Liberty

https://stratechery.com/2020/the-ipad-at-10-the-ipad-disappointment-ipads-missing-ecosystem/

Volaris acquisition: Google translate for the press release: https://www.saatmann.de/cms/?node=1163 h/t @pearnick

Are you implying that Chrysler has automatic acceleration problems? I haven’t heard of that. I agree that we need to check the data log from this Tesla to find out what’s going on. I wonder if it’s auto drive system encountered a bug No, sorry if I wasn't clear. You said "even my Chrysler van has automatic braking, so if I try to do that, it'll brake for me before the crash". I meant that automatic braking doesn't prevent 100% of crashes for any brand, so to say that Tesla's automatic braking must be faulty because there was a crash doesn't quite work.

Hmm... Nowadays even my Chrysler van has automatic braking, so if I try to do that, it'll brake for me before the crash. Isn't TSLA the smartest car in the world? How can it not auto brake in this case? There's got to be a programming error regardless of whether the driver actually pressed the brake or gas pedal. Chryslers have accidents too. None of these systems work all the time in every situation, and a lot of them just allow the car to slow down before impact (which helps a lot) rather than avoid a crash altogether. We hear mostly about the crashes that happened and not about those that didn't, so it's hard to judge how effective these things are. Also, a lot of what we read online probably is just made up stuff, especially when it comes to heavily shorted companies.

https://overcast.fm/+T6hF2gHI Great interview with physicist from ITER about the research fusion reactor. Super impressive and fascinating.

Two new acquisitions: https://www.ejuniper.com/en/blog/2020/01/24/juniper-acquires-tsi/ "TSI provides products and services related to TPF/ALCS and Digital Enterprise technologies to some of the Fortune 500 companies" https://www.petrosys.com.au/petrosys-acquires-globe-claritas/ “Claritas is a globally-recognised seismic processing solution and has been used in 30 countries by more than 75 organisations." h/t @pearnick

EV hacker wk057 on Teslamotorsclub has an open $10,000 bet for anyone who can show him a Tesla with a genuine sudden unintended acceleration problem: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/sudden-unexpected-acceleration-today.114650/page-29#post-3448407 He says he has pulled logs 17 times so far for purported SUA, and the problem turned out to be spurious each time. Having driven a Model 3 for a couple of years now, I can believe that hitting the accelerator pedal by mistake is more likely than with a gas car, since Tesla drivers do a lot of single-pedal driving. Also, there is less time to correct the mistake because of the instant acceleration. Reminds me of the Toyota issue a few years ago... It's possible that some cases were real, but a lot of cases were user error. Seems to happen especially often when you are making a turn and then want to brake, sometimes your brain transposes the spatial location of the pedal because you're senses are telling you you're turning, and then you hit the wrong pedal. But when you look at CCTV footage of the incident, you see that the brake lights never came on (and after the accident you show they work fine) even though the person says they were stepping on the brakes really hard. In fact, they were stepping on the gas really hard... It's actually something that happens fairly regularly, but once it's in the media and people have a story to latch onto, they blame it a lot more on the car because they're primed to believe it.

CFO told me: "The date is tentatively scheduled for Friday May 8."

You're comparing two different technologies that are at different levels of maturity. It's quite common for technologies that are in steeper parts of their development curves to either get cheaper or to give you more for the same price over time. Later on, as they get more mature, that tends to flatten out or reverse. So yeah, you're missing the forest.

Wow https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/21/amazon-boss-jeff-bezoss-phone-hacked-by-saudi-crown-prince

I was thinking that this is one of the most range-bound stocks that I know of... It may look pretty flat over the past decade, but if you put the SP500 as your opportunity cost (which is pretty reasonable, since it's the easiest and most obvious thing to invest in for most), then it doesn't look quite as flat...

I was talking about replacement battery prices. And why would you phrase things like that anyway? Seems needlessly confrontational. A lot of the price cuts were going from the premium models, which they made first, to less premium models (dual motors vs single, smaller batteries, different finishes and interiors, different self-driving packages, etc). The fully loaded S is now about $10,000 less than it was in 2013. Now it comes with 100 kWh battery instead of of 85 kWH, dual motor AWD, autopilot, parking sensors, 2.4 sec 0-60 instead of 4.2 sec. Yeah, it's a mix of changes to the model SKUs and their availability (ie. at first only the top SKUs were made and sold, and it'll likely be the same for the Y at first), and actually lower prices, or often same price for something better (kind of like how you pay about the same for a smartphone now as 5 years ago, but it's much faster, better features, more storage, etc).

I was talking about replacement battery prices. And why would you phrase things like that anyway? Seems needlessly confrontational. A lot of the price cuts were going from the premium models, which they made first, to less premium models (dual motors vs single, smaller batteries, different finishes and interiors, different self-driving packages, etc).

That was my thought exactly. Why would they lower prices if they didn't have to? They still have no real competition. I keep thinking year after year that this is going to change soon, but it hasn't. Yeah, you could pit the 2012 Model S against pretty much any of the competition and it would fare pretty well. The 2020 Model S, well...

Of course, I don't mean that the prices will come down every year and follow exactly production costs... But over a long enough period like the life of a car, there'll probably be a good difference as long as production costs keep falling. Also, so far there's been little market pressure on them to lower prices, since the EV competition is so scarce, but I figure over the next 15 years, there'll be enough new EV entrants, some of them maybe even good, that it'll put more pressure on them to keep prices competitive.

In California anyway, a person driving a Model S (vs a Porsche 911) has likely saved $32k+ in gas money and servicing costs by the time the battery goes off warranty. So when you think of that cash as part of the "residual value", things look a lot better. Tesla could probably resolve the lumpiness by just offering to lease the batteries to the car owners. The monthly lease payments plus electric bills would likely be much more similar to gas costs for an ICE. Anyone with a fancy ICE car (don't compare a Model S to a Corolla) knows that it's also false that they're sure to last a long time and not cost much... repairs and maintenance on a BMW or Mercedes can add up to a lot in later years. Also, shouldn't assume that by the time you'd want a new battery (I think for most EVs, the battery will last the life of the car, it just won't have as much range at the end, but for the majority of people, that's fine since you so rarely drive to maximum range in a day) that replacement batteries will cost what they cost now. Battery prices are still coming down as the industry is scaling up and automating and new denser chemistries are being rolled out. It's not Moore's Law, but after 10-15 years, improvements of mid single digits compound into something pretty significant.

Sundar Pichai op-ed about AI regulation: https://www.ft.com/content/3467659a-386d-11ea-ac3c-f68c10993b04

AlphaFold piece in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03951-0

Battery degradation over time seems to be pretty reasonable (ICEs also get less efficient as they age and their range is reduced/fuel consumption goes up): I can't remember the links, but I've heard about some outliers (people who drive A LOT, or taxis) putting a ton of mileages on Model S's without problem.

With great books, it's worth re-reading once in a while. It's not just about forgetting; the books stays the same, but the reader can change quite a bit, so the "software" that is in the book will get interpreted quite differently by the new "hardware" of your brain. My most recent re-read of Phil Fisher had a totally different impact on me than the first time I read him years ago, for example. I'm about due to re-read 'Gödel, Escher, Bach', one of my faves...

Consider? You don't have a S or X yet? That's surprising. Do you still live in Cali?Tesla cars are as common as Honda or Toyota here. Last I've heard, Eric had a S. I think he means it in if he was buying a new EV now, the S would still be the only choice for him.

I've seen both sides of the argument.. I ended up falling on the side of using sunscreen and getting more Vit D through supplementation. I think humans throughout evolutionary time mostly didn't live long enough to worry too much about skin cancers and skin aging (the sun will make your skin visibly age much faster), a lot of the problems happened after reproduction age, which is an evolutionary blind spot, and throughout most of that time most humans probably had darker skin pigmentation than I do, which also provides some natural protection. There's also issues with the ozone layer being damaged in post-industrial times (some of that has been partially corrected by banning CFCs and such, but not entirely). That's my vague understanding of the situation. I still get plenty of sun without sunscreen, but if I know I'm going to be out for a long time in the sun not being covered too much, I always try to wear good sunscreen now. Excellent points! That makes a lot of sense. I was recently talking about evolution with a biology professor and she made the point that evolution cared (in terms of increasing your chances of survival) only if it helped in reproduction. That is why women live longer than men, because older women help their daughters care for the children, which in turn led to women having more children. So evolutionary wise there is an advantage for mothers to have their grand mother live longer. Men, apparently no so much :) Thank you! Vinod It's not quite as simple as that, but yes, things that tend to happen after reproduction don't get encoded (or at least, not directly, which also leads to the interesting stuff in epigenetic).. That's why aging and the diseases of aging aren't programmed, but rather, a blind spot that evolution hasn't had a time to solve against because for most of humanity's existence, there were few very old people, and they didn't reproduce. There can be secondary effects, like having longer-lived adults helping the germ-line indirectly (ie. grand-parents increasing the chance of survival of their grand-kids).. I'm no expert, but I remember that at the time (10-12 years ago), I learned a lot from this series of posts: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/MH2b8NfWv22dBtrs8 Of course reading Darwin's Origins of Species is recommended as a good starting point, but this book is also a good place to learn: https://www.amazon.com/Adaptation-Natural-Selection-Christopher-Williams/dp/0691026157

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-be-carbon-negative-by-2030/

Update from Altius today: That's a good number. But that's also basically what they would've got the past year investing in the SP500, and now they've sold a bunch of stuff ("During the year the number of portfolio holdings was reduced from 27 to 18") because these aren't the types of holdings you can just hold on for a long time and watch compound, but rather you have to time in and out as cycles come and go and exploration gets lucky or unlucky. Hard game to play...

I've seen both sides of the argument.. I ended up falling on the side of using sunscreen and getting more Vit D through supplementation. I think humans throughout evolutionary time mostly didn't live long enough to worry too much about skin cancers and skin aging (the sun will make your skin visibly age much faster), a lot of the problems happened after reproduction age, which is an evolutionary blind spot, and throughout most of that time most humans probably had darker skin pigmentation than I do, which also provides some natural protection. There's also issues with the ozone layer being damaged in post-industrial times (some of that has been partially corrected by banning CFCs and such, but not entirely). That's my vague understanding of the situation. I still get plenty of sun without sunscreen, but if I know I'm going to be out for a long time in the sun not being covered too much, I always try to wear good sunscreen now.