Comment Re:Short sellers (Score 1) 145
Oh, gawd damn it. 2 and a half billion. Do not use your head for a calculator. Still, that's conservative. Call it 3-4 billion because most of those cars will cost more than 50K.
Oh, gawd damn it. 2 and a half billion. Do not use your head for a calculator. Still, that's conservative. Call it 3-4 billion because most of those cars will cost more than 50K.
Cash burn is utterly irrelevant. Tesla can't go broke, so it can't go bankrupt. They've a half million cars on order at at least 50K each. That's 25 billion in gross sales, and that's *past* orders. Present orders are being held back because they can't make cars fast enough to immediately deliver.
At 25 billion coming in, they have all the lines of credit and investor interest they will ever want.
China just let them own their own factory there. That's...enormous news.
Cash burn is a concern if you can't pay your bills, make product, or invest in plant. Tesla does all of that. This is cost accounting 101. They will sink money in plant - not "burn money" - and operations, one of which is an asset and the other manufacturing the product. Nothing is "burnt". The money is being converted into other kinds of asset.
A corporation is not a Duncan Donuts franchise. It doesn't have to make cash surplus to fund the owner's new marriage. It just keeps going, growing, adding capability. Tesla is cars. Virtual power plants. Powerwalls. Rooftop solar. Solar power plants. A giant charging network for its cars. It has the best and cheapest batteries on earth and go that way by spending money on R&D and plant. Tesla is ten years ahead of everyone else and will stay that way.
virtual upvote this.
The Koch brothers declared war on electric cars and solar/wind last year. I expect some of the the current coordinated howling about Tesla is in fact a single front in their war. The Russians didn't invent this kind of thing. They just copied it for their own use.
Hammer, meet screw.
Elon *believed* robots were better than humans, thanks to Singlarity thinking, and that delusion is biting him in the ass.
LiFePo batteries are the usual choice for electrical car conversions. I wish we could use SCiBs, but those aren't really available for general use,
They do not degrade to uselessness. It's never happened. There are 13 year old RAV4s with nickel-metal hydride batteries that work just fine. Jay Leno's 100+ year old Baker Electric works perfectly with the original battery. Lithium batteries in Tesla Roadster autos are still working fine 10 years on, though they have lost a good 10-40% or so of capacity, which is due to overheating or overcharging. Tesla figured out, and now others are too, how to intelligently manage the charging to avoid forming dendrites in the cells. Better every year.
And I believe Toyota and Nissan both recycle their car batteries into power brick installations for utilities and such, A bit degraded is still a lot of battery.
" -- and it's a big if -- "
Ah, Bloomberg "news", throwing shade on the idea that many cars could ever be electric. Mad, mad! I tell you! Gods and Monsters!
Of course the idea will work. It can't not work. There ain't no "if" involved. Electric cars will lower our power bills, aid grid overload, and walk the dogs while powerwashing the sidewalks. Blackouts will lose their terror all over the world. The upsides of electric cars are now obvious and I can't wait for a VW Beetle cheapie version for the Rest of Us.
Wages up 2.7%? Not that I can see. That is an *average*. The well-paid have rising salaries, the crap-paid wages are shrinking, the average being a bit up. You also have to factor in that the poorly-paid have rents that are rising way faster than their 8.50 up to 9.05 bucks an hour, just about everywhere now. Housing for the poor and merely cash-strapped ain't being built, and probably never will be.
When California goes full solar and has enough juice to desalinate the ocean of water it sits next to, the place will have the mother of all economic booms. That's assuming the graphene oxide passive water desalinization tech doesn't pan out - if it does, all California has to do is stick a hose in the ocean and inhale.
Pumping rivers of desalted water inland won't be a bad idea either. Flood the desert valleys. We have to put the rising waters somewhere, anyway.
California racked up debt because of a majority Republican government that cut taxes and intentionally ran the state into the ground to break social welfare programs, same as the federal government and the state governments of Louisiana, Oklahoma, Wisconsin. The debt is caused by refusing to pay the bills. Now Brown and a majority Democratic government raised taxes, pay all the bills, have a six billion dollar surplus and the state is booming again.
Don't elect Republicans.
If you don't want to pay your bills, go to Louisiana or Oklahama. They're doing *great*.
And he gets in his car and drives away on his free road.
You are a literal idiot or targeted troll to call someone an idiot for pointing out we are in the surveillance state we always feared. I notice this always happens when someone screams "fire". I suspect that people are employed to troll the big sites to psyop-out people who say something is terribly wrong.
We are IN something worse than 1984. Benign today is not benign twenty, thirty years from now. We have the framework in place for a hellish, and eternal, series of authoritian hells. How the hell can it be shut off once evil people take the wheel? They hear and see everything they care to, they know who you talk to, where you go, what you do. It's happened in China, in Russia, in Egypt, and it is spreading.
Ah, Destiny and the March of Progress.
Nothing is inevitable, and nothing happens naturally. This happened because of cultural complacency and sheer lack of imagination on the parts of almost anyone. Many, many cultures have fell into this trap the last hundred years. The Boiling Frog Syndrome: by the time you notice something's wrong, there's no one left who can tell something's wrong.
"If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne