The front door manual release on the Model 3 is so intuitive that I have to explicitly tell people to not use it. Any safety issue is entirely theoretical.
What is not theoretical is how people have already died due to poor manual release designs in other cars, like the Corvette:
…cite?
There are millions of companies all around the world, and whether or not they are “terrible” at finding “good people” or not depends entirely on how one would define a “good person.” Most companies do just fine.
If you’re looking for an article on the subject, you can start here:
In 2019, the company fired its head of recruiting after employees complained of sexism. A consultant retained by Blue Origin conducted a review of the company’s leadership, finding that the primary challenge was Smith’s ineffective, micromanaging leadership style , said two former employees, including a top executive.
There are many more articles along the same lines. However, I am more concerned about Blue Origin’s simple lack of progress. I posted earlier about how Blue Origin and SpaceX were essentially in the same position early on. Why have they diverged so much since then?
BO currently has only two products: their suborbital New Shepard, and the BE-4 engines. The BE-4 is basically 5 years late at this point (not that the article is >1 yr old, and the BE-4 production engines were only just shipped):
New Shepard has flown 23 times in ~10 years:
That’s less than 3 flights per year for a suborbital rocket. In contrast, SpaceX has flown more than once a week in 2022.
There is also the fact that Blue Origin submitted a terrible design for the Artemis HLS contract, and then got butthurt and filed a bunch of lawsuits and other legal nonsense:
Well, they were thrown out. But still, an embarrassing proposal on their part and even more embarrassing to try to fight the rejection in court.
Bob Smith has only been CEO for 5 years, so he is not fully responsible for all of this. Still, it’s not a good record.
You can also check out Glassdoor for company ratings:
Ouch.
…this just sounds like Tesla.
If you think that Bob Smith sounds bad, wait until you hear about this guy called Elon Musk.
And didn’t you say this kind of thing is an acceptable trade-off?
Yep. You did.
This all sounds entirely normal. Two different companies, doing two different things, using two different strategies, are proceeding at different rates. We all know that Musk companies iterate faster, and take much bigger risks. Not everyone thinks that this is the best approach.
…yeah, but the thing is, Bob Smith is significantly less likely to hire a private investigator to dig into your personal life if you were to leave a negative review.
Well, yes. But it’s not like Bezos was unambitious. They’ve been putting out images like this for their goals:
That makes Musk’s Mars ambitions look tame in comparison. One can’t blame their failures on just having smaller targets.
…“Planning to send Dragon to Mars as soon as 2018” is more than mere ambition and certainly more than an image.
“Failure” is subjective. Bob Smith does sound like a terrible boss. But he certainly isn’t worse than Elon Musk who has put his entire ass on display over the last few weeks. And “couldn’t manage his way out of a paper bag” is clearly hyperbole. It sounds like the bro-culture rules where he works, so not as-bad-as-a-Musk workplace then, which you concede is an acceptable trade-off given the alternatives.
A few abandoned projects are fine as long as you have something else to show for it. And that something else has been the Falcon 9, the Falcon Heavy, Cargo Dragon, Crew Dragon, Starlink, their reusability program, and more.
Blue Origin has very little to show for their efforts. New Shepard failed on its last flight, so its reliability has gone down over time (Falcon 9 has had a couple of failures, but they have had >150 successful launches in a row since then). BE-4 is still not in actual use.
Rocket Lab is from your home country. I have a great deal of respect for them, and they have a lot of pluck. They appear to be a well-run company with somewhat modest ambitions. I wouldn’t criticize them all on the basis that they aren’t SpaceX. They have achieved more than Blue Origin has, and on fewer resources. Peter Beck seems to be an effective CEO.
I am not precisely sure what the secret ingredient is, except to say that Musk and Beck have it, and Bezos does not. It is not exactly drive or ambition, which Bezos certainly has. I’m not sure it’s passion, either, since Bezos has shown passion for other projects, like the retrieval of some Saturn V engines or the revival of The Expanse. Running a successful rocket business needs something more.
…and Blue Origin have plenty to show for it.
It’s literally rocket science, and they are operating at the very edge of where our science and technology is right now. Again, nothing you are sharing here sounds out-of-line to where one would expect a company like Blue Origin to be.
I’ll criticize them for failing to properly consult tangata whenua, for not honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi, for literally gating off access to the Māori owners of the land.
I mean seriously, don’t get me started on those bastards.
When there are less than a handful of rocket businesses in the world, then it should be fairly obvious that some will do better than others. You said he " seemingly can’t manage his way out of a wet paper bag." But we are talking about a relatively new industry that was formerly dominated by the public sector where the stakes are extremely high. Not matching the outcomes of a rival does not necessarily demonstrate mismanagement, which is what you allege. If its just rampant sexism, racism and misogyny then that’s fine by you, because that’s an acceptable trade-off.
But that isn’t what we are talking about. We are talking management. I think we’ve established that he actually could manage his way out of a paper bag. I’m sure you would agree you were being hyperbolic.
Heh, I wasn’t expecting to touch a nerve, but I suppose I should have guessed. Well, if it makes you feel better, I think there’s a non-negligible chance they’ll end up moving most/all flights to Wallops Island.
There are worse companies, to be sure. Boeing has managed to spend $5.1B putting zero people into orbit. Again, we have a situation where both Boeing and SpaceX had the same starting point, and in this case exactly the same goal. Boeing should have had the nod due to more money and experience, but it didn’t exactly work out that way.
Stupid question here.
Will Musk’s purchase of Twitter result in a giant tax break for him for (at least) the 2022 fiscal year? Could this be written down as an expense / investment writeoff resulting in a net financial benefit for him, or at least an offsetting of some of that $44BN he spent while he figures out how to move forward with the company?
So basically, he’s a bad CEO just like Musk?
So let’s compare apples to apples and look at the head of design for car companies.
Toyota. Simon Humphries.
Volkswagon. Klaus Zyciora - Wikipedia
Dailmer. Gorden Wagener - Wikipedia
Ford. Anthony Lo. https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-lo-12425a18/
Honda. There seems to be a few. It is unclear to me if there is one single “head” overall.
GM. Michael Simcoe - Wikipedia as of 2016. Prior was Edward T. Welburn - Wikipedia.
Let’s stop there. You stated.
So can you point out which of these heads of design are “shit people”?
I don’t know about his particular case but I would be surprised if any tax break is a net financial gain rather than less of a loss.
You’re being too kind. The Cybertruck is, without a doubt, hands down, the ugliest thing I have ever seen on wheels. If Holzhausen was responsible for designing the original Tesla sedan, then kudos to him – it’s a beautiful car, but the truck is a joke. In the picture upthread, linking to the interview with Holzhausen, my first thought was, what the hell is that thing behind him? Well, folks, that’s the Cybertruck.
The truck, in fact, looks exactly like something that might have been hurriedly hammered together in someone’s garage – a garage that wasn’t very well equipped with much more than a hammer and a welder. Holzhausen repeatedly cites “form follows function” as the design inspiration, but he doesn’t actually seem to understand what “function” means. The flat panels and straight edges don’t have a function; they are (apparently) a consequence of the decision to use stainless steel for the body panels, which Holzhausen says can’t be formed into compound curves. Even the supposed toughness of stainless steel isn’t really a function but more of a whimsical design choice, since it doesn’t really do anything particularly useful except provide a sort of psychologically alluring gimmick.
The comments after the video are interesting. About half of them state frankly that the thing is comically ugly. The other half are apparently Musk fanbois who will buy anything with his name on it.
When I first saw a picture of the Cybertruck it made me think of a very low-budget 1950s corny sci-fi movie.
That is totally the sort of thing somebody would bodge together for $100 to represent their Mars rover: take a bare car chassis, attach some large flat plywood panels at odd angles with extra small window openings, and viola: a space-faring exo-planetary truck.
Maybe we should call it Plan 9 from Mars. Or is that Plan 9 to Mars?
One of my neighbors just got a Tesla about a week and a half ago. After three days, he stilled loved it, but, man, that is a boring-looking car. Guess I was expecting something a bit more jazzy?
Heeheh, aww now, it’s more of a late 70s/early 80s aesthetic. If it were from a 50s movie, it’d have some sort of domes on the back, possibly with rings around them. The flat panels make me think it’s pretty much for Ark II or some such ilk.
https://www.angelfire.com/tv2/ark2/vehicles.html
ETA: Reading that page reminded me of what it really reminds me of, the Landmaster:
Let’s take a step back since the argument I was making was obviously lost somewhere along the way (though I maintain Bob Smith is still terrible).
Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that I give you every negative supposition ever made about him: Musk is an idiot, he only got where he is because he’s rich, the industries he’s in are easy, it’s his employees that do everything, it’s all subsidies, etc., etc.
You still have to explain the massive success of SpaceX and Tesla compared to the competition. Why have they done so much better than everyone else, and essentially come out of nowhere? There must be a reason. What is it?
It can’t really be the money, because their competition had access to billions of dollars as well. Both automotive and aerospace has access to plenty of funding. And it’s not like the competitors had no interest in moving into these spaces–Tesla and SpaceX are eating their lunch now, to their regret.
It can’t be that the problems Tesla and SpaceX are easy, else there would be plenty of competition from all corners. And in fact plenty of companies have sprung up, but they have mostly fallen by the wayside or moved very slowly. SpaceX has no real competition at all, and Tesla only very recently has reasonable competitors.
It can’t just be the people, because everyone has access to the same pool of people.
Either the people at Tesla and SpaceX are better than the competition or they’re not. If they aren’t, then the explanation goes nowhere. If they are, then you have to explain how Tesla and SpaceX got the good people and the rest did not.
It can’t be the subsidies, because again everyone had access to the same funds. And in many cases, actually took those funds (sometimes in much greater quantities) but apparently squandered them.
And so on. You can believe whatever you wish about Musk, but it just makes explaining the success of Tesla and SpaceX that much harder. Or, you can use Occam’s Razor and admit that he’s actually a pretty good entrepreneur and that this was the key difference, enabling him to find better people, to use the funding more efficiently, to push for products that are both profitable and desirable, and so on.
That’s enough for now. I have a few things to check out on Twitter, which, contrary to everything I’ve heard reported, somehow still hasn’t collapsed yet.