My Y has the stalk, but the touchscreen gear selection is no issue. (Ignoring the fact that I rarely manually drive the car) I only touch the screen to put it in gear once, maybe twice on a drive, and I'm stopped in any case.
Add in the fact that car will automatically put the car in the right "gear" 80% of the time based on environment (curbs, walls, etc.), it's even less important how the gear selected. Getting into other cars, I'm struck by how much space in the center console is wasted by this vestige of an actual manual gear shifter. Also the silly paddles on the steering wheel.
Capitalism also spent the last 10 years burning billions to create affordable electric cars, reliable regular spaceflight, efficient delivery of everything everywhere, and the (well, probably) greatest technological invention in human history. This is not a complete list.
If it makes you feel any better, efforts to "disenfranchise" eg. by requiring ID or "enfranchise" by making it easier to vote with same-day registration/voting, mail-in ballots, early voting, etc. have minimal effect on the outcome, independent of the majority party or location.
I just not that hard to (register to) vote. People who want to cast a vote will. The ones don't, won't.
I don't disagree, and most of what I know about Tesla early history comes from the Isaacson biography, but: it seems pretty clear the "actual" founders would never have been able to clear the hurdle of scale production without him. It wasn't just the funding (which would have been hard to come by), it's really hard to build a large, real-things-in-the-world industrial company from scratch, doubly so for something as complex as a car with all the complexities supply chains, regulations, literal factory construction require.
All glory to the guys who started the company (I love my Tesla Y), but I don't believe it would have gone anywhere without Musk.
(I was add something about Stacy Munro and the auto industry, but I'll just link to his first teardown of the Model 3[1].)
What astonishes me about singularity skepticism: every argument was, from when it was released, "but it can't do X", "it's impossible/too expensive". The benefits AI -> AGI are staggering, the competition is intense (both intra-industry and internationally), and the gains self-reinforcing.
I have fears of dystopian worst-case scenarios, and dread the rapid pace of change and what it will do to real lives lived in the world, but it's only clanker cope/wishcasting that believes that (AI+human ingenuity) won't produce real AI ingenuity.
Re-read your comment in four years, I'll take the bet you'll find it very naive.
I don't own shares in any Musk company, and agree that Tesla as a car company is grossly overvalued. But as the parent states, dude gets shit done.
It is _hard_ to start a successful car company, let alone one on an untested platform. He did it, and it taught China how to build the future of cars.
It is _impossible_ to build a successful rocket company from nothing. He did it, and SpaceX is now ~60% of _worldwide_ launches.
He's had plenty of failures, but Musk is what people are buying. He's gross and annoying, but I wouldn't count him out, and I'm rooting for his success.
> is that current "conservative" politicians are actually more neoliberals than conservatives.
I suppose "neoliberal" means whatever anyone wants it too, but perhaps you were looking for "postliberal". From the AI summary:
> Postliberalism is a political and social philosophy that rejects the core tenets of traditional liberalism. It argues that liberalism’s hyper-focus on individual autonomy, free-market capitalism, and secularism has eroded social cohesion and community.
"Conservative" is used to describe the current US administration, and I suppose they imagine they're conserving _something_, but they seem very eager to attack the liberal foundation of the Republic.
The AI numbers are huge, but I remember similar arguments about residential high-speed internet. According to Gemini, the "price for internet" is down 12% in real terms (ugh, capitalism!), while speeds are staggeringly faster.
The providers have spent a fortune on wireless, pulled a lot of fiber/cable, and it's cheaper than it was when it started.
I only use Grok through the "Gork" personality in the Tesla, but find its responses to be very realistic, often genuinely funny, and occasionally useful.
It was a weak joke I made-- I _could_ quit or go without, but I was always nearby to real addicts and ended up smoking a lot for a long time. Also, I didn't inhale deeply or hold the smoke like the "professionals".
> And cars lasted much longer back then and were much easier and cheaper to maintain.
I lived through those "amazingly affordable" decades, and while the engines were simpler (if you're driving a '68 Caprice 327 V8 without all those pesky environmental gadgets), no way they were more reliable. What was reliable was oil leaks, and burning oil. My parents popped a bottle of champagne when the station wagon hit 100k miles! 100,000 miles is table stakes for auto reliability these days.
My father was a quite capable home mechanic, but most people weren't. I guarantee you cars spent more time in the shop then than now.
Go to a car show and compare the interior of anything from this Golden Era to Nissan Versa somebody else mentioned, and tell me you'd take the old thing.
I have nostalgia for the decades I grew up in, but it's for the people I loved and simpler life of a child, not the stuff.
Totally agree. I was non-professional smoker for a long time, and quit many, many times. Even after years, I'll get this "you know what'd great?" tap on the shoulder.
One cigarette is not a slippery slope, it's a vertical cliff drop.
I love booze in all its forms, but it doesn't have the same pull.
Add in the fact that car will automatically put the car in the right "gear" 80% of the time based on environment (curbs, walls, etc.), it's even less important how the gear selected. Getting into other cars, I'm struck by how much space in the center console is wasted by this vestige of an actual manual gear shifter. Also the silly paddles on the steering wheel.