That's a challenging claim to justify when their output is the Cybertruck. Honestly, none of Tesla's lineup is currently impressive - it's mostly gimmicky with less than stellar build quality.
I strongly considered a Model S years ago when they first came out, but the price just didn't seem justifiable. Now? The world has moved on, and Tesla... hasn't.
Has the world moved on? While it may be anecdotal my area has only exploded with Teslas, I live in Florida for context. I see Cybertruks nearly everyday (some days I don't have to drive anywhere due to working remote). I always see a Tesla, heck, sometimes I see two or more of them at any given time, all over Central Florida I always see a Tesla somewhere, but in my area in particular it feels like "Tesla Country" at this point, and I don't see it dwindling, they just built another Tesla building near our Airport (MCO) too. Even see some bumper stickers on Teslas with "Elon" crossed out on them. Heck, my wife's own relatives have Teslas and they don't like Elon's politics, nor do they live in my area.
And Google search, a service on the level of a public utility, has been degrading noticeably for years in the face of shareholders demanding more and more returns.
Comparing something to a public utility is not me saying it's literally a public utility. Google runs a monopolistic service that is essential to a lot of our public life, in a segment that has high cost of entry and infrastructure cost. They make the service worse to make more money. It should be a regulated utility like electricity or railroads, we should have a public alternative like the post office is to UPS, or it should be nationalized. The situation gets more dire when you consider their browser monopoly.
Other search engines exist. Bing is right there, and Microsoft is more than willing to eat the high cost of entry and infrastructure cost.
> It should be a regulated utility like electricity or railroads, we should have a public alternative like the post office is to UPS, or it should be nationalized.
I agree that electricity and railroads should be regulated like Google Search.
It's really weird that snail mail in the US is a government monopoly. When even social democratic Germany managed to privatise them.
> The situation gets more dire when you consider their browser monopoly.
Don't a lot of people in the US use iPhones? They don't ship with Chrome as the default browser, do they?
(And yes, Safari is built on top of the same open source engine as Chrome. But you can hardly call using the same open source project a 'monopoly'. Literally anyone can fork it.)
The existence of few competitors is not proof that monopolistic power doesn't exist and isn't being leveraged. Saying Google isn't monopolistic is being willfully wrong. You're more wrong when we look at the browser market, and Google has lost anti-trust suits on this very topic in the past couple years.
A public mail service is required by our constitution. It's cheaper than the private options and often the only option for many rural areas. It's not a monopoly.
> A public mail service is required by our constitution.
Where does it say so in your constitution? All I can find is the postal clause which Wikipedia summarises as follows, but whose full text isn't much longer:
> Article I, Section 8, Clause 7, of the United States Constitution, the Postal Clause, authorizes the establishment of "post offices and post roads"[1] by the country's legislature, the Congress.
The Postal Clause certainly allows the government to run a public postal service, but I don't see how the constitution _requires_ it. It doesn't even require the federal government to regulate postal services, it merely allows it.
Perhaps I missed something?
> It's cheaper than the private options and often the only option for many rural areas.
If you want to subsidise rural areas, I would suggest to do so openly, transparently and from general taxation. At least general taxation is progressive etc. Instead of just making urban folks pay more for their mail, whether they be rich or poor.
I would also suggest only subsidising poor rural areas. Rich rural areas don't need our help.
The solution is single payer. Any attempt to solve this with technological band aids is completely futile. We know what the solution is because we see it work in every other developed nation. We don't have it because a class of billionaire doners doesn't want to pay into the system that allowed them to become fabulously wealthy. People who are claiming AI is the solution to healthcare access and affordability are delusional or lying to you.
There are good reasons to think single payer systems are not the answer. The numerous documented inefficiencies and inconveniences they suffer from don't need repeating here.
And many single payer systems around the world only appear to work as well as they do because the US effectively subsidizes medical costs through its own out of control prices.
there’s just a lot of partisan media outlets that are trying to make it look this way because it’s the corruption paying to try and stop it so they can keep power
I don’t see evidence of corruption all I see is a system already heavily steeped in corruption and regulatory capture that is using fake and ironic anti-establishment narratives to try and keep it.
It isn't that simple, demand is growing and they're investing in that growth. With the exception of ElGoog the providers are all private entities, so we don't really know.
Something that annoys me about all the AI hype is that it's breaking a bunch of systems that seemed like they were chugging along just fine. Fundamentally all those podcasts probably have the same listeners as before, why is it necessary to totally rethink how we advertise to those people? Seems like we're causing a lot of pain by breaking things to make a bet on something that's totally unproven.
I don't have a reference handy but I think another factor was Apple (at least) started to exclude the automatic podcast downloads as a "listen", which caused a large drop in podcast listener counts for ad purposes.
Safari has like 20% market share right now. The only thing holding it back is that it's Mac only. If Apple got a Windows version going again, it'd eat Chrome for lunch.
They figuratively tried to burn the NIH to the ground and have been routinely and illegally canceling grants and holding research funds hostage to bully universities into going along with their moronic cultural program.
It's not mutually exclusive to have more wealthy people while also having capital concentrating in a way that means most people have less access to it.
reply