He also ruined the Vision Pro on his way out. Engineers wanted to do wireless to a Mac mini-like hub (not standalone) so the hub could have more computing power. It’s a dev device that was supposed to be the very best experience for developing the future standalone AR/VR device. But Ives forced them to do full standalone. Increasing weight, decreasing power, wasting time re-engineering the device.
I think less people care about it politically than you think. Most people I know who have Teslas stand by the product even through Elon’s dumb shit.
I think people care more about their own convenience. There’s nothing else in our market that’s even comparable. People talk a lot of shit and it wasn’t great to start but FSD is on a different level now, especially on newer cars like the new Model Y. Having a car that mostly drives itself is the best purchase I’ve ever made.
It doesn’t seem to be slowing down sales in Seattle. New Model Ys are everywhere here.
It is definitely slowing demand. You can see it in the Q1 numbers and the discounts on vehicles.
You can ask anyone who buys used EVs in Seattle. There is a glut of Tesla sellers and not many buyers.
Like it or not, your car says a lot about you. People bought Teslas because they liked what they said and now they are avoiding them because they don’t like it.
My dude I'm european and unless you have a "i hate elon too" sticker on your tesla, people gonna cut you off, spit on your car, do nazi salutes at you while you drive. The resale value of these cars tanked hard, and noone is buying new ones.
Elon had better put a bunch of quarters up his ass, considering how hard he played himself.
Apologies for my shitty comment; too much doom scrolling and too much crappy 30 year old hiphop. And apologies for writing something that sparked more than a dozen child comments full of divisive crap. Looking back i wasn't really doing the HN comment vibe I'd like to see myself, indeed...
> I recently saw a compilation of Democrat politicians doing the exact same "Nazi salute" over the years. Obama, Hillary, Sanders, AOC, etc.
No, you did not. You saw a collection of Democrat politicians whose arms at one point were sticking out in the same position that arms stick out at the end of a Nazi salute. This happens all the time. I do it 3 days a week when making breakfast.
What Musk did was start with his arm down, rapidly raise it to his heart, and then forcefully thrust it out to the position usually shows in photographs of Hitler doing the salute. There are videos of Hitler doing that full hand to heart and then thrust gesture that almost exactly match Musk's gesture from start to finish.
When you track down the videos that the purported Democrat examples are taken from you will see that none of them did that. They were doing things like pointing, or waving to a crowd, or gesticulating while they talked, and in the midst of that their arms ended up in that position.
Is your argument really so paper thin that you can't even attempt to defend it? You need to go straight to asserting that those who disagree are delusional? Makes me wonder if you even believe what you're saying or you're just taking comfort in repeating it, like an old yarn.
There is nothing to defend. The National Socialists were defeated 80 years ago. That only exists in their imagination, not in reality. Anyone can go to YouTube and listen to the speech. Not a Nazi rally.
We've all seen. Other commenters explained in great detail what they saw. You choose to plug your ears and then insist everyone else is crazy. Everything you've brought up here is irrelevant. No one thinks that the Nazis are secretly living on the moon. The defeat of the Nazis is entirely orthogonal to a gesture made in recent history. The Hunger Games is fiction but I can still hold up three fingers if I choose to.
I saw yours first because it was recent, and your earlier comment was the first that started using terms like "crazy" and "mentally deranged". Sure, it's not ok for others to break the guidelines in replies, and I've now responded to the one you pointed out and others. We're not always going to have the time and patience go through a tyrefire of a subthread and scold every single person. Those who start or escalate flamewars need to take more responsibility.
As for bias: I've spent much of the past week and several hours today responding to allegations of bias in the opposite direction. I say to you what I've said to the others: we're not interested in ideology; we're interested in keeping HN a good place for curious conversations.
The term mentally deranged I used was at those committing acts of vandalism and terrorism against innocent people's private property, not against someone in the comments here. This is clear to anyone who can read at 8th grade level.
Am I wrong that such vandals are not mentally 100? Am I breaking HN rules with this assessment?
Yes, language like this is against the guidelines, whether or not it’s about people in this community. Also, in this comment you've broken at least one more guideline, and I can see other comments in your recent history that also break the guidelines, notably these:
These are just a sample from the past few weeks but there are plenty more that cross the line and have been correctly flagged by the community for breaking the guidelines.
Some particular guidelines for you to pay attention to are:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
But all the guidelines are important to follow and they apply equally to everyone, no matter their ideological position.
We need you take care to follow them in future if you want to keep commenting on Hacker News.
That’s an amazing story. The wife really gathered together all the right people to create a phage treatment to save her husband’s life. Great job on all the doctors and scientists that figured out how to make it so quickly.
To my intense interest recently, I learned that the word sarcophagus literally means “eater of flesh” and indeed has Eucharistic connotation, but of course most commonly applied to Pharaonic caskets.
While less figurative, I don't see how "what's the ultimate goal for large AI models" makes it less scary.
Some of it might have to do with my having recently watched Dune Prophecy (set in the aftermath of the Butlerian Jihad) but this recent rapid progress in AI is putting me in somewhat of an apocalyptic mindset.
People crucified Sears for making teams compete internally but that’s literally what’s happening at Amazon at a larger scale. Teams and orgs regularly push back against helping each other. Will not waste resources to help others.
I don’t believe Amazon has a good outlook over 5 years unless they get lucky with random bets. They no longer innovate, they just copy and try to compete with scale. Even then, it doesn’t work because no one working on that product actually cares about the problem so startups can easily outcompete with “customer obsession.”
Amazon is the same as Google, Meta, Twitter, etc in the sense that they have a couple of wildly profitable products that enables the company to 'play' at running some other businesses that might turn a profit eventually after investing fifty billion. For Amazon it's the retail business and AWS. For Google it's AdWords. For Meta it's Facebook Ads. These businesses will never die, or even face a threat to their futures, despite throwing billions at self-driving cars, AI, phones, VR, etc.
The only existential threat to FAANG companies is a shift in consumer behavior away from spending money on things they see ads for. That's quite unlikely.
Other retail giants had been seen as walking dead for decades in the 1970s and 1980s before finally falling.
Though drivers then and now may differ. Old-school retail benefitted from purchase contracts (dedicated suppliers, corporate buyers), as well as service contracts (for purchased kit). Back when durable goods might actually last 15, 20, 30 years, this meant that at least a trickle of income was still coming in. Sears rather famously botched this hard when it used its automotive repair unit to commit nationwide fraud, see in 1992: "Accusation Of Fraud At Sears" <https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/12/business/accusation-of-fr...>.
How durable Amazon might prove under similar mismanagement in the globalised Internet age is ... an interesting question.
Retail is extremely competitive. Amazon does not have the best prices, and has a horrible experience for shopping. It's basically a specialized search engine with lots of ads at this point. Also, the things which made Amazon shopping a no-brainer are gone. Items no longer always arrive within two days if you have Prime, there are lots of poor-quality items, and it's hard to find what you really want. Finally, it's obvious Amazon's retail employees are not customer obsessed. Look at the web site design, and ask yourself if you would design a retail web site like Amazon's?
My guess is Amazon's retail business will eventually start declining as customers discover it's relatively expensive, and it's too easy to buy low quality items.
Prime is Amazon's moat though. More than 100 million people subscribe to a service that locks them into choosing Amazon first. People with Prime choose Amazon over going to a physical store. It's what took Amazon out of being an e-commerce business and into being a retail business. Don't underestimate how important Prime is to Amazon - it's literally a vendor lock-in that generates billions directly through fees and tens of billions indirectly through additional sales.
It is until it isn’t. The value of prime has largely being hollowed out and competed away in the last five years, from my perspective as a recently-cancelled Prime member.
When the next recession comes, look for the diff in churn rate between Prime and Costco memberships.
I think an under appreciated part of their most is that people hate logging in to things and making new accounts.
I know there have been times where I see a product is a little cheaper on the actual brand website but I decide to just order with Amazon rather than creating an account to place a single order on the other site.
I tell myself that it’s about privacy and minimizing exposure to future breaches, but really it’s just that I don’t want to go through the whole create a password/enter your card and address/wait for marketing emails you need to unsubscribe from loop
For me it's just about time and laziness. I accept for large and specialized purchases, it's worth potentially going to someplace else to buy something. But for some run of the mill $20 item? I probably spend a few minutes on Amazon and call it a day. I usually get the item in a day or two and, if I don't? It's still probably faster than I would get it elsewhere and it probably doesn't matter.
Once you establish a monopoly, the consumer-friendly behaviors which enabled you to crush the competition no longer have a justification for their cost.
Amazon is hardly close to a monopoly no matter how much some political class and their big competitors want to hammer that point. In fact I rarely buy anything from them precisely because they suck quite a bit on retail and competitors have gotten better (and consciously want to take my business elsewhere because I don’t like to benefit AWS). Because they are not a monopoly I don’t feel particularly in pain not purchasing from them.
I suspect the cost structure and consumer behavior has forced their hand to be more restrictive on retail (and perhaps they no longer care as much either).
Yep I ordered a big jug of cleaning solution that showed up completely destroyed in a soaked and ruined box. Amazon refused to credit me a refund unless I returned the product to them, which was literally impossible. They have gotten big enough that they don't need to care about customers as much as they used to and, unfortunately, they might be right. The only solution is to not shop there any more.
Another behavior I started seeing a lot more of the past couple years was paid listings selling a product for 4-5x the normal price, mixed in with the organic results. The only purpose of those is to rip off people who are in a hurry or confused and miss that they are being taken advantage of. They must work often enough to pay for the ad placements and clearly Amazon doesn't have any interest in protecting their customers.
Even the chronic pain patients should not have had the amounts prescribed to them that they were. Doctors were incentivized to give as much as possible. Creating addicts in people who may otherwise would not have been.
I personally knew people getting more than a cancer patient should’ve been given for day to day chronic pain.
I’m sorry if you were personally affected by regulation but that doesn’t mean they didn’t cause the crisis.
None of that would’ve happened if they didn’t start the flood of opiates to begin with. It wasn’t a marginally increased issue, they flooded the market with it. People with minor pain were getting massive bottles of OxyContin and selling or using it. This led to pill mills and crooked doctors. You had normal people getting hooked on high dosages. These are not the people who were using opioids before that. Pills made it seem safer. Most users don’t start with heroin, they start with pills because of exactly that. “A doctor prescribed it, must be okay.”
This is some insane logic to absolve them of responsibility. I say this as someone who also saw the problem firsthand. Was regulation handled badly? Sure but there’s no way you can say they didn’t start the problem.
Not only that, some of the problem with addiction were directly caused by the dosage guidelines for oxycontin. They really wanted it to be a 12h drug, but it really isn't and it wears off after about 8 hours. Rather than admitting this and giving a smaller dosage more frequently they doubled down by using a larger dose and trying to keep with the 12h schedule.
This combination or larger dose followed by mild withdrawal then results in a higher likelihood to become addicted to opioids. So not only they marketed it heavily and got more people on opioids than necessary, they did it in a way that maximizes the likelihood of addiction.
A bartender mocked my brother for getting Aspirin for his broken arm.
"man you got nothin', you should get some oxy for that!"
I'd been living outside the US and this in my first few hours back on US soil. A few hours later my friend (working in criminal defense) explained how opiates accounted for roughly 1/3rd of his income (other sources: drunk driving and domestic abuse). They all followed the same trajectory: minor condition -> prescribed oxy -> illegally obtained oxy -> heroin when the money ran out.
This wasn't normal. It didn't happen anywhere else in the world at the time, or at least not where I was living.
Really sad to see something so amazing get picked apart for its value.
I really wish Paul set up endowments to continue his projects. I don’t know if he knew how his sister would handle his estate but it doesn’t seem like what he wanted.
Be careful what you wish for. Endowments and foundations aren’t really accountable to anyone and just end up getting taken over by people with their own agendas.
It's true. While we're complaining about his sister, we could easily be complaining about someone who came into power of a well-endowed foundation with an agenda we don't like. It doesn't take too much imagination to, say, imagine a climate extremist who blames all computers and cyberspace for consuming so much energy and destroying the planet.
One friend who toured Montechello recently said that there's so much emphasis on slavery that the house has been turned into a monument to the bad things that Thomas Jefferson did in his life. I'm not saying this is incorrect or bad. Only that I don't think this is how Thomas Jefferson imagined his house would be used after his death.
I have a hard time seeing how that's a worse outcome than Monticello (or the computer collection) not being preserved at all (which seems to be the implication of "be careful what you wish for"). A museum agenda you disagree with can be changed in the future by new management, but once the artifacts are gone, they are gone.
A historical site like Monticello needs to be preserved in place, but when it comes to museum collections, a lot of times it's just as well for stuff to end up in private collections. Collectors tend to care (sometimes to an obsessive degree) about whatever it is they collect; it's not just a job for them, nor do they get possessed by weird ulterior motives the way foundations can be.
As someone who has been on the periphery of non-profits for years, they easily become mostly employment sinecures for executive directors and others. I've actually seen foundations set up to formally wind down operations after some number of years for exactly this reason.
