897 karma · joined April 28, 2013
Given that the "Add Enhanced Autopilot" and "Full self-driving capability" features are basically a $9k software update, I think the Model 3 is going to have some interesting margins once they scale up production.
I recently visited my brother and he was talking about crowdfunding a project of his..guess what? YouTube showed me ads for crowdfunding platforms later that day, probably because I was logged into his wifi.
It sure feels a bit creepy sometimes!
The next morning I get a call from a rather rude operator - just minutes before they were scheduled to pick me up - telling me that I haven't paid the full amount for the ride. I told them that I booked using their website and paid online with PayPal. He replied that he doesn't know why the website didn't show the correct amount but if I don't pay an additional £30 to the driver they won't give me a ride. I agreed because I just wanted to get to the airport asap and not deal with finding another company.
The lesson I learned here was: I don't trust minicab companies to be able to deal with the tech behind something like Uber. Of course, this was just one bad experience with a single company but it did leave a bad taste in my mouth.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzhc-N5YynO_shpHhzP2zuw/vid...
I wonder who's behind these and similar channels.
Email me [serious].
By how much? Could you please give us an example?
Would something like Redis' GEOHASH command be any faster if it used ProximityHash?
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/find.html?search...
It will cut my rent in half which would allow me to travel a lot more and save up for a deposit as well - with an average price of £175k for a 1 bed flat in the city centre.
Birmingham Airport is just 10mins by train from the centre and costs like £2.50! Lots of airlines and destinations. Cheap flights within Europe with the budget airlines or even to Asia via hubs like Dubai with Emirates.
I'm self employed, work from home and I don't have a child yet - which makes it a lot easier to move.
Parts of London are lovely but like you said, unless you own a property or your household income is a few times the average UK salary - it doesn't make much financial sense to live there.
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“I will announce locations for between two and four Gigafactories later this year – probably four.” - Elon Musk
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Tesla Grohmann – Mail from Elon I am very grateful that last Thursday I had the opportunity to talk to you and I wanted to give you some additional thoughts.
Tesla is unlike most other companies. Unlike other companies, the existence of Tesla is not only to make money. If it were only about this one goal, then I can tell you that the founding of a completely new car manufacturer would definitely not have been the smartest way. Our foundation and the foundation of everything we do is to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. The welfare of our planet is in great danger, and in order to solve this problem, we need a sustainable solar energy production, we need a sustainable way to store the energy in stationary batteries and we need a sustainable way to consume this energy with electric vehicles. It is critical of the future of humanity to solve this problem – we all want a better world for future generations.
Tesla has made a number of important steps towards achieving this mission in the last 14 years of our existence, but none is more important and can make a bigger difference than Model 3. For the first time ever, there will be an electric vehicle that people can afford and which people love. When Tesla was founded, no one thought that an electric vehicle could ever be more than a golf cart. Today, Model S is the best-selling vehicle in its class. Model X is fast to pick up and recently won a golden steering wheel. And Model 3 is on the brink of production start – just one year after the most successful product launch ever. After the Model 3, many other vehicle products will come, for which Tesla Grohmann will play a key role. To name just a few, which have already been publicly announced (there will be many more): We are developing Model Y (an affordable mid-range SUV), a heavy-duty semitrailer, a pickup and the next generation of the roadster sports car.
And these are only the cars. Tesla is about to launch a new solar roof into the market that will completely change the importance of the use of solar energy. Tesla will soon produce more batteries than the entire world has produced in 2013. These batteries will enable everything to be operated with sustainable energy, including the cars we manufacture. I was never more optimistic about the future of Tesla. Although it is not what drives us, Tesla has the real potential to be one of the most valuable companies in the world.
We bought Tesla Grohmann because we believe that Tesla Grohmann will play an important role in creating this future. It is not enough to produce cool products. To be successful, we need factories that are as good as the products themselves.
This brings us to the current topics at Tesla Grohmann:
First, the question of trust and the longing of every employee for job security. I understand that you are concerned about our decision to focus on Tesla projects instead of serving external customers. We have made this decision, because just so much work has to be done on critical Tesla projects. We really have so much to do that we will be able to hire even more extraordinary talents, and we plan not only an expansion of the team, but also our production facility in Prüm. For all these reasons, I would like to assure everyone at Tesla Grohmann that we will not be able to reduce our workforce in the foreseeable future, Even after these five years, we are expecting further growth at Tesla Grohmann and do not expect any personnel reductions. However, we wanted to give you absolute security for a definite period of time. This is a promise you can rely on and I will ensure that it is also formally implemented.
Second, on remuneration. Last week, we announced that each employee at Tesla Grohmann Tesla will receive shares worth 10,000 euros (US $ 10,000), distributed quarterly over the next four years, and an immediate bonus of more than 1,000 euros in cash. This is just the beginning for each Teammitgled. We will also enter into discussions immediately with the works council to ensure that the remuneration of each individual employee is competitive and corresponds to the local cost of living. Of course, no one at Tesla Grohmann should earn less than he can expect on the local labor market; Just as no one would reasonably require the remuneration in Prüm to be as high as in cities like Stuttgart or Munich, where the cost of living is much higher. In any case, every Tesla Grohmann employee will have the chance to earn considerably more salaries and shares than is usual in the industry and relative to the cost of living in Prüm. Unlike other automotive manufacturers, each Tesla employee receives Tesla shares in addition to salary. These shares can be easily sold for money, but they also open up the possibility of earning much more through stock appreciation. The tenfold increase in our share price over the past five years has made our shareholding exceptionally profitable for our Tesla employees. I firmly believe that we have the potential for a further ten-fold increase over the next five to ten years. That would make a total value of € 100,000 from the share of the share of € 10,000. Although we would not recommend it to anyone, because it is very likely less worthwhile, all those who would rather have a simple cash bonus, instead of the shares, would demand 2,500 euros in cash every year. Tesla firmly believes that extraordinary performance must be rewarded with additional cash and share bonuses. So this is only the beginning.
Thirdly, it is clear that you would like to see more changes at the workplace. At Tesla, we are proud to offer a pleasant, fair, and exciting work environment. It is very important for me that you like to work every morning. We have drawn up a long list of change measures to bring Tesla Grohmann to the conditions at other Tesla locations, as well as changes that are specific to Tesla Grohmann and which we are now trying to implement. This list will be visible in all buildings visible to all. We will update the list on a regular basis so that everyone can see what changes have already been made, which are currently being implemented and which will be implemented soon. You should see every week that improvements happen.
Finally, I know that IG Metall wants to bring the workforce of Tesla Grohmann on the union line. I would like to share my thoughts with you. It is my firm belief that the separation of the workplace into “executives” and “employees” does not create a good working environment. We want to create a system of equality without artificial barriers so that someone can start as a trainee and one day lead the entire company. This is why we eliminate all the special privileges of the executives. For example, everyone will have equal access to parking, eating the same tables, and there will be no management offices. I am convinced that managers should work at the forefront, in the same work environment as the entire team. Even though I run the company myself, I still do not have my own office and often moved my workplace to the most challenging area in the factory and slept on the factory floor when there was a real crisis. Managers should always take care of their team before they take care of themselves – the supervisor is there to serve his team – not the other way round.
As I said at the beginning, everything at Tesla serves our mission and I do not believe that IG Metall is sharing our mission. They have publicly announced in the press that electric cars do not take care of them. In addition, they have a real conflict of interest because their top priority will always be the members of the hugely established automotive manufacturers: their potential of membership is much greater than at Tesla Grohmann.
I would like to thank you for all the contributions you have made to Grohmann over the years. I look forward to what we can create as a tightly integrated team together.
Elon
I've started a free open alpha-test which you can check out here:
It really depends on the bank and branch you're walking into. My advice: Avoid doing what I did and don't apply for your first current account online. It might seem more efficient and time-saving but it's actually not - because of your non-existent credit history in the UK - they will have to ask you for endless documents.
Once you're in the UK, walk into a high-street bank that is actively seeking customers. Lloyds Bank or Barclays comes to mind. Ask for a basic bank account, which they will open for you without proof of address. Make an appointment with the same bank for a startup current account - sometimes they will send you to a different branch - if they don't do business banking themselves.
They will ask you about your business and estimated turnover. Make sure you bring your incorporation documents.
It's worth noting that I'm the only director of my limited company and the companies registered office was my home address - so no further proofs of address were required.
Waiting for your cards to arrive in the mail is what takes the most time, but I was able to use my online banking account even before I had my card.
It's not about cost at all:
> It's really not the expense that drives it. We're committed to having the best possible parts in all of our designs. So if it cost a lot and we needed it, we'd go get it. We were already required to have all this redundancy in the computers to meet all the different safety requirements. Then we started looking at what parts do we want to use and what is appropriate for this design. And what really is more important to us than the cost of the parts is the capability of the parts – how much power do they use, how much memory do they hold, how much do they process, and how physically big are they. That's the first thing.
> The second thing is what tools they come with. We run the Linux operating system, we program everything in C++, and that enables us to tap into a huge pool of very talented people and find the absolute best people in the computer and software industry to work with us. If you go into the radiation hardened parts, they are very limited in terms of what languages you can work in, what support packages there are for them, who knows how to program in them. It really limits your ability to work with the parts. And the other thing it really does is they all take a little longer time to get and they're a little harder to come by.
I watched an old episode of MythBusters last night on YouTube where they tested exactly that, it was Season 1 Episode 3 - if anyone is interested.
The article mentions that paper books in the UK are VAT exempt?
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I focused on scenarios for removing all security checkpoints and delays from a customer perspective.
Imagine checking in at a kiosk to get your boarding pass, and going though no security lines to board the plane. Bring anything you want with you, but know that the flight is under video surveillance, like retail stores today.
I assumed technologies that work in rudimentary form today and will benefit from Moore’s Law. (The only 12-year forecast that I felt confident about is the continuation of the 100-year abstraction of Moore’s Law, bringing a 256x computational advance by 2018).
So, I started with the assumption that computer-controlled flight would be possible. It’s a pretty safe assumption given what we already have today.
With no cockpit, everything changes. The potential for harm is greatly reduced if the plane cannot be navigated from within. No hijacking. No use of the plane as a weapon.
Bombs become the only threat, and a reduced one.
Personal weapons? A gun or knife-fight could do more damage in a restaurant, or many large group gatherings. Why bother with a plane where criminal activity will be recorded, and the only people harmed are on board?
As for bombs, passive sniffers in a free flowing airport gateway are more plausible than detecting improvised weapons than could be used against a pilot.
At the airport, a quick fingerprint biometric would be a natural way to get a boarding pass (as 12 million people have already done in Florida to get access to an amusement park). So even smuggled bombs would have more capture and downside risk for a terrorist cell than other targets.
Pie-in-sky ideas: hardening a UAV to bombs should be easier than current planes; smaller planes could lower risk; luggage could fly separately; biologic weapon sensors could trigger a flight path to quarantine, etc.
I agree though, doing only one transformation would be more efficient - but I'm not sure which USB devices would work on 3.3V - it depends on the individual use-case I guess.
Using two Panasonic NCR18650B 18650 batteries (each ~12Wh) and a 3V to 5V step-up converter it should be able to run for a day!
Add a solar panel + charging circuit and you have a little Linux computer which is able to run continuously on solar power :)
EDIT: 1Wh is with a monitor plugged in and running a GPU-intensive demo, I wonder what the power consumption is like without a GUI but just a WiFi dongle and the Pi-camera sending snapshots periodically.