You've also cherry-picked an instance where Tesla reported weaker than expected growth but you've omitted the times where it reported stronger than expected growth.

As for shrinking margins, that's largely due to growing R&D spending. That's not necessarily or even normally a negative thing.

The growing investment into AI and autonomy is part of a very long standing trend that has been declared for about decade. It's not an indication of desperation (beyond the ever-present desperation that companies always feel with the heat of competitive fires under their feet) or some failure of some previous plan.

I want to add one final point, and that is that every company's position is precarious, including Tesla's. So if that is what you're saying about Tesla, I would agree.

Where I would disagree is in the insinuation that its position is any more tenuous or precarious than any other company's.

Markets can change. Consumer tastes can change. Research and development efforts can fail. competitors can emerge. All these things hold true for every company all the time. And it holds true for Tesla. So, being a cynic when it comes to the prospects of a specific company is very likely to prove prescient. The only point I would disagree with you on is the idea that Tesla's position has recently degraded. Its position has always been precarious, and it has succeeded despite that, not because of some comparatively superior past position.

That meets the definition of hovering.

The concern over what will happen to people who can no longer earn economic resources from their occupation misses the point. Post-economic abundance is already the ultimate goal of an economic system. And in so far as AI eliminates jobs, it does that by moving us to that post-economics paradigm. People are going to be orders of magnitude better off.

Imagine we lived in a world where oxygen was scarce. There were oxygen merchants that sold you oxygen so that you could breathe. And then suddenly the planet transformed and oxygen was plentiful. It became a free resource instead of a scarce resource.

Everyone would be better off. Even the oxygen merchants, while being harmed in one narrow sense, would be vastly better off in general.

"What if we had taxed the internet?

"What was once framed as a trivial tax—half a cent to download a photo, or a cent to send 100 emails—would now cost the average American household an estimated $784,000 per year."

Incredible stats from @JaredWalczak"

https://x.com/senatorshoshana/status/2095980044657021352?s=2...

What the humans would see would be what is filtered up to them after all of this evaluation is done. And content generation would be the reverse. People would provide a seed of an idea and then their agents would turn that into potentially useful work.

For me personally, this kind of stability is always out of reach as I'm always frantically trying to reach the next rung in the career ladder.

On Falcon 1 and 9 he worked directly on major components of the vehicles.

In Tesla, he was heavily involved in the design of every single product they came out with. He also micromanaged Model 3 assembly automation in 2017-18.

After the Three Mile Island Accident, Carter convened the Kemeny Commission which led to a substantial expansion of the complexity of complying with NRC's regulations, which in turn drove up costs and contributed greatly to the slowdown of nuclear power expansion.

The anti-nuclear drive was in many ways similar to the current anti-data center drive.

And if the investors collect economic rent from the workers' output, then the workers collect economic rent every time an investor hires them for a project in which the investor loses money.

But under the standard Economics definition of "economic rent", a positive investment return from a project in which a person risked investment capital and the worker provided labor in exchange for a guaranteed wage is not economic rent that was extracted by the investor.

What distinguishes human intelligence from LLM intelligence is largely information that the latter hasn't mopped up. So the information that the former is uniquely privy to is what gives it economic value.

This surplus is why the county with the highest concentration of data centers, which is Loudoun County, has been able to reduce its property taxes year over year. The property taxes the AI facilities pay is what enables that.

They don't create many permanent jobs on site, it's true, but they also don't consume many government services. So of all the industries, they produce the highest fiscal surplus for local governments. It's a net benefit to the community.

There are some aspects in which the EU provides a higher quality of life, but those have nothing to do with tax rates or the concentration of billionaires. They're more related to things like good city planning allowing for pedestrian and biking-friendly neighbourhoods (E.g. 50% of commutes to work in Copenhagen are by bike, where in the U.S. it's less than 1%.), old cohesive cultures, and better, more developed culinary traditions.

The billionaires here are just a scapegoat because the rent-seeking parties need a target that is naturally unsympathetic for the public to direct its anger toward. The National Education Association is the largest union in the US with three million members. 99% of its campaign contributions go to the Democrats. I haven't seen a single policy that it advocates that is actually good for society. If you look at the jurisdictions where the teachers' unions hold the most sway, they make the least efficient use of public money. New York spends three times more than Florida per pupil on public education and has slightly worse academic performance.