121–130 of 181 posts
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I think the point is tanks in general have little use in the vast majority of modern American battles.
However, tanks are strategic weapons as well as tactical ones. Similar to why we have ICBMs but never hope to launch one.
As usual, Tesla's involvement in the original deal is reported incorrectly. Tesla had no involvement in the original deal. Nor did Solar City. In fact, Silevo did the deal, was then acquired by Solar City which was then acquired by Tesla.
Contracts between entities don't just disappear when the entities involved change hands. Pending business arrangements should have all been factored in to the equity of the purchase.
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> (That means that Rive and Musk are genetically half-siblings.) Apropos of nothing, I'm now imagining a world with forms of address based on the natural logarithm of shared genetic material.
Isn't this roughly how people talk about their relationship with Native American tribes? They don't do the log2 math, but they're happy to hit you with the fraction.
As usual, Tesla's involvement in the original deal is reported incorrectly. Tesla had no involvement in the original deal. Nor did Solar City. In fact, Silevo did the deal, was then acquired by Solar City which was then acquired by Tesla.
If you follow the PV panel manufacturing industry this is actually not super uncommon, there's a number of companies that have gone belly up in the past ten years. In some cases due to business models that relied on weird economic incentives for the panel manufacturing location, where 156mm cells purchased on the commodity market from a third party would be encapsulated and built up into 60 or 72-cell panels. Google…
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Prime example: the NRO donated two unused spy satellites to NASA, each more powerful than the Hubble Telescope. https://www.space.com/16000-spy-satellites-space-telescopes-...
I love this story. Reminds me of Contact, one of my favorite movie quotes of all time: 'First rule of government spending: why build one when you can have two for twice the price?'
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I just can't imagine a plausible scenario where a war between nuclear powers comes down to which side has more tanks. Does the US military actually think that it could invade China or Russia with a conventional army without the other side quickly threatening to use nukes? At that point it would become a two true outcome scenario: either the conventional fighting stops or we are all in big trouble.
You don't keep tanks around for what happens before the nuclear bombardment, you keep them around for afterwards. Most nuclear assets are pointed at either other nukes or military infrastructure; you'd still a large amount of civilian infrastructure around filled with angry civilians that would want to finish the fight one way or another before nuclear winter fucks everything. And tanks being tanks a fleet would surv…
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We've bought "surplus" Dell and HP servers from different government entities that were two generations old, basically brand new in the box. I wonder what % of purchases go unused for whatever reasons.
I've heard you need to use it or lose when it comes to gov budgets. Anecdotes of jets dumping fuel into the ocean just to come back and refill to keep a budget.
Granted stupid waste without any valid tactical or strategic edge case reasons aren't exactly unheard of in the military either.
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The history of the Buffalo "gigafactory" is rather sordid... In a nutshell, Tesla and its subsidiaries made large employment and economic growth promises to the state of NY in exchange for massive subsidies (almost $1B total). The state wanted to stimulate growth in an economically depressed region, but those growth expectations have not materialized at all. And now, at least some of the NY state taxpayer financed eq…
This is just not accurate. The Buffalo plant economic stimulus package had a clawback provision if Tesla doesn't meet employment milestones. They have been meeting those milestones and so will not have to pay the fee: https://buffalonews.com/2020/02/13/tesla-looks-like-a-good-b... I know people want to make this into some corruption scandal (blaming it either on the state or on Tesla or both), but the state did their…
You are definitely right that it isn't clear cut. From what I can see, Tesla has met their contractual obligations even though things haven't gone as planned.
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Contracts between entities don't just disappear when the entities involved change hands. Pending business arrangements should have all been factored in to the equity of the purchase.
Sure. But inheriting a deal is very, very different from originating a deal.