Very, very broadly, I’d say a lot of my concerns boil down to them convincing the broader industry as a whole that cutting costs and delivering a shit product is okay, so long as you’re doing it as a “technology company”

• Pushing out buggy, half-baked SW because “we’ll fix it with an OTA” and a recall has little to no direct financial impact, allowing for you to gamble lives on hopefully getting a SW update out before the bugs cause accidents or deaths, rather than spending the time/money to get it right from the start.

• Removing stuff like important, standard hard controls (buttons/stalks/etc) to make everything a touch control, purely for cost cutting, but acting like it’s because buttons are “old tech”

• Pushing that 100% BEV is the only current solution, rather than pushing for a far cheaper mass improvement of fuel economy and scaling BEVs as HEVs grow too, especially in developing markets.

• Using a proprietary charging standard for nearly a decade, solely as a sales tactic, and only cooperating with other OEMs once it allowed them to collect government subsidies

Those are just a few I can think of off the very top of my head, and the ones I’ve seen have the most impact on the broader industry. I can go into more detail on any of them as well.

As someone who works in the industry, and done plenty of work for Tesla, I can create a far greater list of all the things they’ve fucked up in the industry, including electrification.

The thing is that you don’t need FSD to do that. Having a really good AEB system massively improves safety, far more than a convenience feature like FSD does, but they fucked that up by taking the radar out so now it performs far worse at night, hence running over pedestrians and other VRUs far more often.

But you can’t grift billions out of investors by having a really good safety feature, so you hack together a system from hardware only ever originally only meant for adaptive cruise and lane keeping, and tech bros can show off on YouTube and hopefully not run over a cyclist, all to keep that grift rolling

This is legitimately one of the real reasons Musk is pushing for Trump so hard. NHTSA (and all the other regulatory agencies) were effectively gutted completely by the Trump admin and it’s basically the entire reason Elon could grift his way to where he is today. The moment Biden got into office, basically every single agency in existence began investigating him and pushing blocks out of the proverbial Jenga tower of the various Musk companies. He’s praying that Trump will get elected and allow him to keep grifting, because otherwise he’s almost definitely going to jail, or at a minimum losing the vast majority of his empire.

See: the cyborg soldier subplot of Metal Gear Rising: Revengence

Just because it’s not publicly traded, doesn’t mean that there isn’t stock nor that there’s no market. Usually, you can technically still buy/sell the stock, just not as a random member of the public on a public stock exchange like the NYSE or FTSE.

Or just pull this fuse for the module?

Not to mention that 8lbs is still considered a horrendously high trigger pull. Glocks (what the NYPD carries) are already known for having kind of mediocre triggers, just due to the nature of their design. It’s literally heavier than even the double-action triggers on any of my guns, one of which is literally an old Italian police Beretta. At least then only the first shot is more difficult to fire

If you think that prevents this, you’re wrong. My company did the same thing, and when they announced RTO, people pointed out that they only had enough capacity for maybe 80% of the employees to fit. Management’s response? “I’ve seen empty desks in (other unrelated building on the other side of campus), I’m sure we’ll make it work”.

Don’t think that something silly like “physical space” or “maximum occupancy limits” will get in the way of a stupid decision.

Maybe it was just to wash down some Ambien.

Tallyho lads!

Yeah, that time is even moreso now because cars are far more complex and expensive as fuck now. Just the HVAC system alone on a modern luxury car probably has more components than the entirety of my old 1972 MG. You can bet your ass my friends find it very valuable when I can quickly fix stuff on their cars a dealership wanted to charge $1200 for.

At least on my TV, I’ve had firmware updates enable things like variable refresh rate, enable 4K/120Hz, improve the dynamic contrast performance, and fix a couple of weird bugs it had shipped with.

No, he’ll call it something much stupider like “Gigacommute”

Except they promised it was going to be the NBT in trucking and that companies would be stupid to buy anything else, and it was supposed to be in mass production 5 years ago. In actuality they delivered a couple dozen prototypes to a single company (at least as far as I’m aware) that is using them solely for greenwashing their delivery fleet. Even then, they’ve been absolutely unreliable heaps that probably have cost Frito-Lay far more headache than the slight PR bump they got from them. Oh, and don’t forget that any truck driver will tell you they have an absolutely useless cabin that was clearly designed by someone who had never even been in a truck cab before, and was designed solely for the techbro demographic to gush about, in between its 0-60 time and unrealistic range.

Meanwhile, I see Rivian-made Amazon delivery vans literally every single day, and have legitimately seen more companies operating Nikola semi trucks (the ‘scam’ company that supposedly only could roll a truck down a hill) than the Tesla Semi. And that’s just startups, not counting the actual Mercedes and Volvo Class 8 trucks that are already on the road. It amazes me how people seem to act like Tesla has delivered on literally any promises they’ve ever made, when in actuality it’s just an incredible feat of goalpost moving.

A lot of the stations have the MagicDock adapters now too, so you don’t even need to bring one.

The good news with iRobot is that they actually have pretty solid cybersecurity. They also do a pretty great job of supporting parts for old robots and make them quite easy to repair. For a typical consumer product, I feel like they’re far better than most companies in terms of how shitty they could be vs how shitty they actually are.

“Romex” is a brand name for a type of non-metallic (NM) insulated wire. It’s pretty much the standard for 95% of the wire that’s run in a typical house in North America, and kind of looks like a big flat extension cable. There’s an external plastic sheath that holds all the wires together (that’s the non-metallic part, as opposed to say, running it in metal conduit), and then each wire inside is also insulated, aside from the ground conductor. When you see something like 12/2 or 10/3, that’s the wire gauge (12 or 10 gauge) and then the number of current carrying conductors on the inside (2 or 3, plus a ground).

Would you prefer the FTC just forces them to cut prices, and then give both the corporations reason to sue them, as well as more right-wing talking points about “big government stealing money from Ma and Pa grocer”? The unfortunate reality is that if the FTC don’t do this investigation and come back with hard proof, no matter how blatantly obvious what the large grocers are doing actually is, they will play the victim and make it even harder to take any hard action against them.

The other reality is that, even if it’s not actually the case, if it turned out that it was just “inflation” and all those companies did have to raise prices to stay afloat (again, not saying this is the case at all, just simply playing devil’s advocate), the FTC would face an absolute shitstorm if they took action and it did actually do serious harm to grocers/the broader food supply chain. Again, not a “Oh no, profits were only up 20% YoY instead of 35% because of the FTC action” but a “We will literally be selling all our products at a severe loss and will be bankrupt in weeks”. They have to understand exactly how much they’re fucking people over to take action, because historically there have been plenty of times where a well-intentioned “Stop fucking people over” rule, has caused much greater consequences down the line.

It sucks and is disgusting that in such a wealthy nation that we have people going hungry at all, but at least they’re attempting to finally do something about this specific issue, and hopefully will at least discourage shit like this in the future.

I think it’s mostly the association/“logic” being literally incomprehensible to someone with even the slightest capacity for reason. Classifying an entire group of people as “pornographic” is just so insanely nonsensical, it’s difficult to look at and think of it as anything other than some insane word salad.