base698

The venture capitalists with net worth in the $10s of Millions or the lowly peon software engineer making $200K, paying $3000 a month for a house and supporting a family?

Profitable at this stage means nothing. What matters is they build the infrastructure to solve the problems with delivering an electric car. Elon Musk took his own money and built a car company from the ground up. He used every means necessary to get it off the ground. After IPO and reissuing stock, they've paid back the federal loans and have lots of cash on hand with which to play. That's on top of actually selling a few cars the past two years. They've built a nationwide infrastructure to use quick charging tech to get over the range/refueling issues of every other electric. I like the idea of an industrialist that's also building rockets having a few billion in capital. I'd not bet against what he'll be able to do with that money. He's risking his neck and getting shit done instead of sitting on it and going the safe route. Who cares? The car is fast, fun and creates a desirable product people around the world want to buy. This creates jobs and new industries here in the US. Unrelated. Most of the Tesla drivers are douchebags with money, not tree huggers. You even pointed it out above yourself. The Model S has parity with a $50K because of the gas savings. There are a few spreadsheets on the forums showing that even with great car depreciation it's still much cheaper than an Audi or BMW 5 series after owning for 6 years. A $35000 car with no gas would be much, much cheaper to operate than a $25K outback over 6 years. I think Elon said this week that'd be $35000 without subsidy.

If you read through the Tesla forums they seem to be good about fixing the issues. Building any new product takes a while to get the kinks worked out. It's obviously unsustainable if they start churning out 10000 cars a week and haven't fixed the issues leading to a huge backlog of cars to fix. Slow roll out and scale up is the only way to go. I am dumbfounded by the hate Tesla gets--they make a fun car that creates new opportunities for US car industry, jobs, and they get shit on.

No doubt. He's a big reason there were no prosecution of some of the banks responsible for the 2008 crash. More: http://m.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/ag-eric-holder-has-no-balls-20120815

1) That is factually untrue. A Viper would get what, 24 mpg highway, to a Prius that gets 41 mpg even going 80 mph? 2) Hybrids haven't been eligible for HOV stickers in California for many years. It's the Tesla and pure electric drivers that get the benefit now.

I drive a prius because they are negligible in cost of maintenance and only spend $50 to drive 800 miles on a road trip. Not everything is political statement. The media is fucking poisonous.

They do it to show group solidarity in a time of loss. I don't do it, but get why.

With 300 million people you'd have to be super lucky to be targeted by a single group. Lottery type odds. You're better off worrying about car crashes and skydiving accidents.

Yes, line twists, broken zipper on an old Birdman classic, and when I was unable to immediately unzip on a wingsuit BASE. Basically if there is any hesitation in the zipping motion I cutaway the wings.

You can make an educated guess. Ie cutaway less than 600 ft it likely increases the probability of surviving. I'm more interested in how often that happens vs the complications. I've seen super low cutaways that were in my mind saved by the rsl.

Anyone have any numbers on skyhook saves where not having it would end in death?

My main concern is the number two aspect of people lowering the hard deck. I remember listening to you discuss all the ways skydivers try to kill themselves after a new invention. I just don't remember there being a rash of people dying from low cutaways back 12 years ago. It seems the incidents the skyhook should help in are increasing. I can't imagine the skyhook has saved more people than the three ring.

That's just my rule and why I never jumped on it when it came out. I knew I should have been more explicit :)

The skyhook is a pretty recent invention. I always have the attitude that if someone hasn't been out five years you're a test jumper. That said it has been out for a long time and seems to be in wide use. I see two cons to using one. 1) Any extra equipment has the possibility of being misrigged and there have been fatalities resulting from this. 2) The psychology of having a faster opening reserve could lead someone to try to fix a main longer than usual since they have a fast opening skyhook. There is an obvious trade off in any new piece of safety equipment. I'm just wondering if this is a solution with unintended consequences we are seeing with all the low cutaways.

http://20committee.com/2014/05/17/ideology-is-making-america-stupid/

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/081299342X?pc_redir=1397582649&robot_redir=1 They also don't go to jail:

Just the reload :) I'll change it so there is a pause or at least reset at some point.

It gets pretty similar results to the old one from a decade ago despite not having real physics yet. http://base698.github.io/freefall-drift/ Source and readme are located here: https://github.com/base698/freefall-drift Will put some more love into it if anyone is interested. Cheers. Here's the original: http://www.omniskore.com/freefall_drift2.html

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/taleb_on_skin_i.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Uc4DI-BF28 Ie. When wall street takes huge risks and win they profit and win they lose get bailed out. This is a case where they don't have skin in the game--only upside. There should be reward for risk taking, but when that risk goes south then ill effects should be transferred to the one taking the risk.

Out of curiosity, if a company builds a multi-billion dollar infrastructure but doesn't turn a profit, is that still a problem? Amazon was one of those companies that wasn't profitable for a decade but all the while grew into a powerhouse that's a behemoth in retail by reinvesting the capital. It kind of sucks that Tesla has to play these political theatrics when Elon is trying to displace an existing entrenched industry. It's not like Boeing, Northrop or any other US based aviation manufacturer would exist without the same help. Tesla for some reason has to pretend profitability and worry about how the loans looked in addition to building a revolutionary car that won car of the year with haters on every corner.

My wife and I frequently take road trips in the neighborhood of 400 to 700 miles. I tend to stop at 210 miles on average with the low being 180 miles and high end 300. I like to stop at least 20 minutes otherwise my back hurts a lot. That said a Tesla would force us to stop earlier on average and take longer at the stop. Not paying for fuel or paying $3 to go 200 miles would allow me to get over that. If you buy the supercharger option it's free forever, which happens to be standard on the 85kwh model (largest range battery). The 85kwh model Tesla originally quoted as 300 mile range. Around town that's still the case. The EPA test throws in more highway driving bumping the rated range to 265 miles. Throw in 90 degree day and 90mph highway speed and you can lower the range to 200 miles. Why? It's only 10% of the cost of a medium range Model S. They'd still sell at a 10% higher price. No, it's cool because you can beat a Porsche on the highway off ramp, looks sexy, and doesn't need oil changes.

You're conflating the security of a random website hacked together by people that don't know what they're doing and the bitcoin protocol itself. It's like saying the US Dollar is not secure because a bank with an unlocked vault and no guards gets robbed. I disagree that it's anonymous at all, or that anonymity is the best it offers. You're browser and internet usage isn't anonymous even in incognito mode. Using a "fingerprint" of ip, browser version, OS version, and a bunch of other things they can reliably figure out who you are and most ad networks have that information and by proxy so does the NSA :) That information coupled with the IP address listed in the transaction gives it the most traceable and public currency with which you could come up. The largest thing it has going for it is the ability to move money across borders frictionless. Sending $100,000,000 to Dubai for a construction project is just as easy and low fee as sending $1 to Africa. Governments will always be able to tax cars, businesses, and property. I see it as enabling small business ideas quicker without the red tape. You can get away with hiring people or doing business where the government doesn't want you to as long as you're small. Decentralized taxi services, raw milk at farmers markets could all take bitcoin without worrying about their accounts being frozen or even if the bank will give them an account. When they are big enough to lobby city hall they can become legitimate. This is done through a Merkel tree and isn't the whole history in each block: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree Every bitcoin client has the whole blockchain and can derive the information from it, which is perhaps what you meant? The Hash of a block is: SHA256(Random Number + Block Data + Previous Block SHA256). If any block changes in the chain then all the SHAs for blocks that come after would need to be recomputed. The computation is the proof of work.

I don't know why you'd restrict it period. Lots of research is showing saturated fat isn't bad like they thought and the excess sugar they replaced it with was worse. Fat also makes you feel full unlike sugar which has the opposite effect. http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/is-sugar-toxic http://m.smh.com.au/lifestyle/diet-and-fitness/john-yudkin-the-man-who-tried-to-warn-us-about-sugar-20140212-32h03.html

Reading these comments: http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/09/us/utah-newlywed-killed-base-jumping/

Tiger Direct and Overstock now accept it. It makes some interesting UIs possible for online shopping. Namely the minimal amount of payment information like billing address required. Online only services like hosting don't even need that. Only a complete moron would use it for money laundering--double with the current NSA leaks. Before the halving of value, prices were in mBTC and customizable in both payment clients and the bitpay widgets. It's just as easy to send 0.00000001 as 1.