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This whole thread reeks of Grok astro and challenging Wikipedia. There are fair criticisms of Wikipedia, but I am smelling something fishy.

The floor is much lower, but the ceiling can be the same-ish on a case-by-case basis. That's been my experience as well.

And why people are jumping out of buildings, actually and metaphorically, in 996 cultures.

i think Amazon only had one person jump out of a building last year. it's not as common as you might think.

One is too many...

[flagged]


This is the Charlie Kirk argument against gun control, "I'm ok with a small number of gun deaths, it's a small price to pay for freedom". All well and good until you become one of those gun deaths.

I agree with him by the way. But this kind of maximalist thought ending cliche is weird and anti intellectual.

One death of an amazon employee means we should change the whole system? A huge number of people are employed by them, enjoy their lives, became multi millionaires.

Why am I flagged for a fairly normal opinion? A few deaths are okay if the wast majority are satisfied?


"One company only had one suicide via jumping last year" is not a ringing endorsement.

Yes and also a true meme.

What makes you hopeful that this year is like the other years, and not more like something unto itself?

The bears will be right eventually. But they'll be wrong many times in a row before that. And we'll pull through, eventually. I'm a long-term optimist, so I'm not particularly worried about when the next downturn will be.

Seems like our leaders laundered our money through the US military and government apparatus, to the tunes of billions of dollars, so that they could carry out the dirty work of overthrowing the Venezuelan government in order to enrich Exxon and other oil companies. That's our money doing this. My money doing this. Boomers are cooked, man.

and in the same breathe, the risk is closer to zero than not.


Sure but specifics count. 49% is also closer to zero than it is to a 100%.


Complications from vaccines are not anywhere close to 49% if that is what you are insinuating.


At what point is it fair to call the list something other than ‘predictions’


"Forward-looking statements" aka legal stock pumping.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-looking_statement)


s/Predictions/Ketamine-and-adderall-fueled ramblings


There's a slash missing at the end.


I think they mean grift or even fraud, since they were definitely meant to attract investment.

Now excuse me while I go check on where my 2016 full-self-driving Tesla car. It was supposed to pick me up 9 years ago, something must have happened.


I still don’t understand how they haven’t been sued for the hundreds of millions they took as a deposit for a new Roadster…8 years ago!


Well the government was in the process of doing so, but somehow he seems to have doge’d it.


> I still don’t understand how they haven’t been sued for the hundreds of millions they took as a deposit for a new Roadster…8 years ago!

Because you can cancel your reservation and get your deposited refunded. See terms at Tesla.com


Same site as the OP has an article stating Tesla makes it difficult, and if you put 50k in 8 years ago and obtain 50k now, I think you lost a lot of money. I have no opinion on the process itself though, I don’t know enough about Tesla as I’m only interested in the engineering, just wanted to point out the inflation losses.


> if you put 50k in 8 years ago and obtain 50k now, I think you lost a lot of money.

This is a textbook sunk cost fallacy.


No it isn't. It's textbook time value of money, which is a real thing.

And if you don't think so, please give me $50k, I'll give you back $50.001 in 8 years, a dollar more! You'll come out ahead, right?


I am curious - are you familiar with inflation?


Are you familiar with the sunk cost fallacy?


I'm not sure you're familiar with it either, or I've missed how on earth it applies in this situation.


Are you? Because I don't think it has anything to do with what we were discussing.


Those are borderline lies that deceived both customers and investors.


After the first few some responsibility begins shifting to those still believing him.


Investors know what's up. They want number to go up, therefore they "believe" him and the number goes up.

The map precedes the territory


Put that on your resumé and you'll easily land a cushy job in Washington.


> Put that on your resumé and you'll easily land a cushy job in Washington.

I think you have it backwards. The entire tech bro scene reeks of fraud schemes, and the most successful ones seem to be pulled into all kinds of government schemes as well.


Pump and dump scheme?


What evidence is there for the 'dump' part?

Mr Musk is a strange fellow indeed, but he's not guilty of all the vices and sins. Just plenty enough of them.


That’s a fair point, but a combination of “fake it ‘til you make it” together with extracting massive “compensation” before you actually make it amounts to pretty much the same thing.


How is it the 'same thing'? Especially if he gets his comp largely in the same supposedly overvalued stock?


How is that different from any other CEO, especially of publicly traded companies?

CEOs are constantly making claims and promises that are aspirational at best, their compensation isn't held until all promises are reached.


IIRC, back in 2022 or so he'd made about as much selling TSLA shares as Tesla Inc. has made lifetime profits selling cars.

Tesla's profits have been positive since then, so this may no longer be the case, but still, that's a very iffy state of affairs.


That's more a sign of how poorly investors in the stock market today understand fundamentals, or how little they regard fundamentals.


He has been selling a lot of Tesla stocks through the life of the company (not that it matters to him as other shareholders are giving him load of free shares all the time).


It's not the usual type of 'dump', but he will probably again request massive bonus or threaten to leave. And his statements are the key for pumping part.


He might be pumping until his potential trillion USD bonus :P


his family is going to need it, the guy is the modern genghis khan in a generation or two a good portion of humanity will be a descendant of his


At the current growth rate, they'll be 2.5Billion in just 8 generations...


I'd say more in Doge and Bitcoin but you could argue with his stocks even though they're announced/scheduled.


As Matt Levine points out, Musk does plenty of crypto price moving with his tweets, but he doesn't seem to trade on them.


Do you have evidence on this? Seems like it would be fairly difficult to track. Have people been able to associate his wallets with him?

Maybe I'm misremembering but I seem to recall him (Tesla?) selling a bunch of doge and bitcoin after months of pumping despite some big drops between.


https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2024/05/31/tes...

> Musk sold 19.5 million Tesla shares worth about $3.95 billion in November 2022

I mean sure it is his to sell, but how is that different?


So is your issue here that a CEO makes public claims if his company that may be predictions or aspirations for the future, then sells shares he owns in the company to buy another company?


Exactly my issue. The same way scams are "predictions and future aspirations".


Fair enough. I may just be cynical enough to assume CEOs are always talking out of their ass with regards to the future, but I do understand if people would rather things not work this way.


That was to buy Twitter.


Does using the money from the dump to do something else make it no longer a dump?


I'm fairly sure this was not a pump-and-dump.

My evidence is that in America people sue for these things left and right all the time. It's a popular pastime for lawyers to get a class action lawsuit for securities fraud together. But as far as I can tell, Musk / Tesla weren't convicted of these things in conjunction with the sale of Tesla stock to buy Twitter.


There is a meme for this kind of move. It's pump and dump because it isn't worth what the underlying assets are worth and because there is a sale. Whether people sue for it and whether or not they were convicted is immaterial.


You know that's the timeframe of the Twitter acquisition right?


I guess when people stop believing them. Until then, they're words from a visionary that's building the future, who can get some things wrong / be over zealous etc. When people stop believing him, they become lies.


A statement is a lie if the person saying it knows it to be false. Not if the person hearing it disbelieves it.


Imagine me standing next to the fence of the White House, calling the Meta Office. "I am calling from the White House", while technically true would be a lie, as my intent would be to make the other person believe something that isn't true, that I would be calling in some kind of official role.

So the statement does not necessarily be false to be a lie - if the intent is to deceive.


I don't think this is universally or even widely agreed upon.


Recommend you read the source: Sam Harris "Lying" [1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lying_(Harris_book)


According to the article, a court would call this "corporate puffery", but to me it's nothing but lies and grifting.


To be "mere puff", the claim needs to be so obviously untrue that no reasonable bystander would suppose it to be meant literally.

But Musk often acts as if he does actually intend to be taken seriously. In the case of the current story, consider the marketing resources Tesla have poured into their previous "Battery Day" events and look at the press reaction; it's clear that at least some people believed that the claims stacked up.

A quick search of the hn archives for "4680" shows a similar picture. Yes, there were always some sceptical voices, but they were often shouted down as being from people motivated by an anti-Elon grudge. Nevertheless, the sentiment tended to be overwhelmingly positive with many posters actively reinforcing the hype.

Now, whether or not a self-selecting sample of hn posters can be seen as "reasonable bystanders" is certainly debatable - but it does seem that we're getting close to the point where Musk is going to have to start branding those who believe him as being exceptionally gullible in order to escape a charge of misleading advertising.


Predicting is easy. Predicting correctly less so.


When you are making predictions about what you are going to do, "correctly" is spelled "honestly".


"Tech Optimism"


This article makes me think of how defiant Discord has been against all of this, and how slowly I'm starting to succumb to many of the same forces, although much slowly than other platforms. It's a minor miracle they never got bought up/sold themselves.

Also reminds me of the Dark Forrest Yancy Strickler stuff.


First human robot war is us telling the AI/robots 'no', and them insisting that insert technology here is good for us and is the direction we should take. Probably already been done, but yeah, this seems like the tipping point into something entirely different for humanity.


... if it's achievable at all in the near future! But we don't know that. It's just that if we assume AI can do X, why do we assume it cannot, at the same level of capability, also do Y? Maybe the tipping point where it can do both X and Y is near, but maybe in the near future it will be able to do neither.


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