TvTodd 🇺🇸 ⚡️☢️ ₿🤖

Just revisited the @ashleevance @elonmusk biography again for the first time since its 2015 release. "Musk is now quite rich on paper. He was worth about $10 billion at the time of this writing." In the epilogue: "...If all of this were taking place, Musk, then in his mid-fifties, likely would be the richest man in the world and among its most powerful. He would be the majority shareholder in three public companies, and history would be preparing to smile broadly on what he had accomplished."" 11 years later, at 54 - worth over $700B Amazing prescience, given all the other tech distractions and Tesla/SpaceX uncertainty in 2015. Might be time to start treating @corememory as a prediction market.

Regarding looks: Most people don't like significant change or to stand apart from accepted social and in-group "norms." Owning a Cybertruck requires a personality that is confortable standing apart from both of those, usually high trait openess combinded with a higher levels of disagreeability. This explains a lot: alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-a…

Hard but true answers to the question about why CT isn’t doing volume: 1) Because it is too expensive. 2) Because people hate the way it looks. 3) Because it attracts too much attention and people don’t want to deal with it, even though they like it. 4) They low-key like the way it looks, but are still too embarrassed to own it because of the way it looks. 5) Because it is a target politically for some stupid reason. These are all reasons I’ve heard talking to people in my travels. I’d say being too embarrassed to own it because of how it looks is the most common thing I hear.

@shagbark_hick Based on your vagabond past and intelligent introspection, I'd trust your "best places to live" (based on friendly people) list way more than the usual sanitized publications. Feel free to elucidate.

One of the great luxuries one pays dearly for in America is to privilege of not living around miserable people. There are many places in the USA that *should* technically be a paradise, but aren't, because the residents of that place are wretched bastards. Likewise, there are many places in the USA that are objectively middling, crappy, bummer-type places that actually rock because they're full of cheerful, friendly, optimistic people. People gladly pay the premium and move to wherever the "happy people" are moving, even if the land itself kind of sucks.

It almost seems too "easy" - another SUV. Elon did say whatever it is would be "way cooler than a minivan". Given autonomy is the future focus, I'd rather have a smaller version of Robovan with a convertible/lounge interior. Seems limiting to design any future Tesla vehicle with standard seats facing forward in rows. Still also can't wait for full-sized Robovan with an RV interior.

if anything remotely close to this CyberSUV concept drops, it will take over the entire SUV category Would love to have hyper-lifted feature in this, in order to navigate Tahoe blizzards!

I predominately press the pedal to lessen time at stop signs. Also, I hope that future FSD will either be able to do slow rolling stops if no traffic around, or in cases where the stop sign is way back (20'+) from the actual road, that FSD will stop at the road, not way back at the sign, then do a second creep/stop at the actual road as it now does.

Here's an underreported FSD metric: go-pedal override rate — how often a driver presses the go-pedal while FSD is active. On v14, drivers intervene with the accelerator about 1.9% of the time. On v13 it peaked at 7% and sits at 3.3% today. On v12 it hovers around 5–7%. Worth noting: when a driver does press the go pedal, it's most often about preference — wanting to accelerate faster, take a gap differently, or match their own driving style. What many interpret as a negative intervention frequently isn't. It's personal choice. This is a metric I'll be covering a lot more with real data to back it up. There's an enormous opportunity for @Tesla to do incredible story telling here and broadly about FSD. Hope they do. Happy to help. @CernBasher @wholemars @herbertongg2 @DirtyTesLa

Installed a 240 myself. Sub panel was already in the garage. I ran about 35' of MC to a location between the two garage bays. Total cost for all parts, town permit (required), post-install electrical inspection was just under $600. That includes Hubble/Bryant 14-50, a few breakers (needed some tandems to combine circuits) plus wood to create install brackets and cable caddy. Electrician quoted $1800(!) to do this, even through they said it would only take 3 hours on site. All extra cost must have been parts markup. Some electricians will 3x the quote if they know it is for a Tesla versus "just a 240 outlet".

has anyone had an electrician install a 240v charger for less than $500? mine cost maybe $1500 I think to install, although for mine I needed like 30' of copper cabling which was like $500 or so itself.

@slukas Magic Leap still stands as the most unique place I have worked. Here with Andy in London in 2018 testing (something).

I miss this

The Champlain coast and valley on the NY side has been influenced by in-migration from across the lake over the last 20 plus years as they discovered property with killer views of the lake for a fraction of the price they pay in VT. Those deals are gone and the property taxes have quadrupled or more in some cases

@ToddTownsend @neipate96 Not super familiar with it but just from memories of passing through a few times I'd absolutely buy that. Champlain Coast is so weird because it goes from #1 to #4 very quickly and somewhat randomly

It's very interesting to travel across the Adirondack Park and to make note of the different "types" of towns one sees. By my eye, there are four basic genres: 1. The old money liberal enclaves. Moss growing on the roof, ivy on the siding, Bourdeaux on the boat-dock. Liberal but never "woke," organic / messy -- never sterilized. They are not pouring Roundup on their lawns. 2. "Metro" Lake Placid / Saranac Lake. Government employees (and retired government employees) who drink IPA's and paddle expensive canoes and sing folk songs, young spandex-clad hikers partying hard, skiing, campaigning for Bernie Sanders. I call this region "wannabe Vermont." 3. Working-class vacation towns. Places where chunky Italian bricklayers from Rochester take their families to buy taffy and T-shirts and to jet-ski around the lake on the 4th of July -- plus the roughneck contractors and business owners who make money off of the "summer people." ATV's, chinsy-looking modular camps, 'Don't Tread on Me' flags. 4. Absolutely decrepit, dying towns that are firmly OFF the tourist circuit and in the Park's least-Instagrammable corridors. Welfare, disability, Vicodin, hermits, and broke retirees living in shacks by the river. A handful of well-paid loggers or camp caretakers. Crumbling storefronts, but "poverty with a view." After many years in and out of the Park, I have to concede that the "old money lib enclaves" really do it the best. If I ever get rich, there will be signs: you'll find me in Blue Mountain Lake, fishing with retired bankers and lawyers.

Robotaxi cabin is not dimensionally designed for driving. You're sitting too far back and the average person's legs won't even reach the firewall where pedals live. Tesla could enable virtual control on the touch screen to maneuver the car at low speed for unusual circumstances. Picture a steering wheel on the touch screen to maneuver the car under 10 mph. Two fingers - push up for forward, down reverse, turn left/right.

here's what i don't understand -- why NOT have a steering wheel so you CAN take over, manually, if/when you have to? Or want to?

@shagbark_hick @neipate96 Westport firmly in #1.

@neipate96 Racquette, Piseco, Newcomb, Long Lake, Essex, Schroon..? Roughly speaking. I believe there are others

@shagbark_hick Adks have much more sand vs. silt than VT with its famous mud season. Down here in CNY/Mohawk Valley is also much more silt (mud).

One thing about living in the Adirondacks is that we really don't seem to get "mud season" to the degree that most other folks in the Northern Northeast get it. The soil is just extremely sandy here. High porosity. Flooding does rip up roads of course, destroys culverts too. There might be a muddy patch here or there, but almost never anything difficult to drive on. Obviously, hiking trails do get muddy, but I'm talking about the roads. Whereas most of Vermont and many other parts of Upstate NY often have slick, rutted, ankle-deep (or deeper) mud roads for miles this time of year.

It depends on the personalities involved. Some people feed off of a greater variety of social, cultural, and environmental interactions, while others prioritize "nesting in place". Given your past predilections for roaming, combined with your current family status, rotating through a mix of the Adirondacks and Southwest on an annual basis provides both reasonable stability and decent variety.

@ToddTownsend I've got an aunt that does something like this, spending most of her time in Florida. Seems like eventually you wind up picking one or the other full-time and visiting the other location more and more rarely. Could be a good transition period if nothing else.

I think some clarification is in order here: 1. I grew up in rural Upstate NY 2. I left for over a decade 3. Every time I came back home, it broke my heart to see how this place is declining -- yet the land is so beautiful and the houses are cheap. 4. I came back, not with any illusions about the culture here. I figured that maybe I could help make it better, and if nothing else, I could live cheap for a while after I got out of the military. 5. Within 6 months of leaving the military, I blew up online and wound up accidentally launching into a successful online writing career. It was totally unexpected. 6. On the fly, I tried to use my newfound online reach to attract people here, to promote this place, to try to publicly reflect on ways to improve not just Upstate NY but all of rural America. Some of my ideas were controversial, but the thrust was always oriented towards making my pocket of rural America thrive again. 7. Three years or so into that, we had a baby, and I had to start weighing the feasibility of my ambitions here more seriously out of a duty to our daughter. Does she deserve to grow up in a place that is collapsing? What is her future like here? Some of the more cynical commentators say that any negative experience I have here is me "reaping what I sowed." Some even revel in it as a form of "punishment" for my unspeakable crime: reminding American youth that rural America exists, and that maybe they could make a life for themselves here very cheaply, if they liked. But what I was actually trying to "sow" was a rebirth of my own homeland. It just didn't sit well with me that the place I grew up was just supposed to die and be abandoned, so I thought I'd try making it better. Why not try? I genuinely figured that since so many people are mad about high housing costs, and since remote work exists, maybe we could leverage the ultra-cheap housing here in deep rural Upstate NY to start up a kind of Renaissance. Seemed like maybe it could've worked out for everybody! Cheap housing for folks from unaffordable places, new life in towns that are literally about to become ghost towns, locals get to see their towns avoid total collapse, Churches filling pews again, etc. But I learned it's not quite that simple. Many of the problems here appear to be totally intractable. I found that the property tax situation is worse than I'd thought. And the locals may complain about decline here, but they also don't really want to see a Renaissance either. Meanwhile, though the general public may complain about housing, but they don't want cheap housing badly enough to move to a place like this. To be fair, Albany makes all of this worse than it has to be. But even if the NYS capital started making genuinely good legislation, you can't use policy to force a stagnant, parochial culture into being anything else. And you can't force the wider public to brave long winters, ceaseless overcast, and to take a risk on trying out a place on the far margins of the American mainstream just for cheap housing. So it goes. At this point, I'm simply glad to have tried it out. I did exactly what the "localist" types say to do: I came home. I tried to make it better. I sang the song of my homeland. I did this for about three years, and at the end of it, I've got enough equity to recoup 100% of my housing costs from while I was here. If I walk away, I can do so knowing I tried. I'm not one of those who left with his nose upturned at where he came from. From here, who knows. Maybe I do strick around, albeit without any pretensions of "solving the problem" here. Or maybe we head out to the Southwest, which has always felt more like home to me anyway. Hard to say. Big thanks to those of you who see this and have come along for the ride.

@tesla_na Ultimate freedom will be Robovan with an RV interior and unsupervised FSD.

Freedom

@shagbark_hick What about May-Oct in Upstate, the rest out West?

To my eye, the Southwest is easily the most "optimistic" region of the USA. Every time I'm there, I'm struck by the degree to which everyone I meet has a can-do attitude, believes it can be done, "dream it and do it" etc. Feels like the future of the USA is there.

@elonmusk @Keller @farzyness Convertible/lounge/sleeping interior please for overnight travel with unsupervised FSD.

@Keller @farzyness Well, I guess we should solve this

100% true. This effect has actually been studied carefully with shocking results

@SawyerMerritt x.com/ToddTownsend/s…

I don't think Elon is referring to the Model Y L or Robovan.

Both Elon and @woodhaus2 have said in separate interviews regarding future vehicles that (paraphrased): "Tesla is designing for an autonomous future." If a new ground-up design has human controls and standard forward-facing seats instead of a convertible interior, I'd be surprised. A standard SUV is so 1990's.

@typesfast Noted

If Tesla makes a car with 3 rows of seats, each with its own pair of doors so nobody has to climb over anybody else to get to their seat, they will create a baby boom the likes of which we haven’t seen in 80 years

@cyantist @elonmusk @LeahLibresco x.com/aelluswamy/sta…

@elonmusk @LeahLibresco An RV?!!!!!!

MAKE A MINIVAN, ELON.

@webdevMason @lymanstoneky x.com/aelluswamy/sta…

@lymanstoneky We're so close it's wild

I cannot wait for the day my FSD minivan means I can load up the kids at 8 PM, put on a movie while they (and I!) fall asleep, and at 6 AM we all wake up at the beach.

@KeithLevenberg @webdevMason Keeping it in Mad Max mode will get you part of the way there but not to full a-hole territory.

@ToddTownsend @webdevMason FSD is definitely a better driver than I am, the only problem is that it's not as assholish a driver as I am so I have to help it along with acceleration and passing.

We just got a 7-seat model Y, and we're gonna make that itty bitty third row work for us by hook or by crook because **** I love this car Full self-driving is the first real life changing quality of life improvement I've gotten from a product in as long as I can remember