Someone must be pushing some nonsense somewhere. My boss was going on about how the white farmers are being killed and having their farms taken. He can never tell me where he heard about it.
I told him I didn’t think it was true and he just tells me to look it up. He also acted like he’d never heard of apartheid and he didn’t know that there were even white people in South Africa.
I’ve given up on ever getting him to see reason.
If this was a person born in the 90s or later I’d maybe understand somewhat. Is that the case?
I agree.
There are a variety of ways for insiders to sell (or buy) legally. All of which are designed to prevent, or at least severely limit, the ability of the insider to play on the knowledge they are reasonably expected to have that the general public is reasonably expected to not have.
(Article linked inside the post but not shown in the preview; click thru.)
Hee hee!
Shutting it down has to be cheaper than making it run. Stop buying materials, stop paying workers, turn off the lights, lock the doors, and go home.
The cost won’t decline to zero, but it will decline a bunch.
We went there in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s / early 2000s. It did not go well, aside from the political elite who got free farms.
And even they, whose skin colour was easily discernable, managed to fuck it up. Grace Mugabe got several farms, especially in the fertile Mazoe valley, just outside Harare.
The whole point of land redistribution was to give the land to the impoverished farmers, but it just changed hands from moderately rich/very rich whites to moderately rich/very rich Blacks.
The actual people living on the land, the farm workers, who were often familiies who has lived there for generations got nothing. And with a politician who knows nothing of farming being the new person in charge, these farms failed.
You need, to run a farm, either institutional.knowledge, or a suprisingly high standard of education, support, technology etc.
These new “farmers” had none, they thought a tobacco farm, a dairy farm, a wheat farm… could all just run like clockwork.
It just doesn’t work that way. Farming is tough.
So, apparently - at least for Elon - is online social media.
Can people edit their comments on X? Does it show an indicator, if they did?
Im going to look for the form. There’s usually a reason given for large sales like retirement, leaving the company, quadruplets going to Harvard, medical,…
One of the many, many, aggravating things about discussion about this is the conflation of 2 totally seperate issues.
The first is the phenomenon of ‘farm killings’, infrequent but horrifyingly violent murders of farmers. Which due to their grisly nature, and unclear motivations, always make the news.
The second is the recent changes to the laws around land redistribution. Which is about all land, not just farmland.
These things are unrelated. But in the world of soundbites and ignorance, reality is now vibes based.
I can think of a couple of ways it might be more “expensive” to keep running. For example, if Musk made a deal with the Texas legislature for specific production figures/jobs/etc. then breaking the deal could involve consequences greater than the semi-sunk production costs, even with the reported slow-rolling they’ve been doing. Or it could be “expensive” in the sense that anyone telling --MUSK-- that shutting it down is a good idea is a path to instant post-employment status, which seems quite likely.
The thought of the Texas Legislature and Musk getting in a hissy, drawn out legal fight warms my black, bitter heart I admit.
He’s in his 50’s I think. He’s secretive about his age.
I do think he conflates a lot of the things he hears and never does a ton of research. If trump said it’s true, that’s good enough for him. I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.
If this is true this is a pretty massive departure from Elon’s “move fast and break things” ethos because you’re supposed to expect that you break a lot of things but you don’t get stuck because of one thing that didn’t go as planned.
Especially in an industry that is heavily dependent on supply chains, I could see that contracts locking in suppliers work both ways: Tesla is obligated to take deliveries and pay for them, or else pay massive indemnities. At least cranking out more vehicles produces inventory that for now still has some theoretical value on the accounting ledgers, and there’s always hope the sun will come out tomorrow.
My former MO-based employer had ~25K jobs in Missouri. The non-MO company that bought us promised no job losses ever. 2 years later they laid off off 98% of us claiming changed economic conditions.
The legislature huffed and puffed and did nothing.
Specifically, things like this that affect Musk’s love of Space:
Yes, I know we’re talking about the Cybertruck, and Musk received over $70 million in tax breaks for his Gigafactory, but I believe most of those have expired by now. Still, the money Texas has invested in him is substantial, and the state has LOTS of ways (fair and foul) to make any rational business owner think twice.
For all Musk’s many flaws, he seems to sincerely love the efforts poured into SpaceX. It probably appeals to the same teenage geewhiz that makes the Cybertruck seem cool to my mid 80’s tween brain, and Musk has apparently never outgrown most of his mid teen loves (good and bad!).
So, losing the support for SpaceX (by giving the legislature a slap with layoffs/closings) would likely piss Elon off, but you’re absolutely correct, he could probably care less about the Texas legislature, but they could make all kinds of troubles for him, the sort of regulatory concerns that he constantly complained about in California.
I seriously DON’T think Musk is rational enough to balance all of that out though, and I suspect my second scenario, in that no one dares shut it down because it’ll piss him off is more likely of the two.
My interpretation of “more expensive to shut it down” includes an implicit assumption that it’s not a permanent closure and there will be a need in the near future to start it up again.
Obviously, it costs money to operate something and if you stop the operation permanently you’ll save that money. But if you shut it down and then try to get it back in gear a year or two later, you have a bunch of additional expenses you weren’t previously expecting. At minimum you have to try to chase down and rehire as many people as possible, so you don’t need to retrain. Any remaining gaps, that’s all fresh recruiting. Then, in a manufacturing facility, you have to inspect and clean up machinery that’s been sitting idle; large-scale mechanical automation generally prefers to be kept running, and an extended shutdown will require tons of hands-on work to make sure everything is safe to reactivate. You need to renegotiate and reestablish supply chains. And so on and so on.
In that context, I can see how it would be less expensive, from a bottom-line perspective, to just keep things running in the short term.
(In my own job history, there was an on-again-off-again software project that a certain executive kept initiating and then abandoning and then resurrecting, which wound up costing three times as much as it should have due to all the stop-and-start overhead. That’s the kind of example I have in mind that’s informing my interpretation.)
Obviously, the flip side of this is the sunk-cost fallacy, the idea that as long as you’re spending the money now you should just keep grinding forward because you’re already on the road. The only way to avoid it is to perform the difficult analysis and try to project which path is more efficient. I presume that’s what’s been done here.
The reason it’s funny, though, is that the analysis assumes demand for the Cybertruck will rebound, and this backlogged inventory will move, and eventually the market will catch back up with the factory’s output. That’s the part that I find amusing — Musk is utterly delusional about the future of the Cybertruck and doubtless would not accept any analysis that says “shut down the line and we’ll re-evaluate in two years.” So if the article is accurate and if my interpretation above is correct, the whole thing is skewed by faulty assumptions.
Unless Musk thinks he has some kind of secret deal with Trump to buy the whole kit-and-caboodle and slap, I don’t know, postal service logos on them or something. That could explain his perspective as well.
We’ll revisit your comment in the near future. Prescient or balderdash? I cringe.
I’m voting “Balderdash.”
ETA: Not least because of the fact that Elon would need to convert them all to driver’s seat is on the right.
Happy birthday!!
Occasionally automobile makers come up with turkeys; it happens. So if Cybertruck is a failure, does that necessarily condemn any effort to develop an all-electric pickup truck? And how much of Tesla’s investment is specifically towards that model as opposed to a possible replacement?