It sounds like you two have a lot in common.

They're modding you down because it's beyond stupid.

- There is no such thing as zero emissions ICE. A combustion reaction, by definition, yields water and carbon dioxide at the very least, with the sole exception of hydrogen, which is just water. However, hydrogen fuel cell is NOT combustion, it's done using reduction to get a more direct conversion to electricity by shedding electrons.
- Tire particulates are heavier than air, which means they can't contribute to smog in any meaningful capacity. Furthermore, this is also a solvable problem, both in theory and in practice, namely through materials science. The tires on my Tesla will outlast the tires on your sister's Pinto, without even needing thicker tread, with the added benefit of yielding better range. This comes mostly from reduced rolling resistance. And that's to say nothing of recent developments expected to reduce if not eliminate the use of petrochemicals in tires.
- People who one-pedal drive, which is most EV drivers, barely use their brakes at all, with some having had their breaks seize up from literally not using them enough.

Dude you're getting excited over one-off's when the hard part with batteries is producing them at scale. None of this even sounds that spectacular. Here's a great example of why:

https://insideevs.com/news/771...

I don't know why you think sodium ion is great for EVs given its theoretical maximum energy density is lower than what we're already getting out of lithium, and they haven't even reached that yet.

I believe Tesla is already well ahead of them on dry-cells, which they're already producing at scale and are in production model Ys already on the road, far ahead of a trade show demo. And they're still going to get more energy density out of them than they already are. Right now the problem is energy loss, which can be improved as the manufacturing process is improved. They should eventually be able to deliver on what was originally promised, just not in the time scale originally thought. Like I said, manufacturing them at scale is the hard part.

And Tesla is already selling $29,000 cars that do everything you're talking about and more. By that I mean, the Chinese made model 3 premium is selling for exactly that price in Canada.

No trade barriers without having to fuck with US politicians means competitive pricing. Who would have thought? And then you guys wonder why cars sold here are so expensive while you cheer on the CCP. Get rid of the Detroit automakers and the UAW and watch how fast shit changes here. They're more entrenched and complacent than a socialist dictator. The fact that literally everybody EXCEPT that corrupt bunch is able to deliver a profitable EV says a lot about just how bad they are. The Detroit three and the UAW deserve each other. It was funny how Biden joined the picket line completely oblivious to the fact that they've been lobbying hard against EVs while part of his platform was promoting them. The last thing they want are cars that require less labor to build and less labor to maintain. The last thing the Detroit automakers want are cars that are harder to plan obsolescence around. And despite Trump killing off every last incentive for EVs while leaving in place oil subsidies and lowering emissions standards, Tesla is STILL gaining market share while STILL being profitable.

As for that 800,000km battery, I'm curious if that reflects real world usage. Did they even say how old it is? The reason I say that is because very high mileage battery Tesla's are all quite old. I believe the current highest is 500,000km on a 7 year old model X, and it's still doing well. And that's 7 year old battery tech, which is missing out on a lot of improvements since then.

What you obviously don't understand about EV batteries is they spend most of their lives between 80 and 90 percent of the original capacity. Even with very little use, they'll lose more than the first 10% within the first year. Just like cars themselves, how long batteries last is not about "how much they're used" so much as "how they're used". Having it on the road is a lot different than putting it though 800,000km worth of charge/discharge cycles, or even putting that many miles on a track.

That and the whole fact that so much BS in general comes from China. Tesla has regained market share there, which I think is less due to any changes at Tesla or BYD, and more due to the fact that so many EVs in China were "registered" and "sold" to literally nobody over the last few years. Google the "zero mileage used car" for more details.

The AI doesn't care either way. It has no concept of any of that. It doesn't even have a concept of what overworked is. You're trying to anthropomorphize it, which is nonsense, and you, just as it, have no idea why:

When you give it a prompt, it has no choice at all, let alone a choice to not reply. It's built to output a response, and so it just comes up with something -- anything -- and that's going to be based entirely on whatever data it has available. It doesn't matter whether that data is right, wrong, or anything in between, you're just going to get a response from it. If the only data it has is your personal copy of the communist manifesto, then its response will be nothing more than a derivative of that

Not from AI. Governments create great depressions when they try to "fix" things. Namely Smoot-Hawley. If we get another depression, guarantee you'll be able to trace its origins to none other than Donald Trump. But it's unlikely due to the reversals outside of his control that have already happened. Or perhaps the Strait of Hormuz will force a global one anyway, which is also a "fix" that is now out of his control.

Wait 'til they find out just how subsidized these tokens really are, mainly by circular financing. I'm not pooh-poohing AI, but I think there's a chasm between what executives expect it to provide, and what it actually provides.

You're looking at Detroit automakers, who have gotten complacent after numerous bailouts, with the rest of the US, where this really isn't happening. For an apples-to-apples comparison:

https://evmagazine.com/news/ho...

It's also noteworthy that the last American car to do as well internationally as the Tesla Model Y was the Ford Model T. It also turns out that Tesla has been reclaiming ground previously lost to BYD, including in China. The Canadian government is currently having to rethink things after Tesla began importing its Chinese made Model 3 Premium, selling it for $29,000 there to take advantage of the fact that Canada elevated China to most favored nation status, virtually eliminating tariffs while benefiting from Chinese labor. Canada's government is anticipating that Tesla will take a majority of the import cap before BYD has a chance to sell anything at all, which isn't sitting well with them.

https://electrek.co/2026/05/01...

Nah I'm pretty sure this is him:

https://assets.teenvogue.com/p...

Those are just the analysts that you cherry-picked. Here's why you picked poorly:

Your "analysts" have been saying this since Starlink was at 2 million active terminals. And the simple reason for that is basically this: It isn't a simple matter of "do you have access to wired internet?", chiefly because a lot of that wired internet is basically dogshit. Before Starlink, slashdot routinely ran pieces about how cable ISPs wouldn't serve areas that they told the FCC that they served, basically to prevent funding going towards rival broadband services, especially fiber, and somebody would have to pay insane prices just to get the last mile connection added where the ISP already said it was. These guys always had DSL access, but it was crap. Even when these guys have cable, it's still usually crap.

More importantly though, for their claims to be accurate, then we should have already seen Starlink's growth stagnate by now. But as a matter of fact, exactly the opposite has been happening:

https://www.reuters.com/busine...

Another critical thing you're missing is that Starlink isn't done increasing its total aggregate bandwidth. Not even close, really. You're also assuming that the demand for Starlink only exists for residential broadband, which is also a very bad assumption.

This article is about Rocket Lab, who is seeing increased demand just for launch services, and only launch services. That isn't hype, it's actual growth in a market that basically didn't exist until about 8 years ago.

That isn't what he said, moreover, he's working under the assumption that there will be no more significant growth in all things related to space. He could be right, he could be wrong. Prior to podcasting, he was a hedge fund manager. I don't know about his record in particular, but hedge fund managers are notorious for underperforming indexes, especially the S&P.

He's talking about the NASDAQ-100 index fund, not the NASDAQ exchange. S&P-500 is making a similar rule change. The people who run these indexes, aka index providers, don't make their decisions on a whim, rather they're quite calculated. In fact, people like Patrick Doyle pay these guys big money just to have access to the decisions that they make, which is exactly how S&P makes its money. Maybe he's got better ideas about how they'll perform than the S&P does, but people who say they do...rarely ever do. As for whether this rule change is right or wrong, I have no idea, but the fact that two indices are doing it suggests that it could be the right call.

This is exactly the problem you're having: Your decision-making is entirely based on emotion. You clearly don't even understand about 75% of what you're talking about, rather you're just listening to whatever it is you want to hear while pretending the rest either doesn't exist or is "fake news". People who invest this way lose their money. Your emotion in this case is likely focused squarely on Elon, so for example, you're probably not aware (or just plain denying) that Tesla has gained EV market share in the US, China, and broadly in Europe over the last year. Sales in the US are down, largely due to the loss of tax incentives, but Tesla still remains quite profitable even here. Is the stock overvalued? Without a doubt. But that doesn't change the fact that your nonstop shouting about Tesla not being able to profit without the government incentives, which probably came from some of your cherry-picked analysts, has already proven to be very wrong, and the numbers reflect that. If you were betting actual money against Tesla, again based on emotion, you would have lost this particular bet.

I started at $145k (which by the way, I only asked for $130k, and they countered with $145k, go figure) back in 2022 for just the base salary. Shares pushed that up to $209k. But just only thinking about base pay, $145k in 2022 dollars translates to roughly $163k today. Nevertheless, base pay has since risen to $175k, which is well ahead of the rate of inflation. The actual amount on my W2 has since risen basically on an exponential curve, due to the RSUs appreciating in value. Which is unfortunate, because if I had known then what I know now, I would have chosen stock options instead of RSUs, and kept my W2 income as low as possible.

If I wanted to, I could transfer to Texas and gain a bonus on top of my existing base pay. The real estate out there is dirt cheap, making it a real win financially, but the land in Texas is so...desolate... Florida is my top choice, and I think I can finally get it, but haven't seized the opportunity yet because I still need to stay in LA for the time being, entirely because of its (relatively close) proximity to Phoenix.

Regardless, there are plenty of opportunities well beyond the LA/SF/NYC/Seattle regions. The real question, as always, remains: What do you bring to the table?

I think it's both. I've personally gotten a lot of use out of claude recently just for quickly getting started with somebody else's code (we weren't even allowed to use it a month ago even if we wanted to, which I didn't until I was specifically asked to use it.) E.g. ask it a question like "where is X done?" or "where should start for working on Y?". I don't ask it to make any direct changes. Basically the kind of stuff you do with a knowledge transfer, only you don't have access to the original developer(s) to do pair coding with (in this case, an open source library that I needed to modify) I think it's quite good for that.

Once I asked it to look for possible optimizations that I may have missed in a custom lz77 implementation I wrote, and it made a bunch of changes, only one of them actually made sense and yielded a tiny speed increase. The rest of them were just "this might make more sense" type of changes that actually broke the implementation (made it incompatible) without improving anything. For example, it reversed the order of the mask bits in each mask byte from right to left, to left to right, which is just dumb when the whole point of right to left was specifically for compatibility, and doesn't do a god damn thing to make the code run any faster. Still has a ways to go for making code changes IMO.

I can't speak for all of these companies, but in the case of Amazon, I think this is why management wants it:

https://archive.is/20260122220...

Perhaps you should try Canada.

I make a lot more than that, and my commute is about 30 minutes (probably shouldn't also mention that my employer provides free ev charging, so my commute in my cheap, salvaged Tesla costs zero anyways.) I couldn't tell you what the place I live in is worth, but anybody who looked at it would tell you it isn't worth anywhere close to that. It's probably more common than you think.

You're thinking silicon valley, or at the very least, silicon valley companies. Which are interesting because they (e.g. Google) tend to reduce your pay based on where you live. Fortunately, I don't work for one of those, nor would I live anywhere nearly as fucking cold as silicon valley.

Anyways, you're probably thinking of Canada's real estate pricing. Somehow, Canada figured out how to be 3x worse than California on residential real estate without even having the benefit of socal weather. Wildlings pay a lot for those igloos.

A totally wasted effort. Good luck finding even one engineer at SpaceX who hasn't already thought of that and some.