Ok, as a portion of the earth's surface each satellite would cover an area only 13% smaller than Florida. SpaceX's full network of 42,000 satellites would have areas 10 times larger than Los Angeles.

On top of that, they are actively kept far away from each other via both human operators and internal autonomous station-keeping and collusion avoidance.

If a satellite failed, it's so low it would start losing altitude which would make it lower than the others and again next to impossible to hit another one. That's a benefit to the very low orbits they are going to use. Failed, they won't stay up there that long. SpaceX's StarLink satellites are expected to burn up entirely in any re-entry.

The Earth is huge, these numbers are nothing.

But what about the "If I told you I'd have to kill you" guys? They just love saying that, and people love them saying it. It's like a job perk for having done classified work.

Note: Not me. At best I have "If I told you I'd have to go curl up in a ball and freak out about it" secrets.

Well, no... it sounds normal. You said you've been maxing out your 401k for 20 years into index funds. That's a lot, especially for a CS guy with a "pretty good job".

Incidentally, if you can pull out 3% of that a year and live on it, then congrats you're financially independent and you don't really have to work anymore unless you want to.

Personally, although my boss is a workaholic asshole I doubt I'll ever stop working... but then it is my company so...

Ayn Rand people are something of a trigger for me. I read Atlas Shrugged, it's okay. Obviously naive as hell. That's fine, lots of enjoyable science fiction is. This definitely takes some of that suspension of disbelief stuff I was talking about.

The problem is, I know/worked with several extremely wealthy people who think it's a vindication of their whole lifestyle. The ridiculous thing is they are EXACTLY the loser exploitative establishment the brilliant protagonists are trying to avoid... but they think they're the productive smart ones.

The other problem is Ayn Rand takes her naive storytelling WAY too seriously. It's mediocre sci-fi with delusions of grandeur. It would simply be a little embarrassing if it wasn't so dangerously seductive to powerful people looking for an excuse to be almost sociopathic.

To expand on this... I find it very strange that some people would idolize a simplistic story setting like Lord of the Flies as great literature simply because the character development and interactions seem more realistic, and yet find Tolkien to be childish nonsense.

That amazement and wonder at imagining how those boys deal with such a strange and difficult situation and how it shapes them as human beings? Yeah, science fiction has that in spades. If you could wrap your head around the setting or get past this sad notion that how people act or interact with each other is the only thing worthy enough to be thought about... maybe you could see that.

Discounting something you don't understand is simply anti-intellectualism.

I think what that original study really found was that the people running the study were too stupid to imagine worlds way different than our own.

Some of the most inspiring, thought provoking, deeply meaningful stuff I've read has been science fiction. I can guarantee you that most of the people I know that do not like science fiction simply don't have any real ability or inclination to understand what's going on in the stories.

If you consider sci-fi to be poorly written trash as a whole then I'm going to assume you're missing the entire point of the novels and discounting the real meat of those stories as random technobabble that happens around the "real story" of interpersonal relationships. In other words, you're an unimaginative and ignorant fool.

Many times the people in the story are simply there to help paint a picture of how that world works. It's not just a strange setting for yet another three way romance story.

Exploring the human condition is nice and all, but trying to imagine the future you want and seeking out material to help you with that and inspire you is how the world moves forward.

Maybe there are some people who can't get past obviously wrong story elements to enjoy the world those elements make possible... I almost pity those people. Sure, sometimes there's something pretty difficult to get over (like a lot of the science in Star Trek)... but if you let go of that you can really enjoy these things. "So... if a person dies they turn into a monster that can walk around for years to spread the disease by biting other people.... without any functional circulatory system or food intake required at all... but even after that degree of resilience somehow just sticking a thin blade into anywhere in their head kills them..." "Uh, yeah." "Great! so what happens next?"

... nice. So, if they need outsiders in the meetings then they're not doing their jobs right. Huh. Sure sounds like it's a community project, eh? Wow.

While I'd leave Huawei out of this specific point, I think the equations are actually closer to:

Settle = ((FullLawsuit > WorthFightingAmount) && (SettleAmount < (WorthFightingAmount - SettleReputationDamageAmount)))

if ((Company == Guilty) && (PlaintiffEvidence > PlaintiffLikelyToWinThreshold + CompanyDefenseObfuscationBonus) && (SettleAmount < LawsuitLossDamageAmount))
    Settle = true

if ((Company == Innocent) && (CompanyManagement < RighteousIndignityThreshold + HolyCrapIsThisExpensivePenalty) && (SettleAmount < AcceptableLossAmount))
    Settle = true

Actually, the first equation could do it given the right value for WorthFightingAmount. The others are just hacks / for fun.

I always hated the dialog going to the center speaker. It's rarely even a third as good as the two front side speakers, and tinny voices from a specific location really screws with the immersion for me.

Half the time I disconnected the center speaker and forced it to split dialog across the two front speakers. Sometimes I was able to force dialog across the front speakers in addition to the center... I don't recall exactly what I was doing there. I think it was some surround sound processing mode.

I couldn't understand why DVDs were shipped with the sound mastered in that way. It's crap. I had pretty decent speakers and equipment...

... or maybe they're not 17 years old? Seriously, who screws around with car racing?

A Tesla costs considerably less to drive than a gas vehicle (no matter where you are). It's not worrying about electricity costs.

A Tesla X beat a Lamborghini Aventador recently on a drag strip. A f-ing SUV! Come on.

Car fires as a concern is just stupidity. WAY fewer Teslas catch fire than regular ICE cars. They're just 100% reported in the news.

Autopilot probably has killed a couple people, but overall they're at least as safe as regular cars. Tesla claims the autopilot is 2x as safe, but I think the times when autopilot is allowed skews those numbers in autopilot's favor. It's probably less, but no worse than 1x. Autopilot is also getting better quite quickly.

Bumpers falling off... well, I'm not sure about that but the overall fit could stand to be improved.

I hear people who experience a Tesla just raving about how much better than normal cars they are. I don't hear many people saying they are worse. The overwhelming feedback from people who actually experience the cars in person is stupidly positive.

Uh, no... he's right. They're production limited on model 3.

As was said earlier this week... nobody's made a car yet that can compete with the 2012 version of the model S. Now, maybe they're saturating the market on the S/X, maybe they're not. Model 3? Hell no, that's way production bound and will be for a while.

Imagine if the "last 10 days" deliveries didn't happen until one day into Q2. Tesla would have reported a loss of 2-3 BILLION. Do 10 days really matter that much if they've got the cash to cover it and it's a temporary delay in deliveries? No. This is all bad reporting and shorts.

I really wish Tesla had directly broken this down, it would have saved some pain.

1) 188 million was debt payments. Ok, so this isn't entirely an excuse, you still have to turn a profit. It's not a recurring thing, once they work off their debts.
2) Because they shifted to producing and delivering cars overseas for a bit (the production line has to reconfigure for that), and it takes a lot longer to get the cars to their destinations... even though they produced a record number of Model 3s (63K), they ended the quarter with a lot of those in the delivery pipeline and couldn't count them towards the quarter (12-13K delta in produced vs. delivered). Assuming $50K/car that's another 625 million dollars (!)
3) Sales of S/X were down, for a lot of mostly one-time reasons: (blatantly stolen from a forum post) :

"Reasons for drop in S/X sales:
1) Expiration of full tax credit brought demand forward (compensating price cuts don’t help right away if most people who were planning to buy a Tesla bought earlier to avoid the loss of the tax credit)
2) Model 3 cannibalizes S (and Model 3 had production and delivery issues)
3) First quarter is always slow, all auto sales down
4) Tesla service is starting to get a bad rap
5) 4Q18 massive push to empty the pipeline of cars in transit
6) Rumors of a refresh have people waiting"

We're stocking up on TSLA right now... the reasons for this drop are stupid. If the quarter ended like 2 weeks later the picture would have looked a hell of a lot better. (They specifically said literally half of the Q1 deliveries were in the last 10 days)

Ok, I listened to the earnings call almost twice over. I didn't hear that (could have missed it). He obviously couldn't have said exactly that, as:

1) The "super chip" (FSD computer) development is done. A second generation is in the works and maybe 2 years out, but the current generation is supposed to be good enough for level 5.
2) The "super chip" FSD computer is actually in production and has been shipping in cars for several weeks now.
3) A institutional stockholder asked if Tesla was going to raise money (even defending the idea in the question), and Elon just said it's possible but not in the immediate future... apparently a partial backtrack on some previous statements against raising more money (?), but far from saying they're looking to raise capital.

The thing I'm a bit pissed about is how in the Autonomy day (long-ass presentation for sure, but pretty good if over-technical for most) Elon directly said or implied it'd take a competitor 2 years+ to catch up on designing a chip that could compete with theirs... and then I find out about NVIDIA Pegasus that on paper might be twice as fast and is available (just nobody's planning on using it right now). On a TOPS scale Pegasus is supposed to be twice as fast (320 vs 144)... but architecture may dramatically limit that. On a watt/TOPS scale the Tesla FSD is over three times better (2 TOPS/watt vs 0.64).