Hoth

Pages and pages of crypto posts on a weather board. No speculative froth in these markets lol.

It cracked me up when they IPOed and all the executives dumped most of their shares on day one. Really inspires confidence

What drives me most nuts about her is that she rails against Europe and the U.S., which are legitimately trying to derive more energy from clean sources, but is totally silent about China, which is by far the biggest source of emissions and is churning out coal plants like sausages.

I've got a good feeling about SCAM coin.

Im not sure cryptos really qualify as currencies, or at least efficient ones. High transaction costs, low liquidity, extremely volatile price swings. You want stability in a currency. You don't want to buy a car in Bitcoin, only to have its price shoot up $20k a month later. Or conversely, you wouldn't want to sell a car in Bitcoin and then watch its price drop $20k. These things are just mediums of wild speculation with only a thin veneer of underlying theory to provide legitimacy.

I dunno if it's still there, but the Bon Me in Kendall was awesome and well worth a visit. The Rachel at the Jewish deli next door was also life altering, but should be served with Lipitor on the side.

Elon is above the law. Although I'm not sure there is an explicit prohibition in regards to holding reserves in Bitcoin. I think for accounting purposes they are treated as a long-lived intangible asset. Buying billions of Bitcoin, then using your fame to pump the price, then dumping for a profit is definitely frowned upon for mere mortals. I'd also like to point out the hypocrisy of a guy who claims to care about the environment holding an asset with a carbon footprint bigger than a medium sized country.

I would've felt a lot better streaking at Middlebury had I known that was the law of the land. My girlfriend and I used to jog around town on a lark every so often. Oddly enjoyable hobby.

Ditto, steak tips and brews tonight. A beautiful evening.

and Hackleburg!

Ditto. I actually found running barefoot cured my chronic fasciitis. My arch got much higher and all the little muscles in my toes developed. I gave it up when I moved to Boston though. Didn't want to pick up a parasite jogging through hobo shite or something worse.

As someone who once used to run barefoot for considerable distances, you'd be surprised how quickly your feet get tough.

Well said.

The company isn't "rapidly developing" anything. That's typical Elon BS, like when he said there would be a million level five autonomous Tesla robo-taxis on the road by the end of 2020. Or when he said the Tesla factory would be like an "alien dreadnought" with machines moving so fast you would need a strobe light to see them. Instead, he builds cars mostly by hand in a tent. He is the ultimate snake-oil salesman. Tesla's R&D spending is a joke. They've been losing engineering and executive talent to their rivals for years. If they had top notch battery tech, they wouldn't need to source them from Panasonic or CATL. Nor would independent testing find that they habitually overstate the battery range in their cars. They are getting taken apart by incumbent manufacturers in battery tech, driver assist and are losing more market share by the day. They've had to slash their asking price per car 13% in the last year to move metal. They are absolutely fundamentally a car company, and an abysmally run one at that. Their solar division is the neglected stepchild. Elon coerced Tesla's board into buying out SolarCity because it was insolvent. Consultants opined that it was not a going concern, and suggesting lining up DIP financing--they could not drum up interest in a takeover from a single PE shop. Its demise would have destroyed Elon's and his family's stake, as well as $200 million of SpaceX venture cap money that he had parked in SolarCity bonds. Default would've likely brought down SpaceX too. So Elon threw his weight around and claimed how synergistic and game-changing the merger would be, then paid an excessive premium for the moribund company that paid off his cousins handsomely and got him and the board sued by Tesla shareholders. After Tesla acquired it, solar panel installations plunged. Dig through their reports and look at the kilowatt hours installed. They're minute compared to five years ago. Their panels have been plagued by installation problems and fires. Go read reviews from customers. Scathing almost universally. The so-called "game-changing" solar roof, which is immensely difficult to install and often costs six figures, is hardly a viable solution for 99.9% of the populace. There are maybe a hundred in existence, and that is generous. As for SpaceX, they've done some cool engineering stuff. The Falcon is a reliable workhorse and Elon can't afford to cut corners with it, especially if they are transporting humans. Dead astronauts mean intense government scrutiny, which is the last thing he wants. But let's be clear, as a business, it is still a money loser built on clearly wrong assumptions. How many companies do you know that still need venture capital after 20 years of operation? A company that old should be mature enough to stand on its own, go public and allow VCs to parachute out, but not SpaceX. That alone tells me it is probably hemorrhaging cash like every other project Musk touches. The whole yarn about how reusing the booster would save so much money on launches was BS too. After all the recovery, repairs and inspections are done, it's every bit as expensive as a disposable launch vehicle, even if the landing boosters are cool. In fact, Space X recently was the most expensive per-launch bidder for a recent contract. The whole constellation of internet satellites Elon bloviates about occasionally is just another pretext for raising more money, all the while filling low earth orbit with space junk. They are not launching astronauts to the moon. The NASA SLS booster will be doing the lifting. SpaceX got a contract for the rendezvous once they reach the moon. I've never heard of a Tesla car fire making the U.S. news. China, yes. But a car with no driver slamming into a tree and killing its occupants is certainly newsworthy, especially when that car company's CEO has been criminally exaggerating the capabilities of its driver assist software for years. You see videos all over the internet of idiots pulling stunts like this; who knows how many others have gotten themselves killed by trusting faulty software and will get other innocent bystanders killed before a regulator steps in and says enough is enough. These are not companies that are changing the world for the better. These are companies that survive by syphoning billions in taxpayer subsidies, and raising billions more in new capital from gullible investors who can be duped into believing fanciful narratives. Without historically loose money, and no hurdle rate for investment, Tesla and SpaceX would probably have been consigned to the dustbin of business history long ago.

I think I'm more amazed that Elon effectively did a Bitcoin pump and dump to make his quarter. Buy $1 billion of bitcoin, talk the price up on Twitter, cash out for a quick $100 million profit. Anybody not named Elon would be hauled up before the man for that.

No, those credits are just for auto. Their solar installation is negligible these days anyway. Down probably 80% compared to when they acquired Solar City five years ago.

TSLA recognized $518 million of regulatory credits this quarter somehow lol. Okay. Ex that and non-recurring items like day trading bitcoin profits, TSLA lost a couple hundred million again. $800 billion market cap car company that makes less real money than a lemonade stand.

I figured there must be a few cultured folks in here lol

The stuff will really hit the fan when it becomes widely known that Tesla's autopilot is designed to disengage fractions of a second before a crash so Tesla can claim the driver was in control. Or when it comes out that Tesla is not actually collecting a gigantic amount of data from each car for their "neural net". Or maybe when a car on autopilot runs down a bunch of bicyclists or something. I dunno, feels like regulators are starting to wake up. NHTSA is taking more heat from NTSB and Congress for its blatant disregard for Tesla safety concerns in recent years; China is losing patience with Tesla over all the sudden unintended acceleration, battery fire, broken suspension and autopilot issues. Frankly I'm more interested in how they've been realizing a good $400 million a quarter in EV credits like clockwork. I don't get where this money is suddenly coming from. Until this past year, when most other manufacturers weren't producing EVs but had to have credits, Tesla was recognizing $100-$200 million every few quarters, usually when they needed to dress up a bad income statement. Suddenly, when manufacturers are selling thousands of EVs and don't need to buy nearly as many credits from Tesla, they recognize a lot more revenue from that source? How does that work? Is that number even real? Is it the new accounts receivable inflation to mask how shitty their business actually is?

May you find your Castle Anthrax.

The man just wants to make sweet sweet music with his Christine.

My goal is to be dangerous well into my nineties.

Are you doing your part?

Only trading at 1,200x earnings. It's a bargain!