nickik

> But so what? Debt is one way you finance your company.

If you don't understand what the issue with lots of debt is I don't know how to help you.

> Tesla continuously dilutes its shareholders instead. Is that better?

As an investor I can tell you that most of the time when Tesla did raise money the stock price went up, because they had credible investment targets and people wanted Tesla to raise money.

Also, Tesla hasn't raised money in many years. The last time they raised was in 2020 and they didn't really need to raise, they just added some cash to be safe.

> Hilarious. Remove the subsidy, and how profitable are they? Why aren't they lobbying for it? Other companies would simply stop producing these unprofitable cars.

Musk has actually talked about how subsidies aren't the solution in the long term and he wasn't a huge supporter.

My comparison was against the other electric car makers, all electric car makers profit from subsidies against ICE makres.

What Tesla mostly lobbied for was when the tax credit only allowed for 250k and Tesla and GM had used up its credit while foreign companies came in and used their credits years after when battery cost had fallen. That was nonsensical policy that needed to be changed.

> Other companies would simply stop producing these unprofitable cars.

No they wouldn't. You don't seem to be informed about the car market. Car companies simply can't opt out of EV profitable or not. Because regulation is pushing them in Europe and China. They know that if they don't have EVs they won't survive in the long run.

> how much of that "cash" is RMB that can't be repatriated?

I don't have that information but I don't think it matters. Having cash in RMB is very useful as they are huge in the market in China and need cash there as well. And its not that its impossible to exchange either.

> How much is BTC or some other shitcoin?

Why don't you look stuff like that up. Its basically nothing.

> How much are "cash equivalents" that aren't properly marked?

They are using the same definition of 'cash equivalents' as any other cNo, the biggest risk for Tesla is that China says "you're out", which would bury the company. What percentage of revenue/profit come from there?ompany. So you can ask the same question for every company. Have you looked at their financial statements and have any actual information on these being especially bad.

Simply asking leading questions aren't arguments.

> No, the biggest risk for Tesla is that China says "you're out", which would bury the company. What percentage of revenue/profit come from there?

Yes but in the real world this will simply not happen. Because if China kicked out Western car makers then they would respond in kind and not allow exports from China. And China whole policy for 20+ years has worked towards them being able to export cars.

Tesla is amazing for China because Tesla actually achieved what they wanted, exporting China made cars all over the world. Tesla has great relation with their local government as well.

So sure if China just randomly said 'fuck you' then that would be bad, but that is true for basically every large company on the plant. So its not really something to worry about overly much.

Unless you have an actual clear cut exploitation why Tesla is in a high risk situation with regards to China, it just doesn't really work as an argument.

> Other than that you list a bunch of intangible things that may or may not have a material impact on financials. As if no one else is investing in factories, robots, and data centers.

Well, lets actually think about it. Most car makers use dealers, so they are not investing in service centers and thus will profit less from cars coming of warranty. Most car makers don't make their own batteries, thus they don't have nearly as much investment in battery research and battery factories. Other car makers don't have their own major charging network. Most other car makers don't work on robots. And most other car makers haAnd as for Factories, Tesla is building new factories from the ground up to EXPAND capacity, while most other car makers convert existing factories while having SHRINKING capacity.

ve stopped trying working on self driving tech themselves and instead buy a driving assist solution from suppliers.

Or please tell me where GM own super charging network is located? Or Toyotas? Or Kias?

And as for Factories, Tesla is building new factories from the ground up to EXPAND capacity, while most other car makers convert existing factories while having SHRINKING capacity.

So yes, investing lots of money has an effect on financials, denying that is just baffling. And yes, Tesla with their vertical integration strategy has to invest more but they will also get more of the long term benefit.

Service for example used to be a huge money loser for Tesla, but over time it has turned profitable and over the next 10+ years it will turn incredibly profitable. Current car companies make huge money from selling parts because they have millions and millions of cars out of warranty. Tesla because they are growing has most cars in warranty, over time, as millions of Tesla's are off warrant having their service centers vertically integrated will be huge for Tesla.

Initially there was a bunch of low hanging fruits, as we were going into the 2010 it was increasingly hard to improve batteries and required lots of investment.

You also needed investment for supply chain built up, increasing lithium mining and refining, cobalt mining and refining.

Tesla success with mass manufacture the Model 3 highly profitably in 2017/2018 was a huge shock to the infustry. Nobody thought it was possible and it lead to a huge increase in investments.

And even then the base from where these investments sarted was massivly higher because all companies had increasingly experimented with EVs. The Roadster making EV cool and desirable and the Model S really showing what a modern car was.

Battery investment doesnt come from knowwhere either. You need products that actually allow for continues battery scaling. Tesla investing huge amounts into Giga Nevada was necessary to build batteries in these quantities. And the other battery companies took note and also started to think way bigger.

Those battery factories is what allowed for things like the Model 3. Consumer electronic alone wouldnt have driven battery demand so agressivly since the Model S. Battery improving comes from increase investment and research drivien by expectation of growth in the demand. And Tesla unquestionably was the most important driver behind the believe in future demand.

You need to view things in perspective. I cant give a full finacial analysis in on comment but a few things to note

Tesla has exeptionally low debt, ist almost hilarously low compaired to other car makers.

Tesla cash isnt even remotly an important problem right now.

Subsidies means lots of things in different context. Regulatory credits, arguable not subsidies, are a small part of the overall buissness bur this quarter is a fair bit of the profit as they went up and profit was down.

Removing tax credit would actually help Tesla as they are in a far far better postion to relative to the rest. Other need the subdidies and credits desperatly to not lose even more money.

Tesla is having profit and cash flow while doing upgrades accross their factories, massive investment in service, charging, new factories, data centers, robots, lithium refineries and many other things. Tesle has its own battery factories with its own battery designs, something only BYD has. A huge advantage that people still don't appriciate.

While their are short term issues in the EV market the long term trend is still clear. And Tesla continues to be in a good position to ride that wave up. US is only 8% penetration of EV.

Plus for all Tesla problems, looking at the wider market is advised. Ford has opened their EV finacials, and they are horrible. GM just moved back many EV product and reduced their volume forcadt further (after horribly missing their forcast from a few years ago). Some people point out Tesla inhouse battery production isnt growing as fast as claimed, meanwhile GM factory with a reputable battery partner is even worse. Honda/Toyoto have barly realized EVs even exist.

Other western car makers are massivly struggling in China. VW the company everybody thought would roll over Tesla has massice issues there and also has issues in Europe. Not running plants at capabity and having to fire people, plus delaying prodicts and other factories.

The comming 5 years will be even harder on the automotive industry them the last 5. At some point profitable ICE sales wont be able to compensate for selling EV at non existant markets.

The reality is, right now in the US outside of Tesla prett much nobody is operating profitably and they all desperatly wont more scale but because so many companies try the same plan with the same prodycts and issues. Dealers continue to be a huge problem.

I also would mention Tesla energy buissness is growing really well and is profitiable. And that looks good grow quicky as the demand for grid stabalisation and home energy story is hardly gone slow down.

So Tesla isnt a finacial juggernaut but they are in a hell of a good position in two large and growing markets. With lots of competitors not executing very well. Their position isnt very riscy and the have plenty of cash.

The biggest risk for Tesla is China really makeing a big move into Europe and later the US. But again Tesla is more likely to compete in that market them legacy OEM who are struggling against Tesla already. It takes years for that to really happen and poleticians are already moving against it. It will take more years for China companies to build up local factories, because just like Tesla they will have to do that.

Im against trucks on roads here for the most part. But to act like Cybertruck is particluarly bad just isnt really make sense. Not having a huge nose will mean visibility is much better. The nose is also lower then an F-150 so the chance your head getting smash (the cause of deat most of the time would seem to be much lower). Cybertruck suspensions seem to also make it run closer to the ground when running on roads.

Plus Tesla fleet all follow the newest generation outmatic breaking regulation that is still voluntary. While many car makers including trucks don't yet implement that.

So in general, yes all pickup trucks are bad but this one seems better rather then worse.

In general keeping all these things should be severly restricted for private use, specially in cities.

Share one wrong thing on twitter and you are literally a nazi. Amazing.

But many of the inputs to these battery go threw China as well.

Tesla issues with the Cybertruck has nothing to do with it beeing an EV. Tesla manufactures more EVs then any other company from China, outside of maybe BYD.

And EV companies in China are not magical, and most arent incredibly good at EV manifacture. Many of them are losing money just as in the West. And there is consolidation in that market, just as in the West.

And EV account for like 25% of new cars, so they are not that far ahead. And of course, in China they often have much smaller cars, so pure numbers arent a great comparison depending on what you are analysing.

ZFS new object store backend give you that interface I think.

He addresses the reason for this in the video. I makes some sense but there might be better way to achieve these goals.

Usually things like hospitals already have static fuel burning backups. You would just use those for charging as well. Then you only need 1 fuel source, and that can be gas for example.

Sure this means you need more static power generation capability, but I think its a worthwhile tradeoff.

No. But they are on-par for the most part. Often with better more 'featureful' software.

But have fun getting them repaired as they have even less infrastructure then Tesla.

You went very quickly from 1 headline to 'inevitably'.

Multiple videos of that sort of thing happening came out. Tesla driving threw high water. Musk commented something that for a short period they could float but in general they said this wasn't a supported features and don't do it.

Then for the Cybertruck Musk said it should actually be able to float. But it was said as 'we are shorting for this' not 'this is a feature count on this'. As it stands this would void warranty.

Tesla certainty not ever suggested that they could turn into boats in emergency situations.

Why don't we just no longer have opensource. We can also shut down the wikipedia. Lets also shut down google. Otherwise China might use these things. Why not just nuke Bay Area, NY and LA. Then we can make sure China can't profit from the people there. All universities should be closed, those people might produce research that China can read.

Unless you want to make application specific processors that's just a reality. We are gone include things like crypto even if the computer never uses any crypto.

The thing is, for some things you can get 100x improvement. Even if not used often its gone make a difference.

But for them most part, things that are part of RISC-V RVA23 profile make sense to be on a standard PC or Server.

Asked differently what isn't really necessary that is in RISC-V? One could make arguments for a simpler vector extensions for example. And a few other tiny things you can argue about.

Overall RISC-V RVA23 is a reasonable and feature complete set for a modern processor.

x86 on the other-hand has quite a few things that are not really needed if you redesigned it.

Sure it helps to have a large costumer, its still quite different. Its not 'we've got your back' as it is 'we need to do these things and you are the best costumer we could find'.

SpaceX contracts were very contested, and while it helped them borrow money against the CRS contract, they ended up bidding so low that they basically didn't make any money from it.

For your standard NASA launch, there is also competition and you have to bid. Granted there aren't that many competitors but you can't just set a incredibly high cost.

But its important to recognize that Ariane also gets government contract launches. Not as many, but they still get quite a few. That is in addition to the gigantic amount they get for new development, far, far more then SpaceX got. And in addition to that they ALSO get a direct subsidy.

So when comparing to apples to apples, Ariane is dipping in government money pool for basically everything, development, operations and contracts. SpaceX for rockets only got very limited funds for development, non for operation but gets contracts.

So to my mind, SpaceX getting 300M for Falcon 9 and nothing Falcon Heavy, while Ariane is getting 5 billion $ for a inferior rocket that is mostly based on stuff that was already in development and is only iterative improvement over the Ariane 5.

Its patently ridiculous for Ariane bureaucrats to claim SpaceX is getting subsidies, while they literally just received 5 billion $ for a rocket upgrade. SpaceX didn't get 5 billion $ for development of cargo and human capsule plus Falcon rocket. We are talking a whole different dimension in terms of direct subsidy here.

That is also why Ariane bureaucrats just talk about how unfair everything is and have not actually entered anything into the WTO. Because they know they would get laughed out of the room. So its really just them lying and hoping nationalists and depended politicians will eat it up.

That's certaintly not the view of the current legal system.

Much of the lands values comes from public infrastructure and services provided. A piece of land somewhere in the desert is gone be worth very little.

A house in a city has lots of resources deployed there and land value tax pays for those things.

This tax makes better for people who invest locally and hurts people who don't.

While I love this in general. It should also be mentioned that there are systematic falures in how land valuation works in the US currently. While in general taxing land value makes much more sense, with a proper system of land value valuation this is still far from optimal.

There is a real question on how utilities and services should be paid for. There are places where water is really cheap to provide and then subburbs that require multible expensive pump stations yet they pay the same amount for water.

This incurages building in the wrong places and a land value tax by itself does not fix these things.

In addition the city also needs to strongly evaluate how it uses its land, specially things like on street parking.

Check out some of the work by Urban3 on land value, tax income and so on. Thy have fantastic visualisation that have changed my view on some things.

So yeah, land value tax, go for it, much better system. It allignes insentives better, but there are many otjer distorting effects. Its one piece of a much larger puzzle in terms of how to make great cities with great urbanism.

The real issue is cost of development.

The whole Falcon program, including new engines, Falcon Heavy, reusability, human rating, multible launch sites all in all cost considerably less then 4 billion $.

The Ariane 6 alone cost 5 billion and likely the total cost until it launched is gone be quite a bit more.

But what people dont understand is that lots of parts of the Ariane 6 arent in its own budget. The upper stage engine has been in development for 20 years. The solid booster tech is its own thing. The core engine is a minimal evolution over the earlier version.

A lot of institutions involved in the development have their own seperate government funding.

If it takes you 5$ billion to do a minimal evolutionary update of the Ariane 5 (with parts already developed for the Ariane 5 ME). Then what would it have cost to develop a totally new reusable booster? 10 billion? 20 billion?

Europe also talks about crew vehicles, but that gone also cost them 7-12 billion the way they develop, and thus it will never happen.

ESA they for sure expected otherwise.

There are countless interviews with ESA and Ariane people where the smug superiority just drips of them.

"Yes SpaceX is cheap but totally unreliable and low launch cadence, once Ariane 6 is out we will be much cheaper then SpaceX"

That was basically the attidude they had.

Those 40% can only be substained with the additional budget and does not include the actual cost of construction.

So really that 40% even outside of development cost isnt substainable.

> Prior to SpaceX disrupting the market by surprisingly making what was widely regarded as a bad idea actually work, this was the way to go

Well the whole point of the Arine 6 was to compete with SpaceX. Ariane 6 would never have been approved if not for the pressure of SpaceX.

This target price the targed barly even competed with non reusable SpaceX. And SpaceX was already deep in development of reuse tech whem Ariane 6 was approved.

> if a government backed effort went with a very costly high-risk/high-return project.

Instead they went with a very costly low return project.

Varangian guard was not really a elite guard unit. Varangian guard were stationed all around the empire and were more like a normal part of the military.

In the sources they show up just as often fighting in battles where the emperor was there and when he was not.

The did protect him on campaign, but that might just be because the were the primary infantry arm.

Some people think of them like the Praetorian guard, but that isn't really accurate.

Having a 64 bit system at that time could have also really helped with implementing super fast virtual machines. You have so much space to store information in pointers.

Azul later realized some of these things on Java. Building a virtual machine and even language to take advantage of that from the ground up would have been cool.

One thing that I found pretty interesting is handling of exceptions, you could basically delay dealing with them and then at the end of a block check if anything had happened.

I not a architect and don't know enough about the topic, but I thought that might be something interesting for RISC-V. Love to read about the advantages and disadvantages of that.

He didnt brag, he answered a question about what their goal was. This is simple editorializing.

He didn't say 'We are awesome its so cheap'. He was asked to project and explain what they were working towards and did so.

Technologically it very well might have been possible far, far earlier. The computer in Shuttle are very complex, more complex then what is needed for a simple Falcon 9 70s style.

NASA shackeled itself to Shuttle, a expensive failure of a project and from them on the basically didn't develop anything new for 3 decades.

The millitary if anything is where such thinking should have been happening. The went threw many iterations of rockets.

A few reasons why they never managed to go reusable. Reliance on solid boosters, once you have them reusability is not really practical.

The millitary also simply doesnt care much about cost. What they care about is reliability above all else.

And you would be suprised how much engineers buy into constraints. The reality is that after a while the status quo of the industry you work on is simply an assumed constraint. Nobody asked engineers the question 'how do you get 100 tons to orbit per week' or whatever.

As Musk puts it, the most difficult part is asking the right question. Nothing is as harmful as smart engineers spending lots of money and time answering the wrong question.

It doesn't matter what the reserve is when the central bank has the power to prevent the movement of reserves in other ways.

This is part of the complexity in modern central banking that people don't seem to understand. Many of the things you might have learn in school about how central banks operate are no longer the case.

If cash actually flows depends on many factors.

For a long time, one had every possible advantage and has been given massive subsidies and regulatory requirement. Its of course different from country to country but the basic story is the same in most of the western world.

Germany has spend billions over billions on the green transition for 20 years. Had Germany used the exact same money, to build as many reactor as possible as fast as possible and put them right next to existing coal plants they would likely be much further along.

Nuclear potential is insane. Like, just look at energy density. Nothing has as much energy density. And based on first principle, the total amount of resources required to do the transition with nuclear, is massively smaller then anything else.

Giving it the best possible shot and fullest possible support in the situation we are in, is just absolutely necessary.