If you care about the car not rapidly losing value, you definitely don't have lambo money and you're too poor to be dabbling in supercar silliness.
6,368 karma · joined March 1, 2021
This is the natural flow of things. People with disposable income buy nice new stuff, suffer the rapid, early depreciation, and then they trickle down to the next tier of consumer who can't afford or doesn't want brand new things.
Cars and houses all work like this. Very rarely have the lowest income tiers ever gotten brand new, expensive things.
And if you're high income and smart, you still get used things because you recognize this is the most fiscally responsible thing to do and a great way to build and preserve wealth.
Waste and inefficiency is the cost of anti-fragility that's necessary to not go extinct when the unexpected happens.
Your world would also slow down innovation. Those old machines were much more energy hungry and only rapid iteration has made them dramatically more efficient.
Plenty of time to die later once they all launch and continue punching through the future with our genes and memes.
A tree experiences compounding interest. The longer it lives, the more ground it owns and the more its tall branches and leaves blot out the sun below, making it extremely difficult for any juvenile of its species to take root and mature beneath it.
This is why some conifers have pine cones that only release seeds when burned in a fire. For these species, evolution has determined it's not even worth trying to germinate unless it's likely a fire killed its parents and made space for them to grow. This is part of how we discovered wildfires are a critical part of some region's ecology. We managed to halt most forest fires and it ruined the natural rhythm of life there.
Lack of experience is critical for risk taking. Even great successes like Jensen Huang have said that if they knew how hard it was going to be, he wouldn't choose his path again.
Memory blocks you from experimentation as much as it protects you from making recurrent mistakes. A species or civilization with too much memory will eventually wither away towards complete inaction and decay.
Maintaining order and fighting entropy is hard, but also planned obsolescence is a good thing for systemic resilience.
You have to regularly clear out the old for at least two reasons...
a) keep the process of creating new things well exercised. "We can't build that anymore. We don't know how." A factory that builds things that last too long eventually goes out of business.
b) prevent old things from monopolizing resources due to more time to compound interest. Otherwise, you end up with Saturn devouring his son.
When you're playing prisoner's dilemma games, and your co-player is consistently defecting, you can only play cooperate for so long. Tit for tat is the only way you don't get majorly screwed by the defector over time.
The United States honors international IP law and doesn't cheat its way into threatening domestic production of other countries like China does.
Letting them cheat the globalist system (e.g. violating IP laws, human rights violations, Uyghur/Tibetan genocide) may have been fine when they were desperately poor, but there was always an implicit assumption that they would eventually start playing by the rules and culturally liberalize. But they're not. How can we hold onto ideals like "diversity is our strength" and open borders are good when China is kicking ass and threatening the balance of power as an insular ethnostate with one of the lowest rates of immigrants on the planet?
And now they're growing to a power level that threatens to rival the US and its authority to police this global system we've created. That isn't stable, and the west would be insane to not shut China out and take a step back from our open, globalist ideals until we sort out this geopolitical game of thrones.
In a world where technology is advancing exponentially, aesthetics increasingly offer a poor signal for performance, and only those who obsessively look under the hood and disregard form will see through it all.
Not having kids yourself but still having a retirement of any kind is a privilege that only exists if most people still have kids, so that their kids become workers who will provide the goods and services you need to keep living in retirement.
Government pension doesn't magically continue to work if everyone chooses the individually optimal solution of not having kids and consequently having a much easier time saving more money for retirement. If everyone executed this strategy, all that extra money you saved would become worthless, because there would be no one to give you goods and services in exchange for it.
And you only get to do that once.
Yes, you could do this, but it's parasitic behavior that depends on your ability to extract value from the labor of other people's kids. If everyone does this, then there are no kids to take over the work to keep things running and money doesn't do anything anymore because the economy stops working.
Denmark in particular is seeing some great decreases in annual working hours for working people. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-...
One interesting gotcha that regularly kills people, is that there are some look-a-like species between Eurasia and North America, where one is edible and the other is poison. Apparently is fairly common in Washington state for eastern European immigrants (cultures where mushroom foraging is common) to die this way, because they eat something that looks familiar to them.
Just an incredible public display of cognitive dissonance.
Socialized retirement destroys most of the incentive to sacrifice your youth to grow and raise new people. Why sacrifice your youth and money being a parent when you can leech off the labor of other people's kids in retirement?
I think we'll need to eventually experiment with things that try to give some disproportionate benefit to people who have kids. e.g. everyone gets some minimal socialized retirement and healthcare, but your benefits increase above that baseline in proportion to how many children you raised. Maybe your benefits increase at 3+ kids and decrease with 0-1 kids.
It's a tried and true formula of release a high end, very expensive vehicle with a lot of experimental features that funds and proves out the engineering process that you can eventually roll into cheaper, more well made offerings.
Does he at least acknowledge the groundbreaking engineering for a production vehicle with things like 48V architecture, data CAN bus, and steer by wire, and how this will all likely roll into future Tesla vehicles for a big potential competitive advantage?
Honestly, this whole post should probably be deleted, because it's not a constructive topic.
Probably like he generally does.
"Prototypes are easy, production is hard. I hope Lucid manages to figure out how to get their factory productive so they don't go bankrupt in a year."