Item — HN Reader

If you want long-term thinking then people have to be able to buy into stories about what's going to happen long-term. When Musk does that, you call it a lie. The benefit of financialization is that it provides cheaper access to capital, which should make long-term investment easier, not harder. America still has lots of capital intensive industries that are capable of thinking long-term. I don't think financialization has much to do with the strategic problems that many American companies face.

At the same time that Intel was allowing product quality to degrade, Nvidia, a 30 year old company, was continuing to innovate.

1 comments

No, I don't have a personal axe to grind against Musk. I'm just pointing out his persistent, repeated lies. Being an engineer, he should be able to gauge their capabilities accordingly, or at least make those optimistic predictions closer to the finish line.

"Lies" is pretty charged phrasing for what are explicitly declared as best-case timeline estimates, which the media then loves to (disingenuously) revise into "promises."

The not-so-big management secret is that even if Musk took your advice and sandbagged his timelines, then the timelines still wouldn't be met. However it would move the actual time of completion further to the right! By using best-case predictions, things are actually getting done sooner. Call it the Applied Parkinson's Law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law

https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/

A lot of these are promises, and most of the timelines are not "best case", they were clearly not going to happen.

Even if it somehow gets things done faster, lying to your customers is not acceptable.

They've been selling something which doesn't exist for years, as a fixed fee, or subscription. Most large companies end up walking a tightrope of getting away with as much as possible. But FSD can only be described as a lie, a euphemism if you're feeling generous [1].

It's a company worth unthinkable amounts of money. Most people would have less patience with a guy running a Patreon in his spare time who had claimed for years his supporters would have a product soon, let alone an organisation swimming in funding (Twitter debacle aside).

[1] https://www.pocket-lint.com/is-tesla-fsd-worth-it/