It's a cool car. I'm glad it exists. All SUVs look almost identical. I'm glad it was different, not for everyone but it was an attempt to make something innovative in a very stale market.
It's exhausting reading these kinds of articles from a tech publication none the less. It's just so negative. Here is a summary of paragraphs:
Cybertruck is ceasing production
Here's a mean tweet from some X account with 2,649 followers: "Fuck that shitbox"
No, it sounds like there are clear differences in abilities.
If you think every junior/senior/staff has the same ability, you're delusional. Two people can broadly fall into the same bucket but be very different in terms of output.
I often look at a CV and notice specific skills that can benefit the business even if they aren't part of a normal job description. Imagine a software developer who used to be a graphic designer. I can save handoff time and have this person take on additional tasks, but it won't be in the job ad because the hit rate is too low. I can afford to pay that person more than others with comparable programming skills.
Or, I find value in areas that get overlooked in the market. Career transition people for example might not have many other options and I can take a gamble on how fast they ramp up.
Did you know that US produces 30% less carbon than it did in 2004? Even when adjusted for trade, carbon emissions continue to trend down since the early 2000s (absolute terms, not even per capita)
Ok that's nice, but it's not enough and now you want to add a bunch of natural gas power plants? Is that going to increase or decrease geenhouse gas emissions?
Are you arguing we did good so now we can cheat a little bit and have some ice cream? Like someone falling off the wagon on their diet.
That's great, but it's still not enough. We don't just need to drop by 30% of some number, we need to eliminate all carbon emissions and we need to start sequestering the emissions produced for over a century.
My understanding is that water used in data centers is recirculated, much like all water is. What's the alternative? Does the data center somehow destroy water through a chemical reaction such that is ceases to be water? Or pollutes and releases the water and makes it unusable and incapable of evaporating and being recirculated? Am I missing something?
From the source:
> The water’s going back into the water cycle anyway, so is water usage a big deal? Yes. The phrase to research here is “freshwater scarcity” — cleaning water takes time and energy, the water cycle doesn’t reliably distribute water evenly, water usage can pull water out faster than the cycle can return it, and so on.
If this is true, then it's an engineering problem. Cleaning water takes time and energy, we should improve that and the energy required is already priced. There's more demand for infrastructure and it should be built out.
I think the problem is more the distribution of water rather than the total amount of it. If you use freshwater for evap cooling in Chile then it becomes a cloud and rains in the ocean, you just converted freshwater to saltwater
This whole thing is incredibly cringe. To think someone would rely on a piece of software built on this kind of faux activism and anger about being laid off is laughable.
In the AI age, no one buys software because it's "worth it". You pay a premium because you expect reasonable thought and care about the about the product and support. Sure we can switch over to ICQ or Microsoft Teams or Google chat, which is all essentially free for most corporate customers. But people pay for Slack because it's a known entity, slightly nicer to work with and frankly I just don't want to think about the decision so I pay $8 or whatever per user to not have to think about it.
I love the main character syndrome on display. You have this regional Florida race, not particularly competitive. They do campaign events all day every day. They see an issue with their Instagram account which gets fixed an hour later and they immediately think it's Zuck behind the scenes in his war room following her race and rally with a big red button on his desk to cut her off at the crucial window. Incredible stuff.
> They see an issue with their Instagram account which gets fixed an hour later and they immediately think it's Zuck behind the scenes in his war room following her race and rally with a big red button on his desk to cut her off at the crucial window. Incredible stuff.
This isn't the first time Meta has pulled the plug on rallies and leftwing organizations [1]. It's also not out of character for them to try and push right wing narratives. [2]
You miss the big one where all the social media companies deplatformed a sitting us president but point taken. But I think this is all too low stakes for that kind of action
I mean, companies are responsible for the actions of their employees within a certain scope and it is not outside the realm of possibility that an individual interested in curtailing the momentum of this candidate works at Meta in a capacity that would allow interfering with the account.
Accusing them without due evidence is sloppy, but it's not like the claim carries genuinely zero possibility of being true.
You honestly think meta couldn’t setup an automated system to target democratic candidate’s accounts and mess with them during a scheduled rally or live stream? As if zuck has to personally do anything to make that happen? This is hardly tinfoil hat territory, it would be trivial to put in place, and until I see it is coincidentally happening to their R counterparts, it tracks with Zuck’s current political leanings.
It's in incredible how hostile this tax is but I have to give them credit. They just see something that's productive and valuable and they just see money they can extort from people.
No justification, like gasoline tax, which is used to fix the roads and fund green technology. Or tax on stock buybacks which have questionable value in society. Or carbon tax.
On the subject of gasoline taxes, they are getting increasingly worried about lost revenue from the uptake of electric cars. It is going to be a distance tax I am sure, but what would make sense is to just give the department of transportation the electric tax already existing.
Already coming in in the UK next year. There are all sorts of issues with the approach:
- how does the tax authority know how many miles a car has driven each year? New cars in the UK are exempt from having standard safety testing at garages where mileage is recorded
- how are miles driven outside the UK accounted for? The tax is supposed to replace lost fuel duty, but if someone takes their electric car abroad, they still owe the British government money under the current arrangement
— do drivers pay in advance or arrears? If in advance, how do the government handle people grossly underestimating expected mileage to avoid paying ahead of time?
> No justification, like gasoline tax, which is used to fix the roads and fund green technology
What? There is no justification for gasoline tax beyond "government wants more money" (and has now lent against the income stream and so cannot realistically lower the gasoline tax). Gasoline tax in France goes into the general budget and so there are 3 main things being paid from that: pensions, "health care" (and by that we mean paying sick people to not have to work, not expensive cancer treatments), state personnel expenditures (the biggest of which is education)
Road maintenance is paid partially by tolls, and the rest is not a big part of the budget. Another decent chunk of road maintenance is forced onto homeowners directly. The rest is not a huge part of the budget (which you can tell by the quality of roads in many French cities). Green policy is almost exclusively subsidies and is a very tiny part of spending.
You should check what people say, especially politicians. And reality is that despite endless rhetoric to the opposite, the "green revolution" is something that is happening to the EU, not something governments are meaningfully contributing to. Unless you count extra taxes and fuckups like the German (and French, and Belgian, and even a little bit Swiss) nuclear fiasco. Extra taxes are also being imposed on the green transition by the way (probably like in Australia: because they make especially homeowners less dependent on centralized services and thus harder to tax).
Financial nuclear fiascos are happening all around except to the media it's like there's a huge explosion in a park, and 3 progressively smaller explosions in the same city. In the newspaper you'll find details on how the bigger explosion affected the cat of the major's niece, but you won't find much at all on the smaller explosions. But all the nuclear fiascos have the same "general shape": political decisions, made for electoral reasons, were disastrous financial decisions for energy policy. But nobody cared ...
Neoliberalism 101.. monetize and privatize everything and punish the poor disproportionately. Not for a beneficial purpose, but because "free is communism".
... except ... if there is anything the French government is not it's neoliberalist (yes, the president is, but he has long since lost the ability to change the budget)
Basically make a pledge to never raise taxes. It was called norquist pledge. Signers promise to oppose any and all efforts to increase marginal income tax rates for individuals and businesses.
Questionable whether this actually constrained spending. Ideally would be paired w balance budget amendment
I think there's a lot of "slow" companies that get hacked. The core problem is that the idea of blockchain is incredibly flawed. One should not allow ownership of a string to be definitive to that thing.
I heard people want to put things like deeds on the blockchain but what happens if someone steals your keys? Do they own your home? Of course not. A system should have trusted intermediaries and centralized sources of record. If someone hacks my municipality and updates the record that says that they own my home, obviously that wouldn't hold up and that should be reversed. Why would I sacrifice that safeguard for technical elegance or promised efficiency? Why do I want to allow permissionless transfer of my deed to any party? What problem are we trying to solve here?
Crypto really is "what if possession was 10/10 of the law."
I've made this comment before, but crypto always makes me think of bearer's bonds in fiction, where they always introduce the concept and very carefully emphasize to the characters that if they let go of it, even for a second, it's gone, and it's super important to keep hands on them at all times, and the whole scene is just on the nose foreshadowing that the bearer bonds will absolutely be stolen.
Well, the concept of "this belongs to whoever is holding it" felt like pretty heavy-handed foreshadowing for crypto too, and what do you know?
I like how Matt Levine at Bloomberg put it - crypto is just “speedrunning the history of [traditional] finance”.
I think a lot of people seem to believe that the current setup of banks, currency, and regulation (writ large) is arbitrary and unique, but a lot of the basic building blocks are actually quite natural consequences of evergreen problems handling money.
its a common pattern in todays society. a perceived problem with the system that is actually a problem with the people running that system leading to the design of a new system that somehow wont allow people to run it and cause the same problems. but then you need to reinvent solutions to every other problem the system solves and learned to solve over its operation
there is almost certainly an easier way to fix the problems people are having by making adjustments to the current banking systems, including support for the growth of different banks that simply act more ethically.
I agree with you about using blockchains for various things. With Bitcoin specifically, the problem you are trying to solve for is scarcity and a sound currency. It’s a unique asset not just a methodology or tech (blockchain) I’m sure you understand the problem with centralization and fiat currencies. But again, can’t argue with your other points.
I agree. Money, as defined by a storage of value and means of exchange, is uniquely qualified to benefit from blockchain technology. It shares many of the properties of gold (essentially fixed supply, unique history, lack of centralized control, consistent predictable mining, easy to verify, etc). It's better in that its supply is somewhat more predictable, could be more efficient to store / mine and could be sent digitally. Whether that's worth the downsides (mainly that its newer and easier to steal) is up for debate.
The problem is that you may want to sell your house to someone and be denied permission to do so. However, i have not seen any stories of that actually happening to anyone so idk
The is the obvious question anyone should ask when it comes to assets, but of course its not something that interests those pushing for blockchain-based solutions.
It’s not about moving fast or slow. Iirc the employee said it’s a good idea to do or testing before shipping. The CEO said it’s bullshit. AI actually allows you to finally do that pentesting pretty fast.
One thing I don't understand is how the rise of food delivery has gone up so much and is terrible for everyone.
For context, I used to deliver pizzas in a the early 2000s. I made
$4-5 an hour
+ $1 per delivery
+ tips (~$3 average)
My typical night made me about $20/hour (3-4 deliveries per hour). Someone would order $20 pizza, pay $4 for delivery fee and tip (16% markup). Restaurant paid $1.5 per delivery (amortized $5/h). Everyone was happy.
If you look at it today, the typical take home for delivery people is still $20 (same from 20 years ago, not inflation adjusted).
Here is what typical order looks like today:
Pizza cost: $20
Delivery fee: $3-5
Service fee (10-15%): $2-3
Optional tip (15-20%): $3-4
Possible small order fee: $0-2
Total customer cost: $28-34 (40-70% markup)
Restaurant commission (15-30%): $3-6
Restaurant makes less, customer pays a lot more.
And these companies managing this workforce still manage to lose money! So where the hell is the money going??
For the last 6 months ending June this year, they made $2b in revenue. They report the "cost of revenue" aka what they pay the "shoppers" aka laborers and businesses, plus any deals they made was around $500m, leaving a gross profit of $1.5b.
Then they spent $150m on operations (running the service) and customer support.
Then they spent $370m on R&D (software developers, product people, QA, executives)
Then they spent $460m on Sales and Marketing (adverstising, promotions, business deals, executives)
Then they spent $190m on General and Administrative (accounting, HR, business development, CEO, executives)
That left them with $250m of net profit. Oh, yeah, and they've paid out something like $10 billion in share buybacks in the last calendar year.
They spent three times what they pay their laborers across the entire world on JUST administrative costs. Any problem you have with laborers, or their insane fees, all goes into this corporate slush fund for the operators of this company and the higher-class workers. This is the rule, not the exception.
If you work for these companies, know you are paying your mortgage literally by the spines of the desperate workers your company decides it can exploit for the benefit of shareholders.
Thanks for the breakdown. I guess the bigger question is why? Don't they want profit? Or are they optimizing for something else like expenses and enterprise value (size of spend)
They're taking hundreds of millions in profit and doing share buybacks for the investors, they've got plenty of money, their business is to be a middleman and squeeze everyone external to them: businesses, customers, and laborers
If a business is not "profitable" a ton of people can still be personally earning a ton of money. I feel like finance and accounting is just a game to abuse, but what really matters is who is personally getting rich, or even just earning a high salary.
Nobody cares about abstract profit. They care about money in their personal bank account.
Yeah I’ve been doing DoorDash deliveries in SF for close to two years now it’s pretty clear to me that these companies having an adversarial relationship with their drivers is very much so not working. They have an incentive to pay the drivers as little as possible, but the drivers congregate around the most busy spots and so… they talk. Little cabals of people working together form to figure out how to game the system as much as possible, then the platforms adjust strategies to close those holes. Additionally the platforms use every dark pattern and psychological trick in the book to get you to work for less. People quit in response. Theirs no stable group of people doing this work. It shows up in the quality of what the platforms can provide.
If you run the numbers it’s clear that DoorDash targets 18 an hour to pay folks, but pushes it up to time and a half when it’s busy, so 27 during the holidays. Thing is, you can force them to pay a little more than double when it’s really busy and get 40 an hour from them. People work really hard to hit those numbers regardless of the quality of service they provide in the end.
For instance, I can randomly be 20 minutes late to an order one day and the next that’s a contract violation, three of those and they might fire you, depending on how many drivers they have available at the time. But if you can be twenty minutes late to an order you can do Uber Eats at the same time, you do that for an hour and by law in California the minimum you can make is 46 bucks in SF.
Alright that was all really anecdotal evidence to say that most experienced drivers are probably making more than 20 an hour, the shit service you receive is also directly incentivized by the platforms adversarial relationship with the drivers.
The whole thing just really doesn’t work. They must really banking on the autonomous delivery robots to work out.
> Restaurant makes less, customer pays a lot more.
only the latter is true. the former is true only for a subset of restaurants.
While your old pizza place probably serves the same amount of pizzas as before, for other restaurants, not specialized in delivery, the number of meals they sell has exploded.
so restaurant make less money per meal, put they make more meals.
also while customers pay more, you could see it as the price of convenience and choice.
Seems like the difference is millions of lines of code and thousands of servers now, vs none of either back then (unless you count some erlang ATT switching code for the phone call you make to the pizza shop).
Making a phone call, then paying with cash, is just crazy efficient. What exactly have we even gained?
I think the original business model included giving restaurants a fax machine and just faxing over the order. There is a lot of efficiencies with using an app and not having your guys tied up taking phone orders. Loop in credit card processing as well. Should have stopped there.
Are we really asking this question in the year of our Late Stage Capitalism lord 2026? Are we confused about the American Oligarchy working with private equity to dash all the labor gains of the mid-20th century?
It's going to billionaire's Yacht & Bunker funds. The gig economy is about inserting tech into the middle of a functioning system to extract wealth for 4-5 dudes' benefit.
Who is rich? The platforms aren't making a lot of money, they've been losing money for a very long time. The valuations were pumped by VC money and maybe the founders are paper rich.
Stop hand waving about capitalism. Give me a real answer.
The companies are losing money so the C-suite are doing what most small business owners are doing and not drawing a paycheck so they can make payroll, right?
...right?
Donald Trump is worth billions of dollars despite dozens of his projects "losing money"/going bankrupt. I will stop "waving about capitalism" when it stops doing the same fucking thing while incredulous passersby go "surely it must be something else causing the problem".
It's exhausting reading these kinds of articles from a tech publication none the less. It's just so negative. Here is a summary of paragraphs:
Cybertruck is ceasing production
Here's a mean tweet from some X account with 2,649 followers: "Fuck that shitbox"
The car rusts sometimes
Truck sold very few units
Even with low sales they're still going down
Wildly unpopular with design flaws
Mention embarrassing demo from 7 years ago
It just goes on, truly exhausting.
https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a36715409/why-does-...
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