Think of all the wrangler, hummer, truck buyers who want a militaristic, rough, unpolished steel look and this is that flavor taken to an extreme.

Other buyers still have the S3XYs to choose from so we can all have our favorite toys from the same company. No cannibalization.

Every single Tesla vehicle I've seen in the wild here in Indiana has had a vanity plate, my favorite being Indiana plate "5TAR 5HP" a few weeks ago driving home from work, here she is https://imgur.com/gallery/YGhwGYV

This thing looks like straight out of a sci-fi movie. I think the aesthetic is going to get them a lot of sales. If I had use for a car, this would be at the very top of my list, purely based on the looks.

I bet they'll get a ton of sales from people buying it ironically. Which, when you think about it, is why many people buy trucks in the first place - very few are buying it for utility.

In static images, it looks ugly, but in videos, it looks awesome.

Maybe it's because of the extremely minimal design, and as someone said in these comments, it lacks any features at all.

One thing though, you have to give Elon the credit to travel down the road less traveled.

In fact it's made with the same steel alloy. I think I want to buy one now.

Is the same alloy really also the best at everyday -50 to 50 (c) temperatures?

Can you use this to overtake someone on the hard shoulder (half covered in sand) and go bumming around sand dunes? That's what Tesla have got to do to win there.

What do those words mean? Google Image Search isn't helping.

This thing alienates far more than it attracts in the pickup truck market.

I was referring to parent comment

The US finally decided to bring a knife to a gun fight.

note that, not talking about Apple's data center partner or Microsoft's cloud partner, just talking about Apple/Microsoft's core business (iphone, mbp, windows, office etc) here.

Right now, real estate is simply a good investment regardless of everything else because of the tax benefits of transferring properties to heirs. Depreciation and tax bases are reset, essentially making real estate a double whammy of tax benefits for the current owners as well as their heirs. Depreciation means tens of thousands of dollars saved in taxes per year per property. Transfer benefits means never having to pay that back due to generational reset. Take away the transfer and estate benefits first.

Once that first dent is made, the wealthy/NIMBYs will naturally vote for the next correct move, which is to take away policies that make housing unaffordable to their own children. As the law is right now, there is no incentive for land owners to be altruistic to society because their children are sheltered from affordability problems due to transfer benefits.

My wager is that all it would take is removing transfer benefits on commercial properties (e.g. like kind exchange, or enforcing depreciation recapture upon transfers, including 1031) to see the first domino fall on the way to an eventual partial rollback of laws like prop 13 and more property development due to fewer NIMBY incentives. That’s a very small bite to chew that leads to much greater changes down the road because it realigns incentives tremendously.

I say this as someone who has Bay Area real-estate. The strategy to reverse things doesn’t exist at the moment.

Intuition: to truly achieve all of the functions of the human brain and neurons, the most efficient structure is one that is biological or simulates our biological composition. There is likely no process (energy and material-wise) to produce human cells at the same fidelity as simply having sex and giving birth.

The only thing I can tell you that I have in common with the average Georgian or Texan is that we probably both speak English, enjoy hot dogs, and watching Football and Baseball. That's not much of a strong reason for us to both be in a strong political, economic and militaristic union.

You're right, those aren't strong reasons at all because they're entirely self-centered. Here's a hint -- our union wasn't founded and littered with blood and bodies on the basis of trying to make sure everyone had the highest possible match percentage on eHarmony.

I'm fortunate enough that my grandparents had some of their really old watches sitting in a drawer. For most of them, I just picked it up and it worked. They had no need for them, so they're in my care now. Got lucky :)

You really can't say with anything else over 60 years old. Heck I'd be ecstatic if any of my code even runs/compiles in 30 years from now, let alone 60. But I'm pretty certain the same old watches will still be ticking when it's time for my grandchildren to rummage through my drawer and find them happily awaiting another windup. Timelessness in a timekeeping device is part of the appeal.

No, a run of the mill mechanical Seiko (say a Seiko 5 or even a SARB) will not run as accurately as a modern Patek. That's silly. Patek have their own Seal of quality guaranteeing a certain range of drift per day and performs well beyond COSC requirements. The typical Seiko wouldn't come close unless you're starting to get into Grand Seiko territory or Spring Drive movements which is a different league.

Rolex vs PP on a typical 3 handed watch will have similar performance, with the Rolex probably fairing better due to the typical Rolex being designed (and QAed) for more extreme conditions. However, the most complicated Rolex is an annual calendar and this is where PP shine.

But still nowhere near the PP league, price-wise.

I think you're the one who is being untruthful by introducing qualifications like "run of the mill" which I did not.

> This probably betrays the fact that the audience here is not very knowledgeable about mechanical watches

There are two aspects to understanding mechanical watches: the mechanics and the culture. People who buy a PP want not just a functional, quality timepiece--they want exclusivity. PP is not just a watch company, it is a luxury brand. And luxury brands create exclusivity via high prices--much higher than is strictly justified by the costs of manufacturing.

All this is to say that if another company wanted to replicate a PP, they could do it for less than the retail price of a PP. But there would be no point, because no one would buy it. Because there is nothing cool or exclusive about owning a Chinese knock-off of a Patek Philippe, no matter how well it works.

The answer is "yes" of course a Chinese made Patek Philippe would be an object of appreciation. But there isn't one.

There's actually a rich history of Chinese watch making and it's worth reading up on if you're into mechanical watches at all: http://chinesewatchwiki.net/History_of_Chinese_watchmaking

In fact the project 304 chronograph is still considered collectible, even the reissues: http://forums.watchuseek.com/f71/review-ed1963-chinese-milit...

However, back to answer your question precisely, China simply doesn't have an industry or heritage or history that can support a Patek, which is why it doesn't exist. Even with the history I've linked to above, the Swiss industry is light years ahead and it's not even close.

I don't think you should let your bias, if any, of the very inferior counterfeit movements and counterfeit casing industry color your opinion of watches. Anyone in the know would trivially identify the differences. To your analogy it would be like producing a cheap engine and simply calling it an F1 engine. That's not how it works.

Furthermore, if you asked this theoretical Chinese sweatshop to build a modern highly complicated Patek Philippe, it wouldn't cost 1/100 the price, it would cost 100x the price if not more. They'd have to start by sourcing synthetic materials, reinventing tools, or recreating components that a theoretical sweatshop wouldn't even have access to. Part of why counterfeits are so cheap is because they source really cheap Japanese or local Chinese movements that have had decades of build up to scale to the current counterfeit prices. Meanwhile, the real deal modern watch movements are decades more advanced.

The watch in question made in 1989 is valued at 6 million dollars (according to wikipedia). OK fine, that might be an extreme example. Lets take a typical Patek watch which costs tens of thousands of dollars.

I can't believe that the price reflects the materials, the complexity and labour that went into the watch. I admit i know next to nothing about horology but as a software engineer i have trouble believing it has more complexity than a similarly priced family saloon or even a mobile phone, or a microprocessor.

My point with the Chinese sweatshop example was its really about the image that they want to be associated with. There seems to be a typical formula: An aristocratic sounding family name of the founder, a founding date sometime in the 1800s and a founding place in Geneva or some town or village with a quaint name in France. A making-off video which features men with Germanic features, wire-frame glasses and who is never smiling(we're portraying gravitas here), delicately assembling the watch components. Oh yeah and make sure you get celebrities, powerful politiciansand pro athletes to be photographed wearing the watch (the fact that some of these people couldn't reasonably afford such watches seems to suggest they were given the watch for free or even paid to wear them).

edit: I know there are examples of watch manufacturers like Richard Mille who break the mould (at least with the historical legacy aspect), but it seems to be an unclear path to convince the gatekeepers of this clique that you're not just another poser trying to pry hundreds of thousands of dollars from the wealthy.

Watchmaking and does take a tremendous amount of labor, a watch made by a sweatshop in China will simply not have the same precision and reliability, let alone the fit and finish of its movement inside.

You are confusing complexity with ease of manufacturing. Some very complex objects are actually much easier to mass produce, such as a family sedan or a CPU, simply because we've gotten very, very good at it by now and the economy of scale makes it easy and cheap.

But for a watch, since there is no such economy of scale, and the customers demand those watches to be hand made, then the amount of man hour and labor that's put into making a perpetual calendar way out weights that of a car.

Is there a huge amount of price inflation caused by marketing? Absolutely. But even a top tier Chinese replica of a Patek can cost a couple thousand dollars, while not being the same quality inside.

As a software dev, you're aware of diminishing returns. Fine watchmaking is an extreme case of this. The reason it costs what it costs is because everything is done to an extreme, by hand. Engraving, finishing are all unique on each piece. Quality assurance makes sure that it's passed a variety of brutal tests (and if it doesn't, you're on the hook for fixing it for free under warranty). That's not even getting to the raw material costs, which of course is precious metal 18K for the casing and silicons and alloys and synthetic lubricants for the movement. All of these pieces are proprietary and uniquely fit for the watch, so the Chinese sweatshop would need to reach a certain scale before they could produce it at profit. Just take a look at the extreme lengths Rolex goes to manufacture these watches with automation (linked in the original comment post). Patek has to do most of that by hand to keep each piece unique.

Is there a high margin in the business when done right? Absolutely. Should the Chinese all give up the counterfeit industry and move in high quality watches instead? No, because the pricing would be within the same order of magnitude (though no longer out of reach like the earlier example with the highest levels of watch making) with large gains on labor and marketing cost but minus the heritage and history to actually sell the pieces.

I think you're inaccurately making some assumptions about watchmaking that's fundamentally cutting your estimates down significantly to state that a Patek could be manufactured at 1/100th the price by a sweatshop or even 1/10th. It can't be done for the same reason why there isn't a Chinese Bugatti Veyron. The product is that good and true expertise and industry is backing that product.

At the end of the day, we don't need to argue hypotheticals. If this were possible, it would already be done. In the wild, there are plenty of cheap counterfeit watches with Patek written on the dial but there are no "fake" Patek level watches that a person familiar with watches wouldn't immediately spot as a fake.

And ultimately it's disengenuous to make any argument using "image" or marketing as a basis when it's done with fanfare plenty in our industry (a la Apple)