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Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?


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5 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

There's not much mystery to Elon: if there's authoritarian dick to suck, he'll be the guy kneeling and bobbing on it.  His rate of "siding with authoritarian states" is pretty close to a perfect 100%.

Elon is a fucking authoritarian tool.  He's an unabashed enemy of all free people, everywhere.  Don't try to apply any bullshit nuance to it, there really isn't any.  In any given situation where there's the interests of an authoritarian state on one side, and ANY contrary interest on the other side, he'll pick the authoritarian state.

Elon is the classic douche that runs around with the tough guy while being  biggest pussy in the group. He craves the acceptance of a tough guy. 

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12 hours ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

I am an only child so I would always remind them I would be the person deciding what quality nursing home they will wind up in.  That always worked.

Lol you don't really get a choice unless you're generationally wealthy, just so you know. They all suck unless you're plonking down like five figures a month

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4 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

 

 

I am not an employment lawyer....but that offers some fodder for interesting discussion of unfair labor practices.  If the CEO of an auto company who also happens to be CEO of an internet information company retaliates against a union that has an account on that information company based on labor action taken by the union....hell, I dunno.  I'll hang up and listen.

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16 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

And we all have Wells Fargo accounts whether we know it or not.

Sigh.  Yeah.  We have one.  We also have family accounts at Deutsche bank and HSBC.  Apparently, our banking standard is "are you evil?  COOL, here's our money!"*

* We really, really tried to go with other banks, but they were the only ones that were even feasible for our purposes.  American money-laundering regs aimed at the drug trade make shit super hard.  Like so hard that I thought "fuck it, if I'm gonna be a suspected money launderer, I might as well get in on some of that action."

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The part where he starts talking about the need for regulation because otherwise people are going to die. Interesting how once he got into it -- and as a viewer the first thing I thought about was "auto pilot" -- he had to try to change tracks to "the death of civilization."

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Sorta interesting...


https://www.reuters.com/technology/gigacasting-20-tesla-reinvents-carmaking-with-quiet-breakthrough-2023-09-14/

Quote

AUSTIN, Texas, Sept 14 (Reuters) - Tesla (TSLA.O) has combined a series of innovations to make a technological breakthrough that could transform the way it makes electric vehicles and help Elon Musk achieve his aim of halving production costs, five people familiar with the move said.

The company pioneered the use of huge presses with 6,000 to 9,000 tons of clamping pressure to mold the front and rear structures of its Model Y in a "gigacasting" process that slashed production costs and left rivals scrambling to catch up.

In a bid to extend its lead, Tesla is closing in on an innovation that would allow it to die cast nearly all the complex underbody of an EV in one piece, rather than about 400 parts in a conventional car, the people said.

The know-how is core to Tesla's "unboxed" manufacturing strategy unveiled by Chief Executive Musk in March, a linchpin of his plan to churn out tens of millions of cheaper EVs in the coming decade, and still make a profit, the sources said.

While Tesla has said its unboxed model involves producing large sub-assemblies of a car at the same time and then snapping them together, the size and make-up of the modular blocks is still the subject of speculation.

Terry Woychowski, president of U.S. engineering company Caresoft Global, said if Tesla managed to gigacast most of the underbody of an EV, it would further disrupt the way cars are designed and manufactured.

"It is an enabler on steroids. It has a huge implication for the industry, but it's a very challenging task," said Woychowski, who worked for U.S. automaker GM (GM.N) for more than three decades. "Castings are very hard to do, especially the bigger and the more complicated."

Two of the sources said Tesla's previously unreported new design and manufacturing techniques meant the company could develop a car from the ground up in 18 to 24 months, while most rivals can currently take anywhere from three to four years.

The five people said a single large frame - combining the front and rear sections with the middle underbody where the battery is housed - could be used in Tesla's small EV which it aims to launch with a price tag of $25,000 by the middle of the decade.

Tesla was expected to make a decision on whether to die cast the platform in one piece as soon as this month, three of the sources said, though even if they do press ahead the end product could change during the design validation process.

Neither Tesla nor Musk responded to questions from Reuters for this story.

3D PRINTING AND SAND

The breakthrough Tesla has made centres on the how the giant molds for such a large part are designed and tested for mass production, and how casts can incorporate hollow subframes with internal ribs to cut weight and boost crashworthiness.

In both cases the innovations, developed by design and casting specialists in Britain, Germany, Japan and the United States, involve 3D printing and industrial sand, the five people said. All spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity because they are not authorised to speak to the media.

So far, automakers have shied away from casting ever-bigger structures because of the "gigacast dilemma": creating molds to make parts of 1.5 metres squared or more boosts efficiency but is expensive and comes with myriad risks.

Once a large metal test mold has been made, machining tweaks during the design process could cost $100,000 a go, or redoing the mold altogether might come to $1.5 million, according to one casting specialist. Another said the whole design process for a large metal mold would typically cost about $4 million.

That has been deemed prohibitive by automakers - especially as a design might need half a dozen tweaks or more to achieve a perfect die from the perspective of noise and vibration, fit and finish, ergonomics and crashworthiness, the sources said.

But Musk's vision from the start was to find a way to cast the underbody in one piece, despite the risks, the sources said.

To overcome the obstacles, Tesla turned to firms that make test molds out of industrial sand with 3D printers. Using a digital design file, printers known as binder jets deposit a liquid binding agent onto a thin layer of sand and gradually build a mold, layer by layer, that can die cast molten alloys.

According to one source, the cost of the design validation process with sand casting, even with multiple versions, is minimal - just 3% of doing the same with a metal prototype.

That means Tesla can tweak prototypes as many times as needed, reprinting a new one in a matter of hours using machines from companies such as Desktop Metal (DM.N) and its unit ExOne.

The design validation cycle using sand casting only takes to two to three months, two of the sources said, compared with anywhere from six months to a year for metal mold prototypes.

TAILOR-MADE ALLOYS

The subframes in a car underbody are typically hollow to save weight and improve crashworthiness. At the moment, they are made by stamping and welding multiple parts together leaving a void in the middle.

To cast subframes with hollows as part of one gigacasting, Tesla plans to place solid sand cores printed by the binder jets within the overall mold. Once the part has been cast, the sand is removed to leave the voids.

But despite that greater flexibility achieved in both the design process and the complexity of the large frames, there was still one more major hurdle to clear.

The aluminium alloys used to produce the castings behaved differently in sand and metal molds and often failed to meet Tesla's criteria for crashworthiness and other attributes.

The casting specialists overcame that by formulating special alloys, fine-tuning the molten alloy cooling process, and also coming up with an after-production heat treatment, three of the sources said. And once Tesla is happy with the prototype mold, it can then invest in a final metal one for mass production.

The sources said Tesla's upcoming small car has given it a perfect opportunity to cast an EV platform in one piece, mainly because its underbody is simpler,

The kind of small cars Tesla is developing – one for personal use and the other a robotaxi – don't have a big "overhang" at the front and the back, as there is not much of a hood or rear trunk.

"It's like a boat in a way, a battery tray with small wings attached to both ends. That would make sense to do in one piece," one person said.

The sources said, however, that Tesla still had to make a call on what kind of gigapress to use if it decides to cast the underbody in one piece - and that choice would also dictate how complex the car frame would be.

To punch out such large body parts fast, the people said Tesla would need new bigger gigapresses with massive clamping power of 16,000 tons or more, which would come with a hefty price tag and might need larger factory buildings.

Three of the five sources said one problem with presses using high clamping power, however, was that they cannot house the 3D printed sand cores needed to make hollow subframes.

The people said Tesla could solve these obstacles by using a different type of press into which molten alloy can be injected slowly - a method that tends to produce higher quality castings and can accommodate the sand cores.

But the process takes longer.

"Tesla could still choose high-pressure for productivity, or they could choose slow alloy injection for quality and versatility," one of the people said. "It's still a coin toss at this point."

 

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38 minutes ago, washparkhorn said:

E2CE1C7C-500E-404E-940A-D72613785DAF.thumb.jpeg.991a658229dc77a67354fa1670bf939e.jpeg

 

It's one thing to see this albatross in a carefully lit, indoor setting when it was introduced.

To see it outdoors, illuminated with sunlight and with other things in the photo for reference/scale, it looks like a fucking kit vehicle on a '81 Camaro chassis.

Those door gaps look like my 12 year old son put this together with no instructions.

 

 

 

 

Edited by Francisco 2.0
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Twitter turned over 32 DMs from Trump's account, after resisting it (and apparently it was only a small portion).  The relevant thing for this thread is how much Elmo was involved in fighting back over it, and the really relevant thing is the fact that the DMs are not encrypted, etc. and can easily be subpoenaed.  

A lesson to us all - be careful what you say in DMS

Suspicious Monkey GIF by MOODMAN

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/15/politics/trump-twitter-direct-messages/index.html

Quote

The detail of what prosecutors obtained with a search warrant issued to the social media platform was revealed in a brief submitted under seal in April to the US Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, DC. Twitter – now known as “X” – was appealing a judge’s ruling that sanctioned the company for its delay in turning over the records from Trump’s account.

Quote

The company resisted producing the records because a court-approved order directed it not disclose to Trump details about the warrant. It also raised concerns about the possibility that the former president might want to assert executive privilege over some of the materials on his account.

“Indeed, the materials Twitter produced to the Government included only 32 direct-message items, constituting a minuscule proportion of the total production,” the prosecutors wrote in the newly unsealed brief.

Quote

“As such, Twitter sought to delay compliance with the entirety of the Warrant based on the speculative possibility that a tiny fraction of the total production could, implausibly, contain instances when the President sought to use the direct-messaging function to carry out sensitive and confidential deliberations with trusted advisors within the Executive Branch,” prosecutors added.

The DC Circuit unsealed the brief Friday alongside other previously secret filings in the court dispute. Another court filing unsealed Friday said that the warrant sought information from October 2020 through January 2021.

The warrant sought “[a]ll content, records, and other information relating to communications sent from or received by the SUBJECT ACCOUNT from October 2020 to January 2021, including . .. The content of all direct messages sent from, received by, stored in draft form in, or otherwise associated with the SUBJECT ACCOUNT.” It also sought “All other content, records, and other information relating to all other interactions between the SUBJECT ACCOUNT and other Twitter users from October 2020 to January 2021.”

 

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On 9/14/2023 at 3:49 PM, RDCanecutter said:

Aw man. Things would take twelve years to heat up in the oven, while you're sitting there on the rattan sofa behind the folding metal tray watching one more Bactine commercial then it'll finally be time for Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and you've already got that sticky plastic glass full of Kool-Aid. And those mashed potatoes with the crispy brown edges where they were trapped between two layers of metal, and some of the peas wrinkled up for the same reason, and I mean

DAMN

it was better than school cafeteria food.

The Night Stalker was fantastic.

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More for another thread, but that article got me thing - our kids are growing up in an environment where much/most/all of their communications, or at least the meta data (in the case of phone calls) are just a subpoena away.
 

No shit.
The engineer in me thinks that could be a horrible idea

Why?
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19 hours ago, Goredho said:

"Tesla's previously unreported new design and manufacturing techniques meant the company could develop a car from the ground up in 18 to 24 months, while most rivals can currently take anywhere from three to four years.l

Well shit they are how many years since they rolled a new car off the line for TSLA proper and how many years since announcement of cybertruck?

They haven't announced anything else new.

Lol

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13 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

More for another thread, but that article got me thing - our kids are growing up in an environment where much/most/all of their communications, or at least the meta data (in the case of phone calls) are just a subpoena away.

 

Use signal. Seriously.

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58 minutes ago, trza-hawk said:

Russell Brand has been a  regular in the trending now tab with videos of himself in a West Ham jersey, just asking questions about Vaccines, the Illuminati, Deep State, Media Narratives, and giving appearances with the usual twitter contrarians.

This is the easiest grift in the world, you have to understand. 

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On 9/14/2023 at 7:18 PM, Clintonaldo said:

Elon is the classic douche that runs around with the tough guy while being  biggest pussy in the group. He craves the acceptance of a tough guy. 

Its his life long story, if you read about his youth, he picked on and shunned by his peers. His father kept sending him off to some wilderness camp each year and each year he got his ass beat while there.

He's the weird kid from a wealthy family that wants to fit in and be accepted and liked so bad yet everyone knows he's the weird kid so they make fun of him.

This has carried over into adulthood, he's done some pretty innovative things but hes still begging for acceptance yet his children hate him, his turned his ex into a lesbian and I would wager most of his "friends" only accept him for his power and or influence.

 

Who would have thought the worlds richest man would be such an insecure whiney lil bitch  

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1 minute ago, Smax said:

Its his life long story, if you read about his youth, he picked on and shunned by his peers. His father kept sending him off to some wilderness camp each year and each year he got his ass beat while there.

He's the weird kid from a wealthy family that wants to fit in and be accepted and liked so bad yet everyone knows he's the weird kid so they make fun of him.

This has carried over into adulthood, he's done some pretty innovative things but hes still begging for acceptance yet his children hate him, his turned his ex into a lesbian and I would wager most of his "friends" only accept him for his power and or influence.

 

Who would have thought the worlds richest man would be such an insecure whiney lil bitch  

It’s why I choose to be poor white trash. I like friends. 

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