5,493 karma · joined July 29, 2010
But the way the new world works, that approach loses out against SpaceX.
And unlike the real Old Space companies BlueOrigin doesn't have lots of military contract or a airplane business to actually make money.
But this wasn't always true. For Commercial Lunar resupply they went with SpaceX only as well.
The traditional was one supplier with cost plus.
SpaceX uses that money to lower the price of space flight for everybody and enables a whole lot of other companies to do new things in space.
SpaceX themselves does things like Starlink.
SpaceX also shares materials tech with Tesla that get used in their products.
It will also anable real exploration of Mars and the outer Solar System.
The BE-4 fits into that.
Second, I'm a huge fan of nuclear power so you don't have to convince me of that.
Even if you have nuclear power, you still need EV and lots of batteries, so that is not a solution.
Hydro is limited in location and not a scalable solution. Gravity highly depends on what you are talking about, and most of the proposed solution are not capital efficient.
These however also solve partly a different problem then these batteries solve, in terms of respond speed, frequency regulation and efficiency.
Recycling is of course not perfectly efficient, but current generation batteries have 20 year lifetime and with reuse maybe even 30 years. Some of the next generation can push that even further, wont be recycled for 40 years. Maybe they are recycled more often, but maybe simply because the materials inside are more valuable then the battery of that technology level.
So yes, of course it uses some resources and something has to be mined, but that is true for almost anything.
In terms of grid storage, batteries are some of the better solution. Current Nickel based LiIon will be replaced by LFP and pure LiIon will never solve the complete grid battery challenge. Maybe with Sodium batteries. There are also Liquid Metal batteries, or things like Iron-Air batteries. These solutions are scalable in combination.
All that said, I would much prefer to have a bunch of thorium thermal breeders.
> That sludge must be locked away in vaults waiting for containment to fail.
Can you please show exactly what you mean here? Like what exactly this sludge is=
Who cares about unit margin or operational margin, as long as you can pick a bunch of revenue items and by removing them they didn't make any profit.
And even if your argument was true and they didn't make #realprofit, who would even care as long as they keep having their current growth trend at the unit margin they have.
Markets without ownership are mostly meaningless. All models of market socialism are mostly theoretical. Even the inventor market socialism didn't get far in implementing it.
Yes there are some markets that can exist outside of that but not a central organizing principle of an economy.
> "they got rich cause they worked hard" is a very shallow take
The worked hard on the right idea. Its not a 'take' its a fact'.
I didn't say 'anybody that works hard will be rich'. That would be a shallow take.
And the regulatory credit thing is so fucking played out that people who still bring it up can only be described as haters.
Are you seriously unable to look at a long term trend? Can you seriously not see how Bitcoin is totally irrelevant in their long term story?
As of now, it actually looks more like there are to many recycling company fighting over to few batteries they can recycle. With large players trying to do it themselves in addition to all the startups.
And only less then like 0.0001% burn up in a fire so that really not all that relevant.
Many TSLAQ people were far more extreme then saying 'they could go bankrupt, car industry is risky.
> Not that I think Tesla is particularly well run so, but Elon's ability to entertain the market and keep money flowing is impressive.
The haven't really need to raise that much money in a long time. They did some raises in the last couple years but that money is mostly in the cash balance now.
Its not like they are just raising more cash all the time.
Even if per mile the car would be competitive, the lost of value of the car itself would be incredibly.
Who will still buy an ICE car in 2030.
And that is before the new regulation that potentially makes these cars even less wanted.
10 minutes into a interview with the founder I was instantly convinced that they were a fake, fraud company.
They had a very clear strategy, and as a scammer, one must give him some credit. He managed to push a company to higher evaluation then GM based on literally nothing but marketing and false claims.
Of course we can make some of the same assumptions about highways.
If there was actual competition between these systems we might have a more accurate picture.
But private highways do actually seem to be profitable in some countries.
China invest untold billions in that system, and I don't know enough to say if this is defensible on commercial bases.
That a very reductive view on innovation. Most innovations are not some fancy new technology. They are new way to do deals and partnerships and improve overall process efficiently. That doesn't change the fact that they are real.
Interdicting standardized testing and quality control, is an innovation. Making deals with railroads to have an overall more efficient and cheaper distribution model is an innovation. The railroads agree to it as it allowed them to have higher utilization.
Would you say for example slaughter houses using refrigerated rail-cars is not a real innovation? Its just evil slaughter houses trying to 'game' the system?
At some point in time, doing things a certain way is just more efficient and those companies that can not adopt new processes will be less successful. Had all such innovations been prevented we would be much worse of overall.
Often it actually makes sense for most companies to go out of business, as for overall efficiency it doesn't really make sense to be differentiated into 100s of companies.
> The federal courts took a clear-eyed view on this and did not see it kindly.
No they didn't. Courts didn't create these laws, politicians did. And the enforcement was often very selective and politically driven.
The whole history of Anti-Trust went very strongly along with political interest in it until the 70s.
Anti-Trust lacked a clear definition and eventually the courts, lead by jurist Richard Posner, created a Anti-Trust definition that requires showing that consumers were harmed. Not only some vague accusations of 'market power'. Under that definition things like Standard Oil would not have gone threw.
The first Antitrust act in the US was about local butcher being disrupted by 'centralized' slaughterhouses (refrigerated train cars). Antitrust was literally created to attempted to prevent that. This was on state level.
On the federal level mostly the same thing happened. It was a political tool and it was used by politicians who tried to defend the losing competitors against innovated companies.
Standard Oil is the poster-boy for 'look how great anti-trust is' but if you look at what politics was behind it its clear that the losers in the market were pushing it. Despite in reality Standard Oil simply standardizing and improving quality, using innovative logistics system and lowering prices.
I can't count how many times people in the last 10 years wanted the government to go all in on hydrogen or whatever.
The Boring company is mainly about in city transport, not city to city transport, so its simply a different problem.
And there is a reason why commercial railroads are no longer effective, literally nowhere are they effective. Elon Musk is not magic, he picks the technology that he thinks can be commercially effective.
And those 'lords' whatever that means got that rich because they invested their personal time and resources into things that ended up working out and that's why they have the resources they have.
But show me the tech because:
> From their website: Storage is 30% lighter, 7% smaller, and 17% less expensive than Lithium-ion battery per kWh.
This is nonsense that wont happen.
They are not actually that exceptional anymore. At best they are marginally better.
Tesla new architecture of structural cells in a pack connected to massive castings is far better then Toyota EV have.
> Solid hydrogen fuels will be the next wave.
I really don't think that will be the cast.
> Imagine we hit "peak" Li-ion around 2030, producing 75 tWh annually. (Amazing, right?)
> From their website: Storage is 30% lighter, 7% smaller, and 17% less expensive than Lithium-ion battery per kWh.
By the time this technology is even remotely feasible. Li-Air, Li-Sulfer batteries and a whole bunch of other potential chemistries could be ready. All these more advanced chemistries can beat these advantages without issue.
Li-Sulfer battery could be 2-4x as dense ad current LiIon far smaller and far cheaper.
Even current High Nickel Cathode-Silicon Anode that will roll into the market will beat the numbers advertised by the company.
Why would anybody go refuel with solid hydrogen when you can have better range then Tesla Model S with a battery small battery pack you can put in your trunk and a tiny powerful EV motor?
A car based on the technology is simply worst along every single dimension.
Your analysis basically assumes that people perfectly optimize their consumption, but actual usage data shows that they don't.
Also these cars driving experience simply can't compare to actual EV. Because of the high cost you simple and up with a cheap EV motor and a cheap gas motor.
There is a reason why GM didn't want to sell a million of them.
Complete nonsense. Most Hydrogen is produced with natural gas. And the conversion makes and end to end efficiency makes it actually far worse both economically and environmentally.
Maybe in some imaginary future that will not actually happen it is as green.
> refuels 10x faster than any battery based car
Waste overestimation and in reality even if that was true, you are gone spend 100x more times refueling then in an EV. Because EV you simply charge at home and 99% you not gone use any fuel-station.
And Hydrogen charging station still have many problems if you actually attempted to have a high volume of cars using them.
> They chose wrong maybe, but they chose, and chose a path they though most viable.
The path that would give them the most government subsidies and allow them to delay EVs as long as possible.
> To claim they aren't in the game is beyond unfair.
Go look at how many actually FCV have been sold.
Worst of all Toyota has been the leader against all kinds of environment laws all over the world.
Non of those are EV now.
> EV sales are overwhelmingly replacement sales, largely taking up the sales from the ICE vehicle market.
All those need to be replaced by EVs. Tesla has no ICE vehicles so for them its simply growth.
Tesla can scale EV faster and they can reach better margin then current companies. Currently these manufactures can subsidies their EV with ICE sales, but their ICE infrastructure will turn into a liability soon.
At the same time they build out global charging infrastructure to fuel all those cars giving them a long term income at great margin.
> What's Panasonic's entire battery business worth today? Now increase that 5x or 10x.
We are only just at 2% EV in the market and Panasonic is only a part of that market. Add grid and home storage, industrial vehicles and so on. And eventually also planes.
> Tesla is still at an inferior position to both Ford and GM when it comes to industrial scale
Who wouldn't want all those distributed factories with union workers demonstrating while giving most of the profits to the dealers and suppliers.
> (to say nothing of political connections).
Yeah California and Texas where Tesla produces all the jobs are politically so weak. Elon Musk is also not on of the most famous people in the world and a twitter profile more powerful then GM/Ford marketing budget.
> Tesla represents a very small share of the auto industry globally.
Yes and they are already at industry leading operating margin while still being comparatively small and they continue to grow very fast.
> The past decade was the easy part for Tesla, not the hard part.
And just continuing to produce ICE vehicles and ignoring EV was the easy part for the competition. Repeatably in history we have seen how difficult massive technology transitions are and how established players ran into a lot of issues.