Obviously we don't have the whole picture for the numbers. However, he does state material cost of the car was 140k and as of a month or two ago is 80k. They also raised the price of their vehicle to 109 from 92. Lastly , he mentions good sales of their more expensive Tesla sport which is 128k.
If musk can do with his cars what he did with spacex he will be able to produce items for his vehicles himself and overcome the fixed cost dilemma. I recall him making some of the parts for his vehicles in the spacex plant. Most of (90 some percent) of his rockets are made in house, which is why he can undercut orbital, lockheed, and the russians by a factor of 3. Last I heard theyare building a tesla manufacturing plant in san jose. Let's wish them luck.
They have another model coming out 2 or 3 years after the sedan. That will be in the 30k range. If I recall correctly, Musk once said as a rule of thumb once you raise your production by 10 fold then you can halve the cost of your item.
There are two major types of problems a site like Hacker News needs to avoid: bad stories and bad comments. So far the danger of bad stories seems smaller. The stories on the frontpage now are still roughly the ones that would have been there when HN started.
I once thought I'd have to weight votes to keep crap off the frontpage, but I haven't had to yet. I wouldn't have predicted the frontpage would hold up so well, and I'm not sure why it has. Perhaps only the more thoughtful users care enough to submit and upvote links, so the marginal cost of one random new user approaches zero. Or perhaps the frontpage protects itself, by advertising what type of submission is expected.
The most dangerous thing for the frontpage is stuff that's too easy to upvote. If someone proves a new theorem, it takes some work by the reader to decide whether or not to upvote it. An amusing cartoon takes less. A rant with a rallying cry as the title takes zero, because people vote it up without even reading it.
Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.
Hacker News has two kinds of protections against fluff. The most common types of fluff links are banned as off-topic. Pictures of kittens, political diatribes, and so on are explicitly banned. This keeps out most fluff, but not all of it. Some links are both fluff, in the sense of being very short, and also on topic.
There's no single solution to that. If a link is just an empty rant, editors will sometimes kill it even if it's on topic in the sense of being about hacking, because it's not on topic by the real standard, which is to engage one's intellectual curiosity. If the posts on a site are characteristically of this type I sometimes ban it, which means new stuff at that url is auto-killed. If a post has a linkbait title, editors sometimes rephrase it to be more matter-of-fact. This is especially necessary with links whose titles are rallying cries, because otherwise they become implicit "vote up if you believe such-and-such" posts, which are the most extreme form of fluff.
The techniques for dealing with links have to evolve, because the links do. The existence of aggregators has already affected what they aggregate. Writers now deliberately write things to draw traffic from aggregators—sometimes even specific ones. (No, the irony of this statement is not lost on me.) Then there are the more sinister mutations, like linkjacking—posting a paraphrase of someone else's article and submitting that instead of the original. These can get a lot of upvotes, because a lot of what's good in an article often survives; indeed, the closer the paraphrase is to plagiarism, the more survives. [3]
I think it's important that a site that kills submissions provide a way for users to see what got killed if they want to. That keeps editors honest, and just as importantly, makes users confident they'd know if the editors stopped being honest. HN users can do this by flipping a switch called showdead in their profile.
As a single 26 year old with no house about 30 percent of my salary is deducted for government expenditures.
Given I have little choice in how that money is spent on a large scale at the federal level (beyond voting for my senate, presidential, and house representatives). I am happy that least some of it is going to help develop a new technology that has needed more support and could have a large positive impact. Even if the chances of success aren't definite, at least they have a working product.
While listening to my fellow colleagues and friends reflect on how much is spent on hourly rates for defense contractors here in washington dc that have very little working product I don't feel as bad.
Although, I agree that it can be a negative as we are investing a company with foreign interest and already wealthy private equity holders. To resolve your issue more stipulations could have been made for Tesla in order to grant them the money so that the public can somehow have a more assured return on investment.