I think Tesla's situation is actually even worse than the quarterly numbers suggest. I'm reasonably happy with my Model 3, but I will never give Tesla another cent. The three other Tesla owners I know all feel the same way, and I know two more people who were considering buying Teslas but completely abandoned those plans this year (both got Hyundai Ioniqs instead and report they are pleased with them).
It will take a while for stories like this to filter to the top-line numbers because car replacement cycles are so long, but just on anecdotes I really don't see Tesla returning to growth anytime soon. The brand is absolutely toxic now.
I had to go a step further and sell my Tesla outright. I couldn't be associated with the brand anymore, it made me ill. I figured the best thing I could do is contribute to the glut of Teslas on the market, thus driving down demand and prices ever so slightly.
Is there a mature independent repair shop market yet? What is third-party part availability like? I've talked with a bunch of folk who have considered getting a used Tesla given how dirt cheap they are, but no one was confident they could operate a Tesla without giving the company money.
Sorry, I didn’t phrase that accurately: I intend to drive this car until it dies, and will give Tesla repair money where absolutely necessary. But I certainly won’t be a repeat buyer.
Because increasingly I can't park my car, order from a restaurant, manage my bank account, or schedule a doctor's appointment without an up-to-date smartphone, since the old ways of doing those things got removed in favor of apps. I also can't stay in touch with a bunch of my friends, who are on various chat platforms I can't access.
Unless you're prepared to go full off-grid hermit, you cannot opt out of technological progress even if you want to. That irks me, but what can I do?
> Because increasingly I can't park my car, order from a restaurant, manage my bank account, or schedule a doctor's appointment without an up-to-date smartphone
We still have the ability to opt-out of these things, and (sometimes) loudly let businesses know why, but the window is closing fast. If we want to have any hope for a world that doesn't require smartphones and apps, we need to take action now.
> We still have the ability to opt-out of these things, and (sometimes) loudly let businesses know why, but the window is closing fast.
I sometimes wonder if we do have the ability, because for every one person that has some sense, luxury, or energy to opt-out, there are a hundred that go with the flow. For every person who walks out of a restaurant with a QR-code menu, there are a dozen hungry people that walk in. How can we then take action within this system that is closing up around us?
I don't know what the solution is. The idiot consumers that accept and help to normalize this are too numerous.
One can only hope that there will always be at least one bank, at least one restaurant, or at least one doctor that addresses the shrinking market of those of us who care.
Jony Ive is talented, but we saw what happens when he doesn’t have a Steve Jobs to keep him in check: he dives headfirst into self-parody. And Sam Altman is no Steve Jobs, no matter what he fancies himself. I don’t predict anything worthwhile coming out of this partnership.
In addition to the social problems, which are nontrivial, there are tons of little bureaucratic friction points to living in community houses that people may not have even considered.
I know one community house of > 10 people in California, exactly the type the author says they want, which kept getting fines from PG&E because they were using too much electricity, even though this was solely due to the house size and on a per-person basis they used much less than people living in single-family houses thanks to resource sharing. A policy intended to encourage energy efficiency ended up punishing it instead. Landmines like this are all over the place.
If you scrape at a reasonable rate and don't clear session cookies, your scraper can solve the Anubis POW same as a user and you're fine. Anubis is for distributed scrapers which make requests at absurd rates.
I mean, LLM scrapers set fire to the commons, and when you do that, now you have a flaming hole in the ground where the commons used to be. It's not the fault of website operaters who have to act in self-defense lest their site get DDoSed out of existence.
> You can barely give away china these days. We would get beautiful, perfect condition full sets of china, mark it down to like $30 for an entire 12-place set, and it would just sit there.
Chinaware sucks to actually use: it can't go in the dishwasher, it's smaller and less convenient than normal-sized dishes, and so on. Even if you want to spend lots of money on dishes, you're much better served buying nice stoneware at Crate and Barrel or something, it looks as good or better and is actually useful. Chinaware generally just sits there and takes up space; I wouldn't take any even if it was free.
And the thing is, it's not really a tragedy that nobody bothers with chinaware anymore. Chinaware was only ever a "keeping up with the Joneses" status-signalling purchase to show you'd made it as a middle-class household, and it's been replaced by other goods for that purpose. We're not losing out on some kind of heritage tradition here, it's just one set of shallow luxury goods getting replaced with another.
We got china for our wedding and at some point we just decided to use it regularly like our other dishes. So far it’s been more durable than our crate and barrel stuff that we also got for our wedding, and we put it in the dishwasher too!
That said we also have some china that’s been in my wife’s family for generations and we’re afraid to put that in the dishwasher. That effectively makes it decorative in our case.
No, it’s still problematic because it creates chilling effects and self-censorship, which is deeply wrong if you care about the spirit and not just the letter of the First Amendment.
Spotify’s ultimate goal is to move you completely away from listening to recordings from actual artists, and instead listening to a stream of 100% AI-generated slop that they don’t need to pay any royalties on.
Letting you go from a song you like to its respective album (or really, doing any navigation other than “start/pause this algorithmic playlist”) is counterproductive to that goal and so needs to be disallowed, or at least made as difficult as it can be.
I've never seen a convincing explanation from the laissez-faire neoliberal crowd how their view of the world squares with the fact that all the Asian miracles-- Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea, Singapore-- involved heavy and widespread state intervention. They generally handwave it away and try to change the subject as quickly as possible.
When you have the blueprint of what to build with a large export market ready to buy, it's easier to plan an economy.
Modern economies, unfortunately, don't have that. The capital markets are already mature. What ventures left are uncertain. When governments pick winners there, the pie really doesn't grow.
Well regulated fair markets remain the best system in history to find a way forward to grow the pie.
Unfortunately, regulators have a habit of becoming captured by winners. The markets become no longer fair. Then real growth stagnates.
All industry everywhere is government subsidized. Germany has always had auto tariffs, and all of German industry heavily benefited from the long term, very cheap piped natural gas deals with Russia.
America's remaining industries are subsidized or protected with significant non trade barriers- medicine, rockets, agriculture, light truck manufacturering, financial services.
Software services are the one industry that mostly seems to stand on its own two feet, but there was a ton of nurturing of that in the past, as well as onerous export controls on cryptography.
> all the Asian miracles-- Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea, Singapore-- involved heavy and widespread state intervention.
Hong Kong didn’t. Counter example disproves rule.
It’s really not surprising that people followed a successful model, given that people are fashion followers. See how there was so little variation in COVID response across countries.
Hong Kong operated as a highly independent special economic zone for doing business in China (at it was very close to the Shenzhen SEZ). Its success was due to the way China partially opened up, and the role it played as a crossroads into China.
In 1980 when the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone was founded Hong Kong had a GDP per capita of $5,700 as compared to $8,400 for the UK. Hong Kong was a first world country before China opened up for trade. Shenzhen was a fishing village of approximately 30,000 people. Hong Kong was a city state of 5 million. China didn’t become Hong Kong’s main source of imports until 1982.
HK wasn’t an “Asian Miracle”. It was a trading hub with the benefit of being a British protectorate. That’s very different to the other named countries which built industrial bases.
Hong Kong could only be Hong Kong because others could not: its place as a gateway to China was the driver for economic growth, not the “correctness of neoliberal economic ideas”.
I mean, the simple answer is that people in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and China are all poorer than the US and EU. Japan had decades to catch up and failed to do so. The laissez-faire approach gave people happy, low-stress, and materially rich lives.
Now, we're in a new era where national industrial capacity will at times take precedence over quality of life, and we have to make tradeoffs. But frankly it wasn't obvious that would happen again — China's policies over the past decade made it a reality.
Taiwan and South Korea are both richer than the EU on aggregate measured by GDP (PPP) per capita. So are Singapore and Hong Kong, but it’s not fair to compare city-states. Even in nominal terms, Taiwan and SK are right in the middle of the EU member states between Slovenia and Czechia.
I genuinely think an average person in Japan has "richer" life than a person in NA. No real data points, just vibes. I lived in NA, EU and Japan. It is so relative that, I haven't been able to take GDP per capita statistics seriously. The most awful thing for an average, is the work ethics. But that has been rapidly changing in the last 5 years, I think.
> The laissez-faire approach gave people happy, low-stress, and materially rich lives.
The usual schtick conveniently ignoring the absolute marauding of resources from non-western countries and the effective slave labor extracted from Asia.
You can't wax poetic about the merits about turning your own workforce into "slave labor" (the entire OP point), and then complain about countries buying things produced by the slave labor.
The social safety net and access to basic resources like housing and education in Asian democracies, makes the average citizen there much, much, better well off than the average citizen in the geographical “West”.
PS: China is completely different - makes no sense throwing it in the comparison.
It will take a while for stories like this to filter to the top-line numbers because car replacement cycles are so long, but just on anecdotes I really don't see Tesla returning to growth anytime soon. The brand is absolutely toxic now.
reply