Having seen how my buddy lives with his family being in the ~$100M net worth range and them overall being quite modest people, I’d 100% believe someone well above that and/or wanting to flaunt their wealth in a stupidly ostentatious manner would put a pool in their kid’s room.
The thing is that you don’t need FSD to do that. Having a really good AEB system massively improves safety, far more than a convenience feature like FSD does, but they fucked that up by taking the radar out so now it performs far worse at night, hence running over pedestrians and other VRUs far more often.
But you can’t grift billions out of investors by having a really good safety feature, so you hack together a system from hardware only ever originally only meant for adaptive cruise and lane keeping, and tech bros can show off on YouTube and hopefully not run over a cyclist, all to keep that grift rolling
This is legitimately one of the real reasons Musk is pushing for Trump so hard. NHTSA (and all the other regulatory agencies) were effectively gutted completely by the Trump admin and it’s basically the entire reason Elon could grift his way to where he is today. The moment Biden got into office, basically every single agency in existence began investigating him and pushing blocks out of the proverbial Jenga tower of the various Musk companies. He’s praying that Trump will get elected and allow him to keep grifting, because otherwise he’s almost definitely going to jail, or at a minimum losing the vast majority of his empire.
See: the cyborg soldier subplot of Metal Gear Rising: Revengence
Just because it’s not publicly traded, doesn’t mean that there isn’t stock nor that there’s no market. Usually, you can technically still buy/sell the stock, just not as a random member of the public on a public stock exchange like the NYSE or FTSE.
Or just pull this fuse for the module?
Yeah, that time is even moreso now because cars are far more complex and expensive as fuck now. Just the HVAC system alone on a modern luxury car probably has more components than the entirety of my old 1972 MG. You can bet your ass my friends find it very valuable when I can quickly fix stuff on their cars a dealership wanted to charge $1200 for.
But they were at least limited in their portability and loudness and battery life. Now you can have a tiny speaker that gives up any semblance of sound quality for loudness, but will also manage to last 8+ hours.
At least on my TV, I’ve had firmware updates enable things like variable refresh rate, enable 4K/120Hz, improve the dynamic contrast performance, and fix a couple of weird bugs it had shipped with.
So far, no ghosts yet! Only haunted by the vague odor of the church it was in before, so it kind of smells like an old lady’s house, but it’s going away pretty quickly.
I went on the low side since it’s not in perfect shape and is an older (1985) Young-Chang built Wurlitzer. It was a church piano so it has some bushing wear in the keys, but still very playable, and had a broken string on D2 that was an easy $50 fix. I think after moving, tuning, the string, and eventually rebushing it in the next year or so, I’ll have about $900-1000 into it all said and done. Still definitely a pretty inexpensive piano overall, but understandable why they might not have wanted to put money into something that was probably a donation to begin with.
A $1 grand piano off of eBay. I had been looking around on stuff like FB Marketplace for a “real” piano after learning with a really basic keyboard for a while, and happened across a gorgeous 6’1" grand piano on eBay. It was reasonably close, the ad said it was in good working order, and they took very detailed pictures of basically every single flaw in the case. I called up a piano mover, and had them pick it up from the church, sight unseen. I was so worried that I’d made a mistake, given that the moving was still about $400, but I got insanely lucky, with a beautiful looking and sounding piano worth about $5k for basically just the cost of moving it.
I’d put good money on a company doing something marketing/ad related. My first summer internship was at a company that did digital ads, and the amount of alcohol that was consumed on literally a daily basis was insane. I’m talking the majority of the office being having a minimum of 2-4 drinks after about 2pm rolled around, and probably triple that on Friday.
The only party I was there for was the CTO’s birthday, in which at lunch he received a piñata filled to bursting with those little alcohol shots, and by the end of the day basically everyone had to Uber home. For 19 year old me, it was pretty unreal seeing my bosses and coworkers that drunk in the middle of the week.
Knowing how fucked up everyone was during a normal workweek in the office, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if a Christmas party there was an absolute drug-filled rager.
The good news with iRobot is that they actually have pretty solid cybersecurity. They also do a pretty great job of supporting parts for old robots and make them quite easy to repair. For a typical consumer product, I feel like they’re far better than most companies in terms of how shitty they could be vs how shitty they actually are.
Instant Pot was a product so good that customers rarely needed to buy another one. The company went bankrupt.
Bull-fucking-shit. That’s just not how any of this works.
There are plenty of companies that make appliances that last a long fucking time, and don’t have to rely on fucking DLC micro transaction AI bullshit. The reason Instant Pot went bankrupt is the same reason a ton of popular companies have recently had issues: They got bought by private equity (who also owned Pyrex and fucked them over), saddled with a shitton of bad debt, squeezed of every bit of brand value they had, and then left to fall apart as the PE firm made off with millions.
The fact that the writer correlated “quality, durable good” with “unsuccessful business and bankruptcy” is absolutely one of the worst takes, and really shows just how pervasive this disgusting idea of “must be disposable to be profitable” really is.
I have a 150mi EV and a PHEV. I won’t be bothering with another PHEV, unless I need something that can tow long distances. Every long distance trip I’ve taken in our PHEV since ~2020 would have been almost identical to a trip in an EV. Drive about 3 hours, and stop for 20 minutes for food/restroom, and back on the road. Even with our PHEV, which can do over 600mi on a tank, we were naturally stopping at almost the exact same points as I would when I planned out the same route in an EV.
As minimal as it is in a modern car, dealing with the ICE side of it just isn’t worth it in a daily driver from my perspective. I have an old classic that’s ICE, and if I’m going to be doing oil changes and such, I’d much rather do them for fun on that, than be required to on my commuter.
Unfortunately, it’s pretty true at least internally, though their dumpster fire reputation is changing that. I’ve worked at a number of Tier 1 automotive suppliers and OEMs, and I can’t even tell you the number of times I’ve had to listen to “We should do ‘thing’ because that’s what Tesla does”. It’s leading to a lot of shitty and anti-consumer practices, but fortunately I think some of the smarter leadership is finally seeing that they were shitty ideas all along, and was nothing more that techbro bullahit.
Another adjacent life hack is when assembling flat pack furniture, use a quality wood glue on all the joints and connectors, but especially those little wood dowels. It won’t make it indestructible, but it’ll hold up far better over time.
Knowing many people who’ve worked for him, you have about 6 months at a MuskCo brand company max before you really know what a piece of shit he is, and either a.) leave ASAP, b.) convince yourself it won’t be so bad and hang on for ~2 years, or c.) fall into the cult of personality and believe that Daddy Elon loves his little proles and cares very much about all the hard work you’re doing [EMPLOYEE NUMBER HERE].
The absolute last stop on the “Musk is Tony Stark but IRL epic gamer Redditor and likes weed and Rick and Morty!” train was when he called that cave diver a pedophile. It was apparent well before then, but anyone acting like they had no idea what a piece of shit he was after that either didn’t hear about it, or was willfully ignorant because they wanted to continue pretending that basing their entire personality around a billionaire wasn’t a terrible idea.
As someone who recently came out, I was kinda hoping that this would be here. It is a pretty wild thought