This helium crisis is nothing new. It's now 20 years since I wrote a column titled The looming helium crisis and little has changed.

"A technology can create value by reducing uncertainty, improving coordination, avoiding mistakes, increasing resilience, or expanding opportunities. Those benefits do not necessarily show up as higher output per worker."

This makes zero sense. What good are these things if they do not increase output? If you reduce uncertainty, you cut the time needed to make a decision, thus less wasted time and more output. If you avoid mistakes, that should increase output. If you increase resilience, that means less slowdowns and downtime which should increase output. Expanding opportunities should also increase output unless you are already at capacity. The whole point of these things is to make things more streamlined and increase output.

1) Does anyone really think this will happen? I would put as much faith in this as I do Trump's $5000 checks in the GOP wins the midterms.
2) Does anyone really think he is going to give away his personal shares? Most likely, if it happens, they would issue 73 millions additional shares (or less as he will find some way to send them to only certain people), thus devalueing not only these new shares, but all the shares.
3) Even if he did give his own shares, that is still a time amount of his wealth. Does anyone really think he would ever even notice this change in wealth? This just shows how incredibly out of touch the uber rich are with regular people. This is about 1% of his net worth. He could give away 50% and it would never be noticed. But because it is a big number, people think this is rich people doing good when it is them doing the minimum for good press.

Yes, they did need the money for themselves. But one thing you seem to not understand about poor people is that they are much more likely to actually help people they see and know that are doing worse than them. The rich like to talk a lot about charity and giving, but they generally give less as a percentage of their income and wealth than poor people. Because these people know what it is like to be broke, they are more willing to give even the little extra they have to someone who needs it more than they do.

The bigger problem will be manhole covers on suburban streets. These will get sucked out of the road not only wrecking your Tesla but likely also endangering the traffic behind you. You can bet that this feature will be geofenced and only available on approved racetracks --which, for 99% of buyers, simply makes it useless and expensive payload.

The launch was a circus that PT Barnum would have been proud of.

A handful of specially built show-pony-cars that are ultra-light, only "flew" once (because they probably didn't have a big enough battery onboard to recharge those gas cylinders) and were the ultimate in Musk-level deceptions.

I'm going to do a full technical breakdown of all the reasons why what we saw was 100 percent marketing and why we will *never* see a Roadster 2 with the claimed specifications ever hit the market -- the laws of physics may be inconvenient but ignoring them is not an option.

What we saw in that demo was Musk, once again, coming up with a clever way to get hundreds of millions (perhaps more) of interest-free funding from people who slept through science classes in highschool. What's even more amazing is that this is the *second* time he's promised unrealistic deliveries, taken hundreds of millions in "reservations" and failed to deliver.

PT Barnum was so right.

And Musk also said "Manned colonies on Mars by 2024" and "Hyperloop" and "Fast transit tunnels beneath cities" and "Solar roof tiles" and a whole lot of other stuff to which the laws of physics and his engineers said "nope".

It's not the launch or even the jump that will be the problem... it's landing a 2+ ton car that is descending from several hundred feet above its apex and this has significant vertical speed. Even the gas-thrusters may have their work cut out for them :-)

No word about the real-world range of the Roadster 2.

I find it interesting that Musk can create a show-pony car that does cool tricks that nobody would ever allow on a road-legal car but he fails to address the elephant in the room: "How far will it go on a charge?"

Why did he ignore this crucial aspect of any EV?

Easy, because he originally claimed 1000Km and it is much easier to get a lightweight show-car to do jumping tricks than it is to deliver a real-world essential such as decent range.

The Roadster we saw in the display is just a stunt-car, road-legal production vehicles will be just another fast EV.

If people want to risk quarter of a million dollars reserving one then only one phrase springs to mind:

"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me".

Jesus, not this shit again. You know why colleges are 58-61% women? Because 55-60% of the application submitted are from women. Now, with us acknowledging that more women are in college (and graduating college) now look at something like amount of women CEOs. Or the general pay gap. Or even the pay gap in the same job (much smaller, but still exists). If women are getting more college degrees, shouldn't that mean they also earn more and get higher positions since people with college degrees earn more? So why isn't this happening? Care to explain how that with your anti-male bias BS?

Indeed. I built a Raspberry Pi Pico based controller for some flashing LEDs on my drone. It has red and blue LEDs and I wanted them to flash with the cycle of three short flashes then a pause; alternately the red LEDs then the blue LEDS. Took barely a minute to code that in python and dump it onto the board. In such cases it doesn't matter that the language is interpreted because the task is not demanding of the hardware.

The "Police Drone" still flies to this day! :-)

The arrogance is insane. What a fucking waste of time to argue this when your business model is exactly the fucking same.

How interesting it would be to do a drive-around with an open wifi hotspot in the car -- just to see how many LG TV sets try to connect and find out what data they send.

Just saying, for a friend :)

Yes... we could destroy Putin's nuclear torpedo before it even made it to the UK coast! :-P

How long before the labels start going after new artists that sound like existing ones?

You know, where someone is "inspired" by a singer, a band or a songwriter that they've idolized for years and thus their own creations are heavily influenced by those artists?

If there's a chance for a new Lambo or Porsche in the corporate car park at EMI or WMG you *know* they'll be working on such law suits right now!

I've also wondered why there's no restriction on voice-actors who impersonate famous people -- but if you do it with AI then you are right in the firing line.