robotaxis driving in a chaotic manner on public roads in Austin, Texas.
Elon Musk’s electric vehicle maker debuted autonomous trips in Austin on Sunday, opening the service to a limited number of riders by invitation only.
In the videos shared widely online, one Tesla robotaxi was spotted traveling the wrong way down a road, and another was shown braking hard in the middle of traffic, responding to “stationary police vehicles outside its driving path,” among several other examples.
Elon Musk is not that smart. He chose to use cameras only, and not Lidar, against the advice of his own engineers.
China has robotaxis already. They work fine. They have Lidar.
Tesla is doomed. Their cars are worse than those of their competitors and more expensive. Robotaxis aren’t going to work. The only thing saving Tesla right now is 100% tariffs on Chinese autos, but even non Chinese electric cars are better and often cheaper.
Meanwhile Musk is in a feud with Trump, Trump has threatened to remove subsidies for Musk enterprises and Musk (again, an idiot) has said Trump should go ahead. And yes, he does need those subsidies.
The majority of Musk’s wealth is tied up in Tesla, and it’s days are numbered. Meanwhile Starship keeps exploding, the last time during fueling, not even after launch. There are a lot of competitors to SpaceX, and w/o NASA contracts SpaceX doesn’t look so hot either. Right now NASA is stuck with Musk, but that’s not going to last.
Musk isn’t going to be the world’s richest man much longer.
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Oakchair
Elon Musk is not that smart.
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Right. Yet Musk in part believes he must not only be a genius, but a moral saint because that is the near universal message of our society.
“Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.”
Even people thousands of years ago would understand that pumping your ruling class full of arrogance, greed, and ego would go disastrously.
The CIA funded post-modernism and the “new left” to weaken opposition to the rich and ruling class maybe in a sense they also “funded” “atheism” to do the same thing.
Like & Subscribe
Musk and Trump are similar in this respect, aside from their unwarranted superiority complexes and malignant hubris. They both, despite being failures in business, manage to hoodwink investors into giving them more and more money for their ultimately failed ventures. Needless to say, I don’t feel bad for those investors considering we wouldn’t be having to deal with the likes of Trump and Musk if these enabling investors didn’t prop up and legitimate the likes of Musk and Trump with their monopoly blood money.
Fyi, the one thing Trump has done that I agree with is to strike down the California EV mandate prohibiting the manufacture and sale of new gasoline-powered autos. That mandate will only serve to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. It will make the poor even more immobile further forcing them into favelas American style. EVs will never scale.
Joan
Cars are so expensive these days (electric or not) that I just don’t see how Millennials and Gen Z are going to afford cars from 16 till death like the Boomers and Gen X. So many Americans are in debt for a depreciating asset and it’s just bonkers. I’m hoping more people join me in walking/biking/busing.
bruce wilder
The Charlie Munger take is precious and bears repeating, imho:
https://youtube.com/shorts/cla6mxKXZVo?si=FTR5JNx6eBtdVpIF
bruce wilder
Western societies subcontracted architecting the political economy to the oligarchs when they set off on the neoliberal path in the 1970s. The “free market economy” would magically empower the sovereign consumer, we were told by the conservative libertarian Milton Friedman. The progressives gave up on class war and took up social reform as etiquette and cosplay.
Having given up on any collective effort to think through in a serious way how to structure the economy going forward almost 60 years ago, we are stuck with very little residual capability to think now. Elon Musk and his adolescent fantasies of self-driving electric cars, starlink, trips to Mars, neuralink are filling the vacuum. Better that than Peter Thiel and his transhuman Antichrist, I guess.
Mamdani’s rather tepid proposal to found a municipal grocery wholesaler, and the negative reaction to it, is another useful benchmark for the poverty of progressive imagination. A Costco for Brooklyn? (And, Taibbi thinks that presages a new Soviet five-year plan!)
Feral Finster
Take away government contracts and the value of many of Musk’s businesses drops precipitously.
Oakchair
we are stuck with very little residual capability to think now.
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Imagine you’re a ruler in 1950 and you want to rule over a bunch of passive, obedient, subservient, consumers who can’t even think about rebelling let alone doing so. What would you do to accomplish this task?
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A Costco for Brooklyn? (And, Taibbi thinks that presages a new Soviet five-year plan!)
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It’s revealing what the ruling class supported ideology views as the negative parts of the Soviet union. It’s not the purges, gulags, police state, censorship, and oppression of dissent. No to them the truly horrible part was less wealth for the rich and shit like government grocery stores.
Hiero
the biggest recipient of corporate welfare waving his weewee at the president….lol bullish for not TSLA
Purple Library Guy
Oakchair, rather than atheism I think it would be much more likely that they funded religion. I mean, who is crushing US resistance to the growth of inequality and the ever-tightening grip of the ruling class today? Is it atheists? No, it’s Christian morons. And we KNOW that US evangelical Christianity shifted from largely apolitical to almost entirely right wing in part due to extensive funding from wealthy right wingers; it wouldn’t be a surprise to find that intelligence services got into the act.
As to the “new left” . . . that’s a tricky term that can mean at least two very distinct major political formations. Which one did you mean? The hippies? The Clintonites? Someone else? As to the hippies, the FBI spent a bunch spying on them and infiltrating them. I don’t think that’s the same as funding them.
Purple Library Guy
Like & Subscribe Ah, half the cars sold in the largest auto market in the world, one whose customers are on average still so far not as well off as Americans (that is, China), are electric. What on earth do you mean EVs “will never scale”? They already have, that discussion is over.
As to price, the big-selling BYD Seagull is being sold for $9,700 US. Only in China, there’s a markup on foreign sales even before the ridiculous tariffs, but it would be super cheap even with a 50% markup. EVs are expensive in North America because in North America the auto manufacturers have agreed to sell mostly expensive models and the governments have agreed to keep out the cheap competition.
Oakchair
Purple Library Guy
I agree. It wouldn’t so much be atheism they would have funded but rather religious entities that veered further and further away from the original philosophy of Jesus Christ. Christianity is very right wing in part because Christianity has become devoid of the teachings of Jesus Christ.
By “new left” I mean generally the left that was less focused on class and combating the oligarchs and more concerned about social and other issues. The “new left” is now the prevalent left whileas the “old left” which focused on fighting the ruling/capitalist class has gone by the wayside.
The hippies were associated with non-violence and drugs. If you are a ruler and you don’t want to be overthrown; if you want passive subjects who won’t rebel the hippies are gold. An opposition opposed to action and busy impairing themselves with drugs? What more does a ruling class need?
Mark Level
My responses:
To Oakchair, you beat me to the Bible verse, thanks! I completely agree on the “post-modern” bullshit, AdBusters hipped me to this early this century, there hasn’t been a real “New Left” since the days of Mario Savio and those folks, I could’ve respected the New Atheism if it rejected all religions equally (See Aleister Crowley’s “Thank God I’m an Atheist”), but their Luminaries declared that “Islam” is the one & exclusive religion to be hated, its members should be exterminated without trial across the Middle East and even in Europe and Africa etc.– clearly an Op. Unity with the NeoCons in basic ideology.
Thanks to Joan for the comment– yes, ‘Murican young won’t get cars, they won’t get to live outside of mom & dad’s basement, apartment or home (if they’re lucky, otherwise it’s the Street), the men don’t get women and the women are a highly valued “commodity”. Everything’s a commodity in USA.
I’ll have to watch Bruce’s link later, busy here, but agree with the Elon Sci-fi Geek idiocy, did not know how much Taibbi has lost IQ points– Did someone slip him whatever John Fetterman got? It’s ugly, whatever happened.
To Finster, point taken but the Due Dissidence Duo think with the passage of the “Big Beautiful Kill” today, and hundreds of thousands of CHUDS being tossed off Medicare and Social Security, that a year from now Musk may win the race to the bottom over Trump, who is going to be widely hated even by the hard-right morons who got sold out. I’d have no confidence in an Elon “3rd Party”, but that the 2 oligarch parties have failed is QED.
Speaking of Oakchair’s 2nd post and the topic of “Gulags”, Trump flying to Flori-duh today to see “Alligator Alley” where the sickos are fantasizing they’ll have a US CECOT, something like the book Papillon previewed, try to escape and an Alligator or Python will eat you, while the Right-Wing morons jerk off!! And it won’t be “the worst of the worst”, many immigrants will be in there for a single speeding ticket, failure to signal a right turn, etc. To quote Due Dissidence, “America can’t create high-speed rail, but they put together a prison (laid out just like CECOT) in like 2 months”, soon it will likely be a destination for those who demonstrate against genocide even if they aren’t immigrants!
I half-agree with PLG on Christians, but see my remark about the New Atheists above. Evangelicals have always been filth, there’s just more of them now. Like the Zionists, they have a big thing about mass-breeding and then brainwashing the kiddies with “home skooling”, Jesus likes prisons, cockfighting, misogyny and racism, dontcha know!
The Clintonites were never for a second “Left”, again, the Free Speech Movement were Left, all the Lefties were easily crushed after the 70s by the Powell Memo crew, Bush election theft, Dimmies embracing endless war and Zionism, etc.
Studs Terkel and the real lefties of the past are spinning in their graves no doubt. Mrs. Fatcher warned us, the one who ran Maggie’s Farm, there is no alternative!! The State’s role is to impoverish the majority and likely kill the ones who are weakest. Whee!! Social Darwinism, not Socialism (except for the wealthy Oligarchs).