At the current rate of horrible fiery deaths, FuelArc projects the Cybertruck will have 14.52 fatalities per 100,000 units — far eclipsing the Pinto’s 0.85. (In absolute terms, FuelArc found, 27 Pinto drivers died in fires, while five Cybertruck drivers have suffered the same fate, at least so far.)
I love Elon Bad posts, but I think it’s worthwhile to examine why Elon bad in this case.
Like many reactionaries, Elon’s business philosophy is pure tech-bro-libertarianism. And like all libertarians, he’s stuck in the neoliberal mindset of less regulation (don’t scrutinize) and more efficiency (let me be cheap), in order to create the safe space that industrialists need to
extract, er create.He’s literally said things like (paraphrasing)
His transparent reasoning is that if he’s allowed to cut corners, he’ll save money today and consequences can be dealt with when they arise.
He’s following the software model of release a minimally viable product and patch it later. Only instead of user frustration at being beta testers, you fucking die maybe.
oh god that quote. he’s so lame and fucking stupid.
I’m sure corner cutting is a concern but also he’s so insecure he probably read things about Steve Jobs or something, and tried to ape him. I remember something about Jobs supposedly telling employees to reduce steps in some processes or whatever. this idiot doesn’t understand anything so he thinks asking for fewer bolts is the same thing.
why can’t we do it in two? cause that’s how you secure things you fucking dumbass. your proud fascination for “fewer bolts” is why your hypercuck tried to kill a driver.
Him and his libertarian friends fuck up left and right. Crashing startups and just getting more money for another. Constant recalls. Blowing up rockets until it works.
Yet they hold the government to a standard of being perfect and high performing with no room for failure. NASA can’t be blowing up rockets. As soon as they do the world comes down on them.
And Trump is the biggest fuckup of all these guys.
Blowing up rockets until it works is a far better approach than trying to get everything to work on the first try and ending up with a hugely overpriced white elephant.
Sure, if it was cheaper than just doing it correctly the first time which it’s not
How do you do something “correctly” when nobody knows what that is? If your main priority is to do it “correctly” you will never develop anything fundamentally new.
A rocket is not fundamentally new and hasn’t been for almost 100 years.
Rockets perform correctly when they deliver their payload to the correct orbit.
You can calculate the energy density of fuels, the efficiency of your engines at various atmospheric pressures, and determine the payload size you can deliver with your engines and fuel. Blowing up rockets for “tests” is so 1950s. We have whole college programs on rocket design. We have desktop computers more powerful than anything available in the 1960s, and NASA managed to design the Saturn V, a rocket of similar size to starship, with the computers of the time and fucking slide rules. The Saturn V had its problem, but each rocket managed to deliver its payload and perform its part of the mission without blowing up.
Your comment is classic tech bro. No understanding of real engineering principles and only a desire to shove some shit out of the door as fast as possible.
There are two American rocket projects in the works that can carry a significant payload to the moon. One is using existing parts in a new configuration. It had one successful launch and cost $4B ($2.5B in launch costs alone). One is building a largely new system and improving existing elements and is estimated to have cost less than $2B so far, although it hasn’t reached the moon yet. That said, they have done 7 tests, at least 3 with a full configuration. How is that not better than the other option?
Also, you are acting like there are no fundamental advances happening in space engineering. Sure, the physics is pretty well-known, but the engineering problem of landing and reusing stages/rockets commercially has only been done since the Falcon series, so I think it’s safe to assume the technology and associated product lines is still maturing.
You are 100% correct about modeling being more advanced. It proves just how stupid Musk is. Musk at one point asked for the code that twitter uses to be printed on paper… on fucking paper! Like what the hell is this? The 1970s? I wrote code in the 90s and I never heard of anyone printing out raw code before him.
Okay so say your testing a brand new rocket engine idea. It uses a fuel nobody has tried to use before. So what you do is you figure out how much energy this fuel has and do some math to figure out how much you’ll need to take with you for the typical rocket. You design an engine for this spec or better and thoroughly test it to make sure it’s behaving like expected. You eventually mount it to a rocket and make sure in practice it behaves as you expect. Next you put a payload in the rocket and test it again. If at any point things don’t behave as expected you have to fix your whole model.
SpaceX struggles to go a launch without their engines destroying themselves. Perhaps they should go back a few steps?
I see you don’t understand testing things before they are safe for humans to be inside of. So by this logic, you are saying “blowing up rockets until it works” is also saying “crash testing cars is stupid.”
<blank stare>
If NASA was funded properly, we may not be leaning on one private company, whose owner is a nazi, to be paving our way forward for daily space activities. Can’t say things won’t blow up during testing, but at least it won’t be headed by that guy.
The issue isn’t the way of testing, but the two standards. If Musk blows up rockets in testing it’s a genius move with rapid iteration. If NASA does this it’s irresponsible handling of tax payer’s money on risky endeavors.
I stand by my comment. Things break, shit happens, this is why we test them.
I think it’s also worth noting that Elon Musk is a scammer. Every other word out of his mouth is likely a lie. He’s been claiming to already have technologies available for his Tesla cars, his SpaceX rockets, etc, all ready to go and… it never happened. Tesla full self driving? The Tesla taxis? SpaceX on Mars? The Tesla laughably stupid robots? Even those were faked.
Claims after claims for decades and literally no results
The guy is a full on bait and switch yet everyone seems to lap up everything this scammer says.
You can’t use “literally” and “paraphrasing” like that.
Thank you, my pedantic friend. (I say this because I’m often the one making the comment and getting the eyerolls)
Normally I don’t point it out. But this one was just too much.
You just literally said (interpretive paraphrasing), “I like big butts and I cannot lie”
You’re/they’re just paraphrasing Chaucer
… be over 14
That’s literally not true.
Also, normally the cost savings should go to the client, not into some billionaires bank account.
He is like a child who is still rebelling against his parents who made him go to bed early too many times.
An MVP should not be a beta version, but fully functional and bug-free. The idea is to reduce scope to not necessarily even release it (though that’s possible) but to have a solid foundation onto which to duct-tape bells and whistles.
The MVP of a car doesn’t have heated seats, heck the seats might not even be adjustable without a wrench, but it’s absolutely going to drive and drive well and be crash-safe. Because if it doesn’t it’s nowhere close to being a viable car, go back and fix that before spending time on those seats.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a simplification mindset. Automotive manufacturers certainly do like to overcomplicate things. Unfortunately people like him only care about costs and not quality.
Tech bros are usually not libertarian. Being excited about a failed solution to only one of libertarian problems (blockchain) doesn’t make one libertarian, too.
That’s not libertarianism, more like Ayn Rand and her inverse bolshevism with good mighty benevolent industrial aristocracy and bad stupid mischievous everyone else. She even reads like one of Valentin Pikul’s “historical novels”, only with inverted good and bad guys. That ideology is radically different from libertarianism, instead of freedom, voluntarism, non-aggression and such, resulting in a free society with free contracts, Ayn Rand says that some people are better than the others and thus freedom, voluntarism, non-aggression etc are measures by relative value of the offender and the victim. It’s jungle law.
Anyway, it’s not “neoliberal” either, anti-monopoly regulations are part of the “ideal” free market model. And I think Elon likes patents and trademarks, which are not necessarily there (and in libertarianism are not a thing).
You might have seen the recent news about Tesla sales falling. Maybe it took so long because of accumulated trust into regulators not allowing car makers to make dangerous crap. So - then maybe in other reality, where Elon came to an industry already allowed to cut corners, he’d go bankrupt by now because of consumers understanding who he is.
Life is complex, I’m not saying he’s right, just that.
The way software industry works, a lot of people have died due to its failures. One has to count people who’ve committed suicide due to events cause by some bug or even UX problem, people who failed to communicate something in time, thus possibly saving someone, people who disclosed what they shouldn’t have, thus possibly causing a criminal death, medical errors due to software problems, wars, catastrophes.
But yes, it’s already allowed to do that and Elon wants such wonders in other industries, so that we’d have a bit of natural selection in our daily lives. Dystopian cyberpunk is called dystopian because it’s not utopian, but being a billionaire, I guess, one would dream of living in such instead of utopian version of boring past.